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Allow me to pay you the compliment of being blunt. If you are the sort of person who approves of, or allows their voting preference to be swayed even a little by, the interventions in our electoral process by the wives of the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, you are a moron who should be interned until after the general election.

Insulting the country’s intelligence by wheeling out the wife seems to be a political tactic for all scenarios. Gordon Brown is seen as too serious by voters so the solution is to push out his wife to say nice things about him. David Cameron is seen as not serious enough by voters so the solution is to push out his wife to say nice things about him. The meagre amounts of dignity and self-respect on display are such you wouldn’t be surprised to see the two leaders being dropped off at the televised election debates by their mums.

What about Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg? Well, his wife is yet to mouth platitudes in a documentary or to be filmed in close-up wiping away a tear on a chatshow so it’s as yet impossible to come to a reasoned opinion about the leader of the Liberal Democrat’s character. Hopefully she’ll be shoved out to entertain the nation soon enough.

The media of course lap all this up like dogs going at a pavement pizza. Two women who appear to be reasonably intelligent and successful women in their own rights are reduced to clothes horses entered into a semi-naughty catfight. When the inevitable backlash kicks off after the election and one of these women’s life is made a misery by press intrusion and vilification their husbands won’t have a leg to stand on, them having signed of on the strategy in the first place.

Still, all this gives the rest of us a pointer towards what we should do when we’re facing life’s little challenges. Things not going well at work? When called into the bosses office all you need say is, ‘Yes, what I’m doing is shit and you don’t like me but have you heard what my Mrs has to say about me? I think you may very well change your mind.’

Why not take your significant other along with you the next time you have a job interview? They can tell your prospective employer about how, even though you’re a bit untidy, you like to cook and are good with kids. When the interviewer asks about your ideas for increasing the company’s productivity, your partner can interject with a swift ‘I can honestly say that I don’t think he’s ever let me down’. The job will be yours.

With the polls narrowing towards election day, and with further desperation bound to creep in, who’s to say where we’ll end up next? We’ve already had the excuciating private details of the last days and hours of the children they both lost but there must be some mileage left there.

We’ve had the awkward and wooden marriage proposal story from Brown but how about the marriage consummation stories from both men? They could borrow from the Blairs and boast about how many times a night they stick it to the missus or give intimate details of how their children were conceived. As ever, with the continuing degeneration of British politics, the Blairs with their manifest lack of class and their no-depth-too-low will to win have so much to answer for.

Clearly I’m no expert on foreign policy. That’s why I’m typing this in the spare room and not ordering the bombing of villages in Afghanistan.

That said, something bothers me about Foreign Secretary David Miliband’s plan for peace in the country:

This involves three things. First, the reintegration into Afghan society of low-level insurgents prepared to lay down their arms and accept the writ of the government. Second, political engagement with those disaffected by the current settlement, but prepared to renounce violence, split from Al Qaeda and accept the constitutional framework. Third, a wider regional political settlement that sees all Afghanistan’s neighbours and near neighbours supportive of an independent Afghan state.

It sounds like a plan although it does sort of fly in the face of the hardline ‘we don’t negotiate with terrorists’ thing we’re fed when some poor sod is kidnapped and is about to get his head sawn off by an al Qaeda affiliate somewhere. Define ‘low-level insurgents’. Is it those that only work weekends or don’t load their AK-47s?

What if Ken Bigley or Margaret Hassan’s murderers were ‘low-level insurgents prepared to lay down their arms and accept the writ of the government’ being merely ‘disaffected by the current settlement, but prepared to renounce violence, split from Al Qaeda and accept the constitutional framework’?

We need a moral philosopher of Miliband’s calibre to make the distinction between a beheader and a mere IED-layer or woman-stoner. Still, if we’ve learned anything in the last 14 years, it’s that there’s no moral, logical or rhetorical cul-de-sac out of which the likes of Miliband cannot handbrake-turn.

