One of its key features of the Protection of Freedoms Bill, we were assured by Nick Clegg in January, would be an end to the “indefinite storage of innocent people’s DNA”.

That seemed to be an unambiguous promise, and a welcome one. Unfortunately, as The Daily Telegraph reveals today, the Government has decided not to keep this promise, bringing the number of policy U-turns to at least 14.

Instead of clearly and simply wiping out the DNA of more than one million people who have been arrested but not convicted, the authorities will retain the samples, but in an “anonymised” state.

This means that the names and other identifying features will be removed from the police database but kept elsewhere, enabling agencies with the right expertise to join the pieces of data together again and identify the DNA.

In the clumsy but revealing phrase of James Brokenshire, a Home Office minister, the genetic information will “be considered to have been deleted”.

Considered by whom? Certainly not by civil liberties groups, which have accused the Government of betraying an explicit commitment in the Coalition Agreement and ignoring a judgment of the Court of Human Rights.

Back we trot to the database state, which would always reform under different guises, with different agendas in play. The motive here seems to be straightforward party political – splitting Ed Miliband from his authoritarian underlings, whilst snubbing the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) to please the right wing of the Tories. We deserve better politics than this, but there seem to be very few politicians in the British parliament who have any interest whatsoever with the rule of law. You’d think with the influence of Murdoch waning that you’d have one or two MPs shrieking with outrage at the injustice of it, no longer that worried about a NOTW campaign against them, but no – the cowardice lives on.

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Edson ‘Eddy’ Cosmas has lived and studied in London for several years.  As a child, he spent time in Manchester whilst his father studied there.  Eddy, a young, black, gay man from Tanzania, in east Africa, has built up a circle of friends and fellow students, and is determined to succeed in life.  He has strong political beliefs, and never misses an opportunity to speak out in support of gay rights, immigrant rights and anti-racism campaigns.

On Monday 9th May, Eddy went to the Home Office in Croydon to submit an initial claim for asylum, and to take a screening interview.  Long gone were the days of British immigration officials telling gay people seeking asylum to just ‘stay in the closet’, or to ‘act straight’; a ruling from the Supreme Court in July 2010 ordered that gay people could not be sent back to countries where they would face persecution for their sexuality.  With this in mind, Eddy was understandably shocked when, at the end of his interview, he was detained and put into the back of a van.

Only then was he told that he was being taken to Harmondsworth detention centre.  When I spoke to Edson in his cell at Harmondsworth on Thursday evening, via mobile phone, he sounds tired and frustrated, but determined to resist deportation.

“I’ve been here for ten days,” Eddy tells me.  “They call it a ‘detention centre’, but really it is like a jail.  We are locked up, and followed everywhere by security.”

The Supreme Court ruling was designed to end years of discriminatory, anti-gay immigration policies, but instead, it has had the opposite effect.  Openly gay activists such as Eddy, who should be automatically granted asylum under the landmark ruling, are being ‘fast-tracked’; held without their right to access to a lawyer of their choice, and scheduled for hastily-arranged hearings, and quick deportations.

“If I am sent back to Tanzania,” Eddy says on the phone, “I am facing being beaten, or death.  The immigration officials told me that they didn’t believe me; I said to them, I am the one that has lived in Tanzania, not you, so how can you tell me whether this is true or not?”

The UK Border Agency has long shown itself to be disinterested in basic human decency, let alone holding to the rule of law.  Sign this petition right now to send Theresa May a signal. How appalling that a Home Office which trumpets how well it treats its own gay staff, should continue to treat the most vulnerable gay people it’s responsible for in this way.

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1. Save Betty Tibakawa! The UK Border Agency is yet again trying to deport...

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Emma Ginn, co-ordinator of Medical Justice, said: “Despite compelling medical evidence, the UK Border Agency disbelieves Ms Tibikawa’s story. UKBA do not dispute that Ms Tibikawa has scars caused by a hot flat iron, but conclude that she did not suffer any ill-treatment in Uganda. We condemn the fact that they intend to deport Ms Tibakawa to a country where being gay is illegal and puts your life at risk.”

