The Guardian has been prevented from reporting parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds which appear to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights.
Today’s published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.
The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for …

I didn’t realise what I was taking on when I volunteered for the Carnival of Modern Liberty. The posts have been coming in all week like bills from British Gas, and the doormat is completely buried.

So, here we go with the Wardman Wire version, in a slightly less animated style than Jennie last week.

Via the BBC:

Peter Smyth, chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, backed a call by Grimsby MP Austin Mitchell to introduce a formal code to clarify the position of both the police and photographers.

“Its aim should be to facilitate photography wherever possible, rather than seek reasons to bar it,” he said.

“Police and photographers share the streets and the Met Federation earnestly wants to see them doing so harmoniously.

“As things stand, there is a real risk of photographers being hampered in carrying out their legitimate work and of police officers facing opprobrium for carrying out what they genuinely, if mistakenly, believe are duties imposed on them by the law.”

Of equal interest is a comment on Devils Kitchen yesterday:

Speaking as a serving officer, I would have thought that we would have been fully jemmed up on this law, seeing how it is (apparently) for our safety. Yet neither I, nor any of my colleagues know anything about it. I wasn’t actually aware that I was in so much personal danger that this jaw-droppingly draconian law was needed. Am grateful for those in the blogosphere bringing it to my attention because I would have know sod-all about it otherwise.

Jacqui Smith has banned Dutch MP Geert Wilders from entering the UK on public order grounds, because he plans to show a 17-minute anti-Muslim film, saying that his

presence in the UK would pose a genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat to one of the fundamental interests of society… [and that his] statements about Muslims and their beliefs, as expressed in your film Fitna and elsewhere, would threaten community harmony and therefore public security in the UK.

But since when has disrupting harmony threatened public security? Surely in a civilised democracy like …

So Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gave Channel 4’s “alternative Queen’s speech”. Yes, he’s the President of Iran and has said some rather disgusting and offensive things; that cannot be denied.
But we live in a country where free speech is hard-wired into us as people and in to our political system, even if it does appear to be under threat at the moment. And as we have that alongside a free media, the filming and broadcasting of this message is not a problem – so long as it itself is not offensive. Which, …

Here we go again. Why do these people always think that they can shut down a debate on the internet by complaining to an ISP and getting a blog deleted?
It doesn’t work. And, instead, backfires.
Had she done nothing, the fact that Jenna Delich linked to the website of a known neo-Nazi figure and former Ku Klux Klan leader would not be circulating the internet in such a massive fashion as it is.
As Harry’s Place states:

This website was taken offline as a result of a complaint to Daily.co.uk, our former DNS …

The Oxford Union has voted 2-1 to invite the BNP leader Nick Griffin and Holocaust denier “historian” David Irving speak in a debate. My reaction is simple: So what?
Mike Ion thinks that this is wrong because it “will only help legitimise the BNP”. Will it really? No. The Oxford Union is a student society, for crying out loud, and a debating society with it – and debates require representatives from both sides, however repugnant you may find their views. That they have invited them gives neither the BNP and their …

If you tell a joke about gay people, you could sent to prison for seven years under measures in the Criminal Justice Bill currently passing through Parliament. The Bill, intended to stamp out homophobic behaviour, has been criticised by the comedian Rowan Atkinson, who points out that it has
serious implications for freedom of speech, humour and creative expression.
Indeed it does, especially when the penalty is so high.
When it comes down to it, you can’t “stamp out” homophobia. It’s not something that can be forced out of people. It is best …