Bob Piper has been a Labour Councillor for the Abbey
Ward in Sandwell, West Midlands, for nine years. He is a lifelong supporter of Aston Villa Football Club and a follower of Yorkshire County Cricket Club.
The views expressed here are mine in a personal capacity, not those of the Labour Party, Sandwell MBC, Aston Villa or Yorkshire County Cricket Club. Get it! Mine... just mine!
A final word (for now) on the Damien Green arrest.
One of the most pathetic pompous arguments I've heard is that this shouldn't have happened because he is a parliamentarian. Not that it was heavy-handed, (as quite rightly stated on this site by Liam Murray in the comments to an earlier posting) but that you couldn't compare the locking up of civil servants or ordinary citizens.... because they weren't parliamentarians.
Complete cobblers.
We used to get the same reaction when the military marched on to South American university campus's. It doesn't matter too much when they crack open the heads of ordinary workers on demos, but the middle classes giving us all their angst about 'academic freedom' if it happened on a university site.
Stop fawning and creeping. Get off your knees. If it is wrong for the police to enter Damien Green's house and.... shock, horror, take away his computer, will you be raising your voices just as loud when they knock down the door of Asian families in the early hours and take away the residents. Or will you look the other way, and say to yourself that the police must have had a warrant, obtained from a judge, and that there must have been probable cause.
Ask yourself the question.
Taken from the comments section on Iain Dale's site:
Can we put to rest the fuss about "Counter-Terrorism Police", please, as it's a red herring? (There are enough grave issues raised by this case without getting sidetracked.)
As a matter of routine, cases where there was a potential breach of the Official Secrets Act always fell to Special Branch. Now that S.B. has been incorporated into the Counter-Terrorism Command they fall to officers within that command. They aren't C.T. officers in the sense that they are people who ought to be chasing Al Qaeda. It's simply an accidental result of the way the Met is organised internally.
Good... I'm very pleased to hear that... but I'm willing to bet that there won't be many of these offended Tories alongside you.
Rob Atkins said:
November 28, 2008 7:44 PM | permalink
I don't understand your logic Bob. Are you saying you support this action, because the police are liable to be equally oblivious of the human rights of all of us ?? You are an active participant in our democracy - you should be condemning this from the rooftops on behalf of all of us. If the Government knew about this beforehand, it was authoritarian; if they didn't, it was an outrageous misjudgement by the police. There is no third option. Are you a democrat or not ?
jaymason said:
November 28, 2008 8:17 PM | permalink
All the tories will be in re-education camps learning to love the leader. They will come for the conservatives before they go for the Asians
But Rob, you really don't see it do you? You don't know why the police did what they did, so how can you say it is a misjudgment or not?
Liam Murray said:
November 28, 2008 10:19 PM | permalink
I wouldn't be as adamant as Rob but he has a point Bob. We DO know why the police did what they did (related to leaked home office documents) and under what law Damien was held.
Granted there's detail we've yet to hear but I think there's enough in the public realm to offer at least a qualified judgement on the wisdom of what they did.
There may well be Tories who were silent over Tisdall etc. and they do deserve the charge of hypocrisy. But there are Tories and many others who were outraged by that, by this and by the sort of intimidation you refer to against asian familes. I'm just puzzled that you're not one of them...?
There is clearly no sense in the argument that Green should be immune because he is a 'parliamentarian'. There is a lot of sense in getting to the bottom of whether this arrest was politically motivated. I suspect, Bob, that if the political boot were on the other foot, you would be screaming 'fascist bastard Tories' from the rooftops. Maybe Green has acted in a way over and above his remit as an opposition spokesperson. Maybe the Met have indulged in a rash bit of over enthusiasm. Either way this deserves a full investigation because it is clearly a rocky road if the police - on some shadowy say-so - are going to start arresting troublesome opponents who simply embarrass the party in power.
Interestingly, Brian, when the police arrested Lord Levy I screamed nothing of the sort. My view was if the police had probable cause, he had the same rights as the rest of us. Most Tories, however, including Liam above, made an assumption of guilt in the case of Levy, but want a presumption of guilt on behalf of the police and/or government in the case of Green.
My initial response to hearing of the arrest was to speculate on whether he was the latest Tory sleaze candidate. An 'assumption' of guilt based on previous form for the Tories, and poking a bit of fun at them. But as it became obvious it was more serious, my view is we should wait and see what the evidence is before hanging the Met, the Home Secretary, or Speaker Martin.
November 28, 2008 5:50 PM | permalink
"will you be raising your voices just as loud when they knock down the door of Asian families in the early hours and take away the residents"
Yes Bob, some of us will.