Chicken Yoghurt

Gone to a better place

2006-03-23T19:45:00.000Z

After 14 months of exemplary service this version of Chicken Yoghurt is heading to port for decommissioning. We barely knew her.

The new Chicken Yoghurt-B has set sail and can be found at www.chickyog.net - please adjust your bookmarks. Those receiving posts by email won't have to do anything nor will anyone subscribed to the Feedburner RSS feed.

This site will be left in place so that any links to the posts here will still work and as a floating museum. Like HMS Belfast.

Hope to see you over at the new place.

Mysterious Ways

2006-03-22T12:08:00.000Z

New Labour corruption is a little like religion. As with belief in God, more people believe that Tony Blair is bent than don't but they are unable to produce a scrap of evidence to back up their faith.

It's all so circumstantial (although circumstantial enough for the police to have a sniff, not that they'll do anything as vulgar as proscecute members of the Greater Good). And a bit like intelligent design - a lot of signs point towards the New Labour high command being a bunch of liars and wrigglers but as DSquared says in the comments over at Tim Worstall's blog:

Of course it's all a bit smelly, but I would not want to get my hopes up or stake material personal credibility on there being a paper trail linking the loans to the contracts in any way more substantial than just saying "phwoar, look at that, pretty dodgy".

It's the smoking gun that refused to bark and other such utterances. Until somebody produces a piece of paper saying "I, Tony Blair, offer you Mr X a peerage in return for a £1m loan" - much like God popping up and declaring, "it's a fair cop" - you can bet what's left of your pension that even if (and that's an if as big as the Ritz) Blair does go over this it'll be with "no stain of impropriety against him whatsoever". It won't be the Prime Minister's fault if he's put out into the street. Just you wait - it'll be the fault of the media and the cynics and the Left. Blair, like God, moves in mysterious ways and he may yet salvage his reputation on a technicality.

Not that saying any of this gives me any pleasure. It can't be emphasised enough that this government holds the public in utter contempt. If it didn't why would it feel compelled to continue to swathe itself in its thick cloak of deceit?

Real people can't be trusted enough to deserve an invite to question the Prime Minister - events must be stage managed to the nth degree. Bogus letters must be planted in newspapers and actors must pose as the public at rallies. Posters must tell lies when the truth would be enough. A parallel universe, never mind a parallel party-funding system, must be implemented so the proles don't get a whiff of the stink of high politics.

And then there are the lobby correspondents, those parliamentary journalists given precious access to our masters, charged with the responsibility of informing the public of what's going on in the ivory towers. Instead of showing their mettle and properly questioning our leaders, they bend their knee to them or else risk losing that precious access and the privilege of breathing that heady stench. To ask the questions that matter means risking being cast down. It seems the deal is - it's a good quote from Blade Runner so I'll use it again - "If you're not a cop, you're little people".

As for this business of New Labour and soft money, anyone with even an ounce of common sense could write a list of the questions that our media representatives on their six-figure salaries have failed to ask. The loans weren't illegal so why the cover up? If this wasn't about peerages in return for loans or influence peddling, why the secrecy?

(See also, Lobbygate. "THE LIAR" screamed the headline of The Mirror about Greg Palast, the journalist who broke the Lobbygate story. That was in more innocent times when the fresh-faced Prime Minister was still in the morning of his premiership and the newspapers were happy to cut him some slack. I think you can safely say that Palast's story would receive a more sympathetic hearing than it did in 1998 were it to break in 2006. His account of the saga is related in his book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, which I heartily recommend.)

Given that the party treasurer was ignorant of this second funding system, if the money didn't go through the normal Labour party channels then into which accounts did they go? Who set up those accounts? Somebody banked the cheques from the benefactors but not in the Labour party account, so where? Somebody wrote the cheques that paid for the election campaign - who was it? The 14 million quid that was raised by loans filtered into the party to pay for the General Election campaign. How was that facilitated?

That New Labour finances are in a parlous state has been public knowledge for years. That's what you get for hollowing out the membership. If the likes of Gordon Brown and John Precott say they had no knowledge of these loans, where the hell did they think the money was coming from for posters, adverts and softly-lit, televised Blair-Brown bonhomie sessions?

"You have to wonder how well he was doing his work" is a perfectly reasonable thing to say about New Labour treasurer, Jack Dromey, it just depends who says it. From someone like Charles Clarke it just comes across as a petty, vindictive smear - an exercise in blame sharing - to which you'd be forgiven for mentally appending "...while my boss was accepting numerous secret loans from millionaire businessmen". I also wonder if Clarke has had the courage to say that to Dromey's face as well as saying behind his back at a supposedly off the record lunch with women journalists.

And if the New Labour party finances are as knackered as everybody says, how is the party going to pay the money back? Or are these loans to miraculously become gifts when the stench blows away? Will Lord Sainsbury and the others eventually say, "Nah, don't bother paying it back"?

Were backs mutually scratched? All but one donor (Lakshmi Mittal, got the wooden spoon of the Romanian steel industry instead) giving £1m or over were nominated for honours. One of the 12 lending money to New Labour, Ron Aldridge, just happens to be the chairman of Capita, the beneficiary of huge government contracts (Nosemonkey has more).

Reform of the Honours system was nowhere on the Government's agenda two months ago. Why is it the hot topic now, if not because of the current scandal? When Lord Falconer says he is "bringing forward" legislation, doesn't he actually mean "making it up on the hoof"?

But I, like Nosemonkey and many others, have as much chance of getting our questions answered as we have seeing the likes of Nick Robinson or Adam Boulton ask them. The Budget may also go some way towards sweeping this all away. Nosemonkey, again in Tim Worstall's comments:

I've had confirmation from someone at the BBC this morning that most of their resources are tied up in preparing for the budget, leaving few people to investigate the other people behind the loans.

And let's hope this year's Budget is a more edifying spectacle than last year when there were quite a few New Labour tricks employed, including a leak of the statement's major points to the Evening Standard.

But it's much worse than that. As Matthew Parris says (via Jamie Kenny):

Political journalists love it. Lobby corrrespondents don't want to talk about Crossrail, nuclear-generated electricity, DNA fingerprinting, child poverty, Trident, congestion charging, a new North-South rail line. Lies and misdemeanours are our stock-in-trade. We rejoice when the worthy gives way to the unworthy and a boring but important centrepiece of the parliamentary session is elbowed to the margins by some slimy little half-truth or grubby impropriety.

Nobody's interested in the bigger picture. The media is feverishly all over the loans for honours scandal in the vague hope they might get a scalp. But it's the short game they're playing, like having a Mars Bar for a quick sugar-rush of energy when a big bowl of hearty, sustaining soup would be better.

Yes, allegations of corruption are important and should be investigated but the damage to public confidence done by bent, or seemingly bent, politicians can be repaired over time: New Labour are doing far greater, longer lasting and less easily repaired damage elsewhere.

This government and this Prime Minister are attacking our values and our way of life in a way no terrorist cell ever could: ID cards, the incipient totalitarianism being ushered in by the Legislative and Regulatory Reform bill (a subject deemed too dull by most journalists and their quest for tales of derring-do), imprisonment without trial and the abuse of anti-terrorism laws, to name but a few ways.

Journalists should realise that if you want someone's scalp you don't start by nibbling their toes. The pursuit of the public interest, it seems, is as ineffable as God and New Labour funding.

(Also published at Comment is Free.)

I don't get it

2006-03-22T08:10:00.000Z

Why all the fuss over Abdul Rahman, the Muslim who converted to Christianity? Some people need to grow up.

What are you complaining about? Isn't that why we bombed the crap out of Afghanistan and warmed the heels of the Taleban to the Pakistan border? So that Afghans have the freedom to put each other to death?

I mean, come on, you can't spend all that money on cluster bombs to improve a country's lot, to kill so many of them in order to free them, and then expect them not to act on that freedom. You can't have it both ways, greedy. Where's the logic and humanity in that, eh? Eh?

It would seem that current Western policy towards Afghanistan has been lifted from The Man Who Would be King, when Peachy Carnehan, realising that ruling Kafiristan is not all it's been cracked up to be, tearfully snarls:

Leave them to slaughtering babies, playing stick-and-ball with heads and pissing on their neighbours.

But I don’t want comfort

2006-03-19T17:19:00.000Z

In one of Alan Moore's lesser known masterpieces, Skizz, the eponymous hero is an extraterrestial crashlanded on modern-day Earth, captured by the authorities and subjected to terrifying experiments. Cornered, terrified and at the mercy of barbarians, Skizz, in his halting, hastily-learned English tells his captors, "Yuuu urrr veee aylens". You are the aliens.

"You tell him from me," says Van Owen, leader of the scientific team, "not here we're not. Not here."

This came back to me today after reading in The Observer that "[s]ix international terrorism suspects in Britain are negotiating a return to Algeria because they can no longer withstand the 'mental torture' imposed by the government."

'Here we are not tortured physically but mentally we are tortured. I don't feel human,' said the 39-year-old who can only be identified as 'A'. 'If I'm not going to have my freedom in this country, then I have to go back,' said the man whom Home Office lawyers have described as being involved in 'creating the climate, the motivation and the opportunity that led to the [London bombing] events in July'. 'A' said, if the Special Immigration Appeals Commission does not grant 'unconditional freedom' after an appeal this July, he will return to Algeria.

Now, it's quite possible that this man is the Devil. For all we know he may have been plotting to napalm a nursery school, although being the apologist for terrorism that I am, "creating the climate, the motivation and the opportunity that led to the [London bombing] events in July" sounds more like thoughtcrime to me than filling coffee tins with nails. Whatever the story, the authorities apparently don't have the evidence, or the balls, to prosecute.

But aren't we supposed to be the good guys? Y'know, better than those who blow themselves up on tube trains and fly planes into buildings? Let's not forget that the Foreign Office's own profile of Algeria says:

Alongside the violence committed by the Islamic armed groups over the last decade are numerous documented allegations of human rights abuses by the security forces and state-armed militias, including the enforced disappearances of at least 4,000 people, abductions, torture and extra-judicial killings.

"A"'s control order stipulates he must "stay indoors for 22 hours a day and places very tough restrictions on visitors and access to the outside world."

According to The Independent:

"A" telephoned the Algerian embassy to open negotiations after it emerged that ministers were trying to broker an agreement with the Algerian government that would allow the UK to deport suspects there. That deal, which would involve the Algerians promising not to ill-treat the deportees, has stalled.

Deals with torturers. Enforcing conditions on suspects, suspects mind you, that make them say, "sod it, I'll take my chances with the savages."

But you tell him from me, not here we're not. Not here.

One fine day in the middle of the night

2006-03-19T08:14:00.000Z

So much of what this government does turns on the sixpence of semantic deceit. Why else are city academies allowed to select 10% of students by aptitude in a given subject but not ability. I've yet to hear a clear explanation of the difference that did not um, er and wriggle.

No logical contortion is too ridiculous. It's this most malleable of mindsets that allows the likes of Jim Murphy, sponsor of the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, to acknowledge the concerns people have about the bill but still refuse implement adequate safeguards against the new law being abused.

It's the same deal with ID cards. It's being sold as a voluntary system but from 2008, when renewing your passport, you will be automatically issued with an ID card. It's a voluntary system where you must have a card.

I offer this exchange, from the most recent debate on ID cards in the House of Commons, between Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, and his Tory opposite number, David Davis:

David Davis: Does the Home Secretary think that foreign travel is voluntary for diplomats, soldiers and other Crown servants and their families?

Mr. Charles Clarke: It is not compulsory.

Six impossible things before breakfast? When it comes to believing utter rot, New Labour make the White Queen look like Richard Dawkins.

Blog on Blog

2006-03-18T07:53:00.000Z

Bit late with these (apologies to Gary) but over at Coffee and PC are a couple of good pieces on blogging. Here and here. I'm quoted in the articles but don't let that put you off.

first up

2006-03-17T10:08:00.000Z

My inaugural post is up at Comment is Free.

Anybody who's read my stuff for any length of time will recognise some of it. Consider it a setting out of my stall...

Bill and coup

2006-03-16T10:16:00.000Z

More on the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill - if you're not a fan of democracy look away now.

Remember, the Government say this bill is to reduce the burden on business: to cut red tape. As the Minister for Incipient Totalitarianism and sponsor of the bill, Jim Murphy says:

The real danger is what happens if we don't introduce a bill of this sort. We are trying to do all we can to maintain UK competitiveness, business competitiveness, economic growth, employment levels in a global economy where we face challenges from the emerging economies.

That being the case, take a look at this list of Acts or Parliament (via Nosemonkey) that will not be exempt from part one of the LARR Bill - the part that allows government ministers to change whatever law they like without arguing their case and putting it to a vote in Parliament.

Doesn't look good, does it? The Identity Cards Act 2006 isn't even law yet. If the Government don't want it to be a burden on business, why not draft it properly right now? You know, to save on all the fannying about later. And the Habeas Corpus Acts 1679 to 1862 is a real hindrance to business is it? The Succession to the Crown Act 1707? Magna Carta 1215? What about the Official Secrets Acts 1911 to 1989? "Well, profits wouldn't be down by 50% if it wasn't for that meddling Official Secrets Act".

Everybody knows Digby Jones and the CBI are interfering porkers worried about the contents of their troughs but I don't remember them saying the Church of Scotland Act 1921 is a threat to jobs and economic stability.

I think it's now clear what Jim Murphy meant when he said, "But our ambitions are wider than that!" This list gives lie to the insistence that the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill is merely a device to cut the red tape supposedly throttling British business' ability to compete with Far Eastern sweat shops. It's not hyperbole to suggest that this constitutes little short of a coup d'etat.

Kill the bill.

there goes the day again

2006-03-16T10:04:00.002Z

This (via Dave).

PIN: The tail on the donkey

2006-03-16T08:25:00.000Z

24dash.com: National identity card to come with PIN number

The controversial new national identity card may come with a PIN number like existing bank cards.

The Home Office Minister, Andy Burnham, said a "chip and pin" style code number could be used to verify cardholders' identities in some cases, rather than fingerprints, face and iris scans which will be encoded in the card.

So what does this mean? The biometric data readers have too high a failure rate? That they're too expensive? Whatever the reason, this sounds like an "Oh shit, think of something quick" moment. It looks like the belt isn't going to be enough to keep these trousers up - we need braces as well.

We're told ID cards are going to be handy in that they'll do away with having to carry bank cards and cheque books and drivers licences - you know, all those heavy, unwieldy items - in order to identify ourselves. They'll also be handy in that as well as your bank card pin and your credit card pin and your work door lock pin and your bank account security pin you'll now have to remember your ID card pin as well. No great shakes for most, I'll agree, but then I'm not an 84 year-old woman with no grasp of technology and fading faculties, or a young man with learning difficulties, or a woman escaping domestic violence, fleeing to a refuge in the middle of the night and leaving the scrap of paper with my pin on it at home.

So you go to the doctor and if he's affluent enough to be able to afford an iris scanner, you're asked to present your iris. Ah, he can't get a match. Never mind, let's try the fingerprint reader. No? Tell you what, can you enter your pin number please? Cashback, sir? Are you collecting the schools tokens? You can't remember your pin? Then I'm sorry sir, your baby daughter's antibiotics will have to wait.

Aren't ID cards supposed to be making our lives easier? It depends who you are and what you do with your life. If you're a government bureaucrat then yes, ID cards are going to make your life easier. That's if they work. At this rate, expect Andy Burnham to announce that ID cards will have to be accompanied by a utilities bill or a Blockbuster video card in order to prove your identity.

Biometric ID cards. Their time has come you know.

Fancy that.

2006-03-15T21:49:00.000Z

Pure coincidence. Complete coincidence.

That pearl/swine interface again

2006-03-15T21:23:00.000Z

So anyway. It turns out that this bunch of boffins are working on bacteria-powered fuel cells. Could have important ramifications for cheap energy production, you might think. Particularly in these days of thirst.

But hold your horses. The project is funded by the US Department of Defence because "[t]he Air Force has long been interested in micro-scale air vehicles – some as small as insects – but it has been stymied by the lack of a suitable, compact power source".

Now excuse me, but isn't this a little like finding a previously undiscovered Van Gogh in the attic and, instead of lending it to a museum where the most people can appreciate it, hanging it in the outside bog?

Micro-scale air vehicles. As small as insects.

Donald Rumsfeld is 73.

The All New Chicken Yoghurt

2006-03-15T18:04:00.000Z

After much screaming, weeping and a use of profanity that would make Dennis Hopper whistle with envy, the new WordPress version of Chicken Yoghurt is approaching completion.

Apart from a doohicky that will send posts to subscribers by email (can anyone suggest a good one for WordPress?) the place is just about there. I'm aiming to make the move on April 1 - it seemed apposite.

If anybody has a spare five minutes and would like to have a look at the new place (looks-wise it's same as the old place), make suggestions, post some test comments and generally try and break it, please drop me a line.

The End of the Peer Show

2006-03-15T13:45:00.000Z

Take the pledge:

"I will purchase a Virtual Peerage but only if 10 other people will too."

And unlike buying a real peerage, the money will be going to a good cause. Prices start at a very reasonable £7.50 for a Baronetcy. Baronet McKeating of Yoghurt. I'm having some of that.

You can buy the peerages here. Peasant.

At last the 1983 show

2006-03-15T10:35:00.000Z

If you're not reading Dr John Crippen's blog then you bloody well should be. As well as having lots of children to look after you when you get old and saving for a trip to Dignitas when it all gets too much.

Some will remember a speech Neil Kinnock gave in 1983 when, on the eve of the General Election, he said that under a Thatcher Government, "I warn you not to fall ill, I warn you not to get old." (Owen has a transcript of the speech.) Well, its 23 years later and we have a Labour Government. Would you want to be sick and old now? Maybe not.

