Well, well. The Sunday Times is back firmly on the trail of splits and arguments at the top of the Labour hierarchy, this time claiming that all out war may be just around the corner thanks to the PM appropriating Gordon’s big budget announcement - a rise in the minimum wage to £5.05 an hour - to shore up the current faltering campaign being led by Alan Milburn.

Is this a case of ‘Big Trouble in Old Queens Street’ or just another storm in a teacup? - I’m inclined to think the latter.

As much as Tony’s been out an about playing, alternately at being the international stateman (Davos) and ‘man of the people’ (Richard and Judy) I suspect most of the Labour rank and file, myself included, are of the view that the real election campaign isn’t going to get under way until Gordon has spoken on March 15th despite the best efforts to Milburn and Campbell to push things along with Tony firmly ‘front and centre’.

Whether Tony, Alan and Alistair want to believe it or not, they’ve already clearly been out-manouvered by the Chancellor simply by the expedient of his doing nothing and letting them get on with trying to run the campaign without him.

What that’s given us so far is probably no more than we could have reasonably expected, lots of puff-piece TV appearances, insubstantial pledges and the rather embarassing sight of the Government losing the initiative on immigration and, more recently, the issue of ‘control orders’ which, thanks to the opposition finally waking up and acting like an opposition for the first time in years, will most likely see the Home Secretary back off and place the responsibility for these order with the judiciary where it properly belongs.

With opinion polls showing the Tories pulling up to within a couple of point of Labour but still nowhere nead the 5-6 point lead they need to take into an election to have any chance of winning, the stage is now nicely set for Gordon to enter the fray on Budget day, put the opposition parties firmly in their place and set the scene for a Labour victory and his own eventual ascendancy to the top job.

I’m by no means privy to the inner workings of the party but I have to say that it looks to me very much like the more the Blairite camp try, allegedly, to push the Chancellor to the sidelines in an effort to move him off his position as heir-apparent to the PM’s job, the more successful they are becoming in ensuring that the inevitable will happen and that it will, after all, be Gordon Brown leading the Labour Party into battle to win an unprecendented fourth consective term of office.

The law sometimes throws up odd situations…

Take the issue of communication surveillance as an example. We have a law, the Regulation of Investgatory Powers Act, which ostensibly governs when, where and in what circumstances the Police and Security Services can intercept and monitor telecommunications traffic; phone calls, e-mails, etc - all in the name of fighting crime and national security.

However, despite having these powers, any evidence obtained under RIPA remains inadmissable in UK courts on the grounds that taking this evidence into open court would jeopardise the work of these same intercepts.

This leaves me in the somewhat strange situation of agreeing with Boris Johnson when he says this “sounds like phooey”.

Actually, to digress for a moment, I have to admit that, even as a Tory, I have quite a lot of time and no small degree of respect for Boris.

Do I agree with him? Not that often - but having watched him operate its clear that it would be very unwise indeed to be taken in by the bumbling ‘upper class twit of the year’ routine that most people will associate with him from his appearances on ‘Have I Got News For You’. Look past the Bunter-ish public schoolboy act and watch him at work in a more serious political arena and it quick becomes apparent that he’s no fool and, pound for pound, possibly the sharpest political operator in the current Tory party. Certainly not an opponent to be taken lightly.

Getting back to ‘business’ however, I have to agree with Boris that there’s something about this whole business of legal telecommunications monitoring being inadmissable in court which rings very false indeed. Something in it ’smells’ of there being much more to this situation than is first apparent.

RIPA is a pretty dislikable law to begin with and one which, during its passage through the commons, I was very vocal in opposing. It’s not that I don’t see the necessity for intercepts where justified in dealing with organised crime or genuine threats to national security nor do I disagree with the principle of these practices taking place within the law and being properly regulated - better that the people carryout this surveillance are accountable to someone than no one at all.

What really bothered me about the Act is something which, as a Labour Party member, saddens me greatly, namely the tendency of the Blair government to treat the judiciary and judicial process as being rather an inconvenience and something, if possible, to be avoided if the opportunity presents itself.

