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... and why not? After all, as we now live in a de facto one ideology state (and that ideology is populist utilitarianism), what difference do the antics of what goes on in Parliament really make? The sooner we have the government doing away with this fiction of political process and just start ruling mostly by administrative edict, the better really. Far too many people are just hiding behind comfortable fictions.

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I find the notion that it is news that Tory leader David Cameron is a Blairite so unremarkable that I am puzzled the Telegraph even runs with the story.

The closest thing to an actual conservative party is the UKIP because it sure as hell is not the Conservative Party.

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I have not seen anything written here on what is being called the Abolition of Parliament Bill - the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill that was going through Parliament last week (whilst 'Dave' Cameron was off on paternity leave).

I have heard it finally finishes off the delegated legislation process (the process by which ministers and civil servants pass regulations with power given them under enabling Acts of Parliament) - a process that A.V. Dicey observed before the First World War and Chief Justice Hewitt was the last major establishment figure to oppose ("The New Despotism" 1929). It has taken a very long time to finish the process, but it seems Mr Blair will complete it.

Of course in a modern big government Welfare State having every regulation examined by Parliament is not possible (one extra reason to oppose a modern big government Welfare State).

Still a Statute that allows ministers to alter any regulation (apart from in the field of tax) without coming back to Parliament, and set up to two years in prison as a punishment for failing to obey their arbitrary regulations - well it does seem to a bit much even for Britain.

Have I just dreamed it all then?

Also nothing on our dear friends the Local Government Standards Board - people have noticed them now they have suspended Red Ken from his position as Mayor of London for a month (for nasty things he said to a Jewish journalist).

However, the Board has been doing this sort of thing (and far worse) for years. For example, if a councillor writes to try and expose the "wind farm" con (it is a con because it does not greatly reduce CO2 production - as the wind turbines do not produce much power and have to be "backed up" by coal and gas fired stations which run all the time as a safeguard) they might not (if the Board feels like it) be allowed to speak (or vote) against "wind farms" in council debates.

Ditto saying that Council 'Chief Executives' are paid too much or are useless ('Chief Executives' are the highly paid useless trash who have replaced what used to be called Town Clerks) - if a councillor says that he is in big trouble.

There is no automatic right for an elected councillor to oppose government policy (or 'best practice') in modern Britain and has not been since Mr Blair set up the Board. If the Board will let you speak and vote fine - but they may choose not to.

I am not a fanatical supporter of democracy, but I thought that many people were supposed to be. I have heard very little about what is going on in Britain - most people seem either to not know or not care

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The Guardian's Jenni Russell points out that the attitude of British officialdom is changing subtly.

I find this change truly frightening because I spent the first few years of my life in apartheid South Africa. My parents were political activists, and we lived in an atmosphere of fear. My mother's relations distanced themselves from her, fearing that they too would be targeted if they associated with us. My earliest memories are of police raiding the house at night, emptying out dolls' cots and sweeping books off shelves. People would simply disappear. A black friend left our house to travel to his family in Zululand, and vanished.

After a month of inquiries, someone found a witness who had seen him being picked up by the police. He was being held without charge under the 90-days legislation - the same policy that the government is trying to introduce here. The relief when we came to England was incalculable. This country, these policemen and this government were benign, reasonable and trustworthy. As my father never ceased to point out, a Britain that had fought fascism had a deep-rooted commitment to protecting the individual from the state.

That is no longer true. ID cards are one danger, but there are other measures which are already a reality. [...]

I fear that many of us are failing to see the danger we are now in, precisely because we have grown up in a largely benign state. We still trust in the good sense and reasonableness of its agents, and the rest of officialdom.

However, I think she is wrong about the cause:

This change in the relationship between people and officials can only be explained as a result of the new illiberal atmosphere in which we are living.

That's back to front. An illiberal attitude is insufficient for oppression or we would be living under the dictatorship of the Free Church of Scotland. It is actually about power. Unchecked power will be abused. Not may, will.

You cannot change the culture of the law - Blair minor - without affecting the culture of the land. British police were once famous for courtesy. But then as little as twenty years ago they had few powers not available to the ordinary citizen. They relied on voluntary cooperation for much of their authority, and the reasonable exercise of that authority yielded general cooperation.

