No more Magna Carta?

Dan Keiran is about to bring out a book called "I fought the law" from which there was an extract in last week's Sunday Times.

His basic argument is that all sorts of behaviour which British people would expect to be legal because we fondly believe that we live in a free country have been criminalised over the past few years.

Now it is easy to ridicule or criticise Dan Keiran because he is not always as good as he should be at getting his detailed facts right. While browsing in a bookshop I picked up his previous book, which is called "Crap Towns." (Apologies for the bad language, but it's his not mine.)

After reading the first two pages I put it down in disgust with the strong opinion that if those pages were representative, the adjective was better applied to the quality of Mr Keiran's research rather than the towns he wrote about. Certainly any numerate and computer-literate person could have established in twenty minutes on the internet that some of the myths and urban legends repeated in the book are factually inaccurate.

Sadly, he shows the same willingness to repeat amusing but inaccurate myths in his new book, on a number of peripheral matter which I presume were put in to make the book entertaining. For example, he repeats the old canard about whether it is legal at various times of day to shoot Welshmen with a longbow inside the city of Chester. (Believe me, Dan, if you try it at any time of the day or night the police will find something to charge you with, and if they can prove you've done it the charge will stick.)

However, on his basic argument, Keiran is absolutely 100% right.

Remember Walter Wolfgang? It is absurd and disgraceful that an octegenarian former refugee from Nazi Germany was not just thrown out of a conference, but also briefly detained under anti-terrorism legislation when he tried to return, for shouting "Nonsense" (or words to that effect) at the then Foreign Secretary. Perhaps Walter Wolfgang was lucky not to be charged under the Official Secrets Act for giving away the state secret that Jack Straw was talking nonsense.

It is completely unacceptable that a lady was charged and given a criminal record for standing at the Cenotaph and reading the names of a list of our soldiers and service personnel killed in Iraq.

I will admit that I used to find some of the demonstrations outside the House of Commons unsightly and irritating. But every time I walked past a demonstration which I disagreed with, there or anywhere else, I would remind myself that what made our system stronger than the Soviet Union, the apartheid regime in South Africa, Pinochet's Chile, or Nazi Germany was that anyone, no matter how powerless, could express their disagreement with anyone, no matter how powerful, and as long as they did so without attempting to block the public highway, threaten violence, or drown out an opposing point of view they could do so without threat of punishment.

As Dan points out, section 132 of the Serious and Organised Crime amd Police Act has taken away the right to spontaneous protest within a certain distance of the House of Commons. The area where protest has been banned includes Downing Street and the Cenotaph war memorial in Whitehall.

Shame, shame, shame on Tony Blair, and shame, shame, shame on every Labour party robot who voted for that bill and took away one of the things which made me proud to be British.