So a Times journalist works out the identity of Orwell award winning blogger, Nightjack. Nightjack, a police officer and wanting to maintain his anonymity, takes it to the courts, loses, and is outed by The Times who duly crow…

Mr Justice Eady… , who is known for establishing case law with his judgments on privacy, has struck a blow in favour of openness, ruling that blogging is “essentially a public rather than a private activity”.

Bloggers, ‘can no longer be sure that their identity can be kept secret’, it seems. I was wondering if there were any other enterprises which were ‘essentially a public rather than a private activity’. And then it hit me – of course there are – politics and journalism.

(more…)

So, in an attempt to restore the smashed trust in our political system and our politicians, to give us the ‘different type of politics, a more open and honest dialogue‘ he promised upon becoming prime minister, Gordon Brown has said the inquiry into the Iraq war will be held in private and will not report back until Summer 2010 (that is, after the general election).

In parliament today he was unable to say whether the inquiry will have the power to compel witnesses to appear before it or whether they will have to give evidence under oath. Brown did his best to blame the Tories for the way the inquiry will be conducted. ‘The opposition wanted a Franks style inquiry [the inquiry into the Falklands war] and that’s what we’re having,’ he said making it sound like a generous concession to Tory lobbying. You’re all in this one together, lads.

One of the members of the inquiry’s committee is Sir Lawrence Freedman, professor of War Studies at King’s College, London. Writing in the Independent in 2003 at the outbreak of the war, he had this to say…

Even if it takes time to dislodge Saddam’s regime, the US – and also Britain – will emerge from this conflict hardened in their power and ready to exercise far greater influence over not only the development of Iraq but also the wider Middle East.

Let’s hope Sir Lawrence is better at recording history than he is at predicting it.

Update: Jamie: ‘Let the assistant gravedigger bury the dead‘. There aren’t any words, really. Not longer than one syllable at any rate.

Update updated: A good point from Bob:

But at the end of the day I suspect few will change their opinions because of the inquiry, in public or private. And I’m one of those. To me, Blair either lied on WMD or was conned by the US. Fool or Knave, it makes no difference, both were things for which he should have been made to resign, and if he had some evidence which would persuade me otherwise I’m damn sure he would have put it in the public domain by now.

Updated update updated: Here’s inquiry committee member Martin Gilbert comparing Bush and Blair to Roosevelt and Churchill.

Over at Pickled Politics, Jai is compiling a list of 85 questions that the British National Party need to answer…

- Part 1: Role models, affiliations, and policies of senior members of the BNP
- Part 2: The medical, economic and military impact of a BNP government
- Part 3: The social and legal impact of a BNP government

(With more to come)

Yesterday, on BBC1’s Big Questions programme, Jonathan Bartley of the thinktank Ekklesia asked the first one…

No, the Tories are just desperate to rob Labour of its little publicity coup because Sir Alan Sugar comes across on TV as exactly the sort of cock who Tory voters like. His brand of “no-nonsense” nonsense and second-hand rhetoric, and his public affirmation that wealth makes what you say more important, are perfectly judged to appeal to the sort of idiot who thinks David Cameron talks a lot of sense, even though all he does is repeatedly bleat “change” like a tramp in a doorway, and his only stated policy is “to become prime minister”.

[...]

The real problem with Sugar’s new appointment is that it’s such an obvious and grim attempt at populism. Gordon Brown is either so short of ideas or so despises the electorate that he thinks the best way to demonstrate that the government is coping with the biggest business crisis in a century is to make it the responsibility of a man whose day job is telling self-regarding mediocrities that they should take off their Mexican hats before trying to put on their jumpers. A man who has made himself rich, but whose career as a tycoon has gone sufficiently quiet that he’s got time to do TV.

Read the rest…

If you enter the question ‘is the BNP racist‘ into the Google search engine, and click the ‘I feel lucky’ button…

Right here:

So here we have the edifying spectacle of Hazel Blears with an onion in her hankie and her hand on her heart of stone. After a week of reflection she’s admitted to being ’stupid’. Glad we’re now all on the same page about that, Hazel, if nothing else.

The thing is, one has to wonder if Hazel’s resignation had led to Gordon Brown getting the heave-ho, whether she’d now be turning on the waterworks in public, expressing regret about poncing around the place wearing that look-at-me-aren’t-I-the-clever-one badge, and telling us she’d been ‘thoughtless and quite cruel‘ towards the former Prime Minister.

