Safe Speed Forums

The surveillance of organisations mentioned like environmental groups, animal rights activists and secondary pickets could easily be extended to other "extremist" groups who oppose the Government - like SafeSpeed.

Just what exactly do you stand for, Hazel Blears - except election?
The minister claims to have political guts, but the only principle her voting record shows is slavish obedience

An open letter to Hazel Blears MP, secretary of state for communities and local government.

Last week you used an article in the Guardian to attack my "cynical and corrosive commentary". You asserted your political courage, maintaining that "you don't get very far in politics without guts, and certainly not as far as the cabinet table". By contrast, you suggested, I contribute "to the very cynicism and disengagement from politics" that I make my living writing about. You accused me of making claims without supporting evidence and of "wielding great influence without accountability". "We need more people standing for office and serving their communities," you wrote, "more people debating, engaging and voting; not more people waving placards on the sidelines."

Quite so. But being the placard-waving sort, I have a cynical and corrosive tendency to mistrust the claims ministers make about themselves. Like you, I believe opinions should be based on evidence. So I have decided to test your statements against the record.

Courage in politics is measured by the consistent application of principles. The website TheyWorkForYou.com records votes on key issues since 2001. It reveals that you voted "very strongly for the Iraq war", "very strongly against an investigation into the Iraq war" and "very strongly for replacing Trident" ("very strongly" means an unbroken record). You have voted in favour of detaining terror suspects without charge for 42 days, in favour of identity cards and in favour of a long series of bills curtailing the freedom to protest. There's certainly consistency here, though it is not clear what principles you are defending.

Other threads are harder to follow. In 2003, for instance, you voted against a fully elected House of Lords and in favour of a chamber of appointed peers. In 2007, you voted for a fully elected House of Lords. You have served without public complaint in a government which has introduced the minimum wage but blocked employment rights for temporary and agency workers; which talked of fiscal prudence but deregulated the financial markets; which passed the Climate Change Act but approved the construction of a third runway at Heathrow; which spoke of an ethical foreign policy but launched an illegal war in which perhaps a million people have died. Either your principles, by some remarkable twists of fate, happen to have pre-empted every contradictory decision this government has taken, or you don't possess any.

You remained silent while the government endorsed the kidnap and the torture of innocent people; blocked a ceasefire in Lebanon and backed a dictator in Uzbekistan who boils his prisoners to death. You voiced no public concern while it instructed the Serious Fraud Office to drop the corruption case against BAE, announced a policy of pre-emptive nuclear war, signed a one-sided extradition treaty with the United States and left our citizens to languish in Guantánamo Bay. You remained loyal while it oversaw the stealthy privatisation of our public services and the collapse of Britain's social housing programme, closed hundreds of post offices and shifted taxation from the rich to the poor. What exactly do you stand for Hazel, except election?

The only consistent political principle I can deduce from these positions is slavish obedience to your masters. TheyWorkForYou sums up your political record thus: "Never rebels against their party in this parliament." Yours, Hazel, is the courage of the sycophant, the courage to say yes.

Let me remind you just how far your political "guts" have carried you. You are temporarily protected by the fact that the United Kingdom, unlike other states, has not yet incorporated the Nuremberg principles into national law. If a future government does so, you and all those who remained in the cabinet on 20 March 2003 will be at risk of prosecution for what the Nuremberg tribunal called "the supreme international crime". This is defined as the "planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression". Robin Cook, a man of genuine political courage, put his conscience ahead of his career and resigned. What did you do?

It seems to me that someone of your principles would fit comfortably into almost any government. All regimes require people like you, who seem to be prepared to obey orders without question. Unwavering obedience guarantees success in any administration. It also guarantees collaboration in every atrocity in which a government might engage. The greatest thing we have to fear in politics is the cowardice of politicians.

You demanded evidence that consultations and citizens' juries have been rigged. You've got it. In 2007, the high court ruled that the government's first consultation on nuclear power was "seriously flawed" and "unlawful". It also ruled that the government must commission an opinion poll. The poll the government launched was reviewed by the Market Research Standards Board. It found that "information was inaccurately or misleadingly presented, or was imbalanced, which gave rise to a material risk of respondents being led towards a particular answer".

As freedom of information requests made by Greenpeace reveal, the consultation over the third runway at Heathrow used faked noise and pollution figures. It was repeatedly pre-empted by ministers announcing that the runway would be built. Nor did the government leave anything to chance when it wanted to set up giant health centres, or polyclinics, run by GPs. As Dr Tony Stanton of the Londonwide Local Medical Committees has pointed out, "a week before a £1m consultation on polyclinics and hospitals by NHS London closed, London's 31 primary care trusts were issued with instructions on setting up polyclinic pilots and GP-led health centres". Consultations elsewhere claimed that there was no need to discuss whether or not new health centres were required, as the principle had already been established through "extensive national level consultation exercises". But no such exercises had taken place; just a handful of citizens' juries engaging a total of a thousand selected people and steered by government ministers. Those who weren't chosen had no say.

