Brian Haw

[liadnan]

Though the Court of Appeal have now held that despite the appallingly shoddy drafting of the legislation preventing unauthorised protests in Parliament Square, the section does indeed apply to Brian Haw, for the moment he remains (unless things have developed further since last night's raid).

The response from the Police and Government seems pretty ridiculously pathetic - see here for last night's antics.

Comments

[liadnan]

The government did not win an election. Governments do not fight general elections. Many of the individuals who fought and won their seats under the label of the government party opposed the legislation before the election and oppose these moves now. (Many Tories supported the legislation, including the Opposition front bench) I don;t recall seeing anything about this stuff in anyone's manifesto.

The legitimacy of the government derives solely from the fact that a majority of those individuals nonetheless would continue to support the government in the event of a vote of no confidence.

This may seem a pedantic point but I'm finding references to Tony Blair winning a general election increasingly irritating. He did no such thing, and personally I believe quite a lot of votes went to people from his party in spite of, rather than because of, him.

As for your previous point: if we're to be reduced to cheering because we're only repressing the right to free speech and free assembly with ordinary police force, not with totalitarian methods and paramilitary police, then we're in trouble.

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

You're right - it is largely a pedantic point: voters who elected Labour or Conservative MP's did so largely based on their perceptions of the party leaders - much more so than those electing Independents.

And yes, I was being facetious, but if we throw around charges about the death of democracy and the loss of our government's legitimacy because a clapper disapears from a handbell, how will we define the difference between that and genuine totalitarianism? Outrage is cheap, but I still get annoyed when I see it piled higher than the circumstances warrant.