So, a couple of bits of self-publicity. Firstly, the Cambridge Evening News did a nice piece on Cambridge No2ID with a picture of us on Monday. There was also a second piece -- not in their on-line edition -- with lots of comments from Andrew Watson. The most amusing part of this was that the chap writing the piece couldn't find anyone in favour of ID cards to talk to, and asked us for suggestions. We pointed him in the direction of Anne Campbell, but presumably she declined to say anything.
The ID Cards Bill was in the Lords on Monday; unlike the MPs, the peers seem to have spotted that the Bill is a bit of a catastrophe-in-the-making. The remarks of the Earl of Erroll were particularly notable in this regard. On the dangers of the National Identity Register, he asked,
What about leaks of information? Anyone believing that everything is safe nowadays and will not be leaked must be joking.
Finally, the register will become a prime terrorist target. Can you imagine the value of infiltrating someone on to it? There have to be mechanisms to switch ID. There are witness protection programmes, transgender reassignment, and agents in the field whose true identity must be concealed. Terrorists could have perfect access to the register.
This is not a new point, and it has been made here and elsewhere before. On this subject, the Daily Telegraph today published a letter from myself and others on the question of biometrics and witness protection. It's good to bring this to the attention of a wider audience.
So, I mentioned ID cards, and as a result you get to see holiday photographs:
Update: oh, the other thing I meant to mention here is that Monday's Cambridge Evening News had the front-page headline,
TORY BLITZ ON GYPSIES
I had not appreciated that it was Conservative policy to invade France, build airfields there, and dive-bomb southern England. I shall await their election manifesto with renewed interest.
So, it's St Patrick's Day, and that means that in Whitehall it's National Be Beastly To The IRA Week. This time around the government have `refused to rule out' use of their shiny new house-arrest powers against the IRA; specifically, according to Baroness Amos,
The Northern Ireland Secretary has been considering carefully the application of the powers of [the new Prevention of Terrorism Act] to Northern Ireland.
Of course, the real point here is not whether the government states its intention to use the power of arbitrary detention against any specific person, but that they can be used against anyone at all if the Home Secretary feels like it; he needs only to convince a court that his application to do so is not obviously flawed. First they came for the brown people; then for Irish people, after that... who knows. Travellers, perhaps?
Quite by coincidence, I happened to receive today a letter from Anne Campbell MP, in response to a fax I sent her two weeks ago congratulating her on her remarkable and unexpected discovery of a spine during the debate on the (then) Bill, and encouraging her not to mislay this valuable extra piece of skeleton before she had a chance to get used to it. (I should say that I didn't phrase it quite like that in my letter.)
Needless to say, she caved and voted in favour of the Bill eventually, and her letter was essentially an apologia for her behaviour. She writes,
You have to balance the risk of wrongly imposing a control order on someone, against the potential risk of hundreds of people being killed by a terrorist attack. [and much more in the same vein]
Now, it is very creditable that Anne is concerned about miscarriages of justice, even if, simultaneously, she apparently lacks the imagination to realise that the Orders might be abused deliberately. Later, she continues,
... I have to conclude that detaining terrorist suspects and depriving them of their liberty is a less bad option than deportation [to their previous countries of residence] and [their] risking torture or likely death.
Well, that's a funny thing. The amendment for which Anne voted was intended to make the Bill less offensive chiefly by replacing references to `the Secretary of State' with references to `the Court'. But it also added this clause:
(11) Evidence established to have been obtained under torture shall not be admitted in any proceedings [relating to Control Orders.]
The Act as finally passed contains no such prohibition on the use of evidence obtained by torture, and yet Anne voted in favour of it.
I can, therefore, only conclude -- as might Orwell have done -- that Anne is objectively pro-torture.
A brief comment (and tangential pointless graph update to) something from the Sunday newspapers. Derek Turner, apparently a `jam buster', has told a number of newspapers that speed cameras are a cause of traffic congestion on motorways, because many drivers -- travelling, presumably, above the speed limit -- brake sharply on seeing a camera.
You might wonder why this behaviour causes congestion. Drivers, instructed by the Highway Code to drive two seconds behind the car in front in busy traffic, typically in fact drive about one second behind. On those grounds you'd expect the flow of traffic in one lane of a busy motorway to be about one vehicle per second, independent of speed.
(You might want to think about why this isn't true before reading on....)
... one way to look at this is because real drivers keep a certain distance behind the back of the car in front, and the length of a car is significant compared to the distance it travels in about one second (~4m versus 31m at 70mph). As traffic gets slower, the space taken up by the cars becomes more significant relative to the gaps, and so in a naive model you'd expect a flow of f(v) = v / (v t + L) cars per unit time, where v is the speed of traffic, t the time between cars, and L the length of a car. So for reasonable figures you get something like the following simple picture:
(The horizontal dotted line is the `ideal' one vehicle per second rate.)