Human Rights Watch spokeswoman Gauri van Gulik said: “Our research has shown that many cases of women like Betty are not taken seriously by the UK Border Agency. Unfortunately women who suffer this kind of violence have serious difficulty claiming asylum.”

From Liberal Conspiracy:

Betty Tibakawa, a young lesbian living in Uganda, had gone for a walk on the beach when she was approached by three men she did not know, but who knew her by reputation, who began taunting her about her sexuality.

They took her to a disused building where she was violently assaulted. The men kicked her in the stomach, pinned her down and branded her inner thighs with hot irons. She lost consciousness and when she woke up, the men were gone. Her injuries were so severe that she could not leave her home for two months.

In February, Ugandan magazine Red Pepper outed Betty as a lesbian, publishing an article about her illustrated with photos, and the claim that she is ‘wanted’ for being a lesbian.

It has become incredibly dangerous for her to return to Uganda, where she has been disowned by her family and faces the risk of violent persecution for being gay.

Betty Tibakawa has had her asylum application turned down and is facing deportation back to Uganda, where homosexuality is illegal. Gay women who are deported to Uganda risk being raped and assaulted whilst they are in custody.

We are petitioning the Home Office to overrule this decision from the UK Border Agency, to give Betty the chance to live a life free from violence and fear. No one should be deported to country where they will be persecuted for their sexuality. We owe those seeking asylum in this country better than this.

Please sign the petition from this page.
Petition put together by Betty Tibakawa’s Campaign Group.

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Police are investigating the death of [Jimmy] Mubenga, a 46-year-old Angolan who lost consciousness when three G4S guards attempted to restrain him on British Airways Flight 77 flight on Tuesday night. He was later taken to hospital where he was pronounced dead. No arrests have been made.

On Thursday two passengers told the Guardian that guards placed Mubenga in handcuffs and heavily restrained him while the aircraft was still on the runway. One said Mubenga complained of breathing problems before passing out.

[Witness] Michael said he heard Mubenga complain he was unable to breathe.

“I’m pretty sure it will turn out to be asphyxiation,” he said. “The last thing we heard the man say was he couldn’t breathe. We had three security guards and each one of them looked like they weighed 100kg plus, bearing down and holding him down – from what I could see below the seats.”

Michael described as “completely false” the official accounts of Mubenga’s death, released by the Home Office and G4S on Wednesday.

The Home Office said a deportee had been “taken ill” while on the flight. G4S used similar wording, saying Mubenga “became unwell”, forcing the flight to return to Heathrow. “Sadly, the detainee passed away upon arrival at the hospital,” the statement said.

This is far from abnormal for the UK Border Agency, and their account is contradicted by another witness:

Kevin Wallis, a passenger on the aircraft, said he had been sitting across the aisle from Mubenga and watched as three security guards restrained him with what he believed to be excessive force.

Wallis said he heard Mubenga complain: “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe” for at least 10 minutes before he lost consciousness, and later observed that handcuffs had been used in the restraint.

Our asylum system is entirely bereft of compassion and common sense. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/15/deportation-jimmy-mubenga-borders:

Anyone employed as an immigration adviser, as I am, is aware of the use and abuse of state-sanctioned force against immigrants that lies just beneath the Home Office UK Border Agency‘s “firm but fair” rhetoric. I’ll never forget representing a 24-year-old Ugandan woman who was HIV-positive and weighed only six stone, who bravely spoke out to the BBC about her treatment by officers inside Colnbrook immigration removal centre: “Two were holding my arms, two were holding my legs and then they hit my head on the floor,” she said. “I was feeling pain and then they twisted my arms and pressed my head on the bed. “I couldn’t breathe and then I was shouting ‘I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe’ but they were just twisting it harder.” For his part, Tom Riall, chief executive of the home affairs division of Serco, which runs Colnbrook, said staff there do their jobs “with care and decency and considerable respect for all of those in our charge”. “We only use physical restraint as a last resort,” he added.

She also explains why:

But the raison d’etre for this inhumanity is public enough: it is UK government policy to remove more people. An intensification of border control inevitably sacrifices a human approach: from visa national lists to the criteria of the UK’s points-based immigration system, the focus is on particular nationalities or categories of people to exclude from the UK. Target-driven deportation and removal statistics dictate who leaves and when, rather than the needs and desires of the individual human being at stake. Under this political agenda, the UK has become part of a “fortress Europe” that is spending ever more money and force on controlling human movements and on securing its borders.

