Says there’s none

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 [...]

In the hot sun

Obsolete has an excellent, if inevitably depressing, analysis of the latest from Louise Casey. I was particularly struck by one line in particular: apparently Casey thinks it’s important
to get the public more engaged in tackling crime and to stop the erosion of community spirit.
Oh-oh – Broken Windows alert. Criminologists have spent years of their lives [...]

All the peacemakers

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, [...]

To stun an ox

I’ve written a book. The MS has just gone off to the publisher; it’s still got to be checked, copy-edited, re-checked, typeset, proof-read and probably several other stages I’ve forgotten about, and it probably won’t be out much before Christmas. But it’s a book, and it’s been written. By me.
It’s called ‘More work! Less pay!’ [...]

Working on the sequel

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 [...]

Just to keep you from danger

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 [...]

There’s a party somewhere

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 [...]

It happened before

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 [...]

Your complaint is my mandate

So, if you aren’t going to vote Labour (and I really hope you aren’t), who does that leave?
For myself, I’m not voting Liberal Democrat. On the national level the party remains some way to the Left of Labour, but that’s not saying very much. At the local level their campaigning is truly abysmal. The last [...]

We could crawl

I had a letter recently from this young fellow, claiming to be my MP. Which was odd, as I’d understood that the job was held by this guy. It turns out that constituency boundaries are in the process of being redrawn, so that my ex-MP when Parliament is next dissolved will in effect be him [...]

We’re all normal

Everyone from Jamie to Tony has gone big on this story (old uncle Jon Snow and all). And I can understand that – if there’s one thing more welcome than Charles Clarke looking incompetent, it’s Charles Clarke and David Blunkett looking incompetent.
But I do wonder if this is the right stick to beat them with. [...]

How high?

[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 [...]

Snap into position

Here are three scenarios; see if you can spot the differences between them.
More people were found guilty of car theft in the first nine months of 2005 than in the whole of 2004.
One of four things has happened. The police and the courts are functioning as before but there’s more car theft going on; the [...]

Can we turn around?

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 [...]

The feeble and the bad

Here’s a curious coincidence (as predicted by Unity).
Passers-by stopped police officers to ask why the marchers were being allowed to carry banners threatening further suicide attacks in the city. One police officer replied: “Don’t worry. We are photographing them.“
Here’s Blair:
there is another point, on which the right hon. Gentleman touched. Let me explain why I [...]

The rich man’s militia

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 [...]

Never argue with a rozzer

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 [...]

We’re never together

Back here, I wrote:
Social software may start with connecting data, but what it’s really about is connecting people – and connecting them in dialogue, on a basis of equality. If this goal gets lost, joining the dots may do more harm than good.
It’s not about connecting machines, either – and the same caveat applies. Via [...]

Because he’s a big bloke

[Sorry about the hiatus - life called.]
John Stevens:
I genuinely never thought I’d say this, but I am now convinced that the monster who executed this young woman in cold blood should, in turn, be killed as punishment for his crime.
Logically, I don’t have a problem with the concept of vendetta. I’m a peaceable type – [...]

Scaring the nation

Or: what’s being said about the Walter Wolfgang incident, and what isn’t.
It’s appalling that this should happen to an old man / a lifetime Labour Party member / a former refugee from Fascism
This is roughly the Blair line. I have every respect and sympathy for Walter Wolfgang as an individual, but really… spare us. Blair’s [...]