Before the merger of the agencies, the Inland Revenue was proverbially gentlemanly and reasonable compared to HM Customs and Excise, though the taxation functions were very similar. The difference in culture wasn't accidental. Customs had vastly greater powers and found it easier to rely on fear to do the job.

ASBO-land is a different place from England. And this is why: as they gain more capacity to order us about, those in office will order us about more. What else?

The PM implies he wishes us to 'respect' one another and social norms. He claims he has given powers to officials to make it so. But respec' on the streets will mean something else. It will mean respec' (in the sense of fawning obedience) towards the same officials who have the powers to make it so. And as we have ever fewer rights - perhaps not even existence - without their say-so, truculence, swagger and oppression by officials will become the norm.

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This pretty much explains the political situation in a nutshell. Serial commenter Pommygranate is writing about Britain but the same could probably be said about almost any western country to varying degrees: the state simply bribes people to vote for a bigger state by making them dependents.

His solution is an interesting notion.

But turkeys will still not vote for Xmas. Some on the right of the blogosphere are calling for voting restrictions for those who depend on the state for a living. Draconian indeed, but it may be the only way round this particular Catch 22.

Things would have to get very bad for that to be politically possible but is is a good idea. I quite like the idea "you can either work for the state and live of other people's money or you can vote, but not both". Not a chance that would happen any time soon but it is a damn fine idea nevertheless. In truth I suspect many people would be happy to make that choice as voting is hardly some blessed sacrament. If so many people do not really care about liberty, are they really so attached to voting? I wonder.

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Gervase Markham, who blogs at Hacking for Christ, works for the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit "dedicated to promoting choice and innovation on the internet". He writes about his recent encounter with a UK Trading Standards officer:

They had encountered businesses which were selling copies of Firefox, and wanted to confirm that this was in violation of our licence agreements before taking action against them.

I wrote back, politely explaining the principles of copyleft – that the software was free, both as in speech and as in price, and that people copying and redistributing it was a feature, not a bug. I said that selling verbatim copies of Firefox on physical media was absolutely fine with us, and we would like her to return any confiscated CDs and allow us to continue with our plan for world domination (or words to that effect).

Many people would find the official's reaction to that surprising; but they do not call them disruptive technologies for nothing. The woman replied:

"If Mozilla permit the sale of copied versions of its software, it makes it virtually impossible for us, from a practical point of view, to enforce UK anti-piracy legislation, as it is difficult for us to give general advice to businesses over what is/is not permitted."

As Carlo at Techdirt writes:

It's unclear exactly what role the Mozilla Foundation plays in enforcing the UK's anti-piracy laws, or exactly why they shouldn't be allowed to license their software however they want, just to make things easier for some civil servants. If nothing else, it merely indicates how deeply ingrained people's preconceived notions about software "piracy" are. And it's disappointing that a government officer whose job it is to enforce copyrights can't seem to get their head around the idea that there is another way to license software than how most entrenched developers and companies handle it.

Disappointing? Yes. Surprising? Not really.

Crossposted from the Engagement Alliance

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I am feeling less of a lone loony than I did. After a decade of my saying the key thing wrong with the demon eyes campaign was that the slogan ought to have been: 'New Labour: Old Danger' because the electorate should not have the purported newness reinforced, more and more people in the chattering classes seem to be accepting that there is a danger. Even such fringe lefty agitators as Clifford Chance LLP have offered severe warnings about the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill. Too late?

The War on Liberty may never end, but it became a general action only in the 90s - just about the time, the Wall being down, and the net routing round borders and censorship, we free-lifers had begun to feel we were winning. Now I find I am doing my bit with NO2ID and we are gearing up for a ten-year campaign. Grand constitutionalist coalitions are being proposed left, right, and centre (which I'm sure are meritorious). The differences between Peter Hitchens and Mark Thomas begin to be indistinguishable when the establishment is of the extreme centre...

What worries me is that this ferment is still superficial, a speck of mould on Mr Blair's Horlicks. It concerns the tiny minority of the population that reads the serious press, say 10% - and of those only the avid followers of politics, maybe a quarter of that. The readers and writers of blogs are fewer still, and more introrse.

