Nosemonkey’s back from nuptuals in the Land of the Rising Sun/Credit Card Bill/Overdraft [best not speculate on other possible ‘risings’ here] and clearly full of his usual vim, vigour and vitriol.
Getting both barrels today is the newly elected Labour MP for Burnley, Heather Graham look-a-like, and the only current Member of Parliament to be named after a bit of Victorian music hall slang for ‘lesbian’*, Kitty Ussher.
Kitty has, of course, worked her way up through party ranks to become an MP via the now traditional New Labour route; she was previously a special policy advisor at the Department of Trade and Industry and former Chief Economist with the Britain in Europe group having been educated at at Birkbeck College, London and Balliol College, Oxford - although she does admit to having harboured childhood dreams of becoming a traffic warden…
… then again, she also claims to be a supporter of Burnley Football Club despite being born in Aylesbury, educated in London and Oxford and serving as a local councillor in that well known enclave of flat caps and whippets - Lambeth.
Traffic warden? Economist? Burnley supporter? You’d have thought personal popularity pretty low on Kitty’s list of priorities with that kind of CV. But no, nothing could be further from the truth.
[By the way - if you’re reading this having found your way here after searching Google for ‘Heather Graham’, ‘lesbian’ and ‘traffic warden’ then I’d try somewhere else - I doubt anything that follows is really going to be of much interest!]
You see, as Nosemonkey points out, Kitty’s desperately keen to remind everyone that next time there’s a terrorist attack in the UK it absolutely, postively not her fault!
But if that’s not convinced you already then maybe this will help:
I myself am precisely the type of liberal, Guardian-reading lefty who is instinctively concerned at the power of the police. [Remember, that’s the kind of liberal, Guardian-reading lefty niece of junior Tory minister (Peter Bottomley) who was educated at Birkbeck and Balliol before going on to become a special policy advisor at the DTI and is hotly tipped to be on the fast track to a ministerial position in her first term] I went into politics to sort out health and education, [Nosemonkey has this one taped, voted only three times of health & welfare issues compared 42 votes on other issues] not to strengthen the long hand of the law [That’s the long arm of the law, Kitty]. But, let’s face it: the police are far better placed to judge what type of legislation we need to combat the terrorist threat than I am. [So you’ll immediately be resigning your seat in the House of Commons in favour of the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police I take it? Didn’t think so.]
Of course the real problem here is this last statement which suggests that the police are better placed that she is to judge the legislative needs of the nation - MPs training obviously isn’t what it used to be or Kitty would understand just how unconstitutional her argument is.
The next three paragraphs, as she lays out her Damascene conversion from sceptic to true believer in the Gospel according to Sir Ian Blair, has to be about the least convincing performance I’ve since Gazza did Top of the Pops with Lindisfarne.
Suitably convinced of the need for action, the arguments then turned to the motives of the police. says Kitty the Crony as if she was writing a 6th form essay on ‘Pride and Prejudice’ as if the readers of the Grauniad might just be dumb enough to genuine believe that she ever gave a moment’s thought to doing anything but follow Blair into the ‘aye’ lobby when the vote on 90 days was called.
It all gets even better when we get to this passage:
And so the debate began in earnest. Some people argued that, because they were lawyers in a previous life, they couldn’t tolerate such a change to the way our legal system worked. I’m sorry, but you’re not working as lawyers any more. You’re leaders. And you need to exercise that leadership in the security interests of the country as a whole.
Remember, this the same MP who a mere three paragraphs earlier said:
But, let’s face it: the police are far better placed to judge what type of legislation we need to combat the terrorist threat than I am.
Better to have MPs who can’t quite shake their experience of being lawyer than former policy advisors who can’t get to grips with what it means to be an MP.
It will be interesting, though, to see whether in the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary the definition of leadership is expanded to include:
lead·er·ship (ldr-shp) n.
1. The position or office of a leader: ascended to the leadership of the party.
2. Capacity or ability to lead: showed strong leadership during her first term in office.
3. A group of leaders: met with the leadership of the nation’s top unions.
4. Guidance; direction: The business prospered under the leadership of the new president.
5. Doing whatever the police tell you to do because they know best.
Which brings us, at last, to Miss Kitty’s closing gambit.
Tories and Liberals voted to make the country a more dangerous place in order to score a cheap political point over the prime minister. A small minority of our own side - for whatever spurious reason - did the same. So, as I said at the outset, in the horrific event of a crisis that I hope will never happen, it’ll be their fault, not mine.
All of which sounds very much like the parliamentary equivalent of an exasperated parent yelling at their hyperactive offspring:
Now, don’t you come running to me if you break both your legs.
But rest assured, Kitty. If we do find ourserves faced with the nightmare scenario of suspected terrorist being released after 28 days due to lack of evidence only for them to commit a suicide-bombing on the following day then no, I won’t be holding you personally responsible…
I will, of course, want to know quite what MI5 were up to and what the fuck we’re paying them for, should that happen, as its completely inconceivable that someone released from custody in such circumstances would simply be shoved out of the front door of a police station, bundled into a taxi and told to fuck off home without someone from the security services maybe thinking to look in on them for a few days just to keep an eye on things and make sure they don’t make a detour round the local B&Q, on the way home, for couple of bags of weedkiller and some batteries.
As a final note, Nosemonkey’s updated his original post to include a reference to this post from D-Notice, who lives in Burnley, detailing the response he received from a fagio in Kitty’s office which includes this statement:
However given poll after poll after poll showed the public overwhelmingly supported the measure, which side of the argument would you have her take other than the one supported by the police, the public and the party under which she was elected? It is also a fact that today we have had at least 10 to 1 people ring or contact us irate that the measure did not pass.
Far be it from me to intrude into a citizen’s personal correspondence with his MP but I would hope that D-Notice might consider replying to Kitty’s underling to ask which polls, exactly, he believes demonstrate that the public overwhelmingly supported the measure - surely he’s not referring to the hopelessly biased YouGov poll commissioned by Sky News which has already been more than adequately discredited.
One might also note that it’s hardly surprising, in a town where more than 4,000 people voted BNP at the last election, to find people phoning up to complain that the police aren’t going to be able to intern Muslims for 90 days at a time without charge, not that I suppose that occured to the constituency office muppet who replied to D-Notice.
*I am joking about the music hall slang bit… just my warped sense of humour.