Third patient in is Mary, one of the local speech therapists. She is approaching retirement. I sent her husband into hospital three weeks ago in rip-roaring heart failure. He was on CCU for three days but now is on the far flung corner of Dixon, one of the medical wards. He is partially sighted due to an old stroke, and is hard of hearing. The nursing care is appalling. He has developed pressures sores on his sacrum and heels and, oddly, a suppurating area above both ears which Mary thinks is due to the oxygen mask he uses being too tight. He is losing weight because he cannot really manage to feed himself. Mary was in each day over the weekend. Uneaten food from Saturday was still on his bedside table on Sunday. Mary went to the nursing station at the end of the ward. The nurses were all eating take-away Pizza. Deep Pan pizza from Pizza Hut. Mary remembers that particularly. Mary thinks her husband is dying. She is not sure which consultant he is under, and has not been able to find a doctor to talk to. The nurses over the weekend do not speak English. She tried to tell them that her husband is partially sighted but they do not understand. They show here the nursing assessment. Under "visual problems" it says "none". Mary is in tears and asks what she should do. I suggest she phones the Chief Executive and makes a formal complaint.

We're told we shouldn't use one case to damn the whole system. We can't go into detail about individual cases. I'm sure that's a comfort to Mary and her husband, not mention the man Dr John talks about who the hospital sent home "to his eighty year old wife with one of the worst pressure sores I have seen in years."

Individual cases. Isolated incidents. Apart from ones that aren't. "It goes on all the time. I have had two bad ones today alone," says Dr John in his comments of other pressure sore sufferers.

Still, they can console themselves as their infected sacrums are treated that it would have been much worse without the "unprecedented" investement under this Labour Government.

Myrmidons are made of this

2006-03-14T12:27:00.000Z

Bit late with this but I thought it worth noting. Simon Carr, the Independent's parliamentary sketch writer has been one of the - disgracefully - few journalists to cover the passage of the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill (another excellent summary here) as it blazes, white hot, through the firmament of democracy. It would be no exaggeration, in fact, to to say Carr's been all over it like Charles Clarke with a pork scratching he's found down the back of the sofa.

Carr wrote twice last week about the Bill's passage through its committee stage. Tim Ireland has a transcript of the first article. The second one is reproduced here (with apologies).

Carr has an interesting point to make about Jim "offers long and detailed assurances about how the Act will and won't be used. When asked to put these assurances into the Bill, he refuses" Murphy, the minister steering the bill:

This extraordinary bill has been introduced by Jim Murphy. Slim, smiling, aquiline. Jim is usually the best-looking person in the room. But he is one of nature's sub-alterns and to give him this monstrous regiment was an act of brilliant cynicism by the business managers. Call the Bill something people don't even want to remember and give it to a nonentity who won't survive a 2 per cent swing at the next election.

Murphy should be careful. The way this government's careering out of control a 2 per cent swing might end up being wildly conservative. He could find himself back on Civvy Street and on the rough end of his own legislation, like the rest of us. As Harrison Ford's boss says to him in Blade Runner: "If you're not a cop, you're little people".

He's something of an enigma, is Murphy. Entered Parliament in 1997 aged 30 and used to be president of the National Union Students (and we know how far some of them they - Straw, Clarke - went). And that's it. No word of what he did before he became an MP or what life experience qualifies him for kicking the legs out from under democratic accountability. I smell professional politician but may be wrong.

(It also shores up my theory that we're entering a new Dark Age - yet another young prince unwitting or uncaring of what he's doing.)

Carr continues, chillingly:

The crucial clause will slip through, masked by the insignificance of the sponsor and the anaestethic properties of regulatory regime merger clauses. "But our ambitions are wider than that!" Sunny Jim said, inadvertently. How wide? Only time will tell.

But our ambitions are wider than that! Tomorrow belongs to Jim. It really can't be stressed enough that this is a dangerous, undemocratic piece of law dressed up as dry, dusty and dull parliamentary procedure and sold as a wonderful cure-all for business red tape. It's a medicine show and Murphy is the snake oil salesman.

The Bill passed its committee stage on Thursday which means it now passed to the House of Lords for consideration. You can only hope they've the energy for another fight. It's not enough just to be angry or worried or "Bloody New Labour!" about this. It's time to Save Parliament.

Charles Clarke is unwell

2006-03-13T10:59:00.000Z

Fears are mounting for the mental wellbeing of the Home Secretary, Charles Clarke. According to an unnamed source*, many people are alarmed at Mr Clarke's increasingly passive aggressive behaviour towards the victims of the July 7 bombings and their families. "It's like that Earth, Wind and Fire song, 'After The Love Has Gone'," one is thought to have said.

Relations between Mr Clarke and the victims and survivors began cordially enough. On the eve of the vote on the Terrorism Bill in November 2005, the Home Secretary had coincidentally attended to the memorial service for the victims of the bombings. He spoke of how moved he had been and how the families' wishes were paramount. "It was very powerful," he said. "I talked to a lot of families afterwards. They made it clear that we must back the police." He also said that liberals' attempts to undermine the demands of the victims' grief was "pathetic".

Soon after, however, it was apparent that something was amiss. After having listened so assiduously to the victims' demands for 90 days detention for terrorist suspects and spoken so forcefully on their behalf, Mr Clarke's warmth dissipated somewhat. While admitting that victims of terrorism deserved to be given special laws he admitted that he saw being injured in a terrorist outrage in much the same light as being "stabbed outside a pub".

The victims' opinions, so vital in drawing up anti-terrorism legislation and in selling the case for the new laws, were regarded as less important when it came to actually finding out why and how the bombings took place. In December last year, when refusing to instigate a public inquiry into the events of July 7, Mr Clarke said with pre-emtive reassurance (it was revealed three days later that MI5 had deemed two of the bombers to be no threat), "Certainly, there is no question of a cover-up of any kind."

This see-sawing behaviour towards the victims reached an alarming conclusion last week at a clergy meeting at Norwich Cathedral in his constituency. Mr Clarke was approached after the meeting by a parish priest who happened to be the father of one of the survivors of the bombings, who asked:

Congratulations on fixing the meeting so that nobody can ask questions! You will have heard about Rev Julie Nicholson who is so angry she cannot forgive the bombers who killed her daughter on 7th July, well, I have a question, my daughter was feet away from the 7/7 Kings Cross bomb, and she and some other surivors have said they are not angry with the bombers, but with the Government, because there was no public enquiry. Why is there no public enquiry?

Mr Clarke is said to have looked at the priest "in a very nasty way", and replied: "Get away from me, I will not be insulted by you, this is an insult".

A nutritionist suggested that Mr Clarke might have been hungry. Famous for his double lunches, Mr Clarke may simply have been too long away from the table. His low blood sugar level may have excerbated his "weakness, mood swings, headaches, nervousness, irritability, or nausea" as well as his "visual disturbances, shaking, sweating, confusion, palpitations, anxiety, dizziness, aggression or severe fatigue".

Psychologists, however, say** Mr Clarke's behaviour may be symptomatic of deeper problems. "The passive agressive man protests that others unfairly accuse him rather than owning up to his own misdeeds," said one. "To remain above reproach, he sets himself up as the apparently hapless, innocent victim of your excessive demands and tirades." It's also possible that Mr Clarke is "feeling put upon when he is unable to live up to his promises or obligations," the psychologist added. "He retreats from pressures around him and sulks, pouts and withdraws."

A tragic fear of intimacy may also be fuelling the Home Secretary's increasingly eccentric public displays. Mr Clarke, suggested the psychologist, may be "out of touch with his feelings, reflexively denying feelings he thinks will 'trap' or reveal him, like love. He picks fights to create distance."

This inability to love or form lasting bonds was also echoed by a relationship counsellor*** who added that Mr Clarke's behaviour was often seen during the break up of short-term relationships. "This is classic behaviour from a promiscuous alpha male after a one night stand," she could have said. "He's had his fun, these people are no longer any use to him, and now he's not returning their calls."

Unnamed medical sources**** also expressed concern about Mr Clarke's "epidermal density". "Such a thin skin coupled with obviously enormous internal pressures could be nothing short of disastrous," a doctor might have said.

Voiceover: If you or a member of your family been affected by any of the issues mentioned in this post, then Charles Clarke would very much not like to hear from you.

*Am I peddling unattributable gossip or making it up here? You decide. If you read newspapers regularly, are you even bothered?
** Maybe.
***See *.
****And again.

(Why don't you write to the Home Secretary and ask him why he refuses to hold an public inquiry into the July 7 bombings? It's a game for all the family and couldn't be simpler. First you write to the Home Secretary and ask him why he refuses to hold an public inquiry into the July 7 bombings. Then, a month later, you write to the Home Secretary and ask him why he has failed to reply to your letter you sent to ask him why he refuses to hold an public inquiry into the July 7 bombings. Then, a month later...

Or, you could sign the petition)

I love it when a plan comes together

2006-03-09T13:52:00.000Z

It's beautiful, it really is. Elegant in it's simplicity, fiendishly brilliant.

First we have the Democratic Process Bypass Bill ("Jim Murphy offers long and detailed assurances about how the Act will and won't be used. When asked to put these assurances into the Bill, he refuses.") allowing government ministers to do that they darn well pleasey - introduce new laws, change existing ones and other such trifling matters - without recourse to Parliamentary oversight.

Then, we have Geoff "what's wrong with managerialism?" Hoon proposing the curtailment of parliamentary scrutiny, the coup de grace, if you will:

The Guardian: Hoon plans curb on MPs' questions

The right of MPs to table questions is to be curbed for the first time in the history of parliament, according to a confidential document being circulated to ministers by Geoff Hoon, the leader of the house.

He proposes in the consultation document that MPs be limited to 10 questions a day after a huge rise in queries, particularly since the last general election. Part of the blame is being put on MPs' researchers drawing up a lot of questions.

You have to admire its perfection. If this plan was a car it'd be a jet-black needle-thin roadster that did 500 miles to the gallon and had room in the back for three kids and a grand piano.

Damn those MPs and their insatiable quest to get to the bottom of what the Government is up to. And if only they'd do something meaningful with the largely worthless, and yet jealously guarded, information they're able to glean from ministers.

But couldn't the Government just hire some more special advisers or build a bigger instant rebuttal machine? They haven't been overly concerned about the cost of government before now. How long does it take to write prevaricating and misdirecting answers anyway? Does Adam Ingram get a sore wrist writing:

We make every effort to minimise any impact of the coalition's military action on the Iraqi population. We have no means of ascertaining the numbers of Iraqi military personnel or civilians killed during the conflict.

He, along with other ministers, should stick a list of such stock answers up on his office wall as a cheap and easy labour saving device.

The thing is, when Geoff Hoon frets that Ministers are being deluged by questions what he means is they are being asked too many questions like, "how many civilians did we cluster bomb today?" and not enough like, "minister, why are you so great?". I doubt he'd be complaining very much if every question could be answered with a friendly, "everything's smashing, thanks for asking".

It's like his recent kite-flying exercise suggesting that the Salisbury Convention (the agreement by which the House of Lords do not vote against legislation that featured in the government's election manifesto) should become legally binding. If the Lords, and as an advocate of Lords reform I'm writing this with gritted teeth, weren't doing such a bang up job preventing our New Labour overlords from establishing a junta, I imagine Geoff wouldn't even have heard of the Salisbury Convention.

Democracy, I suppose, is all well and lovely until it's not working for you. In fact, that would make a good line in a speech given by the New Labour minister of your choice: "Democracy - if it's not with us it's against us". "DEMOCRACY: TRAITOR" the Sun headline will screech. Efficiency is our friend now. It's the roughage that will ease the passage of so much New Labour legislation.

The real worry is that Labour MPs are permitting these excesses four years out from a General Election. God knows what they'll be prepared to vote for on the eve of election, with sub-zero polling figures, when Blair/Brown says "back me on this measure [pensioners to be turned into Soylent Green, restrictions on the consumption of Victory Gin or whatever] or lose your seats".

To steal a phrase: I know why the sun never sets on New Labour: God wouldn't trust them in the dark. Geoff's doing his best ARP warden impression.

Meanwhile, elsewhere...

2006-03-09T07:44:00.000Z

I was asked to write a piece for this week's Press Gazette which you can see on the Press Gazette blog (one of whose contributors is the estimable Martin Stabe). The article is a comment piece in which I try very hard to be nice about newspaper blogs. Go and have a look and then come back and rip me to bits.

As I say in the piece, I've also been invited to write for the Guardian's new über-blog, Comment is Free. With 200 contributors (199 better known than me) it remains to be seen how prominent my guff will be, but hopefully I'll be in there somewhere.

I don't have any details on when the blog actually launches other than it's very soon. I haven't seen the site yet either but will give the heads up as soon as I can.

Right, I'm off Up North for the weekend to have a decent pint and one of my Dad's fry-ups. Back Monday.

2006-03-08T13:06:00.000Z

wednesday, march 8, 2006

Tim Ireland: The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill must die!

Be afraid...

A certain ratio

2006-03-08T12:16:00.000Z

Some regular vistors will have noticed that a troll has taken up residence in the comments here this week. If he'd been witty or gained responses from other commenters I would have been prepared to let it go. Unfortunately, he forgot to bring the funny in any sense, has been studiously ignored by the rest, and seems determined to derail any debate or conversation.

I've been deleting his comments but can't police the place 24/7. So, very reluctantly, I've turned on the blog's comment moderation facility. Nobody's comment will appear until it has been approved by me.

I hope this won't put off other commenters. Until this week I've been flattered and fortunate to have a class of commenter who have been generous with their time and thoughts and made this blog immensely satisfying for me.

I also hope this won't be a permanent measure. Rest assured it is just to weed out the comments from the one spoiler and I shall not be deleting any other comments.

Apologies to all (-1).

PS. If any other bloggers would like to share tales of similar inadequates and how they dealt with them, I'd be grateful.

2006-03-07T20:00:00.000Z

tuesday, march 7, 2006

Reuters AlertNet: New catch in Baghdad as fisherman haul out bodies

Iraqi leaders, struggling to form a government of national unity, have been trying to play down the extent of violence since an eruption of sectarian bloodshed in the past two weeks.

But the fishermen's tales and other anecdotal evidence add to suggestions that the death toll may well be higher than officially recorded in a country where statistics are erratic.

more...

Bliss on the move

2006-03-07T14:27:00.000Z

Jim Bliss has moved from London to Dublin and from Where There Were No Doors to The Quiet Road.

Get over there and say Hi.

The rough with the smooth

2006-03-07T12:09:00.000Z

Marina Hyde in the Guardian today on Foreign Office's satellite phones stolen in Iraq (one of the phones was used to run a sex chat line, running up a bill for £594,000):

Freedom-wise, forget hearts and minds. Everyone knows groins and pockets is where it's at. Downtown Baghdad naturally has yet to reach the heights - or indeed the depths - of the San Fernando valley, the Los Angeles suburb known as the pornography capital of the world and which contributes billions of tax dollars a year to the US kitty. But watching Iraq take its first teetering steps on a journey that we know ends in Red Hot Forty Plus - well, the PM ought to be weeping public tears of pride, as opposed to getting in a tizz about a phone bill. Pretty soon we'll be able to take off the Iraqi people's stabilisers and marvel as the line representing their electoral turnout begins its sharp descent, in exact counterpoint to the line representing the number of Temptation Island reruns being watched in the region. Clearly, they are currently far too interested in politics, so the sooner the debate shifts to whether or not the first Iraqi Big Brother contestants will have sex live on TV, the better.

You could run and run with this. So I'm going to. Would "Iraq has the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the Middle East" headlines be deemed a victory for Western values? Shouldn't we be encouraging the country's young men to put down their AK47s and turn away from thoughts of insurrection and pick up their cheap cans of Stella Artois and turn to thoughts of vomiting, headlocks and grunting bunk-ups?

What about telling Al Qaeda that there are those who find the concept of happy slapping almost as, if not more, terrifying as televised beheadings? The sooner Baghdad develops its own curtain-twitching, reactionary and paranoid middle class, the sooner Al Qaeda can switch from a campaign of terror based on bombing and beheading to one of being gay, claiming asylum, scrounging from the benefit system and hanging around in groups on street corners. I mean look at it over here. A bunch of knobs blow themselves up on the tube, the nation shrugs and turns back to Eastenders. But tell them there might be a nonce at the local school or asylum seekers are moving in across the street and it's like the ballroom scene in The Poseidon Adventure when the water starts coming in.

I wonder if it crossed the minds of the Greater Good when they drew up their plans for Iraq that you can't export democracy without some of the more unsavoury aspects stowing away in the shipment. Liberation with sexlines via stolen satellite phones. Voting with binge drinking. The rule of law with poor sexual health. A free media with happy slapping. The freedom to walk to streets with the freedom to be accosted by a screeching hen party.

We should go the whole hog. Why not send bunches of squaddies into downtown cafes to glass the regulars? Start a range of "cheeky", not-at-all misogynistic, "empowering to women" magazines so Iraqi parents can't take their kid to the newsagent to buy them a comic without the child being presented with an eye-level image of Abi Titmuss on all fours offering herself to the viewer. Make sex the cornerstone of Iraq's popular culture and then refuse to give its children the emotional and educational tools to deal with the information. Why should it be just us that suffers? (I'll shut up before I start to sound too much like Rorschach from Watchmen.)

It just goes to show that you can't build a new Eden without the slugs and the snails and the cockroaches getting in and chewing on the flowers. Tony Blair should embrace this fact and give a speech, "Only when the streets of Baghdad are slick with Bacardi Breezer vomit and its gutters lined with inebriated teenagers having emotional episodes will we bring the troops home. We owe it the Iraqi people." Then we can bomb them again when they start exporting anti-social behaviour and refuse to implement a culture of respect.

One born every minute.

