New Labour's terror bill

New Labour's terror bill is back before the commons. New Labour might not be trying to reinstate the section allowing the to hold people for three months in prison without charge (having settled for merely doubling the current period), but they do want to have the the offence of glorifying terror which was removed by the unelected toffs and cronies. The reason for this?

Mr Blair said it was the government's "duty" to protect people.

He told Labour's spring conference at the weekend: "Once we understand that providing security is our duty, we also see that to try to fight the new security threat of the 21st century without the new laws and resources that are needed would be an abrogation of that duty."

Which doesn't really ring true when you realise that because of the unwritten "buy european" policy the primary means of providing security, the armed forces, is being given inferior equipment at over the odds prices. According to the Chief of the Defence Staff the Royal Navy is currently only just large enough to defend our coastline, and planned cuts will stop it even being able to do that. This is while being engaged in a very large number of conflicts, there never being a war that the Tyrant Blair didn't want to get involved in. From Hansard on 18 Jun 2003 we get a list:

However, the Armed Forces have already been hit in recent years by major reductions. The problem is—and has been for a number of years—that our Armed Forces are far too small for the many tasks that have been laid upon them. They remain heavily over-committed. They have responded magnificently in the Falkland Islands, Northern Ireland, Cyprus over many years, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, the first Gulf War, Iraq and now the Congo.

Many of these conflicts being long term commitments without any exit strategy, and I am not talking about just Iraq here. From the same Hansard as above:

I was amazed to learn that somehow we have slipped into supporting the French in the Congo without any clear concept of operations and without any clear reinforcement or exit strategy. I hope that we are not doing so to please the French rather than to bring relief to that sad country.

New Labour obviously does not care about the primary means of defending the realm, so what about from terrorists attacking from within the country? This particular bill is supposed to be aimed at them. Well, there are only a few terrorist groups that attack within the UK, the IRA, Islamists, and Animal Rights activists (in order of the number that they kill). The IRA have seats in parliament and their political wing gets funding from the government because of this. We have also seen clearly over the last few weeks how New Labour bends over backwards to appease Islamists. So again New Labour's retoric on being out to defend the citizens seems hollow.

So what is left? Well there is the argument that this is about shutting down freedom of speech. Now that fits with New Labour's record.