On November 15th 2004, The Children’s Bill 2004 received the Royal Assent and became the Children’s Act 2004, having passed its third reading in the House of Lords by a mere 12 votes. Reading what the DfES has to say about this Act it would seem benign enough […]

Forget the complaints from Opposition MP’s about the scheduling of the second reading of the ID cards Bill to coincide with today’s Internation Fleet Review marking that the start of celebrations of the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar. The Government could not have chosen a more […]

In the annals of official stupidity, a report is today’s Times that the Home Office has, over the last month, been deporting asylum seekers to Zimbabwe of all places, and is due to deport many more over the next few weeks, deserves a page all of its own. […]

One of the more interesting and illuminating books I’ve read in a long time is Tim Slessor’s ‘Lying in State’ which through a range of examples, some familiar (Hutton, Belgrano, Gulf War Syndrome) and some maybe not so familiar (the Chagos Islanders, Chinook ZD576) explores the way in […]

The other day I pointed out how, once you have a government in possession of a National Identity Register, it was possible for people’s civil liberties to slowly and quietly slip away over time without them ever realising it until it was too late. It doesn’t take a […]

I suppose it had to happen… finally up pops a blogger willing to mount some sort of defence of the Government’s ID cards proposal. Actually, I have to say this is a good thing, not just from the point of view of simply having points to debate but […]

Today – well yesterday now – my esteemed blogging colleague PoliticalHack wondered whether, having laid into fundamentalist Christian movie reviewers, I also noticed the bunch of nutballs who now claim that there were dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden. Oddly enough I had noticed and commented on it […]

Of all the soulless enterprises I’ve ever come across in the online world one of the worst has to be the ‘Cap Movie Ministry’, a website which provide alternative film ratings for ‘Christian’ parents using its own ratings system which includes scores for ‘impudence/hate’ and ‘offense to god’ […]

One the options being discussed in a number of places is the possibility of civil disobedience should the Identity Cards Bill makes its way into law, the simplest form of which being a refusal to register for a card – after all, at this stage, they’re not compulsory… […]

Another day and some more information you may not have come across regarding the Identity Cards Bill. One of the key omissions from the bill is that it has no provisions whatsoever to cover the recording of information from the National Identity Register by third party. The bill […]