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Why do they want to do all this? I don't get it. It's so plainly wrong, what's their MO behind the scenes? Surely it's not just all a thinly-veiled pulling up o

by frenger 13y ago

Why do they want to do all this? I don't get it. It's so plainly wrong, what's their MO behind the scenes? Surely it's not just all a thinly-veiled pulling up of the draw bridge between 'us' and 'them'? I mean, what do the politicians talk about between themselves when they decide to do this shit.

Silhouette 13y ago
Why do they want to do all this? The cynical view is that they're all cowards, so deathly afraid of the next big one happening on their watch that they won't risk anything that might look like they were soft on national security. One of the difficulties of this issue politically is that it's all too easy to ignore someone whose civil liberties have been infringed as long as it's not someone you know personally, but no-one misses an event like 9/11 or 7/7. A more dispassionate view might be that right now the British public does collectively favour having intrusive measures available to fight the bad guys and trust that the authorities will use them acceptably. For example, see this recent YouGov poll: http://yougov.co.uk/news/2013/08/21/public-divided-over-miranda-detention/ http://yougov.co.uk/news/2013/08/21/public-divided-over-mira... It's worth reading the PDF linked from that page, which shows the actual questions they asked, so you can decide for yourself how neutrally phrased you think they were. The PDF also gives a more detailed breakdown of voting by demographic. Notice that in the breakdown, even Lib Dem supporters somewhat support having having Schedule 7 on the books (54/37), while Tory supporters overwhelmingly favour it (80/12). It's also striking how the picture changes with age, with 18-24s supporting moderately (49/30) but 60+s overwhelmingly (76/18). Of course, you can argue that the current public sentiment is/isn't based on a sound understanding of the issues, as you can with any political polling, but those are the real numbers they found over the past couple of days. What is perhaps more striking is that despite the general support for authoritarian laws being available, public sentiment was much more hostile to the specific application of the law in this case. Tories and UKIP were still in favour but by smaller margins (58/27 and 52/40 respectively) but Labour and Lib Dem supporters were quite strongly against (54/29 and 62/29), and the overall opinion was against (44/37). This suggests to me that much of the sentiment in favour of these laws is based on trust that they won't be abused in practice, and therefore that the degree to which public support for such measures continues will probably be based on the government being seen to be using them responsibly.

by frenger 13y ago

Silhouette 13y ago

Why do they want to do all this? The cynical view is that they're all cowards, so deathly afraid of the next big one happening on their watch that they won't risk anything that might look like they were soft on national security. One of the difficulties of this issue politically is that it's all too easy to ignore someone whose civil liberties have been infringed as long as it's not someone you know personally, but no-one misses an event like 9/11 or 7/7. A more dispassionate view might be that right now the British public does collectively favour having intrusive measures available to fight the bad guys and trust that the authorities will use them acceptably. For example, see this recent YouGov poll: http://yougov.co.uk/news/2013/08/21/public-divided-over-miranda-detention/ http://yougov.co.uk/news/2013/08/21/public-divided-over-mira... It's worth reading the PDF linked from that page, which shows the actual questions they asked, so you can decide for yourself how neutrally phrased you think they were. The PDF also gives a more detailed breakdown of voting by demographic. Notice that in the breakdown, even Lib Dem supporters somewhat support having having Schedule 7 on the books (54/37), while Tory supporters overwhelmingly favour it (80/12). It's also striking how the picture changes with age, with 18-24s supporting moderately (49/30) but 60+s overwhelmingly (76/18). Of course, you can argue that the current public sentiment is/isn't based on a sound understanding of the issues, as you can with any political polling, but those are the real numbers they found over the past couple of days. What is perhaps more striking is that despite the general support for authoritarian laws being available, public sentiment was much more hostile to the specific application of the law in this case. Tories and UKIP were still in favour but by smaller margins (58/27 and 52/40 respectively) but Labour and Lib Dem supporters were quite strongly against (54/29 and 62/29), and the overall opinion was against (44/37). This suggests to me that much of the sentiment in favour of these laws is based on trust that they won't be abused in practice, and therefore that the degree to which public support for such measures continues will probably be based on the government being seen to be using them responsibly.