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In his introduction to the collection of his excellent, and seemingly never out of fashion, V For Vendetta, Alan Moore had this to say:

It’s 1988 now. Margaret Thatcher is entering her third term of office and talking confidently of an unbroken Conservative leadership well into the next century. My youngest daughter is seven and the tabloid press are circulating the idea of concentration camps for persons with AIDS. The new riot police wear black visors, as do their horses, and their vans have rotating cameras mounted on top. The government has expressed a desire to eradicate homosexuality, even as an abstract concept, and one can only speculate as to which minority will be the next legislated against. I’m thinking of taking my family and getting out of this country soon, sometime over the next couple of years. It’s cold and it’s mean spirited and I don’t like it here anymore.

Moore’s words were very prescient of the future and not just his, then, present. Only the names, it seems, have changed and little else. We still have a Thatcherite government with its claw on the rudder. Yesterday, today and tomorrow belongs to them.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine Charles Clarke stamping on a human face – forever