A Very Strange Day

It all stared down at the Ritzy in Brixton. For reasons I'm legally restrained from divulging, the panel event next tuesday has had to be moved from the Ritzy to the Clapham Picturehouse. The staff at the Ritzy are striking over low pay, and Chris Atkins and the Taking Liberties team completely support the Ritzy staff and BECTU in their industrial action.

At lunchtime interview with the Daily Mail. Yes this will give even more fuel to accusations that this is a right wing polemic, but they seem to like the film a lot and there will be a big piece coming out next week. So on balance we also made sure we did an interview with the Socialist Review as well.

Got back to office to see reviews coming through thick and fast...

Another 5 star review at Shadows on the wall

Great piece on the BBC News Website

And The Londonist is throwing it's weight behind us.

Then someone called to say we've got 4 Stars in The Mirror - life could be worse.

And, much to our horror, we've been emailed some images of a new kind of protest that seems to be springing up. It appears that as a novel way of protesting against the continued inaction of our government over Guantanamo Bay, people are putting hoods over the top of statues of civil rights leaders. Take this one for instance of Fenner Brockway (famous early peace activist and founder of CND).

Neither Revolver Entertainment nor the Taking Liberties team could ever condone this sort of direct action, but if you do end up in the possession of such photos, please email them to us. And if you could use orange hoods instead of black it'll stand out more.

Power to the People

The campaigns to get the film shown locally are all working. Thanks to Dr David Nichol at The Stirrer and my mum, Cineworld Broad St Are screening the film on the opening weekend. Can everyone now please stop sending them emails!

And due to local pressure the film will now be shown in Manchester and Glasgow.

Latest on the Newswire is that it is now booked in London at Odeon panton street and Odeon Swiss Cottage. Blimey - these are proper cinemas. Martin the booker at Revolver has done a fabulous job - especially as the film was only finished 9 days ago.

Now I'm about to jump in a car and drive across this green and liberty eroded land to the Hay Festival where we are the closing night film. We're going head to head with Ronnie Corbett, so we're playing in the bigtime now.

And one morsel of Liberty News....

Majority Of CCTV Cameras in the UK are illegal

You've got to laugh haven't you? New Labour spend hundreds of millions of pounds of our money on CCTV on the pretext that they cut crime, then they do a study in which they discover that they don't stop crime at all, and then we discover that the huge majority of them are actually committing a crime by their very existence.

Not only do most of them breach the information commissioner's code of practice, but they also completely contravene the data protection act. It wouldn't be so bad if there weren't more CCTV cameras in Britain than the erst of Europe put together. Or that they are now being fitted with directional microphones and facial recognition software so they can track our every move and listen to every word we say.

But if you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear!

Government’s policy review of police powers

This actually came out a couple of weeks ago but we have been a bit busy and have only just got round to reading all 102 scintillating pages of it. Mostly it is the usual government speak about rebalancing the system in favour of the victim and focusing on the criminal instead of the crime. It’s a comfort to know that thanks to this review policemen will be out on the street with the certain knowledge that they are hoping to detect and prevent criminals and not crimes (here we were thinking they were supposed to do both – that’s why this sort of review is so useful).

The review shows this government’s usual excitement with any solution that involves a database. It suggests expanding the DNA database to include anyone that the police suspect of committing a crime (why don’t they just admit they want a national database and get it over with), using CCTV with facial, weapon and explosives recognition capabilities (is that a gun in your pocket…sorry it’s a terrible joke but I just couldn’t help myself), using more powerful data analysis of databases (interestingly the identity database is included in the list of databases to be analysed, this was one of the things that Blair promised Parliament would not happen when the Identity bill went through) and providing police officers with access to databases where different levels of confidentiality are currently an issue (goodbye data protection laws then).

The terrorism section is mostly taken up with talking about how we have to embrace our shared values. This always makes me wonder what they are:
- All crises should be immediately followed by the offer of a cup of tea
- Anything is better if you’ve had to queue to get hold of it
- Shorts and a t-shirt should be worn at the slightest sighting of sunshine
- People should always stand on the left of an escalator and walk down the right.
- The breaking of any social rules should be met with some quiet tutting and a steely stare of disapproval. That’ll teach them.

Almost as an afterthought they add that their not entirely comfortable with Article 3 of the ECHR since it stops them sending terror suspects back to countries that might torture them so they are busy thinking of a way round this problem. If anyone can do it New Labour can!