Scary Terrorists

The old mantra 'terrorist threat' has been wheeled out so many times to justify more and more oppressive measures by New Labour that it lost its impact a long time ago. Indeed many of us doubted the seriousness of the threat from the start. Apart from the odd nutter or two the threat has never been as severe as that from the IRA a few years ago, and we lived in a state of relative freedom then in spite of them.

Then, over Christmas, the authorities wheel out a nutty Nigerian who used a syringe on a plane to make something on his leg go 'pop' and spout a bit of smoke. There you are, no doubt they will now ratchet up airport security even more, and install even more CCTV cameras in Kendal and Kirkby Lonsdale.

But last time I flew I had a bottle of over-sized shampoo confiscated because they thought I was going to use it as a terrorist weapon. Rub suds in the pilot's eyes perhaps causing the plane to crash? So how did nutty Nigerian chap get a syringe and a thing that goes 'pop' and makes smoke through all that hi-tech security? Perhaps it was actually time for the state to show us that there is a threat and that removing our freedoms and liberties is justified, but they didn't want to actually kill anyone in the process, not at Christmas.

The other thing that concerned me was that this nutty chap has a mechanical engineering degree from University College London. Now I don't expect they teach bomb making at UCL, but what happened to education, education, education under New Labour if that is the best an engineering graduate can do? On top of that his family are very wealthy it seems, so he could have afforded the best ingredients.

I think it's all very odd.

Abuse of Power by Greater Manchester Police

Via our colleague Matt over at Woking Libertarians comes a recent news story about a man in Manchester who was arrested by the police for allegedly using his mobile to take pictures of sewer gratings! Yes, apparently it is now possible to be arrested for this under our wonderful "anti-terrorist" laws. When they couldn't find any pictures of sewer gratings on his phone, they arrested him anyway and held him for two days while they searched his phone, his home and his computer.

Finding nothing incriminating, they had to release him, but have kept this innocent citizen's DNA on file, as he is now listed as someone who has been accused of plotting a terrorist act. See the Channel M news report below:



Do you feel like these "anti-terrorist" laws are giving you any extra protection? Or do you now feel that the police now have a license to harass anyone they don't like the look of, lock them up and sully their good name?

This is what nearly twelve years of Labour misrule have brought us to - but do you really expect to see any improvement under the Tories?

We don't just need a change of government, we need a change of attitude when it comes to the relationship between the citizen and the state. The state needs a certain amount of power to carry out its core duties - protecting people from crime and suchlike - but it's unhealthy to have too much power concentrated in the hands of the state, including the police. Excessive power always gets abused. The police already had all the power they needed to fight terrorism, they didn't need the extra powers recently given to them.

The Libertarian Party supports the police in carrying out their duties of protecting the general public from criminals, but no-one in their right mind can support this kind of behaviour. The police need to be more accountable. Under a Libertarian government, chief constables would be democratically elected by the local population. I'm not saying that would put an end to all abuse of power - human nature isn't that enlightened - but at least there would be a way of holding them to account.