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Simon Hoggart: Dead fish day

Our prime minister looked pretty rough. But he was James Bond at the poker tables compared with the president. At the best of times - and these are not the best of times - Bush finds it hard to find the right words, so he thrashes about in the hope that some will pop into his head, like wasps into a jam jar. (At one point he called the sectarian attacks in Iraq “unsettling”. It’s a word, I suppose.)

read the rest

Matthew Norman: Together they rode off into the sunset…

As they walked out together to face the press, smiling with a sort of studied sombre courage, the closing scene that came to mind was the one in which Butch turns to Sundance and says, with the sort of inspired gallows humour we can only hope they reprised in the Oval Office yesterday: “For a moment there I thought we were in trouble.”

read the rest

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“The standard for recording attacks acts a filter to keep events out of reports and databases,” the report said. “A murder of an Iraqi is not necessarily counted as an attack. If we cannot determine the source of a sectarian attack, that assault does not make it into the database. A roadside bomb or a rocket or mortar attack that doesn’t hurt U.S. personnel doesn’t count.”

read the rest…

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Paulie over at Never Trust A Hippie gives a rather good response to this post of mine about Alastair Campbell and the idea of a blogger’s code of conduct.

Update: On the same subject, this is very, very good.

John Brissenden is hosting the end of the year awards ceremony.

(Not safe for work or in the presence of small children who are learning to read).

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Well, I hasn’t taken me long to descend to the level of a shameless, dignity-free shill.

After Rachel’s suggestion and kind offer, an unholy alliance of eBay, Photoshop and too much spare time has produced these babies: limited edition Blog Digest 2007 keyrings. There are currently only ten in existence.

To get one, email me a photo of you with your copy of The Blog Digest along with the proof of purchase. I’ll publish the photo and a link to your blog if you have one. You can then put the keyring on eBay.

Update: Simon gets the first keyring. He bought his copy from Amazon so ignore their ‘Usually dispatched within 4 to 6 weeks’ warning - it’s cobblers.

Tim Worstall’s Britblog Roundup #94, Mr E’s Swearbloggers Roundup #9 and James Higham’s Blogfocus.

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The book, spotted in Borders in Brighton:

Sorry if you’re bored of of my going on about the book but I warn you I may still be hammering on about it for some time yet. When your first book comes out I guarantee you’ll also be this giddy/sad.

The Home Office is at the centre of a fresh row over its handling of asylum applications after it emerged that hundreds of people who have fled the slaughter in the Darfur region of Sudan have been told by officials that it is safe to return to their homes.

Among those who have been refused permission to remain in the UK is a woman doctor who was gang-raped by Sudanese soldiers for protesting to aid workers about the rape of more than 40 schoolgirls.

read the rest…

Patricia Hewitt’s got a little list…

At the beginning of November we had this:

Millions of personal medical records are to be uploaded regardless of patients’ wishes to a central national database from where information can be made available to police and security services, the Guardian has learned.

Details of mental illnesses, abortions, pregnancy, HIV status, drug-taking, or alcoholism may also be included, and there are no laws to prevent DNA profiles being added. The uploading is planned under Whitehall’s bedevilled £12bn scheme to computerise the health service.

Now, (via the excellent Philip), at the beginning of December, we have this:

Sir Liam Donaldson, the chief medical officer, said letters from patients who want to keep their private medical details out of the government’s reach should be sent to Patricia Hewitt, the health secretary, for “full consideration”.

‘Full consideration’. The Secretary of Health would like to give you her full consideration. Sod the privacy of patients frightened of what an authoritarian government, that has been shown time and time again to be darkly mendacious and comedically incompetent, might be capable of. Patricia wants to know who you are.

Just what that ‘consideration’ will involve other than creating another little database, this time of dissidents, and then tossing the letters in the trash, isn’t clear. The Government’s response seems to be a polite ‘get stuffed‘:

The department’s response to people [...] explains that it will not agree to their request to stop the process of adding their information to the new NHS database. The department does not believe that processing their information in this way is a genuine reason linked to substantial and unwarranted distress.

This form letter (pdf) sent out to all those good enough to submit their misgvings, along with their names and addresses, to the authorities is full of warm reassurance:

While a few doctors have said that the Spine could have been designed in a different way, the majority - including some of the most senior and respected doctors in the country - are supportive and believe that it will improve delivery of healthcare to patients.

There are those who disagree. You have to wonder how much of a comfort that is to Helen Wilkinson who…

…was mistakenly labelled an alcoholic after a simple computer error by the NHS. An unknown official at a hospital was updating her medical records and inputted a wrong code. The mix-up meant she was recorded as having received treatment for alcoholism, instead of surgery.

Wouldn’t you call that ’substantial and unwarranted distress’? And how about this:

She was also angry that the records had been shared with a private company which distributes personal medical records to academic researchers [...] In 2003 she was contacted by researchers a week before she was due to have an operation.

The thing is, and it can’t be pointed out enough, the people forcing this on us are the last people who are going to have to rely on it. Are you seriously telling me that Gordon Brown’s son will have nothing but the finest care for his cystic fibrosis? That he’ll suffer the vagaries of the system as pointed out by the Cystic Fibrosis Trust? (Word document). Tony Blair was lucky enough to get the catheter ablation he needed to sort his dodgy ticker. Others haven’t been as fortunate.

Is it any wonder that people refuse to sign OurPetition, the petition asking ‘elected representatives of all UK political parties voluntarily refrain from self-paid or insurance-paid medical care treatment’. The former Tory leader Michael Howard was just the latest:

I cannot sign your petition for a number of reasons. First, the number of letters I receive from my constituents suggests that very many people have to use private healthcare not through the desire to jump the queue and the system, but because it is necessary for their own health. Such is the state of NHS dentistry, for example, that many people have no option but to use the private sector.

It looks, once again, that we’ll have to put our faith in governmental incompetence and hope the system never sees the light of day in full ‘working’ order. That you have to hope your government is as stupid as you suspect it is in order to secure peace of mind just shows how low we’ve come.

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Anybody tempted to buy the book from Amazon but put off by the message ‘Availability: Usually dispatched within 4 to 6 weeks’ should ignore it. Davide received his copy from them in 24 hours.

I did a little rooting around in the 18 Doughty Street archives and found the Vox Politics show that I appeared on this week.

Watch me here (windows media) in all my fat glory. The lager and sausage roll diet is clearly not working.

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Are you sick of jokes about OJ Simpson and his musings of ‘If I Did It’ yet? Hell, a legion of newspaper columns and topical comedy routines in the last couple of weeks have been hung on nothing else. Imagine ‘If I Lied About WMD in Iraq’ by George Bush, they joshed. ‘If I Had Actually Had All My Enemies Killed’ by Vladimir Putin, they japed. ‘If I Could Dance’ by the one with a face like a robber’s dog but thinks she’s a sex kitten who got kicked off ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ (we thought last week while heavily drinking to drown out the cacophonous ejaculate that passes for Saturday night television these days).

And now we can add ‘If I Apologised For Slavery’ by Tony Blair. The Prime Minister came so close this week to saying sorry for the forced transportation of 12 million people and the deaths of three million of them. Without actually saying the ’s’ word you have to wonder what possible purpose his stating the obvious - ‘we condemn its existence utterly’ - actually served. He is, after all, a person who *loves* saying sorry for stuff he didn’t do. The Irish Potato Famine killing a million people? Sorry. The Guildford Four wrongfully spending 15 years in prison? Sorry. Until his slippery wriggling this week we’d have bet an apology for the asteroid strike that killed the dinosaurs was due any day.

(more…)

I received an email from the New Statesman’s online team asking for a link to their new website if they linked to me. (It’s very flattering but they should see my visitor stats - I am the ‘all fur coat and no knickers’ of British blogging.)

They have a list of blogs on the new site but I’m not on it so I don’t know if I’m going to get my link. Still, here’s the plug if only because all the content is now entirely free. First stops should be Shazia Mirza’s ace column and Mark Thomas’ back catalogue.

‘…covers everything from abortion to Zinedine Zidane, taking in bears, corpse robbers, Danish cartoons, elderly care, foot fetishists, golf, Hegel, irreducible complexity, Elton John, the Khmer Rouge, the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, memes, Newsnight, Mark Oaten, Jon Pertwee, a brace of Rooneys, speed-dating, toilets (inevitably), the United Nations, vaginas (Noreen’s, inevitably) and wasps…’ - Philip Challinor

‘The perfect Christmas present, then, although as I have noticed that both D[evil's] K[itchen] and Mr Eugenides have articles in there, not one that I’d leave lying around the lounge when granny comes to visit on Boxing Day’ - Ministry of Truth

‘The book’s an excellent read, and a great synopsis of the year that’s gone by. The blogosphere has definitely churned out very decent comment, and I’d be interested to see if anyone could codify opinion from the MSM in the same period which would be as good as this.’ - Osama Saeed

‘…eloquent knowledge of a type that you won’t find in the MSM…’ - Devil’s Kitchen

‘The Blog Digest has lots of variety; all of the writing is good; and seeing it in print, with links as footnotes and all, makes it fresh.’ - Charlie Whitaker

‘All human life is there. Wit, wisdom, righteous anger, sleuthing, revelations, compassion and yep, love. The love of writing, and the joy of sharing it with others - blogging is unpaid, unadulterated, and unequalled as a communication opportunity. Dive in.’ - Rachel North

‘McKeating does an excellent job of why the blogosphere has been doing so well in terms of media coverage. It’s not because it’s new and shiny, it’s because it has the quality necessary to be worth reading.’ - Ken Owen

‘He’s done the hard work of tracking down many intelligent, poignant and witty bloggers, which should save you the trouble.’ - Flying Rodent

‘If the blogger in your life already has an anorak, this would make the perfect present.’ - Mr Eugenides

‘…I can categorically say that it compares very favourably indeed to standing up to your arsehole in mud…’ - Larry Teabag

One of my more fatheaded contributions while on 18 Doughty Street the other night was the assertion that the Government weren’t doing enough to reassure the public over the Litvinenko poisoning.

We’re given endless information, I said, (the terrorism threat level and dark allusions to 30 terrorists plots, to name just two) on which it is almost completely impossible for us to act. How do we modify our behaviour? What positive contribution can we make, other than be good little citizens and assent to confiscation of another civil liberty or two?

On the other hand, with Litvinenko, I argued we have a very specific case which is slowly drawing in a large number of people. The Government could go a long way to reassuring people by releasing details of the poisoning - what the Polonium 210 would look like, for example, and how to spot possible radiation poisoning. I was pretty much shouted down at the time. (’Why, are you scared?’ Rob McGibbon, sitting next to me, gently mocked.)

And rightly so. It was only much later (the l’esprit de l’escalier has been a bitch all week) it came to me that releasing such details would be potentially disastrous. It’s much like why in police procedural movies, they never release the details of a serial killer’s modus operandi - it attracts the copycats and the crazies. In this case, NHS Direct would be inundated by hypochondriacs (if they haven’t already). The malicious and the idiotic, with a description of a deliverable radioactive poison, would be filling envelopes with their facsimiles. False alarms would bring the police investigation to a grinding halt.

No, on the whole, it’s been handled with restraint. Even John Reid, never one to miss an opportunity to burnish his ego, seems subdued. There’s been an admirable lack of hysteria considering Litvinenko fell victim to, what the Guardian this morning describes as, a team of ‘rogue’ Russian agents who it seems were as careful with their isotope as the rest of us are with the Shake ‘n’ Vac. As I’ve followed it, the whole thing’s played out more like a Len Deighton slowburner than a death-on-the-streets potboiler. No ‘45 minutes from doom‘ headlines as of yet. Maybe that will change if anybody else’s hair starts falling out over the weekend.

But is this a radiological attack? I suppose it depends on what you mean by ‘attack’. That this appears to be a seemingly clumsy attempt to eliminate just one man and not a wider group may be why there’s been so little heat in all of this. How hot would things be if it wasn’t Russian agents running amok that we were talking about but a cell of Islamist terrorists bent on ‘mass murder on an unimaginable scale‘?

That said, that these Russians haven’t killed a more people appears to be more by good luck than good management. If we were to be consistent, shouldn’t we be kicking in the doors of the Russian émigré community?