This. Time to get over her, people.

What the hell? Suspending an elected representative from office for four weeks for making a foolish but hardly earth-shattering (and certainly non anti-semitic) remark that happened to offend someone? Does this mean I can get Tony Blair and Charles Clarke suspended from office for offending me EVERY SINGLE BLOODY DAY with their illiberal attacks on pretty much everything that used to make this country a place I could be proud to live?

Update: More ponderings – Livingstone’s been done for “bringing the office into disrepute”, an entirely subjective judgement. This will have set precedents – as could his appeal – as this is one of the first major tests for the Adjudication Panel for England (which was only set up five years ago), designed to rule over local government officers. If the ruling is upheld it could open the door to hundreds of petty suits against local government officials nation-wide, purely on the basis of people pretending to have been offended by something they’ve said. A handy new weapon in the party political warfare arsenal…

Plus, as the precise constitutional basis of the APE (heh – “ape”…) remains rather unclear – it works much like a court of law and its members are directly appointed by the Lord Chancellor – its decisions could potentially be used as precedents for other cases in areas of law outside its own jurisdictional remit. Especially when combined with the current government attempts to legislate against incitement to religious hatred and glorifying terrorism, where perception is all and it doesn’t matter for hell what the intent is/was.

People are stupid, part 4,567 – UK Polling Report:

“45% of Labour voters want Blair to go this year or next year”

Which means, of course, that 55% of Labour voters DON’T want him to go. Likewise, “67% of current Labour voters think [Gordon Brown] will be a good Prime Minister” – even though “51% think that �it will be pretty much �business as usual�”

In other words, they LIKE what Labour’s doing. they couldn’t care less about the erosion of civil liberties. Because civil liberties are not a vote-losing issue. It’s the economy, stupid, and until that REALLY begins to crumble, Labour will remain safely in power. We’re stuck with ‘em.

The more I hear about these ID cards, the better they sound. The ID will control our impulses, the police (renamed the Ego) will pacify those of us with ID and do its best to please the government (renamed the Superego in honour of The Rt Hon Anthony Blair), which will keep us from doing anything it deems disruptive and/or dangerous.

Here endeth the cod psychology.

I’d missed this – a nice, quick overview of the current situation re: democracy in the EU, and a handy highlighting of yet another example of ill-informed and therefore misleading EU journalism. Sadly, though, much like the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, the EU’s simply too dull for people to pay too much attention (and those that do are generally dismissed as nutters)…

Go read this. It would seem once again that Mr McKeating and myself are pondering along similar lines – with him covering a whole bunch of the potential flaws of the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill in his usual entertaining style.

At some point soon I may get around to doing a lengthier take on the role of business interests in all this, which I’ve been pondering for a while… Unusually, if it happens it’ll almost certainly be from a decidedly non-Marxian perspective, which may make a nice change from the usual “business is evil” crowd.

Why is it a controversy when the (unelected) heir to the throne writes low-profile letters expressing political opinons to ministers and MPs, but not when the (unelected) Metropolitan Police Commissioner stages press conferences expressing political opinions to the entire country?

Busy, so a quick heads-up: Electronic surveillance enters EU statute books –

“Europe�s justice ministers have given final approval to controversial rules forcing telephone operators and internet service providers to store data.”

More later, if time. But it’s worth noting that this legislation was originally introduced by our very own Tony Blair during the UK EU presidency. Cheers Tony, you maniacal fascist.

Some more past parallels, from Tom Paine:

1) (from 1776′s Common Sense) “Ye that dare oppose not only tyranny but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the Old World is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger and England hath given her warning to depart.”

2) (from 1776′s The American Crisis) “panics, in some cases, have their uses; they produce as much good as hurt. Their duration is always short; the mind soon grows through them, and acquires a firmer habit than before. But their peculiar advantage is, that they are the touchstones of sincerity and hypocrisy, and bring things and men to light, which might otherwise have lain forever undiscovered. In fact, they have the same effect on secret traitors, which an imaginary apparition would have upon a private murderer. They sift out the hidden thoughts of man, and hold them up in public to the world.”

