Thursday, April 06, 2006

Footballing Liberties

Where are the howls of protest from Liberty for the civil rights of 4,000 Football hooligans who have to surrender their passports for the duration of the World Cup Final in Germany?

They are being banned for what they might do in the future.

Would Liberty take a more active interest if the hooligans came predominantly from a minority background?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

How difficult is it to type in the words "Liberty football banning order" into the Google search engine ?

Where were you in the year 2000 when Liberty were lobbying of MPs etc. to protest about exactly what you are complaining about now ?

http://www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/resources/policy-papers/policy-papers-2000/pdf-documents/july-2000-football-bill.pdf">http://www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/resources/policy-papers/policy-papers-2000/pdf-documents/july-2000-football-bill.pdf

Snafu said...

Anonymous, thanks for the correction! I hold my head in shame.

I googled "Liberty uk" and then used their search engine for "football banning order" and found nothing!

Anonymous said...

It is Liberty's unecessary use of wretched Adobe .pdf files which confuses their simple search engine.

The removal of the freedom to travel before you have committed a crime, is another bit of NuLabour totalitarianism.

The same laws give a policeman the power to stop you from boarding an aeroplane flight, even if you have not been served with a football banning order, but are simply wearing the "wrong" football colours or shirt or scarf etc.

Tracking football hooligans who were deliberately setting up fights, used to be the job of the National Criminal Intelligence Service, but now that they have been merged into the Serious Organised Crime Agency, that is no longer a priority.

Given SOCA's secrecy and their penchant for hiding from the public (no email, no phone number) perhaps the cunning plan is to infiltrate the World Cup finals entirely, with the thousands of undercover SOCA agents posing as England supporters, who will, presumably, behave themselves at the taxpayers' expense.

Anonymous said...

Why should football hooligans - our national disgrace - be treated differently than sports shooters who had their private property stolen by the government for crimes they "might" commit at some future date?