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TONY Blair yesterday won his battle to outlaw the "glorification" of terrorism after accusing opponents of his plans of trying to weaken Britain's defences.

Despite some predictions of a widespread back-bench revolt, only 17 Labour MPs voted against a government move to restore the glorification measure to the Terrorism Bill, reversing a move by the House of Lords to remove the clause.

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Of course, that's a USian perspective which may not be shared here.

Seriously, we get the impression that Britain is not really a free country anymore even more so than the US, especially in free speech regards. They have the laws, per se, without the Guantanamo concentration camp set up we have here. Our laws are less precise, allowing wide interpretations to suit the state. So one must, I suppose, credit the Blair government for spelling out precisely how one "glorifies" (what a term!) terrorism.

If Bush and his cronies were this efficient we'd really be screwed.

But my point is, I suppose, that these laws are always ticking time bombs - lying somewhat dormant until the state chooses to use them to 'protect itself' from supposed threats including its own citizens. We have many such measures in the US, many of them executive orders which operate under 'the colour of law' for use whenever the state chooses and in whatever manner the state chooses.

One only hopes that the Lords will again rise up against this little Enabling Act and slap it down again. I note with great bemusement that Blair uses the same catchwords that Bush does and pulls the same rhetorical strings on the British people. Do they share speechwriters or hold teleconferences every morning to get the rhetoric straight?

They have some sort of public speaker's corner in London, I believe? What fun it would be to go there and deliver Patrick Henry's "give me liberty or give me death" speech and see what happens.

Second thought: Here's to the Lords. I hope they defeat this again.

Third thought: I had thought that over the past couple of years, popular understanding of and hostility to Blair's dishonesty with the British public had been growing and deepening. Unlike the Americans, the Brits paid attention to that first memo disclosure, and now we have a worse one.

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Originally posted by josh:
I'd like to see the text of the law.

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Anyway, the most recent version I can find says this about indirect encouragement:

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For the purposes of this section, “indirect encouragement” comprises the making of a statement describing terrorism in such a way that the listener would infer that he should emulate it.

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Originally posted by sgm:
... He asked whether or not people glorifying 'our' acts of terrorism would also be prosecuted under such a law.

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Not to worry, they've thought about that:

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from the BBC
Critics say the laws are just not needed and will only damage legitimate freedom of speech. They claim the glorification offence could see the Irish taoiseach prosecuted in the UK for celebrating the Easter Rising. They also point out such laws could have led to people being arrested in the 1980s for supporting Nelson Mandela's fight against apartheid in South Africa. These claims are rejected by the Home Secretary Charles Clarke, who told MPs such circumstances as the anti-apartheid movement would not happen again.

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I wonder how he knows that, though?

But here's a thought: the UNHCR's independent commission has just ruled that Guantánamo is a torture camp, as many of us suspected from the start. Furthermore, a well-researched report shows that the majority of the victims being held in Guantánamo were not combatants at all, in the normal sense of the word, and furthermore that many of them were grabbed by mercenaries and sold to the occupying forces.

Kidnapping innocent people and then torturing them is a terrorist activity, is it not?

And the definition of glorification is surely loose enough that White House statements defending Guantánamo would qualify (Rumsfeld: "The people in Gitmo... 99% have the best food probably, the best medical treatment they've ever received in their lives...")

So maybe this new law will have some positive features after all

[ 17 February 2006: Message edited by: Rici Lake ]