The mass of the population of Britain is nescient, complacent, and has no interest in the abstractions of liberty, or the threats from power assumed only to be threats to others, to bad people. Many people are happy to claim the status of an 'ordinary' person, with "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" from officialdom, while being paradoxically susceptible to fears of everything else. Passively concerned with material welfare, security against virtual risks, and gossip, they graze and are milked as the livestock of the state.

This is Foucault's concept of governmentality in action. Not, pace his fans on the left, a neo-liberal order, but a post-liberal order in which the foundational institutions of liberalism - liberty and individuality, rule of law, the separation of private and public life, a civil society and a political sphere distinct from one another - have ceased to have a meaning for even the bulk of the middle-classes.

Where is the cattle-prod that will change the public mood?

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If you are in Oxford on Saturday and want to join a protest against animal rights extremists, check this out. The Research Defence Society blog has more, as does the Social Affairs Unit and Laurie's own blog.

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A year ago, a headline like this was pure comedy. And this Evening Standard headline that I snapped last night even now has a slightly comic, Carry On Farming feel to it.

Alas, bird flu seems to be getting rather serious.

Governments thrive on infectious diseases, because only governments, or institutions that are very hard to distinguish from governments, can contain them. Which is why I always suspect that such "pandemics" (pandemic seems now to be the regular word for an "epidemic") tend to be somewhat exaggerated. But if I were a politician, I would never dare to say such a thing.

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The 2012 London Olympic Games could be hit by electricity blackouts as energy supplies fall off, according to a poll of scientists and other eminent folk in this story by the BBC. Well, pole vaulting and javelin throwing have not been done in the dark before, but I guess it might have a certain novelty.

Seriously though, how should one take these jeremiads about impending shortages to electricity generation? This excerpt from the BBC story makes it clear that many analysts believe that solutions must embrace technologies including nuclear power:

All 140 respondents to the survey said that the best way to ensure energy security for the future lay in a diversified mix of electricity generation, including renewables, coal, gas and nuclear

This story of a few days ago suggests the opposition Tories might, in their quixotic desire to appear Green, ditch the nuclear option. This seems rather ironic given that some figures in the environmentalist movement have started to embrace nuclear energy as a way to cut carbon emissions (while not being blind to the problems of nuclear waste disposal and the large capital outlays involved in building nuclear powers stations).

I am an agnostic on nuke energy. If it can, in a free market, hold its own compared with other energy sources, fine. But given the vital importance of electricity to our modern, information-age economy, it is madness to tempt disaster by shutting down options now.

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I have been 'on the road' again since a few days after the New Year. Travel may seem exciting to some, but it does wear you down when you do it week after week. This is especially true when planning is impossible and you cannot say with any certainty which of several jobs will be next in line. You just adapt and make your arrangements on the fly.

That said, constant travel does lead to unexpected adventures and misadventures. I would count losing my glasses going through security in Toronto among the less exciting and more expensive of these. Although there are some weeks more to go on this jaunt, the event which most stands out happened before I even got out of the UK at the start of January.

Due to contract signings running late a couple layers up the food chain from myself, travel arrangements for my usual January gig backstage at the big Healthcare investment conference in San Francisco were last minute. Translation: they were so late the flights were almost unaffordable so I was booked on a simply ridiculous connection. I left Belfast on an evening flight which dropped me in Heathrow just as the airport closed up operations for the night. My New York flight was first thing in the morning... so I got to sit up all night in the main terminal.

Well, my slogan is "Have Laptop, Will Travel", so after some help from friendly airport staff to move some seats closer to an electric outlet, I settled in for a long, long night of work. Time crawled by. Over the top of my screen I idly noticed a gaggle of armed police wander by and hassle a couple black teens whom I think were also waiting for a connecting flight.

One of the cops walked towards me. I naturally assumed he was going to act as a friendly face to London's major airport; perhaps commiserate on my bad luck in being stuck there over night; or possibly warn me to beware of this, that or the other.

I was wrong. He planted himself in front of me in his best "Clockwork Orange" intimidation posture and proceeded to tell me I was guilty of theft. I looked at him blankly. Theft of services. I was plugged into the airport's electricity. He quoted a section number I was purportedly violating. As I have lived in Belfast through troubled years, I know how to deal with this sort. You smile and you verbally give them squat to grab hold of. They want to provoke a response that will let them play cop.