2006-03-07T10:38:00.000Z

So I'm in the big Sainsbury's in Portslade this morning picking up a few bits. As you walk through the bread and cakes section, there is a gorgeous warm waft of the sweet-spicy smell of hot cross buns. The bakery is pumping the aroma from the ovens into the air conditioning system. As you walk under each vent in the ceiling another blast hits you.

It's much the same psychology, I suppose, as the one that dictates you should put a pot of coffee on just before a prospective buyer comes to view your house. A comforting aroma helps create an atmosphere more conducive to purchasing.

The cynical inventiveness of the application of this psychology to the marketing of food is amazing, however. Some misanthropic master of manipulation had the original idea. His ravening colleagues laughed and high-fived at the idea's fiendish simplicity. The designer of the store and its systems had to arrange the air conditioning just so. All to sell baked goods, in this case, hot cross buns. The time, planning and money behind this swaying of the weak-minded borders on the sinister.

I bought two packets. They were lovely.

2006-03-06T08:33:00.000Z

monday, march 6, 2006

Times: Met suppress files that tell full shooting story

Well-placed sources say the Met has declined repeated requests by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) to disclose hundreds of pages of internal papers. The documents give the Met’s private assessment of the botched counter-terrorist operation that led to Jean Charles de Menezes mistakenly being killed by Yard marksmen at Stockwell Underground station last July.

more...

Britblog Roundup # 55

2006-03-05T15:35:00.000Z

Out now.

He was limping when he left!

2006-03-05T08:32:00.000Z

When turbulence did begin to swirl around [Robin] Cook it was not political, it was personal. On the morning of Friday 1 August Alastair Campbell was contacted by the News of the World to be told the newspaper... was planning to expose the Foreign Secretary's affair with his assistant, Gaynor Regan... "You're in the shit," the Foreign Secretary was told by Campbell. "But I can buy you a few hours." Only, however, as long as he fell in with the deal Number 10 had struck with the newspaper. The tabloid would not pursue Cook, his wife or Regan in return for a statement. The way to close down the story rapidly, Campbell continued, would be for Cook to speak with "clarity" about his intentions towards the two women in his life. "We need a decision," said Campbell. "I understand," Cook replied...
Andrew Rawnsley, Servants of the People.

Independent: The real reason Jowell split from Mills
[I]t was reported last night that Mr Mills and Ms Jowell consulted Alastair Campbell, a close friend of the couple, on how to present news of their separation...

God is our co-pilot

2006-03-04T07:46:00.000Z

If this was anything to do with trying to appeal to the electorate, he wouldn't be so excruciatingly honest.

That's Stephen Pound MP, speaking about Tony Blair's latest only-God-can-judge-me gambit, inadvertently writing New Labour's epitaph. I don't think I've seen the mendacity, the arrogance, and the fear of the truth that is the New Labour project encapsulated so perfectly. It's elegant in its simplicity.

And that it should come from as loyal a Blairite as Pound is the big plump cherry on the top. Write that quote down and put it in your pocket. The next time Tony Blair makes an appeal on any subject ("Look, I simply believe it's the right thing to do") whether it be Iraq, Iran, education reform, new nuclear weapons, even that the sun came up this morning, take the piece of paper out and read it.

So, Blair said:

In the end, there is a judgement that, I think if you have faith about these things, you realise that judgement is made by other people... and if you believe in God, it's made by God as well.

Is the Prime Minister briefing against God here? Sharing the blame? That's one for the lobby correspondents. I can see Nick Robinson on the Ten O'clock News:

I've been told privately tonight that while God still has the the Prime Minister's full confidence, Our Lord isn't out of the woods yet. Backbenchers are calling for God to go.

The problem with involving God in the decision-making process on matters of war is that he's an unelected official. I mean, aren't there constitutional ramifications here? He's not even a government minister like Lords Falconer, Adonis and Drayson. He's, at best, a special adviser with too much power.

As much as he should be pelted and mocked for yet another sweaty, weaselly attempt at wriggling from, shall we say, temporal accountability, I do have a nagging sympathy for Blair. A person so steeped in blood and horror would frantically search for even the slimmest shot at forgiveness and redemption or else surely go mad, wouldn't they? I wonder if, deep down, if he's truly frightened of what might happen to him when he's finally gathered unto justice. I hope so.

(Maybe we could persuade a now idle Fathers 4 Justice activist to sneak into Downing Street and jump out of Blair's wardrobe in the middle of the night dressed as the Devil.)

No longer having to face the court of the electorate, it seems the Prime Minister now deems only one authority now fit to judge him. Maybe he pictures himself as David Niven in A Matter of Life and Death, raffishly winning a second chance. Or has he been reading his Dostoyevsky and, after committing such terrible crimes, now sees himself as the reborn Raskolnikov:

He did not know that the new life would not be given him for nothing, that he would have to pay dearly for it, that it would cost him great striving, great suffering. But that is the beginning of a new story – the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life. That might be the subject of a new story, but our present story is ended.

Draw a line. Move on.

Something in the water?

2006-03-02T15:32:00.000Z

I read somewhere that the reason the Roman Empire fell was because of its plumbing. Lead pipes. By the time the barbarians arrived at the gates, the Romans were so tonto after drinking lead-poisoned water for generations that they were a pushover.

So what to make of this? (via Tim):

Craig Murray: I thought I had heard it all

Sir Gus O'Whitewash has ruled. Teresa Jowell [sic] did not break the rules because for four years David Mills did not tell her he had received what he then believed was a gift of $600,000.

How nice it must be to be so fabulously wealthy that a gift of $600,000 is so unimportant to you that you do not even bother to mention it to your partner!

It's just as well New Labour aren't so blase about party donations or the Labour benches in the House of Lords would be empty. Still, at least Tessa isn't alone. She's a member of a very select support group all with their own stories to tell.

I see we have a few of them here this afternoon. Let's begin with you Tony.

Hi, my name's Tony (Hi, Tony!) Remember the Cheriegate scandal when my wife spent half a million quid of two flats in Bristol? I knew nothing about it.

Thanks, Tony. What about you, Jack?

Hello, I'm Jack (Hi, Jack!) I couldn't remember why I wrote "Zola Budd" on a memo to my private secretary when enquiring about a passport for one of the Hinduja brothers.

That's ok, Jack, you let it all out. Stephen, I see you have your hand in the air.

I'm Stephen (Hi, Stephen!) I misled Parliament over Railtrack being taken into administration but can't "remember the motives behind it".

Very good, Stephen. You've taken your first steps. David, how about you? Go on, you're among friends.

Hello, I'm David (Hi, David!) My famously prodigious memory failed me when it came to the matter of whether I'd passed on a letter attempting to obtain a visa for my lover's nanny.

That's great, David. In all your cases, ignorance is a defence. Yours and that of the public.

(I'm recycling here but what the hell, some things never go out of fashion with this government.)

When the Hammond report was published in March 2001, it exonerated everybody involved in the Hinduja passport debacle, including Peter Mandelson who had resigned over the affair (he couldn't remember making the incriminating phone call). The report, the Observer said, "revealed the way government works; the favours, personal notes and telephone calls that oil the wheels of power" and showed how "those outside get access to those with the ability to guide events ... [b]y having money and through that, influence,". A "Downing Street source" said: "It is an irritant... We just have to wait and see now if it goes away."

And thus it ever was. By the end of March 2001 foot and mouth was in full swing and the public got bored of watching one bunch of pigs, with their snouts in the trough, dodging the bullet, and turned to watch another bunch who weren't so agile. Bird flu, anybody?

There remains only one question. Who's drinking the lead-poisoned water here, the government or the yahoos who continually vote for them?

Strange things are afoot at the circle y

2006-03-02T07:42:00.000Z

Things might be a little slow around here for a few days while one or two things get done. Anybody passing through here last night while the site was unavailable will have got a clue as to what one of those things might be...

Linda Smith

2006-03-01T18:03:00.000Z

Jeremy Hardy: She was born at Erith in Kent, a town of which she said: "It's not twinned with anywhere, but it does have a suicide pact with Dagenham." She had no fondness for the place. Her father worked on the railway. Her family was hard-up and she very much enjoyed shopping when she eventually became comfortable, describing her spending habits as "working-class fecklessness".

Mark Steel: [A] group of us were watching the Euro 2004 final, which was won by Greece. As the Greek captain received the trophy, Linda said, "We'll have that in the British Museum by the end of the week claiming it's ours." Linda Smith's everyday conversation contained more jokes than most comedy scripts and more social comment than most dramas.

Simon Hoggart: We always said that she was without malice, and she was, for people she knew and liked. And, truth be known, even people she knew and didn't like. Politicians were an exception, though I used to get the odd message from cabinet ministers, saying that they loved her "whatever she said about them". Which could be rude. "David Mellor, the thinking woman's fat, ugly bastard. The last woman to run her fingers through his hair was the nit nurse." She could build up slowly: you thought she was in gentle, ameliorative mood: "I do sympathise with Bush and Blair trying to find WMDs. I'm like that with my scissors. I put them down, then I search all over the house, and I never find them. Of course, I do know that my scissors exist."

2006-02-27T08:19:00.000Z

monday, february 27, 2006

Observer: Thousands of children at risk after computer fault

An Observer investigation has found that the child health information system, introduced last summer as part of the government's £7 billion IT programme, has derailed the country's entire vaccination programme, leaving health staff resorting to slips of paper to work out who needs immunising. Several women whose babies were stillborn have received letters asking them to take their babies for their first vaccinations.

more...

On the money

2006-02-25T20:58:00.000Z

The ace Matthew Norman on the crime of the century:

Myself -- not that I'd given a minute's thought to the matter before now, of course -- I'd take my five-million-pound cut, wait for a moonless night and head for the Normandy coast in a fishing boat. Airports, car ferries and especially Channel Tunnel trains are out of the question with All Ports Bulletins in effect throughout the land; but given a following wind and a bit of luck, a tiny fishing vessel should make the beach at Trouville or Honfleur undetected by French coast guards.

Once arrived, the next step would be to launder the money, very slowly, in the casinos to be found in every French coastal town. It's an old and well-known scam, but with caution it should be OK.

Whether the Tonbridge Mob will follow this blueprint is anyone's guess, but it will be the hope of us all that whatever laundering method they employ will fail, and that they are swiftly apprehended.

Then, as is traditional with major fiscal offences, they can spend twice as long in jug as they would have done for committing a couple of murders.

For the merest flavour of the "oh shit, what are we going to do now?" moment these villains must be experiencing at this minute in time, I heartily recommend the final episode of season two of the mighty, mighty, The Shield.

To fund their retirements, the frighteningly appealing bent cop/sadist/monster Vic Mackey and his knuckle-headed colleagues on LA's Farmington Precinct anti-gang Strike Team have robbed an Eastern European mob's "money train" of crime-supplied cash. Back at their hideout, they stand around the table admiring the Kilimanjaro of cash. One by one, their laughter dies as they realise the sheer enormity of their crime...

Nick Barlow: MIA

2006-02-25T17:32:00.000Z

Public Service Announcement: Anybody worried about the disappearance of Nick Barlow's blog should be reassured that it's merely a hosting problem which should be resolved once Nick's given his webhost the hairdryer treatment on Monday morning.

2006-02-25T11:11:00.000Z

saturday, february 25, 2006

Jenni Russell: We are giving the authorities an open invitation to abuse their power

I fear that many of us are failing to see the danger we are now in, precisely because we have grown up in a largely benign state. We still trust in the good sense and reasonableness of its agents, and the rest of officialdom. We don't understand that that has been sustained only by the existence of our legal rights, and by a respect for our freedom of action. We don't see the lesson of every society: that if you do not place constraints on official power, its instinct is to grow. Our tolerant world is disappearing, and it is only when many more of us start running up against that reality that we will realise what we have lost.

more...

Broken Yoghurt?

2006-02-25T10:25:00.000Z

The estimable MatGB writes, regarding the Chicken Yoghurt template...

On post pages, the comments and text of entries flows all across the screen, so you can't read things, and the sidebar takes priority so I can't even highlight stuff.

He's using Firefox 1.5.0 on Windows XP. I use the same but everything looks fine to me. Would anybody else seeing anything strange (or not) with the site layout please shout out in the comments. Cheers.

I like this

2006-02-24T16:55:00.000Z

From the comments:

[D]efined by the cousins over the water as the
Napolean-Clarke Law - "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice"

Its origin lies in the elegant splicing of Napoleon's...

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

...and Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law...

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Expect to see it used here to the point of dispiriting cliche.

2006-02-24T07:56:00.000Z

Telegraph: ID cards have already cost taxpayers £32m

The figures issued by Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, in a Commons written answer, also show that spending soared in the second half of last year from £25,000 a day to £63,000 a day.

more...

George Monbiot: When it won't need a tyranny to deprive us of our freedom

At the end of last month, a leaked letter from Andy Burnham, the Home Office minister, revealed that the identity cards for which we will involuntarily volunteer will contain radio frequency identification chips. This will allow the authorities to read the cards with a scanner. I propose that as the technology improves, the police will be able to scan a crowd and (assuming everyone is carrying his voluntary-compulsory ID card) produce a list of whom it contains. I further propose that it will take only a year or two for this to seem reasonable.

more...

Washington Post: Leaving Las Vegas: So Long DefCon and Blackhat

Los Angeles-based Flexilis set the world record for transmitting data to and from a "passive" radio frequency identification (RFID) card -- covering a distance of more than 69 feet.

more...

2006-02-23T20:09:00.000Z

International Herald Tribune: Ban on abortions is voted in South Dakota
After more than an hour of fierce and emotional debate, the senators Wednesday rejected exceptions for incest or rape or for the health of a mother and voted, 23-12, to outlaw all abortions, except those to save a mother's life.

(Via Warren Ellis and his Grim Meathook Future.)

Murphy's Law

2006-02-22T22:53:00.000Z

When I finally succumb to the massive and catastrophic stress-induced brain embolism that is to be, no doubt, my final destination, the coroner will be able to pinpoint the exact time of my terrible and furious demise to whenever the pointless junior government minister, with a dangerous and unpopular piece of new law to sell, was interviewed on either the Today programme or PM that day.

This morning it was the turn of Jim Murphy, Parliamentary Secretary to the Cabinet Office, to usher me just that little bit closer to the big dirt bath. Murphy was the luckless soul sent onto the Today programme to defend the Furtherance of Unaccountable Government Bill.

For those just coming in, otherwise known as the The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, this harmless-sounding piece of proposed legislation has bothered those of us who think that our barely accountable public servants - along with our not at all accountable public servants - should be kept on a short lead.

This is arcane, hard to engage with stuff but nonetheless has some pretty far-reaching consequences should this new legislation's power fall into the wrong hands. It's about how we are governed and what those to who we lend power do with that responsibility. Put simply, the The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, as Marcel Berlins explained in the Guardian the other day, will make it...

...possible for the government, by ministerial order, without a debate in parliament, to create new criminal offences, punishable with less than two years imprisonment. It could also, according to Cambridge law professor John Spencer (who is not alone in his analysis), introduce house-arrest, give the police stronger powers of arrest and interrogation, set up new courts, and in effect re-write the rules on immigration, nationality, divorce, inheritance and the appointment of judges.

That's a pretty disturbing list, I hope you'll agree, particularly under this Government who are determined to be harder and nastier than anybody else when it comes to The War Against Terror. However, taking the basic premise that we're not dealing with Darth Vader and friends here, I think we can say that if/when this bill is passed into law, dissidents aren't suddenly going to find themselves locked in their homes with their knackers wired to the mains.

But this is to forget the law of unintended consequences and as I said the other day, when your thirst for efficiency, or for at least the facade of efficiency, produces the same outcome as if you'd set out to be a bastard, you can't really be too sore, in my opinion, if people start refusing to make the distinction. "I didn't mean to hurt you," often doesn't impress those on the receiving end. It's a trust thing.

Murphy, in his interview (RealPlayer required), did at least give a few a pointers as to what intentions lie behind the bill and just what the Government mean when they say they will place "safeguards" within it. As to why we need the bill, Murphy played his joker, otherwise known as the Armageddon Gambit. Don't argue your case on its merits, just scare the shit...

The real danger is what happens if we don't introduce a bill of this sort. We are trying to do all we can to maintain UK competitiveness, business competitiveness, economic growth, employment levels in a global economy where we face challenges from the emerging economies.

You hear that? If we don't get this bill, we'll be swept away by the Yellow Peril. Don't blame Jim when you're sewing Nike Trainers for a bowl of rice a day - it'll be those bastard urban intellectuals' fault for not letting him have his way.

So where's the pressure for this bill coming from? Here's the clue: UK competitiveness, business competitiveness, economic growth, employment levels. The "stakeholders" in this bill are the CBI, the Federation of Small Businesses, the Institute of Directors, British Chambers of Commerce.

Maybe paying a bunch of honking, low-wage conservatives massive salaries is all that stands between me and a third world lifestyle. I'm not a complete idiot, maybe British business is being choked by red tape. Frankly, I don't really care enough to find out, although anything that might make Digby Jones' life slightly less pleasant can't be all bad if you ask me.

But you would have thought that that Britain's business community would have had the law of unintended consequences closer to the front of their minds when they lobbied for this bill, particularly after Gary Mulgrew, Giles Darby and David Bermingham fell foul of the Extradition Act 2003. The CBI were sanguine about swarthy suspects being sent to Guantanamo under the act but less happy when it was applied to wholesome white collar types. Where's Martin Niemöller when you need to misquote him?

But all is well. There are safeguards to protect us:

The relevant select committees of the House of Commons will have a veto on every single proposal.

For those with rich and fulfilling lives who don't know what select committees are, here's how Charter88 defines them:

Select Committees of MPs carry out detailed investigations into policy matters and government performance, and produce detailed reports and recommendations. Sometimes they will draw up and recommend new legislation.

