‘Anti-terror style “control orders” could be used to disrupt the activities of the gangsters at the top of organised crime, the government says.’

‘The government brought in control orders to target terror suspects who could not be prosecuted in courts. Control orders allow terror suspects to be tagged, confined to their homes and banned from communicating with others.’

(In other words, without a trial, they can tag you and put you under house arrest, and no communicating means no visitors, no mail, no phones, landline or mobile, and no internet access). First it was terrorists, now gangsters, what next?

Note further: ‘The plans also include introducing new laws to target people on the periphery of criminal activity and moves to increase the amount of data sharing between public sector agencies.’

Right, so they’ll be able to extend these to people they allege might be involved, and severely reducing the protections under the Data Protection Act.

Big Brother or what? Doesn’t this sound a little like a fascist or communist dictatorship? Hitler? Mussolini? Idi Amin? Saddam Hussein? Stalin? Nicolae Ceau?escu?

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictator
“In modern usage, dictator refers to an absolutist or autocratic ruler who governs outside the constitutionally normal rule of law with checks and balances, usually through a continued state of exception. However, unlike the original Roman dictators (who were a constitutional institution), modern dictators rarely give themselves the title “dictator”; it is generally used by their opponents as a pejorative term for totalitarian rule, just like despot and tyrant (also unlike their counterparts in Antiquity). “

At least some have wit. For example, Idi Amin Dada, who had been a British army lieutenant prior to Uganda’s independence from Britain in October 1962, subsequently styled himself as “His Excellency President for Life Field Marshal Al Hadji Dr. Idi Amin, VC, DSO, MC, King of Scotland Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular.”

Oh, and the Crown Prosecution Service have decided not to prosecute any police officers over the killing of the Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes on London’s Underground (metro), but will prosecute the police in general under the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act for “failing to provide for the health, safety and welfare” of Mr Menezes on 22 July.

So they can shoot you now to and get away with it.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/5187752.stm

[…]

Snarfed from a thread on Digg.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 17th, 2006 at 7:13 pm and is filed under Someone Clever Said.