As things stand, we’re left to wonder just what it was that prompted this crisis of confidence in the usually bullish and never-wrong Ms Blears…

Hazel Blears will face a motion of no confidence next week at a meeting of her constituency Labour Party.

Yes. That would do it.

They Work For You now have every parliamentary speech going back to 1979. Here’s a promising young man giving his maiden speech in July 1983…

I am a Socialist not through reading a textbook that has caught my intellectual fancy, nor through unthinking tradition, but because I believe that, at its best, Socialism corresponds most closely to an existence that is both rational and moral. It stands for co-operation, not confrontation; for fellowship, not fear. It stands for equality, not because it wants people to be the same but because only through equality in our economic circumstances can our individuality develop properly.

Tony, if you’ll forgive me asking, what the fuck happened?

This is a bloody brilliant piece of work by Beau Bo D’Or:

When brutality and terror and abuse are government tools, used against people whose only crime is to want to come to this country for a better life, it’s a vital time to fight for the rights of refugees.

It’s Refugee Week from June 15 – 21. There’s loads happening. Perhaps a simple act is in order.

Pass it on.

This isn’t repellent because it’s a supposedly left wing PM that’s the target – fuck Gordon Brown. His crime in my eyes is getting involved with this shower of deceitful turds in the first place, and he’s been up to his nuts in every scam and scandal of the New Labour years. He wanted the premiership so badly he was prepared to do anything to get it, and now he is getting it, good and hard.

But let’s not dance around what we’ve seen with last week’s press circle jerk and shows like tonight’s Dispatches. It’s a naked attempt by a massive chunk of the nation’s ruling class to pin all the faults of the country they created – the fucked financial system, the sleaze-ridden politics, the empty PR machine that is New Labour – on Brown, leaving the rest of them to get on with business as usual.

Read the rest

Yet more people are talking about Alan Johnson’s perfect upbringing. This time, The Scotsman:

Johnson’s back story is as good as it gets. His father, a painter and part-time pub pianist walked out of the family home when he was eight. His mother died when he was 12, and he was then brought up by his teenage older sister in a council house in Battersea.

As good as it gets. The lucky, lucky bastard.

Meanwhile, back in 1968…

Within two weeks, Enoch Powell was to make his notorious “rivers of blood” speech in Birmingham. But by then the Labour government had already done more to catalyse racial prejudice than Powell’s rhetoric ever could. In fact, as Callaghan’s biographer, Kenneth Morgan, points out: “From Callaghan’s point of view, Powell’s antics were a valuable distraction. They enabled the government to appear, by contrast, sane and balanced…”

And it was ever thus. While we’re watching two BNP thugs getting elected to the European Parliament (they enable the government to appear, by contrast, sane and balanced), the not-at-all-fascist New Labour are quietly getting on with stuff.

Remember Fatou Felicite Gaye and her son Arou, who has ‘post-traumatic stress disorder caused by previous interaction with the Border Agency’, who were picked up by the Home Office in dawn raid, and who were sent to the Dungavel detention centre? They were deported but refused entry to the Ivory Coast because ‘Ms Gaye has no paperwork to prove her identity, and Arouna was born in the UK’. They are now stateless, back in the UK and in the Yarl’s ‘without adequate health services‘ Wood detention centre.

British National Party? Watch and learn, lads. Watch and learn.

The British National Party’s Nick Griffin has just been on Radio 4’s Today programme. How did he choose to launch his first day as an elected member of the European Parliament? By railing against the fact that Friar Tuck in the BBC’s Robin Hood television show is played by a black man. No, he really did.

Griffin was elected last night with less votes than he got five years ago. This isn’t about a surge in support for fascists, it’s about a collapse in support for New Labour. The tide went out and exposed the stinking crap beneath the polluted waves.

Not in my name.

To describe New Labour policies as ‘back of a fag packet’ has, up until now, been a metaphor for their seemingly dashed-off-in-minutes nature, their paucity of ideas and passion. (Plus they make you feel dizzy and nauseous. And give you cancer)

Who knew that when it came to the party’s European and local election campaign strategy, it could actually, literally be written on the back of a fag packet. Here’s John Prescott whining about New Labour’s pisspoor campaigning…

I kept asking the party what was the strategy, what was our message, what was the campaign? I became so concerned I actually wrote to Harriet [Harman]. Her reply was less than satisfactory. These apparently were the ‘messages.’

