So, the police officer who assaulted and potentially killed Ian Tomlinson won't face prosecution. The main reason given by the CPS is that the different results of the post-mortems make it impossible to secure a conviction.
This is a tidy result for the Met, who clearly knew what they were doing when they rushed Tomlinson's body into a post-mortem by their favourite pathologist.
At the time, Lib Dem Shadow Justice spokesman David Howarth spoke out against the Met's actions:
Who chose the first pathologist and how? When the first post mortem came out saying natural causes so soon after his death, I thought that was too quick....At the very least, there now needs to be a full and independent public inquiry into the Tomlinson case, and the actions of the public authorities in the days after his death. Who knew what - and when?
David Howarth quoted in The Guardian
That call for an independent public inquiry is even more important now. Although Mr Howarth has now left parliament, Britcit fervently hopes other Lib Dems will decide to make waves on this issue rather than paddle happily in the shallows of the coalition.
The other question on which Britcit is unclear at the moment is why the officer is not to face any lesser charges, i.e. assault?
I cheerfully take it all back.
First, sweeping legislation to restore the hard won liberties that have been taken, one by one, from the British people. This government will end the culture of spying on its citizens. It is outrageous that decent, law-abiding people are regularly treated as if they have something to hide. It has to stop.
So there will be no ID card scheme.
No national identity register, a halt to second generation biometric passports.
We won't hold your internet and email records when there is just no reason to do so.
CCTV will be properly regulated, as will the DNA database, with restrictions on the storage of innocent people's DNA.
Britain must not be a country where our children grow up so used to their liberty being infringed that they accept it without question. There will be no ContactPoint children's database. Schools will not take children's fingerprints without even asking their parent's consent.
This will be a government that is proud when British citizens stand up against illegitimate advances of the state. That values debate, that is unafraid of dissent. That's why we'll remove limits on the rights to peaceful protest.
It's why we'll review libel laws so that we can better protect freedom of speech.
And as we tear through the statute book, we'll do something no government ever has: we will ask you which laws you think should go.
Because thousands of criminal offences were created under the previous government: taking people's freedom away didn't make our streets safe. Obsessive lawmaking simply makes criminals out of ordinary people. So, we'll get rid of the unnecessary laws, and once they're gone, they won't come back. We will introduce a mechanism to block pointless new criminal offences.
And, we will, of course introduce safeguards to prevent the misuse of anti-terrorism legislation.
There have been too many cases of individuals being denied their rights...and whole communities being placed under suspicion. This government will do better by British justice; respecting great, British freedoms...which is why we'll also defend trial by jury.
Nick Clegg, Deputy Prime Minister, 19th May 2010
I like Nick Clegg, I really do. I'm quite fond of the Liberals, too, as throughout the last 13 years of creeping authoritarianism they have consistently spoken up for civil liberties and political reform.
Having said that, this prolonged media orgasm about Clegg's debate performance and subsequent poll surge is really starting to irk me.
It's impossible to tell how much of it is real - the media needed a line on the debate story, quickly coalesced around a blatantly exaggerated Clegg 'win', ran it endlessly, then went apeshit when - quel surprise - some of the public reflected this view back to them (in polling, and then in the even more suspect vox pops).
The numbers are soft, there's really no way to know what they mean beyond the fact that more people now know who Clegg and the Lib Dems are. But despite that, it seems to be all the pundits are talking about. I can't remember the last time anyone asked or answered a decent probing question about the deficit.
With the Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty almost certainly producing a 'Yes', there's now some sort of consensus building in the commentariat about the impossible position David Cameron now finds himself in. If, as is likely, the treaty is ratified before Cameron gets to Downing Street, then his hands will be tied. He can't hold a British referendum on the treaty after the fact, because it would undoubtedly be seen by other member states as a Eurosceptic wrecking move and would leave the UK isolated and without influence. No matter what anti-EU bravado pumps through Tory veins, weakening our position in Europe will not be seen as a victory. More than that, the controversy accompanying a rear-guard referendum would inevitably distract from the domestic and economic policy areas a Cameron government will want to focus on.
Or so the thinking goes. But here's the thing: the EU, for all its good points (and there are many), is profoundly, abhorrently undemocratic. The widely acknowledged democratic deficit in the EU has now, thanks to the way member states have denied their people their say on Lisbon, become something approaching a democratic crisis. MEPs are unknown (when did you last read about yours?), unreachable (unless of course you're a lobbyist who can afford to travel to Brussels or Strasbourg on a whim), and unaccountable (the MEPs expenses scandal will dwarf the Westminster one). Now, this distant parliament has strayed even further from its supposed electorate. A European president will now stride across the world stage in the name of millions of citizens who never had the chance to vote for him or her. It may make sense from an organisational viewpoint, but from a democratic one it stinks.
And here is where David Cameron can fight his rearguard action. Lisbon can't be put back in the box, but the European democratic deficit is still very much in play as an issue. The reforms of the Lisbon Treaty may have been necessary to streamline the EU, tackle inefficiencies and iron out some of the other inevitable wrinkles that gather in such a massive system, but the most important reform was left out: to make the EU more democratically accountable to its citizens. A Tory government - or a Liberal Democrat one for that matter, if they would only stop being such European lickspittles - could make the argument not that Lisbon went too far, but that it has not gone far enough. Cameron should call for democratic reforms of the EU as a matter of urgency, with the threat of a British referendum on Europe being called should the EU continue to ignore the democratic rights of their citizens.
This should allow Cameron to placate the Eurosceptics in his party, keep the UK at the heart of Europe, and yet take a firm stand against the European federalists. It's very hard to argue for a democratic deficit; the problem for Cameron, of course, is that if he calls for greater democracy, he will have to mean it.
