If someone had asked me in the pub what the slogan should be for an organisation devoted to digital rights and civil liberties, this might well have been my suggestion. The pub, however, is where such humorous ideas should probably remain:

Another in an occasional series of pefectly formed TWAIN scanner errors. The fact that only the quote is borked somehow means that the overall effect is even more insane.

Baroness Ford: The IOC President, Jacques Rogge, not always an easy man to please… confirmed London’s achievement at the last IOC session when he said:

" ........" t4v Iiac vc iS ed      bcu' oi-.. kW A; 1Q & 1 %    Liuj(M2 C u     e Mk    U   .      K e~ 0. 1 cti. c~ 1; ~S f ~. ; c~e #     iSbyrita,J C-' j Imo, G X L.j a,ui j~(av~pt1~" - (- stS ~•

Praise indeed, my Lords, and none of this has occurred by accident.

Awoke with semi-memory of a dream (I know, I know, but how often do I do this?) where we were due to make a sequel to a phenomenally successful film I was responsible for. Huge crew, huge sets, vast convoy of equipment, helicopters, etc, all turned up. Things turned ugly when it turned out that instead of the finished script everyone was expecting, the furthest I’d got in planning the two slated multimillion dollar sequels was a small uncertain note saying “Dog?”

The Lord Bishop of Wakefield: Having sailed through the Gulf of Aden only last year, and engaged to my full extent in pirate practice on board ship, the realities of the instability and dangers there were very immediate in our minds.

Recently I was showing some American friends around Parliament, and we found ourselves behind a jovial Liam Fox also giving some guests a tour. I explained who he was, and that he had had to resign as defence secretary after being caught essentially running a shadow UK foreign policy. They stared at me, and explained that in the States something is deemed to be wrong if your defense secretary isn't running a shadow foreign policy. (Fox would probably still have had to have resigned in the States, but only because he was running his shady contacts with the help of a non-security-cleared man widely assumed, though obviously never proven, to be his boyfriend.) This left me thoughtful. How much else of what the coalition has been getting up to would be considered a problem only in the UK? Your suggestions are welcome but here are a few:

* The French, who really know about political corruption on an epic scale, wouldn't even blink at what Hunt, Osborne and Cameron have been accused of over News International.

* Iain Duncan Smith's doublethink when he preaches the gospel of liberation and salvation, even as he cheerfully strips thousands of sick and disabled people of their state support and dripfeeds stories to the press that cumulatively serve to demonise them, will be instantly recognisable to anyone who ever lived in a Soviet country.^[1]

* The coalition's onslaught on employment rights, which by the end of this parliamentary term will be almost non-existent, is designed to compete with, and will no doubt gratify, China.^[2]

* The assistants from African countries I have met at international conferences who apologise sheepishly when they predict (accurately) that their delegates will turn up late for every official appointment because “they run on African time” would know how to work around Teresa May's grasp of the calendar.

* Ministers with personal interests in the industries they are legislating for, such as Justice Minister Jonathan Djanogly and the insurance industry or Andrew Lansley('s wife) and private health... hmm, France again.

Clearly, we in the UK are too uptight about all this. In a world that is increasingly—in that truly excellent non-tautologous phrase—global, it's only right that we should look abroad for our inspiration. Far from being an administration whose cancerous malice is tempered only by its unspeakable ineptitude, the coalition in fact turns out to be composed of true internationalists, scouring the world for examples of awful practice and straining to emulate them. So while this year's Queen's Speech may have been a bit thin on legislation because Parliament confidently expects to be tied up in knots for a year over Lords reform, expect next year's to contain more bold coalition gambits including, but not limited to, death squads for union activists, prosecutions for sorcery and the introduction of child soldiers. It will be worth it just to watch Nick Clegg earnestly explaining how these measures will aid social justice and mobility.

Say what you like about Tony Blair (well, that's the rest of the day gone), but at least when his administration made its peace with Colonel Gaddafi—the usual sour commentators accuse it of the base motive of doing so in return for access to oil, but it's worth remembering that Blair himself never shied away from an opportunity to befriend owners of spectacular beachfront properties—and started surreptitiously forking over Libyan dissidents to the very secret police that it had previously protected them from, it was acting with the exquisite hypocrisy that the British spent centuries making our very own.