RIPA of just one example of this in practice and allows a variety of people, from the Home Secretary down to fairly senior police officers to legally authorise communications intercepts, a right I’d much prefer to see vested in the judiciary where it properly belongs. I say one example as there are unfortunatly many others ranging from the trend towards ’summary justice’ as a means of dealing minor offences through ‘fixed penalty notices’ - which, broadly speaking, puts the ‘offender’ in the position of being found guilty unless they are willing to go to court to prove their innocence - to the latest round of anti-terrorist laws which seek to reintroduce internment onto the statute books, something I had thought long gone (and good riddance, too, or so I thought).

None of this, however, goes any way towards explaining why evidence obtained from communications intercepts remains inadmissable in court or why the Government believes that this would compromise the ability of the security services to carry out such surveillance.

Logically, its nonsensical to try to suggest that criminals, terrorists, etc may be unaware of the possibility that the ’spooks’ may be on to them and listening in.

I lived in Moseley for a while a few years back, an area of Birmingham which, as anyone who knows it well will know has a well-established drugs culture (mostly cannabis) and from personal experience can testify to the fact that even for small, personal use, transactions, dealers and their customers have their own ‘code’ which is used when making arrangments over the phone. If the average dope smoker looking to pick up an eigth of hash for recreational use takes such precautions then it stands to reason that major traffickers, terrorists and all sorts of other people involved in serious criminal activity will be at least as careful and, more likely, far more cautious when it comes to communications by phone, e-mail etc.

Add to that that the courts have more than sufficient powers to protect identities, sources, etc. where necessary and it pretty soon becomes obvious that this whole argument is about as watertight as the post-iceberg Titanic.

So we’re back, again to why? Why adopt a practice which, logically, makes no sense and which seems to get in the way of bringing criminals to justice?

Call me a suspicious beggar (and have your tinfoil beanies ready) but I can’t help but wonder if the problem isn’t so much whether the spooks are listening and who they’re listening to as who’s spooks are actually doing the listening.

The existance of our own electronic surveillance capabilities is no real secret at all courtesy of the Thatcher government’s banning of Trade Unions at GCHQ during the 1980’s and the furore that ensued from that decision. What far fewer people are aware of is that its not just our boys out there listening on British soil, Britain also plays host to a number of US listening stations including one of the largest in Europe, which is situated in North Yorkshire - this is one of those official secrets which is no real secret at all - even the Quakers know its there. (link to a PDF, BTW)

Ostensibly, as these bases are on UK soil, our trans-Atlantic ‘friends’ should be playing by our rules and observing UK law when they tune in - at least that’s what the government reckons. Anyone who’s ever run across the US military on their own (leased) bit of Blighty will know that it doesn’t quite work out that way - in the eyes of the US military, US military bases are considered to be islands of Uncle Sam’s territory which happen to be on foreign shores and once you step into their domain you play by their rules, not those of the ‘host’ nation.

Faced with the current government’s apparent disdain for judicial process you might think this perhaps not such a bad thing. After all, if you’re playing under US rules then you still have a proper and unequivocal right to silence unlike our own watered down version which goes something like:

“You sort of have the right to remain silent but if you don’t ‘fess up straight away we’ll treat any story you come up with later as an admission of guilt even if you deny everything, so there!”

However, look at the whole Guantanamo Bay issue and things become much less reassurring as its then obvious that degree to which the US actually plays by its own cherished and constitutionally protected rules depends very much on the proximity (or lack thereof) of a Federal Court Judge… and Yorkshire’s a long way away (3,000 miles of so) from any of those - unless there’s one over here on holiday being regaled with the delights of sticking you hand up a cow’s arse for no better reason than that they filmed ‘All Creatures Great and Small’ up there a few years back. Any anyway, Yorkshire being the place it if, if you could yourself a Federal judge they’d probably be too pissed on Theakston’s Old Peculiar to care about your civil liberties anyway.

Ok, I’ll conceed that we may be well into whacked-out conspiracy theory territory here, especially as I’m writing this at 2:30 in the morning and am currently nicely ‘jacked’ on coffee with a few chapters of Hunter Thompson’s third ‘Gonzo Papers’ collection to look forward to before bedtime, but the idea that the ’secret’ being protected by refusing to allow intercept evidence in court may be that its not our own people collecting that evidence seems at least as plausible as any other explanation that’s been put forward by the Blair government and probably much more plausible that the rather banal excuses we’ve been getting of late.

Who know’s for sure, but if any of Uncle Sams boys do happen to be looking then don’t take it personally guys, its only a bit of late night speculation after all.