This is the problem, and it’s resulted in a cowardly and racist immigration policy to placate the country’s Daily HateMail readers, rather than one which reasonably addresses the serious issues surrounding international migration. It led to Jacqui Smith’s Home Office’s disinterest in reprieves for LGBT asylum seekers from being sent back to countries such as Uganda and Iran, it leads to the destitution of ‘failed’ asylum seekers while they’re in the UK and doesn’t acknowledge the genuine social and economic needs of the UK economy. New Labour has gone but it’s left behind a legacy of mistrust of asylum seekers, whom it frequently conflated with economic migrants – just take a look at this comment about his criminal record:

Hmm, I see that the author makes no reference to :

In 2006, Mubenga was convicted of actual bodily harm after a brawl in a nightclub and given a two-year sentence.

From the linked Guardian article. So he had a history of violence and had broken the law in this country. What were the guards supposed to do, bring him tea & biscuits?

His death is to be regretted, but not the deportation or the policy behind deportation. Especially for conviced criminals who have abused this country’s hospitality.

Should that give the state the right to cause his death and then lie about it? What sort of society are we becoming?

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‘Non-conviction’ information doesn’t clarify much, says Equalities Minister

By Jane Fae Ozimek

Writing in her local paper, the Hampstead and Highgate Express, Ms Featherstone starts with a sobering tale of a young black boy picked up by the police for the appalling crime of playing hide-and-seek on the grounds of a local hospital. No action ensued. But, of course, the record of the fact that this boy had been picked up – the “soft information” – would remain on file pretty much forever, and the result of a brief and innocent youthful jape could blight his entire life.

Ms Featherstone is naturally not too happy with this. She writes: “The Home Secretary and I have commissioned an independent review of Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) checks. Obviously if someone is charged and convicted you would expect that information to remain on the police database – and it does. But in the area of ‘soft’ information (ie non-conviction information) at present this remains on the database too.

“And ‘soft’ information varies – anything from the above incident of playing Hide and Seek – to the sort of ‘soft’ information about Ian Huntley – the murderer in the Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman murder in Soham.”

She goes on to argue that it’s possible we over-reacted to the horrific events in Soham, coming up with a system where some nine million adults might have ended up on a national vetting and barring database. Time for some balance!

The government – as per the coalition agreement – is therefore now reviewing the Vetting and Barring scheme, with a view to scaling it back: the process of setting the terms of reference is under way.

Well, not quite.

An instant uber-frothy write-up of this story by the Mail on Sunday suggests that cutbacks in the CRB scheme are already a done deal, with parents no longer required to get checked before helping out in schools, and details of offences committed by new partners also far more limited than current schemes would make them.

The Home Office doesn’t quite see it like that. A spokesman there told us last night: “No review has yet been announced. Nothing is official.”

He then relented and admitted that even if nothing was yet official, the move was in the coalition agreement. It is the sort of thing that might be brought forward in this Autumn’s great repeal Bill – so we could do the math ourselves as to the likely timing for a consultation on that issue. The Minister might just have used the “wrong tense”.

It is to be hoped that the consultation will look beyond child protection, taking some time also to consider the legal and cultural consequences of New Labour’s machinations. Despite the Bichard Inquiry, it is highly unlikely that the Vetting and Barring scheme would have done much to stop Ian Huntley. His contact with his victims was secondhand, through a partner with a clean CRB record.

Meanwhile, an increasing reliance on “soft information” (aka hearsay) and its second cousin, behavioural scoring, has done much to legitimise the singling out of individuals who fail to conform. It has been given legal justification by the Pinnington case, in which judges ruled that even where police placed little reliance on “soft information” they held, they must still pass it on to a prospective employer.

A further green light for state surveillance was provided by the Court of Appeal last October, when three senior judges ruled that the police were perfectly entitled to carry on holding on to conviction data for as long as they wished – in fact, for up to 100 years – thereby driving a coach and horses through both data protection and legislation around the rehabilitation of offenders.

