Richard's Kingdom

The Government has launched a consultation on reducing the burden imposed on our lives by the state. The Your Freedom website has been live for about a week and has already collected an incredible number of ideas, comments and suggestions. In fact enthusiasm has been such that the site has struggled to stay online thanks [...]

Yesterday the Government announced a “Freedom or Great Repeal Bill” to undo the worst excesses of Labour authoritarianism. If many of the policies therein seem familiar it’s because they seem to have been cherry-picked from the Freedom Bill that the Liberal Democrats put together for the Convention on Modern Liberty last year. After the publication [...]

The new Conservative-Liberal coalition Government today announced it intends to pass a “Freedom” or “Great Repeal” Act. This will:

Scrap the ID card scheme, the National Identity register, the next generation of biometric passports and the ContactPoint Database.
Outlaw the finger-printing of children at school without parental permission.
Extend the scope of the Freedom of Information Act to [...]

Over the last two parliaments the British state has grown ever more authoritarian. Personal liberty has been sacrificed on the altar of public opinion for political ends. The false dichotomy of privacy versus security has been used repeatedly to justify robbing us of the former while failing to deliver the latter. Billions of pounds have [...]

Legal firm Carter-Ruck has lost a secret battle to keep from public scrutiny the actions of its client the multi-national oil traders Trafigura.
In a masterful display of political and media manoeuvring the Guardian led a charge of the blog-brigade against an injunction preventing the newspaper from reporting Parliamentary proceedings relating to the case. In a [...]