However a second man, farm worker Chris Mahlangu, 29, was found guilty of murder, attempted robbery and housebreaking.

During the day, as the verdict was read out at a court in the farming town of Ventersdorp, there were clashes between hundreds of uniform-clad white supremacist groups and local supporters of the two defendants which were broken up by riot police wielding batons and shields.

Mr Terreblanche rose to prominence in the 1980s with angry speeches calling for a separate Boer nation. He was beaten to death with a machete and an iron bar in the bedroom of his farmhouse in April 2010, shortly before South Africa hosted the World Cup. Following his death, Mr Ndlovu and Mr Mahlangu handed themselves in to police. Mr Terreblanche was found lying on his bed, with deep wounds to his head and body. His trousers were undone and his genitals exposed and blood covered the walls and floors of the room.

Although it has not yet been publicly launched, the National Allegations Database is already receiving tip-offs at the rate of one every six seconds.

Right off, ya’ hear?

Whether or not I agree with what they’re saying I do know that we’ll all be entirely buggered if they’re not allowed to say it.

This is, still, a free country and it will remain one if we have to strangle the last quangocrat with the intestines of the last bureaucrat.

So The G has reorgainsed its former Liberty Central as Human Rights and Liberties. The thing is, I can find no reference at all to economic liberty there.

Something of an ommission?

Or as we might put it, social justice requires the abolition of liberty and freedom.

British intelligence agencies were subsequently forced to carry out their own investigations, according to Whitehall sources.

The breakdown in relations came after the release of US intelligence in the case of Binyam Mohamed, a former Guantánamo Bay detainee who took legal action over his incarceration. The Government was subsequently forced to pay millions in compensation to him and other detainees.

Kenneth Clarke, the Justice Secretary, yesterday warned that unless judges were allowed to hear evidence from MI5 and MI6 officers behind closed doors, lives would be put at risk.

He said: “The Americans have got nervous that we are going to start revealing some of their information, and they have started cutting back on what they disclose.

“I’d love open justice but let’s have some common sense here. Open justice cannot be at the expense of lives being lost.”

And you’ve just proven that you’re unfit to be Justice Minister Kenny Boy.

Yes, open justice is more important than lives being lost. You know, that water the tree of liberty with blood shit? Or perhaps you’d prefer that standard o0f the English idea, better than 100 guilty go free than that one innocent be jailed?

Or perhaps we should just point to the really basic idea here. Justice, this open courts stuff, knowing and being able to challenge the evidence against you, representation in court, presumption of innocence, all this malarkey. Why is it there? No, BZZZZZT!, it’s not to protect the guilty from their righteous and just punishment. It’s to protect us, the citizenry, from the whispers of the secret police into the ears of the justice system. From the crushing of liberty by State power.

And if some die as a result of that maintenance of liberty then so be it: for certainly some will die as we rise up to massacre those who would steal our liberty from us.

Plans to monitor emails, phone calls and websites are vital to track down and convict killers like Ian Huntley, the Home Secretary has said.

Listen you ignorant trollop. That you did not need the new powers to track down, capture and convict Ian Huntley means that you do not need the new powers to tack down, caputure or convict killers like Ian Huntley.

However, they are the de jure and de facto government. So under what provision of what law are they not allowed to impose public order? Put down an armed uprising?

Isn’t that what de jure government means? That you are indeed allowed to use violence against a violent uprising?

If, to take an absurd example, the SWP captured a few tanks and started to attack HMG in Bristol, wouldn’t HMG have the right to call out the military to deal with them?

Onto something less obviously trollish.

As a British citizen, the 36-year-old former investment banker will, however, be free to travel to Britain, though William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, said that was unlikely given current circumstances in her adopted country.

“British passport holders do obviously have a right of entry to the United Kingdom,” said Mr Hague.

Quite right too. However:

However, The Daily Telegraph has learnt that the Home Office is in the early stages of examining the possibility of revoking Mrs Assad’s British citizenship, which was gained by birth.

Eh? When the fuck did that become possible?

Sajid Javid, the MP for Bromsgrove, has asked Theresa May, the Home Secretary, to consider using her powers under the 2006 Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act, which allow the deprivation of a person’s citizenship if it is deemed “conducive to the public good” and doing so would not render that person stateless.

Err, no, that should not be possible, not in anything approaching a liberal or just legal system. The government gets to jail citizens who have done something naughty once they’ve been tried and found guilty. The government gets to frame the rules about who gets to join us in winning that lottery of life in being British. But it shouldn’t have the power to strip someone British by birth of being British. Simply because that’s not a power the Govt should have.

For it is us who select the government that we wish to have, not the government who selects who it wishes to rule: that’s far too Brechtian a system.

This little known provision of the 2006 Act seems to be another piece of Soviet style law that Blair et al smuggled into our system.