Two further thoughts that the Minister might care to insert into her consultation process.

The Independent Safeguarding Authority was hailed as a means to inject professionalism into the debate, but it owed as much to former Education Secretary Ruth Kelly’s embarrassment at finding her department too closely involved in the decision-making process, as it did to any real need for such a function. It was a prime example of ministerial buck-passing masquerading as statesmanlike wisdom.

What about the nine million who now won’t all need to be vetted? As El Reg has consistently argued, the end total, even under the reduced scheme announced by Ed Balls, was always going to be far greater, given the cultural drive towards “proving” one’s innocence. We reckoned between 14 and 16 million.

Without clear signals from government, that cultural imperative towards fearfulness, so assiduously fostered by New Labour, is still there, and is a key reason why so many employers not required by law to CRB-check their employees have started to do so. The recent case of a parent banned from a school sports day for not having a CRB check is just one instance of that culture.

At last, perhaps, the tide has started to turn – but it may yet need more than a little help from government to make sure it stays turned. ®

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Two gay men who said they faced persecution in their home countries have the right to asylum in the UK, the Supreme Court has ruled.

The panel of judges said it had agreed “unanimously” to allow the appeals from the men, from Cameroon and Iran.

They had earlier been refused asylum on the grounds they could hide their sexuality by behaving discreetly.

It was an inhuman policy, which no doubt Alan Johnson will go back on the TV politics shows to defend. And the counter-argument of course is that anyone could pretend they’re gay in order to claim asylum, but of course it’s the job of the UK Border Agency to determine the legitimacy of all asylum claims. Brendan Keenan is right when he says:

Equally important is that while one paragraph makes reference to stereotypes of gay men enjoying Kylie Minogue and “exotically coloured cocktails” (paragraph 78), it does so only to make the broader point that sexuality is a living thing, expressed in infinitely different and individual ways, and that as a result each individual’s case must be treated with the respect and attention it deserves, rather than looking solely at some prescribed categories of behaviour or preconceptions.

And Lord Hope got it equally right however in the ruling, when he said:

“To compel a homosexual person to pretend that his sexuality does not exist or suppress the behaviour by which to manifest itself is to deny his fundamental right to be who he is.

“Homosexuals are as much entitled to freedom of association with others who are of the same sexual orientation as people who are straight.”

The court said it would be passing detailed guidance to the lower courts about how to treat such cases in the future.

We live in a bizarre political landscape when Theresa May thanks the Supreme Court for justifying her Tory Home Office’s liberal position on this.

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He’s a brave man, I’ll give him that. But the answers are there in front of his face. Let’s start with the case of Jules Mattson:

On Saturday 26 June, photojournalist Jules Mattsson, who is a minor and was documenting the Armed Forces Day parade in Romford, was questioned and detained by a police officer after taking a photo of young cadets.

According to Mattsson, who spoke to BJP this morning, after taking the photo he was told by a police officer that he would need parental permission for his image. The photographer answered that, legally, he didn’t. While he tried to leave the scene to continue shooting, a second officer allegedly grabbed his arm to question him further.

According an audio recording of the incident, the police officer argued, at first, that it was illegal to take photographs of children, before adding that it was illegal to take images of army members, and, finally, of police officers. When asked under what legislation powers he was being stopped, the police officer said that Mattsson presented a threat under anti-terrorism laws. The photographer was pushed down on stairs and detained until the end of the parade and after the intervention of three other photographers.

Now I know Jules. He’s a good kid and a superb, passionate photographer, and this is is just appalling. Want proof? He recorded it:

The debate about the Metropolitan (and City) Police’s abuse of Section 44 has been waged many times and the arguments have been made more times than I can be bothered to think. But it’s now, once and for all, conclusively been ruled in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights:

In January 2010 the European Court held that section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 (the broad police power to stop and search without suspicion) violates the right to respect for private life guaranteed by Article 8 of the Convention on Human Rights (Gillan and Quinton v. UK4158/05 [2010] ECHR 28 (12 January 2010)). The claimants received £500 each by way of compensation.

