http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/lawandorder/4643415/Spy-chief-We-risk-a-police-state.html

The powerful, and rich do not want a democracy , they want a fascist state. With the collapse of Communism, and the apathy of voters they see the chance to remove many of the freedoms people take for granted. The fact that this agenda is being helped ,and pushed by a Labour govt just shows how rotten the whole system is.

The reality is that it would be extremely easy to cause frequent and mass terror when thinking of how unsecured our train lines (and even train stations) are. But they haven’t once been targeted since the subway attacks (which are notably harder to achieve, as you say). Terrorists in Spain and India have regularly attacked trains in the past, yet here it doesn’t happen.

Could it possibly be, shock horror, that terrorists just really aren’t as active in this country as people would want us to believe?

David Starkey just confirmed.

It is almost as though changing govt does not matter, the politicians just keep giving more and more power to the police. Each power or weapon the police get we are told they will only use that power in exceptional circumstances. Yet within a few months the outrages emerge. Only a couple of months ago an 80 year old man in an old people Home was tazered by the police in north Wales. And the police claimed, in their usual, syrupy George Orwell language , that the old man was tazered for his own protection.

This govt has contained the policies of Michael Howard in giving more and more power to the Police. Howard’s solution to all the wrongful conviction that were being overturned in the 1990s was to let the Police destroy evidence earlier so that the miscarriage would never come to light. The Police have learned over the last 30 years that they are untouchable. The number of people who have died in police custody has reason alarmingly and the number of innocent people shot dead by the police is appalling. But no officers are ever disciplined never mind brought to justice.

The real reason the police don’t want people filming them is because people have filmed the police behaving badly. So as usual, the police complain ,and the politicians bend over. Of course the police are able to carry on filming the public. Because if you do anything wrong the police want it as evidence. But not the other way round now. Of course, the other people to blame are the right wing tabloids who are basically the propaganda arm of the police force and just love the idea of a police state.

Go back in the careers of Blunket, Straw, to the days of the miners strike. It is truly depressing to see the difference in those people now – I’ll bet John Smith turns in his grave.’

Much as I would love to get some ideological carping in, it really isn’t anything much to do with socialists or even the individual politicians. The nature of politics itself is to turn the most powerful officials against their own principles, whatever they happen to be. Powerful people naturally come to elide their own interest with the public interest (”If I win, everyone wins!) and that in the end comes to justify all manner of expediency until you get this.

I suppose the other problem is a variation on the problem of health and safety regulation. A bureaucracy gets blamed for every faulty good or service allowed on the market, but will never get blamed for having so retarded a market place that it no longer offers innovative products (you never see the innovations that never happen, so you never think to blame someone for not having them). Similarly, a politicians will certainly get it in the neck for every terrorist atrocity that takes place. They are less likely to be personally held responsible every time a individual from a dispossessed minority ends up detained for a couple of months, or if a known troublemaker ends up in prison for a few years from photographing a policeman.

Why is it, then, that a government many of whose members were similarly socialised should be so keen to give them even more power, even though they know this will be misused?

A question I have been asking myself since ‘97. I voted Labour that year – I won’t go intot he full text but I was over joyed that “we” had won.

I sincerely don’t know how anyone at all can say that those in government now are left-wing, liberal, and – to bejeebus, are socialists.

The biggest problem politically, is that with the Blair and Brown governments you have a situation where the right can say “Look – that is how the left, socialists, govern!” They [Blair and Brown] have put the left-wing cause back eons!

Go back in the careers of Blunket, Straw, to the days of the miners strike. It is truly depressing to see the difference in those people now – I’ll bet John Smith turns in his grave.

Even the international community has condemned the UK (and the US).

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/7892387.stm

Secondly, New Labour (like most governments) has a problem with the politics of dissent, if not more so because of its centralised ‘on-message’ culture

Thirdly, the government is terrified of a(nother) terrorist outrage on its watch.

Fourthly, Blair always had the idea that whatever he did was right, and that little legal niceties – such as habeas corpus – were just inconveniences to delivering the firm ka-pow of justice.

Lastly, given the number of ex-leftists in the senior ranks of New Labour, I’m not remotely surprised they pulled the ladder up after them, and set the dogs on everybody else.