Fixes like this might give you some clues about why more people are not taking part in politics. I believe there is a vast public appetite for re-engagement, but your government, aware of the electoral consequences, has shut us out. It has reneged on its promise to hold a referendum on electoral reform. It has blocked a referendum on the European treaty, ditched the regional assemblies, used Scottish MPs to swing English votes, sustained an unelected House of Lords, eliminated almost all the differences between itself and the opposition. You create an impenetrable political monoculture, then moan that people don't engage in politics.

It is precisely because I can picture something better that I have become such a cynical old git. William Hazlitt remarked that: "Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be." You, Hazel, have helped to reduce our political choices to a single question: whether to laugh through our tears or weep through our laughter.

We all need to way up what’s going on and how people are starting to speak out, the way some of our politicians are acting and things they are doing are well out of order. We need to get together and put an end to what’s happening or something bad is going to happen. Stop fighting one another and sort it out.

How is the campaign to have speed cameras removed as part of a greater understanding of road safety going ?
Any gone yet ?
Or are the partnerships still growing in size ?

The time, for action, has come and gone.

Will limiting ourselves to mere moans about missed opportunities get us anywhere?

No - you can act by driving more slowly.

Your main complaint is not related to speed cameras, but about general constraints. You don't care about
technology, but freedom. Yet freedom must be accompanied by responsibility. Time and time again, people
have abused freedoms, and constraints follow. Constraints don't come out of the blue - they are imposed
for a reason.

My advice is to drive more slowly. If everyone drove nice and slowly, there would be no need at all for speed limits.
My main enemy is speeders, because they cause speed limits (and cameras).

You must be having a laugh, aren't you?

Your response to the issue of abuse of power is to abide by it without question

Even if everyone did drive slowly enough, the partnerships would tell us to drive slower still until an unreasonably level of slow is reached, thereby achieving their goal of a perpetual source never-ending infringement and hence income.

Our main enemy are those who abuse their power whilst letting the criminal underclass act with impunity

I think we need to decide who is abusing who.

I'm relatively unconcerned about my tax being paid by (let's call them) heavy footers,

I'm not sure what you mean by "letting"? Is there something else to be done?

...
You demanded evidence that consultations and citizens' juries have been rigged. You've got it. In 2007, the high court ruled that the government's first consultation on nuclear power was "seriously flawed" and "unlawful". It also ruled that the government must commission an opinion poll. The poll the government launched was reviewed by the Market Research Standards Board. It found that "information was inaccurately or misleadingly presented, or was imbalanced, which gave rise to a material risk of respondents being led towards a particular answer".

I'm relatively unconcerned about my tax being paid by (let's call them) heavy footers, and I couldn't care less that the roads are less congested
while they serve their ban, and that they pay extra insurance so that my costs are lower. In fact, for me, cameras are a boon. But I don't like being watched by spies. I rather like the idea of the speed-addicts getting it in the neck, but not enough to offset my fear of a surveillance society.

COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY.

To politicians, we're little more than meaningless blobs on a monitor. Bring on the summer of rage

We're the ants in their garden. The bacteria in their stools.
Politicians have nothing but contempt for us

Charlie Brooker
The Guardian, Monday 2 March 2009

Any abusive relationship tends to end with a long, slow phase of mounting disappointment followed by a sudden, irreversible snapping point. The descent to rock bottom may take years but when you get there, the force of impact still shocks, and it's precisely this shock that gives you the strength to walk away. Take smoking, for instance. You can light up for years, hating yourself and the habit a little bit more with each accumulated puff, yet remain hopelessly locked in nicotine's pointless embrace, until one day you find yourself scrabbling through the kitchen bin, picking potato peelings off a dog end because it's 11pm and the shops are closed and GOD YOU NEED A FAG . . . when you catch sight of your sorry junkie-arsed reflection in the shiny bin lid and undergo an epiphany of self-disgust, vowing to quit there and then.

I bring this up because I suspect that across the country, people are undergoing similar epiphanies every day. Not about cigarettes, but politicians. My personal snapping point was reached last week, at the precise moment Jack Straw announced the government was vetoing the Information Tribunal's order for the release of cabinet minutes relating to that whole invasion-of-Iraq thing. Come on, you remember Iraq: that little foreign policy blip millions of us protested against to absolutely zero avail, because Straw and his pals figured they knew best, even though it turned out they didn't and - oops! - hundreds of thousands of lives were lost as a result. Remember the footage of that screaming little boy with his limbs blown off? Maybe not. Maybe you felt a shiver of guilt when you saw that; guilt that you hadn't personally done enough to prevent it; should've shouted louder, marched further. Or maybe it stunned you into numbness. Because what was the point in protesting any more? These people do what they want.

They do what they want, these people, and you and I are cut out of the conversation. I'm sure they're dimly aware we still exist. They must spot us occasionally, through the window, jumping up and down in the cold with our funny placards . . . although come to think of it, they can't even see us through the window, since they banned peaceful protest within a mile of Parliament.