The European Court has now rejected the UK’s application to appeal to the court’s Grand Chamber, meaning that the decision is final. This leaves stop and search powers in further disarray. The Home Secretary has already announced an “urgent review” of the powers after the recent admission by the Home Office that thousands of individual searches had been conducted illegally.

It’s clear that Section 44 has to go, but the risk remains that Clegg uses this scheme either to get the country to vent about laws they don’t like, or simply to delete specific laws without confronting the trends and behaviours which led to them in the first place. The cops who attacked Jules Mattson didn’t just cite Section 44 to try to stop him taking perfectly lawful photos – they made all sorts of garbage up in order to intimidate him into not taking photos. There is an institutional prejudice within the ranks against photographers, which was channelled by Section 44, and which would be much harder to root out and stop. New Labour made it abundantly clear they didn’t care one iota about the Met’s excesses. Time will tell if Theresa May cares any more, and this is what I want Nick Clegg to understand and tackle, more than anything.

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Home Secretary Theresa May has announced that [ISA] registration, due to begin next month, has been put on hold.

There will be a review of the entire vetting and barring scheme, with a scaling back to “common-sense levels”.

The government says the vetting scheme would have been “disproportionate and overly burdensome”.

Mrs May told the BBC that the measures were “draconian”.

“You were assumed to be guilty until you were proven innocent, and told you were able to work with children,” she said.

“All sorts of groups out there were deeply concerned about this and how it was going to affect them.

“There were schools where they were very concerned that foreign exchanges could be finished as a result of this, parents were worried about looking after other people’s children after school.”

The government is now contacting 66,000 organisations, including charities, voluntary groups and education authorities, to tell them that the planned registration is being cancelled.

Excellent news, really quite an impressive step in the right direction, particularly by a Conservative Party which in the past has been so succeptible to moral panics. In fact it’s highly impressive that May has used the term ‘draconian’ to describe the scheme, but it remains to be seen what this ‘scaling-back’ will involve. The ISA has already caused significant damage to the social fabric, presuming as it does that everyone is a paedophile unless they can prove otherwise. The Vetting and Barring Scheme was one of the most serious blights on the rule of law under New Labour, allowing the ISA to decide on people’s suitability as ‘safe’ to work with ‘vulnerable’ people (which would inevitably widen in its scope and definition over time) based on heresay and personal prejudice, with the most threadbare of rights of appeal.

The ISA, left unchecked, will send the message to younger people that everyone older than them is a potential threat, will make it more difficult for younger people to learn how to risk assess meaningfully for themselves, and will allow government to make decisions which are best suited to local people and local communities. After all the Soham murders, which the ISA was set up in response to, weren’t caused by an absence of child protection at the school which Ian Huntley worked at. And Huntley would never have worked at that school if existing protection provisions had been properly adhered to, and only gained contact with Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells because of their association with his girlfriend. The ISA could never have prevented that, indeed such a bureaucracy will never adequately be able to detect child abuse, which is invariably perpetrated by someone children already know (and who won’t be on a database). Is there a problem with paedophilia and child abuse? Of course, but it’s not best tackled through over-reliance on a database, nor by subverting the rule of law. We can only hope that the coalition really has understood that it can’t prevent risk, can’t protect everyone, and must allow employers and voluntary organisations to exercise their own expertise and discretion.

The only credible solution would be for the ISA to be wound up.

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“protect our freedoms from state encroachment” on the one hand and “encourage greater social responsibility” on the other.

She then goes on to add:

No explanation is given as to how to achieve these triangulated aims without weakening the protections we now have in the HRA.

It’s also not quite clear what those aims actually mean in practice. The language is quite reminiscent of New Labour’s similar idea of a British Bill of Rights and Responsibilities, although when discussed at the Convention on Modern Liberty early last year the idea was kicked thoroughly into touch for failing to identify what additional responsibilities should be codified other than to obey existing criminal law. Both parties have in recent years tried very hard to conflate civil rights with human rights, and have notably attacked the latter when rulings under the HRA haven’t been to their political benefit. But that’s not a sufficient reason to replace the Act, quite the opposite in fact, particularly, as Richard Norton-Taylor acknowledges:

All the Human Rights Act, brought in by the Blair government, really did was incorporate the convention into UK domestic law, avoiding long and expensive delays in disputed European court cases.

