Terrifying

Well, Today the Government will try to write it's legacy into law - the new terror legislationgiving ministers the power to impose house arrest on people that there may or may not be enough evidence to indicate that they are a terrorist.

They say they are motivated by their duty to protect citizens right to life. Yet thousands die on the roads each year, and we hear not a peep about internment of motorists. More plausibly, they claim the security services have asked for this power, because they feel they need something between simple surveillance and a full scale trial. It beggars belief, though, given the plethora of anti-terrorist laws - and other laws - that they could not find one charge to lay against a terror suspect that would not endanger their sources.

The reality, though, is that irrespective of the legislation - which is dubious at best - state power can and will be arbitrarilly used in the interests of the ruling elites anyway.

During the miners strike the Thatcher government established an unlawful national police force, unofficially suspended freedom of movement and used arbitrary arrests to break the miners movement. More recently, the Movement Against the Monarchy crowd were arbitrarilly arrested to avoid them causing trouble at the Queen's Jubilleee - the state just decided to pay the compensation for it's arbitrary abuse of power.

Judges have never been any help in the past. Hide-bound and caught up in their support of deference and power, they defend the establishment - and are no more likely to protect people from arbitrary arrest than a Home Secretary would.

These powers, though, are part of a war being fought between the capitalists of Britain and Midle-Eastern capitalists, wanna be capitalists and their respective camp followers. It is a war of power, control and oil.

The threat of terrorism cannot be removed by ever greater use of power, but by removing the source of the conflict - greedy men seeking to own the riches of the Earth. Today's events in Parliament are a side-show.