3) (from 1795′s Dissertation on First Principles of Government) “It is the nature and intention of a constitution to prevent governing by party, by establishing a common principle that shall limit and control the power and impulse of party, and that says to all parties, thus far shalt thou go and no further. But in the absence of a constitution, men look entirely to party; and instead of principle governing party, party governs principle.”

4) (from the same) “An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”

5) (from 1793′s The Age of Reason) “It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.”

Is Tony Blair our very own “secret traitor”, willing to destroy our liberties faced with a perceived threat from abroad? Has he “corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind”, or merely that of his party?

Those who forget the lessons of the past are doomed to repeat them…

Notes from a small bedroom – a new blog that’s well worth a look. And also brings a handy H.L.Mencken quote:

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed � and thus clamorous to be led to safety � by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

I really must read some more Mencken. Anyone got any suggestions of especially good collections?

A lengthy pondering on Blair, Bagehot and the threats of our consitution from me over at The Sharpener, following this, this, and especially this. Go read and stuff.

I thoroughly disapprove of this. His kind of questioning of the Holocaust may be hurtful, it may be distasteful, it may be based on dubious evidence and on the utterly unhistorical discounting of thousands of eyewitness accounts, but someone needs to question the accepted version of history, even if only to be roundly debunked and ridiculed. Just as the late, great Conrad Russell was not sent to prison for challenging the received wisdom on the origins of the English Civil War, David Irving should not be sent to prison for challenging the received wisdom on the Third Reich. Nor should he be prosecuted for being a bad, failed historian – which is all he really is…

Hazel Blears, 20th October 2005.

“It is regrettable that any families with children have to be detained at all but it is sadly the actions of the adults in the family that make this necessary.” Hazel Blears, 13th August 2003

Ms Blears, as well as being Minister of State for Crime, Security and Communities, is the constituency MP of Olive Mukarugwiza, a Rwandan asylum seeker who, after living in the UK for three years, without warning found her home raided by police at 6am last Tuesday morning. She and her three children were packed off to Yarls Wood detention centre pending their deportation. On Friday they were bundled onto a plane in such a distraught state that the pilot refused to fly.

Harry’s Place has evidently received the same emails from the campaign to get her a decent review as me. More here and here.

This particular case appears to have received precisely no newspaper coverage. A google search for Olive comes up with precisely nothing. I can neither confirm nor deny the truth of this one. Nonetheless, a mother and her three children – the eldest of which apparently has offers from three universities as she prepares for her A-levels – hardly sound like a threat to national security. But in Labour’s brave new world, asylum seekers are merely statistics – and the more they can refuse and deport to placate the anti-immigration crowd, the better.

Edited: It would appear Olive’s surname was spelled wrong in the email I originally received. Now corrected. Still practically no Google presence though.

If you want to vote in the May local elections you only have three weeks to make sure you are registered, as the deadline is Monday 13th March. Application forms can be downloaded here – and at the same site you can enter your postcode to check whether you have any elections in your area.

It is well worth noting that as local elections traditionally have a very low turnout, they are an ideal time to have an impact. Want to give Blair and co a bloody nose? Get registered and show your displeasure in the only way they understand – by voting for somebody else and reducing their hold over the country.

Update: From A Logical Voice, potential marginals and other interesting electoral battlegrounds. Doubtless we’ll end up with more detailed breakdowns over the next few weeks. In the meantime, if you live in any of these places, your vote could be significant on May 4th, so make sure you’re registered:

Bexley, Bradford ,Brent, Bury, Calderdale, Camden, Croydon, Doncaster, Fulham, Hammersmith, Haringey, Havering, Hillingdon, Kirklees, Lambeth, Leeds, North Tyneside, Rochdale, Solihull, St. Helens