And as of an interview in the Times yesterday morning the Deputy Prime Minister wasn’t having any watering down of the HRA or any suggestion of its repeal. Clegg said:

“Any government would tamper with it at its peril.”

In response, Theresa May, the new and already illiberal Home Secretary has seemed to back down:

May was asked about the manifesto promise in an interview on BBC Radio 4′s Today programme, she downplayed the significance of this pledge. “We did say that we thought the Human Rights Act was not working in certain areas,” she said.

She went on: “We are currently in discussions with our coalition partners about what we will be doing in this area.”

‘Discussions with our coalition partners’? We can only hope they went along the lines of  ’you tamper with it at your peril’, but there are pressures for both sides to do just that. The HateMail has unsurprisingly gone on the offensive:

A flagship Tory pledge to tear up the Human Rights Act has been watered down in the coalition pact with the Liberal Democrats.

In opposition, the Conservatives repeatedly promised to replace Labour’s controversial legislation with a Bill of Rights.

But Government sources said last night that an independent commission would now be established to examine the ‘feasibility’ of the move.

‘Are we going to replace the Human Rights Act with a Bill of Rights? Very possibly,’ said one. ‘But the commission is going to look into all that.’

A commission? Shami Chakrabarti, Director of Liberty, has said:

“A coalition that has attempted to tie itself together with the language of civil liberties cannot now renege on fundamental human rights.

Given the way in which Liberal Democrats all the way up to the Deputy Prime Minister vowed to defend our Human Rights Act, any attempt to dilute it would spell the end of this Coalition – and rightly so.

Governments like people are bound together with common values not vested interests. There is nothing more British than the free speech, fair trials, personal privacy and rule against torture protected by the HRA.”

Yet the final coalition agreement accepts this commission. We have to hope that its findings aren’t against retaining the HRA – both for our sakes, and for the Deputy Prime Minister’s political future. Helena Kennedy concludes:

it may be very tempting for the Liberal Democrats to carve out victories on some areas of reform by making concessions elsewhere. This is why we have to make it clear that the terrain of human rights must not be the ground on which any further deals are done. Human rights have to be non-negotiables in this new political landscape.

And Clive Baldwin warns:

Experience shows that a taste for human rights acquired in opposition can soon wear off in government. Once comfortable behind their desks, new ministers tend soon to find the very repressive and authoritarian measures they decried in opposition rather congenial and useful once they sit in government. Let’s hope that the novelty of coalition government can buck that trend.

I couldn’t agree more. It would be alarming if the new Prime Minister actually negotiated effective repeal of the HRA and achieved his ambition of curbing the power of the judiciary:

And it’s why we will abolish the Human Rights Act and introduce a new Bill of Rights, so that Britain’s laws can no longer be decided by unaccountable judges.

It’s a second gripe about the HRA, it isn’t related to the first, and is a common refrain from the Right – ‘unaccountable’ or ‘activist’ judges must be stopped from interpreting codified, semi- or actual constitutional laws, because it interferes with the legislators’ political agendas. But to suggest the Act is at fault because judges have been free to interpret the European Convention on Human Rights from a British perspective makes no sense other than a political one – the judges and the Act get in the way, and the Tories would prefer they themselves had control over human rights law in the UK. Except the UK would still be covered by the convention.

The immediate effect would be to effectively deny access to the European Court for those who really need it because they simply wouldn’t be able to afford it – it’s dog whistle politics, Tories agreeing amongst themselves that some people deserve access to human rights, and not others. But Helena Kennedy is right – human rights are human rights – they are (and must be kept) universal. A replacement, which the final Coalition Agreement hints at, would water down the principle of universality and endanger those most in need of human rights protection. Clegg surely understands that, and given the rumours that all other disagreements in the coalition are being referred to similar ‘commissions’, it does look as though this battle will remain at stalemate. Any other outcome would surely smash the coalition into smithereens.

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Landmark legislation, from politicians who refused to sit back and do nothing while huge swathes of the population remained helpless against vested interests.

Who stood up for the freedom of the many, not the privilege of the few.

