I haven’t seen the numbers on what this costs or what the carbon footprint is like, but I assume they’re both pretty low; the boilers however seem to have required quite a few maintenance calls over the winter; they’re largely untested modifications to an Italian design, and have been used quite heavily over these cold winters. Naturally, every house has a backup electric immersion heater.

No related posts.

We’ve already heard that Barnet is doing a Ryanair – you want your council to work for you (or just to put you to the front of the line on stuff like planning applications) – you pay them for it (in addition to council tax, of course).

Lambeth’s approach is to spin out services as co-ops. Note that this isn’t privatisation – a co-operative is owned, run by and run for the very same people. Retail giant John Lewis (also owns Waitrose) gives partner status in the business to all 69,000 permanent employees, who run the company and take the profits.

So according to the council, they are “proposing an alternative where [the Council] can give people the tools to do the job or mutualising where [the Council] can set up something and then hand it over to the people who will use it, to run it.”

They like to highlight housing as a prime example – Lambeth already has more tenant-run estates than any other London borough.

"We have been doing this for three or four years. We have experience of it. What has happened, as a result of recession we are putting it together to help save costs, keep services and give something to the community."

The company that runs Lambeth’s leisure centres is a co-op, owned by its employees.

They also float the idea of turning some schools into mutualised private co-ops – the idea of a teacher-run school is intriguing; to what extent would parents also get a say? Lambeth is trialling a ‘Parent-Promoted Foundation School’ (link to Lambeth mag) where “local parents with support from the council took the lead in setting the school up, appointing the head teacher, choosing the design, and deciding what the school would be like”. It’s the first in the country, and took 6 years to set up. The general Secretary of the National Union of Teachers has come out guns blazing against any experimentation:

“It is simply not right that public money should be given to a group of enthusiastic amateurs, motivated by what they want for their own children.”

“If they think there are issues with the schools, there is a number of ways to suggest changes through the existing structure.”

Related posts:

1. The co-op
2. The Chinese, by any other name…

"Why do you live in a commune? Please explain…"

So asks a friend. I’ve moved. But not to a commune! To a co-op. This post aims to start explaining what it is and why living here is so desireable.

This is an especially good time to set out the basic principles, given Gordon Brown’s statement earlier this week that Ed Miliband will work with the Co-operative party to draft Labour’s forthcoming election manifesto. Gordon Brown, it is worth remembering, is the first British Prime Minister to be a member of the Co-operative Party, alongside his main party affiliation (New Labour).

This post will focus on the general legal principles behind cooperative housing, especially the one I now live in. I hope to discuss other aspects in later posts, if there’s any interest. My overarching aim is to spread some appreciation for the concept (both from self interest and in the hope that maybe readers or their acquaintances might consider helping co-ops to be set up or develop by getting involved in their financing, making gifts or provisions in their wills.

I’m a tenant, with similar basic rights and obligations as any other poor bastard grinding away in this big city, paying rent to a landlord. But in a co-op housing association, there’s a difference – my landlord is virtual; a legal fiction, a juristic ghoul created by the founders of the co-op when it was built 35 years ago, courtesy of a big change in the law in 1965.

When you sign the tenancy agreement, a token £1 payment gets you a share in the co-op society, making you a full member. Through voting  and volunteering, the members of the co-op animate this ghoulish puppet. Dear landlord – we would like to hedge against rises in gas prices and slash our CO2 output by installing woodchip-fuelled heating systems. And the landlord makes it so. Dear landlord – we would like you to please set aside some of our rent (about £51 a week – £40 for basic rent, the rest is bills, tax, insurance and service charge) to fill a room with paint, tools, flooring, lightbulbs any other consumables we need for our houses. Make it so! Dear landlord – we would like a totally noninterventionist, liberal policy concerning how we arrange the house, paint walls, put up fixings, etc. So.

The landlord is us; we hire CDS (itself a cooperative) to handle the bureaucracy. We own the land (on long lease from the council) and can do largely as we please with it. So when one resident – a designer with the very illustrious Heatherwick Studio – came up with a plan to build a huge storage cage for bikes built with Russian railway sleepers – the co-op agreed and members got together to get it built, with the money, as always, coming from our rent.

There are ~120 of us living here, in houses and apartments. We live a 20 minute cycle from Waterloo, five minutes from a Jubilee Line station, and just around the corner from Goldsmiths Art College. It’s insane how far rent can stretch, even this close to central London, when nobody’s trying to make a profit.

