Writing this post later than I would have liked, I’m surprised that there has been so little commentary today about the launch today of the New Generation Network, founded by Pickled Politics‘ Sunny Hundal.

I think Sunny has hit on something here, something not all that dissimilar to my own contributions on the subject recently. In my own view, what we seem to have seen over the last five or so years, is an importation of the worst kind of multicultural politics that we see at a local (particularly Northern metropolitan) level into the national stage.

When I first got involved in Lib Dem politics, I’m ashamed to say that the first campaign I worked on was a blatant and cynical attempt to court the Pakistani vote in Rusholme, Manchester. In my defense, I was young and naive, but we were also inheriting a situation exacerbated by Labour’s own approach.

I would imagine that most people who have had a similar background would recognise the technique. Find a few ‘community leaders’ from the Pakistani or Bangladeshi community, beef up their egos and work on the assumption that they can single-handedly deliver you thousands of votes, simply through talking to the right clerics and family leaders. The fact that we weren’t particularly adept at it in the mid-90s was simply because Labour had got in there first, something which held firm until the Iraq War in 2003. This wasn’t about representation, dealing with basic needs such as housing and crime, it was about buying off the ‘right’ people with things like money for religion-based community centres and ‘partnerships’ with schools in Kashmir. And it has only helped to increase tensions and divisions.

This all should have reached its nadir with the 2001 riots. Much of the reportage at the time reflected on the complete failure of both ‘community leaders’ and mainstream politics to connect with the second- and third-generation of black and Asian communities. But 911 seemed to end what looked like the beginning of a sensible national conversation about race, religion and identity. Since then, national government seems to have treated ethnic communities in a remarkably similar way to what we’ve seen on the streets on Rochdale and Bradford. And the result seems to have lead to even greater tension and lunacy such as Trevor Phillips’ monthly predictions of race riots.

So I welcome NGN, its manifesto and its unequivocal call against prejudice, for equality and for freedom of speech (in light of some of the rows I’ve had in recent months I particularly welcome the line “we reject the idea that representation should mean ‘ethnic faces for ethnic areas’, which would ghettoise minority representation.”). I would urge my fellow bloggers and Lib Dems to sign up.

Polly Toynbee is really starting to depress me. The fact that a member of the aristocracy actually gets paid to write, week after week, about the need for the government to intervene on absolutely everything, is quite remarkable. She is beginning to eclipse any attempts at parody.

Today, she writes a heartfelt paean to the joys of the surveillance society, suggesting that anyone who opposes ID cards and a national DNA database is a green ink using paranoiac. Fortunately, there is a much more sensible piece by Michael White in the same paper to give a bit of balance (one suspects that the latter was written in response to the first), but I can’t help but feel that someone really needs to give her a proper fisking.

Unfortunately I’m far too busy to day to do it justice, and there are far more eloquent people out there than me. So please, if you get a chance, do make an effort to write your rebuttal and leave a link in my comments section so my faith in humanity can be restored.

Ta.

Jonathan Calder suggests that Brass Eye inspired the government’s latest idea for flying robot drones being used to spy on anti-social behaviour.

Of course, given the name of this blog, I should point out that Spy-in-the-sky cameras have been a staple part of crime fighting in the Judge Dredd comic for years now.

I used to work in a comic shop many years ago. One thing that always struck me was that we had a number of policemen who would come each week to pick up their local comics and all of them seemed to think that Judge Dredd was a good idea.

15 years later, we have spy-in-the-sky cameras and summary powers for the police. Most of these coppers would now be senior officers now, with an influence on policy. Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Oh dear, the police are getting bored. They’ve started enforcing arbitrary rules on the myriad leafleters delivering outside of the Labour Conference secure zone, forcing them to stand behind invisible lines that, remarkably didn’t exist yesterday.

Of more concern, I’ve just watched half a dozen police officers spend half an hour filming an anti-vivisectionist handing out flyers. The lad didn’t exactly look very dangerous (his 60-something female colleague on the other hand seemed somewhat unhinged), and the flyers they were handing out were relatively innocuous (questioning the validity of vivisection but not using the usual emotive photos of bleeding monkeys, etc). With animal rights activists taking ever more extreme action, I can understand why the police may have wanted to photograph any activists they come across, but why film him for half an hour? And why does it take 6 PCs to do the job?

When you see this sort of just-plain-weird police activity, it gives you a jolt because it makes you realise quite how arbitrary police powers have become in this country. And of course, those powers were introduced by the very people inside the conference secure zone.

