UK News

A campaign has been growing in support of comic Roy Chubby Brown performing following the news that a planned gig in Sheffield has been cancelled.

Following complaints from a number of people, Sheffield City Trust decided to censor Roy Chubby Brown's show and remove it from the City Hall's programme of upcoming events.

A statement from Chief executive of Sheffield City Trust, Andrew Snelling, said:

We have decided to remove the rescheduled show by comedian Roy Chubby Brown at Sheffield City Hall on January 29, 2022.

We don't believe this show reflects Sheffield City Trust values, particularly our ambition that our leisure, culture and entertainment venues are inclusive for all in Sheffield.

Roy Chubby Brown responded on Facebook:

Hi all, you may have heard by now that the Sheffield city trust/council have banned me from appearing at the City Hall Sheffield in January 2022 due to the nature of my show, so I just wanted to put my view on the record -- At first I had a sense of anger and disbelief, but on reflection I now feel just disappointment and sadness with the decision and the way things are going generally.

I have been performing at the City Hall annually for the last 30+ years and have always had great nights there and a wonderful working relationship with the management and staff at the City Hall, and my fans have always come along and supported me in their thousands through the years.

Now in these strange times of snowflakes and political correctness it has been decided that I am no longer welcome.

Why Now! is my question, WHY NOW! is my show unsuitable after 30 years at the City Hall??

Nothing has changed, the show is performed behind closed doors, and it clearly states on all advertising that IF EASILY OFFENDED! PLEASE STAY AWAY!We don't allow children in! It is strictly 18+ and people who come to the show know exactly what they are coming for206. A GOOD LAUGH! it's an act with one sole purpose, and that is to put a smile on people's faces, certainly not to offend, which I'm sure all will agree is much needed in these present times. I understand the content of my show isn't to everyone's taste, and hand on heart I totally respect that, so as the posters and advertising clearly states.. IF EASILY OFFENDED, PLEASE STAY AWAY!

That quite simply means don't buy a ticket to see me if the show is not for you! It's not difficult! I dont buy tickets for things which aren't my cup of tea, but I certainly don't demonstrate to get them cancelled, and spoil things for people who do want to see it! You have a choice!! But the show obviously does appeal to thousands of people or I wouldn't have had to put pen to paper to write this.. as Chubby Brown wouldn't exist if no one came to see him, and I've been going for 50 years..??!!!

Love Roy

A petition in support of Brown has gathered about 29,000 signatures.

An artwork featuring three garden benches surround a rose garden has been banned by Southend Council due to it referencing the locally based development of early atom bombs which were then sent to Australia for testing. Promotional Material for the Estuary 2021 Festival explains:

An English Garden is the Estuary 2021 Festival iteration of How to Make a Bomb , the durational gardening project by artist Gabriella Hirst. The project is centred on the propagation and redistribution of a nearly-extinct species of garden rose which was created and registered under the name Rosa floribunda ‘Atom Bomb’ in 1953.

The How to Make a Bomb project aims to provoke questions about the relationship between of nationalism, gardening, and nuclear colonialism. The garden is a reminder that the red rose of England and the English garden is entangled with a violent past of gardening the world, which has continued into a dangerous present.

The artwork is installed just upriver from Foulness Island at Gunners Park, Shoeburyness, which is former MOD land and is now a nature reserve under the care of Essex Wildlife Trust.

An English Garden's formal layout and beds echo the floorplans of Foulness's nuclear heritage architecture, and the aerial maps of the Australian contaminated test sites.

The artwork has now been taken away and placed in storage thanks to Sourthend councillors' objection to the wording of a plaque in the installation that detailed the fact that nuclear weapons were assembled at Foulness (a matter of record) before being shipped to Australia, where they were detonated. The most vocal of the offended councillors, James Moyies, has said he objected to the artist's view that by increasing its nuclear armament by 40%, the UK government was directing considerable resources towards industries of violence instead of those of care, and by the suggestion that Britain had a historical and ongoing identity as a colonial nuclear state.

The councillors emailed the local arts charity Metal, which commissioned the work jointly with the artists' charity the Old Waterworks, claiming that it constituted a:

direct far leftwing attack on our History, our People and our Democratically Elected Government.

GCHQ's methods for mass snooping on online communications violated the right to privacy and the regime for collection of data was not in accordance with the law, the grand chamber of the European court of human rights has ruled.

It also found the bulk interception regime contained insufficient protections for confidential journalistic material but said the decision to operate a bulk interception regime did not of itself violate the European convention on human rights.

The chamber also concluded that GCHQ's regime for sharing sensitive digital intelligence with foreign governments was not illegal.

The judgment is the culmination of a legal challenge to GCHQ's bulk interception of online communications begun in 2013 by Big Brother Watch and others after Edward Snowden's whistleblowing revelations.

Three judges dissenting from the majority position quoted from Orwell in their statement:

There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You have to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinised.

Comment: ECHR's Judgment on UK Govt's Mass Surveillance Program

24th May 2021. See article from openrightsgroup.org

Responding to the Judgment of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on the UK's RIPA regime for bulk surveillance, Jim Killock, the Executive Director of the Open Rights Group and one of the organisations challenging the UK's activities before the European Court of Human Rights, said:

The Court has recognised that Bulk Interception is an especially intrusive power, and that 'end-to-end safeguards' are needed to ensure abuse does not occur.

The court has show that the UK Government's legal framework was weak and inadequate when we took them to court with Big Brother Watch and Constanze Kurz in 2013.

The court has set out clear criteria for assessing future bulk interception regimes, but we believe these will need to be developed into harder red lines in future judgments, if bulk interception is not to be abused.

As the court sets out, bulk interception powers are a great power, secretive in nature, and hard to keep in check. We are far from confident that today's bulk interception is sufficiently safeguarded, while the technical capacities continue to deepen. GCHQ continues to share technology platforms and raw data with the USA.

This judgment is an important step on a long journey.