Time for a Magna Carta version 2

You want to know where we go from here? We need a new Magna Carta. Sunny Hundal of Liberal Conspiracy recently said he wanted “an insurgency to take our rights back from the state”. This now includes our right to honest government, though I think we always knew that. The emphasis needs to be on achieving this.

In February the Convention on Modern Liberty in London and across the UK showed a clear public concern with the threat of authoritarian power and a hunger to debate and confront it in an intelligent and democratic way. Guy Aitchison, Clare Coatman and Tom Ash are, from today, launching Magna Carta 2.0 with the aim of taking the spirit and intelligence of the day to the country.

They have a post setting out the idea here on OurKingdom. I’m joining them. We need you to as well if you have a moment – on your own terms and in your own way and whatever your political affiliations if you are a democrat concerned with how we’re governed.

Here are six problems they set out:

1. The corruption and suborning of parliament as a check on the executive, which accelerated after the Iraq invasion.

2. The rise of a surveillance society: from the blanket logging of all our electronic communications to CCTV to travel scrutiny

3. The sharing of personal information on official and commercial databases: the rise of the so-called database state.

4. Growing police autonomy, both nationally – the Association of Chief Police Officers, for example, is an independent corporate entity not a public body – and internationally, especially within the EU.

5. Exploitation of the threats of crime and terrorism to excessively enhance state power and undermine our fundamental rights often accompanied by encouraging populist fears and alarms

6. The exercise of arbitrary and unaccountable power by government agencies and quangos.

via modernliberty.net

Posted via web from Hexham Matters