The nice people at the TUC website have
posted notices about the Convention and it’s on the NUJ website too.
Time to think about trade unions.

Not long ago the media was saying very little about this key
democratic movement, though there are 6.5M trade union members in
Britain and many millions more worldwide.

Cometh the hour. With recession, unions have come back into the news.

So 24 hours before the Convention kicks off, we've set up a centre of operations in the Royal National Hotel across the road from where the event will be. At one end of the room Henry is briefing the press team for tomorrow. At the other, people are sitting on the floor in orderly style, stuffing Convention carrier bags. Georgia is using a neat camera to shoot, Leibowitz-like, the hands and faces of people on phones, at computers, writing in notebooks, calling couriers, receiving boxes, arranging printers, bringing coffee. Anthony walks up and down making calls and beaming genially. Guy in CML T-shirt drinks Coke and taps away at his laptop. Young Claire is typing, eating a sandwich, licking her fingers and writing with a biro in a notepad simultaneously.We haven't even hit the hall yet.

For me it's a no-brainer. As a mother of teenage children, a citizen of this country, a trade union activist, NO2ID staff member and a journalist, I care about the world I live in and I want it to be honest, fair and reasonable. I want the moral frame of reference which we have to work within to be agreed, broadly speaking, between most or all of us. I want those people designated as criminals in this society to be the ones who actually hurt people and do wrong - not innocents locked up without charge, indefinitely. I want to be able to trust the authorities whose job it is to administer the country on our behalf. And I want it all to make sense.

But the mirror's cracked from side to side. Less and less of what I see does make sense. Some of it is palpable and obvious nonsense - such nonsense that, like Alice, I sometimes feel as though I've gone through the looking glass to a world of inverted logic and deliberate stupidity.

There is simply no good reason whatsoever to "share" (steal) data between government departments - and a thousand urgent and compelling reasons not to. There is no good reason for the National Identity Scheme and the database state, and it is going to harm millions upon millions of people, in big ways or small. There is no good reason to stop peaceful protest and to arrange laws that criminalise and punish people of conscience. And for God's sake, in whose name is this society allowing the terrifying, horrific torture and detention of innocent people? Not mine. Not my family's. Not the people I know. We were never consulted. And I do NOT agree with it.

This country went to war with Iraq and killed and tortured many young soldiers and uncounted families, babies, children, men and women, destroyed a whole irreplaceable culture, the place where the first written words were ever written, the site of the Biblical Garden of Eden and a modern, complex nation, for no good reason anyone has ever presented. We marched against this war, a million of us in the streets of London, and were ignored. I do not agree with that either.

Something is badly wrong - so very wrong that it seems the whole moral underpinning of our society has been shifted. This is a Britain I don't recognise, a British government I trust less and less and feel more and more ashamed of. This is not the Britain which stalwartly stood up for freedoms and defended the weak, created the oldest democracy on the planet, gave birth to the sublimest poetry, the first dictionaries, the first computers, the Industrial Revolution. This is not the society which lived by faith, which welcomed my ancestors, heroic fighters for freedom who arrived on these shores without a penny and brought up families to trust in Divine good and social justice. It's not the country I knew, where decent people shared their food and laughter across the alleyways, where violence was condemned and dishonesty decried.

No. Now we live in a Britain where 6,500 police officers are armed and trained to shoot to kill, not talk or negotiate. We have innocent men shot dead without accountability. We are ringfenced by the machinery of spying, watched wherever we go, listened in to, monitored. Now, music can't spontaneously happen in the streets - and neither can meetings. There can be no joy, no compassion, and God forbid, definitely NO forgiveness. Fill in the forms, tick the boxes, and you better watch out and do as you're told at all times, or you're simply dead meat. And that is a literal, not a metaphorical threat.

I do not believe that we are surrounded by terrorists. Where are they? I do not believe that we need to be numbered, tagged, chipped, surveilled, "shared", watched, controlled, monitored, categorised, tracked, assigned to groups from babyhood onwards, made to walk this way, not that, all for our own so-called "protection" from so-called "terrorists". I think that's cruel, and I think it's a lie. Life is supposed to be about free will and conscience. We're supposed to be allowed to make up our own minds.

So I'm looking for ways to restore proper values to the society - and world - that I live in. I am deeply worried about the actions of those in power, and the powerful tools they're playing with, which I see being used to destroy far too much of centuries of human progress, and which will hurt the innocent. But I am profoundly confident about people's innate common sense, compassion and goodness. Human beings are not bad. We mean well and we are endlessly creative. There is so much altruism in the world. I believe we can sort this thing out, find out what's really going on and get the state back on track, if we work together and keep asking awkward questions.

Thus I'm helping with this Convention in the spirit of doing the right thing - of doing what I can to help open the conversation. It was Schumacher who said it best: "We must do what we conceive to be the right thing and not burden our souls with whether we're going to be successful. Because if we don't do the right thing, we'll be doing the wrong thing and we'll be just part of the disease and not part of the cure."

That's why I'm here. To be part of the cure.

Christina Zaba (London, NO2ID): Since 4th January we’ve known it:  the UK police will soon be able to hack into people’s personal computers without a search warrant, in line with “EU initiatives against cybercrime”.

I know: it’s almost unbelievable. It makes a nonsense of the provisions within the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, whose own Codes of Practice state: “All [surveillance] activity should be carefully managed...and must not be arbitrary or unfair. Measures should be taken to avoid or minimise unnecessary intrusion into the lives of those not directly connected with the investigation.”

Christina Zaba (London, NO2ID): So now we know that Gordon Brown doesn't much care about the safety of "every single item of information" we hand over to the government, as he told ITN last Sunday in the wake of yet another data breach.

It's the scale of the information gathered that interests him. Who cares if it's your particular NHS records, bank details, fingerprints, iris scan, benefit entitlements or shopping habits that fall into the wrong hands? Forget data protection: this is the era of data-sharing. 

The policy was devised some time ago. Tony Blair published the idea in 2005, in Transformational Government: Enabled by Technology, when he promised a "balance" between government "maintaining the privacy of the individual" and "delivering services". But it's government, not you and I, who will be deciding that balance. 

Picking up in Comment Is Free on the Prime Minister's staggering admission which was otherwise ignored across the media (why is this?) David Davis compellingly and eloquently argues that the proposed National Identity Register is obviously, stupidly insecure. It's designed that way. You don't need to be a hacker to get into a system which gathers everything on giant linked databases, open to hundreds of thousands of officials. You just need a password.

And what could be simpler, once we're all on the Register and our detailed information and biometrics are in the hands of the state, than to render someone functionally non-existent at the flick of a switch?

Let's not go there. Our information is ours and, as David Davis says, naïve ministers are disastrously missing the point. No system exists anywhere on the planet which could secure every single, precious, personal item of information on the National Identity Register, therefore it must not be built. As we say in NO2ID: You can't protect it, so don't collect it. End of story.

Christina Zaba is Union Liaison Officer for NO2ID