As the two UK by-election results last night demonstrate, Blair cannot hold on to power for much longer – but just what will his legacy be?

By HENRY PORTER in Vanity Fair

In the guise of fighting terrorism and maintaining public order, Tony Blair’s government has quietly and systematically taken power from Parliament and from the British people. The author charts a nine-year assault on civil liberties that reveals the danger of trading freedom for security’and must have Churchill spinning in his grave.

In the shadow of Winston Churchill’s statue opposite the House of Commons, a rather odd ritual has developed on Sunday afternoons. A small group of people’mostly young and dressed outlandishly’hold a tea party on the grass of Parliament Square. A woman looking very much like Mary Poppins passes plates of frosted cakes and cookies, while other members of the party flourish blank placards or, as they did on the afternoon I was there, attempt a game of cricket.

Sometimes the police move in and arrest the picnickers, but on this occasion the officers stood at a distance, presumably consulting on the question of whether this was a demonstration or a non-demonstration. It is all rather silly and yet in Blair’s Britain there is a kind of nobility in the amateurishness and persistence of the gesture. This collection of oddballs, looking for all the world as if they had stepped out of the Michelangelo Antonioni film Blow-Up, are challenging a new law which says that no one may demonstrate within a kilometer, or a little more than half a mile, of Parliament Square if they have not first acquired written permission from the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. This effectively places the entire center of British government, Whitehall and Trafalgar Square, off-limits to the protesters and marchers who have traditionally brought their grievances to those in power without ever having to ask a policeman’s permission.

The non-demo demo, or tea party, is a legalistic response to the law. If anything is written on the placards, or if someone makes a speech, then he or she is immediately deemed to be in breach of the law and is arrested. The device doesn’t always work. After drinking tea in the square, a man named Mark Barrett was recently convicted of demonstrating. Two other protesters, Milan Rai and Maya Evans, were charged after reading out the names of dead Iraqi civilians at the Cenotaph, Britain’s national war memorial, in Whitehall, a few hundred yards away.

On that dank spring afternoon I looked up at Churchill and reflected that he almost certainly would have approved of these people insisting on their right to demonstrate in front of his beloved Parliament. “If you will not fight for the right,” he once growled, “when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.”

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Judge quashes anti-terror orders

From BBC Online

A key plank of the government’s anti-terrorism laws has been dealt a blow by the High Court. A senior judge said control orders made against six men break European human rights laws. Ministers say they will appeal against the ruling.

The orders are imposed on people suspected of terrorism but where there is not enough evidence to go to court. They mean suspects can be tagged, confined to their homes, and banned from communicating with others.

Home secretary

In his ruling, Mr Justice Sullivan said control orders were incompatible with Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which outlaws indefinite detention without trial.

The home secretary had no power to make the orders and they must therefore all be quashed, he said.

Under the control orders restrictions, the suspects have to stay indoors for 18 hours a day, between 4pm and 10am and are not allowed to use mobile phones or the internet. And there are limits on who they can meet.

The judge said the restrictions were “the antithesis of liberty and equivalent to imprisonment”.

“Their liberty to live a normal life within their residences is so curtailed as to be non-existent for all practical purposes,” he said.

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Having spent so much energy denying all knowledge of the procession of CIA torture flights passing through UK airports, it was perhaps only natural that the UK government would also seek to deny the existence of the protests against such flights. What’s more surprising is that the BBC seems to be faithfully toeing the party line.

“‘No show’ for rendition protests”, declares today’s BBC headline, claiming that “Demonstrations at Edinburgh and Prestwick failed to materialise.”

“Evidently I hallucinated the whole thing”, says Craig Murray, who joined yesterday’s demonstration at Edinburgh airport. As this report from Indymedia shows, the protest was highly visible, and the Police were well aware that it was going on.

UPDATE – by the magic of the memory hole, the BBC has now corrected its story, but the original has been helpfully archived here.

From The Guardian

The government will today come under pressure to disclose all it knows about how Benyam Mohammed, a British resident held in Guant?namo Bay, was seized in Pakistan in 2002, and the likelihood that he would be tortured when he was moved to American custody.

Mr Mohammed, 27, is accused of planning al-Qaida attacks. Following his arrest in Pakistan he was flown on a CIA rendition flight to Morocco, where he was allegedly tortured.

The Council of Europe highlighted his case in a report this month in which the UK is accused not only of allowing the use of British airspace and airports, but of providing information used during his torture. Today, the all-party group on extraordinary rendition will hear there is strong prima facie evidence of British involvement in Mr Mohammed’s seizure in Pakistan in 2002 and his subsequent secret transportation to Morocco and Afghanistan before been flown to the US camp in Cuba.

The former foreign secretary Jack Straw, told the Commons foreign affairs committee last year that while in jail in Karachi, Mr Mohammed was interviewed by a member of MI5. Mr Straw said MI5 had no role in his capture or in his transfer from Pakistan. He denied that the officer had noticed any evidence of torture, and said Mr Mohammed had not complained of ill-treatment. However, MPs say the Foreign Office has refused to cooperate with their requests for further information, according to Andrew Tyrie, Tory chairman of the group.

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The UK Governments position on torture was made clear again earlier this week in a case concerning Britons detained and tortured in Saudi Arabia.

From The Guardian

Four men who were arrested and subjected to “severe torture” in Saudi Arabia today lost their bid to sue those responsible for their treatment. Five law lords unanimously overturned a court of appeal ruling from October 2004 that cleared the way for Sandy Mitchell, Les Walker, Bill Sampson and Ron Jones to claim damages from the Saudi government and its officials.

The Saudi government, supported by the British government, argued its agents were protected by the State Immunity Act 1978 from proceedings in Britain

The four men today said they were “devastated” by the ruling and vowed to take the case to the European court of human rights.

Solicitor Tamsin Allen, who represents Mr Mitchell, Mr Sampson and Mr Walker, said: “The House of Lords have chosen to support the rights of states, including those who torture, over the rights of torture victims.

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