UK home secretary wants to overturn human rights treaties and make terror suspects stateless

I hate May so much it gives me energy.

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Not if her party has anything to say about it. Remember that ā€˜getting out of Europeā€™ is nearly as high on the list as abolishing human rights.

ā€˜Getting out of Englandā€™ is my plan, if the fuckers get another term.

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The problem is that anywhere better has a shittier climate than we do!

Shakes fist at Scandinavians

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Shit, Iā€™d just take a run for the border, if Scotland got independence. Then burn my passport & send May the ashes. Itā€™s only an hour away.

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Although not to worry, they wonā€™t win another election. The UKIP are trending well though! shudders

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Iā€™m at the other end - Iā€™d have to swim to France or something.

I have thought that about the Tories many times. Many, many timesā€¦

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Clearly the entire point of this move is to allow May and the like to punish people they do not like without a trail or judicial oversight.

If a person acts in a treasonous manner, there are laws and procedures in place to deal with them. The only reason to have a law, such as the one May is proposing, would be to punish people who didnā€™t do anything a court would consider wrong.

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Has the concept of ā€œBring the accused to trialā€ just gone out the window everywhere now? Just what world am I living in, anyway?

I, for one, am a lot more scared of the Baby Boomers than I am of Al Qaeda.

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Well actually a passport may be a privilege in the UK - you can be a citizen without a passport.

Thereā€™s already a legal penalty for treason. Why do we need to revoke citizenship? And why are recent immigrant traitors to be treated differently than native-born traitors?

It sounds like a good idea. Act against your country? Well, bon yoyage! Traitors are pretty contemptible, and not many people are going to stand up for them as a class.

But if citizenship is a privilege, not a right, then every other right that putatively comes with citizenship is now just another privilege. This idea would consign the Magna Carta to the dustbin.

Now it occurs to me Robert Bolt said it much better:

Roper: So now youā€™d give the Devil benefit of the law!
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: Iā€™d cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you - where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This countryā€™s planted thick with laws from coast to coast - Manā€™s laws, not Godā€™s - and if you cut them down - and youā€™re just the man to do it - dā€™you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?

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That is true, but if you leave the country on that passport, the right to return home is a basic human right by international treaty. If your only citizenship is UK, you have an absolute right to return there - after that, they can take your passport away; May is trying to administratively remove peoplesā€™ citizenship. With no trial or path to argue the point, I would add.

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This distinction is an important one, which seems to have been neglected. But stripping citizenship is a tactic sheā€™s not averse to.

Furthermore, her statement that ā€œa passport is a privilege, not a rightā€ sets a very nasty precedent. It implies you have no right to leave the country, or to get back in, even if youā€™re a citizen who hasnā€™t been found guilty of anything anywhere.

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This is, after all, a Just World.

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Is it? I thought it was just a world. Well, thatā€™s alright then. Bombs away!

Fucking Cameronā€™s a gen-Xer like me. We went to the same free parties & that in the 90s, so the rumours goā€¦

The UKā€™s immigration policy is arse-backwards. I heard this evening that a 19 25 year old asylum seeker from Darfur who was a member of a sexual assault ring, as one of five defendants, who were convicted for crimes against a 13 year old girl in the UK and jailed while awaiting deportation, with the recommendation from the judge that he be deported at the end of his sentenceā€¦ cannot be deported, and will instead be paid compensation for his detention. I wonder if the government deliberately screws up what should be fairly clear-cut deportation cases in order to enrage public opinion.

I donā€™t understand how revoking someoneā€™s passport revokes their citizenship? Iā€™m American, and the UK system might be different, but cancelling a US passport will only make it hard to cross the border. Here, citizenship is something youā€™re born with. A person who has never traveled abroad has no passport, but has full citizenship. I havenā€™t had a valid passport in years.

Likewise, @nunavutwolf, the no-fly list has no effect on citizenship. The TSA can make it hard to fly, but they canā€™t decide who is and is not American. I donā€™t even think we have a way of revoking citizenship, although felons lose many of a citizenā€™s rights. But it takes a trial to make a felon.

Was it the Gen-Xers that voted him in, do you think?