No, what bothers me is this. Hamid Karzai has been the elected leader of Afghanistan since 2004 and we’re only just coming up with this now? This plan’s six years and countless deaths late isn’t it? Mind you, only a cynic would suggest that the glorious liberators of Aghanistan are scrabbling around for this fix now because they’re saddled with a seriously bent partner in Karzai and a military campaign limping into its ninth year.

I for one cannot wait to see the fighters, extremists and women-haters that Miliband is hoping to coax onto our side (not to mention the ones already on our side) implement his much loved universal values.

Gordon Brown was bang on the money today in his speech on crime and anti-social behaviour when he said…

…you don’t tackle the fear of crime by cultivating it, by ramping up a public sense of panic, by abusing the figures and claiming our society is broken…

Way to go Gordon. His intervention is a fresh breeze through this debate. Creating fear of crime where none should exist is cynical, dangerous and not worthy of serious politicians. His illustrious predecessor Mr Tony rode to power by kicking off a crime and punishment arms race between New Labour and the Tories, and preying on people’s fears (when he was Shadow Home Secretary he called the murder of James Bulger ‘the ugly manifestations of a society that is becoming unworthy of that name’), so it’s great to see Brown condemning such transparent and tawdry charlatanism and blatant pandering to right-wing tabloidism.

But then, later on in the speech we got…

The next time you hear somebody question the value of retaining DNA profiles from those who have been arrested but not convicted, remember Jeremiah Sheridan. And most of all remember the innocent woman he attacked.

It was futile, one supposes, to expect any kind of consistency or cohesion between arguments when cheap political points need to be scored in an election year. So Brown thought he was well within his rights to use the rape of a disabled woman as a weapon with which to attack his opponents.

In summing up, Gordon says fear of crime is being stoked by the Tories and is a Very Bad Thing. But also, if you don’t back New Labour’s policy on the DNA database, it will mean horrible men will escape justice to continue their reigns of mayhem and terror. Don’t listen to Tory fear-mongering but pay close attention to Gordon’s in case you end up giving comfort to rapists and murderers. Think on.

Some of the testimonies of the survivors of the Child Migrant Programme, which sent ‘poor children for a “better life” to countries like Canada and Australia from the 1920s to 1960s’, and for which the Prime Minister today apologised, are harrowing…

There was this woman, just shouting, shouting at my sister to get up. She was in bed asleep and she’s only five so she was crying and the woman just kept shouting at her. She didn’t have to do that. The search was bad. Why did they have to search my sister? She is only five, what is she going to have? They touch you all over and they’re rough. [1]

…

He had previously been a happy child who was successful at school, but now became very sad, skipped school, lost his appetite, slept poorly, was plagued by nightmares, and screamed in the night. [2]

…

‘I wanted to kill myself all the time I was there. And I think Joseph picked up on how I felt, because he cried so much. Some of his hair fell out, he wouldn’t eat and became ill’ [3]

…

‘You don’t know how it feels to be a kid full of dreams and to feel that nobody cares, that the dreams are not important to anyone. My little sister Jessica is four years old. You think, well, she won’t understand, but in her world Jessica knew what was happening.’ [4]

…

[O]lder children were so stressed they wet their beds and soiled their pants. [5]

…

In actual fact, those testimonies are from children who have been detained and imprisoned by our government in the last few years.

Now, you might think that’s a cheap shot. That it demeans the suffering of those children taken from their families under the Child Migrant Programme and deported overseas where they faced abuse and misery along with the the hard work of the people who support them. I don’t mean to: those people deserve apologies, riches and peace. It’s just… how can the Prime Minister’s apology carry any weight whatsoever when his own government’s agencies are – right now – giving children similar treatment here and then deporting them to countries where they and their parents face abuse or worse? Brown said today…

“We are sorry they were allowed to be sent away at the time when they were most vulnerable. We are sorry that instead of caring for them, this country turned its back.

“And we are sorry that the voices of these children were not always heard, their cries for help not always heeded. And we are sorry that it has taken so long for this important day to come and for the full and unconditional apology that is justly deserved.”

