Civil liberties, justice, crime

The official review of the UK’s Prevent “counter-terrorism” strategy led by William Shawcross has finally come out , after much delay. Amnesty International UK’s racial justice director Ilyas Nagdee has responded that the review “has no legitimacy. William Shawcross’s history of bigoted comments on Muslims and Islam should have precluded his involvement in this review in the first place.” That is right. As Solidarity flagged up in May last year, Shawcross is a radical right-winger with a startling history of anti-Muslim commentary. The idea that the UK government appointed a former director of...

The openDemocracy website has revealed how Sadiq Khan’s London administration worked with a security firm to target youth climate change campaigners, seemingly spying on them. When supporters of left-wing group Green New Deal Rising tried to attend an event at the O2 to challenge the mayor over his environmentally damaging Silvertown Tunnel project, security not only barred them but already knew their names. Both the Silvertown Tunnel itself and this latest information are yet more reasons for the London labour movement to call Sadiq Khan to account. • openDemocracy report here

Venturing into out of the way pubs in the 1970s customers were sometimes confronted with petitions calling for the restoration of the death penalty. It was perhaps unfair to regard all pub landlords as dyed in the wool reactionaries, but given that their profession produced the highest number of alcoholics, ready access to the demon drink maybe turned many licensees into misanthropes back in the day. Albert Pierrepoint, the state’s official hangman, was a pub landlord. His boozer in Oldham was Help The Poor Struggler. Imagine though if the “bring back the rope” brigade manage to get a...

Review of Secret Power: WikiLeaks and its Enemies, by Stefania Maurizi (with a foreword by Ken Loach). London: Pluto Press 2022

Russian journalists put their lives on the line to expose the corrupt Putin regime. At least 38 have been murdered in Russia since he came to power. Others face physical attacks, arrest and constant intimidation. One would hope that investigative journalists in Britain can write about Putin and his cronies without suffering negative consequences, given the UK government has imposed several sets of sanctions against oligarchs associated with the Kremlin. That supposition, however, ignores Britain's lenient libel laws, which disproportionately favour the rich and powerful, as well as amoral law...

The case of the trans prisoner Isla Bryson has led to an outcry from transphobes, as she was initially housed in a female jail. She transitioned during her trial, and was convicted of two rapes. The outcry came shortly after the Scottish government’s reforms to allow for a quicker legal-gender recognition process based on self-identification, and the Tory government’s move to block those reforms; but gender-recognition legal reforms do not shape the decision about where to house Bryson. Prisons in Scotland, as in rest of the UK, have to risk-assess all prisoners when deciding where to house...

The Public Order Bill introduced in May 2022 is a ploy by the Tories to reinstate the more-restrictive amendments they introduced to their already-bad-enough Police Act but which failed in the House of Lords. The Police Act became law in April 2022. Now the Tories have moved amendments to the Public Order Bill to make protesters subject to arrest, not for disruption, but for being thought likely to create disruption. The Public Order Bill is now approaching its third reading in the House of Lords, having completed all stages in the House of Commons. The Police Bill, as it then was, drew big...

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe (on right) and her husband join protest to demand freedom for Alaa Abd el-Fattah Jailed Egyptian democracy activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah, whose profile rose during COP27 because the summit was in Egypt and he is a UK citizen, is still alive. His family has finally been allowed to see him , and reports his hunger strike was broken by the regime, which forced him to take intravenous fluids. They revealed many harrowing new details of the most recent period of his decade behind bars. There are over 60,000 political prisoners in Egypt’s jails. The UK labour movement should...

The enactment of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts (PCSC) Act in April was a serious blow against the right to protest. The Tories’ new Public Order Bill, reviving the worst elements removed from the Police Act by the House of Lords, is more serious still. There were some lively protests against the original law — but so far very little against the new one, which has already made its way through the House of Commons to the Lords . The left should speak up, advocating protest and looking for ways to mobilise it. The introduction to briefings from Justice, a campaign “for a fair...