Most Unlikely
I don’t normally blog about present-day politics. That’s not really true because my support for feminism is political (in exactly the same way that anti-feminism is political), and also because copyright is an important political issue for me. What I mean is that I’m not very interested in what the mainstream media call politics (ie what Labour and the Tories have said about each other, and what lazy journalists have said about them). I don’t watch TV or read newspapers because I just find them boring. So I’m only vaguely aware of what’s going on.
I see from Ted Vallance that the British government is planning to do something involving Habeas Corpus and the number 42, and that various opponents have invoked Magna Carta in a way that misunderstands what Magna Carta was. I heard on Richard Herring’s podcast (which is pretty much my only regular source of news, but perhaps that perspective is no more distorted than any of the papers) that David Davis is standing against this in a by-election.
I’m clearly not the only person to be surprised that Davis is making such a stand for civil liberties. I heard from my friends in the band Billy Ruffian that they’ve recorded a song about this and put the video on YouTube, and that it’s already got a lot of attention from politics blogs. “The Most Unlikely Civil Liberties Defender of All” isn’t their best song (check out “Death of a Band”) but political songs are notoriously difficult. The kind of words that you need to use don’t fit together easily. I always think Billy Bragg is at his best when he’s singing about woman trouble and that his most overtly political issue-based songs can be quite clunky (the arguments in “Sexuality” can’t be disagreed with but if you’re going to write a song about that then shouldn’t it be, y’know, sexy? For a better celebration of gay sexuality try Luxembourg’s “Close Cropped”).
It’s also pretty unlikely that Billy Ruffian should ever find themselves supporting David Davis. They’re on Filthy Little Angels, they’re friends with Art Brut, their cool alternative credentials are impeccable. I’ve known Ste (the singer) for nearly 7 years and played bass in one of his previous bands (we’ve both come a long way since then) so I know that he’s no friend of the right wing and previously didn’t like David Davis very much. That such unlikely bedfellows are united against them shows just how badly New Labour have screwed up.
Comment by Ted Vallance — 9:30 am, 25 June 2008 [permanent link to this comment]
Personally, I’d rather vote for Dickie Davis…but you are right, it is weird to see Shami Chakrabarti, Tony Benn, Simon Heffer and D Davis all lining up on the same side. My point really is that if you don’t have a proper written constitution, this does become a ‘how long is a piece of string question.’ As Davis admits on his new blog, it raises questions about his current support for detaining people for 28 days without charge (why isn’t that against ‘Magna Carta and Habeas Corpus’?)Of course, this doesn’t mean that he isn’t right to oppose the counter-terrorism bill, which is definitely a ‘bad thing’ and for more reasons than 42-day detention – see the letter signed by Lord Rea et al which went in the Guardian some weeks ago for the full horrors of this piece of legislation.
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 11:01 am, 25 June 2008 [permanent link to this comment]
I think we’re in an impossible situation because we need a written constitution but can’t trust anyone in power to write it. Just look at the so-called Human Rights Act, which I think takes away more than it gives. The need to comply with the European Human Rights Convention could have been an opportunity for a new constitution but what we got instead was at best a hopeless mess.
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 8:36 am, 28 June 2008 [permanent link to this comment]
Update: the song has been featured on the Today programme. “I wasn’t expecting our first play on national radio to be on Radio 4 but I’m really not complaining”.