Simon Hoggart:

[I]t was left to the much-derided Ming Campbell to make the best intervention about the prime minister’s statement on security. “Consensus,” he said, “cannot be achieved at the cost of principle … of course the public has a right to security, but that includes security from the power of the state.”

There’s no answer to that, and he didn’t get one.

Tim W:

So they’re going to change the law again, so that if some policeman doesn’t like the look of you, you can be locked away for more than the current month. Given that as yet no such suspect has had to be released after 28 days of questioning, it’s a little hard for them to come up with a justification.

The thing is, until they’re rounding up nice white middle-class people instead of shifty brown people with their peculiar rituals, who really gives a sod?

We’re all Ruth Turners and Lord Levys at the end of the day. As long as the police aren’t banging on our doors at dawn they can do what they like.

Why 15 years? Why not try and bring a project in under budget and ahead of schedule for a change?

I’ve marked July 8 2022 in my diary as ‘VT Day’ and the champagne is on ice. But who do we blame if it takes 16? The street party invites have already gone out.

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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Genius.

(Via Chris. I want one of those t-shirts too.)

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)

Reaction to John Reid’s plan to radicalise another generation of the British population has been mixed if predictable.

Peter Hain, for example, disinterring his heroic anti-Apartheid past that he’d so successfully buried during the Blair years, used the word, ‘Guantanamo‘.

Predictably, in her role of attempting to win back Labour’s hitherto unheard of disenfranchised quasi-fascist supporters, Hazel Blears said the plan was ‘sensible‘.

The only question left to ask is this: ‘Does Blears shit in the woods?’.

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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This and this. Now, please.

Update 1.45pm: MI5 are moving sharpish on this. The MI5 News Update email service is pointing towards an official version of events.

Update 5.20pm: At least one clear thing to came out of this afternoon’s flurry of establishment propaganda. The fact is that, if you fancy a spot of credit card theft, you should get yourself on the ‘periphery’ of the planning of a terrorist outrage:

MI5 had decided, on the basis of bugged conversations, that [July 7 bomber] Sidique Khan was largely interested in petty fraud.

The spooks, having bigger fish to fry, seemingly couldn’t find five minutes to tip off Khan’s local police.

Update 2/5: A word from the mighty Mrs Rachel North.

John Reid, tosser:

‘If you will permit me to use one of my favourite quotes - in a sense not to answer your question - I think the Owl of Minerva will spread its wings only with the coming of dusk.’

Why doesn’t he just punch people and tell them to fuck off like we all know he wants to? Or would that show marginally less contempt?

Read this. Sign this. Pass it on.

But will the time ever come, one wonders idly, when our revisionist historians reconsider the ravings of Comical Ali? The idiocy of most of his statements will, admittedly, endure. Footwear-based supremacy has not been achieved, despite the much-vaunted boast that the Iraqis would be waiting for the coalition forces “with shoes”. But the smile fades when recalling other pronouncements. “Do not be hasty because your disappointment will be huge,” the old crazy warned. “You will reap nothing from this aggressive war, which you launched on Iraq, except for disgrace and defeat.” “We will embroil them, confuse them, and keep them in the quagmire,” he said later, adding that “they cannot just enter a country of 26 million people and lay besiege to them! They are the ones who will find themselves under siege.”

There are, of course, rather fewer than 26 million people in Iraq these days, but even those who dispute the precise extent of the population depletion might agree that it comes to something when, in hindsight, several statements by this preposterous character seem more prophetic than anything spouted by the British government at the time.

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In an exclusive, we have received a video from the mastermind behind the recent spate of parcel bombings across the country. Here is a transcript.

…

You, the British people, I talk to you today about the best way to avoid another catastrophe and about war, its reasons and its consequences.

Contrary to what Blair says and claims - that we hate freedom - let him tell us then, ‘Why did we not attack South West Trains?’

We fought with you because we are free, and we don’t put up with transgressions. We want to reclaim our nation. As you spoil our security, we will do so to you.

I wonder about you. Although we are ushering the fourth day after the DVLA, Blair is still exercising confusion and misleading you and not telling you the true reason. Therefore, the motivations are still there for what happened to be repeated.

And I will talk to you about the reason for those events, and I will be honest with you about the moments the decision was made so that you can ponder. And I tell you, Clarkson (praise be unto him) only knows, that we never had the intentions to destroy the speed cameras.

But after the injustice was so much and we saw transgressions and the coalition between Ken Livingstone and the Congestion Charge against our people in London, it occurred to my mind that we deal with the speed cameras. And these special events that directly and personally affected me go back to 1982 and what happened when a policeman gave me a ticket for doing 37 in a 30 zone. And assistance was given by the DVLA.

