Taking Liberties [purplecthulhu]

You're viewing

purplecthulhu's journal
Create a Dreamwidth Account Learn More

Reload page in style: site light

←

→

A very good film that everyone in the UK, or who can vote there, should see.

Not that it will make you happy - I was boiling with rage at some points - but it something that responsible citizens should watch, even if they don't agree with it. Maybe, like An Inconvenient Truth it should be sent to schools on DVDs for use in citizenship classes.

Particularly affronting were the juztapositioning of various of Blairs pronouncements (how much he likes to hear protesters as its part of a free society, how he opposed right wing tory plans for ID cards and would rather hire more police etc. etc.) with his actual actions in office. The bastard should be tried for false advertising along with war crimes.

As a result of watching the film I'm thinking of joining Amnesty. I'm in Liberty and No2ID already, so I might as well collect the set. Either that or emigrating.

←

→

There are 36 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

Do No2ID ever send you anything? I paid them some money and am not convinced I have ever received anything in the way of acknowledgement, emails etc.
Not that this is a bad thing per se (I usually bin the Liberty crap after a cursory glance) but if this is normal rather than cock-up it is unlikely to endear them to people.

Yes - they sent me a membership pack with badge, stickers and flyers, and I get a weekly email from them as well (though you may need to join the email list for that).

Give 'em a prod - something may have been lost in the works. Was your cheque ever cashed?

[link] [parent] [reply]

Yep, no sign that any money went through. The Open Rights Group on the other hand, some money did go through but I didn't get anything back from them.

[link] [parent] [reply]

Probably time to give no2id a prod then. Good luck!

[link] [parent] [reply]

Since it didn't go through, I have donated more money. I imagine there was some sort of glitch that I didn't notice when I did it last time.
To be honest I don't particularly want to get anything from them, but it worries me when campaign groups / charities don't acknowledge things because it suggests they may be rather hopeless organisationally.

[link] [parent] [reply]

Either that or emigrating.

Thailand is looking more attractive with every passing month...

Didn't they have a coup not so long ago?

I was thinking more on the lines of Canada or New Zeeland...

[link] [parent] [reply]

A bloodless one. Things are still stable there, the military have so far lived up to their promises and want to return power to an elected civilian government later this year. The former PM, Thaksin, is now living in exile in London, his right wing party Thai Rak Thai ('Thais Love Thais') was dissolved by the courts last week (it was a BIG day for democracy there) and if he ever returns he'll undoubtedly end up on trial and probably be jailed.

Thailand seems more and more to me like an almost naturally socialist country, if such a place exists.

[link] [parent] [reply]

Thailand seems more and more to me like an almost naturally socialist country, if such a place exists.

Scandanavia?

[link] [parent] [reply]

There too.

[link] [parent] [reply]

Aren't you forgetting how protesters were suffocated when squeezed into the Black Hole of a shipping container. Thailand is off limits to me until they sort out their human rights record

[link] [parent] [reply]

Thailand is off limits to me until they sort out their human rights record

I think that's pretty much how I feel about the US right now, but unfortunately I can't avoid being sent there.

[link] [parent] [reply]

Yes, it was really interesting and informative - there were bits in there that I already knew, but there were other things like Blair's previous opposition to ID cards that I wasn't aware of.

I should write to my MP about it, but he's an ultra-loyal New Labour backbencher with a strong majority, who does everything the whips tell him, and will just get one of his researchers to fob me off with the usual spin, so I haven't yet summoned the energy or enthusiasm to write the letter.

Write to him anyway. The way things are going he might already be worried, and the more letters he gets the more worried he'll be. The usual calculus is that one angry consitituent letter equals 100 angry constituents, so the more the better.

My constituency was safe Labour until the Iraq war. Now we don't have a labour MP at all.

[link] [parent] [reply]

No. You now have a [COMMENT REDACTED LEST I GET LETTERS FROM M'LEARNED FRIENDS] instead :-(

[link] [parent] [reply]

If one believes in the concept of representative democracy where the MPs represent the view of their consitiuents, then he's an appropriate MP. In contrast to the last incumbent who quite specifically stated (I can dig out the letter and quote if anyone wants) that her job in parliament was not to represent the views of her constituents but to do what she thought was right.

[link] [parent] [reply]

My local one appaeras to see her job as representing the party to her constituents. Of course with safe seats the only people who can get rid of her are the local party..

[link] [parent] [reply]

My consituency was a safe Labour seat. No longer...