Hurrah, you cry, select committees will save us. Ah, well, Charter88 continue...

But there the Committees' powers end: they have no right to ensure that their reports or recommendations or proposed Bills are debated by parliament.

...and it gets worse...

Currently select committees, whose job is to investigate government actions and performance, are appointed by the government - i.e. the whips draw up the list which is then voted for en bloc in the House.

Members or select committees are placemen allocated according to the electoral makeup of Parliament. What if, and I know this is a cynical point of view, any scrutiny of new laws proposed by a government under this new power divided along party lines with the dominant (that is, government) party winning the day?

Regardless of party loyalties, however, it's still MP's faults that we need to give the Government power to do whatever it likes. As Murphy said:

We still have a one-size-fits-all approach to better regulation. So regardless of how controversial or the scale of a proposal, it still has to go through exacting parliamentary scrutiny which some times can take a number of years. That's not fit for purpose.

MPs. The lazy bastards. Clogging the arteries of the mother of parliaments. And on our dollar as well. But if that's the case - and Parliamentary scrutiny isn't always the constitutional bottleneck Murphy would have us believe - why does Andrew Miller, Labour MP for Ellesmere Port and Neston and chairman of the Commons Regulatory Reform Committee (on this occasion, granted, no placeman he) say:

Our report demonstrates that the current parliamentary procedures are not responsible for delaying regulatory reform orders.

Our evidence shows that departments themselves are slow in identifying the unnecessary regulations, in bringing the proposals for orders to Parliament and in making the orders once Parliament has made its recommendation on individual reforms.

Government departments. The lazy bastards. Clogging the arteries of the mother of parliaments. And on our dollar as well.

The interview's worth listening to if only to hear how little Murphy gave away. He's few bones to throw to the dogs on this one. Oh, and the - ha ha! - jokey exchange about Prince Charles - ha ha! - and his so-called dissidence right at the end, oh, it's a hoot.

So, as others have said it's time to do something. My MP doesn't answer my letters so I'm left whistling in the dark somewhat. Her voting record wouldn't inspire confidence even if I wasn't being ignored. So I charge you, dear reader, with the noble quest of rescuing democracy.

To conclude - with the requisite glib, broader point - in the nine years since they came to power New Labour have pretty much made it up as they went a long. That's what happens when you swap principle for power at any cost - the star you used to sail by is obscured by clouds and you have to guess where you're heading. There are no lighthouses. When Gordon Brown ascends to the throne he may find himself a Scot on the rocks.

Convergence

2006-02-20T16:09:00.000Z

I understand that New Labour feels it must pander to the public's basest, most disgusting human instincts in order to consolidate its power. I realise only too well that the only way to stay at the top is by warming the cockles and stoking the fears of Daily Mail readers.

But I wonder if anybody (apart from say, Nick Griffin) feels the requisite glow of a job well done after hearing this:

Ms Blears, as well as being Minister of State for Crime, Security and Communities, is the constituency MP of Olive Mukaraguwiza, a Rwandan asylum seeker who, after living in the UK for three years, without warning found her home raided by police at 6am last Tuesday morning. She and her three children were packed off to Yarls Wood detention centre pending their deportation. On Friday they were bundled onto a plane in such a distraught state that the pilot refused to fly.

Did even the official who signed off on this think it was the right thing to do? Did he tick the box, go home for his tea and proudly tell his wife and kids what he'd done at the office that day? Did even Hazel Blears, a person who is never, ever wrong about anything ever, not feel a small wave of cold disquiet upon hearing this story? Did what's left of her humanity not itch, even a little?

As I said in the comments at Europhobia, I try very, very, hard not to believe that New Labour are actually evil. But doesn't this kind of petty, bureaucratic "efficiency" (ad nauseum) pretty much amount to the same thing?

It's time to show these people the door. You won't convince me the Tories would be any worse than this...

Chain of command

2006-02-17T15:10:00.000Z

1 + 1 + 1 = 3...

1... Cabinet Office: New bill to enable delivery of swift and efficient regulatory reform to cut red tape
Cabinet Office Minister Jim Murphy today introduced a Bill to Parliament that would provide a swift and effective mechanism for delivering the Government's radical regulatory reform programme to cut red tape.

The Legislative & Regulatory Reform Bill aims to make it quicker and easier to tackle unnecessary or over-complicated regulation and help bring about a risk-based approach to regulation.

+ 1... Marcel Berlins: Why is the government seeking the power to pass far-reaching laws without parliament's approval?
Well, so what? We're only talking about minor, technical laws which don't raise any controversial issues, aren't we? No, we emphatically are not. Try this one. It will become possible for the government, by ministerial order, without a debate in parliament, to create new criminal offences, punishable with less than two years imprisonment. It could also, according to Cambridge law professor John Spencer (who is not alone in his analysis), introduce house-arrest, give the police stronger powers of arrest and interrogation, set up new courts, and in effect re-write the rules on immigration, nationality, divorce, inheritance and the appointment of judges. Yes, there are safeguards written into the bill supposedly to prevent this sort of dictatorial behaviour, but my experience of safeguards is that they look better on the page than they perform in practice.

+ 1...Charlie Whitaker: The tipping point?
If you have any remaining doubts that this government is opposed to democracy - opposed to popular representation, opposed to debate - now would be the time to discard them. The fact that this government has not recognised this bill for what it is - a proposal for major constitutional change that hugely empowers the executive - means that we should distrust them. Even if it turns out to be because of their ignorance, and not because of malign intent, we should distrust them. In a democracy, the government needs to demonstrate that it knows what democracy is: how it works, what it takes to sustain it. A government that fails that test is dangerous.

So what now? There is a lot of mud in the air: we need to prioritise. There are a lot of bad bills before parliament: this is the worst.

I think that an attack on parliamentary democracy trumps all former political prejudices: we should support any organisation that can effectively oppose this government within our democratic structures, and we should act. Today.

= 3... Not Little England: Getting New Labour out of office
The New Labour project started as a method of making Labour electable again, by bringing under control their less, shall we say, thoughtful, elements. In government, it has taken that controlling tendency further. It is taking control of our lives...

Hear no evil, see no evil

2006-02-17T11:47:00.000Z

I know this is going to sound frightfully liberal - sandal-wearing or whatever witty epithet we're using at the minute - but this kind of thing bothers me:

BBC News: 'Dog whistle' to control youths
A high-pitched "dog whistle" device is to be used by police in north Staffordshire to stop groups of nuisance youths hanging around shops.

I suppose it's cheaper than a water cannon or a barrage of rubber bullets. It's literally the 21st Century's clip round the ear - it (hopefully) won't do them any harm. Most of the news outlets are treating this as a gleefully sadistic "and finally..." story. The fact is, this is yet another of those "tough on crime" while not giving a toss about "the causes of crime".

The inventor of the device was on PM on Radio 4 last night and he actually said, "...what about the human rights of the shopkeepers?" He'll go far that one, A New Labour peerage can't be far away. What about the nice children and their rights? What about the A-grade, never-said-boo-to-goose, model child sent out for a pint of milk?

Once upon a time latchkey kids were something to be pitied, now they're a control group for technocratic social engineering. Never mind why these children are hanging about, let's just corral them like animals. Why not give them collars that explode if they stray into a designated area as in the movie Battle Royale?

Adults can't hear the siren, although I bet the technology could be adapted to drive off, oh I don't know, let's say unauthorised protesters around Parliament. I wonder how easy it would be adapt the technology so that instead of emitting a high-pitched whistle it sent messages, "CONSUME. OBEY. PROCREATE. BE CONTENT."

We've been shown, most recently in the Tory leadership campaign, that age and experience are embarrassing liabilities. We're also told to fear the youth - hooded, rutting, drug addicts that they are. It seems the only age worthy of respect is complacent, condescending, comfortable, careerist middle age. And yet look at the carnage the forty- and fifty-somethings have caused since 1997. Won't anybody think of the children?

Lies, damn lies and Peter Hain

2006-02-17T11:11:00.000Z

If you've got a spare hour, and if you didn't watch it last night, I recommend you have a look at this week's edition of Question Time online (it'll be there until this time next week), if only to see the feckless Peter Hain taking a kicking.

At some points it was painful to watch, the other four panellists, the audience and even the arch establishment figure David Dimbleby queued up to lamp him. It was like a bunch of squaddies taking their frustrations out on an Iraqi teenager. He didn't give up much of a fight.

You have to wonder what really goes through the mind of a former anti-Apartheid firebrand when he has to (half heartedly) defend ID cards, house arrest and extraordinary rendition. It doesn't take a huge leap of imagination to know what Hain's reaction would have been had, in 1970, the South African government put Nelson Mandela on a plane to Algeria to have information beaten out of him.

But as fun as was to watch this abject turncoat take his licks, he was also guilty of peddling this to defend ID cards:

Look at the 7/7 terrorists, they had multiple identities, as many as 12.

I wonder where that came from because, try as I might, I can't find any mention anywhere of the July 7 bombers having used multiple identities. The nearest I can find is this, from Andrew Marr's interview with Gordon Brown on February 12:

I mean most of these terrorists we're talking about have about 12 identities, they operate multiple identities and false identities.

And, as has been repeated over and over (particularly by me), Charles Clarke himself said that ID cards would not have prevented the the July bombings. I doubt whether Hain will ever be picked up on this but for thousands of people watching Question Time last night, the seed will have been planted. It'll be interesting to see if it surfaces anywhere else, from whose mouth, and if anybody challenges it.

(I could quite easily spend a day dissecting the evasions, equivocations, misdirections and, yes, downright lies, that Hain put across last night - on glorification of terrorism, on how ID cards won't be compulsory without a further act of parliament, on why the British government won't help the British residents still in Guantanamo Bay - but you have to wonder what the point would be. I'd be that little bit more pissed off, you'd be that little bit more pissed off and it's such a sunny day and everything. The level of deception at which this government operates that becomes apparent to even a halfway attentive observer is amazing. Just what Hain got away with in one hour of a TV show, despite his mauling, well, you have to salute him for it really.)

I guess the identity theft/fraud angle on ID cards has failed to catch the public imagination so the prevention of terrorism aspect has to be bigged up again. It went away for a bit - so much so that the Prime Minister did not use the T word once in his defence of ID cards at Prime Minister's Questions on January 18 - but now it's back. Fear sells - Gordon Brown, in his hard man speech to herald the arrival of the "dual premiership", used the words "July 7" seventeen times.

It's said that the New Labour project lifted, wholesale, policies and their way of conducting business from the Clinton administration. In this technique of embracing the politics of fear, it's obvious New Labour have picked up a few things from Clinton's successors as well.

Bloomberg: U.K.'s Blair Wins Vote on Glorification of Terrorism
The government scheduled the terrorism vote for the same day that 20 people received honors at Buckingham Palace from Queen Elizabeth for helping to rescue victims of the July 7 terrorist attacks in London. When the Commons last took up the bill, in November, the vote was scheduled for the day after the memorial service for victims. Blair's spokesman Tom Kelly described that as a "complete coincidence."

2006-02-16T11:35:00.000Z

Continuing the "isn't technology crap" theme I'm warming to this week - and this one is for bloggers only - is there anybody else who finds Technorati (or "Sorry - We couldn't complete your search because we're experiencing a high volume of requests right now" as I like to call it) a massively overhyped curate's egg?

The Guardian Glyn Moody seems to like it but to be honest I've stopped using it. The javascript users can put on their blogs to link to Technorati is moody, the stats on any given blog are slow to update (and, I suspect, inaccurate) and the functionality itself is up and down like a bride's nightie (and like on a Victorian wedding night, it's mostly down - "Sorry..." doesn't seems to be the hardest word). And you have to be seriously anal to get any hits in return from "pinging", laboriously hand-coding "tags", standing on one leg in field at midnight smeared in cat's blood, or whatever convoluted method you have to use this week to gain one or two extra visitors.

If you really want to know what others are saying about you, you'd be better off subscribing to the RSS feed via Bloglines of Google's Blog Search's result for your blog (put "link:your blog's url" into the search engine to see who's linking to you). Either that or check your visitor stats once a day. Or actually writing something people might want to read rather than spending your precious time trying to second guess, what is in effect, a glorified speed-dating system. It's much, much less irritating than repeatedly hitting F5 every thirty seconds on Technorati in the hope that enough coal's now gone in the furnace to supply the energy to tell you that nobody's linked to you today.

Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed

2006-02-14T12:50:00.000Z

So we're in the big Tesco in Hove this morning picking up a few bits. In the store, they have those cashier-free cashier desks that allow you to scan your own shopping, feed your money into the machine and leave without so much as clapping eyes on a member of staff. All very convenient. All very "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot."

Except. Except. The computer system is of such glacial ponderousness, the bar code scanner is so temperamental, the touch screen that allows you to key in how many packets of lard and cans of budget lager you're buying is so unsensitive, the "jolly" splosh! noise the machine makes when you scan an item is so ulcer inducing, that by the time I was feeding my twenty pound note into the machine - like trying to stuff a marshmallow into a test tube - I was on the verge of going Krakatoa. From soup to nuts the whole transaction took at least three times longer than if we'd gone to a human cashier and the stress it induced has probably shortened my life by considerably more.

And then realisation. Which didn't help my temper. The machines aren't there to make the customer's shopping experience any more quicker, more easier, more pleasant or any less dispiriting or less soulless or less "In the low-ceilinged canteen, deep underground, the lunch queue jerked slowly forward". They're there so Tesco doesn't have to employ so many drones with all the overheads that that entails. It's about buying yet more fur-trimmed solid jade commodes for the corpulent amoral shysters at the top of the tree.

I'd be tempted to try and comfort the rest of us by saying they can't take it all with them when they're finally dragged screaming to the new and exciting circle of Hell that's currently being built for them*. But in my darker moments I think that they've probably worked out a way to do it. I bet when the likes of the chairman of Tesco or Digby Jones or Tony Blair or Polly Toynbee are inducted into The Greater Good, right after they've had their HIV/AIDS and bird flu vaccinations and been measured up for their jetpacks, they're shown the teleport technology - powered, literally, by the sweat of the lower classes - that will allow them to send their wealth into the afterlife.

I think the reason nothing works in this country - trains always late, government computer systems always vastly overdue lemons, our troops dangerously and criminally undersupplied in battle, and the rest of the fourth-largest-economy-in-the-world-my-arse incompetence - is that the cream of the scientific community have been commandeered for the likes of building said teleporter or making Blair's hair just the right shade of Statesman Grey or making Digby Jones look just that little bit less smug (you should have seen him before the £600m was spent).

Welcome to the 21st Century.

*The bastards have probably got a nice, fat, dripping slice of the PFI pillage being used to build it.

the blog and code

2006-02-13T20:28:00.000Z

I was going to post a long and bad-tempered tract about Gordon Brown and how his so-called and much-vaunted enormous intellect has been little in evidence today. That was until Tim Ireland unveiled BlogCode and distracted me.

That's two things you should be thanking him for. Anyway, it's very groovy. Go see.

Right to vote

2006-02-13T20:06:00.000Z

A Fistful of Euros have opened the polls on their 2nd European Weblog Awards. Get along and have a look.

Me old mucker Nosemonkey gets a well-deserved brace of nominations as does The Sharpener, my second home.

2006-02-13T19:27:00.000Z

Craig Murray: Murder in Samarkand: The FCO prepares for legal action

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office seem determined to stop me publishing my book. They are threatening four grounds of legal action:

a) Libel
b) Crown Copyright
c) Breach of Confidence
d) Official Secrets Act

The first point is that plainly this is an attempt to suppress the book and prevent publication by scaring me (and the publishers) with the threat of legal action. This will not work, as neither of us scare easily...

Conspiracy theory

2006-02-13T10:02:00.000Z

BBC News: Blair to miss key ID cards vote
He had been due to return from a summit in Pretoria, but his flight was aborted on take off when the pilot spotted a problem with one of the engines.

Engine trouble. Being of a somewhat cynical mien, my immediate thought was: Yeah, right. I wonder if the Whip's Office, finally getting its act together, has been in touch. "Don't come home. We don't have enough bodies to win the ID card vote. You'll have lost a vote you personally stamped your authority on."

Or, of course, it could have been: "No need to rush back, it's in the bag".

Britblog Roundup # 52

2006-02-12T20:41:00.000Z

The first anniversary Britblog roundup is up. The best posts of the year as chosen by Tim are also there.

On top of that, Tim's put 2005:Blogged online here.

The case for the Defence Secretary

2006-02-11T09:22:00.000Z

Whatever else you can say about Defence Secretary John Reid, he gives good value in an interview. You can imagine that even when he says "I love you", it's hissed through gritted teeth. King Rat in panto beckons.

Nosemonkey, Charlie Whitaker and Jamie K have picked up on Reid and his cry of "let us match savagery with savagery" on Radio 4's Today programme the other day.

What was interesting was that Reid brought the subject up completely unprompted and in relation to the current brouhaha over those bloody cartoons.

We need a dialogue internationally as well as domestically because if we're going to adopt the standard of sensitivity towards various religions, which I believe we should do, it has to apply to all religions. And we can't on the one hand have people demanding that we apply standards which they themselves want to see applied continually but they don't apply them themselves. Now, let me make one final comment on that, which is specific to British troops as it happens. Similarly, we cannot continually have an assymetric, uneven battlefield for our troops where we are facing an enemy unconstrained by any legality, any morality, any international convention and at the same time subject our troops to a level of scrutiny, accountability, media intrusion, questioning and every conceivable opportunity to criticise. So I say, in that kind of world, where we're facing that kind of enemy, let us be very slow to condemn our troops, our forces, and very quick to support them and understand them.

For the record, the interviewer, Jim Naughtie, gave what I thought was a craven response:

Yes, but political judgements must be made about the wisdom of the leaders who do things with the troops.

