Same old trick

Obnoxio wonders what’s going on.

He says:

I promise, I am not making this up.

Remarking upon the people arrested for the ‘terrorist offences’ of

…possession of an article in circumstances which give rise to a reasonable suspicion that possession is for a purpose connected with the commission, preparation or instigation of an act of terrorism…

and

…collecting or making a record of information likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism…

he protests

Is that a slightly vague and nebulous pair of charges, or fucking what? I mean, for the love of Christ, printing out a map of London that includes tourist attractions could be considered “making a record of information likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism”, couldn’t it? A copy of the V for Vendetta comic could be then subsequently be considered “possession of an article in circumstances which give rise to a reasonable suspicion that possession is for a purpose connected with the commission, preparation or instigation of an act of terrorism”.

In my humble opinion this is exactly the purpose of such vaguely-drafted, catch-all legislation. Obnoxio seems to be a man younger than myself and so he may be unfamiliar with the history of this sort of thing.

For example, Section 1 (1)(a) of the Official Secrets Act, 1911 :

If any person for any purpose prejudicial to the safety or interests of the State…approaches …or is in the neighbourhood of… any prohibited place within the meaning of this Act.. he shall be guilty of felony…

Note the catch-all ‘interests of the State’, which does not require evidence of espionage for conviction, and that a number of quite ordinary establishments, including Her Majesty’s Stationery Office in High Holborn (Kafkaesquely the official source for copies of the laws by which we are governed) are ‘prohibited places within the meaning of the Act’.

This means that if the State can show that one’s purpose in walking along High Holborn was in any way prejudicial to its interests, one can be convicted under this Act, and imprisoned. Evidence of purpose is likely to be solely to do with one’s political affiliations, associates, secret records, etc. etc.

Another example: Section 5 (b) (i) of the Wireless Telegraphy Act 1949 (consolidated by the 2006 Act):

Any person who… uses any wireless telegraphy apparatus with intent to obtain information as to the contents, sender or addressee of any message… shall be guilty of an offence…

The BBC, as part of their campaign against amateur radio, say:

The maximum penalty for listening to private radio communications with a scanner is a £5,000 fine and confiscation of the equipment.

This criminalises the use of VHF/UHF scanning receivers which can receive police, etc. frequencies. It happens that the vast majority of all car radios are now ’scanning VHF receivers’. The police have not, I believe, used their small frequency allocation at around 100MHz (right in the middle of the FM broadcast band) for some years, but it remains a ‘police frequency’.

Very nearly all car radios are therefore in the same legal category as the multipurpose receivers which we are now being told are useful only to terrorists, and have been for some time.

Standard practice in British government is to make everything illegal, with selective enforcement. Agents of the state may therefore use their discretion in selecting, from the wide range available, the legislation under which people they simply don’t like may be prosecuted.

One might speculate that the recent enthusiasm for catch-all ‘terrorist’ offences results from the public’s ceasing to respect the Official Secrets Acts. There have been a number of celebrated cases in which the public failed to take the state’s side. And, though nobody remembers the Acts themselves, they do remember Sir Humphrey Appleby:

The Official Secrets Acts, Minster, are not there to protect secrets; they are there to protect officials.

State policy in such circumstances is to leave the discredited Acts on the books, but to pass new laws, even more vague and imprecise, to allow state agents to arrest (and now to ‘disappear’) anybody whose politics they dislike on the basis of charges which will convince the public that the disappeared were a serious threat to national security.

This sort of thing has been going on for a very long time in this country and its exuberant adoption by NuLabor is merely its most recent and visible manifestation.