Oh, and before I forget, props to Tim at Bloggerheads (as usual) for some of the links which led to this latest bit of semi-literate rambling.

HST DEAD. STOP… SOS. STOP… SEND DRUGS. STOP…

Two weeks ago, Arthur Miller cashed in his chips. Yesterday, Hunter S Thompson committed suicide.

In Bush’s America dissent is dying on its ass, Dan Rather takes another kicking without ever finding out what the frequency is and who the hell is Kenneth and the good ol’ boys in Homeland Security whistle ‘Hail to the Chief’ and watch The Fear spread like cancer in the bowels of the Old Glory.

“I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead.
Be watchful, and strengthen the things which remain, that are ready to die: for I have not found thy works perfect before God. Remember therefore how thou hast received and heard, and hold fast, and repent.
If therefore thou shalt not watch, I will come on thee as a thief, and thou shalt not know what hour I will come upon thee.” Rev 3:2-4

We may never know quite what led Hunter to take his own life but you kind of hope his reasons were something less than mundane, that it all came down to a final act of defiance; a cosmic ’screw you’ to the Bush generation and to the editors and media men who’ll spend the next week or so eulogising over a man than most lacked the cojones to hire while alive.

Its started already, the obliqué, and sometimes not-so-obliqué, references to Hemingway and Kerouac, the shifting sands of memory which will ultimately lead to the literary beatification of HST.

America loathes its eccentrics and iconoclasts while alive and loves them with a passion when dead As a nation it is all the poorer for it.

Farewell, HST.

Res Ipsa Loquitur.

Hunter’s final body of work, for ESPN, can be found here.

IDS is, apparently, a convert to the cause of blogging, if his article in Saturday’s Grauniad™ is to be believed.

Of course, this is IDS the failed Tory ex-leader we’re talking about here, so his credentials as a ‘technology correspondent’ hardly stack up to much in the credibility stakes - he’d have rather more if, say, he actually had a blog…

Tim at Bloggerheads has already nicely deconstructed most of IDS’s arguments - I’ll leave him to deal with the question of ‘media bias’ against the right and the ‘tinfoil helmet’ stuff surrounding Dan Rather’s public kicking by right-wing bloggers over Bush’s military service record - hey, at least no one asked for the ‘frequency’ this time around.

What’s more interesting is IDS’s opening gambit:

“…all the evidence suggests that broadcasters have possessed the greatest potential to frame public debate. British politicians have known that communicating their message depends upon getting the nod from a small number of powerful figures in the broadcast media.

The editor of BBC1’s six o’clock news bulletin can make a minister’s day by putting his department’s latest announcement at the front of the bulletin. Hearing Huw Edwards say something positive about that afternoon’s policy launch will even put a smile on Alastair Campbell’s face.”

Ah right, so its not about a new dawn of conservatism after all, just a new variation on the age old Tory vendetta against the Beeb - less a revolution in democracy more the return of the Chingford cyber-skinhead.

There are points where IDS’s arguments break down into sheer farce, not least in his ‘Town Hall’ analogy:

“An online community of bloggers performs the same function as yesteryear’s town meetings. Through the tradition of town hall meetings, officials were held to account by local people. Blogger communities are going to be much more powerful. They will draw together not only local people but patients who have waited and waited for NHS care. They will organise parents of disabled children who oppose Labour’s closure of special-needs schools and evangelical Christians who see their beliefs caricatured by ignorant commentators.”

… which conveniently fails to recognise that online communities, through Usenet and online forums and bulletin boards has a far longer and richer history than blogging.

While a relative latecomer to blogging (properly) I’m no novice when it comes to online communities having been around since the days when Usenet was ‘king’. If there’s one thing that experience has taught me its that to find the few nuggets of gold out there on the net frequently requires that you wade, first, through veritable mountians of crap. For every “Mr Knowledgeable (and it is usually a Mr) of Smallville, Wyoming” there are tens, if not hundreds of “Mr Pig-Ingnorant of Trailer-Park, Mississippi” to wade through first, many of whom belong to the self-same right-wing evangelical constituency that IDS wishes to court.