———- Legal detail

The governing statute for the co-op is the Industrial and Provident Societies Act 1965. Under it and the Financial Services & Markets Act 2000, the co-op is registered with the FSA (Financial Services Authority). As with most co-ops, companies (often co-ops themselves) provide co-op housing societies with management services and registration, doing the basic bureaucracy and letting the ‘hippies’ get on with actually calling the shots concerning the property.

Share structure:

Like public companies, a co-op has share capital. There are diverse ways of organising this, but where I live the share structure is par value, fully mutual: each member gets 1 share; each share costs £1; and on moving out, you get your £1 back – you can’t take it with you or sell it for more even if the property has gone up in value. Your share gives you a single vote on the rare occasions where everybody gets together to vote on something. Liability when things go wrong is usually limited to that £1. The property remains in the ownership of current occupants (members) – but any profit cannot go to them; it must, by its regulations (and probably by law*), be spent on improving the co-op. If one day the land is sold at a profit, that profit has to stay within the co-op or find another co-op (cy-pres principle) – the same with any excess from the rent. This is a form of land ownership that’s very different to most in the country – it is not owned in the hope of making a buck at the end (what this means for the mortgage provider, I’m not sure yet).

Tax:

The land is private property; my council tax is paid from my weekly £51 rent (council tax is £2.58/week at present). The co-op, if fully mutual, is normally exempt from Capital Gains Tax and Corporation Tax*; co-ops can also often classify as charities and get the vast tax benefits associated with that, too. I don’t know for sure whether my co-op is a registered society but I am going to infer it isn’t: charitable housing associations must give their members security of tenure, whereas my contract stipulates that I can be kicked out with a month’s notice (that’s also my notice period), which makes getting mortgages much easier (the lender is sure it can take exclusive repossession of the vacant property if the co-op were to default.

Tenancy:

A co-op, being run for its inhabitant’s benefit, is not an Assured Shorthold Tenancy; it is a contractual tenancy, which ends when membership is resigned or withdrawn. Things sometimes go wrong. The wrong sort of person is let in. A fully mutual status, with properly defined rules, allows the co-op to act to end a tenancy and withdraw someone’s membership; a sad but crucial control mechanism.

Financing the purchase

I’m fresh here and have little idea how the co-op was first set up, the lease acquired, or the houses built (surprisingly nice for 60s housing!). So this section is subject to the proviso that I’m talking about co-ops in general, which may or may not apply to where I live.

Primary funding for establishment will come from mortgaging the property, to the Housing Corporation and/or the bank (from my contract it seems both mortgages were entered into at the start – I have no idea what’s been paid off to date). Secondary funding is then from the members, from charities, the government. Some state funding was provided in the early 70s under Reg Freeson. Fresson was a member of the Co-operative Party and Housing Minister under the then Labour government – I suspect some of that went into this community; the timing fits. This co-op does not take council money as the council then demands the right to nominate people (e.g. the homeless) into membership – people that usually just want to get housed and don’t lift a finger for the co-op.

Most interestingly, co-ops can issue loan notes (properly called loan stock) to finance their activities. An investor will receive a fixed rate of interest back over the repayment term.

Those are the basics; I thought I’d start with the legal nitty gritty, having just come from a land law class on (of all things) leases!

*these are things I haven’t independently verified, for co-ops as a whole, and certainly not for the one I live in

Related posts:

1. Lambeth Council to spin out services as co-ops
2. BNP disgraced by the Royal British Legion

Marina-Selini Katsaiti finds that “obesity has a negative and statistically significant effect on individual well being”. She estimates that, in Germany, a three-point rise in BMI (from, say 24 to 27 – equivalent to gaining around 20 pounds for someone who’s 5’8”) reduces happiness on average by so much that it would require a 67% pay rise to compensate. In Australia it would require a doubling of income to offset the adverse effect of such a weight gain.
Now, contrast this to a new paper (pdf) by Andrew Clark and Yannis Georgellis. They show that, in the UK, men and women who have been widowed are happier in the 3-4 years after their loss than they were the year before it. Yes, their well-being slumps in the 12 months after bereavement, but it recovers thereafter.

Now, remember of course that winning the lottery will statistically do very little, if anything, to make you a happier person in the long run

How very peculiar!

No related posts.

