State of civil liberties in Britain today
Saturday, January 22, 2011 at 12:52 Alex Deane, director of Big Brother Watch, has produced a book that I warmly recommend.
Published by Biteback, it's called Big Brother Watch: The state of civil liberties in modern Britain and it's available on Amazon and in the larger branches of Waterstone's, like this one in Piccadilly where I bought my copy on Thursday.
You will be familiar with the names of several contributors because they include a number of people who took part in our 2010 Voices of Freedom debates: Guy Herbert, No2ID; Mark Littlewood, IEA; Josie Appleton, Manifesto Club; Philip Johnston, author of Bad Laws: An Explosive Analysis of Britain’s Petty Rules, Health and Safety Lunacies and Madcap Laws; and Alex himself.
Another contributor is Brian Monteith, author of The Bully State: The End of Tolerance, published by The Free Society in 2009. There's also an essay by Simon Davies of Privacy International who has just completed a report commissioned by Forest that we hope to publish next month. Watch this space.
Update: Josie Appleton, director of the Manifesto Club and a contributor to Big Brother Watch (above), has written a piece on the rebellion against the Spanish smoking ban. "It's quite heartening!" she tells me.
Reader Comments (2)
""Dave then said he no longer had it [his bar in Spain] as he'd got out before the smoking ban. l asked why because l thought a lot of the Spanish were ignoring it. He said that they are but the officials were targeting bars run by Brits. His mate who also owns a bar had just got fined 1000 Euros because he was smoking in his own bar.""
This is a quote from Smoking Hot via Frank Davis's site.
I suppose the idea of doing that is that these Brit bar owners are not part of the group of Spanish bar owners - easy pickings for the authorities to prosecute 'pour encourage les autres'. On the other hand, I am not sure that a couple of weeks is long enough for a prosecution to proceed to completion. But the really important thing is that the Spanish bar owners should stand together. I hope that they do.
This is a very erudite and timely book that is the centre piece for civil liberties not only for the UK but we hope as an example to others worldwide.
If anyone is interested there is an official launch on the 2nd February and I believe it is a public event should you want to come. The invite made me titter.
"Food and drink provided: goodness me, yes."