Evening Plenary

Billy Bragg was surprised to find himself agreeing with David Davis, but want to talk about the role of the artist “in this struggle. The issue we have and why we don’t have a document that starts we the people is because our revolution was 100 years to early. As we have no framework it is difficult, David Davis had problems protecting our rights because of it. It doesn’t really matter if it is called a British bill of rights as long as it is fair to all.

Lisa Appignanesi says she noticed a lot of talking about silence in the context of people not wanting to talk about things. She is revisiting Dominic Grieve’s point about repealing of laws. She would like the parties to say what they would repeal. 1st on her list are the anti terror laws, she talks about kids being arrested protesting, people being arrested reading at the cenotaph and then she moves on to a topic mentioned in my stream in which she finds laws to be abhorrent, “seditious” libel and criminal defamation. Penultimatly she wants to deal with what she refers to as concentration camps for asylum seekers. Lastly she supports the human rights act and isn’t sure why the media is so down on it.

Feargal Sharkey is here to talk about the oppression of music in the UK under the licensing act and other regulations especially in the Metropolitan area rather than here to do his normal trick of asking for extension of copyright. Tells a very funny story about belly dancing to lead in to a discussion of form 696. Apparently only 21 London councils have included the wording that enables this to be a licensing issue. He is reading from the form the implied threats if you don’t fill it in correctly.

Paul Gilroy wants to ensure that all of this is done in an intelligent and sensible manner, and brought what had been absent (from what I had seen) apart from Chuka Umunna all day which was the perspective that us white guys havn’t had it as bad as other people and provided a good bit of context about the UK and the rest of the world.

Cory Doctorow has been called a geek for twittering from the platform then he suggest that the US didn’t spot 9/11 because it collected too much info. Taking photos of public buildings can’t be considered a security issue as we all know what they look like. All of this would be less painful if the government delivered what it promised. I think that is a big disconnect  from a lot of people here who don’t want to give this information up even if it did the things the government suggests it should (Cory FFS slow down!).

Sorry this is patchy had wifi and power and helping out people with wikipedia lookups during the talks, huge apologies to the panel especially Paul :-(