This fellow was very obviously tired, bored and looking for someone to take it out on. I, being one of the few persons in the terminal was 'it'. He went on. Not only was I 'stealing services'. I was in violation of... of.... HEALTH AND SAFETY REGULATIONS! I did not have appropriate authorization from the Airport declaring my laptop was safe for use with their AC sockets, and if I were to get electrocuted they might be liable!

I quietly studied the hole in his head.

He ranted on that I was still stealing power as he talked. Actually I was concentrating on keeping up a fake smile and non-threatening eye contact so as to avoid serious trouble. I was also dumbfounded, but I snapped out of it and casually reached over and unplugged. Slowly. I was not quite sure of the stability of this character and he was, after all, an armed member of a society in which only his sort are armed.

With the offending laptop unplugged and as he had utterly failed to provoke any sort of lese majeste remark from me, there was little more he could do. He sternly told me he would let me off with a warning and then retreated and joined his cohorts. They had remained some distance away throughout. Backup I suppose. I might well have been armed with sharp verbs and poisonous nouns for all they knew.

The previously hassled white robed African teen was not far away and as our trooper stormed off we caught each others eyes. I shook my head. He wryly smiled back. Wordless understanding passed between us.

Welcome to 21st Century London.

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Reuters reports that the hunting with hounds is more popular than ever despite the move by parliament last year to outlaw the hunting of foxes with hounds. (Incidentally, foxes are increasingly a problem in the cities as they scavenge for food. I used to live in Clapham and the place was full of them).

It makes me wonder about whether the vote by MPs this week to ban smoking in public places, including private members' clubs, will be easily enforced. Let's hope it meets the same fate as the anti-foxhunting measure. I say this as someone who does not smoke or hunt on horseback (despite being a Suffolk farmer's son, hunting with hounds never appealed, although I have shot the odd bunny rabbit from time to time).

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Harry Hutton speaks for many, I am sure, when he says this:

It's been a pretty good week for all you non-smoking, non-terrorism glorifying, pro-ID card tossers. All going your way at the moment, isn't it? Must be feeling pretty pleased with yourselves.

For now you triumph. But you'll get your comeuppance, you swine. That slippery villain is going to ruin us all. You think he doesn't have plans for you too? You think that just because you don't smoke or glorify terrorists you're off the hook? Just wait. You're gonna learn the hard way.

Personally I have never really bought in to this Blair-is-evil meme. Perhaps if I met him face to face I would feel differently, but to me he merely seems desperately eager to do good, but somewhat dim about how to actually contrive goodness, like a trendy vicar. Good at winning elections though, and making speeches, and doing Hugh Grant impersonations. The man knows his rhetoric, and if, at any time during the twenty first century, Blair were to step down from being the Prime Minister, I think his rhetoric will be sorely missed by the next government, assuming it's Labour. Slippery, yes. But a villain? Not really. I don't think so, anyway.

But whatever his motives may be, and however little he may have any deliberate plans to screw the non-smoking, non-terrorism glorifying, pro-ID card tendency, Blair, or the processes he has now set in motion, will still do this. But, he meant and he means no harm.

But feel free to disagree.

While you are still allowed to.

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Mark Holland is on a blogging roll just now, and one of the more interesting things to be found on his blog earlier in the week was a link to and a big chunk of a speech made by Winston Churchill, on June 4th 1945, which I assume Mark to have found here. (Mark himself offers no link.)

Quote:

But, you will say, look at what has been done in the war. Have not many of those evils which you have depicted been the constant companions of our daily life? It is quite true that the horrors of war do not end with the fighting-line. They spread far away to the base and the homeland, and everywhere people give up their rights and liberties for the common cause. But this is because the life of their country is in mortal peril, or for the sake of the cause of freedom in some other land. They give them freely as a sacrifice. It is quite true that the conditions of Socialism play a great part in war-time. We all submit to being ordered about to save our country. But when the war is over and the imminent danger to our existence is removed, we cast off these shackles and burdens which we imposed upon ourselves in times of dire and mortal peril, and quit the gloomy caverns of war and march out into the breezy fields, where the sun is shining and where all may walk joyfully in its warm and golden rays.

