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Andrew Watson is coordinating a letter writing campaign to the House of Lords. Please do what you can to help, as this will probably be the last chance you get to have an effect on this rotten bill. Here are the details of his proposal: The next two weeks in the campaign are crucial. On Monday 6th March the ID cards Bill goes back to the Lords. Last time they looked at the Bill, their Lordships amended it to make ID cards truly voluntary, removing the link to getting a passport. As you know, Labour MPs out-voted the other parties...

A bill that would have allowed homeowners and shopkeepers to use greater force to defend themselves against burglars was 'talked out' of the House of Commons today. To the dismay of Conservative MP Anne McIntosh, who proposed the private member's bill, the legislation ran out of time after Labour MP Andrew Dismore talked for a total of three hours and 17 minutes on the issue. MPs are allowed to talk about a proposal as long as they stick to the subject and Mr Dismore - known for his long speeches in the Commons in the past - surpassed his own...

It looks like the third and final vote on the national ID cards Bill in the House of Commons will be on the 18th of this month.If you are a British citizen and you oppose the national ID card/NIR scheme then you need to write to your MP in the next few days (for convenience you can use this website) or else it will be too late to make your opinion count.Here is some useful information to use in a message to your MP: Misleading government claims for ID cardsIf we assume that the ID cards will be impossible to...

A Conservative councillor who left two children alone in his home for three hours with access to a Bren gun and a musket narrowly escaped jail yesterday. John Smith, 49, was told by a judge that his behaviour had been "deplorable and disgraceful". He was given an eight-week suspended prison sentence. Sheffield Crown Court was told that police forced entry into his locked house and found two distraught boys aged eight and four. Officers found the Bren gun with a loaded clip at the top of the stairs, a rifle in a bedroom, exposed wires on a light switch and...

BRUSSELS - The EU is set next week to discuss its strategy for tackling the current problems caused by soaring oil prices, as several member states have suggested they are ready to release their stockpile reserves to the US or world markets. "We are in contact with them and whatever they ask for they will be given, from reserves of oil that different countries have provided, to any other thing that they may need", EU foreign chief Javier Solana said on Friday (2 September) in Wales. However, his statement seemed to contradict an earlier announcement by the British foreign minister...

Details have emerged about some of the men suspected of carrying out the attempted bombings of Tube trains and a bus on 21 July in London. FIRST SUSPECT: MUKTAR SAID IBRAHIM Muktar Said Ibrahim, 27, also know as Muktar Muhammad Said, is suspected of leaving the explosive device on the back seat of a number 26 bus, in Hackney, on 21 July. He arrived in the UK in 1992 from Eritrea in east Africa as a child refugee, with his family. Brought up in Stanmore, Middlesex, he attended Canons Hill school in Edgware, north-west London. A convicted violent criminal whose...

Opposition MPs have accused Leader of the Commons Geoff Hoon of trying to "bury bad news at sea" in timing a debate on ID cards when many are away. The first vote on the government's controversial scheme is on Tuesday, the same day many MPs will mark the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar. Conservatives said many would find it hard to attend and said coverage would be overshadowed by celebrations. Mr Hoon argued MPs could attend both events, as he intended to do. 'Conspiracy theorising' Next week's debate will be the second reading of the bill and the...

Internet censorship is increasingly common, says technology commentator Bill Thompson, but making small gains in freedom may be enough. "We shouldn't be surprised to learn that the Chinese authorities have finally turned their attention to weblogs and decided that they have to be censored. After all, a government that has put so much effort into controlling the free flow of information was hardly going to ignore a publishing tool that is easily accessible by 78 million net users. Now anyone in China who wants to blog has until 30 June to register or face criminal sanctions, and according to the...

ID cards are needed to stop the soaring costs of identity theft, Prime Minister Tony Blair has said as proposals for a national scheme were reintroduced. The plan is for cards to be phased in from 2008, and made compulsory later. The Conservatives have now decided they will join the Lib Dems and some Labour in opposing the measure. Critics claim Mr Blair is highlighting ID theft as his other reasons for the cards have not won support. The cost of the scheme has risen since November. Passport costs The Home Office will not put a figure on the cost...

Teacher Linda Walker, who was jailed for firing a pellet gun during a row with youths, has been freed by the Court of Appeal. Three judges gave her a conditional discharge but refused her permission to challenge her convictions. The 48-year-old, from Urmston, Greater Manchester, was jailed for six months after she was convicted of affray and possessing a firearm on 29 March. She said she fired the gun after the youths had terrorised her family. Her trial was told she had received nuisance phone calls abusing her family, her garden shed had been broken into, and a car and...

A group of suspected Islamists have attacked a meeting of George Galloway's Respect party in Bethnal Green and Bow. Police said there were reports 20 to 30 Asian men had disrupted the meeting and there had then been a fracas outside. Respect said the men had threatened Mr Galloway's life and talked of a fatwa. After the meeting a man was knocked to the ground and police arrested three. The anti-war campaigner is standing against Labour loyalist Oona King in the east London constituency. Ms King's campaign have revealed her car was attacked over the weekend and pelted with eggs....

