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...but, because I think they are probably completely loopy, I'm not a Scientologist. But I'm damned sure that in a pluralist society where we accept as a Human Right the freedom to follow religions we don't agree with, that we ought not to let this happen without a fight:

Germany moves to ban Scientology:

Germany's federal and state interior ministers have declared the Church of Scientology unconstitutional, clearing the way for a possible ban.

There is probably much that can be said against the Church of Scientology and its strange beliefs and sometimes even stranger followers. But I'm not sure there's any specific charge that can be leveled against them in terms of exploitation and behaving like a cult that can't also be leveled at, say, Opus Dei or the Jesus Army. And I'm not sure how they get to this:

German intelligence agencies... claim the movement's structures and methods could pose a threat to the rule of law and "democratic order".

...any moreso than, say, Jehovah's Witnesses subvert democracy by refusing to participate in elections (indeed the greater charge might be leveled against them for holding up the processes of democracy by keeping canvassers talking for an hour and a half!). Indeed some of the activities of the Catholic church in Europe in response to the "moral relativism" of liberal democracy - demanding magistrates refuse to implement laws relating to gay partnerships and so on - could be said to pose a far bigger threat given the numbers of their adherents.

If it can be proven that they practice extortion, then sue them, but to ban them, presumably in order to protect people from their own folly, is a slippery slope that Europe would do well to remember the potential consequences of.

Whilst I accept that some of the Clarkson protestors objected because they think he’s a boor with a (deliciously) “un-PC” sense of humour, the main concern appeared to be his supposed environmental record.

In this respect, it’s the environmentalist lobby (I rather like Clarkson’s own word, “eco-mental”), that has it dangerously wrong. It is not the search for quality, for fun, for pushing technology to the limits that is the environmental culprit. But the economic system that continually forces more vehicles on the roads travelling further and further.

The traditional green response to “too many cars” seems to be to get people on buses, bikes, anything but cars. And on a small, localised scale, this may be superficially right. Congestion makes our towns seem as if they are choking.

Rather, we must ask why people need to hurtle around day after day and resolve pressures that will add to this. They are pretty fundamental economic questions.

For example, we are, in the developed world, the wealthiest we have ever been. And yet we are about to tell people they need to work for an extra five years at least to be able to afford to retire. That’s an additional 10%+ of rush hour traffic.

The amount of debt-money swilling around our system means that for much of our working lives we work two days a week for the government and one for the bankers, before we ever get to work for our own financial security. Solve that and we could finally see those 30-year old predictions of life in the 21st century, of 70% leisure time and such like, fulfilled.

Each working person in the country is permanently slaving to pay the interest on around £50,000 of systemic debt. Not necessarily their debt, but the trickle-down effects of corporate and government borrowing on top of personal borrowing.

25% of road haulage is just keeping the haulage industry moving – fuel, parts etc. 30% of all transport is shunting food ever increasing distances around the planet. Raw cotton, subsidised in the US, is flown to China and India before arriving here as £2 tee-shirts – all barmy, with diminishing returns and frightening consequences.

Take all that unnecessary debt-fuelled traffic off the roads and we’ll find we can respect the planet and still have fun with Ferraris.

Yeah, okay, it's a bit of hyperbole, perhaps, but I simply cannot fathom why someone who is presumably deemed bright enough by her colleagues to manage law and order in this country cannot understand how drugs prohibition worsens the problem and leads to deaths, from violent street crime in the gangs that fight over patches where they sell drugs, via the dangers of adulterated or unknown strength products, to ignorance of what to do in reaction to symptoms of drugs and the inability to admit you have a problem because it marks you out as a criminal.

And our lawmakers are directly responsible for all these deaths. They could begin to take the supply chain out of the hands of the real criminals, disarming the streets. They could regulate and control the quality of substances so that people know what it is they are getting and taking. They could make it so much easier for people to access treatment where they develop a problem, and remember not all drugs users do develop a problem, simply by removing the stigma of criminalization, freeing up people to admit to friends and family, to stop hiding until it's too late.

Channel Four News has just run a package talking to teenagers who started various drugs in their early to mid teens. This is a problem, but it is far more difficult a problem to tackle while the whole supply chain is criminal, hiding from the law not operating within it and subject to proper scrutiny like alcohol and tobacco sales. And I'll bet you that in any community in the country there are more drugs dealers hiding, especially if you include 'social suppliers' who just sell to a close circle of friends, than there are outlets for the legal drugs of alcohol, tobacco and caffeine. How are you supposed to police that. How are you supposed to police the international trade in heroin when you realize that a month's supply for an individual addict can be concentrated enough to fit under the postage stamp on a letter?

And now, in addition to all the deaths and misery that prohibition causes, the government wants to overturn a central tenet of nearly all legal systems - that one is innocent until proven guilty - by seizing assets when someone is arrested on suspicion of supplying drugs rather than on conviction. We have truly entered a police state.

Jacqui Smith...I hope you are prepared, just as the Defense Secretary should do to returning coffins of our service personnel from theatres of operations, to attend every funeral of a drug related death of someone's son, someone's daughter, someone's husband or wife, look their relatives in the eye and tell them you're doing everything possible. Because you're not. You're exacerbating the problem and making rich some very nasty people. Prohibition kills, just as surely as if you strapped them to a chair and plugged them into the national grid, and you are perpetuating those deaths.

Tristan points us to companies we might like to boycott who are now on he shortlist for contracts related to the ID cards and database:

ID Cards - companies to boycott:

El Reg gives us the list of companies able to bid for the ID cards contracts.
They are:

Accenture - BAE Systems - CSC - EDS - Fujitsu - IBM - Steria - Thales

Other ways to fight the ID card madness

But it got me thinking. Perhaps rather than just boycotting companies whose products, let's face it, most of us are unlikely to come into direct contact with other than IBM's (and even then having got rid of laptops to Lenovo probably not them), perhaps we should be more active. Perhaps we should start a campaign of mass action against senior officers of these companies, and major shareholders where appropriate. Like what the animal rights activists are doing but without the threats and violence.

After all, I would have thought that there are sound commercial reasons not to get involved. If a national ID cards scheme goes ahead there will be less scope for competition for creating computerised trust mechanisms in future. Of course the ones that get the contract will be in the money - at least until costs spiral and they get squeezed as with the NHS systems - but the losers will be locked out of ID and trust type systems for as long as the national scheme operates I'd suggest.

PS - I see from my logs that this post has made it onto some Accenture daily list of "negative" comments about them .  Good!  But to set your minds at rest, what I mean by "mass action" is shareholder action, using any influence we have in other organizations to get them not to do business with the companies who hope to be involved with the ID Cards, persuading like minded antiID card employees to not get involved and so on.  NOT Speak style attacks on executives, oh dearie me no!