I’ll wager Corbyn’s is.
Nah, imho Merkel’s wishywashy style does not work for the UK.
The Wilson Doctrine will be used as blueprint for the Wilson Law. End of debate*, the MPs are happy.
*) The citizens? Not our concern, the poll rates look fine.
This is so beautiful. The irony, oh the irony. Let me taste your hypocrisy, yessssss…
This judgment [the grauniad at its finest] is a body-blow for parliamentary democracy.
Democracy… surveillance… bad?
My constituents have a right to know that their communications with me aren’t subject to blanket surveillance
Confidentiality… good?
As parliamentarians who often speak to whistleblowers – from campaigners whose groups have been infiltrated by the police to those exposing corruption in government departments – this judgment is deeply worrying.
Police… untrustworthy? My god, why did no-one bring these facts to the MPs’ attention earlier?
In a democracy there is absolute no excuse for people who contact parliamentarians to be subject to blanket surveillance
Sentence could be shortened without substantial change in meaning - ed.
No 10 … denied that the Wilson doctrine had misled MPs
Hahaha, sure fucking looks like it, guy.
It insisted that the intelligence services understood they could only use their powers to tap phones in a proportionate way, and there were safeguards in place.
Oh yeah no totally bro, we’ve got this.
It strikes at the heart of our liberties.
I’d vote for that guy.
The freedom of members to be able to speak without fear or favour and without fear of being spied on by the government or any other agency is a vital part of us being able to do our jobs as representatives. It strikes at the heart of our liberties.
Oh wait your liberties. nvm
Promises made by successive prime ministers about the Wilson doctrine were not worth the paper they were written on.
So much of this stuff you could just replace “the Wilson doctrine” with “mass surveillance” and these people would disagree with their own statements. Is it somehow less obvious to them than the rest of us?
All we need now is for (another) double agent to be exposed in the ranks of the British intelligence services, funnelling all this data to the Russians or Chinese, and that might just about break the camel’s back.
Surveillance is “good” right up until it can be you having your right to privacy invaded. Yet still some MPs don’t seem to get it when the public says parliament is completely out of touch with the every day lives and concerns of the little people they’re supposed to be representing. Of course you’d be out of touch if you manage to exist in a state where the laws that you craft and impose on everyone else don’t apply to yourself.
And John McDonnell, Diane Abbott, Dennis Skinner, Caroline Lucas…
Maybe Douglas Carswell as well.
One rule for the rulers; another for the ruled.
Fun fact: the word ruler has it’s roots in ancient (as opposed to modern Church) Latin’s word for the precisely measured straight sticks the ancient Egyptians before them used to measure stones for building afterlife palaces for their leaders (the Pyramids). What we today would call a foreman was issued his measuring stick at the start of his shift and had to turn it back in at the end of his shift, because the exact length of the stick (the “ruler”) was regarded as what we would call a state secret.
My linguist wife told me about this. I take two things away from it, one disparaging and one hopeful. The ruling classes have always tried to maintain a power imbalance of knowledge as leverage over the peoples they’ve ruled. But their control invariably slips with time and their ability to force their will on the awareness of their subjects shifts inexorably towards greater transparency.
However, this does not happen on its own. It happens because we the peoples of the world demand to know what our governments are really doing. And while the arc of history may bend towards transparency, it’s path can be kinked up by complacency leading to generations of strife and pointless oppression. As the TPP “agreement” has once more demonstrated, the ruling classes and their paymasters will never cease their efforts to control what we know. I don’t live in the UK, but I do live the in another modern Western Surveillance State, and I know that our fates are inexorably entangled. Our commitment to transparency must also be intertwined or our governments and the international corporations that buy for our political ruling classes their party nominations and media exposure will simply work together to circumvent whatever few regulations contain their corruption.
I can only imagine that any occurrence of a conversation between an MP and a representative of GCHQ would consist entirely of the Minister babbling about the importance of the political caste and the rep from GCHQ laughing uncontrollably in their face.
A suitably appropriate clip.
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