My life is my own!

Further powers for privately-employed bailiffs to use force to enter and seize private property.

It is claimed these powers are already abused. In one case, an 89-year-old grandmother returned home to find a bailiff sitting in her chair having drawn up a list of her possessions. He was pursuing a parking fine owed by her son, who did not even live at the address.

Must we learn again every lesson from history? Under New Labour, it seems so.

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Douglas Carswell MP writes candidly about the ability of Parliament to do its job:

The House of Commons is useless at holding those with executive power to account. If Mr Speaker presides over a Table Office that won’t allow questions about the license fee, what’s the point of Parliament or of elections to decide its composition? (The Table Office claim its because the license fee isn’t part of ministerial responsibility – but its the executive deciding what is and what isn’t their responsibiliity, not the legislature – as was once the case).

Fearsome stuff.

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The high profile effort to agree legislation to lend $14bn to the US auto industry collapsed on Thursday night, leading the Bush administration to hold open the possibility that it would seek funds from its financial rescue plan instead.

Efforts to agree a deal in the US Senate ended in failure when Harry Reid, the leader of the Democratic majority, said negotiations with Senate Republicans were at an end and warned that millions of jobs were at stake as a result.

…

Both Democrats and Republicans said the sticking point was a demand to push Detroit to bring down labour costs to a par with foreign manufacturers in the US. Democrats said the move made unrealistic demands on the United Auto Workers union, while Republicans argued that no effort to restructure the industry would work without such a step.

Perhaps a loan conditional on appropriate commercial restructuring was an appropriate way to help families through this catastrophe, but it appears the coercive powers of state and union have created a destructive intransigence.

Presidential candidate Congressman Ron Paul spoke powerfully in the debate:

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From The Telegraph, the jury return an open verdict on the killing of De Menezes:

After a three-month hearing costing an estimated £6 million, jurors rejected a verdict that the innocent Brazilian had been killed lawfully by police.

They returned an ambigious, open verdict – the only other option they were given after the coroner ruled they could not find that Mr de Menezes was illegally shot dead by officers.

For those of us not completely familiar with the nuances of legal language, we are told:

The coroner had directed them to find an open verdict only if they rejected that the two marksmen who shot dead Mr de Menezes, “were acting in lawful defence of themselves or others” having “honestly although mistakenly” believed that he was a suicide bomber.

The BBC’s explanation of the verdict is also interesting: the jury decided that firearms officer C12 did not shout the warning, “armed police”. This is apparently consistent with the “Kratos” policy explained here.

How things have changed since Lee Clegg was convicted of murder and since I was trained as an armed guard and armed guard commander in the UK, facing an IRA threat.

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Lord Lester, a Liberal Democrat and distinguished human rights lawyer, quit as the prime minister’s adviser on constitutional reform a month ago. In a scathing attack yesterday, he revealed for the first time how he felt tethered by the government, describing its record on human rights as “dismal and deeply disappointing”.

Which makes this thread of reporting rather more interesting.

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