He also said they were cruelly lied to and their childhoods “robbed”, and described the scheme as “shameful” and “a deportation of the innocents”.

Sound familiar? How long until the children of Yarl’s Wood and Dungavel get their apology?

It’s Brown who demeans the suffering of the survivors of the Child Migrant Programme. His apology is worthless while children under his government’s supposed care also suffer.

(Visit the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns website. Sign the Downing Street petition calling on the Prime Minister to end child immigration detention.)

[1] Mark Easton: Children in detention at Yarl’s Wood
[2] The Children’s Commissioner for England’s follow up report to: The arrest and detention of children subject to immigration control
[3] New Statesman: Katherine’s testimony
[4] New Statesman: “My dreams are not important to anyone”
[5] OurKingdom: Roll calls, body searches and sex games

If this blog has one theme running through it, it’s a morbid fascination with the grotesque, mewling shapes into which morality – as most of us thankfully recognise it – is often twisted when political pressure is applied to it.

Take Alistair Darling and his peach-like ego for instance. He goes on the telly last night and says Gordon Brown’s crew unleashed the ‘the forces of hell‘ against him when he predicted the worst recession in 60 years, as if he was some poor Germanic tribesman being swooped down upon by a horse-riding, sword-wielding Russell Crowe.

It’s the complete and utter lack of perspective and self-awareness (on both Darling’s part and the way the media have lapped it up) that makes you torn between whether to laugh yourself sick or emigrate with alacrity off this toilet-bound rock. We unleashed ‘the forces of hell’ on millions of Iraqi men, women and children. Alistair Darling had a couple of fat blokes say a few things about him that he didn’t like. He’s still in his job and nobody died.

How about New Labour’s much heralded ‘Fast Track’ asylum system, built to outflank the Tories and appease the right-wing press? Human Rights Watch released a report yesterday that…

…documents how women asylum seekers with complex claims are being routed into a system designed for much simpler claims. The women are held in detention largely for the UK’s administrative convenience, have very little time to prepare a legal case, and have only a few days to appeal if refused. But the claims often involve such sensitive and difficult issues as sexual violence, female genital mutilation, trafficking, and domestic abuse. There is little time for lawyers or other representatives to build the trust with their clients needed for them to explain their claims or to obtain medical or other evidence needed to verify them.

It’s more and more apparent you couldn’t trust Gordon Brown’s moral compass to stop him taking a whizz on the the bathroom rug let alone show some humanity to these people.

Speaking of the devil, the Prime Minister is in this morning’s Telegraph speaking out against assisted suicide. Such deep respect for human life would be laudable, consistent and admirable coming from most people but Gordon Brown was at the centre of a government that assisted at the very least 100,000 Iraqis off this plane of existence.

Is he the right person to be lecturing us that, in high moral tones that ‘I know in my heart that there is such a thing as a good death’? I suppose there’s an argument to be made somewhere that those herds of brown people had good deaths in that they died in the service of the Greater Good (not, unfortunately, the abstract concept but the exclusive club of politicians and business leaders).

Brown’s obvious hypocrisy would be lessened if palliative care centres weren’t having to hold fundraising events and the hospice movement (founded by Brown’s heroine Dame Cicely Saunders) wasn’t scraping to get by. After 13 years of New Labour, many people have anything but ‘a good death’ in this country.

The corollary to an anti-euthanasia stance should be well-funded, universal, humane and dignified palliative care systems, shouldn’t it? His claims to seeing ’such a thing as a good death’ in his heart is one thing, seeing it in his government’s actions is quite another. As with many other things, Brown’s claims to morality on this are engulfed by a greater one. That’s conveniently forgotten, however, when another pitch has to be made to religious voters and Daily Mail readers in an election year.

In an election year all parties have to make compromises. Before being thrown into the stewpot of a manifesto, issues and ideas must be chopped, seasoned, stirred, simmered and reduced.

