Safe and Secure

This was on The Times web site today.

I’m not a great fan of Tony Blair, but he certainly has this one right.  Twenty years ago, my husband and I had a gay Catholic friend, who was dying of lung cancer.  His priest told him it was God’s way and gave him virtually no solace.  But luckily not everyone was so damning and the Hospital Chaplain, showed the sort of humanity, that we often expect but rarely get.

We’re all different and if like me you’ve read Darwin, you can understand why.  We must celebrate those differences, not condemn them.

A lot of people are wondering what David Davis is doing by resigning from the Parliament and forcing a by-election on the issue of too much Government surveillance and detaining people without trial for 42 days.

I support his stand and if I was a constituent of his, I’d be voting for him.

We already hold people without trial for longer than virtually any other country in the civilised world.

This was on Liberty’s web site.

A comparison between the UK and 14 other countries showed Australia following the UK with a time limit of just 12 days. Turkey comes third with 7.5 days and Ireland fourth, with a one-week limit on holding suspects without charge.

So why do we want to go so far?

I don’t know and I’ve not seen any reasoned argument as to why we need to.  Except some senior policemen have said that we need it.  But then how many people were kept beyond fourteen days in 2007?  I think it was six and three of those were released without any charge or restriction at all.

I can see an interesting scenario building.

The government have not said if they are going to fight David Davis in his constituency. 

If they did, I would expect that they would get a serious thrashing, as if it’s one thing the British like it’s someone who takes a stand.  For instance today, large numbers of people were phoning and e-mailing the BBC with messages of support for Davis.

If they don’t, then Kelvin McKenzie has said he’ll fight and with Rupert Murdoch’s backing.  Apparently, this plan emerged at a party last night, where Tony Blair and Gordon Brown also attended.  So we all know that something’s probably cooking here.

But even then, the good voters of Haltemprice would still probably vote Davis back.

So what happens then.

We live in interesting times.

If Brown attempted to use the Parliament Act to force the legislation through, it has been mooted that against the backdrop of an over-whelming Davis victory, Parliament would either bow to the will of the people or the Courts would make them.

I’m off down the betting shop to put a bet on an early General Election.

I just caught a quick look at the front of the Independent today, with a headline of Lawyers vs. The General.

In the west lawyers are often decried as fat cats, who make a lot of money, but in Pakistan, they seem to be leading the opposition to the dictatorship of General Musharraf.  The Chief Justice has also upheld a lot of what the General wants to do as illegal under the Pakistan constitution.

Here in the UK, Prime Minister Brown has announced that he wants to allow detention for up to 56 days on terrorism offences.

Why?

All the lawyers I know, say twenty-eight is enough, provided that the case is managed well by the Police.  And anyway few have gone anywhere near that limit. 

It’s just Brown taking a racist view on terrorists and treating them as non-persons. 

Would he want this law, if the terrorists were white and say demanding home rule for Borsetshire? (If you don’t know, this is a mythical part of England, where a BBC radio soap opera called The Archers is set.) No such law was needed to deal with terrorism in Ulster and deaths at the height of the troubles there, were at a much greater rate since they’ve been in the UK since September 11th, 2001.

The lawyers have revolted against the various Blair/Brown proposals, such as control orders, in the past and got them declared illegal or unworkable. I suspect that this is another case, where the government is on a collision course with the judiciary and the human rights lawyers.

The government may not like it, but they can’t overturn centuries of legal practice, precedent and rights, as easily as they think they can. They’ve also got Europe to contend with as well.

You don’t take on senior judges or barristers in an argument.

So there was no wrong-doing by Tony Blair in raising money for the Labour Party. 

What an unexpected surprise!

As I was away when he stopped being Prime Minister, I hadn’t realised that he’d resigned from Parliament as well.

That seems to me that he’s rather deserted all those loyal people in Sedgefield, who voted for him for so many years.

It didn’t take long, but someone has written a musical about Blair.

Edward Duncan Smith is apparently in the show. He is the son of former Tory leader, Iain Duncan Smith, and confessed on the radio to not having voted last time.

There has been a lot of hand-wringing over the slipping standards at the BBC.

What was done was wrong, but I as no-one was defrauded or lost money, it is not as serious as some of their rivals are saying.

But it is part of a much larger malaise.

Newspapers, politicians, company bosses and a lot of others, always up-sex what they are doing to get the message across.  And when they are caught out, like Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell were, do they resign?

Of course not.

I was presented with a report by one of my employees, that was a blatant piece of spin, which had not been properly checked.  Figures taken from internal memos at the company were not checked and it was only because, my man thought it too good to be true, that we didn’t make (and inevitably lose) a substantial investment.

My anger was such, that the employee has not made such a mistake since.

Being under pressure, is no excuse for cutting corners.

Bertrand Russell once said, “Necessity may be the mother of invention, but pressure is the father of genius.”

He is still right.

Is this a joke?

Blair argued that education was important when he took office.

But if it is so important, why is it so inefficient.

According to the BBC, there are now 758,000 empty school places in the UK, which is the equivalent of about 2,000 schools.  And how many teachers does that mean are under employed?

Where my daughter lives, she has good schools and her children go to nearby schools that lack for little and teach people well. But I do know that a mile or so away is a school that is only two-thirds full and struggles to attract pupils. Plans have been put forward to merge it with another school and sell one site for housing.

But it won’t happen, as parents feel that two inefficient and lousy schools are better than one good one.

They just feel that to close a school is wrong, despite the fact it is needed because of falling birth rates.

It seems no-one can win.

Simon Mayo’s program on BBC Radio 5 Live yesterday had an interview with Sidney Blumenthal, who was an adviser to President Bill Clinton.

He had some interesting things to say about Blair’s relationship with two American Presidents.

Unfortunately, Tony Blair’s achievements have been overshadowed by his relationship with George Bush and his involvement with the Iraq war. From an American perspective the Blair Prime Ministership is divided into two parts. The two Presidents that he worked with President Clinton and President Bush. Under President Clinton it was a very fruitful relationship and the arrival of Blair was seen as a conformation of a new kind of modernising politics on the centre left and a new internationlism. And it gave a lot of incentive to the centre left in Europe and elsewhere in the world.

Blair also had Clinton in a way to protect him and while Blair could act out all of his impulses, Clinton was protecting the Western Alliance at the same time. The truth of the matter is that contrary to the theory that Britain would be the bridge between the United States and Europe, it was the United States that protected the Western Coalition from Blair’s more messianic impulses. During the Kosovo war for example, Blair wanted to take a much more forward position on putting troops in Kosovo which would have disrupted the Western Alliance and Clinton understood that and kept all these things in balance.

Under Bush there was a completely different relationship and Blair thought he could guide this inexperienced American president, curb his unilateral impulses and somehow turn him into more productive International channels. And that’s not what happened and by the end Blair embraced Bush’s messianism and Blair was not listened to. Blair was trapped and Blair also found that his influence had decreased to almost nil by the end. I find that Bush used Blair not as a partner but as a PR instrument.

It’s lucky that I trained as an audio typist, so I was able to type it off the Internet copy of Simon’s program. I’ve checked it and I hope there aren’t too many mistakes.