A quick post to register a rather striking piece of news (via), which didn’t seem to get much notice in the British media. First, here’s the complete text of a piece on torture from the January 2008 Washington Monthly:
According to the latest polls, two-thirds of the American public believes that torturing suspected terrorists to gain [...]
30 November 2008 – 12:42 am
Belatedly, a bit more Bingham. (Updated 30/11.) And a question: what, exactly, was Martin Kettle saying in this column?
What’s most remarkable about the column is that Kettle doesn’t actually contest the argument Bingham put forward. Instead, there’s a steady drip-feed of insinuations that Bingham’s speech shouldn’t be taken seriously, whatever it was he actually said [...]
20 November 2008 – 9:42 pm
Airmiles was quoted in the LRB the other week:
it was clear soon after 9/11 that the Bush administration … believed that the awesome demonstration of American military muscle would intimidate present and potential enemies everywhere. The administration had its own intellectual cheerleaders and experts on the Middle East: Bernard Lewis, for instance, whose pet conviction [...]
3 September 2008 – 2:55 pm
All RIGHT! Whoo! Are there any LEGAL THEORISTS in tonight???
OK then. (Hi Rob!)
Here are some thoughts on regulation and the law. This is a slightly abbreviated version of a paper I gave at a seminar earlier this year, which I’m planning to write up at greater length for publication.
I’d like to examine the conditions which [...]
Socialist Unity has a notice for what looks like an interesting and important meeting:
Creating the Climate of Fear: Counter-Terrorism and Punishment without Trial
Friday March 14; 6.30-9.00 p.m, London Muslim Centre, 46 Whitechapel Road
Organised by Campaign Against Criminalising Communities, Centre for the Study of Terrorism
It’s a meeting about the proposed Counter-Terrorism Bill (the ‘42 days’ bill, [...]
28 February 2008 – 11:47 pm
It is fair to recognize the difficulty and the immensity of the tasks of the revolution that wants to create and maintain a classless society. It can begin easily enough wherever autonomous proletarian assemblies, not recognizing any authority outside themselves or the property of anyone whatsoever, placing their will above all laws and specializations, abolish [...]
I like a good fallacy; I managed to get the Base Rate Fallacy, the Hawthorne Effect and Goodhart’s Law into one lecture I gave recently. So I was intrigued to run across this passage in Jock Young’s 2004 essay “Voodoo Criminology and the numbers game” (you can find a draft in pdf form here):
Legions of [...]
20 February 2007 – 11:22 pm
David Cameron: active hypocrite or passive hypocrite? Or both?Jim has an excellent post up discussing Tory Boy’s not-quite-admission to a dope-smoking past. Clearly Cameron’s a hypocrite, in the sense that he’s conformed to other people’s standards while covering up his past transgressions. But, Jim argues, that only accounts for passive hypocrisy; what’s really objectionable about [...]
20 September 2006 – 9:51 pm
An open-and shut case?
The charge alleges the force “failed to conduct its undertaking, namely the investigation, surveillance, pursuit and detention of a suspected suicide bomber, in such a way as to ensure that the person not in its employment (namely Jean Charles de Menezes) was not thereby exposed to risks to his health or safety”.
Apparently [...]
I’m not much of a raver; actually I’ve never raved in my life, with the possible exception of a couple of hours at a hotel near Preston, one night in 1988. (I was there for a systems analysis course. I said I wasn’t much of a raver.)
All the same, I remember smiley-face music, and I [...]
I hate it when my doctoral thesis gets topical. Here are some figures:
1975
1976
1977
1978
1979
1980
1981
333
282
277
190
103
33
81
92
169
460
1110
802
258
141
3
8
5
28
21
25
15
Take a moment to read across the rows and get a feel for the shape of the series. Row one starts pretty high – almost one of these things per day – then declines year on year, plummets to almost nothing in 1980 [...]
More Italian blogging later. While we’re waiting for what I fervently hope will be good news (apparently Berlusconi’s been running at 3.7 to 1, which is encouraging) there’s a Guardian story which needs a bit of background. This gets a bit dense, but stick with it. Now, watch closely…
David Mills, the estranged husband of the [...]
[First posted 29/3; updated and moved to the top 6/4. You'll see why.]
Back here, at the time of the Danish embassy protests, I wrote about ‘high’ and ‘low’ policing:
‘low policing’ [is] the unending and mundane job of maintaining social order and responding to breaches of the criminal law. ‘High policing’, by contrast, is policing with [...]
Depressing If True Dept. In comments here, Kevin writes:
I was half asleep this morning when it was on Today and heading to the pub tonight when Shahid Malik MP spun the line on Question Time but I think I heard it right: the Labour establishment’s second front is that the Italian legal process is [...]
David Mills is a liar. At least, he is if he’s telling the truth.
David Mills, under police interrogation, July 2004:
Silvio Berlusconi had decided to give me a sum of money in recognition of the way I had managed to protect him in the course of the judicial investigation
Mills volunteered this explanation when asked to explain [...]
26 February 2006 – 9:46 pm
[Updated and edited 26/2]
In 1997 – shortly after Labour came to power – a London-based lawyer named David Mills received a sum of around half a million euro, which was paid into an off-shore account. It has been suggested to Mills that the money came from Silvio Berlusconi; Mills himself has referred in writing to [...]
17 February 2006 – 10:33 pm
The first thing that has to be said about the “glorification of terrorism” law is that it’s appallingly ill-written legislation. Here it is, courtesy of ‘Unity’:
Encouragement of Terrorism (1) A person commits an offence if—
(a) he publishes a statement or causes another to publish a statement on his [...]
5 February 2006 – 8:37 pm
Ian Blair:
“There’s a bigger piece going on, isn’t there? It’s not only about these counter-terrorist measures, it’s also about the position of the prime minister. We can’t play entirely outside that process.”
In 1983 Jean-Paul Brodeur, a Canadian criminologist, published an essay called “High Policing and Low Policing: Remarks About the Policing of Political Activities”. Brodeur [...]
19 January 2006 – 9:00 pm
This (PDF) is explosive stuff – and, as often happens, some of the smallest and dullest details are the most powerful.
You asked for further advice on substance and handling, following my letter of 5 December, including with a view to PMQs on 7 December.
“Substance and handling” here being Civil Service-ese for the nature of an [...]
13 January 2006 – 9:57 am
In all the recent blogging around the ‘Respect Agenda’ (Justin and TP have been particularly good), one point that hasn’t been made is that all this is nothing new. Or rather, it’s nothing new to New Labour. This government has passed huge amounts of law-and-order legislation, much of which has been devoted to taking responsibilities [...]