But then he probably had a script to get through and Reid going off reservation probably rattled the titan of British political journalism. High politics is a much safer area of discussion than low blows, after all.

I thought it was quite the leap between cartoons and abuses by UK troops. Still, it was obviously preying on Reid's mind. It's almost as if he's saying, if you want us to respect your religion you need to accept that our lads may want to give one or two of you a kicking now and again and be expected to get away with it. And you know, he's probably got a point.

Imagine Baha Mousa. As the blows rained down and the eternal darkness folded around him, no doubt his final thoughts were, "In this kind of world, I must be very slow to condemn these troops." Picture Ahmad Jabbar Kareem. As he slipped beneath the water for the third and final time, no doubt in a last moment of clarity he said to himself, "let no-one be in any doubt, the rules of the game are changing."

This passage from Reid puzzles me though:

And we can't on the one hand have people demanding that we apply standards which they themselves want to see applied continually but they don't apply them themselves.

Who does he mean here? Are the Iraq insurgents and suicide bombers demanding to be treated under the terms of the Geneva Convention? Does he mean those in Guantanamo Bay (some, if not many, of who may be innocent)? Or George Galloway? Or is it a straw man? How about Omar Khayyam? Khayyam is clearly an idiot but I didn't see him applying blunt force trauma to a man with his hands cuffed behind his back. (He didn't look much like a suicide bomber to me either. Maybe it's just me but I thought he looked more a like an uncertain just-out gay man, with a thing for Jean Claude Van Damm, trying to fit in at a provincial gay club.)

Is Reid advocating that we be lenient on soldiers who stray from the path of righteousness? So much for hearts and minds on the ground and ideals of justice. Earlier in the same interview Reid said:

There will be blemishes, there will be abuses, I have no doubt that occur. But the difference will be this, Jim: When abuses took place in the past, when these sorts of things by the Iraqi government or others took place under Saddam Hussein they were covered up, now they'll be exposed. The perpetrators were promoted. Now they will be prosecuted.

How to reconcile Reid's two statements? We must prosecute the perpetrators of abuses while being slow to condemn them. That would make for some interesting sentencings in murder cases:

Judge: Slasher McGee, you have been found guilty of eating your wife. While I sentence you to life imprisonment without parole for this crime, I will not in any way condemn it.

Of course, Reid didn't have our lads in mind. He meant Iraqis who beat and degrade, not - as consensus dictates - the "few" "bad apples" in the liberating forces. I suppose it becomes easier to understand when you remember that these statements come from a man who can argue the merits of firebombs over napalm. Reid can believe six morally reprehensible things before breakfast. In order to save Iraq it was necessary to put a bag over the head of a hotel receptionist and beat him to death.

"In the long run democracy is far more stable than a dictatorship," said Reid. There are those who would disagree. Israel's Shin Bet security service chief for starters. But what we bleeding hearts and fetishists for the rule of law forget is that while we've installed democracy in Iraq, if the harbingers of that democracy want to use a few tactics borrowed from the deposed regime to make their life easier and - if we're going to be honest here - to pass the time, it's all for the Greater Good. Be slow to condemn.

In the interview Reid also paraded his so-called intellectual credentials when he said, with regard to the current chaos in Iraq:

I've used before the old expression "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will"

The expression is from Antonio Gramsci, reputedly a favourite of Reid's. It would have gone over many listeners heads (including this one's), had Peter Hitchens, who featured in the item on the contemporary relevance of the Far Left, straight after Reid's interviews, not blown the whistle. It's a phrase Reid's fond of, using it over and over and over. Reid's been in many a hopeless situation - Health, Northern Ireland, Defence - but he'll fight and he'll win. He'll dream the impossible dream.

It's a typical New Labour trait poking above the surface: take something potentially engaging and inspiring, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, until it's reduced to a platitude. Like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of the Mona Lisa. Of course, quoting Gramsci makes him sound much cleverer and better read than if he'd said "many a mickle makes a muckle" or "you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs" (which, in the various contexts Reid has used the Gramscian line, aren't a million miles away semantically.) The thing is, New Labour rhetoric is like the chimp you put in a suit and teach to eat with a fork. It's very impressive - but he's still a chimp when the bill arrives.

It turns out that Gramsci was quite the clever guy and still speaks to us from beyond the grave via the medium, Madame Google. No doubt, in the cases of Baha Mousa and Ahmad Jabbar Kareem, Reid could bring another tenet of Gramsci to bear:

He who by profession has become a slave of trivial details is the victim of bureaucracy.

Personally, I prefer:

The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.

That would truly be something to aspire to although, I think, beyond the likes of me. Immediately, this might be a more useful one to adopt and try to live by:

My practicality consists in this, in the knowledge that if you beat your head against the wall it is your head which breaks and not the wall... that is my strength, my only strength.

Update: In his own piece about Reid's appeal for see-no-evil, Nosemonkey said:

So, what's going on? Has Reid got wind of another Abu Ghraib-style war crime? Is he trying to cut something off at the pass?

It looks very much as if Reid was...

BBC News: MoD to probe Iraq 'abuse' video
Pictures from a video allegedly showing British soldiers brutally beating a group of Iraqi teenagers have been published by the News of the World.

I feel like Bill Hicks in that, in a reverse of the perceived wisdom from the anti-war crowd, I'm for the occupation but increasingly against our troops. I'm not sure I agree with Nosemonkey in his reaction to the NOTW story:

No one could have predicted the massively over the top response to publishing those crappy cartoons. The News of the World was and is fully aware of the potential for a violent response in publishing this story. Yet they went ahead and ran it anyway, putting British troops in further danger, isolating them further from the average Iraqi. In a regular wartime situation, that could be considered tantamount to treason.

It's those troops who will be to blame if this comes home to roost, those beating Iraqis and "kicking a dead Iraqi in the face" for not much more than shits and giggles. It would be amazing if stories of beatings at the hands of British soldiers weren't already doing the rounds in Basra and, in the nature of embellishment in the telling, weren't less lurid than the story in today's papers. And it's not like this is the first time British soldiers have kept souvenirs. The detainee's been out of the bag for a little while now.

But at least we now know what Reid meant when he said in his Radio 4 interview:

And we can't on the one hand have people demanding that we apply standards which they themselves want to see applied continually but they don't apply them themselves.

It looks like he meant the Murdoch press. At least that's one mystery solved. Go get 'em John. I look forward to him raining fire and brimstone on an institution he'll be abasing himself in front of come election time.

Back soon

2006-02-10T15:23:00.000Z

Family, the need to do some ~~proper~~ money-earning work, not to mention a beer festival at my local this weekend, are preventing me from writing anything right now.

Enjoy this brief, merciful respite while you can.

New Toy

2006-02-06T10:06:00.000Z

I found this via Warren Ellis. It'll probably wear thin pretty quickly but it's of a passing novelty value.

The "Listen to this article" link at the bottom of each post will download an MP3 of that post being read by a lady computer. Anybody who doesn't glaze over after listening to the voice for more than a minute can subscribe to the podcast feed with this link.

2006-02-06T09:30:00.000Z

Further to this...

Kitty Killer: Matthew Boulton: Assed and Daniel lose their appeal, suffer permanent expulsion

The Panel is satisfied that the penalty imposed reflects the offence caused by your actions and is designed to protect both staff and students. Members are aware that the decision to dismiss your appeal is not the one you will have wanted but you are urged to accept the outcome and seek advice on how you can continue your studies elsewhere.

Britblog Roundup # 51

2006-02-06T08:41:00.000Z

...is up over at Tim's place.

The politics of the workhouse

2006-02-03T11:35:00.000Z

Well stripe me pink. In the face of all the odds, Margaret Hodge answered one of my questions in her Webchat on the proposed Incapacity Benefit reforms.

Margaret, you plan to take one million people off incapacity benefits. Where, do you think, will those jobs come from?

Now unfortunately, her answer wasn't as thoroughgoing as the one provided by Unity...

Actually a million off incap in 10 years is perfectly achieveable.

Remember these are government targets and therefore not quite what they appear.

Around 850,000 will come of incapacity benefit in the next 10 years without the government doing anything - that's the number due to retire over that period, most of whom are people, men in particular, whose working life ended when Thatcher rips the guts out of British manufacturing.

That leaves 150,000 to find, give or take the mortality rate - some of theme are genuinely sick y'know.

Thw real squeeze will be on keeping new claimants off long-term incap to begin with - once someone's been on there for more than two years they're next to unemployable anyway. A sweep will pick up a few lazy twats along the way, but the real push will be on people in those first two years, especially those with 'soft' illnesses like depression.

To be honest, I'm not sure what I was expecting. The slim, naive hope that to have one of my questions answered would push out an astroturfer proved vain. I got the "aren't we great" answer an astroturfer would have expected:

Margaret replies: We have been very successful in our stewardship of the economy and have enjoyed consistent and steady growth since 1997. There are now 2.3 million more people in work today than there were in 1997. I'm always talking to economists and other experts about the prospects for jobs and most people are very confident that we will continue to grow jobs in Britain. That doesn't mean that people have a job for life today as they were used to in the past. Some of the old industrial jobs have gone but new markets, new businesses and new jobs are always emerging. So today we see more jobs in the service industries and in places like health and education.

The translation is either "I don't know" or "I could tell you but you're not going to like it". "Service industries" sounds like call centres, shelf stacking and McJobs to me. Piano tuning for the blind. I'd also be interested to know what jobs she has in mind in the health and education sectors. I may be being overly cynical but I doubt they'll be on the fulfilling end of the scale.

That's why I'd never make it as a politician. I'm too romantic, too utopianist, too naive. When I say I want people to be empowered I mean I want them to be happy and fulfilled. I spent years in a job that made me at first miserable and in the end unwell. I'd spare others from that if I could.

I was struck by what Chris Williams said in Jamie Kenny's comments, that, with this Government, we are dealing with...

[t]he self-made (wo)man can never quite understand why the rest of us didn't make it up the greasy pole.

When Tony Blair says he want to empower people you suspect he means making sure their hamster wheels fits just right. You suspect he's never enjoyed the thrill of an illicit sickie and is suspicious of those who have.

It's the same with Charles Clarke. When, as Education Secretary, he said he thought medieval history was "ornamental" and learning for its own sake as "a bit dodgy" he managed to sum up the New Labour ethos in one contemptible, misanthropic gobbet. A man of his narrow, unimaginative outlook couldn't square those activities with the overriding "modern" concept "human capital".

Anybody with an ounce of romance in their soul or interest in the human race and how it ticks (ie, anybody outside the New Labour project) should have been horrified. That's New Labour for you. They're done with history. They've put it behind them. But as the old adage goes, those who do not learn from history are like the dog with nothing more on its mind than wanting to hump your leg: doomed to repeat themselves until somebody hits them.

Now, even I'm not that naive that I can't see that we simply must have someone on the end of the phone when we need to check our bank balances at two in the morning, just as I know there will be blood on the streets if we're prevented from being able to buy a carton of milk at midnight. I know we need people to do the mundane. I also know that initiatives like Pathways to Work are nothing to do with empowerment and allowing people to "liberate their talents".

Isn't there an interest in a more contented working population with all the attendant benefits to business of lower staff turnover and higher staff morale (and higher revenues for the Treasury) as well as being able to strike people off the list marked "Dosser" and putting them on the list marked "Drone"? Or am I being utopianist again? Or Chauncey Gardiner?

I know from experience that the welfare system isn't geared to helping people with aspirations beyond menial jobs. It's barely geared to helping people full stop. When my IT career ran into the sand and I fell into the clutches of the Department of Work and Pensions, desperate for advice and guidance, I beat my head against institutionalised apathy and ignorance. I didn't see one adviser for six months - she was off sick - and there was nobody else with her knowledge to help or so I was told. Another adviser told me that he wasn't in a position to explain the tax credit system to me because, although he'd been on the training course, "it was boring and I can't remember any of it". (I was also told that newspaper are classed as a luxury. And they wonder why the poor are disenfranchised - but that's a story for another time.)

When I finally decided I would embark upon a new career and go back to school to study journalism, you should have seen the glazed expressions I met from the civil service's finest. They wouldn't have been any more befuddled if I'd announced that I'd hit upon exposing myself to children as a brilliant money making scheme. Those with career aspirations, those who set their sights a little bit higher, are regarded as freaks.

The system breaks down. The benefits couldn't be transferred to my partner while she took care of the kids and I studied (the course was more than sixteen hours a week which, while it didn't class as work, didn't class as job-seeking either and that meant I was no longer entitled to benefits) because I, and only I, was the "client". Help with course fees and materials was a no as well. We scraped and begged and borrowed instead.

I would say many people who are unemployed or on IB want a career, to stretch themselves, to go home happy that they haven't wasted the quality hours of their lives doing a job they hate. To my mind, however, those who want to escape their circumstances while realising their aspirations are best served cutting out the middle man and doing it under their own steam.

That's if they're educated, wilful and resourceful enough and determined not to be brought low by a system that doesn't give a shit. I'd suggest that many on Incapacity Benefit (and indeed, Jobseeker's Allowance) won't have those resources to draw on.

Much is said of New Labour's doctrine that divides the poor into the Deserving and the Undeserving. The Undeserving should get nothing we're told. As someone who's been at the sharp end let me tell you, under this lot, the Deserving don't get much more other than badly designed, incompetently implemented and cruelly-apathetically operated sops to middle class consciences and are told they should be grateful for it.

I'm white, middle-class, educated and earned a considerable salary in the year before I was made unemployed. It only takes a couple of twists for you to find yourself at rock bottom and it's a long, soul-destroying climb back. I'm surprised, given the way our system works, more people don't fall through the cracks completely. People with contempt, either implicit or explicit, for the poor would do well to remember that. The unemployed aren't all sitting in the park with bottles of cider or watching Richard & Judy, and many of them don't want to settle for minimum wage drudgery.

You'll be surprised to hear I don't share Margaret Hodges' optimism. I hope anybody on Incapacity Benefit with dreams of more than shelf stacking won't either.

2006-02-02T11:20:00.000Z

Robert Newman: It's capitalism or a habitable planet - you can't have both
We are caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of climate change and peak oil. Once we pass the planetary oil production spike (when oil begins rapidly to deplete and demand outstrips supply), there will be less and less net energy available to humankind. Petroleum geologists reckon we will pass the world oil spike sometime between 2006 and 2010. It will take, argues peak-oil expert Richard Heinberg, a second world war effort if many of us are to come through this epoch. Not least because modern agribusiness puts hundreds of calories of fossil-fuel energy into the fields for each calorie of food energy produced.

To the death, I suppose

2006-02-02T09:49:00.000Z

From Slinging Ink, on the naughty cartoon apocalypse:

We therefore call on free-thinking bloggers everywhere to post the images on their sites and, through sheer weight of numbers, defeat those who would deny us our right to freedom of expression. We also request the that the companies that host these blogs do not capitulate to this 21st century inquisition. In particular we expect the British government to respect the vote that was passed in the House of Commons not two days ago.

I'll provide links to the cartoons but I'm not going to reproduce them here, for the same reason I don't post Bernard Manning jokes: I think they're shit.

Some of these cartoons barely pass as art let alone satire. Some of them, in my opinion, are making no other point than attempting to be deliberately inciteful. It's a taste thing, I suppose. If they'd been clever and made me laugh I'd have posted them.

This whole thing is the equivalent of Little Johnny being given detention because he drew a knob on his pencil case (which is actually funnier than these cartoons). It's childish, it's puerile but the seas didn't boil and the skies didn't rain blood. The people who drew some these cartoons are arseholes but, in what we laughingly call our liberal society, we must defend their right to be arseholes. So scribble away lads, somebody, somewhere must find you funny.

And, whatever your faith, if it's not up to withstanding a few rubbish drawings or a sweary opera, then your god clearly isn't as great and powerful as you keep telling us he is. What exactly are you frightened of? Get a bloody grip, eh?

A bridge too far

2006-02-01T22:47:00.000Z

You know, as much as I'm against the war in Iraq and as much as Euan Blair's privileged progression through life gives infuriating lie to his father's ridiculous claims that we all live in a meritocratic society, I can't help but wonder what the point of the likes of this is:

Pte Phillip Hewett was the same age as Euan Blair but while the Prime Minister's son was celebrating a 2:1 at Bristol University, the 21-year-old soldier was returning home for his funeral.

Phillip Hewett's death is a terrible thing, that goes without saying. But the last time I looked the army was staffed by volunteers. It's not like Euan's daddy pulled some strings so the boy could dodge the draft, is it?

And we wonder why the anti-war movement is shafted. I never really got the "why don't these warmongers send their children to fight?" schtick. Instead of asking why rich boys don't go to war, wouldn't we be better served by asking why poor boys do go to war (the clue's in the question).

I'm not sure suggesting that the Prime Minister's son should be shitting bricks on the streets of Basra elevates the argument in our favour. Wishing death or injury on our leaders' children certainly isn't a cable car to the moral highground.

Update: John Harris in The Guardian...

His first spell in the army, including tours of duty in Northern Ireland and Kosovo, lasted until March 2004, when, after a spell in Basra, he decided to leave. He had met Sarah McLaren, a local girl who was now pregnant, and he had resolved to stay in Glenrothes. "He left to be with her," says Martin. "He was a young guy, maybe a bit paranoid, thinking, 'What will she be up to if I'm in Iraq or wherever?' But as soon as he was out, he thought, 'Why did I do that?'"

...

After three months living on benefits, he decided to return to the army. "He knew he was going back to Iraq," says Martin. "I said, 'Scott - why are you doing it?' He said, 'I'm fed up not being able to get a job that's satisfying.' Sarah was pregnant, and they were planning to get married, and they wanted to have a financial future for the kid.