Some would argue that there are ideas that shouldn’t be played with for the sake of politics. The health and well-being of our children for instance. New Labour would beg to differ…

Campaigners today accused the government of performing a U-turn over sex education in faith schools, after changes to a bill they said would allow the schools to discourage the use of contraception and teach that homosexuality is wrong.

Why would a self-styled and so-called ‘progressive’ political party do such a thing, undermining the issues of safe sex and tolerance?

Religion should play a role in British politics, Scottish Secretary Jim Murphy will say in a lecture later. The UK government minister will say connecting with religious voters could help Labour win the general election.

Ah, that’ll be why.

God, it’s going to be a long few months before the general election and we get the privilege of rubber stamping the next elected dictatorship. Does the mind not reel at the prospect of having to listen to week upon week upon bloody week of this kind of horse’s doings from the likes of Harriet Harman?

“We have to understand that we now have a new cohort of well, active, healthy older people. The role that they play in their families, in the economy and in society must be recognised and responded to. We must recognise the emergence of the “wellderly”.”

You can just picture the warm little thrill she got when she said that, can’t you? I bet she did her best ‘aren’t I clever’ look. I sometimes think that some people are against all-women shortlists for parliamentary seats for no other reason other than the fear that such a system might turn up another Harman.

Anyway, her talking down to the electorate got me thinking. There must be loads of condescending does-he-take-sugar neologisms that New Labour could half bake in order to patronisingly pigeonhole thinking, breathing human beings. How about…

We now have a new cohort of well, active, incontinent older people. We must recognise the emergence of the “smellderly”.

…or…

We now have a new cohort of well, active, sexy older people. We must recognise the emergence of the “bombshellderly”.

…and…

We now have a new cohort of well, active, anti-social older people. We must recognise the emergence of the “neighbourfromhellderly”.

…then there’s…

We now have a new cohort of well, active, healthy older people aghast at the destruction of our civil liberties under New Labour. We must recognise the emergence of the “orwellderly”.

Then we’ve got the ‘farewellderly’ (never going to vote New Labour again).

Well stripe me orange. While out walking the dog just now, I actually saw a team of guys out in high-visibility jackets with ‘COMMUNITY PAYBACK‘* printed on them. That New Labour has nasty, vindictive little ideas running through it like shit through a goose should be news to nobody. The fact that they’ve managed to find the practical wherewithal to actually put one into action – and one of Hazel Blears’ to boot – comes as a bit of a shock.

Apparently these jackets exist ’so you can see that they’re paying back your community for their crimes’. But surely, if non-custodial sentences for crimes are enforced properly, that’s implicit without the need for bright orange signs? These jackets are merely and only a manifestation of revenge-by-proxy that New Labour divines the British public (or at least the right-wing paper reading faction) yearns for.

So what happens now? I’ve identified several small time lawbreakers that live in my community. These jackets are clearly meant to mark these people as ‘others’, not like you and me. What should my reaction be if I meet them without their jackets? Shun them? What if I meet one in the park walking his dog? Turn my back? What if I were a local businessman and one turned up for an interview for a job? Should he be shown the door?

Just what purpose does my new knowledge serve?

* The website slogan is ‘JUSTICE SEEN, JUSTICE DONE’. Somebody should tell these marketing pricks they haven’t been commissioned by Judge sodding Dredd.

Look, this MPs’ expenses cataclysm is a side show. While we’re hurling rotten fruit at the government they’re carrying on doing their job and rounding up the real bastards. All I can say is thank Christ these public menaces had their doors kicked in at dawn and were dragged to a detention centre:

A woman from the Ivory Coast and her four-year-old son are being held at the Dungavel detention centre following an early morning raid in Glasgow.

It comes days after details of measures to improve the treatment of failed asylum seekers were announced.

And look at these scumbags…

Ismail Cherbal and Safia Aouf, nationals of Algeria, and their British-born children Sonia aged four and son Aya aged 15 months have been detained in Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre for the past 32 days.

Fifteen months old? Well, you can’t be too careful. You might think that New Labour are a bunch of grasping venal bastards but under all the brouhaha with expenses, the true heart of our government still beats.