Experienced ‘Netizen’s’ (Netropolitans?) will tell you straight away that by far the worst idiots out there are the ‘fundies’ - right-wing, fundamentalist christians. These aren’t people whose beliefs are caricatured by ingorant commentators, these are living caricatures in their own right, Boss Hogg meets the Clampitts meets the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, an underclass too dumb even for the Jerry Springer show - people who revel in their own ignorance, who view any kind of education that doesn’t start with the Bible and end with ‘Guns and Ammo’ as the work of Satan.

The reality of IDS’s Neocon Utopia is anything but his apparent vision of empowered, communal conservativism challenging the metropolitan elite - it a cesspit of intolerance, venom and bile which brooks no opposition and even less debate. I know, I’ve seen it and its full of assholes.

Tim Ireland’s ‘Backing Blair’ site continues to rattle various cages within the Labour Party.

This time it’s Blyth Valley Labour Councillor, Gareth Davies, who’s not happy with Tim and. as a result. is bandying around the usual tired old list of ‘bogeymen’ in a facile attempt pour scorn on the Backing Blair campaign.

In attacking Tim’s project, Gareth (excuse the familiarily, us netheads tend to be an informal lot) succeeds only in displaying everything that’s wrong with the Blairite wing of the party and with being ‘unremittingly New Labour’.

It’s all in there if only you look.

There’s the empty rhetoric of ‘ultra lefties, half baked trots and dilettantes’ (note - ‘Trots’ references a name and should be capitalised, someone needs to order a few copies of ‘Eats, Shoots and Leaves’ for the campaign HQ), always a sure sign of the inability to formulate a cogent argument - stuff the issues where’s that list of ‘bogeymen’.

Then there’s the obligatory ’soundbite’ - ‘Trojan Horses of Toryism’ - a third-rate play on Spiro Agnew’s famous ‘nattering nabobs’ line and a horse that’s already bolted when Roy Hattersley, hardly noted for being a half-baked Trot, observes that Blair is “a far better One Nation Conservative than he (Michael Howard) can ever be”.

Like his political masters, Tony and Alistair, Gareth’s also not particularly net savvy otherwise he’d understand just how easy it is to shift a political website overseas and outside the jurisdiction of UK law, rendering his suggestion that online political commentary be regulated an utter nonsense. Let’s just hope no one’s given him a Blackberry…

Then again, that’s no real surprise given his obviously shaky understanding of International Law. His attitude to the legality of the Dubya’s recent Middle Eastern escapades beggars belief and comes straight out of Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘Big Book of International Relations and Diplomacy’ - just look in the index under ’screw you’. After all invading Irag was ‘probably legal’ and if it wasn’t well then that’s only because ‘international law is an ass’ so long as you illustrate your point with an analogy based on false syllogism. I hate to say this, Gareth, but there is a bit of distinction, even in international law, between going to war to oppose colonial occupation by a foreign power (Abbysinia) and invading a sovereign nation (Iraq).

Ultimately, its not the question of whether Cllr Davies is a ‘Labour stooge’ or the intellectual dishonesty of wrapping himself in the cloth of democracy while seeking nothing more than the absolute right to ‘know his enemy’ that grates, its the overweening pomposity he adopts in his exchanges with Tim coupled with with apparent inability to see the same faults in himself that he purports to see in others.

“…why not get on with some positive political campaigning instead of running a knocking campaign?” he cries, seemingly oblivious to his own opening gambit of describing Tim and others behind the Backing Blair site as ‘odd mix of ultra lefties, half baked trots and dilettantes” - Hiya, Pot, it’s Kettle here…

I think Orwell said it best…

“He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

So the Royal Mail is to lose its virtual monopoly on letter deliveries from the first of Jan 2006, 15 months earlier than previously planned and another much cherished public institution heads inexorably into the bearpit of the free market.

I wonder how many people noticed the carefully worded ‘kicker’ in the the Beeb’s write-up.

“At present, Royal Mail alone is exempt from VAT, which means it has a significant price advantage over rival firms, and Postcomm said “competition issues” would be addressed.”

“competition issues would be addressed” loosely translated means imposing VAT on postage - EU regulations mean that once VAT has been imposed on something it cannot then be made VAT-exempt at a later date, so the only way to address these ‘competition issues’ will be a hike in postage rates and a minimum bunce of 5%, the lowest possible rate of VAT, to the Exchequer.

Marvellous

So, after promising ’something different’ it turns out that Kilroy’s policy on immigration amounts to nothing more than the same tired old rant about ‘furriners stealing our jobs’.