[link] [parent] [reply]

My girlfriend and I went to see our MP a couple of years ago, to explain why we thought (and still think) ID cards are a really bad idea. After stalling for a couple of minutes complaining that we'd not booked properly or given them advance warning of what we wanted to talk about (which we had) and then dismissing my concerns as Tory-led party-political point-scoring (which he only stopped when we explicitly said "We're not Tories, we're not actually members of any political party, we just think this is a bad idea"), he finally came out and said, effectively, that he wasn't really interested in anything we had to say against ID cards or the NIR, anyway, because it was government policy and part of a manifesto he'd been (re-)elected on.

What I didn't, unfortunately, say at this point was "not introducing university top-up fees was also a very clear manifesto commitment but I notice you didn't feel obliged to follow that one, why is that?"

As we were leaving, to be polite I said "Well, congratulations on being re-elected, and thanks for talking to us, anyway" and he replied "Thanks - I don't suppose you'd be interested in handing out leaflets for us, would you?" which I thought was pretty cheeky.

No, I've got very little time for him - he's got a comfortable, highly-paid and reasonably secure job and we're only likely to fire him once every four or five years, whereas the whips can screw up his life at a moment's notice, so he has neither incentive nor interest in standing up for any principles he might once have had (he used to be a staunch trade unionist but quietly binned all that back in the mid-1990s). Unfortunately, the local Tory and LibDem parties keep fielding the same two utter no-hopers every election, so it's not going to change in a hurry - if he retires they'll plug in another New Labour clone to replace him.

[link] [parent] [reply]

This kind of thing is a problem, but seeing him and raising your concerns is the right thing to do. We had a fairly effectice communication with my partner's (now-ex) MP on this. One of the tricks is to ask what they *personally* think, and also to try to link your issue of concern with something you know they're concerned about (we managed this by asking about the linking of ID cards to access to healthcare which did in fact worry our MP).

The next step, when you don't get any kind of communication, is to write to your newspaper and start quoting what the MP says about not being interested in what his constituents think. That can start worrying them. Bringing up the issue, and the MPs attitude, at other fora, like election hustings, communications with local councilors (a lot of Labour Councils are opposing ID cards) can also help.

A single meeting with the MP is only a step. This is a long campaign and educating the MPs, getting them to thik for themselves for a change, is going to take a while. We bought our MP a copy of Schneier's Beyond Fear as part of the education process. This raises questions of substance which the MPs must address or start to look rather foolish.

Letting No2ID know what the MP said is also a useful step.

Good luck with your continued campaign!

[link] [parent] [reply]

I feel that way with Harriet Harman - it feels totally pointless dealing with them.

[link] [parent] [reply]

I know it feels that way, but if this stops you trying then they've already won.

[link] [parent] [reply]

It sound slike it works as a propaganda film - but is it true? I'm wary of political films that want to stir my emotions.

The bits I got most angry about were real documentary footage of the police being utter thugs. They were definitely true.

[link] [parent] [reply]

Oh I'm not denying it's true - the best propaganda is. It's the way it's presented - shots, music etc designed to work on your emotions.

[link] [parent] [reply]

Either that or emigrating.

More and more, Scandinavia looks inviting.

An independent Scotland would also work...

[link] [parent] [reply]

Something which has occurred to me, strangely enough. :)

[link] [parent] [reply]

Won't do any good to send the stuff to schools. I trained as a Citizenship teacher (alongside History) and when I protested that the information on a certain issue was one sided and offered to provide source material putting the other view, was told that that would be proseletising. The issue was "Europe". All teaching materials supplied by the E.U.. Add to that the fact that only government approved topics can be tought in the first place, and you come up with why I did not complete my PGCE and am not a teacher.

That's quite worrying - see earlier post and linkage about the teaching of physics.

So the National Curriculum is all about producing people indoctrinated to, in the words of Blunkett, be 'right thinking' and be productive drones rather than be informed people who can think critically for themselves? No wonder they don't want science to be taught properly.

[link] [parent] [reply]

Have you seen the documentaries by Adam Curtis? Many of them are available through you-tube and archive.org. If not, these make pretty depressing, if informative/interesting, watching.

Not that I'm aware, no. Can you supply links?

[link] [parent] [reply]

Wikipedia page on Adam Curtis, with links to the Power of Nightmares and Century of the Self on the bottom.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Curtis

Links to the Mayfair Set and Pandora's Box (6 episodes) (the latter's quite interesting for scientists :)

[link] [parent] [reply]

and I guess more interesting in this context - it also looks like his latest documentary "The trap - What Happened to our Dream of Freedom?" is now also out there ...

[link] [parent] [reply]

I glanced at Liberty and Amnesty's web pages recently, but I wanted to join a broad spectrum, but UK focused group. What would you recommend?

Liberty wuld be the one to go for in that case. Amnesty is very much international and concerned with political prioners. Liberty is specifically about human rights in the UK - it used to be called the National Council for Civil Liberties.

[link] [parent] [reply]

December