Author Archives: James Elsdon-Baker

The Independent View: surveillance lessons from Birmingham

Birmingham, the city that this week played host to the Conservative party conference, has also been hosting a grass roots battle for Liberty.

This battle takes the form of a campaign run by residents against Project Champion. This project involved the police installing automated number plate recognition cameras (ANPR) in a Muslim area of the city.

It has now been shown that the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) provided the project’s funding as part of an anti-terror grant. This raises the questions as to why people were mislead by senior officers into believing the cameras were installed for crime prevention

Posted in Op-eds | Tagged , and | 4 Comments

Opinion: Securing civil liberties

Along with other civil libertarians I’ve dedicated my time to fighting off Labour’s encroachments on our freedoms and liberty. This struggle has found me working with traditional Labour members, Greens, Liberal Democrats and Conservatives; everyone from anti-corporate Libertarian Socialist to Euro-sceptic UKIP activists. People of all tribal loyalties and ideological outlooks have come together in non-partisan campaigns like NO2ID, and events like the convention on modern liberty. Not because they have sought to make their ideological explanation of why our liberties have been encroached the dominant one, but because they realised achieving a shared goal required finding the common ground …

Posted in Op-eds | Tagged and | 13 Comments
Advert

Recent Comments

  • Simon R
    Sorry to disappoint people but the Democrats are not going to win a 2/3 majority in the senate in 2026. They currently have 45 seats out of 100, plus there are ...
  • Steve Trevethan
    Might part of the "Special Relationship" be that both nations share having extreme differences of wealth distribution? Might this suit their leaders? In A...
  • Peter Martin
    "It’s more accurate to refer to Israelophobia, which means the de-legitimising of Israel and denial of its right to peace and security." It actu...
  • nigel hunter
    UK sitting on the fence looking both ways? Is there a chance we can go it alone and make trade deals with any country that is interested? We need to develop our...
  • Craig Levene
    This is UCLA in receipt of hundred of millions of Dollars of taxpayers money... That is what it's president presided over.. https://youtu.be/ZmBk3T935CI?si=...