Now I am not trying to say or even to suggest that what governs Britain now is what was meant in 1945 by "Socialism". That hard-line root-and-branch government control of everyone and everything is a horror story has by now been well understood by all but a tiny few lunatics, if only because the promised economic benefits of such a system have all turned to dust and rust, in Britain and everywhere else where such Socialism has been attempted. Churchill's team won that argument, even if this took rather longer than Churchill had hoped in 1945. But the book which prompted Churchill to say these things, Hayek's The Road To Serfdom, paints a more complicated picture than just simple tyranny. Hayek also foresaw chaos, and an ever more desperate governmental effort to correct chaos, with even more chaos. And at the moment, governmentally induced chaos probably looms larger in our lives than governmental tyranny. But the means of inflicting a more self-conscious and deliberate tyranny at some future date are now pretty much all in place.

And, once again, the traitor in our midst is war. In 1945, it was the recently concluded war against Nazi Germany, and the warm glow of team spiritedness which that war gave off, for those who had good wars like formerly poor soldiers who had lived through victories (rather than those who had died during defeats), and like behind the lines enthusiasts for central planning. Now, it is the so-called War on Terror, which creates an atmosphere in which the Government does not demand or expect to know everything, but does insist upon its absolute right to know anything in particular that strikes it as important. And, now as in 1945, the British people, on the whole, do not object. Rather do they expect this, and complain only when the Government fails to keep an eye on things enthusiastically enough.

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Heh. Who was that speaker again?

From an email circular promoting think-tank events around Europe:

London

21/02/06 Policy Exchange "Why the Agenda of the Future cannot be delivered by a person stuck in the Past" - William Hague MP, Shadow Foreign Secretary

RSVP: info@policyexchange.org.uk

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Danny Finklestein has had a nightmare. About Britain becoming a despotic state. This one-time advisor to John Major (oh dear, we all make errors), even says this:

"But I have to admit that the legislation being debated in the Commons this week — the new ID cards, the smoking ban, the measure on the glorification of terror — has tempted me to take up smoking and start attending lectures about Hayek organised by earnest men with pamphlets in carrier bags."

Nice patronising tone there Danny - I tend not to bother with carrier bags these days. Welcome to the concept of liberty and limited government.

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I am not recommending this because the Government wants to punish you, although it does, but because it is the only place you are likely to be allowed to smoke in peace for the forseeable future. The Home Office is not about to ban smoking in prisons.

But what about the health of non-smoking prisoners in the confined space? What about passive smoking by prison officers, whose workplace it is? N'importe. The tobacco allowance in prison is a means of control used by the authorities. Removing it would remove something of their capacity for arbitrary reward and punishment of individual prisoners. Plus withdrawing it would lead to riots, both acutely in fury at withdrawal, and chronically on losing the calming effects of nicotine.

So the lesson for prisoners in what Shami Chakrabarti calls HMP UK who do wish to smoke is plain. Threaten violence. You will either get your way as other aggressive sub-groups do, or be sent to the segregation block that is the officially acknowledged prison system - and there you may smoke all you like, provided you behave yourself.

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If ever developments heralded the demise of the television licence fee, it is the ubiquitous spread of the digital media. Now that televisions have spread to the mobile phone, the BBC is not far behind. Whether it be on your PC or your phone, you must pay the pirates for the privilege of not watching them:

As the mobile industry debates the future of television on phones and other portable devices at its convention in Barcelona, there's a warning closer to home that the new technology will still be subject to licensing regulations laid down in the 1904 Wireless Telegraphy Act.

TV Licensing, the body charged with collecting the £126.50 fee (rising to £131.50 on April 1), said that it doesn't matter whether you are watching television on a PC, mobile phone or old fashioned cathode ray tube, you must be covered by a TV licence or face a fine of up to £1000.

"There is no difference between a mobile phone or a television or any other piece of electronic equipment used to watch live or as-live programming. You will need to be covered by a TV licence," a spokesman for the body confirmed.

It can not be long now before even politicians see the abolition or curtailment of the BBC licence fee as a no-brainer.

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MPs have just voted in favour of making it compulsory for Britons to have an ID card when they apply for a passport. Bastards.

