the Lords later in the year. Shadow Home Secretary David Davis resigned in protest over this issue, saying that it threatened to undermine habeas corpus, the right not to be imprisoned without charge or reason established by Magna Carta. The limit remains at 28 days.
The right to a fair trial
The 2005 Prevention of Terrorism Act allowed the government to place control orders on terrorism suspects in cases where there was insufficient evidence to prosecute them, for example when intelligence against the suspect had been compiled by using bugging, which is not allowed to be used as evidence in court, or where sources needed to be kept secret. Control orders can take many forms, such as restricting an individual’s movement, work or communication with others, curfews, electronic tagging, requiring the individual to report at a certain place and time and confiscating a suspect’s passport. In 2007 the Law Lords ruled that 18-hour curfews were too long to be imposed as part of control orders, but otherwise that control orders were not unlawful.
The right to privacy
CCTV has been used by Labour as their main way of fighting crime. Since the 1998 Crime Reduction Act, the number of CCTV cameras in the UK has risen astronomically from a few thousand to over a million (exactly how many is unknown). It is unclear whether CCTV has been effective in reducing crime, and the ubiquitous cameras have led critics to talk of the UK’s transformation into a ‘Big Brother’ or a ‘nanny’ state. Other government measures have added weight to these Orwellian concerns. The 2006 Identity Cards Act provided the legal framework for compulsory ID cards to be issued to everyone over 16 who remains in the UK for longer than 3 months. The proposed card can store 52 pieces of information on the National Identity Register (NIR) about every individual, any of which could be passed on by the Home Office to any other public authority when deemed necessary. The cards have been criticised as being too expensive, both for the government (around £10 billion) and the individual (they could cost up to £60 each), and for being ineffectual in tackling terrorism and stopping illegal immigration, two of their intended aims. The launch of the card has been delayed several times, but is currently tabled for all new passport applicants for 2012.
The NIR is one of several controversial government databases: the National DNA database, which was set up in 1995 to retain the DNA records of criminals, is the largest in the world except for that of the US, and contains the DNA records of over 4.4 million people. Of these, 850,000 are innocent, including 40,000 children, while 40% of convicted criminals in the UK do not appear. In December 2008 the European Court of Human Rights judged that the database was in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights. Other databases labelled illegal by groups such as the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust include ContactPoint, which contains the personal details of children; Onset, which identifies potential child offenders by examining their behaviour and social background; and the Detailed Care Record, which enables GPs, nurses and social workers to make unmonitored updates of patients’ NHS records. David Cameron has pledged to scrap ID cards and ContactPoint if he is elected.
The UK public’s fears for their privacy were heightened by a number of high-profile cases in 2007-8 in which confidential records concerning child benefits, the armed forces, justice staff, driving test candidates and criminals were lost in incidents involving stolen laptops, mislaid memory sticks, computer disks and documents left on commuter trains.
A British Bill of Rights?
One of the most high profile and controversial laws passed in the UK in recent years was the Human Rights Act 1998, which applied to UK law the European Convention on Human Rights. While some have welcomed it, others, notably Tory leader David Cameron, have criticised it for making it difficult to deport terror suspects and for providing a ‘veneer of respectability’ underneath which civil liberties can be eroded. Because of what Cameron calls ‘the need to enshrine civil liberties in a way that is relevant to our British traditions and the need to guide the judiciary and the executive towards proportionality and common sense’, he believes the Human Rights Act should be replaced with a British Bill of Rights. If the Tories win the next election this will be high on their to-do list.
‘He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.’
THOMAS PAINE (1737-1809), author of Rights of Man
‘We can live in a world with airy-fairy civil liberties and believe the best of everybody—and then they destroy us. This is not the world we live in.’
DAVID BLUNKETT, UK Home Secretary, 11 November 2001
Is it really happening?
Yes. In 2007 the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) established that global warming is a certainty and provided overwhelming evidence that man is to blame. It concluded that ‘warming of the climate system is unequivocal’ and that ‘most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th
century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic [man-made] greenhouse gas concentrations’. Their findings have largely silenced the minority of politicians, industrialists and lobbyists who had previously denied the reality of climate change despite the mounting evidence.
How do greenhouse gases cause climate change?
Most greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and others) are naturally produced by the earth’s ecosystem and are essential to maintaining its temperature by absorbing and emitting radiation in the atmosphere. However, an excess of greenhouse gases leads to a phenomenon known as radiative forcing, whereby heat that would normally leave the earth becomes trapped, causing the atmosphere to warm up. By examining ice cores which contain bubbles of the earth’s atmosphere dating back thousands of years, IPCC scientists have shown that greenhouse gases have increased ‘markedly as a result of human activities since 1750 and now far exceed pre-industrial values’. CO2 levels are now the highest they have been for over 650,000 years, due to an increase of around 30% in the last 50 years, and there is over twice as much methane in the atmosphere now as there was in pre-industrial times.
Which human activities create greenhouse gases?
Burning fossil fuels and land use change are the two main causes of global increases in carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas. Fossil fuels—such as coal, oil and natural gas—are hydrocarbons, and are burnt in order to generate electricity, provide heating and power transport. The most common example of land use change is the destruction of forests to make way for agriculture. Deforestation accounts for at least a fifth of daily carbon emissions, leaving CO2 in the atmosphere which would otherwise be removed by trees for use in photosynthesis. Increases in methane, the other most significant greenhouse gas, are principally due to agriculture (especially rice cultivation and flatulence in livestock), leakage during fossil fuel production and the burning of biomass (plant matter).
Positive feedbacks
As the atmosphere warms, its capacity to hold water vapour (in the form of clouds and humidity) increases; water vapour is itself a greenhouse gas, and so the warmer the atmosphere gets, the greater its potential to continue doing so. This is one of several ‘positive feedback’ processes associated with climate change. Ice and snow reflect sunlight, so in areas where they are melting, solar energy is absorbed instead by the sea or land beneath, causing the earth to heat up further. Permafrost, the deep frozen soil of the arctic and subarctic regions which locks away carbon dioxide and methane in the form of long-dead vegetation, is also melting as the earth warms, releasing more and more of the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Rising sea temperatures are threatening to wipe out