First up, brilliant stuff from Blood & Treasure on the latest, seemingly dumb, pronouncement from the Home Office - well worth a read especially for this…

An Afro-Caribbean Englishman a Sino-Irishman and a Scots Muslim of Pakistani descent went into a pub. “That Hazel Blears� said the Afro-Caribbean Englishman, who was Welsh on his mother’s side. “What fucking planet is she from?�

However; I want to advance a bit of a theory here.

First of all we know, or should know from several years experience, that the current Labour government is the most media ‘aware’ government we’ve ever had. Let’s face it, at the last general election Labour wiped the floor with the opposition parties, even allowing for £1.5 million worth of Saatchi expertise and Lynton Crosby behind the Tory campaign.

So, if that’s the case, how come Labour ministers seem so prone to dropping bollocks in public by floating seemingly dumb ideas which appear not have been through the PR mincer at Old Queen Street?

Ok, so today it was Hazel Blears - not your top flight minister by any means - but its not just the juniors opening their mouth and seeing their foot disappear up to the ankle. Remember Tony’s great frogmarching yobbo’s off to the cashpoint idea? Even the big dogs in Labour’s yard seem to screw up from time to time.

Well maybe, just maybe, there’s rather more method to this seeming madness than first meets the eye.

You see - tinfoil helmets at the ready - this all seems to me to happen rather too often to be mere chance: to be the product of a random accretion of brains cells which serve to kick the mouth into gear before the brain has got anywhere near leaving neutral. It just doesn’t add up - at least not unless Labour ministers get some sort of sadistic pleasure out of continually winding up their army of PR flunkies and minor functionaries, in which case it seems rather like pulling the wings off a fly one by one - with Blears having long since graduated on up to food chain to pulling legs off (metaphorical) spiders.

There is another explanation which fits the bill here - what if these seeming dumb statements are being made in an entirely conscious and deliberate fashion?

Follow the thinking here: not only do we know that the current Labour government is particular media ’savvy’ in a way not previously seen in British politics; but we also know the current governement to have a rather a prediliction for populism and populist ideas - this is not only a government which ‘works’ the media to its own benefit but its also more than a little sensitive to the media and the extent to which it both shapes and reflects public opinion - or at least prevailing opinions within which ever segment of the public that the government may be trying to court at a particular time.

We also know that at ministerial level many Labour politicians have bought, wholesale, into managerialism with all its fads and strage euphemisms: as if government weren’t already chock full of its own incomprehensible jargon and overweening use of TLA’s - Three Letter Acronoyms.

So, with that in mind, what if many, if not most, of these seemingly inane statements which exude from government on a regular basis aren’t merely the product of ministers trying to think on their feet - and tripping over their toes in the process - but a quite deliberate and, in some respects, cynical use of the media as a barometer of popular opinion.

Think about it. In this day and age, thanks to television and the internet, feedback on general policy ideas; the kind of thing which looks for all the world like ministers doing a little uncensored thinking aloud; is more or less instantaneous. You push an idea out at an early morning press briefing to hit the breakfast news and by lunchtime you’ll have a pretty good idea where the popular view is heading … or to use a horrid piece of management-speak, you run an idea up the flag pole at breakfast and by lunch you’ll know if its still flying or whether someone’s set fire to it on the way up; in which case you can have safely started to back pedal by the early evening news and have your excuses nicely bedded in in time for the main news bulletin at 10.

Just think about how the public debate on anti-terrorism legislation has played out since July 7th.

Day One: Blair states that we will not allow terrorism to change our way of life and gets a good public reaction.

Day Two: Clarke pitches in and, without pushing too hard, floats the idea that some compromises may be necessary on civil liberties in order to safeguard the public. Ok, so the usual civil libertarians kick off a bit but otherwise there’s no great public outcry at this idea.

A couple of days later, Blair’s back as the front man and pitching the idea that while government is in no hurry to introduce new legislation, if the police feel they need extra powers then they’d have to consider their views. Again no real negative public reaction.

Lo and behold, within a day or two, back comes the Association of Chief Police Officers, with a shopping list of new measures and before you know it there’s Blair et al back on the goggle box talking about how we may need a bit of new legislation, sooner rather than later; again the response is mostly a low murmur of general approval apart from the ‘usual suspects’ who’re now kicking off again because they can see where this is headed.

And over two of three weeks, the government have parcelled out their real intentions and fed them out to the media a bit at a time without ever getting a large scale negative reaction; to the point where now the opposition parties feel compelled to cut deals with the government on, at least, the principle of this new legislation so as not to appear to swimming against the tide of public opinion. After all, who wants to be seen by the public to be soft on terrorism at a time like this.

And, of course, before anyone really cottons on to what’s happening, the public has more or less been sold on a whole package of new measures: measures which, had the government put them up front from the outset, would have probably drawn a far more negative and questioning reaction.

Blears might have looked a bit of idiot today by publicly suggesting something as banal as replacing terms like ‘Asian’ with ‘British Asian’ as a means of promoting greater integration, not least as the census (and the CRE) already uses something very similar, although it uses the term ‘Asian British’ rather than ‘British Asian’, but out that the Home Office have got themselves a bit of sounding of public opinion from which they can start to reshape other policy ideas, ideas they will hope will not get quite so negative a reaction.

Remember, out of Blair’s seeming faux pas on marching yobs off to the cashpoint eventually developed into the government’s entire policy on anti-social behaviour orders. The feedback he got at the time was not simply that he was floating a dumb idea - full stop - but that while that was a pretty dumb idea the public would still buy into something to address the issues he was talking about if only a more ‘reasonable’ plan could be put forward - and while Blears may, temporaily, look like a bit of prat you can be sure that out of today’s dumb idea she’ll have got a bit of ‘buy in’ into the idea of shifting from multiculturalism to integration as the primary ethos behind further government policy towards ethnic minorities.

So maybe ‘British Asian’ is not such a dumb suggestion after all - not when you think about it carefully and look at where it may eventually lead.