Last weekend, Clive Stafford Smith, the Director of the legal action charity Reprieve, travelled to Sudan to meet the recently released al-Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj. He had been represented by Reprieve since 2005 and was now a free man. This is an edited version of Clive’s report, which includes a passage specifically refuting Pentagon claims that Mr al-Haj, who had been on a hunger strike for 16 months prior to his release, and was taken to a hospital on his arrival in Sudan, “seemed like a healthy individual” as he departed from Guantánamo.
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What has the Liberal Left got to say about obesity? Or parenting? Or green taxes? Or organ donarship? In short, where does it draw the line between public and private issues – and what kind of government intervention, if any, should it support?

We are increasingly aware of the public consequences of private decisions – but where do we draw the line? These are the questions posed by The Politics of Public Behaviour, published by Demos today.

The liberal case against intervention from government in these issues is easy to make.

Libertarians argue that it instrumentalises citizens, reducing politics to the achievement of goals established not by people themselves, but by a small governing elite who believe they know best.
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Never fear Labour supporters, here’s the latest messiah to solve all the party’s problems in one fall swoop:

Purnell will declare today that Labour can still beat the Tories in the fight against poverty because it is willing to stump up the money and is committed to tax credits.

“Both their goal and their policies are just aspirations,” Purnell will say. Mocking the Conservatives’ approach, he will say: “It would be nice to reduce child poverty. It would be nice to put more money into the working tax credit. But nice isn’t good enough. Until they pass the test of hardening their commitment and costing their policy, they cannot claim to be committed to ending child poverty.”

Ah, yes, child poverty. It’s strange how this government’s modest redistribution, so modest that it may have lifted some children out of poverty but has done nothing whatsoever to alter overall inequality, only gets mentioned when the going gets really tough. It screams of desperation, of someone begging their lover not to walk out the door, bumbling, “but, but, look at all we’ve done for the poor kids!”

In any case, Labour’s pledge to end child poverty is just as much an aspiration as the Conservatives’ policy announcements are: it’s simply unattainable and completely unrealistic without far more targeted help being provided, and Labour doesn’t have either the will or the funds to do it with. The less said about tax credits, the most hopeless and over-egged panacea of all time, the better.
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Unity from LC and Brendan O’Neill from Spiked debate whether it was right that Dr Nicholas Kollerstrom be stripped of his honorary post at UCL after bloggers uncovered his views.

Now that it has backed down over the 10p tax band, we need the government to lose over the 42 days legislation too. Labour loyalists might balk at this but not only would it be good for our democracy, but its an incredibly bad piece of legislation.

On Monday Jackie Ashley faithfully asked loyalists to hold their nose:

For after the 10p vote will be plenty more possible crises, not least the vote over the 42-day detention proposal. On both, I am 100% against the official government view and, with every instinct, on the side of the Labour rebels. But disaster is looming and the real parliamentarians have carefully to weigh in the balance what they now do, and ask how much likelier it will make a Tory landslide a year hence.

This sort of thinking is appalling. It is the road of good intentions to hell.
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This video is released by Amnesty International today on torture…

3 ½ years after The Washington Post first reported it, President Bush acknowledged this weekend he sanctioned meetings on “harsh interrogations” of detainees.

Over at LibDemvoice Peter David has said why he will hold his nose and vote for Livingstone as a second choice, on the back of Boris’s disastrous appearance on Newsnight.

Let me state from the outset I’ve been more a critic of KL than an ardent supporter. But some of these criticisms don’t stand up.
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Every single candidate for the London mayoral elections in May - even Tory Boris Johnson - supports an amnesty which would allow illegal immigrants living in the UK for four years or more to follow a “path to citizenship”, The Independent reported yesterday.

Last month Mr Livingstone called for a “fresh start”, with a one-off amnesty for migrants without “regular status”, in spite of his party’s stance. “Migrants contribute hugely to the economic, civic and cultural life of London and the UK,” he said. “To have a substantial number of them living here without regular status because of deep-rooted failings in the immigration system, some dating back over a decade, is deeply damaging to London as well as to them.”

This is really good news.
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Well done those Parisians, for having managed to extinguish that Olympic flame a few times. But I can’t help feel this is like the last gasp before the world learns to shut its mouth in front of China.

But before I get onto that, I have a question. Who still supports that anti-terrorist legislation then?
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A couple of years ago I was part of the team that produced The Unrecognized, a film highlighting the plight of the Bedouin population of the Negev (Naqab) desert in southern Israel. Despite having lived and worked on the land since the time of the British Mandate and before, their settlements and farms are not acknowledged by the state. Despite paying taxes, the residents are denied basic services such as water and healthcare, which their Jewish neighbours in the area take for granted.

Their story has been in the news again recently, due to a recent report by Human Rights Watch that renews the criticism of Israel’s discriminatory laws.
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Violent pornography has become part of our cultural language. Its conceits are used to sell everything, from clothes to cars to women’s underwear. But is censorship the answer?

A recent article of mine on The F Word in response to new UK porn laws laid down by the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill 2008 generated a surprising amount of controversy. In brief, part of the Bill sets out to ban various forms of ‘extreme’ pornography, including bestiality, necrophilia and some ’snuff’ porn.
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Let’s say it nice and loud, people - IMMIGRANTS DO NOT COME TO THIS FAIR NATION TO TAKE THE PISS. It is simply inhumane to create a society where there is no safety net for those in need - even those who weren’t born here.