Unlike other systems, it is said that in the UK, political will can find it hard to block cases coming to court, because anyone in the UK can make the accusation and take it forwards, without the case being picked up (or shelved) by a prosecuting lawyer (e.g. in France, juge d’instruction).

It will be interesting to see how Cabinet can somehow repair ties. The Israelis are very displeased:

President Peres described the incident as “one of the greatest political mistakes” that Britain could have made and calling for the law to be changed.

Calling for our law to be changed, because they don’t want ex-leaders, now retired and stripped of their diplomatic immunity, having to stand trial for war crimes. Surely the office charged with protecting British values and interests around the world appreciates the strength of our system, and the will of our democratically elected Parliament in incorporating the United Nations Convention Against Torture into the Criminal Justice Act 1988, and responded in kind? Er…

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office said yesterday that the Government was “looking urgently at ways in which the UK system might be changed in order to avoid this sort of situation arising again”.

Yes. How terribly embarrassing, sorry about that chaps.

To dump this action would be to risk a very serious constitutional crisis within the UK, one that has been building for a while.

Remember that the arrest, in London, of General Augusto Pinochet for war crimes (wanted under Spanish warrant) was considered by many as one of the most significant developments in human rights and international law since the Nuremberg trials. remember, then, that our Home Secretary (none other than Jack Straw, the miserable shit) found a back door to let him go rather than send him to Spain: grounds of ill-health made him unsuitable to go to Spain to stand trial.

So he went back to Chile, stood up from his wheelchair and smiled.

We seem somehow to have escaped the battle even more recently, after the government decided that a case against BAE (bribery and corrupt business deals with Saudi Arabia) should be dropped due to:

1. ‘national security’ – a breakdown of relations with Saudi Arabia threatening bilateral anti-terrorism efforts if we decided to go after the globally corrupt instead
2. fear of job losses: under EU law the UK government cannot continue to contract with BAE if it is found guilty of corruption, which it argues might cripple the arms manufacturer far more critically than any punishment imposed

And the most immediate context is the growing anger at how easily members of our 2003 administration are escaping serious questioning over our entry into the Iraq war and subsequent behaviour therein.

I for one encourage serious outrage if our law gets changed or meddled with at the behest of alleged criminals in foreign lands.

Related posts:

1. Back in the land
2. The paradox of being good

Posted with his permission – original post here

Why is there still a row about bankers’ bonuses? What I mean is that the issue should by now be settled against them. There’s abundant evidence that large bonus “incentives” are not only not justified (pdf) by efficiency considerations, but can actually backfire, with the result that intelligent observers are demanding an end to them.

If we were serious about designing high-powered incentives, we’d consider abandoning bonuses and instead simply killing under-performing bankers. After all, the threat of death works perfectly well in motivating airline pilots or soldiers. So why not apply it more generally?*

Let’s be clear. Bankers’ bonuses have less to do with rational incentive mechanisms than with the fact that bankers have power. It’s a form of legal extortion.
Which raises the question; why is this not more clear? It’s because any power structure is sustained by ideology – a set of cognitive biases which might have a grain of truth but which serve to defend vested interests. In the case of bonuses, there are four such biases:

1. The fallacy of composition. If any one banker doesn’t get a big bonus, it’s possible he might flounce off in a huff to another firm. But it’s not possible for all bankers to do so; only a tiny handful of British bankers could get good jobs in New York or  Switzerland. In this sense, a blanket nationwide ban on big bonuses wouldn’t do much harm.
What’s true for an individual needn’t be true for a group.
There’s a parallel here with one of the errors that got us into this mess – what Keynes called the “fetish of liquidity”. An asset might be liquid from the point of view of an individual, but there is no such thing as liquidity for al investors.

2. Mental accounting. Last year’s banks’ losses seem to have been put into a separate mental box, and are regarded as an exceptional item now that business is back to normal. But this shouldn’t be the case. Those losses vindicate Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s point that banks, on average, don’t make money because occasional huge losses wipe out years of profits. Which suggests bankers don’t have the skill they pretend to.

3. The fundamental attribution error. The belief that banks’ profits come from skilled individuals is in part due to the common error of attributing to individual agency what is in fact the result of situational or environmental factors. It’s trivially true that today’s banks’ profits are due to cheap money, government guarantees and state bail-outs. But it’s always been the case that profits have risen and fallen according to environmental forces such as monetary policy, waves of takeovers and general investor sentiment.

