seminole87: say what?

UK Tory Shadow Home Secretary Davis resigns unsafe seat to fight byelection as referendum on 42 days detention. Asks people to call him "V"

That's nice, peanut.

I know those words, but that sign doesn't make sense.

I saw an interview with Boris Johnson where he claimed that Douglas Adams was visionary because some computer with a convoluted algorithm randomly came up with the answer of 42.

Anyone out there able to translate that headline into english?

/american?
//australian?
///something understandable?

huh?
Ok Uk [place] Tory [party?] Shadow Home Secretary [title] Davis [Name] ((for those following along we have where and who))
resigns unsafe seat [action] to fight byelection [reason for action]
as referendum on 42 days detention [wtfbbq].
By god i tried

???²

David Davis is a member of the Conservative Party (The Tories), and he is mad about a bill being passed expanding detention (or something like that, I think). So he resigned his seat, and he plans to stand again to prove a point. The seat is considered a swing seat. But Labour is going through bad times, so the Tories should win easily.

The American equivilent to this would be Dennis Kucinich resigning from Congress in 2001 to protest the Patriot Act and seeking election in a special election.

Actually, I think the equivilent is a bit off, but anyways.

OK. The Brits have this new law. You can go to jail for 42 days without being charged for anything. Hello - a month and a half of your life gone away, because we don't like you.

Some people are upset about that. The typical kinds, as you would expect in the U.S., are the liberals. In fact, some are so upset, they're expecting their liberal cabinet ministers to make some dramatic act to protest. But nope. No dice.

Instead, a Tory - which is the Brit's equivalent of a neocon Republican (even though in absolute terms they're approximately equivalent to conservative Democrats) - has up and decided to leave his position in protest. This is ironic.

Imagine if, say, back in the day, someone like Tom Delay resigned his position over the Gitmo laws. It's kind of like that.

Except actually believable.

RobbieFal: David Davis is a member of the Conservative Party (The Tories), and he is mad about a bill being passed expanding detention (or something like that, I think). So he resigned his seat, and he plans to stand again to prove a point. The seat is considered a swing seat. But Labour is going through bad times, so the Tories should win easily.

The American equivilent to this would be Dennis Kucinich resigning from Congress in 2001 to protest the Patriot Act and seeking election in a special election.

Well that explains the Ironic tag, but what's up with the V reference? V for Vendetta? How does that tie in?

RobbieFal is pretty much correct as I understand it. High-ranking opposition MP resigns seat to fight re-election as some kind of referendum on holding "terrorist" suspects for 42 days without charging them.

It's a disgusting piece of legislation, but it looks like it'll be ripped to shreds by the House of Lords in the next couple of weeks.

On checking around, this is supposedly "backfiring" because Labour isn't too thrilled to contest this election.

Granted, for this to backfire, David Davis would need to actually feel negative effects. It's not a negative consequence if he beats candidates from the Monster Raving Loony and Rainbow Dream Ticket parties next month.

The LibDems and British Nazis National Party are both refusing to contest this election.

This actually makes sense, if you follow British politics. I recommend watching "The Thick of It" for a primer.

Having just returned from a couple of weeks in western Europe, and being exposed to the UK's finest, I want to say that I strongly disagree with this man's protest - all Britons should be locked up as a favor to world. Seriously, wtf? They make Red State American Baptists look refined and cultured.

Mr.Insightful: OK. The Brits have this new law. You can go to jail for 42 days without being charged for anything. Hello - a month and a half of your life gone away, because we don't like you.

Some people are upset about that. The typical kinds, as you would expect in the U.S., are the liberals. In fact, some are so upset, they're expecting their liberal cabinet ministers to make some dramatic act to protest. But nope. No dice.

Instead, a Tory - which is the Brit's equivalent of a neocon Republican (even though in absolute terms they're approximately equivalent to conservative Democrats) - has up and decided to leave his position in protest. This is ironic.

Imagine if, say, back in the day, someone like Tom Delay resigned his position over the Gitmo laws. It's kind of like that.

Except actually believable.

You lived up to your name. If I had any money, I would sponser you, myself and a metric-assload of beer for TF. Thanks.

Apik0r0s: Having just returned from a couple of weeks in western Europe, and being exposed to the UK's finest, I want to say that I strongly disagree with this man's protest - all Britons should be locked up as a favor to world. Seriously, wtf? They make Red State American Baptists look refined and cultured.

Even compared to the Southern and TrueBlue Baptists?

Waiting for the Minehead/Hilter/Ron Viventroff references.