Kilroy’s big plan for immigration revolves around protecting low wage ‘indigenous’ workers from the scourge of cheap migrant labour from Eastern Europe - yeah, there you have it, the great threat to British culture and society isn’t Bin Laden and Al Quaeda, it isn;t even Tony Blair and the nanny state, its the ravening hordes of Romanian fruit-pickers, Bulgarian burger-flippers and Polish toilet attendents that are taking away good honest labour from the unwashed masses of the British public.

Never forget that an Englishman’s white van is his castle and every ‘indigenous’ Briton has the right to good honest toil in return for crap wages and Working Families Tax Allowance.

So remember Kilroy’s pledge come election day - Piss-poor McJobs for the Master Race™, you know it makes sense.

The Anglican Church sufferes from a peculiar form of schitzophrenia when it comes to the question of divorce, so it comes as no real surprise that the Archbishop of Canterbury has blocked moves by the evangelical wing of the Church to debate Chuck & Camilla’s upcoming wedding at today’s meeting of the Church Synod.

Its a rather curious fact that there are some in the Church who vehemently object to the idea of a divorcee (Chuck) becoming head of the church on his mother’s departure from this mortal coil, despite the fact that the Church owes its position and status in British society solely and exclusively on the desire of a previous king, Henry VIII, to get shot of his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, in order to marry his mistress, Anne Boleyn. Historically speaking, the Anglican church owes its entire existance to its ability to sanction an divorce that the Roman Catholic church refused to permit.

Some go even further and predict a possible constitutional crisis if and when Chuck eventually ascends to the throne. Will the church accept him as its supreme governor as a divorcee who went to marry the mistress who was the cause of the breakdown of his first marriage? Will the people accept him as King in that situation?

The Daily Express thinks not, despite polls taken before the announcement of Chuck & Camilla’s engagement indicating that majority of people really don’t give a toss about the pair of them.

As ever, there’s a simple solution to this whole ‘problem’ such as it is - disestablish the Church of England. Separate Church and State and there can be no ‘constitutional’ crisis, not that we’ve a proper constitution to have a crisis with anyway. A solutions go, its simple, effective and clean - just what we need.

Quite a few years ago, Billy Connolly did one of the ‘An Audience with’ shows for ITV during which he suggested we replace the current, extremely turgid, national anthem for something rather livelier - Connolly’s suggestion was, as I recall, the theme music to the Archers, which is apparently a piece called ‘Barwick Green’ by a composer called Arthur Wood.

I could see what he was driving at at the time, if a national anthem is supposed to tell you something about the nation to which is belongs then our own little dirge says ‘ponderous apathy’ - ‘God Save the Queen/King/Whatever’ is the anthem of a nation that can’t be arsed to get out of bed in the morning.

I was watching the Wales v Italy Rugby Union international over the weekend and the contrast couldn’t be more marked. On the one side you had the Welsh anthem ‘Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau’ - that’s ‘Land of My Fathers’ to us English and especially to John Redwood following his clasic performance of the song while Secretary of State for Wales - which has that big Methodist hymnal feel to it, especially when sung with gusto at a Rugby match. On the other there was the Italian national anthem which is about as lively and upbeat as national anthems get and rattles along at a fair old pace. Both are infintiely preferable to our own turgid little tune.

Over the week end I also watched a fascinating documentary on the history of the British Monarchy on one of the Discovery channels, which apart from highlighting the ragbag of Normans, French, Welsh, Scots and Germans who’ve all ruled this country since the Norman conquest of 1066. also shed some light on the origina of our present national anthem, which was, according the programme, originally written to cheer up Louis XIV of France after an operation on his backside before being ‘given’ to one of his mistresses to James II, the Stuart king who was deposed in favour of William of Orange so as not to put a Roman Catholic on the British throne, before eventually being adopted to show support for George II (German) while he was having a little trouble with a few rebellious Scots.

Kind of sums it all up really, doesn’t it - the thing that God was originally supposed to save the King (Louis XIV) from was a boil on his arse!

There are far better arguments for ditching the monarchy, certainly, but as a fringe benefit dumping ‘God Save the Queen…Yawn’ in favour of something a little more uplifting certainly has its attractions.

Hubris…

Pronunciation: ‘hyü-br&s
Function: noun
Etymology: Greek hybris
: exaggerated pride or self-confidence

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