What sort of country sends a dozen uniformed officers to haul innocent sleeping children out of their beds; gives them just a few minutes to pack what belongings they can grab; pushes them into stinking caged vans; drives them for hours while refusing them the chance to go to the lavatory so that they wet themselves and locks them up sometimes for weeks or months without the prospect of release and without adequate health services?

Our country, apparently.

(See also the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns)

The closer Gordon Brown’s Courage: Eight Portraits gets to the remainder bins, the more perverse it becomes as a joke. Gordon Brown and courage in the same sentence. We laughed at the time. We’re not laughing now.

For those who don’t remember, just before being anointed New Labour leader and Prime Minister, Brown released his anthology of profiles of Edith Cavell, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Raoul Wallenberg, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Nelson Mandela, Dame Cicely Saunders* and… Aung San Suu Kyi. Nobody really knows why. Theories abound about the book being a rather pathetic pitch for some sort of reflected glory.

With most of them dead and Mandela already out of the nick, it’s been interesting to watch Brown’s actions for Aung San Suu Kyi. There haven’t been many. For instance, Brown’s heroine has received just five public utterances of support from her biggest fan since he became one of the world’s supposedly most powerful men, according to the Number 10 website.

So what can we expect from Gordon now that Aung San Suu Kyi is ‘to face trial for breaching the conditions of her detention under house arrest‘ (the breach consisting of being under house arrest when a bloke decided to swim a lake to visit her uninvited)?

It’ll be worth keeping an eye on the news. The Burmese junta had better back off before Gordon is forced to express regret and concern. Maybe we could bomb the top security prison where Ms Suu Kyi is being held with unsold copies of Gordon’s book.

(You can join Amnesty International for as little as two pounds a month.)

So, the Home Office released its Strategy for Countering International Terrorism yesterday. There are one or two things in it that catch the eye. I liked this for example…

Contemporary terrorist organisations aspire to use chemical, biological, radiological and even nuclear weapons. Changing technology and the theft and smuggling of chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive (CBRNE) materials make this aspiration more realistic than it may have been in the recent past.

More realistic. Not more likely. Not more imminent. More realistic. Is that a tacit admission that we’ve been fed a load of scaremongering bollocks in the last eight years?

Needless to say, as is the case with all these things, this new document doesn’t offer any real proof that this isn’t another load of scaremongering bollocks.

For instance, the document says…

By 2003 Al Qa‘ida had developed a device to produce hydrogen cyanide gas, intended for use in crowded urban spaces.

…and cites this BBC news story as the evidence. ‘The plan was allegedly found on one of the computers’ found when an al Qaeda cell was arrested in Bahrain. The only example of the device making it off the virtual drawing board was when the CIA built a model of it for George Bush.

Mr Bush and his aides were left guessing at the reasons why [Osama Bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-]Zawahiri allegedly cancelled the plan.

Count the allegedlys in that story.

On on it goes. ‘In 2004 Al Qa‘ida associated cells in the UK considered the use of radiological devices’. Ah, yes, this would be Dhiren Barot (that link is the Home Office paper’s evidence). The police did not find ‘any evidence that materials had been acquired to carry out the plans’.

The materials Barot needed to carry out his plan? Ten thousand smoke detectors. We all laughed at that plan at the time. Why should we take it any more seriously now it’s in a footnote of a New Labour ’strategy’?

And that’s just two links from the Strategy for Countering International Terrorism I stumbled across and spent half an hour blogging. There’s many more. Are they all so thin? Are they all so unconvincing? Has the government learned nothing since they let Alastair Campbell copy and paste stuff he’d found on the internet so his boss could bomb another country? Seemingly not.

Tom Harris MP is annoyed that bloggers haven’t noticed the fact that New Labour has backed away from its proposal to let bailiffs break into people’s homes and hit them.

Well, I noticed, but while I believe in credit where credit’s due, it’s not as if New Labour are overturning an existing law, is it? What they’re actually doing is crawling away from one of their own disgusting policy ideas.