UK Tory Shadow Home Secretary Davis resigns unsafe seat to fight byelection as referendum on 42 days detention. Asks people to call him "V" The Aristocrats.

/FTFY Subby

Sorry, subby (and columnist), but that's not an unsafe seat. It (and the constituency it replaced) have never elected anybody but a Conservative MP. He won almost 50% of the vote last time, and beat his nearest opponent by over 10% of the vote.

Oh, and the party that came in second last election (Liberal Democrats) isn't going to field a candidate, meaning the only high-profile party that might run lost by almost 35% of the vote last time. It'll be a cakewalk for him.

Okay, headline translated:

David Davis is a prominent member of the Conservative Party. He ran for their leadership election and narrowly came in second last time. He's currently the Shadow Home Secretary, which means he's the Conservative opposition counterpart to the Home Secretary (Jacqui Smith of the Labour Party). Home Secretary is sort of like Secretary of Homeland Security in the US.

Just yesterday, the British Parliament held a very controversial vote on whether to extend the maximum period of detention without charges from twenty-eight days to forty-two days (yes, both are absurdly long; Britain had by far the longest detention without charge period of any democracy worldwide even before this vote). This move was supported by the Labour Party but opposed by the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, as well as by a number of Labour Party members of Parliament who rebelled against the government. Labour barely won the vote and did so only by calling upon one of the minor Northern Irish parties (the Democratic Unionists) to vote in favor in exchange for various sops to Northern Ireland.

The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats are really annoyed about this. David Davis is particular is a rather eccentric man, and so his response was to get really angry and resign his seat in Parliament in protest. This means a by-election (in our US terms a special election) will be held to fill the seat in a few weeks. David Davis's safe is probably safe in any election, despite what the headline says, although the Liberal Democrats are at least within striking range. But Davis struck a deal with the leader of the Liberal Democrats that they would not run a candidate against him in the by-election as a way of expressing Davis's and the Liberal Democrats' anger at Labour for the detention extension by humiliating Labour at the by-election. (The Conservatives are less enthusiastically opposed, which had caused some tensions between Davis and his party over the issue.)

And then the headline ends with a lame joke about V for Vendetta. Aren't you glad you understand now?

I recall reading sometime back while this was being bandied about that one of the reasons they were asking for 42 days was because somehow that was the magic number for breaking encryption on computer equipment confiscated during the arrest. Without those files being decrypted, there may not be sufficient evidence to charge the person (with anything other than not giving up the key, which I believe is also illegal in the UK, but I could be wrong on that).

Problem with this, as some very notable people pointed out (such as Ross Anderson at Cambridge, who knows a wee bit about cryptography in the same way the Bruce Schneier does), is that any system for cracking the key of a well-chosen encryption system that doesn't succeed within hours due a faulty key choice will NEVER succeed on current equipment. Not even with a botnet the size of the Internet working on it.

(1 billion processors checking one key per nanosecond would get through 2^200th keys in around 5*10^34 years. If there are no known flaws in the algorithm and the key is not discovered by assembling a sophisticated dictionary, then you're looking at 2^255 guesses to reach a 50% chance of guessing the key. Even a 128-bit key would take on the order of 5 trillion years with those systems working on it. Go ahead and increase the total power by a factor of 1000. Hell, increase it by a factor of a million and you're still taking about 5 million years to have a 50% chance of success against a 128-bit key brute force. Then again, maybe British suspects are REALLY fond of 56-bit DES.)

I don't know if that was still part of the rationale or not, however.

Instead, a Tory - which is the Brit's equivalent of a neocon Republican (even though in absolute terms they're approximately equivalent to conservative Democrats) - has up and decided to leave his position in protest. This is ironic.

I thought Neocons were closer to really fiscally irresponsible, big government, conservative (morally) Republicans?

I don't like those kind of Republicans.

The rest was still pretty funny.

Verrai: Britain had by far the longest detention without charge period of any democracy worldwide

Probably technically true, but in practice, probably not:

http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1132653917855 (new window)

http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR51/112/2003 (new window)

oday_juarez: RobbieFal is pretty much correct as I understand it. High-ranking opposition MP resigns seat to fight re-election as some kind of referendum on holding "terrorist" suspects for 42 days without charging them.

It's a disgusting piece of legislation, but it looks like it'll be ripped to shreds by the House of Lords in the next couple of weeks.

Plus the queen still has to sign it. She may send it back for consideration. It would be a bold move and the only question is if she has enough backbone to do it. On the other hand this is a right spelled out in the Magna Carta so it is kind of a big thing.