Civitas Blog

Should MPs’ be exempt from police bugging when conversing with terrorist suspects being held in detention and awaiting extradition?

Forget, for a moment, whether any laws or protocols were broken when police recorded the conversations between Labour MP for Tooting Sadiq Khan and his childhood friend and constituent the Islamist terror-suspect Babar Ahmed.

What laws should govern cases of this kind?

A terrorised pensioner died of a heart attack during an attack on his home in a dispute over a parking space at a supermarket. What makes this story especially worrying is that a policeman (and friend of the defendants) traced the 79-year-old by his car registration number, using the police national computer database. There is no word in the news on what legal action the policeman will face, which is strange considering that accessory to manslaughter would be appropriate.

When the DH slashed the second wave of independent sector treatment centres (ISTCs) last year, it reasoned ‘they were unlikely to provide acceptable value for money’. This was based on capacity assessments by the new Director General of the Commercial Directorate, Chan Wheeler.

But now it appears a separate, independent, review concluded exactly the opposite. Nick Timmins, writing in the FT, reveals how the DH actually suppressed the findings of an independent assessment – conducted as part of the ‘gateway’ process – which rated the project’s chance of success as ‘green’, described the planned ISTCs as ‘well-matched to the [NHS’s] requirement’ and described the programme as ‘suitably tailored to regional needs’. Key stakeholders, such as strategic health authorities (SHAs), in fact told the review the deals were ‘appropriate and very welcome’. Strange indeed, then, that most are not going ahead.

More findings have come in from Cambridge University’s Primary Review and they’re not positive.

The Primary Review, led by Cambridge University’s Robin Alexander and launched in 2006, is an independent inquiry into the state of primary education. This week the Review has launched three reports, touching on testing and assessment, the curriculum and international comparisons. Each report identifies fundamental misgivings about primary school arrangements in this country, however the most damning findings are on our testing and assessment arrangements. The Review’s conclusions have prompted the Times Education Supplement headline ‘Tests fixation sets England apart’ – which might well be re-headed ‘Tests fixation sets England back.’

Forgive me for returning to the claim made last week by the Archbishop of Canterbury that it is now unavoidable in the interests of social cohesion that certain elements of sharia become recognised by or incorporated within British law.

Despite having been gone over so well by now, his remarks raise such an important issue concerning the future direction of this country that they are well worth revisiting. For, despite all the attention his remarks have received, there are certain dangers in what the Archbishop is calling for that have yet to be sufficiently spelled out.

Continued on the Centre for Social Cohesion blog.

School children are to be mandated 5 hours of ‘culture’ a week by the latest government initiative. This hour-per-school-day prescription seems to be the government’s answer to every education issue, as it defines more and more of every state school schedule through Whitehall guidance. This follows on from the five hours of mandated sport a week designed, in part, to tackle obesity. Bureaucrats should be careful not to overdo this wheeze. After all, secondary schools still have to cope with teaching maths and English to pupils who didn’t manage to pick up those basic skills during their …err… compulsory numeracy and literacy hours at primary school!

Richard Vize writes what can only be described as a vitriolic attack on the BMA in his editorial in the Health Service Journal this week, describing them as resorting to ‘sabotage to block the modernisation of our primary care services’ and ‘crass, childish behaviour’.

His particular gripe is that the BMA’s GP Committee has, very unhelpfully it must be said, advised practices they are within their legal rights to withhold data being requested by Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) on practice opening hours and the availability of appointments as part of an audit ordered by the Department of Health (DH). In this sense, Mr Vize is entirely correct in his attack, quite rightly pointing out that ‘GPs cannot take state money then refuse to be held to account for the services they provide’. But then, in the context of the whole debate on extended opening hours one can feel slightly sympathetic.

Who is it that can keep London safe in the run-up to the Olympic Games?

If you have been tempted to answer either the ‘Metropolitan Police’ or the ‘Special Branch’, then you would have been wrong.

That is the view of the recently retired head of the Special Branch’s Muslim Contact Unit.

continued on the Centre for Social cohesion blog.

A worrying case has emerged this morning. A shopkeeper managed to fend off an attempted robbery by stabbing the assailant with his own knife. From the details available, this response was proportionate since the shopkeeper suffered wounds in the struggle as well (it was clear that the robber was prepared to carry out his threat to attack). Yet the shopkeeper now may face charges of murder, manslaughter or assault, pending a review by the CPS. While it is proper for the police to investigate deaths along these lines, unless there is more to this case than meets the eye, this is a highly disproportionate response to a citizen protecting his life and property.

Today’s Times reports that 20,000 Muslim leaders have just issued a declaration condemning terrorism as un-Islamic.
Their declaration was made at a conference held yesterday at the Dar Uloom madrassa in Deoband, northern India. It runs:

“Islam is a religion of mercy for all humanity. Islam sternly condemns all kinds of oppression, violence and terrorism.”

Clearly, Muslim scholars should know what their own religion condemns and what it condones far better than any non-Muslim. But the remarkably pacifistic tone of the declaration not only seemed too good to be true. It also seemed at variance with numerous other claims made by Muslims and non-Muslims alike that Islam condones and sometimes mandates physical violence in the form of jihad.

Could any further light on this matter be shed by visiting the website of the madrassa at which yesterday’s declaration was made?

continued on the Centre for Social Cohesion blog.

The Daily Mail reports that one in eight entries on the police’s growing DNA database is incorrectly inputted, threatening to associate the DNA signature of a criminal with the record of an innocent member of the public. In the future innocent people could be arrested on the basis of an error made by a data entry clerk, a possibility imagined before in Terry Gilliam’s 1985 film Brazil, set in a totalitarian state with an ever-bungling bureaucracy.

The problem is that even if the government could sort out these problems, DNA evidence will never be a magic bullet to save our criminal justice system. Part of why it is so successful at the moment is that it is still a comparatively novel technology that average criminals have yet to learn to exploit. If it comes to be relied on in the majority of cases, dispersing other people’s DNA around a crime scene, in order to put police off the scent, will become much more commonplace and evidence based on it will become just another thing for lawyers and juries to examine, trying to tease out the facts from mere conjecture. To make criminal justice effective, as discussed last week, we need a system that concentrates on reducing crime rather than "managing" offenders.

The Times today reveals the Conservatives are equally, if not more, committed to throwing yet more money at the NHS than Labour. The Shadow Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley has boldly so he thinks, and completely foolhardily so many of the public will think, pledged to increase spending on it by £28 billion per year to around 11 per cent of GDP.