Man in a Shed: We offer asylum from foreign governments but extradite our own people without any British justice

Wednesday, July 12, 2006

We offer asylum from foreign governments but extradite our own people without any British justice

Well done to Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems getting an emergency debate in the commons today on Extradition Act 2003. Iain Dale is right call it a good day for the commons. I think NuLabour is slowly being found out here. My views on this are here, here and here

But one thing occurs to me its a strange position to be in that we offer asylum to protect people from their own governments ( and some of those who don't get it can't be returned because of what those governments might do ). Yet we don't insist on a case being made before our own citizens are sent abroad. IE British Justice is only for citizens of other countries ! How mad is that ?

(OK I know there are differences between the governments that can remove people at will from the UK ( mostly EU and US I think - the economist did an article on this quite some time ago if you want to go and look ), but it doesn't sit right does it ?)

Personally I'm opposed to any extradition from this country without a case being presented and challenged in court.

Update:

Check out Jesse Norman's article in the Guardian's Comment is free -- spot on except as I've mentioned I'm against automatic extradition on principle, regardless of the recipocracy of the arrangement.

Also unhappy development in the NatWest3 case ...here

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The pound in your pocket

"We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists." James Callaghan

“The trouble with theoretical economists is that they don't understand that when you have a deficit, you can only finance it by borrowing, and you've got to persuade people that it's worth lending money to you and that they'll get their money back... there's no way of escaping it.” Dennis Healey during the 1976 Stirling Crisis.

"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens ... Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of over-turning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." John Maynard Keynes, 1920.

"To preserve [the people's] independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude." Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States of America,1801-1809.

Inflation is taxation without legislation .. Milton Friedman