For the many v for the few
Grow your way out v cut your way out
On your side v on your own
Substantial leadership v insubstantial salesmanship

And that was it.

And that was it. To think they had the guts to use the word ’substantial’.

So Work and pensions secretary James Purnell has gone to spend more time with his sideburns. Good. All right-thinking people will have danced a little jig at the news this morning.

I imagine it’ll be just the Tories upset at his departure, him having been a sleeper agent for them – ‘I say old boy, any chance you could be a bit more beastly to the great unwashed?’ ‘I. Obey. Master.’

Now he’s gone rogue they must be hoping Brown can dig up another total and utter bastard to further their agenda. The chilling thought is that Purnell’s flounce moves the terrifying Phil Woolas closer to a big job.

How much damage has this done for Brown? I bet most people outside of political geekery and adrenalin junkie political journalists went ‘James who?’ on hearing the news. Even a breathless John Humphrys on the Today programme on Radio 4 is struggling to make this sound seismic.

After all, Purnell’s a one-dimensional figure even to those of us who have followed his revolting career. Unless they’re on the receiving end of his misanthropic policies I doubt he’s made much impact on people’s awareness other than as a bugger-gripped, Jolie-lipped New Labour drone who looks like he was grown in a laboratory they see burbling away on the news on a slow day.

Here’s a fun little story from the government’s News Distribution Service…

Plot to keep Iran’s ‘Top Gun’ jets flying … …with parts from eBay!

I like the exclamation mark. Hahaha Iran hahaha with its hahaha crappy airforce hahaha needing part from hahaha eBay!

Three men were jailed for a total of ten years for their part in a plot to supply military equipment to keep Iranian F-14 ‘Tomcat’ fighter jets airborne and combat ready in contravention of an embargo on military exports to Iran.

The thing is, I’m not sure if the British government should be crowing about this, to be honest. Not with our soldiers being killed because we’re too incompetent (or, in the case of former Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon, too evil) to make sure they got body army. Not with our Snatch Land Rovers which in Iraq and Afghanistan are called ‘mobile coffins‘. Not when US troops in Iraq called our lot the ‘borrowers’. Not with our welcoming of a greater deployment of US troops into Helmand in Afghanistan because it finally means our troops might get some decent helicopter support.

No, instead of jailing Mohsen Akhavan Nik and his son, along with Nithish Jaitha, for breaching the embargo, we should be making them heads of equipment procurement for the Ministry of Defence.

The BNP are hot on law and order. BNP crime and justice* policy will:

- Free the police and courts from the politically correct straitjacket which is stopping them from doing their jobs properly;

- End the liberal fixation with the “rights” of criminals and replace it with concern for the rights of victims – and the right of innocent people not to become victims;

- Re-introduce corporal punishment for petty criminals and vandals

If the BNP were to come to power, it wouldn’t be good news for some of their own. End the liberal fixation with the “rights” of criminals and replace it with concern for the rights of victims and Re-introduce corporal punishment for petty criminals?

Will that mean a beating and the withdrawal of the rights of the BNP’s Robert Bailey, ‘the most senior of the London candidates for the European parliament’ who was arrested and charged last week ‘for failing to provide a sample to the police and using a vehicle without benefit of insurance or an MoT certificate’?

It’s probably just as well that the BNP weren’t in power when their Group Development Officer Tony Lecomber was jailed for three years for offences under the Explosives Act, including possession of homemade hand-grenades and electronic timing devices. His conviction for unlawfully wounding a Jewish schoolteacher whom he caught trying to peel off a BNP sticker at an underground station will presumably overturned in the event of a BNP victory.

How about South East London organiser Colin Smith who has 17 convictions for burglary, theft, stealing cars, possession of drugs and assaulting a police officer? A petty criminal if ever there was one. Then there’s the party’s very own football hooligans, violent assaulters, and rapists. The gruesome details are here.

In the 1960s the BNP’s founder John Tyndall was sent to prison for a crime his own party describes as ‘non-indigenous crime’, namely possession of a loaded gun. The rest of us love our curries and our Music Of Black Origin. The BNP? Their ‘non-indigenous’ influences don’t seem to extend much further than importing violent crime.