Now, suppose that drivers, proceeding illegally along the motorway at 80mph (right vertical blue line) observe a speed camera. Keen to remain unpunished for their transgression, they break sharply, reducing their speed below the legal limit to 60mph (left vertical blue line). Once past the camera, they accelerate again.
That means that cars on the part of the road just after the camera are travelling at 60mph, and so the rate of vehicles passing through that region is smaller than that in the part before the camera -- 0.87 cars per second as against 0.90 cars per second. Cars enter the region of slow-moving traffic more quickly than they leave it, so that the region must get bigger, creating a congested stretch of road before the camera. This, we surmise, is responsible for the effect Derek Turner mentioned in last Sunday's Observer.
Well, a simple calculation based on the above numbers shows that the length of the congested stretch of road will expand at about 2.6 mph (the rate is (f(v1) - f(v2)) (v2 t + L), in case you were wondering). So, suppose that a motorway is busy for three hours during the `rush hour'; you'd expect each speed camera to be associated with a stretch of congested road of size about eight miles. In the congested region, cars travel at 60mph; outside it at 80mph. Each speed camera therefore causes a delay of approximately two minutes in each driver's journey.
This does not seem like very much to me, especially since there aren't -- so far as I understand -- all that many speed cameras on most bits of motorway.
(Of course, one can always try to put a value on this. Using the same assumptions as above, on a busy three-lane motorway, about 10,000 pass in an hour. In three hours the average traveller is delayed by one minute. Suppose that travellers' time is worth, on average, £8 per hour -- the current median wage, roughly. That means that, each rush hour, each speed camera `costs' about £1,200 in wasted travellers' time. I don't regard this as a very sensible way to look at this problem, but if somebody from the ABD wants to turn it into one of their trademark silly press releases -- if, indeed, they have not already done something similar -- I will be very amused.)
Quite independently of this, you might ask whose fault this wasted time is. But, like most `moral' discussions, that's not very likely to be productive, and in any case I've given my opinions on motorway speed limits here before.
(I should say that there are lots of other subtleties which I've ignored here, but which will, no doubt, be brought up in the comments.)
I don't usually try to do this `web logging in real time' thing, but three comments about the proposed Prevention of Terrorism bill:
Firstly, all of the debate about this bill is essentially racist.
The previous legislation was explicitly racist. It said that the Home Secretary could gaol anybody he wanted, so long as they weren't British.
Superficially, the new bill looks non-racist, because it gives the Home Secretary the power to lock up anyone he likes -- foreign or not -- under house arrest. But note that all parties in the debate are not talking about locking up anyone; they're talking about locking up `suspected terrorists'.
Specifically we are supposed to hold in mind brown people who are Muslims (such as those who have been bailed from Belmarsh today).
This is, I suspect, is why the majority of people in this country are in favour of giving Charles Clarke the power to lock up anyone he likes. He says `suspected terrorists', and means `anyone he likes'; but people interpret this as `eeeevil brown people', and so it's a-OK with them. By contrast, I suspect that there are rather few Irish Catholics living in this country who think that this legislation is a good idea.
(Why do I say that Charles Clarke intends to lock up `anyone he likes'? Surely he is fluffy and nice, and has only our best interests at heart? And anyway, won't there be some condition about evidence from the `security services'? No messing about now -- these people might be THE TERRORISTS.
Well, in honesty I don't know whether Charles Clarke actually intends to start having people hauled off the streets by armed goons and held under house arrest purely for his own personal ends -- MICHAEL HOWARD DISAPPEARS, REMAINING TORY BLAMES HOME SECRETARY -- and even if he does I expect that it will take a few more years of deterioration before we wind up completely in the manure. But that said, the government's claim that the people in Belmarsh have been identified by the security services as dangerous terrorists should be taken just as seriously as the similar claim that the were `weapons of mass destruction' in Iraq. More generally, this is pure argument from authority, and is no way to run a justice system, even if giving individual ministers the power to lock people up were a good idea..)
Secondly, the `promise' offered by Tony Blair to bring in new legislation in July -- a promise which the Liberal Democrats and Conservative Parties have apparently now accepted -- is, of course, of no value. I expect that any legislation is offered to replace this bill in July -- if any -- will not restore habeas corpus.
Similarly, the proposed `sunset clause' would also have been worthless, because there is no guarantee that it would not be repealed.
Thirdly, if the Tories had retained their collective backbone, the government could, if so minded, just bring the thing in under the s.20 of the Civil Contingencies Act, which would require neither the consent of Parliament nor Royal assent, though the bill would then have to be renewed every thirty days.
Any suggestions for `countries to flee to'? The current list is Australia, India, or New Zealand, I think.
This is all done with wwwitter.
Copyright (c) Chris Lightfoot; available under a Creative Commons License. Comments, if any, copyright (c) contributors and available under the same license.