According to the Guardian’s leader-writer:

David Cameron’s claim to radicalism, rehearsed in these pages yesterday, seems not to have convinced many Guardian readers. Less than a fifth of those who voted in our poll thought the Conservatives had really changed. But in one important respect there should be common ground. For all their bizarre equivocation over the Human Rights Act, in recent years the Tories have sometimes been on the right side in specific challenges to individual liberty. Among their battle honours has been their opposition to government plans to retain for up to six years the DNA of people arrested for minor offences, many of whom will be innocent. A loss of nerve, perhaps understandable, at the last minute on Wednesday let the government off the hook.

But then Labour is playing very low politics with crime. Last month a peculiarly vicious video was put up on the party website suggesting that anyone who – like both Conservatives and Lib Dems – opposes government policy on DNA retention is in effect the burglar’s friend. At a news conference yesterday Gordon Brown and the home secretary, Alan Johnson, revived the attack, flanked by the family of Sally Anne Bowman, the 18-year-old murdered in south London five years ago, whose killer was caught after he was involved in a pub brawl and his DNA was found to match that from the scene of the crime. But, as we report today, this is a misrepresentation of the evidence. The murderer, Mark Dixie, would have had his DNA taken under Tory and Lib Dem proposals too; and the real question is why a man who was later revealed to have a string of previous convictions for sex attacks was not already on the database.

The Guardian’s fact-check on Gordon Brown’s claims, written by Alan Travis, is available here. After careful analysis of the specifics of this case, he concludes:

Brown is being misleading in suggesting that the killer of Sally Anne Bowman would not have been caught using DNA under the Conservative proposals.

This entry was posted by andrew on Saturday, April 10th, 2010 at 10:47 and is filed under Anti, Biometrics, Database state, UK News Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.