It’s a bit like a violent drunk expecting praise because he rolled home from the pub tonight and thought better of smacking the wife for once. These people really are desperate for votes, aren’t they?

And it’s not as if the idea has gone away forever either…

But the Ministry of Justice said such a change will not now be considered until the industry is regulated in 2012.

We’ll hang on to our plaudits for a year or three yet, Mr Harris, if you don’t mind.

(Via James Graham on Twitter)

Remember those government plans ‘proposing wide-ranging new powers for bailiffs to break into homes and to use “reasonable force” against householders who try to protect their valuables’?

Looks like they’re being abandoned:

[F]ollowing a comprehensive reassessment of the provisions in the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act 2007 ordered by the Secretary of State for Justice, the Government will not be extending bailiffs’ powers of entry and the use of force by enforcement agents…

Good news.

Another display of governmental humanity at Yarl’s Wood…

The UK Border Agency wants to build a detention unit to house 500 single men at Yarl’s Wood and says it will be built to prison standards.

Built to prison standards? In case anybody needed reminding, refugees aren’t criminals. Treating them as such pleases who, exactly?

Do you have ‘legitimate’ expectations? It’s probably best not to, you’re only going to end up disappointed, and quite possibly angry. You see, the matter of whether we, as citizens, can have ‘legitimate’ expectations became the matter of legal precedent last year.

In short, we, as citizens, are not entitled under law to have a ‘legitimate’ expectation that just because a political party puts something in its election manifesto it has to put it into law. This means that a party can put any amount of bribes and bullshit in its pitch for election but if they get elected don’t be stupid enough to expect that they need to make them a reality.

Gordon Brown is quite entitled under law to promise you a solid gold brick if he wins the next election. The small print actually says solid gold brick may not actually exist and there’s nowt you can do about it other than impotently wave your little fists as ministers blame the media and bloggers for making people cynical about politics. Hey, get used to it.

It turns out the government has a similar get out with laws it actually gets around to putting on the statute book. For example, last year Help the Aged and Friends of the Earth took the government to court over its implementation of Warm Homes and Energy Conservation Act 2000. The act demands of the government that it ‘publish and implement a strategy for reducing fuel poverty; to require the setting of targets for the implementation of that strategy’.

Unfortunately, Help the Aged and Friends of the Earth lost:

The High Court has ruled that the Government has not broken the law by failing to keep homes warm, despite allowing the number of households in fuel poverty to reach the highest level in ten years.

As to the get out, here’s a written question to Parliament, answered by Energy and Climate Change Minister Joan Ruddock:

Mr. Dai Davies: To ask the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change what assessment he has made of paragraphs 34 and 35 of the adjudication of the High Court on 17 October 2008 in respect of a case brought by Help the Aged and Friends of the Earth on enforcements of the Warm Homes Act 2000, in terms of the duty placed upon the responsible Secretary of State under section 3 of the Act.

Joan Ruddock: Paragraphs 34 and 35 of the judgment refer to section 3 of the Warm Homes and Energy Conservation Act 2000. Provisions like that section are commonly included in Bills, and therefore in Acts of Parliament, without any intention that they should have a substantive legal effect.

Without any intention that they should have a substantive legal effect. There we have it – a lovely little convention that means government ministers aren’t bound by their own laws. Try it yourself if you ever find yourself up before a judge. ‘Come on you’re honour, was there any intention that this law should have a substantive legal effect?’ Tell them they shouldn’t have a ‘legitimate’ expectation of your future good conduct. Let me know how much he or she adds to your sentence as a result.

(Via the Guardian Diary)

There’s a disgraceful policy idea doing the rounds about putting people under house arrest for up to a month on nothing more than a policeman’s say so. It’s a bit Apartheid-era South Africa.

So where’s David Davis, that doughty defender of civil liberties, when you need him? Didn’t he once accuse the government of ‘casually disregarding our civil liberties in the face of problems to which it has no adequate solutions’?

