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(Via Bloggerheads.)

What strikes me most about Bollywood movies is how the hero’s love for the female lead is intertwined with his love for his homeland (India). Loving one entails loving the other.

Recently on Comment is free, Brian Whitaker sought to defend not only the concept of human rights, but the practical methods of realising them.

While I have no problem in Whitaker making a case for protecting human rights, sadly such defences give the appearance of being tone deaf to actual events around the world. This is even before we must consider the ‘theoretical’ problems with the current human rights regime.

Students will be “blackmailed” into holding identity cards in order to apply for student loans, the Tories have warned.

According to Home Office documents leaked to the Conservative party last night, those applying for student loans will be forced to hold identity cards to get the funding from 2010.

Anyone aged 16 or over will be expected to obtain a card - costing up to £100 - to open a bank account or apply for a student loan.

The document says: “We should issue ID cards to young people to assist them as they open their first bank account, take out a student loan, etc.”

The government had planned to start issuing the ID cards to people applying for a passport from 2010, but confidential documents confirm that the scheme will be delayed to at least 2012.

The biometric cards are due to be introduced for foreign nationals later this year, with the first expected to be issued to UK citizens on a voluntary basis from 2009.

From next year, they will also be issued to people in “positions of trust” such as airport workers.

The revelations have led to concerns that the government is planning to collect the fingerprints and other biometric details of more than two million young people entering higher education each year by stealth.

Shadow immigration minister Damian Green called the plans “straightforward blackmail” to bolster “a failing policy”.

“This is an outrageous plan. The government has seen its ID cards proposals stagger from shambles to shambles. They are clearly trying to introduce them by stealth.”

Source.

Mosques in Britain are more extreme than in Iraq, according to the country’s deputy prime minister.

Dr Barham Salih claimed some mosques in Blackburn would be banned in Iraq for the extremist messages they preach.

He made his comments during a dinner party in Baghdad attended by Tory culture spokesman Tobias Ellwood.

The 41-year-old MP claimed Dr Salih said: “I am not surprised that you British are facing so many problems with extremists after what I saw in those mosques in Blackburn.

“What I saw would not be allowed here in Iraq. It would be illegal.”

Dr Salih, a Sunni Muslim, went to several mosques in Blackburn when he visited the town on the invitation of the then Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, in 2005.

If anyone is interested in the source of that claim by Tobias Ellwood, it was made at a Westminster Hall debate on Pakistan and terrorism earlier this month. In the Mail reporting above, Straw is quoted as saying people who were expressing ‘extreme’ views during Salih’s 2005 visit were from outside the area rather than inside mosques. The Lancashire Council of Mosques, whose leading members are on very good terms with Straw, has responded to Salih’s claim on its website. The main problem is, of course, Ellwood’s report of Salih’s views are unsubstantiated. For example, which mosques did Salih visit?

The Lancashire Telegraph says it has contacted Salih via the Iraqi embassy in London asking him to clarify his views. I don’t expect they will receive a response.

American and British politics have indeed tended to mirror each other. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair; Reagan and Margaret Thatcher; before them, Eisenhower and Macmillan, and JFK and Wilson: the two countries’ political cycles have often overlapped, and like-minded leaders (albeit less schmaltzy in Britain) have coincided. There is a longstanding transatlantic trade in tactics and policy ideas, and in consultants, pollsters and other political mountebanks. Mr Brown and his fellow New Labourites are known to have studied Mr Clinton’s victorious 1992 campaign; but the phenomenon goes back at least to the influence of Nixon’s 1968 advertising on the Tories. (It is not exclusively west-to-east: witness the Tory-influenced Republican attacks on Mr Clinton in 1992, and, maybe, the speech his wife made on a John Major-esque soapbox in New Hampshire.)

Further down in this piece, Bagehot lauds the “impressively eclectic” collection of British political leaders in the last two decades. This is a counter to people who say British politics is bland. Bagehot (and Jackie Ashley) misses the bigger problem: the pool from which our political class is drawn has been narrowing over the last few years.

An early draft of the government’s discredited Iraq weapons dossier written by John Williams, a former journalist and head of the Foreign Office news department, must be released, the Information Tribunal ordered yesterday.