"As strange as it might sound, I had an inkling he was never coming back that day, when I said goodbye to him. I was never emotional with him, and that day I was. He never had much money, 'cos he was living off the dole. So I gave him money for him and his missus to go and have a meal and make his last night a night to remember. And I said it to someone that evening: 'I doubt we'll see Scott again.'"

2006-02-01T21:37:00.000Z

A bunch of notables for anybody fancying a change of scene...

The Federation of American Scientists have launched a couple of blogs: Secrecy News, which is a mirror of Steven Aftergood's estimable Secrecy News email newsletter, and the Strategic Security Project Blog, which is going to cover all kinds of goodies such as nuclear weapons, arms control and biosecurity.

I found the PhysOrg mailing list via Warren Ellis' site. It details what's hot in science, physics and space and is great for the occasional "they can do what now?" moment.

PS. This is the greatest achievement of human endeavour. It's the end of history. Pack up and go home everybody.

Try it, it's life affirming. When the cataclysm finally strikes and those of us who survive are eking out our miserable, brutal existence in the Arctic Circle, it will come as huge consolation when you remember you once got the best Doctor Who to ring your Mum and Dad to tell them you loved them.

Battlefield medicine

2006-01-31T21:38:00.000Z

I hope the Government has appointed a Webchat Tsar to oversee the avalanche of Whitehall-sponsored internet interaction currently engulfing us.

I know we're all dancing in the streets right now, celebrating our unfettered access to the great and the good. An old lady on the bus told me how she thought "that Louise Casey seems such a nice, comfortingly vague woman" and my local shopkeeper is cock-a-hoop at the prospect of having his question carefully vetted before submission to Margaret Hodge who might answer it if he's been successful in phrasing it as a slightly concerned compliment. But it won't last. One day webchat fatigue will finally set in and the great British public will turn back to its Proust and Rachmaninov, leaving the likes of poor Louise sitting alone, stabbing out "HeLlO? helo?" with her meaty fingers.

The next brave soul to try and slake the British public's unquenchable thirst for being patronised and told half-truths is Dr David Colin-Thome, National Clinical Director for Primary Care. I like that "Clinical" bit. It adds a dash of gravitas and tells those who don't know what Primary Care is (and let's face it, why should they?) that his job is something to do with operations and bandages.

Anyway. It's his job to spike the guns of criticism being trained on the proposed NHS reforms. Or "Make your voice heard on NHS reforms" as this rally is being billed.

And with joy-sapping inevitability, that paradoxically also always seems to come as a surprise, the NHS reform white paper comes with the requisite ragged farting trumpet fanfare of eye-catching initiatives. Health MOTs and "health trainers". Why does that make me think of pedometers and "community matrons"? Health MOTs are such a witless idea that even no less august an organ than the New Labour in-house magazine got stuck in:

Patients who request the new NHS "Life Check" won't see a doctor - but simply be handed a tick-box questionnaire.

Their answers will be looked at by advisers who will suggest ways to improve their lifestyle.

They will not even get a lung test like the one taken by PM Tony Blair when he launched the scheme yesterday.

Of course if (and I can't stress that if enough) Health MOTs do come into being, the system will live and die by how honest the respondents choose to be on their forms. The last time I was honest on a doctor's form about how much I drink and smoke was before I was allowed to drink and smoke. Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt will receive the results of the questionnaires and think the British public are collectively clean-limbed and clear-eyed with a lung capacity to shame a Tour de France winner. "We're cutting funding to the NHS," she'll be able to say to Parliament, in the belief that we're all olympian Übermenschen, "because extensive research carried out by GPs across the country shows there is no need for the NHS!".

As an aside, Mary Riddell, writing in the Observer this week, tells of meeting a woman at a party who "introduced herself to all and sundry as the voice coach of the host, a serving cabinet member". After hearing Patricia Hewitt being interviewed on the radio over the last few days I can't help wondering if it was her voice coach Riddell met. She's certainly sounding less patronising of late. "Try and tone down the side of your voice that makes you sound like you're directing a five year-old Japanese tourist, who doesn't speak English, to the ickle bunny rabbit farm," you can hear the coach saying. This, I would argue, is proving something of a double-edged sword for Hewitt. While I found myself mercifully less infuriated at how she was speaking, I found myself on the verge of a stress-induced stroke now that I was able to concentrate on what she was saying.

The proposal to have doctors available in supermarkets is also an idea that should have all fans of ill-thought out, fag-packet initiatives hugging themselves with glee. I for one can't wait until Tesco's shareholders cotton onto the fact that store-based doctors are advising customers, who've waddled in for a check-up while doing the weekly shop, that the reason they're hypertense diabetic leviathans is because they're shoving too many buy-one-get-one-free cream cakes and 13%-mechanically-recovered-turkey hot dogs into their gaping maws while shotgunning too many eight-for-seven-quid cans of Stella Artois.

But then the realisation. These so-called eye-catching initiatives are just that. They're a trap. Misdirection. While we're enjoying the natural high of feeling superior to people who peddle ideas that must have been produced by a random word generating computer program ("Health MOT", "Supermarket Doctor". Stay tuned for "Jet-propelled Nurse" and "Coal-fired Appendectomy"*) written by a disastrously inbred chimpanzee who was wearing boxing gloves and coming up on horse tranquilliser at the time, we're not looking at the real substance of the white paper like the issues of greater private sector involvement in the provision of health care.

It's here that I miserably suggest that Alan Milburn is right when he says:

Since last year's election victory New Labour has won an even more crucial battle - the ideological one.

...and Squit the Younger is right when he says:

The change we are making recognises that we have won the battle of ideas.

They're both right in the sense that there's nothing to distinguish the Blairites' monkey-see-monkey-do Thatcherism from the Cameroons' walks-like-a-duck-quacks-like-a-duck Blairism. (Or, for that matter, their cookie-cutter, cliched, read-some-decent-books-you-smooth-between-the-ears-bastards, stifling, insulting, passionless, can-I-go-home-yet?, unimaginative, identical, any-old-shit-will-do, and utterly, utterly depressing use of language.)

The consensus has been reached. You can see why the likes of Nick Cohen and David Aaronovitch get the most pleasure out of attacking the stereotype (largely of their creation) of their despot-appeasing comrades on the rump of the Left and are increasingly one note. They're like the fish trapped in the African lake as the unforgiving sun dries it to a pond, to a puddle, and finally to constricting, panicking mud. There's not much left of what used to pass for political debate in the UK, particularly on the Left (although if Cameron gets his way, the Right won't be laughing for long either) and what does remain must be jealously guarded.

If I were to voice my entrenched views questioning the morality of making a profit from the provision of healthcare I can probably expect to be attacked on two fronts: From the Thatcherite Right, who at least have the respectable position of ideology, and from the Blairite "Left" who deserve little respect speaking, as they are, from the bottom of the bear trap dug by the Conservatives and the right-wing press during the Labour Party's wilderness years - Blair, Kinnock and the rest believed the myths about the Loony Left and "Baa Baa Green Sheep" and the propaganda about the financial incompetence of the Callaghan Government (I recently read a very plausible account that Jim Callaghan's Labour Government ran aground in 1979 while trying to clear up the mess caused by the rampant inflation unleashed by Conservative Prime Minsiter Edward Heath's unfettering of consumer credit in 1973) and obligingly shifted right-wards.

Neither Cameron nor Blair want to go back to the bad old days. It's just that the Blairites (but not necessarily Blair) are wincing at faded news cuttings from the Sun and Cameron is sniggering behind his hand. Still, it boils down to the same thing. Whether you're Thatcherite or neo-Thatcherite, the crimes committed by the likes of me are those of antiquated sentimentality, a harking back to a golden age that either didn't exist or was strangled at birth and clinging to a logic that observes that taking resources out of a closed system means less resources within that system. Milburn and Cameron disagree about who actually won their dick-swinging contest when in truth they both did.

What's left for me and my kind is the scrap of enjoyment from the rosy glow of moral superiority over the cowards and misanthropes we have in fact, through our apathy, indolence or self-destructiveness, allowed to spoil it for everybody.

*I'm enjoying this bit. "PFI Enema", "Community Trepanning", "Faith-based Cauterisation", "Triage Politics"...

In understanding be men

2006-01-31T16:50:00.000Z

It remains to be seen whether he can develop substance alongside style...

That's Alan Milburn, taking a break from hurling rocks from his conservatory, writing about David Cameron in the Observer on Sunday.

...Or whether the Tories are so hungry for power they will digest an unpalatable diet of policy U-turns.

Don't mention the (Clause) Four. Milburn is spectacularly lacking in self-awareness, principle, shame and, it would seem, long term memory. That's how he can say what he does and why he can be safely ignored, except for the purposes of sport, as the political equivalent of John Mills' character in Ryan's Daughter.

You have to feel a little sorry for Tony Blair though, since Cameron's arrival. The new Tory leader sheds his principles like, well, a power-starved politician shedding his principles, and sets about systematically alienating his party while u-turning on a sixpence, and the media are all like, "wow, look at him go!", forgetting that Blair did it all before 12 years ago.

Tony must feel like the older sibling of a toddler. Sure, Tony can walk and talk but the little fella's so much cuter, just finding his feet and saying the funniest things. It makes you wonder if all the fussin' and a'feudin' over the education reform bill isn't Tony making some kind of jealous cry for attention.

"Look at me everybody", he trills as everyone coos over the antics of the youngster, "I can still piss off the activists and tear up what little of my party's heritage hasn't been incinerated by my blowtorch vanity". But those who do pay him any attention just tell him to stop being so silly. Maybe one or two people looking at Cameron say, "aw, remember when Tony used to do that, wasn't he cute?"

But Tony's not cute any more. Talking like a baby isn't that endearing when you're not a baby. People expect a little maturity and get cross when you don't show it. David on the other hand can say he wants to be like Tony when he grows up and everybody laughs encouragingly as he shuffles round in his big brother's boots. Just as we did when Tony tottered around in his mum's high heels back in 1994. When he does that now people just thinks it's creepy, like Norman Bates in his mother's dress.

Frying pans and fires

2006-01-31T11:54:00.000Z

Iraqi Tourism Minister Hashem al-Hashemi has been made interim Oil Minister after Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum successfully resigned from the post on his second attempt.

There's a dark "unluckiest man in the world" joke in there somewhere. Has al-Hashemi been promoted or demoted here? He's moved from a poisoned chalice to a poisoned trough. His next elevation will probably see him parading the street of Baghdad wearing a sandwich board featuring a photoshopped picture of Saddam Hussein and Abu Musab al Zarqawi in a homoerotic clinch.

Poor Mr al-Hashemi's predicament brought a shard of my Catholic indoctrination back to me. I remembered that Saint Jude is the patron saint for lost causes and desperate situations, but a little googling tells me that he's also been sent reinforcements in the shape of Saints Eustace, Rita of Cascia and Gregory the Wonderworker (he vanquished demons and moved large stones with the power of his faith, apparently).

Like a Catholic Fantastic Four. Let's hope they're feeling ecumenical as al-Hashemi steps up.

2006-01-31T11:19:00.000Z

Spiked: Whatever happened to the anti-war movement?
The case for war has been worn thin, and Bush and Blair's political authority has gone with it. Yet the striking thing is that, at precisely the same time, the leading anti-war voices in British politics are in disarray. Galloway's Respect Party and Charles Kennedy's Liberal Democrats were among the most prominent opponents of the Iraq war. The speed and apparent ease with which both have been thrown into crisis exposes the myth of the powerful anti-war movement.

(Via The Sharpener)

House!

2006-01-31T09:55:00.000Z

BBC News: UK soldier killed in Iraq blast
A British soldier has been killed in an explosion in southern Iraq - the 100th to die since the 2003 invasion.

Tomorrow's front pages will write themselves. No doubt some newspapers have had their 10 x 10 grids of the dead soldiers' faces (minus the final two, like a serial killer's bingo card) ready to go since November and are feverishly scrambling for the last pieces to this jigsaw of squandered lives.

So, a time for reflection, a time for lazy journalism. Let's hope there's some decent analysis among all the stuff about the glorious dead. (Will Blair dare mark the occasion with more than the usual passing reference at Prime Minister's Questions tomorrow?)

Let's see how many times the phrase "grim milestone" is used by soulless hacks straining for deathless prose.

Update: Marching in step, the demoralising herdthink. We have a melancholy milestone from George Galloway and a tragic milestone from Michael Moore, Liberal Democrat Shadow Defence Secretary. The Glasgow Evening Star gives us the first grim milestone.

Update 1/2/06: Peter in the comments beat me to it.

The Independent went for the 10x10 grid (on page 2) and the "grim milestone". They weren't the only ones to go that extra mile in search of cliche. Daily Mail: "grim milestone". Telegraph: "grim milestone". Channel 4 News (written by the great Jon Snow no less): "grim milestone".

WWWWWH #3

2006-01-31T08:15:00.000Z

Welcome to Chicken Yoghurt's third WWWWWH. Each week a blogger is interviewed according to the golden rules of journalism, the Six Ws: Who, What, Where, Why, When and... How. Think of it as a mock execution without the mockery. Or the execution.

This week, the hammer falls on the empty chamber for Andrew, proprietor of the Bartlett's Bizarre Bazaar emporium (est. 2004).

Who are you?
A wannabe bearded left-wing public intellectual. Failing that, a bearded left-wing comic book writer. Hmmm, I am getting too old to play rugby for a living… Oh, who are you? I am a Yorkshireman, and alien in Wales.

What are you?
Too short, too slow, too soft. A habitual self-abuser, with a secret taste for right-wing websites that yields nothing but spectacular bursts of high blood-pressure that cannot help but send me blind.

Where are you?
Safe in an ivory tower. In fact, given that I am supposedly a sociologist of science, the ivory tower that I inhabit is, Russian doll-like, contained within another.

When are you?
In bed by eleven, even though my most productive writing hours are the small hours of the morning. And so usually I am way past any deadlines that I might have.

Why are you?
The inevitable product of material forces, the end-point of the unfolding of history. Or more likely, I am the intellectual product of innumerable irrelevant books and employability sapping bouts of education, the physically degraded result of scrummages and boozed-up binges, and the rootless cosmopolitan consequence of a life spent without a place to call home.

How are you?
I can hardly complain. Actually, I ought not complain.

Last week's WWWWWH can be found here.

Webchats: the new sliced bread

2006-01-30T13:53:00.000Z

Hurtling on from the runaway success of the "live" webchat (not so much the white heat of technology as the grey tepidity of unenthusiastic two-fingered typing) with Louise Casey, the Government's Anti-Social Behaviour Kaiser, we're now invited to send questions to Margaret "milk of human kindess" Hodge as she drinks deeply from her own poisoned chalice, live on the interweb, and tries to sell the proposed incapacity benefit reforms.

Here's my questions.

Margaret, you plan to take one million people off incapacity benefits. Where, do you think, will those jobs come from?

...and...

Do you, considering the laws of supply and demand, expect one million more workers entering the job market to have any effect on wage levels?

Margaret's on deck at 10.15AM on Thursday Feb 2. Dave Weeden currently holds the trophy for actually getting a question answered during a Government web rally. Andrew B, they're playing your song.

In related news, Jon Ronson has grave tidings for the call centre industry.

Dirty deeds done dirt cheap

2006-01-30T10:47:00.000Z

I probably won't be the only one to make this point, the British blogscape being peppered with complacent, glib bastards and their over-developed sense of fair play, sorry, moral equivalence. But I think this is a cheap shot worth making.

The leak of the Independent Police Complaints Commission's report investigating the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes alleges that the surveillance team who wrongly identified him as a suicide bomber doctored the records in an attempt to cover up their involvement in the debacle.

Still, no harm done. Just identify the culprit, slap him on the wrist and allow him to retire early due to ill health on full pension. The very model of police justice.

Just one snag.

The Daily Mail: Those on duty that day all deny involvement, which means the Independent Police Complaints Commission finds it difficult, if not impossible, to establish the truth.

When something happens in our house (spilt milk, felt tip pen marks on the sofa, the guinea pig shot eight times, that kind of thing) and nobody will admit they're responsible, we say "the fairies must have done it". In between getting my five year-old into trouble, those fairies are clearly busy stitching up special branch coppers.

I've said this before but when my brother and I were young and one of us had been up to no good but wouldn't confess, my dad would crack us both "to make sure he got the right one". It never did me any harm. Apart from engendering a white hot, near-pathological hatred of injustice, of course.

So, why not apply this methodology to the de Menezes surveillance team? Some may be guilty and some may be innocent but the actions of at least some of them it seems led directly to an atrocity being committed on the streets of London. They must all, of course and regardless of the evidence, be held without trial. As Charles Clarke once said: "There remains a public emergency threatening the life of the nation". These men are, clearly and maybe, a possible and potential danger to the public. Belmarsh would seem suitable for such men and they can all be assigned a letter to protect their identities. I think we're up to Q already.

Maybe, to get to the bottom of all this we could try a little "harsh treatment". Nothing too drastic, maybe just the odd mock execution or a long stand? (Who, after all, as a callow youth, wasn't sent out for a "long stand" by joshing workmates and suffered nothing more than mocking laughter ringing in their ears?)

And naturally, it needn't be us getting our hands dirty. We could bundle the team onto one of those CIA planes, that Tony Blair knows nothing about, stopping here on its way to Syria or Uzbekistan or wherever. It'll also save on expenses and could double up as an exchange programme - our boys gaining first hand knowledge of how the Syrian secret police do things on their manor.

After all, we do not agree with the use of torture. Is that an absolute rule? Absolute in this sense, that you say 'Look, it is simply the civil liberties of the suspect, or simply the liberties of freedom from being shot in the head on the tube'. You have to balance those two things.

I also say it is wrong to frame this debate simply in terms of the civil liberties of suspects. Of course their liberties are important, but so are the liberties of the people who may be victims of a police shooting, what about their most basic civil liberty - the right to life?