Why isn’t he resigning his seat and calling a by-election in protest against yet another revolting assault on the criminal justice system? Why isn’t he manning the barricades? Or rallying cross-party opposition?

Chris Grayling: Labour is soft on crime and soft on the causes of crime

Our police should have powers to go straight to a magistrate and get an order against that troublemaker confining them to their homes for up to a month – except for during school hours. And if they break that curfew order they should expect to find themselves in the cells.

[...]

The Conservatives are the party of law and order – law and order based on common sense, strong families and communities and a system which places the victim above the criminal.

Ah. That’ll be why.

From today, anyone taking a photograph of a police officer could be deemed to have committed a criminal offence.

That is because of a new law – Section 76 of the Counter Terrorism Act – which has come into force.

What could possibly go wrong?

So what’s going on here then? We’re getting a new fleet of ’super express’ trains. It’s terribly exciting. But who’s going to build them?

At 10.13 am this morning, we had…

British-led consortium Agility Trains – which includes train maker Hitachi, services group John Laing and Barclays – will build and maintain a fleet of new “super express” trains for the Great Western and east coast main lines. The Department for Transport said the contract will safeguard and create over 12,500 jobs.

A British-led consortium? Hooray for British jobs for British workers and other such populist utterances. Transport Secretary Geoff ‘Bab’ Hoon, bearding the BNP in its den, said, ‘It is good news for the British economy that over 12,500 jobs will be created and safeguarded’.

However, by 2.51 pm, things had changed:

The government sparked a trade union backlash today after awarding a £7.5bn train contract to a Japanese-led consortium and admitting that some of the 12,500 jobs created or safeguarded by the deal will be based outside Britain.

It’s a Japanese-led consortium now? That’s fast work. This deal is changing its nationality faster than Zola Budd. Of course, by this time, the worthless Hoon who only hours before had been draping himself in the Union Flag, was nowhere to be seen.

New Labour propaganda tsar Derek Draper is getting jolly exercised over the issue of tax avoidance, saying some troop of right-wing wannabe demagogues called the Tax Payers’ Alliance (no, me neither) ‘gives green light to corporate tax avoiders‘.

It’s strange really, particularly when you consider that tax avoidance costs the nation billions thanks to loopholes that the government refuses to close. Who is the party of government right now giving the green light to corporate tax avoiders? Oh, that’s right. New Labour. The party Derek Draper’s propaganda offensive is busy losing votes for.

Really, Draper’s like the pub landlord shouting at the bloke who mops the pub floor for people getting drunk. Shouldn’t he be screaming down the phone to the people at the brewery?

Any other bloggers out there getting emails from a John Miles on the Labour Party ‘New Media Task Force’? I am even though I didn’t asked for them and I’m unable to unsubscribe from them. Five emails since January 13th. I’m being spammed by New Labour.

Tim Ireland has the full story including why and how New Labour are breaking the law on spamming.

Like Tim, I’d assumed I was getting them because I’m signed up to New Labour’s general news email list. Not a bit of it, in fact. The emails are specifically begging for links from blogs. It’s a link-whoring exercise. New Labour have had someone harvest the email addresses of blogging ‘Labour people’ (don’t laugh) in order to spam them.

We’re trying to get the maximum number of Labour people involved and if you could blog about the discussion forum – even a short post with a link – we can ma ke sure as many people know about it as possible.

…and…

With David Cameron launching his Energy policy today, we thought you might like to have a copy of Ed Miliband’s response to it.

…and…

…you can embed the widget onto your blog using the code here…

…and…

I wanted to let you all know about the site we’re launching today…

I’ve been unwillingly conscripted into New Labour’s online propaganda offensive it would seem. The spam is addressed to ‘Justin’ so some New Labour drone has taken the time to read this blog’s ‘About Me’ page (but not this which is very prominently linked to at the top of the page) but didn’t take the (very, very short) time required to read a few posts and discover that I’d drive rusty nails into my generative organs before I’d help New Labour hawk their tawdry wares.