Do we hang or shoot the bastards that came up with this?
.

Gay marriage is not a human right, according to European ruling

And do not forget, the definition of what is and is not a human right has been outsourced to those very judges. Not something for us to decide domestically any more.

And there’s a sting in the tail to this as well:

Neil Addison, a specialist in discrimination law, told the Mail: “Once same-sex marriage has been legalised then the partners to such a marriage are entitled to exactly the same rights as partners in a heterosexual marriage.

“This means that if same-sex marriage is legalised in the UK it will be illegal for the Government to prevent such marriages happening in religious premises.”

Ah.

Now, that does in fact change matters. For the debate moves from, well, what skin off the Catholic (to take an example) Church’s nose is it if Teh Gayers can marry elsewhere to you what, we’re insisting that the Catholic Church must marry Teh Gayers in Church?

That is a substantial change in position I would suggest.

Which really leaves us with only one viable solution. We do as Portugal has done and just entirely remove from the legal code the entire idea of religious marriage. There is just one State contract open to any couple of any variation of adult humanity. This must, can only, take place on State premises.

Where you go as well so that the Sky Fairy would approve is entirely up to you and entirely sod all to do with the law.

Yes, that does mean that us Papists, the CofE, whoever else has those register rights in the middle of a ceremony loses them.

But if Addison is right then the only way to deal with the insistence on non-descrimination in religious marriage is to make religious marriage disappear from the law entirely. For really, seriously, no one is seriously suggesting that the local Mosque must marry Teh Gayers are they?

The British media must be challenged as to why they give UKIP leader Nigel Farage so much attention, air time and column inches when UKIP members hold such vile views. While I believe in free speech speech, I do not find it acceptable for the media to promote a party which is so obviously on the right-wing political fringe.

Free speech is only allowable for those views I approve of…..that is, I don’t believe in free speech at all.

There is no reason sexual harassment in the street should be any more permissible than racist language

But racist language should be permissible in the street. As should sexist, xenophobic, religious, irreligious, blasphemic and pure blind outright hatred.

It’s called “free speech” you see?

Incitement to violence, no, that’s not permissible, libel (OK, slander when in the street), no, but given those two then everyone should indeed to be free to utter whatever the hell it is that crosses whatever they might possess as synapses.

Absolutely agree that all of such is not polite, much of what is/would be said is not desirable, can often be hurtful of feelings and even lead to outrage among some of the listeners.

But none of those are reasons to ban anything by law.

You could characterise this argument as Tim Worstall arguing for idiots being free to be dickheads in public.

And yes, I am. On the basis that that’s what free means, you see?

Homophobia: at last we’re learning to cherish difference

There is heartening evidence that we are becoming more tolerant of people’s sexual orientation

The second line is obviously true. The first may or may not be: but it isn’t what we need to be doing anyway.

Whether we want to be talking about sexual orientation as a choice (which it is, sometimes*) or something innate (which it is, sometimes) the duty is not upon me, as a good little liberal, to cherish either the choice being made or the way God made us all. It’s also not to celebrate, applaud, affirm or congratulate.

It is to tolerate….and in certain circumstances even defend….but there is no duty at all to cherish.

Indeed, moving a little wider than just sex, there may be people out there doing things that I find deeply repugnant but as long as it’s all consenting adults with no horses being frightened it is my duty to tolerate their actions.

But no cherish, no.

*Look, the mere existence of bisexuality, where people make a choice about which sex they sleep with, shows this.

Christians who want to be exempt from equality legislation are like Muslims trying to impose sharia on Britain, Trevor Phillips, the human rights watchdog, has declared.

No, I’m afraid this isn’t quite correct.

“To me there’s nothing different in principle with a Catholic adoption agency, or indeed Methodist adoption agency, saying the rules in our community are different and therefore the law shouldn’t apply to us. Why not then say sharia can be applied to different parts of the country? It doesn’t work.”

One group is saying that the law of the land should recognise our beliefs and accomodate them. The other is that the law of the land should recognise our beliefs and impose them on others.

Or if you prefer, there’s a difference between active and passive. Not providing adoption services to Teh Gays is one thing. Insisting that no one provide adoptions services to Teh Gays is another.

For example, it is legal to open a shop on Sunday. But there is no law that says a Christian shopkeeper must open on a Sunday: nor that a Jewish one must do so on a Saturday or a Muslim on a Friday.

Another example, prostitution. This is indeed a legal activity in the UK. We have quite strict laws about discrimination between people on the grounds of their sexuality. Yet absolutely no one is absurd enough to say that prostitutes may not discriminate against (or even for) potential customers on the grounds of their sexuality.

In a free country you should indeed be allowed to discriminate on what services you offer to whom for whatever reason you care to. Just as there should not be laws preventing you from doing as you please (subject, as always, to the no harm to others and the Mrs. Patrick Campbell clauses) in order to impose the prejudices, religious or otherwise, of others.