A spirit this government will draw on as we deliver our programme for political reform: a power revolution.

A fundamental resettlement of the relationship between state and citizen that puts you in charge.

Andrew Copson, BHA Chief Executive, said:

‘Much in this new Government statement accords with the BHA’s policies we set out in our own manifestos ahead of the election and with the principles of human rights, democracy and the rule of law. We particularly welcome moves to increase freedom of speech, and a reformed House of Lords which, by being fully elected, would necessarily remove the right of Bishops to sit in our second chamber.’

‘We also look forward to making our case for the repeal and revision of unjust, restrictive and discriminatory laws, such as those which require compulsory worship on our school children – a clear violation of their freedom of conscience – and those which unfairly restrict the right to free speech and protest.’

I think Copson is generally right but there are serious problems here. Clegg’s ideas are laudable, but there are as yet no indications as to how he thinks he’ll implement them – moving children of asylum seekers from one detention centre to another (particularly one with a notorious reputation) is not a remotely adequate solution. Much of the push towards ID cards came from within the civil service itself, and there is still an entrenched authoritarian culture in government agencies which needs urgent tackling; just yesterday the new government took the same stand on control orders as its predecessor.

I don’t just expect a repeal of New Labour’s surveillance state laws, I expect a change in culture to uphold the rule of law and to abide by evidence-based policy making. That means not just accepting the European Court of Human Rights’ ruling on the National DNA Database, but abiding by rulings against denying prisoners the vote and on the legality of Section 44 of the Terrorism Act. I’m worried that now in government Clegg is going to pick and choose what works for him and what doesn’t and not challenge the vested interests, defeat of whom really would make the “most significant programme of empowerment by a British government since the great enfranchisement of the 19th Century” much more than overexcited hyperbole.

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Geoffrey Robertson asks whether new Home Secretary Theresa May (and indeed new Deputy PM Clegg) will see reason on Gary McKinnon’s behalf, following her party’s and the Lib Dems’ long opposition to his extradition:

The first acid test for Britain’s new government is not the economy, but whether it is capable of an act of simple humanity. Can Theresa May deliver on the repeated promise of Tory and Lib Dem leaders to end the torment inflicted by the state on Gary McKinnon, the hacker with Asperger’s syndrome, whom the Home Office wants to send to lengthy imprisonment and likely suicide in a US jail? His courtroom cruelty is scheduled to begin again on 24 May: the time has come to end it, once and for all.

So, over to May, then. Her main difficulty will be to override her Home Office advisers, who have for years fought an unremitting, expensive and merciless battle against this poor man and his indomitable mother. They will, perhaps, tell their minister that if she reverses the Smith-Johnson decision, the Americans might take her to court for judicial review. But this is unrealistic: the Obama administration is unlikely to challenge a decision of the new British government. And even if it does, it is unlikely to be successful. And even if that happens, parliament is sovereign and can sweep away any adverse court decision simply by passing the Gary McKinnon (Freedom from Extradition) Act (2010).

Of course the truth is even simpler than that. Alan Johnson admitted that he did have the power to stop McKinnon’s extradition – he was just loath to use it for fear of setting an unwelcome precedent. Theresa May has an enormous task on her hands, not just to prove to a sceptical public about her suitability to be Equalities Minister, but to prove that she’s less of a hostage to the (as Robertson puts it) ‘uncivil servants’ in her department than her immediate two (if not four) predecessors. If this coalition is to mean anything, if its civil liberties agenda is going to have any believability whatsoever then at the very least Gary McKinnon’s extradition should be halted. Given that what evidence there is wouldn’t stand up in court (and none is needed to extradite him to the US) no further action should probably be taken against him.

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”What people see is a sort of ”Euro-friendly” that would have us in the single currency. They would have an amnesty for illegal immigrants, they would allow asylum seekers to work, which is utter, utter madness.”

I think that’s an appalling, inhuman position to take. New Labour’s policy of forced destitution of asylum seekers has been one of the many low points of their period in office, but Cathy Newman has gone further and fact-checked Johnson’s wider claim that it was ‘madness’ because 83% of asylum seekers were found not to have had a genuine claim:

His 83 per cent figure ignores 10 per cent of asylum claims which were granted leave to stay in the UK on humanitarian or discretionary grounds – making it hard to dismiss these as not genuine.

