12th June 2008 T-Shirt

12th June 2008

On the 12th June, Briain’s Shadow Home Secretary blasted the government and its controversial ‘42 Days’ law – the right to detain without charge people suspected of terrorism, a law which was by many accounts “bullied” through parliament by the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Now I have no better solution for what to do in these uncertain times, but I utterly applaud Davis’ convictions in resigning from his position, and forcing a by-election in his electorate. The words of his speech are inspirational, and not wholly transferred onto this shirt. Highlights:

This Sunday is the anniversary of Magna Carta, a document that guarantees the fundamental element of British freedom, habeas corpus. The right not to be imprisoned by the state without charge or reason. But yesterday this house allowed the state to lock up potentially innocent citizens for up to six weeks without charge.

Because the generic security arguments relied on will never go away – technology, developing complexity and so on – we will next see 56 days, now it’s 70 days, 90 days.

42 days is just one, perhaps the most salient example, of the insidious, surreptitious and relentless erosion of fundamental British freedoms.

We will have, shortly, the most intrusive identity card system in the world, a CCTV camera for every 14 citizens, a DNA database bigger than any dictator should have with thousands of innocent children and millions of innocent citizens on it.

consider one of the most fundamental issues of our day: the ever intrusive power of the state into our lives, the loss of privacy, the loss of freedom and the steady attrition undermining the rule of law.