Offski

2006-01-26T14:43:00.000Z

...Up North, where beer, house prices and life are all considerably cheaper than down here, for the weekend. To Blackpool, land of my birth to be exact, Europe's largest Fight Club.

For those who've never been, imagine a remake of Escape From New York scripted by an Absinthe-fuelled Michael Barrymore and whose cast members have been forced to eat nothing but cream cakes for six months.

When a man is tired of Blackpool he is tired of pavements slick with vomit. Ah, Blackpool, land of contrasts. Its town centre's night time denizens comprising exclusively of disconcertingly sexually agressive mental defectives. Its day times filled with the perfumes of overcooked chips and rotting sea breezes.

Back Monday.

2006-01-25T11:59:00.000Z

Media Lens: Paved With Good Intentions - Iraq Body Count - Part 1

In December the Independent on Sunday made fleeting mention of Iraqi casualties in its review of 2005:

"Death toll in Iraq war stands at 30,000 Iraqis, 2,140 US soldiers and 97 British service personnel." (Independent on Sunday, December 18, 2005)

This was clearly a reference to the IBC total - for +civilians+, not all Iraqis. But anyway, as we have seen, the IBC figure is selective in its sources, is the lowest estimate of eight serious studies, and relies on "professional rigour" in the Western media that does not exist.

2006-01-24T21:39:00.000Z

George Monbiot: Building bigger nuclear weapons will make us even less secure

Three weeks ago, the Royal Navy announced that it is spending £125m upgrading the Faslane naval base on the River Clyde in Scotland. The base houses the submarines which carry the UK's Trident missiles... [T]he spending has been approved before parliament or the public has had a chance to decide whether it is necessary: what it means, in effect, is that the Trident replacement programme has already begun.

Minor 49'er

2006-01-24T18:15:00.000Z

I've been tagged by Young Mr Ayling to do this bloody 7x7 meme. He'll pay, oh yes, he'll pay. Maybe not now...

Anyway, without further ado...

Seven Things To Do Before I Die
1. See a Labour government
2. Meet Elvis Costello
3. Go to New York
4. Eliminate the need for sleep
5. Hear the lamentations of my enemies' women
6. Wembley Stadium
7. Attain immortality

Seven Things I Cannot Do
1. Long division
2. Listen to Leonard Cohen
3. Eat broccoli
4. Or cauliflower
5. Not have the telly or the radio on
6. See the point
7. Take it any more

Seven Things That Attract Me to… the Mrs
1. Sleepy
2. Sneezy
3. Bashful
4. Grumpy
5. Dopey
6. Happy
7. Doc Martens

Seven Things I Say
1. In a minute
2. For fuck's sake
3. Mañana
4. I'm never drinking again
5. You'll never go bust appealing to the lowest common denominator
6. I'm not a scouser
7. Say that again, you're breaking up

Seven Books That I Love
1. Crime and Punishment
2. London Fields
3. Catch-22
4. The Man Who Was Thursday
5. Foucault's Pendulum
6. Our Man in Havana
7. The Selfish Gene

Seven Movies That I’ve Loved (at different times and in no particular order)
1. Brazil
2. Aguirre, the Wrath of God
3. Hobson's Choice
4. The Empire Strikes Back
5. Hudson Hawk
6. The Conversation
7. Seven

Seven People To Tag (in no particular order)
1. Jarndyce
2. Nosemonkey
3. Jim Bliss
4. Rochenko
5. Larry
6. Bag of Bears
7. Snooo

That'll teach them to mess with me.

WWWWWH #2

2006-01-24T07:45:00.000Z

Welcome to Chicken Yoghurt's second WWWWWH. Each week a blogger is interviewed according to the golden rules of journalism, the Six Ws: Who, What, Where, Why, When and... How. Think of it as waterboarding without all that unpleasant mock-drowning.

This week, the hood is pulled off to reveal the internet's foremost lady of letters, Esther Wilberforce-Packard, illuminator of Topic Drift and Minneapolis' very own Esther Wilberforce-Packard.

Who are you?
Already I'm uncomfortable with the tone of these questions. How much detail is appropriate, I wonder? Do you think Amelia Earhart perished in the crash, or do you think she was captured by Japanese fishermen? Personally, I think she survived the crash but died in a tree. "I'm tired of life on this island," she told Fred Noonan. "I say, is there a sandwich in that tree?" It was a sandwich, but she couldn't eat it. The anorexia got her in the end. Then came the carnivorous tree ants.

What are you?
What am I what? What am I... doing? Wearing? Reading? Pfff. Nobody cares about that stuff. People are interested in one thing: real estate. It is as old as mankind, the love of real estate. And not just real estate; many people also love sport. My advice to you is simple: build your house on a tennis court.

Where are you?
I am in Uptown Minneapolis in Minnesota in America. I was about to type "United States," but I don't like to think of the states as united. Most of the states are a complete loss and contribute nothing to the general weal. Missouri doesn't pull it's weight, and that congresswoman from California scares me in my sleep. The only real states are Minnesota and Manitoba, and Manitoba doesn't always count because it's technically Canada. What I'm trying to say is that we all know the English drink too much.

When are you?
I'm usually early, but that's because I walk very quickly. Some of my most intense anxiety occurs when I'm walking down the street at my usual top speed and some guy in front of me is walking only slightly slower than me. This means that I have to slow down and just let the man walk in front of me, which is impractical, or maintain my speed and pass him, but pass him at a slow rate, as he is also walking very quickly but not as quickly as me. Are you getting this? I must, by default, walk WITH the man for several paces! Intolerable intimacy, considering the circumstances.

Why are you?
Not sure. I don't have an answer for this one. I just had an idea, however. Over the past year I've read several articles about the international hotel bedbug epidemic. I was worried that I'd never sleep in a hotel again. But here's where my new idea comes in: don't sleep in the hotel beds! It's brilliant. Sleep on the desk. But what if your room has no desk? The bathtub will do. But you will have to bring your own tub cleaner, because they don't clean the tub floor. They only clean the sides.

How are you?
Fine. I'm fine.

Much to ponder there, I think. Join us next week when our guest will be...

(Last week's detainee can be found here.)

Oaten

2006-01-22T17:10:00.000Z

What a bloody disgrace. Does this kind of thing really still sell newspapers? In the 21st century? Are people really that lacking in their own lives? What the hell has this got to do with anyone except Oaten and his family (including two daughters who have to go to school tomorrow)? What Oaten did was wrong, yes. But within the confines of his marriage. To say he's been politically naive is an understatement but that's not a hanging offence yet either.

It seems Oaten has enough problems without the moral adjudicators of a Murdoch newspaper stirring the pot. I suppose, however, we should credit the editor of the News of the World with not patronising his readers. He must, after all, be just about the only person in the country to think that his readers would know who Mark Oaten is. I bet most of them picked up the paper this morning and thought little Mark from Take That had been outed. And then turned to see what Sven's been up to this week.

And like Nosemonkey says, it's the use of language that sickens as well. "Rent boy". The rest of the media dutifully fell into line. I suppose "male prostitute" was considered too politically correct as well as failing to add the strong dash of tawdry prurience that this story demands. It didn't conjure up the right amount of homophobic revulsion.

None other than Guido Fawkes himself is claiming Oaten's corpse. He says he outed Oaten in a drunken podcast that made its way as far as that august journal of public morality, Popbitch. He also gives some self-serving, arse-covering excuse about Oaten having been hypocritical over the Government's plans for prostitution. If this is the kind of thing bloggers need to do to get noticed then I for one want no part of it. And if this turns out to be the first stripe British bloggers earn ("British bloggers claim first scalp"), it will have been scrawled with a turd.

UPDATE: Tim Ireland has a partial transcript of Guido Fawkes' and Recess Monkey's podcast. You can make up your own mind but I think reveals them as sniggering little homophobes who like to conflate homosexuality with paedophilia. I'm prepared to be put right on that naturally.

Both of them have left comments on this post attempting to explain themselves.

UPDATE: So there we have it. I've heard the famous podcast.

Once you get past the fact it sounds like two O-level Politics students having their first pint (ie, it's sweary rubbish available on a myriad of blogs, including this one), the stuff about Oaten is, as Tim Ireland says, cracks about Oaten looking like a paedophile tempered with innuendo about Simon Hughes' sexuality (he's got a friend called Dorothy, apparently). All very childish, all very grotty but, in the end, it was The Screws wot done it. As Guido says in the comments below, a new podcast is out on Wednesday. I'll leave to you to decide why he'd see the need to jump on the NOTW's coat-tails.

...

Max Hastings: It's simpler to damn a man for his sexual lapses than for his policies

[I]nstead of discussing where the Lib Dems propose to position themselves in British politics - a really interesting question - we can expect days of debate about the merits of three-in-a-bed. The British media have a poor record of uncovering misgovernment, mismanagement and financial chicanery in high places. We lead the world only in exposing bonkers.

The Last Word (for now): That Oaten has been a fool seems indisputable - he built the prison he now sits in. Support for Oaten was conspicuous by its absence from his parliamentary colleagues today. Not even Lembit Opik, who had backed Oaten for the leadership and had been admirably fire and brimstone in his defence of Charles Kennedy, could muster words of any warmth. Every time something like this happens, you think that, for the sake of friendship or camaraderie or empathy or whatever, a colleague will speak out in support, at least acknowledge the dark place in which their friends find themselves, take the risk for pity's sake. But no, it never happens. Oaten is now unclean and those with ruthless ambitions must get far away for fear of drawing the taint towards them. It's a dirty world.

Jarndyce rounds off the day.

Britblog Roundup # 49

2006-01-22T17:02:00.000Z

...is now being served.

2006-01-22T11:08:00.000Z

Observer: Kelly accused of hiding key evidence on school reform

Ruth Kelly has suppressed a crucial report warning her plans for schools could drive a wedge between rich and poor children, The Observer can reveal.
The academic research warns that giving schools control over which pupils they admit could increase social segregation. This is precisely the claim made by Labour MPs in revolt over the reforms and until now denied by Kelly.

Its authors have been told by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) to postpone publication of their study, which will not now be released to the Commons Education Select Committee which is set to report on the Kelly's education white paper this week...

2006-01-22T10:07:00.000Z

Independent: Westminster 'misled' over CIA torture flights

Pressure over the use of British airports for secret CIA torture flights increased dramatically yesterday after it emerged that a Foreign Office minister misled Parliament over a meeting between the UN and UK civil servants about the issue.

When innocence in no defence

2006-01-21T18:22:00.000Z

It's all a matter of perspective. When is innocent not innocent? When you're Stuart Hyde, Assistant Chief Constable of West Midlands Police, who speaks on DNA for the Association of Chief Police Officers.

Hyde was interviewed on Radio 4's PM programme this evening* on the subject of collecting and keeping on a database, the DNA of children who have been neither cautioned or convicted of any offence:

Hyde: We're not abusing any liberties other than to reduce and detect crime... This is not a criminal conviction, this is a reference database that we can use not just to identify people who are responsible, much more importantly, to eliminate people from enquiries before we even get to speak to them...

Isn't that kind? Stuart Hyde: taking the police work out of police work. If some DNA evidence turns up at a crime scene they can run it against the database of all those people just to make sure they're still innocent. Don't worry sir, we can re-establish your innocence in a matter of moments. Everyone's a suspect until the computer says they're not.

It would certainly make episodes of Poirot more... far reaching:

Poirot: Ladies and gentlemen, I'm afraid there has been a murder.

(Women faint. Men shout, "I say! Jolly bad show!")

Poirot: Now, ladies and gentlemen, I must ask that that you all remain where you are. Nobody must leave this country until I have eliminated you from my enquiries. Officer, do we have the butler's DNA?

A murder in John O'Groats? Let's make sure it wasn't that bloke in Land's End. Nobody, it would seem, falls into the clutches of the police for nothing. Except Gerry Conlon, obviously. Hyde also said he'd be in favour of cataloguing every man jack of us, innocent or guilty. He went on:

We are looking after that data, we are looking after it properly and we have some of the most strict guidelines in the world for making sure that it's safe and secure.

Interviewer: Even if you're holding, as we speak, the DNA detail of a hundred thousand innocent people?

Hyde: We're holding the details of a hundred thousand people who were arrested in relation to criminal offences within the UK.

It's semantically true, of course, but the innuendo is there nevertheless. In other words, they must have been up to something or why else would they have been arrested? The police just didn't have enough to pin it on them. Translation: Innocent? You may think that...

Does anybody know the penalty for refusing to give a DNA sample?

*The interview will be on the PM website until Monday evening. The segment's right at the beginning lasts 12 minutes or so.

UPDATE: Interesting. Home Office Minister and ID Card fall guy, Andy Burnham on the Today programme, this morning (interview here, RealPlayer required)...

The DNA database is not a criminal record. There are proper safeguards in place as to how information stored on there can be used, and it focuses around the prevention and detection of crime.

Now, I don't know about you but that sounds to me incredibly similar to what Stuart Hyde said on PM. I mean practically identical in content.

Hyde: This is not a criminal conviction...
Burnham: The DNA database is not a criminal record...

Hyde: We are looking after that data, we are looking after it properly and we have some of the most strict guidelines in the world for making sure that it's safe and secure
Burnham: There are proper safeguards in place as to how information stored on there can be used...

Hyde: We're not abusing any liberties other than to reduce and detect crime...
Burnham: It focuses around the prevention and detection of crime...

It looks very much to me as if the government and the police (as Sir Ian Blair reminded us, an apolitical organisation) have colluded on an agreed line to take on this matter. What other explanation? Mental telepathy? Did Hyde copy Burnham's homework?

Just who's representing who's interests here? It's like the 90 Day detention lobbying all over again. You know, when the police lobbied the Government and so the Government lobbied the police to lobby reluctant backbenchers?

Burnham was on Channel Five's news headlines as well tonight, spouting the old "if you're innocent, you've nothing to fear". It's a line he likes to drop into conversation whenever he can. Not only is it a rancid little pitch to the prejudices of the ignorant it also happens to be blackly, filthily false.

Now, it's likely Burnham's career is going to be wrecked when the groaning ID Cards boiler finally explodes in what most people expect to be a spectacular fashion. And little sympathy may it garner him. He's obviously desperate and willing to sow fear and false reassurances in order to save both the project and his neck. He is, after all, shilling a "Freedom is Slavery" ticket. He really believes you can sell horse manure to people by telling them it's ice cream.

Catalogue model

2006-01-21T09:51:00.000Z

So, Charles Falconer, the UK's foremost unelected flatmate sounds off on ID cards:

BBC News: ID cards 'should be compulsory'
Lord Falconer told BBC Radio Four's Any Questions: "The question is should you require - and I think ultimately, unless there is compulsion, you won't get the benefits of an ID card system - is it right to compel those that don't have a passport also to get an ID card?

"I think it is, I think it will become inevitable that you need reliable means of identification, both to stop people stealing your identity, and also making it much, much easier for you to deal with the state."

He neglects to mention it's also to make it much easier for the state to deal with you.

New Labour should ditch ID cards and divert their energies into ensuring their Thousand Year Reich - play the long game. The rate at which they're cataloguing our children means they'll probably have most of the population on file within a couple of generations.

The Prime Minister was 24 carat on the subject of ID cards at Prime Minister's Questions this week...

As for the calculations made by the LSE, I think that I am right that, although the report was put out under the LSE's name, it was actually written by the leading campaigner against ID cards on the ground of civil liberties. So I do not think that it is an entirely objective assessment.

...showing all the self awareness of a man who's main line of persuasion on war with Iraq reduced down to little more than "you're going to have to trust me on this" and "it's what I believe". Still, playing the man, what a bastard trick, eh?

The reasons for having ID cards are ever narrowing. They won't save anyone's life for a start. But the Prime Minister is adamant that they will stop a new breed of "early 21st century" crime. It's a disease and biometrics are the cure. Let's see if we can spot what it is from his answers in the House this week:

Because if we introduce an ID card scheme and reduce identity fraud, that makes a major difference to the costs of Government and the costs of doing business. In today's world, if we want to tackle illegal migration, crime and identity fraud, using the new biometric technology to have ID cards is an important part of doing so.

...and...

Why are ID cards so important now? Because we know, from all the available evidence, that identity fraud is on the increase—that is bound to happen in the modern world. Many people, including the former leader of the Conservative party, reached the conclusion that we need identity cards, and it is right to do that now because the biometric technology is coming in. Other countries are moving towards biometric passports and we will have to do that. The largest part of the cost of an identity card will be the biometric passport, which we must have. I assume that the right hon. Gentleman is in favour of the biometric passport; perhaps he could elucidate that—we know that his policy tends to shift a little quickly nowadays.

We need the identity card to fight crime, illegal migration and identity fraud in the early 21st century and the costs will be largely met by the biometric passport.

I love the "we need identity cards, and it is right to do that now because the biometric technology is coming in". We can so we should. He's like James Bond nemesis Blofeld and his plans for world domination. In the next Bond film, the villain will be a middle manager with a god complex promoted to his level of incompetence:

We need to blow up London, and it is right to do that now because the satellite made of diamonds is coming in.

And onwards...

With the greatest respect, he should think again about the matter. We will have to introduce biometric passports—I know that he agrees with that—and we will therefore have to make enormous changes in the years to come for the vast bulk of people who have passports. Identity fraud is also a major and growing problem. People throughout the world are moving towards identity card systems because they are necessary to tackle the problems of today's world. Of course there is a cost to identity cards but there is a cost to identity fraud in so many different ways.

He does go on about it, doesn't he? I hope it's all to do with him desperately trying to sell a pup and not something more deep-seated and festering. Imagine him before a public appearance splashing cold water on his face and chanting "You are Tony Blair, you are Tony Blair, you are Tony Blair" into the mirror. His ID card could be a little mirror he takes everywhere. Some positive reinforcement that he isn't just a uncomfortable grin and a thinning bouffant, a bucket into which business pours its interests.