He also ignores the cases subsequently found to have genuine merit on appeal – just over a quarter of those that make it through to an appeal tribunal.

That’s not to dispute that the majority of asylum claims are rejected. But given the context in which Johnson cited the statistic and the need to be careful about the way figures are presented on such an emotive subject, we rate his claim fiction.

Good old Alan Johnson. The party which is currently promoting ‘fairness for all’ clearly means nothing of the sort.

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Bungling officials have labelled 15,000 innocent people as criminals in the past six years.

The blunders by the Criminal Records Bureau, a Home Office agency, amount to around seven smears every day.

The victims discovered they had been branded sex offenders, violent thugs or fraudsters when they had a CRB check before a new job. Many went through lengthy appeals to clear their names.

Our Freedom Of Information probe found the CRB coughed up an incredible £290,000 last year alone in “apology payments” to the worst-affected victims.

Most of the bungles involved CRB checks being mixed up, or incorrect details being given out by staff.Others involved police releasing information which was recorded wrongly when an offence was committed.

This is the effect of large-scale state bureaucracy on society. It’s being reflected by the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA), it would be reflected through the National Identity Register, and it’s downright sinister. Supporters of the government’s authoritarian agenda insist ‘if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about’, but evidence such as this keeps coming up to prove otherwise. Using a contracted-out agency to determine for employers and voluntary organisations who’s worthy and who’s not worthy in society will inevitably skew the entire basis of human relationships, and make what might otherwise be minor administrative errors catastrophies for those affected by them. It’s shameful how prepared this government has been to reduce people down to mere statistics on databases, when the evidence has been that the databases are inevitably incompetently managed and frequently abused. Far worse though has been the extent to which people have bought into the database state in the name of convenience, given the extent of the misery it’s responsible for.

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The Conservatives have dropped their opposition to the government’s crime and security bill, including its controversial provisions to allow the police to retain the DNA profiles of innocent people for up to six years.

Instead of blocking the bill, the shadow home secretary, Chris Grayling, made a fresh commitment that the Tories would bring in early legislation to ensure the DNA profiles of innocent people arrested for minor offences would not be retained on the national police DNA database.

“We will not seek to block this bill because the indefinite retention of innocent people’s DNA is unacceptable and has been ruled illegal,” said Grayling.He added that on taking office the Conservatives would also change the official guidance to the police, to give people the automatic right to have their DNA withdrawn from the database if have been wrongly accused of a minor crime.The decision follows a threat by the home secretary, Alan Johnson, to ditch the DNA provisions of the crime and security bill entirely, unless the Conservatives dropped their opposition to keeping profiles of innocent people on the database for up to six years.

Johnson said this morning he would pull all provisions from the amendment bill today if the Tories refuse to assent to the government’s plans. The bill is destined for this afternoon’s wash-up session to complete the government’s legislative programme ahead of the dissolution of parliament for the election.

Johnson told Sky News: “This is a basic example of how they [the Tories] talk tough on crime but act soft.”

I don’t normally use strong language on this blog, but what a cynical bastard the Home Secretary is. He’d rather play politics with one of the most important human rights issues in Britain today, and keep the country in breach of the Court’s ruling, instead of ensuring there was a system of appeal for people even to argue for their removal from the database. Yet more undemocratic game playing in the ‘wash up’ period by a government which has presided over the most out-of-touch, corrupt and inept parliament in living memory. The right to privacy and the presumption of innocence are commodities too precious to use as electioneering bargaining chips. When will this abuse end?

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Where’s the evidence that retaining DNA profiles of innocent people on the scale (and without any debate) perpetrated by the Home Office has actually led to more matches and more convictions? Oh there isn’t any. But hey vote Labour folks, after all they have policies which may breach human rights, but they make you safer. Except they don’t. Instead we have police forces which fail adequately to protect the public, but admitting to that wouldn’t be a vote winner in marginal seats. This started out as a government committed to human rights; its third attempt at retaining power proves it’s now more interested in power. That’s something we should be afraid of. New Labour, New Danger.

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