And as I was looking at those drivers that were fined in Britain, it occurred to me that we have to punish the transgressor with the same - and that we had to send fireworks to office workers so that they taste what we tasted, and they stop fining those who speed and park illegally.

Then, what happened was that Blair was impressed by the Congestion Charge and the collection regimes, and he was jealous of them, embezzling the public money without any accountability. And he moved the tyranny and suppression of freedom, and they called it the Road Charging Scheme, under the disguise of fighting motorists. And Blair, the father, found it good to install his cameras as governors.

We agreed with the poster of the parcels, to display a spectacular lack of perspective. And we never knew that the Prime Minister would leave thousands of office workers to face those events by themselves when they were in the most urgent need of their leader.

He was more interested in meeting Shilpa from Big Brother than worrying about what was happening in the DVLA post room.

Your security is not in the hands of Blair or Congestion Charges or firework-posting inadequates. Your security is in your own hands. Anybody that allows us to drive as fast as we like and park where we want will not be attacked.

(First published in this week’s edition of The Friday Thing.)

From the diary column in today’s Guardian:

‘In the light of the events of the past few days, d’you reckon the government will be urging moderate members of organisations representing the nation’s motorists to address the actions of the extremists within their midst? Just a thought.’

Don’t hold your breath.

Update: And isn’t this glorification of terrorism?

An angry motorist could well be responsible for the latest attacks, according to “Captain Gatso”, the campaigner responsible for attacks on speed cameras and who operates under a pseudonym.

“What we are looking at now is a war on the motorist,” said the man who represents Motorists Against Detection (Mad). “And the motorist is fighting back,” he said. “It’s payback time.”

‘There are far too many people attached to our government and our commentariat who are determined to attach important policies to more or less crude threats. Let’s get this out in the open; whenever we do a big deal about “our shared British values”, then the implicit message is “and if you don’t sign up to this list, we’re going to put you on a boat”.

‘Nobody would be so vulgar as to put it in quite exactly those words, but unless you are very careful with the mood music, that’s the message that the audience is going to hear. Now for a rhetorical question; precisely what is it about our experience with radical Islam since the Russian invasion of Afghanistan that makes us think “yes, these people respond well to threats”?’

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Left-wing intellectual Norman Geras on Nick Cohen’s new book:

…note that there is a mini-industry in the blogosphere obsessed (some of its denizens to the point of appearing half-crazed) with those they contemptuously call ‘the decents’…

As opposed to…

…note that there is a mini-industry in the blogosphere obsessed (some of its denizens to the point of appearing half-crazed) with those they contemptuously call ‘the stoppers’…

…I suppose.

But wait, there’s more from Norman:

…give some time, if you can bear it, to re-reading through the comment and opinion pages of the liberal press for the last four years. That you were of the left and supported regime change in Iraq has just been unthinkable, unassimilable, for many - hence the hostility and the anathemas.

Jesus Christ, man, let it go. You got your invasion, you got your liberation, and you got your victory. And you’re still whining. You and Cohen and ‘the Decents’ were listened to and the anti-war crowd were ignored - that’s why the world looks like it does today. And you’re still not happy?

That Nick Cohen should then feel compelled to write a book rubbing us anti-war types’ noses in it, despite getting everything he wanted, smacks of gloating. Nobody likes a sore winner.

Update: If I was as articulate as John Harris I’d have put my argument something like this.

It is to be noted with interest that the British Social Attitudes survey…

…found seven in every 10 people think compulsory identity cards for all adults would be “a price worth paying” to reduce the threat of terrorism. Eight in 10 say the authorities should be able to tap the phones of people suspected of involvement in terrorism, open their mail and impose electronic tagging or home curfews.

Now, I’m no statistician or pollster but I would like to see have seen another question inserted into that survey:

Can you see yourself at any time in the future falling victim to a miscarriage of justice or being otherwise inconvenienced by this so-called ’surrender’ of civil liberties?

I’d bet that a similar figure to those above would say ‘no’. Hence the above figures.

I’d also like to see the survey data broken down by race and religion. How many brown and/or Muslim people (let’s say) support home curfews or detention without trial?

Props to the chaps at Spyblog for chasing down just what a dog’s breakfast MI5/the Home Office managed to make of the new Terror Alert email system:

Astonishingly, MI5, the Security Service, part of whose remit is supposed to be giving protection advice against electronic attacks over the internet, is sending all our personal details (forename, surname and email address) unencrypted to commercial third party e-mail marketing and tracking companies which are physically and legally in the jurisdiction of the United States of America, and is even not bothering to make use of the SSL / TLS encrypted web forms and processing scripts which are already available to them.

