At last the light is shone on the IRA

Telegraph (UK) ^ | 3/13/2005 | Kevin Myers

[MadIvan]

he political control in the UK has flipflopped and the socialists in the UK has passed one socialist/anti-freedom law and regulation after another. Quite a few of these corrupt laws and regulations have been reported on FR over the past few years.

Living under Labour is no more the end of us than living under Clinton was the end of you. Were you calling America socialist tyranny when Clinton was in office? If not, you're a hypocrite.

The UK law that disgusts me the most is that it is a crime to defend yourself.

You're the one living under a rock. That was changed. The guidance to judges is that reasonable force can be used, including killing an intruder.

Also, there is no rights to privacy in the UK with a government camera at every street corner.

Yawn. Like you're not using security cameras? Hypocrite!

It's 1984 (the book) over there and you seem to be in denial about it.

You're confusing your feelings with facts again. And I actually read 1984, unlike you - there is no camera in my house, or dictator barking orders. Yes, this government does things I don't like - but that doesn't mean I'm an unfree citizen who can't change its path, nor does it mean I don't have rights which persist no matter who is in power. Your whole excuse for the IRA is just that - an excuse.

Finally, you can never deal with the point I raised - even if I was unfree, that would not excuse the IRA perpetrating injustice on civilians.

Ivan

[Winniesboy]

I hope Ivan will forgive a late-arriving British footsoldier for adding his modest salvo to the MadIvan battery. Paul, I've gone back to your original post in which you describe Great Britain as a 'communist country'. This is so preposterous that it would be laughable, were it not that an alarmingly large number of Americans appear to believe it.

Let me try an image to demonstrate how wrong you are. Imagine the mighty structure of British liberties, dating back to Magna Carta, as a mountain range the size of the Himalayas. Now, it so happens that we currently have a government with some worrying authoritarian tendencies, which has not scrupled to chip away at those liberties (always with 'the best of intentions', of course), mostly in fairly petty ways. Imagine that chipping away as the odd mudslide or avalanche on this side of the mountain range - troubling, even disastrous, for those who happen to get caught up in them, but having no effect whatever on the durable solidity of the mountains themselves.

The 'communist country' of your imagination, Paul, is a deep and murky abyss many thousands of miles away on the far side of the mountain range. What you are doing, if you will forgive me, is soaring in one mighty leap of illogic from this mudslide to that abyss as if the intervening mountains did not exist. Rest assured that they do, and will long outlast the feeble scratchings of this or any future government.

Like Ivan, I love my country passionately above all others. I believe that, on all the fundamental indices, we are and will remain the most free of all the nations in the world save only one other: not least because the citizens of this country retain the power to dismiss any government which chooses to meddle with those freedoms, as sooner or later we will dismiss the current government. The Himalayas will barely notice its passing.