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I'm a councillor in the London Borough of Wandsworth; this blog mainly covers that, sometimes general politics and policy and occasionally anything else that takes my fancy.
Tag Archives: civil liberties
Dear Government, to save you spying…
Yesterday I used the Internet as follows: Sent and received 81 emails, of which 58 related to council and ward work, 10 related to my non-council work and 13 were to friends and family Visited pages at BBC News, Department of Communities and Local Government, London School of Economics, Local Government Information Unit, Angry People
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Stop and search restrictions
Great news that the Home Secretary is limiting the use of stop and search under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000. Of all the erosions of our civil liberties under thirteen years of Labour their insistence that the best way to counter terrorism was to restrict the freedom of the innocent was one of
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Politics, power and the Lib Dems bonus
I’m definitely one of those Conservatives for whom the coalition has been a real eye-opener. I wasn’t keen when the talks were taking place, especially when it seemed that the Lib Dems were playing the two sides off against each other by holding talks with Labour. And the political animal in me just didn’t like
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Defending CCTV
It’s becoming increasingly fashionable to knock the use of CCTV as if it is inherently evil. Bizarrely – since I would consider myself to be a strong supporter of civil liberties – I’ve found myself defending its use again and again. This is partly because they have concentrated on the number of cameras, rather than
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CCTV. Revisited.
Once again the issue of CCTV has raised it’s head. This time it is as a result of a ‘Big Brother Watch’ press release that, I believe, totally misses the real point. I’m afraid I don’t have a lot of sympathy for BBW (and don’t put that into Google at work). They are an offshoot
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The pointless exercise of stop and search
I’ve touched on police powers to stop and search a couple of times in the past. Once when I was subject to a stop – but not a search – around a year ago (although I posted about it some months later, prompted by section 76 of the Counter Terrorism Act coming into force) and
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Council acts responsibly shocker
I don’t often get the Wandsworth Guardian, so missed their sensational story that the council has used ‘anti-terrorism’ powers 300 times in the past four years until someone pointed it out to me last night. And quite a sensational story it is: the council abused powers introduced to fight terrorism to “snoop on residents”. Except,
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Posted in Wandsworth
Also tagged investigations, Leonie Cooper, RIPA, Wandsworth Guardian
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Weekly wrap-up, 24 July
My usual end of week wrap-up of bits and pieces I want to highlight or didn’t post about at the time. Pre-summer council meeting Wednesday saw the council had it’s last full meeting before the summer recess. Of course, the council doesn’t take a holiday in the same way that Parliament does, but there’s a
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Posted in Weekly report
Also tagged CCTV, Council, crime, election, Gordon Brown, police, public spending, recession, Shami Chakrabarti, Surgeries
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Why Big Brother isn’t the problem with CCTV
At the end of last week I found myself at the top of Putney High Street doing an interview for Newsnight about CCTV. Following a series of freedom of information requests the BBC had discovered that Wandsworth had the highest absolute number of CCTV cameras of any local authority (although the Shetlands are the most
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Can anyone claim section 44 works?
With the blanket coverage of MPs’ expenses late last week I almost missed a BBC News story about stops under section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 The article contacts a few facts and figures about how effective section 44 has really been. In London during 2008 there were more than 170,000 searches conducted Of
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