21st Century Britain: Fascist regime or third-world dictatorship?

Dr Mohammad Naseem, chairman of Birmingham Central Mosque, speaking after the latest made-for-TV-and-the-gullible terror-inducing police raids in Birmingham last week, for which the Home Office appear to have written the story 24 hours before the raid took place:

"The German people were told Jews were a threat. The same thing is happening here. This is a persecuting course of action that the Government has taken. They have invented this perception of a threat. To justify that, they have to maintain incidents to prove something is going on. There is dismay and people feel they are being persecuted unjustly.

"There is no reason for that. If there is a reason, the process should be open and for everybody to see what is happening."

"People are upset. If there is evidence either charge them or release them. If they (the police) have been working on this for six months, what is the delay?"

Of course, Dr Naseem is a Muslim, there-by making his words -- according to conventional Islamophobic media wisdom -- the words of an extremist, but is it possible that there is also a Church of England extremist in our midst too? Dr John Sentamu, Archbishop of York, on the same subject:

"Why does he [Home Secretary, Dr John Reid] want these days [90 days detention]? So the police do what? Gather more evidence? To me that becomes, if you're not very careful, very close to a police state in which they pick you up and then they say later on we'll find evidence against you. That's what happened in Uganda with Idi Amin."

Or maybe it's the inherent anti-capitalist nature of adherence to religious doctrine. Either way, Dr Naseem and Dr Sentamu both make interesting and highly pertinent analogies.

In the case of Dr Naseem's drawing of parallels between Britain today and 1930s Nazi Germany, he is right. We have seen it all before.

In the case of Dr Sentamu's analogy, he too is right. While it is unlikely that the true death toll during Idi Amin's regime will ever be accurately known, an estimate from the International Commission of Jurists claimed that it was not less than 80,000 and more likely around 300,000. 300,000 deaths just happens to be significantly under half of the known deaths that one Mr Tony Blair can chalk up on his list of 'achievements', along with the privatisation, privatisation, privatisation of education, public services and everything else that once belonged to 'we, the people'. 60 million people in Britain, largely unwittingly, now find themselves dumped into an increasingly militarised state, backed by a complete legislative decimation and eradication of any notions of, and legal premises for, freedom or democracy that might once have existed.

21st century Britain: Fascist regime, third-world dictatorship, or the worst of both? You decide.