One thing’s for sure, ‘the politically correct straitjacket’ which is ’stopping’ the police and courts from doing their jobs properly was no impediment to bringing these thugs to book. The system seems to have worked just fine in their cases.

Get out and vote today. Stop the BNP.

* I’m not linking to it. Google can help you.

- Bookdrunk takes a look at the BNP’s education policy.
- 5cc – BNP Immigration policy – something tells me it’s not just about immigrants
- NCCLols looks at Housing and Welfare
- Sim-O on Defence
- Irritability Incarnate on Foreign Policy
- 5cc and The Pickards on the BNP’s claim to be Britain’s Most Democratic Party

- Tim has the round-up.

Right here:

If you’re going to vote BNP, do it because you’re racist, not as some kind of protest vote…

Don’t forget… theBNParetwats.

The days when pretentious gits like me invoked tragedy in a Gordonian context have long since passed. Tragic heroism relies upon a certain largeness of spirit, or at the very least a sudden moment of self-knowledge so acute that it induces intolerable psychic anguish. Ajax slaughtered his sheep when made aware of his fatal flaw, Oedipus put out his eyes when faced with his. Despite his ocular head start in that direction, Gordon is as nugatory a figure as Nero, fiddling with ritualistic lines at yesterday’s PMQs while his government self-immolates.

It’s the smallness of the man, the lack of grandeur in his dreams, the pathetic dressing-up of rank self-interest in the translucent cloak of dutifulness, that makes guilt-free schaudenfraude less a temptation than a moral obligation. For this has become a morality play – specifically, the first morality high farce in politico-theatrical history – about a system so deranged in its complacency that it gifts such power to one whose personal ambition is surpassed only by his lack of talent, without any mechanism to remove him once that power has drained away.

Read the rest

So I’m going through all the election leaflets we got this year, all the vapid, patronising and platitudinous crap that’s supposed to convince us to lend our support to this party or that.

And you know what? There’s not a single ‘please’ in this asking (’VOTE BLAH’ is more of a command, really). Not a single ‘thank you’. Not from red, blue, yellow, green, purple or swastika. Not even in the ‘personal’ one I got from Gordon Brown. There’s your relationship between politics and people.

Ignorant pricks.

Somebody came to this blog yesterday by Googling…

Was Churchill in UKIP?

And then Jesus wept.

And lo, so much did the Communities Secretary love the Labour Party that she resigned from her cabinet post for ‘personal reasons’ the day before elections that look set to smash the party that has sheltered her mediocre talents. Nice to see her getting her priorities straight.

Still, wa-ha-hay!

Memories, like the corners of my mind. Misty water-coloured memories, of the way we were. Scattered pictures, of the smiles we left behind, smiles we gave to one another for the way we were. Can it be that it was all so simple then? Or has time re-written every line? If we had the chance to do it all again, tell me, would we? Could we?

Let’s be honest, if Jacqui Smith had quietly slipped out the back door of the Home Office (instead of somebody starting a rumour that’s she’s jumping before she’s pushed) would anybody have been any the wiser?

It’s been four years since Alex Harrowell suggested abolishing the Home Office and it’s an idea that’s lost none of its appeal. What does the Home Office actually do anyway? The department could be closed, all it’s vestigial functions outsourced, and none of us would notice.

The police more or less do what they like so cutting them loose from Home Office ‘control’ is unlikely to see much difference on the ground. Home Office pronunciations on drugs seems to have little effect so some kind of computer programme that automatically generates a press release on the issue every 18 months could easily fill that role.

Does the Home Office ‘protect the public from terrorism‘ as it claims? The police and MI5 do the heavy lifting on that front with Home Office ministers merely taking the credit on the rare occasion an actual terrorist plot is actually uncovered or keeping schtum when it’s a more common false alarm. Again, the subsidiary Home Office role of stoking public fears about terrorism and foreigners could be given to some kind of automated fear generator that emails tabloid newspapers’ news desks.

You could sack the UK Border Agency and simply give its job to a rebadged British National Party. Who better to kick brown people’s doors in at dawn before violently dragging them to stinking, nightmarish hellholes, traumatising their children and deporting them to violence or death? Hell, I bet Nick Griffin’s lot would do it for free, slashing millions off the Government’s budget. Who’d notice the difference? Certainly not the people being kicked, punched, dragged, incarcerated and shot.

Simple as that. The Home Office can follow Jacqui Smith into well-deserved oblivion.