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Our home grown authoritarians plan to inflict yet more absurd measures which have nothing to do with defending ourselves against terrorism. ID cards would not have stopped a single terrorist attack in the UK: they are a control measure designed to make taxing and regulating people's economic activities easier, nothing more. Yet because there is a genuine threat from Islamic terrorists, the government keeps trying to conflate ID cards with 'doing something about terrorism'. As it is so obviously untrue, this issue makes a rather good quick and easy litmus test to detect people who are either complete idiots or barefaced liars (or both).

Moreover the intend to make 'glorifying terrorism' illegal is not just bound to backfire, it is a terrible idea on every level. You would think people in the dismal halls of Westminster would have learned to leave well enough alone given the comical absurdity of past attempts to ban terrorists saying things in the UK, which lead to such farcical situations as having Sinn Fein/IRA's Gerry Adams' voice being dubbed by other people's voices to get around attempts to stop him airing his views. We need people to actually say what they think and the more vile they are, the more important it is to hear what motivates them.

Moreover does anyone seriously think people are attracted to actively support terrorism because of what they read in a mainstream newspaper rather than opinions closer to their every day life? It is a bit more complex than that and again you would think the experience of Ulster would have shown that when terrorists gain the support of a section of a society, all stoping their spokesmen from talking in the media does is prevent everyone else from understanding what they really think.

The BBC and mainstream media generally has followed the government line that there is a large pool of moderate Muslim opinion which does not support or sympathise with radical and intolerant Islamic views. I too have assumed this to be the case, at least in some measure, and yet as time goes by the theory is starting to look rather threadbare as if there really is a majority of moderates out there, they are more than just silent, they are almost invisible. The organisers of the demonstration yesterday in Trafalgar Square carefully choreographed the event to show the world a moderate face of muslim opinion standing hand in hand with a few dhimmis like Ken Livingston and select useful idiots such as Pax Christi and former KGB front man Bruce Kent. Yet it took less than 24 hours for one of the people behind the demo to reveal his true colours.

But any attempt to shut these people up with the law will not stop them saying whatever they want amongst their own community, unless the government plans to have multi-lingual spies reporting on what gets said in every single mosque and Arabic/Turkish/Kurdish/Pakistani social club in Britain. The only people who will no longer know what these guys really think will be the rest of us. And given that anyone who trusts the what the state says to decide who is and is not 'the bad guys' is a credulous fool, that is not a good idea to say the least. Yet again we see why freedom of expression is not just important, it is essential if we are to know our enemies as well as our friends.

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The demonstration in Trafalgar square, supported by dhimmi-in-chief for London Ken Livingston, was clearly orchestrated to show a homogenised face of 'moderate Islam' for the world to see. An interesting feature of the demo was that no 'home made placards' were tolerated by the organisers. A small group of Kurds turned up with their own signs and were fairly quickly handed the printed blue-white official signs. I was not quick enough to get a picture of the Kurdish ones before they vanished as I did not expect them to be taken down, but the ones in English were fairly anodyne.

Not even in Islamic green!

I would guess maybe 7,000 people showed up, perhaps 10,000 tops, at least by the time I lost interest around 3:00 and wandered off to a nearby computer faire. Many of the usual suspects were there, such as the inevitable socialist workers and CND set...

Quite what wicked old Blair and BushMcHitler have to do with protesting against cartoons of Mohammed in Denmark was not clear



Hands off secular fascist police states and theocratic police states!



You can be sure those naughty cartoons (or that tee-shirt) would not have been allowed in Cuba!

The large official signs were clearly expensive high quality creations and contained all manner of utterly irrelevant slogans designed to appeal to the 'hard of thinking'.

So if some Muslim desires sharia law for themselves, presumably this is what he also wishes for me... Oh I feel much better now!



Tolerance? Sure, it is yours by right. Respect? You must be joking, that you have to earn



Jyllands-Posten did not 'incite' to violence, they just defended free expression, unlike some others we know of. Respect however has nothing to do with it

And just to remind people what this is really about...

The Danish embassy in London under police guard

And one final picture which tickled my sense of irony... a pleasant looking young woman watching the demonstration in her stylish Christian Dior scarf.

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Governments are not know for being truthful, but it would seem sensible to tell lies that have a reasonable probability of being believed - and I do not agree that the "biggest lies are the most likely to be believed" (at least if by 'biggest' we mean thing that are most obviously false).