Personally, I’m very suspicious of the need for a secure zone altogether. The whole thing is paid for by the taxpayer, which on one level is fair enough. But of course, Labour can charge higher room booking fees for organisations inside the zone. In short, regardless of the actual security implications, they are making a packet out of creating a ring of steel around their conference, inconveniencing locals and ensuring that a large number of conference goers only get exposed to the lobbying organisations with larger paychecks.

Funny how, even after the Brighton bombing in 1984, it was a decade and a half before such security was deemed neccesary.

My boss has written a nice post about the last episodes of the West Wing last night, linking it with the House of Lords Constitution Committee’s report this week on Royal prerogative.

For me, the “choke” moment of the two episodes was the bit when Bartlet gave Charlie his copy of the US Constitution. But then it got me thinking: not only do we not have a document with similar meaning in the UK, but for our government such rules are problems to be got around, not sacred limitations of their power.

Both America and the US Constitution have their faults, and the iconic status many Americans grant the Constitution occasionally strikes one as bizarre. I would certainly take issue with the way some treat it as if it were written on tablets of stone - constitutions have to be able to slowly evolve over time. But I take far more issue with those, including its current non-fictional president, who act as if it is a legalistic buffet that you can pick and choose from to suit your agenda.

In the UK, we desperately need a written constitution; the last five years of repeated assaults by Labour on our civil liberties prove that. But going hand in hand, we need a culture that values constitutional documents.

Yet the nearest thing we have to a constitutional document, the Human Rights Act, is continually under attack. We are told we have a “human rights culture” - the truth is we have anything but. A human rights culture is a culture in which people instinctively understand what rights are, not one in which the police claim the HRA forces them to give perps Kentucky Fried Chicken on demand.

The problem is, for constitutions to have that sort of ownership or resonance - for them to be able to convey that West Wing “choke factor - they tend to be borne of war or revolution, neither of which are things liberal democrats (small-l, small-d) should wish on the country. The real problem with the HRA is that it was drafted by ministers and civil servants while the rest of us were shut out. It should have been drawn up in a more open fashion and should have been ratified by a referendum - back in 1999 Labour could have easily won such a thing. If we are to have a written constitution, it has to be written by the people, for the people, and nothing less than a Citizen’s Convention will do.

I’m not exactly as ecstatic as Guido is over Lord Levy’s “perp walk” - relishing in political scandal as Mr Fawkes does is part of the problem (feel free to call me self-righteous in the comments section). But I will defend the police’s decision to arrest Levy, which Labour politicos are lining up today to denounce as “theatrical” (yet were strangely reticent to condemn Sir Ian Blair’s impersonation of Cecille B De Mille when the Metros descended on Forest Gate last month).

The truth is, justice is - and has to be - theatrical. A barrister friend of mine gave me an impassioned defence of the practice of wearing wigs in court a couple of weeks ago. His point was that the courts should have a degree of other-worldliness to them because the decision to deprive someone of their personal liberty is a serious business. The courts should be intimidating because that discourages people to hold them in contempt.

Jonathan Freedland has a fairly balanced article about the Levy affair today (the headline is misleading), making the point that white collar workers in the US can expect to be dragged out from their offices in handcuffs if they get caught with their metaphorical hand in the figurative till. That this - and Lord Levy’s arrest - is regarded as shocking while the indiscriminate handing out of ASBOs to kids in council estates doesn’t register the merest flicker of the political establishment’s collective eyebrow says a lot about how class is alive and well in the 21st century UK.

When “great” men like Lord Levy are accused of doing wrong, it is vital that we see them humbled. One of the most fundamental principles of our society is that justice must be seen to be done. A cosy fireside chat between the the Prime Minister’s tennis chum and Yates of the Yard doesn’t cut it I’m afraid.

For a perfect example of how confused David Cameron’s speech on human rights yesterday was, you need look no further than Iain Dale’s blog:

David Cameron is getting excellent coverage this morning for his Human Rights Act policy. I just heard Baroness Helena Kennedy saying positive things, which is deeply ironic considering she was one of the prime movers behind the original legislation.

There’s nothing “ironic” about Kennedy supporting calls for a Bill of Rights, as that is what she and Charter88 were calling for in 1998. The HRA was regarded by them as a compromise.

What is “ironic” is that both Kennedy and David Davis’ Representative On Earth seem to like what Cameron was saying. One of them is surely going to be deeply disappointed. My suspicion is that it will be the Baroness as I think I can just make out the high-pitched screeching of a dog whistle.

Rebekah Wade can quite clearly hear one. She reckons that what Cameron is proposing accords entirely with the Currant Bun’s “string’em up” campaign. The rhetoric is all there: he isn’t calling for reforms of the HRA, but to scrap it. This nonsense about the Strasbourg courts backing off from countries with their own Bill of Rights (only if they believe that the Bill of Rights is worth the paper its printed on, Dave). And to many Tories, the Bill of Rights is something that came down from Mt Sinai in tablets of stone circa 1689.