4. The impossible/difficult conflation. Throughout history necromancers, witch-doctors alchemists and ju-ju men have extracted high incomes. They’ve done so because their patrons have believed their job to be very difficult, demanding supreme skills. But in truth, the jobs of foretelling the future, controlling the weather and turning base metals into gold  haven’t been difficult ones. They’ve been impossible.
So it is, perhaps, with banking. Making high risk-free returns isn’t difficult, but impossible. In failing to see this, we give bankers the fortunes our ancestors gave other charlatans.

* Of course, the same reasoning applies to politicians, as they too can make huge errors which cost society dearly. This probably explains why they are not proposing the idea.

No related posts.

…cosmetic surgery is now primarily consumed not by the rich, but by the working and lower-middle classes, sometimes even by the poor.  According to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ASAPS), about 1/3 of cosmetic surgery is consumed by people who make less than $30,000 a year.  About 70% of it is consumed by people who make less than $60,000 a year. It is mostly women (90%) and mostly white, middle-aged women (80% and between 35-55 years old).

If past trends are much to go by, this is something we might possibly expect here in the UK and elsewhere in the West (not to mention Japan).

The fashion/beauty industry, for years the source of an irrepressible esteem-destroying, envy creating lifeforce targeted primarily at the very well-to-do with nothing better to do with their money, has now shat all over the minds of people who quite frankly ought to have better things to spend their money on, than plumping up their lips. Let’s not forget the role of lower class diet, doubtless a tidy earner for US liposuctioners.

Once again, business interests walk leash in hand with complacent middle and lower class sheep (a sheep, on a leash?) lacking better sense than to accept and be subject to (and typically pay for exposure to!) that noxious influence and keep their hand in their pockets for objectively valuable endeavours.

Oh, and hurrah for a reduction in the cost of getting cosmetic surgery. What a boon for society that we now have such an ‘affordable’ means to tackle the symptoms (but not the cause!) of endemic low assertiveness and wisdom.

You can’t even argue that it significantly helps intelligent, but not very good looking people (in an age where looks supposedly matter more) to pass on their DNA to the next generation: 80% of people getting cosmetic surgery are women approaching menopausal age anyway.

(via Marginal Revolution)

Related posts:

1. On the Happiness of the Fat and the Bereaved
2. Stolen post: BONUSES & IDEOLOGY

Now comes the news that protest has spread from idiots on their blogs (bows), via broader groups like the Open Rights Group and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, to the major players in the digital economy: Google, Facebook, eBay and Yahoo.

This can only be good news and I doubt anybody involved in pushing Mandy’s clause forwards expected such a quick and concerted slap in the face from established players in the UK’s digital economy. Whether fledgling businesses speak up for or against the Clause still remains to be seen; and I somehow doubt that the House of Lords would stand for the Clause either.

In that case, what on Earth was Mandy thinking he’d achieve by adding Clause 17 remains a mystery. Could it really be so sad and semi-sinister as a move to please a Corfu yachtsman? I don’t mean to imply greedy conspiracy on Geffen’s part; he has openly pledged to pass any money he makes from now on direct to charity. Or perhaps Murdoch is the likelier target of such posturing. Murdoch’s been badgering the great, the good and the puny for years now for stricter (or in his perspective – more generous) scope for extension and enforcement of copyright; here he is at it recently, hinting he’ll sue the BBC…

Related posts:

1. Nobody ever expects… the Corfu Inqusition!
2. Skype for free on Three

As if that wasn’t weird enough, that patent application was used as evidence of genocide at Auschwitz by Penguin Books who were being sued for defamation by David Irving.

Related posts:

1. Study predicts 50% of all patents will be owned by just 150 big companies

Mind out, though, that whilst these are impressive numbers, this isn’t a very scientific study and the statistical analysis seems overly simplistic. If anyone knows of a better study along these lines, I’d be indebted to be pointed to it…

Announcement: http://www.grayonclaims.com/home/2009/11/23/top-150-customers-increasing-domination-of-the-patent-system.html

Direct link to the results slideshow: http://www.grayonclaims.com/storage/GrayWegnerTop300Nov23REV.pdf

Via: http://www.patenthawk.com/blog/2009/11/1.html and http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2009/11/patently-o-bits-and-bytes-2.html

Related posts:

1. Odd, horrible tidbit

(Primary source for this post: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/nov/19/filesharing-timms-digital-economy-bill)

Who exactly does Lord Mandelson *not* give the creeps to? (hint: yacht owners). This former alumnus of my Oxford college is to be given some of the most wide-ranging legislative powers any secretary of state for business has ever been given. The government proposes to give Mandelson the power to:

"impose such duties, powers …on any person as may be specified with or for the purposes of facilitating prevention of reduction of online infringement of copyright"

He could, if he wanted, rename the Tower of London Beefeaters ‘Copyright Inquisitors’ going around nabbing laptops and slapping you around until you dob in your mates for downloading the latest autotuned voxpop shite off the webs (and quite right, too).