The government has said the dossier was entirely the work of the intelligence agencies. Williams’ role in the affair was not disclosed to the Hutton inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the death of David Kelly, the government weapons expert who questioned the way the dossier was drawn up.

The tribunal dismissed FCO claims that the release of the draft was not in the public interest. It said: “We do not accept that we should, in effect, treat the Hutton Report as the final word on the subject …

“Information has been placed before us, which was not before Lord Hutton, which may lead to questions as to whether the Williams’ draft in fact played a greater part in influencing the drafting of the dossier than has previously been supposed. We make no comment on whether it did so in fact.”

The Hutton inquiry, which cleared the government of conspiring to “sex up” the dossier, was not handed the Williams contribution or address the questions which it might raise, the tribunal said.

It has been suggested that the draft might contain the first mention of the notorious and ill-founded claim that Saddam Hussein could launch a WMD strike within 45 minutes. Williams has denied the claim.

Carne Ross, a high-flying diplomat who resigned in protest at the way the Blair government led to the country to war, told the Guardian last night that the decision should pave the way to the publication of the later dossier drafts drawn up inside Whitehall. The FCO said it would be “studying the tribunal’s decision”.

Source.

The government is facing defeat over its legislation to hold terror suspects for up to 42 days without charge, which is to be published today without many of the safeguards demanded by opponents.

Government whips are believed to have warned ministers that if a Commons vote were held now on pre-charge detention it would be “touch and go” and the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, must go out and make the case if she is to win over sceptical Labour backbenchers.

Smith, a former chief whip whose weekend media push to sell the 42 days proposal was undermined by her remarks about fear of walking the streets at night, is undertaking an intensive programme of one-to-one meetings with backbenchers in an attempt to save the plan, which the government argues is necessary to give police enough time to gather evidence of complex plots.

The detailed legislation is expected to be tougher than originally trailed, with no legal definition of the seriousness of the alleged offence that could trigger an exceptional period of detention beyond the current 28 days without charge. Critics fear that even the recent case of the “lyrical terrorist”, who wrote inflammatory poetry about martyrdom, could be caught by these wider criteria.

The government was dealt a fresh blow over its plans last night by the Commission for Equalities and Human Rights, which described the proposal as disproportionate, unjustified and in breach of human rights law. In a strongly worded letter to the home secretary its chair, Trevor Phillips, said the CEHR, which has powers to seek judicial review, is seeking legal remedies should the counter-terror bill reach the statute book. The commission says the proposal would have a disproportionate impact on Muslims, and suggests that people who are unlawfully detained for the 42 days and lose their livelihoods, homes or families in the process should be entitled to compensation.

Source.

Related:
34 votes needed to defeat 42 day detention bill
Director of public prosecutions rejects increasing detention without charge to 42 days
Not a Day More

A story based on the Three Little Pigs has been turned down from a government agency’s annual awards because the subject matter could offend Muslims.

The digital book, re-telling the classic fairy tale, was rejected by judges who warned that “the use of pigs raises cultural issues”.

Becta, the government’s educational technology agency, is a leading partner in the annual schools award.

The judges also attacked Three Little Cowboy Builders for offending builders.

The book’s creative director, Anne Curtis, said that the idea that including pigs in a story could be interpreted as racism was “like a slap in the face”.

Next week, Becta will decide upon the fate of this famous political satire, to prevent Muslim children from being force-fed (you can decide if this pun was intended) tales of Stalinist pigs.

The world’s first zero-carbon, zero-waste and car-free city, designed by the British architect Lord Norman Foster, is to be unveiled today in the United Arab Emirates.

The location of Masdar City in the harsh desert on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi will eventually grow into a settlement housing 1,500 businesses and 50,000 people.

Although the a 6km sq site has no fresh water and temperatures reach 50C in the summer, sponsors and designers say that it will incorporate methods used by ancient settlements to survive in such a harsh climate.

Much of the city’s electricity will be generated through solar power, which will drive the cooling systems and a desalination plant producing fresh water.

Landscaping within the city and crops grown outside the city will be irrigated with recycled and treated waste water.

Source.