Meanwhile, Cameron is trotting that old canard about having to balance security and liberty. To be fair, he’s probably only saying it because Blair said it first, but it is still utter balls. Was it safe to live in Saddam’s Iraq? Is it safe to live in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe? Blameron’s logic would have you believe these were paradises of security. Karl Popper may as well have never existed as far as these two are concerned: political theory begins and ends with Hobbes for them.

The fact is though, liberty buys us security. It isn’t a perfect trade-off but if people are free, by and large they behave responsibly. If people are treated like impudent children, they behave like impudent - or if you go too far, traumatised - children. Politicians who believe otherwise are potential tyrants who deserve to be treated with nothing but contempt.

A terrific kerfuffle is waging over a judge’s decision to grant 9 Afghan hijackers asylum, with both Blair and Cameron muttering about human rights.

What do human rights have to do with it? No-one is seriously questioning that we should extradite people to countries where we can expect them to be oppressed or badly treated are they? The question is less about the Human Rights Act and more about the current state of Afghanistan and the judge’s decision.

Cameron is now promising to “reform, replace or scrap” the HRA. Well, make up your bloody mind, which is it? We’ve had this nonsense from the Tory front benches for years now, and they have consistently refused to spell out exactly what their problem is. It’s utterly ludicrous because if we did scrap or otherwise water down the HRA all that would happen is that more high profile cases would get resolved by judges in Strasbourg and not the UK, while other human rights abuses will simply be allowed to continue. Or are we now going to leave the Council of Europe?

Judicial activism in the UK is unrecognisable compared to the highly politicised games that go on in the US. It is only problematic if we have a government that is cavalier about Human Rights. Labour seem to think the fact they introduced the HRA means they must now be regarded as immune from it. The problem stems from the fact that the broad coalition that brought Labour to power in 1997 has now been sloughed off, and we are left with an authoritarian, illiberal core that doesn’t quite understand why it did half the things it did in the first three years of power.

The Tories meanwhile are beginning to embrace a lot of what we might call the “democracy” agenda, but are being incredibly selective. Yes to elected Police Commissioners, citizen’s initiatives, more power to local authorities, but no to electoral reform, a written constitution or human rights. The result is more power to the majority (or, more accurately in most cases, the plurality), but no safeguards to protect minority interests. I’m not sure I would describe mob rule as democracy.

As well as the “green tests” that Campbell and Huhne have been setting the Tories, we should be setting them a number of “liberty” tests as well, since they are so keen to co-opt this agenda. After all, those of us who remember the 90s recall that back then Tony Blair was falling over himself to demonstrate what a liberal he was as well. The Tories weren’t so keen on civil liberties back then either.

In a bid to save his own bacon, Charles Clarke has come up with what he regards as the perfect solution: announce the creation of new laws. You can see why he thinks this will get him off the hook; it has been the standard recourse of action for both him and his predecessors whenever they have found themselves in anything hotter than mildly tepid water. It follows the standard formulation of “something must be done, this is something, therefore it must be done,” which generally speaking completely outfoxes the media.

The problem is, also as per usual it manages to be both draconian and completely misses the point. On the one hand, it means a presumption of deportation for anyone imprisoned for not paying their TV license. On the other hand, it wouldn’t have stopped Mustaf Jamma who was considered for deportation. It also does nothing to solve the systemic failure that caused this crisis in the first place. It is all for show.

We all ready have a system in place. Charles Clarke should have spent the last week trying to make it work. The fact that he has apparently spent the last 7 days simply coming up with more illiberal laws suggests that he is incapable of government. In essence, announcing this new law is a cry for help, “somebody stop me before I use my discretion again!”

Jock and Vivienne have already got the IPPR’s compulsory voting pamphlet covered, so there is little for me to add. All I will say is that before Geoff Hoon decides to force this measure through, he ought to consider the obstinacy of the British. I live in a Labour-Tory marginal; I vote Lib Dem simply to keep the national average up and to get the Lib Dems a bit more public funding (which works out at approximately 12p per vote). Compulsory voting however would mean that if I and another 10,000 or so people didn’t vote we could use polling day to make a political statement about how poor our voting system is. With so few votes that count under our electoral system, frankly, I’d be surprised if it is as low as 10,000.

A lot of people are already feeling pretty bloody minded about ID cards; this is an invitation for a mass civil disobedience campaign. I can think of nothing else that would more quickly hasten electoral reform. Perhaps Geoff Hoon and the IPPR are fifth columnists secretly plotting to bring down the status quo through the sheer incompetence of their scheme?