Britain's most senior police chief has called for new laws to combat terrorist conspiracies, saying the UK is being targeted by al-Qaeda. Sir Ian Blair, Metropolitan Police Commissioner, said ID cards should be given more consideration, as should iris recognition technology. He told BBC One's Breakfast With Frost: "There's real clarity now that al-Qaeda affiliates are targeting Britain." His comments come after ricin plotter Kamel Bourgass was jailed for life. 'Loose-knit conspiracies' He was found guilty of murdering Special Branch Det Con Stephen Oake in a Manchester flat in January 2003, and received a further 17 years for conspiring to...

- Is an "urgent" decision justified? - Why does the European Parliament not question the legal basis of the measure? - Why does the Parliament's draft report accept the need for biometric passports? Statewatch has learnt that the European Parliament has been asked by the Council of the European Union (the 25 EU governments) to use its "urgency" procedure to rush through the measure on mandatory fingerprinting and biometric passports for all EU citizens at its plenary session next week (1-2 December). The Council's letter to the parliament (Piris letter, pdf) making the request encloses the latest version of...

David Blunkett has promised tough action to tackle gun crime in the wake of the murder of jeweller Marion Bates. The home secretary used his keynote speech to the last day of the Labour conference in Bournemouth to pay tribute to Mrs Bates. She was gunned down during a robbery at her Nottinghamshire shop on Tuesday while trying to protect her daughter. Mr Blunkett pledged support to the police in the battle against gun crime saying: "My heart goes out to her family. "I want the experience of the Metropolitan Police in London with Operation Trident - dealing with gang...

Tony Martin's most precious possession, his dog Otto, was moved to a secret location yesterday hours after it was claimed that travellers planned to kill it. A newspaper reported that a £5,000 "contract" had been put out on Otto, the only one of Martin's three Rottweilers to survive since he was jailed. The dog had been moved from Worcestershire to kennels in Lincolnshire shortly after Christmas. Yesterday morning, it was taken to another, secret address. "Mr Martin was tremendously upset by the suggestion people were out to kill his dog," said Malcolm Starr, the farmer's closest friend. "They haven't been...

U.S. broadcasters' coverage of the Iraq war was so unquestioningly patriotic and so lacking in impartiality that it threatened the credibility of America's electronic media, the head of the BBC says. BBC Director General Greg Dyke singled out for criticism the fast growing News Corp's Fox News Channel, owned by media baron Rupert Murdoch, and Clear Channel Communications, the largest operator of radio stations in the United States, with over 1,200 stations, for special criticism. "Personally, I was shocked while in the United States by how unquestioning the broadcast news media was during this war," Dyke said in a speech...

THE impression that Britain is drowning under a tidal wave of gun crime is a fiction promulgated by the government to create the illusion it is cracking down on crime, a former police superintendent claimed yesterday. Colin Greenwood, who has previously been consulted by the Commons home affairs select committee firearms sub-committee and acted as a firearms consultant to West Yorkshire Police, accused David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, of conning the public and creating a panic about guns. His comments came as Mr Blunkett and senior police officers yesterday approved a firearms amnesty in the latest of a series of...

The government has tightened its clampdown on a rising gun culture, promising a ban on airguns and replica firearms. The proposal to outlaw replicas, which are often converted to fire live ammunition, comes hot on the heels of a suspected gangland shootout last week, which left two girls dead, cut down in the crossfire. "Our crackdown on airguns is part of the government's wider commitment to tackle the anti-social behaviour which blights some of our most vulnerable communities and breeds a fear of crime," Home Secretary David Blunkett said in a statement on Wednesday. Carrying the weapons in public without...

Rod Liddle reveals that in some military quarters there is plenty of enthusiasm for assassinating the Iraqi leader, and reports on some of the methods that might be employed. There’s something terribly primitive about bombing the hell out of a country simply to get rid of one man (and, perhaps, his small ragbag assortment of grinning, psychopathic sons, obsequious flunkeys and hired assassins). This is what we’re about to do to Iraq, if I’m not mistaken about the utter futility of this business with the weapons inspectors. We are angry with one evil man and further irritated by his devoted...

The government is facing calls for tough new gun laws following the killing of two teenage girls outside a New Year party in a suspected gangland battle. Latisha Shakespear, 17, and Charlene Ellis, 18, died in hail of bullets in a gunfight involving a submachinegun after they briefly left the party at a hairdressing salon to get some fresh air on Thursday. Charlene's twin sister Sophie and a fourth girl Cheryl Shaw, 17, were also wounded in the incident in Birmingham which brought renewed demands for action against increasing gun violence on the country's streets. The Home Office said on...