Government, the police and intelligence services are too easily given sweeping powers that they too often abuse
Jenny works with campaigners to defend our civil liberties
Read on for her latest posts on this topic
Jenny raised the concerns of home schoolers at the Committee and Report stages of the Schools Bill by tabling a number of amendments, including proposing the deletion of parts of the Bill. She also supported amendments which would have changed the approach to one of offering genuine support, recognising the right to home school, and stopping the coercive approach proposed. Plus we, and many others, have called for the Bill to be halted and a new approach taken.
Times Radio have obtained figures that show more than a hundred members of the House of Lords attended parliament fewer than ten times in the most recent parliamentary session.
“Only two peers attended parliament on all 156 days it was sitting: Lord Moylan, a Tory peer, and the Green Party peer Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb.
This bill, if enacted, will see the destruction of the privacy rights of a minority group. The question is why? Given the intrusive nature of the proposals I would, at least, have expected some form of independently reviewed study showing that there is some kind of systemic problem with the freedoms of families who home educate which the Government has been unable to address by other means. Where is that study?
It is a very serious step to compel law abiding families who are educating their children at home, to be subject to statutory enquiries about their children, completely in the absence of any presenting problem. This approach to families crosses a line in the involvement of the state in family life. The state is going to be able to single out a discrete group of law-abiding families from their peer group and then subject them to special monitoring. Continue reading “Second Reading of Schools Bill – Home Education”
The Lords deleted nearly 18 pages of the most draconian restrictions on the right to peaceful protest from the Policing Bill, but the government are now trying to bring them back. This must be opposed.
The government want to stop any protest that might get noticed and be effective. They have already got the right to ban noisy protests, now they want to clamp down on all the other forms of peaceful, non violent protest that people use to get attention. And that’s the crucial point – protestors are just people. People who work, pay taxes, study, or collect the pensions they have earned. People who see something wrong and want it to stop. People like you and me.
This was a bad week for democracy and our freedoms in the UK. We lost the right to protest noisily, and effectively, to vote without ID, and to have an independent electoral commission. Parliament also allowed the government to break international law by deporting refugees to Rwanda, along with giving the Home Secretary the power to arbitrarily deport several million people born in this country (dual nationals) with no right of appeal prior to them losing their citizenship.
The Government talk all the time about stopping trafficking gangs, but our Government are becoming a trafficking gang. They are going to take people abroad and leave them there. They are taking them to a country that has human rights abuses. Continue reading “Nationality and Borders Bill Ping Pong”
The Government have created a legislative deadlock. This was not the fault of this House; it was the fault of the Government, and if this legislation is not passed in the next few days, it falls completely. I have no problem with that—I would like to see it all fall—but the fact is that that probably is not a position this house House can take. However, we can obtain very significant concessions from the Government. They will not want to lose all these Bills, and this is an opportunity for us to throw out the worst bits of the legislation that we have all argued about over the past few months. Continue reading “Let it all fall”
People do not approve of crackdowns on protest because there are times when they themselves want to protest. They want to protest about a crossing that is in the wrong place on their own road or to complain about cars idling outside their children’s school. People protest. It is all very well to call them “protesters” but actually they are just people.
Obstructing the highway should not land anyone in prison for a year. You can still be put into prison for a year even if the roads have already been closed by a traffic authority. When roads in Sheffield, sometimes quite minor ones, were closed for trees to be cut down, local people who were furious about that and were doing their best to stop it protested on those closed roads. Under the Bill, they could have faced up to 51 weeks in prison for protesting on their own road to try to protect their own trees. Peaceful protesters should never face jail. The original government amendment was bad and the compromise is also bad.
I would like to know why the Government are denying democracy to a section of society. If blind and partially sighted people cannot see to vote properly, or cannot vote in privacy, that is denying them democracy. Continue reading “Elections Bill Committee Stage Day 2”
At the moment political parties face higher fines for data protection breaches than they do for breaking election law. The risk is that fines for breaking election law just become part of the cost of doing business for political parties, especially those with the deepest pockets and richest donors. The Electoral Commission must be independent of both the Government and Parliament. Continue reading “Elections Bill Committee Stage Day 1”
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb 