It’s doubtful whether Live Aid would have taken off quite as much as it did, if the song had been: “The river banks burst / So the carpets went first / And one woman’s fridge / Is now under the bridge. / It’s a tale of endurance / But they should get most of it back / On the insurance.”

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The Danish military has secretly airlifted out of the country about 200 Iraqis who were helping its troops.

The Iraqi civilians, mostly those working as aides and translators in the southern region of Basra, will now be offered asylum in Denmark.

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Update: Jamie does a Danish/British compare and contrast.

Despite the dangers and hardships involved in the investigation, which cost £800,000 of taxpayers’ money, the three highly influential and well-connected people involved were not shot, and the possibility that they might have confessed if imprisoned indefinitely without charge does not appear to have been explored.

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TYR can exclusively reveal that the Iraqi insurgency is being funded by the trade in a toxic, explosive, and highly addictive substance that is peddled on Britain’s streets. Junkies, known as “petrol heads”, are willing to spend almost anything to get their hands on their next “tank”. It offers them a passing sense of boundless power and confidence - but the downsides include thousands of people a year being killed and injured, billions of tonnes of CO2 emissions, and our cities filled with toxic, stinking smoke. Millions of Britons are sending vast sums of money to foreign pushers - many of whom are in league with our enemies - enough money to make it a significant contribution to the trade deficit. Even as we speak, oil dealers are selling their wares only a few hundred yards from my keyboard.

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Muslims, non-Muslims, the SWP, MI6, lefties, righties, soggy wet liberals, feral libertarians, believers, atheists…one thing I’ve never seen mentioned about the big antiwar march before the Iraq war took place is the fact that it was the most politically representative gathering in British history. It wasn’t a gang of fanatics out there; they were on the other side. It was we-the-people, including us-the-Muslims. If integration is the basis of your counter-terrorism strategy, you couldn’t build from a better starting point than acknowledging that we were right.

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Oh, the Piccadilly fireball would have blown the car’s windows out, and popped its doors open, and sent various bits like mirrors and so forth into the air at velocities possibly fatal to people nearby. It would have looked really cool, that’s for sure. But an explosive event…a detonation? Not in a million years. Sorry lads: you failed car bombing 101; you did not attend a single lecture; you did not even open the textbook.

Some stupid people did a stupid thing. Yes, they might have injured or killed one or two passers-by, but any body count would have come in spite of them, not as a product of their efforts. You and I are more likely to have been killed accidentally by the lousy driver than intentionally by his Beavis and Butthead car bomb.

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(Via Tim)

[T]he whole thing was a predictable let down, which has left the BBC sexing it up by screaming “biggest cabinet change since second world war!” and “surprise changes!”. Some of the Blairite deadwood might have been removed, but some has inexplicably escaped the chop, probably only not to cause immediate ructions between the warring factions.

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Now, there’s no doubt in my mind that Lord Goldsmith’s role during the past few years has essentially been to try and convince anyone who’ll listen that New Labour’s participation in the outright destruction of a sovereign nation — I’m talking about Iraq here, not the UK — and murder of between 2 and 3 percent of the population, is completely legal and above-board. Whenever Tony Blair did something that should rightly land him in a cell in The Hague, Lord Goldsmith popped up and said it was completely legal and above-board. There’s a P.R. agent in the novel I’m writing. His name is Henry Stone and it’s his job to spin the actions of a rich psychopath so that they appear completely legal and above-board. He’s a bit part, not a significant character, but the consequences of his actions have serious ramifications and permit said psychopath to continue his nastiness. In the language of psychology we would describe Henry Stone as “an enabler”.

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The number of people killed in road accidents fell, by 1 per cent from 3,201 in 2005 to 3,172 in 2006. 31,845 people were killed or seriously injured in 2006, 1 per cent fewer than in 2005. There were 258,404 road casualties in Great Britain in 2006, 5 per cent less than in 2005.

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It is a badge of shame for the parliamentary Labour party and the cabinet (and indeed his successor), who between them could have driven Blair from office, that they did not do so earlier. But it also reflects a moral failure by Blair that he leaves today believing himself to be a star, going out on a high.

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I’m sure most of you heard of the non-lethal weapons that the US Dept. of Defense looked at creating - the “Gay bomb” and the “Halitosis bomb” being my favourites.

Well, it looks pretty obvious to me that they’ve succeeded in developing an Al-Qaedification bomb - a weapon that strikes targets and transforms them from Iraqis into dead Al-Qaeda militants in the blink of an eye.

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Not for the first time in the context of Alastair Campbell, but almost certainly for the last, we should offer a quiet prayer of thanks to the state broadcaster. The organisation that removed Mr Campbell from political life at such cost to itself will transmit three hour-long extracts from his Downing Street diaries within days of their publication next month, thus removing all temptation to blow £25 on what promises to be the biggest publishing non-sensation since the Hitler Diaries themselves.

The general form with such a memoir, on what’s known in the literary world as the Blunkett Principle, is to buy the Daily Mail for four or five days, plough through the serialisation for the tasty bits, and then wait for the remainder bins at Waterstone’s to fill before buying a few copies at £2.99 a time to give as Christmas presents to those relatives who have pissed you off most during the past 12 months.

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Lord Levy wished to be seen “as a latter-day Kissinger”, [then US Ambassador Christopher] Meyer had been warned, and if that appears a peculiar ambition for anyone without a heavy stockholding in a napalm factory, it’s worth remembering what a pin-up of global statesmanship the old monster always was to New Labour’s high society. With my own ears I have heard Peter Mandelson dwell disconsolately on how “I don’t get invited to breakfast with him when he’s in London any more. I’ve had some of the best conversations of my life with Henry.”

…

For five years, British policy on the most politically complex, dangerous and incendiary part of the planet was shaped by a former record label owner answerable solely to the PM; an unelected crony who, having been created a “working peer” by Mr Blair, hasn’t spoken in the Lords once since his maiden speech in December 1997. Anyone in doubt about the need for a written constitution might care to dwell on that as Lord Levy takes his leave not with a bang, and with barely a whimper.

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…petition the Prime Minister to implement a full Freedom of Information Act. There is no justification in Government business being executed in a shroud of secrecy. The Government works in our name, therefore access to ALL business should be free and immediate.

So if you are a member of the Labour Party, and were considering using your vote ‘inappropriately’, you should thank the Parliamentary Party, for telling you that you can’t have one. Accept your the leader that has been chosen for you, and know your place. There will be no contest, your views are not required. Those of you that are left knuckle down, keep stuffing the envelopes, knocking the doors, attending the meetings and kidding yourselves that the people running the show are in some way interested in your input.

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Is Gordon a spammer?

Tony Blair’s resignation speech, first draft

I was born decayed after the Second World War. I was a young man after I was a child. Before that I was a baby. Between the ages of thirteen and nineteen, I was a -teenager.

At that time, I looked at my own country, though back then of course it still wasn’t mine.

Magnificent country, wonderful history, splendid traditions, proud of its past, super people, lovely sense of humour, fantastic fish-and-chips, great train robbers.

But too reliant on old-fashioned verbs. And pronouns. Speeches back then, too wordy. With no mid-sentence pauses for.

Emotion.

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Steven Poole gives us the thinking behind Blair’s resignation speech.

That broiling Friday morning 10 years ago, with that massive parliamentary majority and unparalleled public goodwill, he had the most powerful starting hand dealt to any new prime minister in modern history. The one thing he didn’t need to do was bluff. The murderous thing about Tony Blair’s nature, and thus his leadership, is that he never knew how to do anything else.

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Section 37 of the Identity Cards Act 2006 requires the Home Secretary to publish his estimate of the ten-year cost of the ID scheme “before the end of every six months”. The first Dobson report was published on 9th October 2006. The next report is now more than two weeks overdue.

Phil Booth, NO2ID’s National Coordinator said:

“What’s the big secret – why the delay? It can’t be lack of resources as there are dozens of highly-paid consultants doing nothing but planning the ID scheme. These latest cost estimates matter to local government and yet the Government is hiding the cost to councils, even from its own candidates.

“The elections on May 3rd are a test for policy and the ID scheme is unpopular. 1 in 3 people across the UK, if we are to believe recently-revealed government figures, are expected to resist it. Labour Party candidates, whatever their personal views on the scheme, suffer when public attention is drawn to it. Is this yet another attempt to bury bad news?”

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It wasn’t one mistake or one flawed policy that eroded all that initial optimism, it was New Labour’s very meaning. In fact, Blair’s support for Bush was a result of that adoration for the wealthy and powerful. Iraq wasn’t an aberration, it was a consequence of all he stood for. But Iraq is what he’ll be remembered for - forever always, no matter how much he tries to orchestrate a “legacy” around social reforms or whatever. He might as well have got Harold Shipman to say: “It’s not fair. No one remembers how I helped out Mrs Ambridge at the Post Office with her shingles. Just ‘murders murders murders’, that’s all the bastards go on about. Well, they’ll be sorry when I’ve gone.”

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The Department for Constitutional Affairs (DCA) - against the advice of the Electoral Commission, an independent watchdog, has decided to play fast and loose with the election process and commission a spate of experimental voting and counting procedures which have not been properly thought out. Worse, some of the experiments have been predicated on laws that, ministers have just discovered, were not properly drafted in the first place.

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I think it’s amazing how we have given the police, MI5 and the government the benefit of the doubt. Of course it is right that a determined and lucky bomber will always get through, but these people are paid to protect us from harm. The New Labour deal on civil liberties was that we gave up certain rights in return for security. Now one side of the contract has been broken.

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The death of a significant figure such as a pope or a former prime minister, or a major sporting occasion, provides good cover. The last day of parliament before recess can be an excellent opportunity to slip out an unfortunate statistic or embarrassing report. Then there’s the “late on Fridays” trick, when political journalists are desperate to get home. It doesn’t always work, as Gordon Brown discovered last month when the Treasury released details of his 1997 decision to launch a £5bn-a-year raid on pension funds on a Friday evening. But who knows how many times it has worked? The public certainly doesn’t.

So imagine what ministers could do if they had a whole month or more in which to bury bad news.

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Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.

They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.

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