Kitchen worker Vanildo Fernandas, 29, was waiting for a bus on Fulham Palace Road late one night after work in October 2006 when two complete strangers walked up to him and tried to kill him with a couple of knives. He still isn’t sure why they did that; maybe for for the hell of it?

“Maybe for a robbery?” Vanildo’s wife Claudia, 37, asks a couple of times. She doesn’t really buy the robbery theory, though.
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One message on the Tory ‘Whole Campaign’ key messages page tickles me above all the others: ‘Can work - will work: help people into jobs and cut benefits for those who won’t work‘.

Which is nice, but I wonder if sorting out welfare dependency will be quite that straightforward. What would liberal lefties think about this?

I recently interviewed a number of people who’d been on benefits long-term. I asked these people about their lives, and what they thought of government plans to cut welfare.
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Published in the Guardian today you will find, in the letters page, a statement drawn up by myself and signed by 30 other people to state that home office plans to extend pre-charge detention past 28 days would: “undermine the efforts of those involved in the difficult task of building confidence in the intelligence work and policing efforts among all British citizens…”

Well, there is more to it than that. And you can read the letter on CIF in full with all the signatories from later on this morning. There’s also a piece in the paper trailing the letter here. I was helped tremendously by Anthony Barnett of OurKingdom on it and I’m grateful to him for that.
Update: Sunder Katwala writes more on World After Bush.

I’m holding fire on the oath swearing nonsense. I mean, if you think that’s bad how about a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities, a Green Paper on which is apparently due in the next few months.

This Bill will set out the rights we enjoy and the responsibilities we owe as members of society.

A Bill of Rights is a constitutional document. Constitutions can be more or less permissive in the rights they afford the citizen. Most have a mechanism by which more rights can be added, or which override previously accepted rights. Offhand, I can’t think of a constitution which sets out obligations to the state as a basic condition of citizenship, on which the enjoyment of rights is conditional.
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This piece was first published two years ago at The Sharpener and in an edited form in this book (as “Talk amongst yourselves, we couldn’t possibly comment”). It’s main hope – that Westminster politicians stop ducking the abortion issue – has come to pass. That is a development I welcome; and I stand by (most of) what I wrote then (some of it now in lost, much missed links). The piece also tries to define “what’s so special” about 24 weeks, though perhaps less elegantly than Unity. So now’s a good time for a re-run. It does seem, alas, that what we’re about to get elsewhere is tabloid drivel (via) rather than proper debate. I guess that’s what happens when professional politicos get involved.

One word absolutely not on the lips of political hacks, not even Tory political hacks, is… Abortion. Not this week, not any week. It’s impolite conversation inside the beltway.

But a post here last year (picked apart here) attracted over 250 comments. Just publishing the word is pure Google-juice. Everyone in the real world has an opinion, so why does nobody in political Britain want to discuss abortion in public? It can’t be that 186,274 (2001 data; pdf) annual terminations don’t warrant justification or inquiry. Continue reading…

Via Anthony Barnett, I find that the home secretary is preparing to offer “concessions” in an attempt to avoid a rebellion against its plans to extend pre-detention charge for up to 42 days.

Under the proposal, MPs would be allowed to debate a decision to invoke the emergency powers within 10 days of a government decision. At the moment MPs would only be given a say within 30 days, a proposal seen as largely meaningless by critics - suspects could have been charged or released by the time MPs had a chance to scrutinise the need for an extension beyond the current limit of 28 days.

This is so meaningless as to be an insult to our intelligence. Martin Salter, Labour MP for Reading West, who Anthony rightly says is preparing to be a sellout, says we have: “got stuck in a sterile debate on the number of days”. So why not remove any delay of time in which MPs can debate the decision? It is cosmetic surgery and it is being thrown as crumbs to Labour MPs who still have control of their conscience. Feel free to write to Salter by email. As Anthony rightly adds: “There are few things more insufferable than MPs telling us how they are the guardians of our liberty and all the great things about Britain while the executive laughs up its sleeve and voters snort with derision.”

Later this week I’ll be speaking alongside Liberty at an event organised by the Muslim debating group City Circle about how this campaign can be taken forward strategically. All are welcome to attend.

Another majestically irritating contribution from pro-life sympathisers today: Dave Cameron, who should know better, tells us that he likes the idea of cutting the time limit for abortion from 24 weeks as the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill progresses through parliament.

A few thoughts:

I wonder if I can stand much more of this tripe from these persons. We’re not even talking the real world here - just Nadine Dorries and Ann Widdecombe and other leading lights in Dave’s menopausal mafia claiming - I think my notes are correct - to have seen pictures of foetuses walking/dancing/voting conservative at 24 weeks’ gestation, and being moved observe that we should save babies of this age simply because we can.

I’ve never quite got my head around this aspect of the pro-life argument, but let’s give it another whirl: as far as I can gather, they’re trying to imply that because we’re at a point in medical history where doctors are able to save babies born at 24 weeks, aborting other babies at 24 weeks is giving the big finger to human technical advance.
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I was there five years ago, one of the two million or so. I’ve never regretted attending and I still think the cause was fundamentally good.

But even at the time I and many other comrades had our worries. The self-congratulatory carnival atmosphere was all very well, but where were the Iraqi socialists, democrats and trade unionists amongst the assorted Quakers, sloanes, hippies and Islamists? Why was that disgusting pro-Saddam apologist Galloway on the platform but no representative of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions?

Why had left-wing Iraqis been excluded from the national committee of the Stop The War Coalition?
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