The safeguard? Positive approbation of the relevant Statutory Instrument in Parliament (which could be as little of a nod-through without debate, most MPs having not the foggiest idea what the cost-benefit and scale of the problem at issue actually is, nor, apparently, giving a fuck).

Guess how many SI’s have been rejected by Parliament. The House of Commons last did it in 1979, or 1969 where they *have* to give it their OK (10% of all SIs). The House of Lords hasn’t done it in nearly 9 years (ref).

Oh but of course, there’d a be a

public consultation. It would be a very, very public process. This would be a very public process indeed. It wouldn’t be possible to slip something through clandestinely. That’s the biggest safeguard. People will obviously want to look at what the clause says. But it simply gives us the ability to tackle what’s likely to be a growing problem."

So when I ‘publicly’ air my disagreement government can ‘publicly’ ignore me. Doubtless they’ll still be ignoring me when I publicly dance on Mandelson’s grave, shortly before he rises AGAIN from the dead to stalk the public Earth – there are still powers he has not been granted, and corridors of power he has not trod.

Does the giant loophole being granted to the Secretary of State (SoS – the clue’s in the acronym) force him to actually set up publicly accountable measures? No.

So Murdoch might be made a Copyright Wytchhunter and come bother you for looking at his news stories through Google not The Sun, alongside all the tits and bile they like to sling at you in carefully worded 7-year-old grade sentences (try it yourself: run something like this page through this readability tool)

Don’t forget that existing copyright law makes you an offender if you store a file on your computer or your server without the rights holder’s permission. What’s not simple and effective about that? Why give Mandy the power to be an unelected, unelectable but, good for him, unaccountable lawmaker with the power to put SI’s giving himself new powers that Parliament can only accept or reject, but not amend?

“The answer is the same as peer-to-peer, we need an effective way to deal with it. It’s an effective answer to do this so we don’t have to work out a proposal [to control copyright infringement in some new way] where we would need to develop and go through the whole process [of enacting legislation]. But we need this to be able to address parts of the problem other than peer-to-peer."

Damn the pesky problem of having to get our elected representatives to legislate in response to evident problems. Oh by the way, do we actually HAVE the problems this claims would deal with?

"It’s reflecting the fact that technology is changing very fast," said Timms. "The existing [method] is quite cumbersome. We might need something else in the future."

What amount the main issue faced by enforcers of copyright – is this going to help tackle the issue that servers are often in another country, out of this jurisdiction?

"No, it’s not that.

Right then. So just to recap, we don’t know what the problem is, nor what it’s going to be. We don’t like having to bother our ‘democratic’ legislators in Parliament for legislative solutions to future legislative pickles. We do like giving unelected bodies gigantic loopholes so that they can amend their powers over the public upwards and outwards. We don’t like prescribing messy democratic and accountability safeguards. We don’t care that illegal filesharing is now receding faster than the government is capable of responding to it – CLEARLY, the problem is so big that batshit insane powers should be granted to those incapable of even coherently identifying the problems or where existing solutions are coming from (iTunes, Spotify are typically credited with the move away from illegal filesharing).

Some say the Rule of Law is replacing Parliamentary Sovereignty as the fundamental constitutional underpinnings of the UK’s legal system – see for example the comments of our top judges in Jackson and others (Appellants) v. Her Majesty’s Attorney General (Respondent) [2005] UKHL 56 – but what we’re equally seeing is Parliamentary Sovereignty being replaced by a system of dilute Parliamentary Oversight over unelected legislators, enforced by special tribunals.

Perhaps you’d like to see how Mandelson goes about consulting with the public on these measures.

Related posts:

1. Major internet players stand strong against (Mandy’s) Clause 17 of the Digital Economy Bill
2. Obscene: UK gov’t uses back door in anti-mafia powers to fund itself
3. Imagine a country…

Imagine a country where the right to trial by jury has been undermined, where an individual can be tried twice – the rule on double jeopardy abandoned – where well over 3000 new crimes have been enacted in the past ten years; where racial, sexuality and religious tensions are said to need the protection and might of law.