However, the British government seems to have adopted a policy of telling obvious lies. In the last few days alone we had (for example) the claim that "violent crime has fallen by 23%". This was duly reported by the Independent newspaper (a newspaper that hates the current government, but hates truth even more - and so was glad to support the claim). This was brought out in support of the government policy of allowing "24 hour drinking", I am not much interested in the policy (other than like so much 'deregulation' it has turned out to mean a lot more form filling and other such), but the claim of vast drop in violent crime was obvious nonsense.

If the government had said "contrary to people's believe that violent crime is rising, it is actually saying much the same" that might well still have been telling lies (as violent crime is, most likely, on the up) but they would have been more likely to be believed.

But to say a "23% drop in violent crime"? They might as well have said a 123%.

Then there was the recent launch of a new navy destroyer - "The most powerful ship built since World War II"... actually it is an extremely expensive (£1 billion pound) grossly under-armed ship (part of the government's 'buy European' policy - a policy exposed by Christopher Booker and Richard North). But why say "most powerful ship built since World War II" - an obvious lie even to people who nothing of Booker or North?

Lastly we had yet more claims of super educated school children "the best ever" - almost needless to say the Universities (hardly strongholds of free market people) reported today that the students they are getting are as ignorant as sin.

What is the reason for all these wild lies?

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I wrote to the Department of Culture, Media & Sport (!) back on 10th January to nominate the CCTV camera as an 'icon of England'... and they have just written back accepting the nomination.

Interesting.

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Muslim Action Committee are calling for changes to the law in Britain to implement an aspect of sharia law and they want the British state to do it for them. What they want is to legally ban people from displaying pictures of Mohammed, the seventh century warlord who founded their religion, because it annoys them. Never mind that showing images of this historical figure does not threaten them with violence or prevent their exercise of religion, they want to make it illegal to annoy them.

They are planning to stage a protest march in London on 18 February, expecting to attract 20,000 to 50,000 people. I hope the number is considerably larger because I am sure as hell going to be there expressing my views as well.

If they get their way, we will undoubtedly be prosecuted as Samizdata's response to this islamo-fascist proposal will be a "Mohammed Picture of the Day", each day and every day until hell freezes over or we run out of server space. Intolerant Islam does not like being annoyed? Well guys, you ain't seen nothing yet, I promise you that. Our Dutch friends at The Amazing Retecool are a fairly good place to start for interesting interpretations of Mohammed's image.

If this ever becomes law and I personally get dragged into court over what Samizdata will most certainly do, rest assured that as we are hosted in the USA we will remain on-line and 'expressive' regardless, even if I have to 'host' myself in the USA a few years earlier that I expected. So to all your intolerant Islamic fascists out there who think it is within your power to silence all the voices you dislike, with all due respect (i.e. none), you are very much mistaken.

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The Cardiff University newspaper Gair Rhydd [link down as of late 7 Feb] reprinted one of the Jyllands-Posten 'Satanic Cartoons' and as a result, the edition was recalled and pulped by the university authorities. Now as the paper is no doubt the property of the university, I do not contest their right to do as they please with their property. However the statements from them make no sence whatsoever

"The opinions expressed in that publication are those of the editorial team independently of the students' union or university. The editorial team enjoy the normal freedoms and independence associated with the press in the UK, and are expected to exercise those freedoms with responsibility."

So they recalled the edition, destroyed all the copies, suspended the editor and are 'investigating' three of their journalists but the editorial team enjoy the normal freedoms and independence associated with the press in the UK. As we say on the internet, WTF?

Several newspapers in Europe and elsewhere (and I do not mean student newspapers) have reprinted the cartoons, so this is hardly an act of unprofessional behaviour seeing as several editors who actually do this for a living decided it was in the interests of their readers to publish the damn things.

Had they said "it is our paper and we will pulp anything that bucks the party line", well fine, but please, I will thank Cardiff University to not declaim as if they were on the moral high ground when all they are doing is covering their politically correct arses.

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This call [original link removed] for a rally in Trafalgar Square next Saturday is interesting. Does anyone know any more details of who is behind it? I would like to know more before leaping to any conclusions.

update: question answered - not worth supporting one group of (white) fascists protesting against another group of (Islamic) fascists

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Here is a photo taken of the march by Muslims protesting against Jyllands-Poster and the 'Satanic Cartoons' saga in London earlier today.