Instead they pick us up on a monitor, courtesy of one of the 15bn CCTV cameras that scrutinise our every move in the name of security. On the screen you're nothing but a tiny monochrome blob; two-dimensional and faceless. And that's just how they like it.

Straw and co blocked the release of the minutes, claiming that to actually let us know what was going on would set a dangerous precedent that would harm good government. Ministers wouldn't speak frankly at cabinet meetings if they felt their discussions would be subjected to the sort of scrutiny that, say, our every waking move is. In other words, they'd be more worried about the press coverage they'd get than the strength of their arguments.

Well, boo hoo. Surely craven pussies like that shouldn't be governing anyway?

Having pissed in the public's face, Straw went on to shake the final drips down its nose, writing a defence of the government's civil liberties record in this paper in which he claimed "talk of Britain sliding into a police state is daft scaremongering, but even were it true there is a mechanism to prevent it - democratic elections . . .

People have the power to vote out administrations which they believe are heavy-handed." Thanks, Jacksy - can I call you Jacksy? - but who the hell are we supposed to vote in? Despite a bit of grumbling, the Tories supported the veto. Because they wouldn't want cabinet minutes published either.

It's all over. The politicians have finally shut us out of their game for good and we have nowhere left to turn. We're not part of their world any more. We don't even speak the same language. We're the ants in their garden. The bacteria in their stools. They have nothing but contempt for us. They snivel and lie and duck questions on torture - on torture, for Christ's sake - while demanding we respect their authority. They monitor our every belch and fart, and insist it's all for our own good.

Straw wrote, "If people were angels there would be no need for government . . . But sadly people are not all angels." That rather makes it sound as though he believes politicians aren't mere people. Maybe they're the gods of Olympus. Maybe that's why they're in charge.

Thing is, they could get away with this bullshit while times were good, while people were comfortable enough to ignore what was happening; when people were focusing on plasma TVs and iPods and celebrity gossip instead of what the politicians were doing - not because they're stupid, but because they know a closed shop when they see one. But now it looks as if those times are at an end, and more and more of us are pulling the dreampipes from the back of our skulls, undergoing a negative epiphany; blinking into the cold light of day.

Consequently the police are preparing for a "summer of rage". To the powers that be, that probably just means more tiny monochrome blobs jumping up and down on the long-distance monitor for their amusement. Should it turn out to be more visceral than that, they'll have no one to blame but themselves.

This week Charlie managed to convince himself he was coming down with the winter vomiting bug three times despite a total lack of symptoms: "Apparently, it comes on so fast the first sign you've got it is the sight of puke shooting unexpectedly from your own mouth, followed almost immediately by an involuntary trouser-soiling evacuation of the bowels."

wow Charlie, if I am not mistaken, you are paraphrasing Chomsky here. In his view, as is so often in history, the enemies of our political class, are not Bin Laden, the Russians, or other decoys whether x y or z, but their own citizens.

Yep, thats you and me, all of us. The name of the game is to distract us from what they are really doing, and an endless supply of some supposed threat or other.

The reason that the millions who demonstrated against the pending Iraq war, made no dent at all in the plans, is that the UK's decisions are made on its behalf, in Washington and Tel Aviv, not London.

Britain has been a vassal state for some time. It makes no difference which mainstream party you vote for, because they are effectively one.

it is premature to talk of cures, till the public can agree on the what the disease is, and why it seems to pervade so deeply through officialdom. Unfocused street rage will just play into the hands of the wrong people.

In the meantime, what is worth demonstrating over, is to challenge each attempt to curb our liberties as they arise, lest the ratchet just tighten around us. Most important of all, is to preserve the confidence for everybody to peacefully demonstrate, without fear of criminalisation or police brutality. This is where the key battle-line will be drawn, and where the struggle for an open and free society will grow, or fail.

If that battle over the confidence to protest is lost, then we will all be the losers. The government will seem to benefit at first, but the public will quietly simmer and the rage will grow. In the end, the government and newspaper editors will suddenly learn what a summer of rage really means, and might end up hanging from lamp-posts. But we will just end up again with yet another fascist or treasonous government.

So making the government fall is pointless, there is no 'saviour' waiting to step in. Britain's problems go beyond the government, the problems are systemic.

In all political parties and official bodies though, are a few rebels, likely patriots, who need to be empowered through public support. The change must come from within.

looks like we'll need more than 2 million demonstrators next time though, that number fell a bit short of requirements last time. Is the British public up to the job?

It is encouraging to see so many people getting angry about politics. But nothing will come of it while they still trust so blindly in the version of news fed to them through the mainstream media, whether telly or the press. So, if I were in the government, i would feel as secure and smug today as always, because the mass public are as reliably naive as ever, on that score.

And most important of all, if circumstances make the possibility of real change near, beware the selfsame mainstream media, who will be quick to declare and appoint the new heroes, who would likely be the old gang in new colours.

In summary, it is more important to fight for general issues and freedoms that will constrain whoever is in power, than for regime change. Has any society ever been truly free?