We know how this is going to turn out, don’t we? The freedom of commerce is going to be crushed under the tanks of political power?

Amazingly, no:

Loma Linda had, until now, managed to avoid the global tentacles of the fast-food giant, primarily because of the number of Adventists. Despite this, the city council – all are Adventist – has voted three-to-two to allow the new drive-thru. Those in favour say that it isn’t the job of local officials to stop people if they choose to indulge.

Fancy that! You only get politicians who believe in freedom if they’re religious nutters perhaps?

Man’s a loon of course.

His various forays into the world of economics have been laughably ignorant.

Certain of his campaigns have been based upon very, very, odd readings of the world.

Yet, as Sellars and Yeatman didn’t put it, he’s not been wrong but wromatic, nor even right but repulsive.

On balance, he’s been a Good Thing.

On which note Happy Birthday to Mr. Tatchell, someone who probably wouldn’t accept one but most certainly should be offered a peerage.

For we should cherish, promote, reward and acknowledge the loons that we are privileged to have among us.

Writing in today’s Observer, Baroness Warnock, a leading expert in medical ethics, backs a change to the law, which currently leaves someone who assists in the suicide of a friend or loved one liable to up to 14 years in prison.

Yes, this is true, it does.

Although the current law is clear that assisting someone to die is illegal, the director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer, has produced guidelines to clarify when an individual might not face prosecution. These suggest that relatives acting on compassionate grounds are unlikely to go to jail, but those acting in a professional capacity, such as doctors or nurses, are much more likely to face charges.

Quite, and we have a system that deals with this problem.

For we do in fact want a system that sorts through the various cases. At one end of the spectrum there’s someone topping Granny for the house and the inheritance. At the other end there’s that bolus of morphine that shortens a horribly painful life by a day or two.

We’d like then first to go to jail and the second to face an investigation and then to let it lie.

After his death his parents contacted police to admit that they had helped him achieve his wish to end “a second-class existence” by taking him abroad – despite praying to the last, and urging him to change his mind. The police had to investigate and the Jameses underwent three hour-long interviews each by officers days after their son’s funeral. The case against them was eventually dropped.

Quite. Talking to coppers for three hours isn’t everyone’s cup of tea but it seems a fair enough price to pay having taken that momentous decision to aid another in taking their life.

You know, so that we can sort through the Type A cases and the Type B?

Another way of putting this is that we’ve a system in place already. Police investigation, decision of DPP on whether to prosecute or not, trial by a jury of peers.

Why do we need to change the law?

The home secretary, Theresa May, has ordered Muslims Against Crusades, an Islamist group which is planning to disrupt Friday’s Armistice Day ceremonies, be banned from midnight.

Sigh.

Freedom of speech means that people are indeed allowed to burn poppies if they want to be idiot enough to do so. Freedom of association also means that people who want to burn poppies are allowed to join together with other people who want to burn poppies.

No, of course I don’t like people who burn poppies: but that’s got fuck all to do with it, has it? My dislike of the shitty little creatures is not a sufficient reason to invoke the law of the land to salve my affronted opinions.

Yes, the Illinois Nazi Party really does have the right to march: and we to protest against it.

So, how do we go about getting shitty little fascist cockweasels like Theresa May out of public life?

It is incumbent on the advertising industry to demonstrate that the cultural impacts of advertising are benign.

No mateys, that isn’t how it works.

It could be of course, it’s possible to have a system where you’re only allowed to do what you can prove is benign. Or even a system where you can only do what the law says you can do, or a self-appointed committee of experts says you can do or even, it we were to take things to the level of true absurdity, what self-appointed guardians of Gaia say it’s OK for you to do.

But we don’t live in such a system. We live in one where we value certain very odd concepts like “freedom”, “liberty” and even “free speech”. And in order to protect these very odd ideas we have a system of law which says that you can go and do absolutely anything you like as long as the law does not expressly forbid it.

There is no law against advertising Uncle Joe’s Mint Balls and therefore you can advertise Uncle Joe’s Mint Balls.

There is a further implication of this too. If you think that a particular activity is not benign then we have a route that you can travel so as to get that not benign activity made into one of those things which the law expressly forbids. Stand for election, get into Parliament, introduce a bill to outlaw advertising Uncle Joe’s Mint Balls and advertising Uncle Joe’s Mint Balls becomes something you cannot do.

So off you go and have fun. In the meantime we’ll all be enjoying this freedom and liberty lark plus the free speech bit which allows us to call you puritan fuckwits.

For, as the UK supreme court made clear in July, the right to know the case against you remains a fundamental common law principle – as Lord Kerr described it, “an elementary and essential prerequisite of fairness”.

Ken Clarke and the security services can bugger off then, can’t they?