International Law

The Convention on Modern Liberty is over - now what are you going to do to save our freedom and liberty ? Get rid of Clause 152 from the Coroners and Justice Bill

Saturday's Convention on Modern Liberty seems to have been a success, judging by the number of attendees, both in London (over a thousand) and at the web streaming video linked satellite events held in Glasgow, Belfast. Manchester, Birmingham, Cardiff, Bristol and Cambridge.

There were lots of influential or famous people to meet and talk to. Spy Blog got to exchange a few words with Henry Porter and Antony Barnett, the co-directors, and with David Davis MP (Conservative), Chris Huhne MP (Liberal Democrat), Kate Hoey MP (Labour).

It is always a bit curious to see "people off of the telly" walking around like normal people or actually on speakers panels e.g. pop stars like Neil Tennant, Brian Eno, Billy Bragg, and Feargal Sharkey, politicians like Lord Goldsmith, activist campaigners like Peter Tatchell and Tony Bunyan and Cory Doctorow etc.

Spy Blog made face to face contact with some journalists, e.g. from BBC Radio and The Guardian, with whom we have been in electronic correspondence with,

We met many of our friends and activists in organisations like the NO2ID Campaign, the Open Rights Group, from ARCH - Action on Rights for Children and the Foundation for Information Policy Research FIPR, as well as formidable individual campaigners and investigative journalists and bloggers like Heather Brooke , Malevolent voices that despise our freedoms in The Times has now magically re-appeared on their website after it had mysteriously been removed) and by David Davis MP at the end of the day.

The most politically significant speech, was probably that of the Conservative Shadow Justice spokesman Dominic Grieve MP QC, who again stated in public, the Conservative party's commitment to scrapping the Identity Card scheme and to repealing (an as yet unclear) list of repressive Labour legislation, almost immediately, if and when the Conservatives form the next Government.

Presumably there should be a lot of common ground with the Liberal Democrats, who also want to repeal lots of repressive legislation as well, - see our previous blog posting on Liberal Democrats Freedom Bill 2009

There are transcripts and videos of many of these speeches (with some more to come) , already available on the Convention on Modern Liberty website.

The NO2ID Campaign was instrumental in organising or helping to organise these satellite events, as well as providing many of the stewards at the London event.

So now that the Convention is over, what exactly are you going to do to save your own liberty and that of your family and friends, which is indivisible from that of any other humans caught up in the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of the Police / Nanny / Surveillance / Database State which the current Labour government has been inflicting on us all ?

Phil Booth, the National Coordinator of the NO2ID Campaign made this plea to the to everyone in the country via The Guardian, and directly to the audience of over a thousand people in London:

152 must go

A clause in the new coroners and justice bill will allow the sharing of your personal information. Write to your MP now

* Phil Booth
* guardian.co.uk, Saturday 28 February 2009 13.58 GMT

Full post as published by Spy Blog on March 02, 2009 (boomark / email).