At one of the sessions at The Convention On Modern Liberty, Helena Kennedy proposed coming up with a list of pledges that could be used at the general election to show where prospective MPs stood on civil liberties and political reform.
That initial idea is now bearing fruit with a campaign called POWER2010, chaired by Kennedy and funded by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust. The campaign is seeking ideas from the general public for reforms to the UK political system, with the five most popular becoming the POWER2010 pledge.
You have until 5th November to submit your ideas - Citizen K will certainly be doing so - so get typing, fellow citizens.
And so, conference, I can say to you today: in the next parliament, there will be no compulsory ID cards for British citizens.
Gordon Brown, Labour Party Conference 2009
As Alan Travis is already pointing out, Gordon Brown's pledge on ID cards this afternoon was, to all intents and purposes, an outright lie.
There may be no law introduced to make ID cards compulsory, but that's because it's already happening by stealth. Anyone who applies for (or renews) a passport or a driving licence will from 2011 automatically have their details submitted to the National Identity Scheme:
Brown is right to say the ID card will not be compulsory for everybody during the next parliament, but it will in effect be so for the 80% of the population who hold a passport to leave the country.
James Hall, the chief executive of the Identity and Passport Service, has told me that is incorrect. He says you can leave the country without a passport; you just won't be able to get back in again when you come home.
Alan Travis, Gordon Brown's back door to compulsory ID cards
The 'no compulsory ID cards' line received considerable applause from the floor of the conference, presumably because delegates were foolish enough to take the Prime Minister's words at face value. In fact, according to the BBC some in the hall thought that Brown had just announced that the whole ID scheme would be scrapped. I wonder what they'll do when they discover he was saying exactly the opposite.
As will not have escaped your notice, Citizen K's patchy spring break has become something of an extended summer vacation. Part of it was the pull of the sunshine, part of it was some personal gubbins, but the main reason was I really needed a break from the sheer bloody awfulness of our current political class and the relentless deterioration of parliament.
And besides, if Parliament is going to take the summer off, why shouldn't I?
A distasteful development. The BNP has won a seat in the Yorkshire and Humber European election, apparently due to the collapse in the Labour vote.
Happy now, Gordon?
UPDATE 2:10am
Nick Griffin has become an MEP. The BNP now has 2 MEPs, the same number as the Green Party. Some have blamed the system of proportional representation, but that's surely a cop out. New Labour has to take responsibility for alienating its core vote and looking the other way while support for the far-right festered, and Gordon Brown in particular has to answer for his reckless 'British jobs for British workers' gambit earlier this year.
The BNP now have a national platform, a European platform. It's a huge gain in propaganda terms. But look how much the Labour vote fell. Nick Griffin is there because of the failure of other parties.
Nick Robinson on BBC Election coverage
The Prime Minister must go. But doubtless where everyone else will see a clear need for him to quit, he will see a reason to stay. I can almost hear him now: "The appalling success of the BNP in the European elections shows that it has never been more important that we get on with the job of tackling the serious problems that the British people want us to solve. I'm getting on with the job I'm here to do."
GO NOW YOU DELUDED UNELECTED DISASTER.
UPDATE 8/6/2009 18:00
An excellent Downfall mashup from Man Widdicombe:
There is something mesmerising, and not altogether human, about Gordon Brown's grim determination to remain Prime Minister. It seems he will pay any price, tell any lie and suffer any indignity in order to hold onto power, even as that power drains away. Matthew Parris's report from Friday's bizarre post-reshuffle press conference skewers it:
It is also an act of supreme selfishness on Mr Brown's part. Wrapping himself like some wingless albatross around his administration's throat, starving his own colleagues of oxygen in his mindless determination that other careers should not live in order that his should not die, he has brought his Government and his party to the ground, broken their legs - and yet still will not release his grip. They must crawl on, shackled together, past the humiliation of Thursday's elections and onward for another year: plans jettisoned, policies stalled, Bills postponed, shelving everything bold, all in the name of mere survival. Mr Brown's survival. Never mind Labour's, never mind the future of progressive politics, never mind the ideas and spirits of capable men and women in and around his Cabinet.
Matthew Parris ~ A shell of a man, propelled by anger and pride
But it's not just Labour who stand to lose; what about the country? Worse than an ineffective, drifting government is a Prime Minister who knows his time is running out and is desperate to get back in the game with one swing. Gordon Brown shows every sign that he will seek salvation through legislation, announcing on Friday that he would push ahead with economic rescue, public service reform and (gulp) constitutional renewal.
New Labour has a well-documented tendency to rush out badly-drafted, ill-considered law in order to solve its own public relations problems. How much worse will that get now that the Prime Minister is living in Shitsville? He has already (twice!) undermined Sir Christopher Kelly's independent report on MPs' expenses by suddenly announcing his own arbitrary measures, and now he seems hell-bent on using the British constitution as the vehicle for his personal rehabilitation.
Such a thing cannot, and I think will not, be allowed to happen. We clearly need comprehensive constitutional and electoral reform, but such an undertaking is too important to be left to politicians alone. It has to be separate from government. Although the details of his proposed Council for Democratic Renewal are sketchy, I have a terrible feeling that he will use it to try and dictate reform rather than establish an open, independent and inclusive process for debating and agreeing changes to our system.
Perhaps tonight's European election results will be so bad for Labour that Gordon will not survive; but I doubt it. If the loss of every single Labour council in England didn't shift him, why would a collapse in Labour's European voteshare shame him into going?
But there's always hope. Citizen K will be watching the results with interest.
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