Imagine a country where the spooks can ask for closed trials where neither you nor your lawyers will see the evidence they use to dismiss your claims for damages after you go after them for making you suffer torture, unlawful imprisonment, extraordinary rendition – and the government supports that gross erosion of a critical component of the rule of law (They’ve been using these closed procedures to lock people up for a while now)

Imagine a country where the chief justice and many leading judges fear for the future of justice and civil liberties because the government of that country has eroded civil liberties in the name of countering terror (which the government states ‘threatens the life of the nation’) and  has reduced support for those of limited means, and vulnerable people, to fight their corner and pay for lawyers.

Imagine a country where people are imprisoned without charge for 28 days (42 days was defeated), or simply placed under house arrest without charge or actual arrest (only, it’s not house arrest, we’re told – merely confinement to a life where the government can ban you and your loved ones from using the phone, internet, meeting friends, being visited, communicating ‘with people in general’, finding employment you actually want to do, can move you around the country, suspend your passport, submit to any surveillance, searches and seizures are ‘deemed necessary’ – and until the Law Lords of its highest court stepped in to unanimously declare the opposite, you aren’t even made aware of the allegations and couldn’t thus instruct your lawyer)

Imagine a country where the right to speak freely is restricted and individuals can be threatened by lawyers who can simply telephone a judge in Chambers to restrict them from speaking out,  on what may well be a matter of great public importance,  to protect sectional and very private corporate interests, where attempts to restrict the reporting of the proceedings of the press are routinely granted through the use of super-injunctions and, latterly, a country with laws which allowed lawyers to attempt to restrict the reporting of proceedings in parliament itself.

Imagine a country that leads the world in CCTV surveillance with more cameras per head of population than any other on Earth – even if each camera has only a 1 in 1000 chance of solving a single crime a year.

Imagine a country where not only the police but local authorities and other civilian bodies can routinely spy on you, intercept your email, bug your phone and can intrude to examine your bank accounts and then, even for quite minor offences, can seize your assets, freeze your bank account and seize and crush your car; powers intended to tackle terror and organised crime but which now will, inevitably, be used for far less serious offences.

Imagine a country which has restricted the money paid to experienced criminal lawyers with the result that many lawyers can no longer afford to practice in the field and the quality of representation may decline as a result.

Imagine a country with over 85,000 people in jail, a country where the Justice Ministry wants yet more prisons and even considered hiring prison ships from elsewhere.

Imagine a country where the government uses the device of statutory instrument to slide controversial legislation through into law without the eyes of the public, expert commentators or members of parliament being able to see, or objective  minds,  to consider those laws.

Imagine a country that justifies going to war on the basis of a ricin plot that never was – only, the public only finds out two years later, when a blanket press ban is lifted, showing that the government continued to claim a ricin plot despite no ricin being found -

Imagine a country that allows the prime minister to wage war without the consent of the elected representatives of the people…

You don’t need to imagine such a country.  You are living in it.

Edit: from a comment on Charon QC’s blog:

Imagine a country that allows its citizens to be extradited to other countries without the requirement to provide prima facie evidence.

Imagine a county that allows unaccountable officials to take children away from their families,http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/camilla_cavendish/article4303324.ece

Imagine a country where breaking a civil order can result in up to five years imprisonment.

Imagine a country where it is proposed that police patrol with sub-machine guns.

Imagine a country that keeps the DNA profiles of over 4 million of its citizens on a giant database, including 24,000 profiles of children and young people aged from 10 to 18 who have never been convicted, cautioned or charged with any offence.

Imagine a country where two police officers are not allowed to look after each other’s children.

Imagine a country where an estimated 11 million people will need criminal records checks, just so that they can continue working with children.

Imagine a country where tens of thousand of citizens are being trained to look out for ’suspicious behaviour’:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/mar/31/civil-liberties-human-rights1

Imagine a country where its citizens are encouraged to spy on each other:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2648384/Environmental-volunteers-will-be-encouraged-to-spy-on-their-neighbours.html

Imagine a country with an unelected prime minister

Related posts:

1. Lambeth Council to spin out services as co-ops
2. Obscene: UK gov’t uses back door in anti-mafia powers to fund itself