Anyway. Identity fraud. It's a problem. It would, of course, be less of a problem if the Government's tax credit system wasn't the "low hanging fruit" of the identity fraud racket.

BBC News: Tax credit fraud hits Job Centres
Up to 13,000 Job Centre staff may have had personal details stolen by criminals making fraudulent claims for tax credits.

...and...

BBC News: Treasury denies tax fraud 'chaos'
The Treasury has denied a fraud carried out on thousands of Network Rail staff shows the tax system is in crisis.

The system gives nothing more than the impression of having been written for someone's GCSE Computer Studies project.

So the solution is to sit another massively complicated computer system (with all the overruns, bugs, recriminations and budget bloat that that entails) over the top of the old, massively complicated computer systems, like a filthy rag on a weeping sore.

When I worked in IT, bugs and system crashes caused by programs we had written were know as "factoring in the overtime". New programs and fixes had to be written and overnight callouts to fix system crashes were paid at double time. The ID Cards are merely this thinking factored up beyond the dreams of the avarice of an IT contractor.

2006-01-20T15:33:00.000Z

Tim Ireland: The 'limits' of the exclusion zone

On Saturday 14th Jan 2006, I went on a little pilgrimage to the exclusion zone, and gathered some data. I began with a map and the limits of the zone as defined by The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 (Designated Area) Order 2005:

...

Exclusion Zone Fact #3 - The perimeter extends much further beyond Parliament than MPs were expecting when they voted on the Act and, at its very limits, it just happens to cover Labour HQ, both branches of the Home Office and Scotland Yard (i.e. the people responsible for introducing it, and the people responsible for enforcing it)...

Carolyn Quinnraha-Quinnrahan

2006-01-20T14:17:00.000Z

Shifty. Obfuscating. Misdirecting. After years of these kind of comtemptuous insults, if a cabinet minister in this government were to tell you that it was raining, you'd feel compelled to stick your head out of a window to corroborate his statement. If you were to ask Jack Straw if he fancied a cup of tea and a nice biscuit, he'd say:

May I just say this, with regard to the cup of tea and the nice biscuit currently on the table, and this is an important point which I think is worth making...

So how best to tease information from a government minister who doesn't want to give it? (Taking for granted, as the decent types we are, that we can't hold him without trial, waterboard him, or insert a broken bottle into his downstairs.)

Should we make a frontal assault like a Paxman or a Humphrys? Try the firm civility of a Jonathan Dimbleby? How about lulling them into a true sense of security a la Radio 4's Carolyn Quinn?

On the PM programme last night, Quinn interviewed Lord (actually Baron) Adonis, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State in the Department for Education and Skills, after his ministerial colleague Ruth Kelly's performance at the despatch box on the matter of Britain's schools being riddled with fiddlers (any red-top sub-editor passing through here can have that one, gratis). One of Quinn's questions was:

The Prime Minister heard this statement and we're told he thought it was "excellent". Did you?*

Put yourself in Quinn's position for a moment, a prominent broadcaster with enviable access to the greatest and the goodest of The Greater Good, years of experience, given the opportunity to ask to the most searching of questions and get to the bottom of one of the biggest stories of recent weeks, to put our betters on the spot, live on national radio. What would you expect Adonis' answer to be?

a) "It was an excellent statement."
b) "Dunno. S'pose."
c) "Come on! Did you hear it? She boiled down a complex issue to a one size fits all collective punishment solution in order to appease tomorrow's headlines."**
d) Other

If you answered b), c) or d) you should apply for Quinn's job immediately.

Did she run through this interview with her editor beforehand? Maybe "what other nice things is the Government going to do for us?" was deemed a little too challenging.

Carolyn! You've lost the news! What are you going to say?

* Her opening gambit in this tense game of verbal chess was: "Lord Adonis, are you happy that, with this statement, Ruth Kelly has done enough to calm the concerns of parents, teachers and other people out there who really have been confused about what's going on?" Let's just say his answer wasn't "No. Quite honestly, she's fucked."

** I know. But I've being doing some reading and also decided to use my "I Agree With David Aaronovitch" voucher for this year.

2006-01-20T10:37:00.000Z

Control Arms

"Lack of controls on the arms trade is fuelling conflict, poverty and human rights abuses worldwide. Every government is responsible. The Control Arms campaign is asking governments to toughen up controls on the arms trade.

Our Million Faces petition is collecting photos and self portraits from around the world to reach our goal of one million faces by June 2006. We will use these faces to send a powerful, global message of support to the world's governments for an International Arms Trade Treaty."

upload your fizzog >>

2006-01-19T19:32:00.000Z

The Guardian: UK accused of complicity in torture

Human Rights Watch yesterday accused European countries, including Britain, of undermining human rights worldwide by courting countries such as Russia, China and Saudi Arabia while ignoring evidence of their extensive abuses.

...

Mr Roth describes Britain as being "complicit in torture" by sending terrorist suspects back to their native countries even when torture is commonplace. The British government has signed, or is still negotiating, memorandums of understanding with countries in the Middle East and North Africa in which they promise not to torture suspects sent from Britain.

But Human Rights Watch says the memorandums "are not worth the paper they are written on" and said it was impossible for the British government to monitor what happened to suspects returned to their native countries. "Round-the-clock monitoring might deny torturers an opportunity to ply their trade, but Blair, like the Bush government, contemplates only periodic monitoring."

(HRW's World Report 2006 is available, with a number of podcasts, here.)

You ain't from around here, are ya boy?

2006-01-18T18:23:00.000Z

If I can be ooh-look-at-me-aren't-I-the-one for a minute, I once had the opportunity of swimming with wild dolphins off the southern coast of Australia. They didn't come very close and were gone in a flash but the memory of it is vivid - I can still see them in my mind's eye - which you can't say about many experiences in a lifetime.

Before we went into the water, we were told that the dolphins were particularly intrigued by children and, because of the dolphins' keen senses (sonar and whatnot), pregnant women. I remember reading somewhere that an adult dolphin has the intelligence of a seven year old child. Truly amazing creatures. And that's from a bloke who'll eat anything. Rare.

So, when a lone bottlenosed dolphin (christened Marra, the local dialect for "mate") turned up in Maryport harbour in Cumbria you'd expect there to be more than a little excitement. (Trust me, my parents are from Workington, just up the road from there and having visited the town all my life I know you take your kicks where you find them). And so there was, from most. But not all:

BBC News: Dolphin watchers given warnings

The Maritime and Coastguard Agency has teamed up with the RSPCA's maritime division to put posters up around the area urging people to think of the dolphin's welfare and warning them to take care.

Agency deputy station officer Elizabeth Dicken said items like pork pies, cans of lager and footballs had been thrown into the water.

And it was reported on PM on Radio 4 tonight that the authorities were investigating sightings of a man with an air rifle.

Now, I don't want to do the place down - I do have some fondness for the place and the people, after all - but imagine being so fucked in the head that at hearing there's an amazing, life-affirming sight not too far away, your first thought is: "Fetch my bloody gun!" or "There you go Flipper, have a can of Wifebeater". What we need's an Action Plan.

It makes you wonder if any of Marra's *ahem* marras managed to see a copy of the Independent yesterday (you know, washed out of a storm drain or summat) and are counting the days.

Like extra pocket money

2006-01-18T14:18:00.000Z

New Get Your War On. Huzzah!

2006-01-18T10:05:00.000Z

Independent: Denis MacShane: US should talk to Iran, before it's too late
America broke off diplomatic relations after the 1979 overthrow of the Shah and the hostage-taking in the US embassy in Tehran. Now is the time to send an ambassador to Iran - why not Bill Clinton for the first 12 months? - and initiate a new policy of trade, travel, tourism and mass contact between the people of Iran and the West.

The Casey for the defence

2006-01-17T11:22:00.000Z

Further to this, I thought I'd attempt to make my own contribution to Anti-Social Behaviour Czar Louise Casey's webchat this afternoon. I thought keeping it civil was the best approach:

Louise, nobody would deny that something must be done about anti-social behaviour. But I am concerned about the increase in summary powers that, it is proposed, will be given to the police. If an innocent person is wrongly punished under these summary powers, surely this will foster a feeling of resentment rather than respect for authority? Also, a person on low income (innocent or not) may find themselves in real difficulties, particularly if they have family, if forced to pay a spot penalty. Do we not risk making the poor poorer and more desperate?

If other people have a go as well, we could offer a special prize - a rosey glow of self-satisfaction at having struck a blow for webocracy, participated in a shiny new future and accepted that the respect agenda is not driven forward by gimmicks, perhaps - to anyone actually getting their question answered.

A holiday in the Seychelles for anybody getting a straight, satisfactory answer.

UPDATE: Well, we knew it was going to be a big pile of vetted astroturf but this bad? (The transcript is still up for any other self-harmers out there.) You know things are going to be pretty abject when the woman who's supposed to be conducting a webchat about respect turns up a full 20 minutes late.

Kudos to the number of Daily Mail readers who conquered their fear of the modern age in order to submit questions to an interweb chat though. And hearty congratulations to our boy Backword Dave Weeden who actually had a question answered (of a fashion). Salut!

WWWWWH #1

2006-01-17T08:15:00.000Z

Being the indolent type, I'm always looking for stuff for Chicken Yoghurt that writes itself. A few years back there a was a show on Radio 4 called The Sunday Format. If you haven't heard of it, it was the comedy conceit of a broadsheet Sunday newspaper on the radio. One feature was...

Each week we interview a celebrity in strict accordance with journalism's Ten Commandments, the Six Ws: Who, What, Where, Why, When and... How.

To be honest, it's too much of a good idea not to nick and I plan to invite a fellow blogger to participate each week on CY.

So without further ado, the nightmare opening slot is brought to you by the fragrant Pigdogfucker, the hammer and the anvil of public morality.

Who are you? I'm a computer programmed to pick arbitrary news stories and write offensive one-liners about them. And I'd beat Glenn Reynolds in a Turing test any day of the week.

What are you? Offensive, liberal, mildly annoyed, anti-authoritarian, generally amused, and frequently drunk.

Where are you? London: the world's finest city, the cradle of modern development, and the template for the western world. Naturally.

When are you? At my best from 21:00 to 03:00. At my worst from 08:00 to 13:00. Asleep or aiming for it in the interim.

Why are you? God sent me with a mission. I'm hoping by the time I'm 33 I'll work out what it is, then some bastards will nail me to a tree.

How are you? Not bad, considering all the above.

Join us the same time next week, when our guest will be...

2006-01-17T07:52:00.000Z

Blairwatch: Newsnight report a new FOIA Request, by al-Jazeera about the Plot to bomb al-Jazeera. [Audio Clip]
Tonight BBC's Newsnight reported that al Jazeera have filed a new Freedom of Information Request with the UK government about Bush and Blair's conversation about boming al-Jazeera.

2006-01-16T20:32:00.000Z

Reuters: US general dodges questions in detainee abuse case

WASHINGTON, Jan 12 (Reuters) - U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, a key player in the treatment of detainees in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, has invoked his right not to incriminate himself in the cases of two soldiers charged with abusing Abu Ghraib prisoners with dogs, officials said on Thursday.

Fool Britannia

2006-01-16T09:25:00.000Z

So, critics of Gordon Brown's "Britishness Day" headline grabber didn't so much shoot the fish in that particular barrel as take an anti-tank weapon to them. As Gordon picked the sushi and splinters of wood out of his porridge this morning, he must have wondered what the hell's gone wrong. Are the fish getting larger, the barrels smaller or the marksmen sharper?

A few years ago I lived in Staines underneath the Heathrow flightpath. For the first few weeks it was hell as seemingly every few minutes a jet would roar past. But slowly I acclimatised until one day I realised I hardly notice the noise at all any more.

I wonder if that's what's happening with New Labour initiatives. Other than those with blogs and newspaper columns to fill, who gawp at these things wondering how the hell they stay up, who's really paying attention to Brown wrapping himself in the flag or Blair barking, "you have 20 seconds to comply"? Most people busily get on with their lives while yet another focus-grouped idiocy screams over their heads.

Does anybody wake in the night, fretting about what it is to be British? Aren't we more likely to crawl from bed in the morning sagging under the crushing melancholy of the thought our crap jobs, or our roaring hangovers, or the nagging purposelessness that is our post-millenium existence than whether there are enough union flags fluttering in the breeze? Brown, if anything, is to be envied because if this really is close to the top of his agenda he must be just about as carefree as it's possible to get.

Did he really stand at the Cenotaph last November and think, "what this rememberance of all those young men who were shot, bombed, shrapneled and bayonetted needs is the sight of a large black lady dancing with a policeman and wearing his helmet, or maybe a bunch of Chelsea Pensioners jigging arythmically with Girls Aloud"?

I was over in Australia and everyone's like "Are you proud to be an American?" And I was like, "Um, I don't know, I didn't have a lot to do with it. You know, my parents fucked there, that's about all. You know, I was in the spirit realm at that time, going 'FUCK IN PARIS! FUCK IN PARIS!' but they couldn't hear me, because I didn't have a mouth. I was a spirit without lungs or a mouth, or vocal cords. They fucked here. Okay, I'm proud.'"
Bill Hicks

And as Roger McGough said, patriots are a bit nuts in the head. It's all down to an accident of birth, after all. Brown's idea is like calling for a day of celebration for being white or male or having two ears - inherently ridiculous - and if he'd picked any other concept, he'd have been laughed out and/or lynched:

You must have a clear view of what being a brunette means, what you value about being a brunette and what gives us purpose as brunettes.

Why pundits speculate over whether the handover from Blair to Brown will be a "smooth transtion", I'm not quite sure. If Brown's speech is anything to go by, we won't be able to see the join:

[W]e have no constitutional statement or declaration enshrining our objectives as a country; no mission statement defining purpose; and no explicitly stated vision of our future.

Mission statement. As pleased as I'd be to see a written constitution for the UK I think we can be certain that no one with even an ounce of romance in their souls would be allowed within a hundred miles of the drafting process.

Brown's brainchild should certainly keep the honours system ticking as well:

I am meeting all faith groups to discuss community service. And shortly I will meet business organisations.

And I thank businesses who have already signed up as pioneer sponsors for this idea and today I invite and urge businesses to match fund £100 million – £50 million each from government and business – for long-term funding for this new idea.

I wonder how many peerages, knighthoods and C/M/OBE's £50 million buys.

2006-01-16T09:19:00.000Z

Kitty Killer: Watch your words: update on the Matthew Boulton two

Almost a week ago I wrote about two students who were suspended after accused the college of breaking the Human Rights Act in a homemade newsletter.

Since my original post Assed Baig, 24, and Daniel Williams, 22, have both been expelled by the college. Last week I met up with them to find out more about what exactly went on. Assed and Daniel had both gone to college with the precise intention of progressing to University as they both had taken up Access courses. The decision to interrupt their academic careers during the Winter mucks up this process entirely, as most UCAS submissions are made around this time. If you fail to get the application processed, you're stuck with clearing...

The Smoking Gun

2006-01-14T19:44:00.000Z

Tony Blair is a liar.

A unified theory of respect

2006-01-14T08:28:00.000Z

Oh, dear god. "Clinton backs Blair as UN chief." This looks more like Clinton talking out of his backside rather than some kind of softening up exercise but was I the only one to feel a little bit sick at seeing the headline? I mean, what next? "Clinton backs Putin as Amnesty International chief"?

Now, I know the UN under Kofi Annan has its faults, not least in it's failure under his stewardship to reform its approach to human rights and democratise the Security Council (or even take a step towards it). But is a man who bombs at the drop of a hat with or without UN sanction, the right man for the job? Or are we talking a "Nixon goes to China" moment where a man with manifestly so little respect for the UN, civil liberties and human rights can go there and shake things up?

If he got the job, would Blair bring a Respect Action Plan for the world with him? He's already proved adept at evicting nuisance neighbours. Will a country found with nuclear ambitions late at night with no reasonable explanation DESERVE prosecution regardless of whether the UN can actually PROVE it is the result of wrongdoing?

In fact, the more you think about it, Blair's respect agenda is actually his foreign policy brought home and applied on a local basis. The deserving/undeserving poor. Rights with responsibities. Do as I say or you're going to catch it. Undermining innocent until proven guilty. The short sharp shock and awe. It's all there.

Which has been terrifying enough on a regional level and looks as if it's going to be something of a trial (metaphorical not literal, law and order fans) on a local level. Imagine the fun to be had if Blair's vision were to bear fruit on a global stage. Will you be able to shop Sudan to The Sun? What if someone spits at Israel on her the way to the shops? Will Colombia be boarded up for three months?

Don't go, I'm just getting warmed up...

2006-01-13T16:44:00.000Z

Statewatch: UK: Arrest and stop and search figures for 2004-5 (PDF)
Over the year there were 851,200 "stop and searches" under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (14% more than in 2003/4). Only 11% of those stopped were arrested (13% in 2003/4). In addition there were 41,300 stop and searches under Section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, with only 3% leading to an arrest, while another 35,800 were stopped and searched under S.44(1) and (2) of the Terrorism Act 2000, 1.3% leading to an arrest.

2006-01-13T14:53:00.000Z

Scotsman: Tube shooting: police officers cleared by internal Met inquiry
AN INTERNAL review by the Metropolitan Police has found two officers followed correct procedures when they shot dead the Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes at a Tube station, it emerged yesterday.

When the clock chimes I shall be gone

2006-01-13T11:52:00.000Z

2006-01-12T08:17:00.000Z

BBC News: Iran bombs link: retraction or non-retraction?

A dispute has developed over a claim by Britain last October that Iran had provided the technology for bomb attacks on British troops in southern Iraq.

Two British newspapers - The Times and The Independent - now say that British officials have dropped the claim.

(Times articles here and here. Independent article mirrored here. Blair's remarks on the matter here.)