Someone at New Labour’s ‘New Media Task Force’ is clearly a dickhead. On top of Derek Draper’s woeful LabourList it’s all too apparent that it’s amateur hour in New Labour’s online propaganda division right now.

‘We made a list of bloggers we thought might be interested,’ Sue Macmillan, ‘New Media Campaigns Taskforce Leader’, told Tim Ireland. Well, we’re interested now, Sue.

The next question is: how do I get off New Labour’s spam list?

Holy heck. Via Tim we get LabourList’s latest ‘viral video’. With its blurred, blocky low resolution and scratchy, screechy audio it’s certainly got the cult-of-the-rank-amateur feel in keeping with the rest of the venture.

Oy. I suspect it takes its inspiration from CIA sensory-overload interrogation techniques. I made it to 34 seconds before capitulating. How long can you last?

(It’d also be nice to think that LabourList’s lawyers might be getting some practice soon – fending off Mr Wonder’s people.)

Remember back in December when we heard about the government ‘proposing wide-ranging new powers for bailiffs to break into homes and to use “reasonable force” against householders who try to protect their valuables’ and we wondered how long it would be before someone ended up dead?

Well, we didn’t have to wait very long:

A 78-year-old man from Accrington collapsed and died from a heart attack after being taken to a cash machine by a bailiff to pay a £60 speeding fine.

Retired pub landlord Andy Miller had only been released from hospital a fortnight before following an earlier heart attack in October.

[...]

His son, Mick, 48, from Lower Darwen, Blackburn, said: “We made countless phone calls and sent numerous letters to the court to tell them about dad’s stay in hospital.

“The bailiff called at his house and said he had to make a payment, otherwise they would bring a delivery van and locksmith. He said they would get into the property and take goods and there was nothing he could do about it.”

They were after the 60 pound fine plus £300 court costs. Some tough guy, with the blessings of New Labour bestowed upon him, hammered on a 78 year-old man’s door and threatened to have the down down and the man’s possessions on the back of a van. For three hundred and sixty quid. Three hundred and sixty poxy, fucking quid.

Gordon Brown’s kitchen – which we paid for – cost 25 times that. Twenty five Andy Millers.

(Via Laurie at LC)

Laurie Penny at Liberal Conspiracy:

I’ve just got back from stewarding at the Fabian Society Conference, ‘Fairness doesn’t happen by chance’ – tickets fairly priced at £30, which is why I was stewarding.

Worried that the grass roots of New Labour’s LabourList propaganda ghetto are actually astroturf? Then try Labourist. All the content, none of the control freakery.

As well as sticking his tongue out at the retreating back of George Bush, David Miliband’s also been indulging in a little tokenistic slumming while on his trip to India:

Foreign Secretary David Miliband spent the night in the hut of a Dalit or “untouchable” [as those on the lowest rung of India's ancient caste heirarchy used to be known] in an Indian village, sleeping on a wooden cot, reports said Thursday.

As the Foreign Minister says on his blog:

I am at the airport on the way to Amethi district in Uttar Pradash. 800m Indians live on less than 2 dollars a day, 450m on less than 1 dollar. Today I will get a chance to see some of the gap that exists between metropolitan middle class India and the rest.

And again, you think: right words, wrong bloke to be saying them. I’d be interested to see if Miliband’s had any meetings while on his trip to facilitate arms deals.

In 2002, the UK government lobbied hard to flog a billion quids worth of arms to India (at a time when India and Pakistan were toe-to-toe over Kashmir). In 2008 we gave most of that money back ‘to target areas such as the eastern state of Bihar, one of India’s poorest’.

Government officials will also be on hand this February to ’support’ UK businesses attending the Aero India 2009 arms fair. India is, after all, a lucrative market for merchants of death (it was worth £130 million to the UK in 2007).

So when our Foreign Secretary and his new-found conscience emerges from his thatched hut wringing his hands about India’s poor, don’t forget that him and his colleagues are the middle men urging the Indian government behind the scenes to spend their money on other things than 800 million Indians living on less than two dollars a day.