Is this evidence of a rush job, to satisfy the demands of the Home Office spin doctors or is it incompetence, or indifference to the privacy and security of the general public ?

They continue to chase here (when the spooks finally got their act together), here and here, and the story was picked up by the BBC.

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?

In the new James Bond film, there’s a scene where ‘M’, Bond’s boss, goes on national television and declares that she knows who the villain is, where he is, what he’s up to and, furthermore, that her agents are following his every move.

Now, you’re probably thinking ‘what a preposterous load of old bollocks, that’s far-fetched even by the standards of Bond movies’. Ordinarily, we’d agree (we did make it up after all) but that was before we read the speech given last week by head of MI5, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller.

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You know, nobody really complained when Status Quo churned out pretty much the same stuff year after year. Oasis pretty much got away with it as well. Sean Connery gained a massively successful movie career by being Sean Connery. All the time, every time. Similarly, in his movies, Michael Caine is Michael Caine. Like Weetabix or Lego or heroin, if you’ve got a winning product, why mess with it?

And so to Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair and the speech he gave in Berlin a few days ago.

It’s the usual stuff really, pitching for extended powers, putting the frighteners on again, etc. etc. And one phrase in the speech caught my eye:

The sky is dark.

Where have we heard that before? Oh, yes. From Sir Ian. It’s his favourite piece of scare-the-shit-out-of-you imagery. He used it not once but twice last year, in his Dimbleby Lecture and in a more populist piece for The Sun shortly afterwards.

I would go on, but why bother? In tribute to Sir Ian and his recycling of brooding scaremongery, I give you the post I wrote last year when he first expelled this rhetorical guff.

—

Does Sir Ian Blair, Metropolitan Police commissioner, have any time to do any actual, y’know, policing? He seems to spend so much time putting the wind up the public these days that, if he was in any other profession, his boss would be saying, “do that on your own time, Blair, not the company’s.”

He’s been at it again tonight in his Dimbleby Lecture . (How many hearts must have sank at “During the next 40 minutes…”)

Is this his job? What he’s paid to do? I, and others, would argue that it is not.

And how about this?

The sky is dark…

Ring any bells? It’s the same gothic imagery he used in his last piece of scaremongery, published in The Sun, during his failed attempt to interfere in the parliamentary debate of the new terrorism legislation.

He’s obviously very pleased with the metaphor. Maybe it comes from a poem he wrote as a teenager (”Why do all the nice girls hate me?” or somesuch) and somebody said, “Oooh, Ian. I don’t know how you do it but you paint the picture so vividly”. That stayed with him and ever since he’s been dying to use the phrase again. And again.

It makes you wonder what’s next from Britain’s Top Cop. Maybe he could embark on a busking tour (as long as he’s got his busking licence) of the London Underground, regaling commuters with a rendition of “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall“. Hours of fun to be had writing his set list. It’s The End Of The World As We Know It.

‘A’ Bomb on Wardour Street?

This lecture by Henry Porter is vital stuff. Read it before it slides behind The Independent’s infernal subscription wall in a few days.

(Thanks to Tim for the link.)

The news sources are full of the story that a ‘Muslim’ officer was excused from guarding the Israeli embassy during the recent Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

I have two questions.

First, who leaked this story to the press, and what effect did they hope to produce?

Second, why are news sources concentrating on the fact that the officer was a Muslim?

It seems to me that the important feature of this officer’s identity was not that he was a Muslim, as did not ask to be excused from guarding the Israeli embassy prior to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and once the Israeli bombing of Lebanon ceased he returned to full duties. He was excused from guarding the Israeli embassy during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon because his wife is Lebanese.

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I believe these are the correct positions for progressive politics in the modern era. But if others feel they’re not the right policies, and some clearly do, let us debate them openly and candidly.

Tony Blair, ‘No more coded critiques - let’s have an open debate on where we go next‘

This is not an abstract discussion. It is one which touches upon the preservation of the values and freedoms. I look forward to that debate with you.

John Reid, ‘Security, freedom and the protection of our values‘.

I believe it is time now to engage in a new and honest debate about integration and cohesion in the UK.

Ruth Kelly, launching the Commission on Integration and Cohesion.

I’ve asked this before, but where is the forum for these debates? What are the formal mechanisms? Can I join in? I’m not the only one to notice.

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