---

^[1] The comparison with such a godless system might seem slightly ironic with regard to a man who professes himself a fervent Christian, but of course he is no such thing. The gibbering demented imp that has taken up residence on his shoulder is identical to the one that haunts Tony Blair. It starts by convincing its victims that it is the voice of their conscience, but soon enough it manages to persuades them that it is actually Christ.
^[2] Watch out in particular for proposals to allow employees “flexible leave”. The suggestion is so at odds with the comprehensive measures designed to reverse a century of employees' rights—and all but wipe out their representation at tribunals so they can't fight back—that we can only view it with suspicion. Just as “simplify” has been used in welfare reform as an unsubtle code for “cut relentlessly”, we can only imagine what “flexible leave” means to the government. You can choose when you take your holiday but you have to keep returning to work every other day? Only part of you is allowed to leave the building at any one time? Christ alone knows what they're dreaming up—and, sadly, it's Iain Duncan Smith's vicious drooling Christ, so he'll be no help.

Commons Speaker Michael Martin, now Lord Martin of Springburn, interrupted the progress of the Parliament Square (Management) Bill, due to go through on the nod, to stress that the Bill should strengthen powers to bar protesters from Parliament's environs and keep them looking neat. This seemed slightly redundant, as the entire purpose of the Bill is to strengthen powers to bar protesters from Parliament's environs and keep them looking neat. Lord Martin had already complained about the persistent failures in the past to evict Brian Haw, and then he said these actual words, with actual people listening to them:

Lord Martin of Springburn: We even had those who called themselves the Tamil Tigers and held hunger strikes, not only on the pavement but on the square itself, which meant that anyone who wanted to visit the beautiful memorials to people like Abraham Lincoln, Nelson Mandela and Lloyd George could not do so.

The noble Lord is quite right. If there's one thing Nelson Mandela would never stand for, it's someone protesting and risking their very existence for their beliefs, let alone on a nicely tended lawn.

From New Scientist:

Thirty years ago Joe Davis, a peg-legged artist and motorcycle mechanic from Mississippi, walked into MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies demanding to speak with the director. Forty-five minutes later - after trashing a receptionist’s desk and fending off the police - Davis left with a six-month academic appointment. It ultimately lasted more than a decade.

Davis reasons that bacteria engage in activity that produce audible frequencies but we don’t know what they sound like because no one has bothered to listen. He then invents a laser-powered optical microscope. Pointing his microscope at brine shrimp and paramecium he realizes you can easily tell them apart by the sounds they make, in the same way you could differentiate sheep from cows by listening to their vocalizations.

So far so good, but who cares? In the next scene we find Davis demonstrating his optical microscope at an exhibition in Lisbon, Portugal. Only this time he has convinced a striking young woman to let him cover her in nothing but honey and gold dust - presumably for her own protection. Then he uses his optical microscope to project the sound of her heartbeat and respiration to a rapt audience...

In another sexually charged example of performance art Davis sets out to correct what he feels is a case of censorship in scientists’ efforts to communicate with extraterrestrials. He explains that researchers have sent images of an anatomically correct man into outer space but the image they sent of a woman lacked genitalia. To right this wrong, Davis transmitted the sound of vaginal contractions of ballet dancers to several nearby stars. The audio recording was beamed from MIT’s Millstone Hill radar for several minutes before the United States Air Force shut him down.

Apart from art bordering on the perverse, Davis has invented a bacterially-grown radio and a frog-leg powered airplane. He developed supercode, a silent or bio-chemically inert genetic code to embed Greek poetry into the DNA of white-eyed flies and the image of the Milky Way into the ear of a mouse.

New Scientist

The unbearable excitement of local council elections is upon us. While you're hanging the bunting and moving the furniture outside for next week's street parties, you might like to meditate on these examples of the coalition's dedication to “localism”.

1. Council tax benefit

The Tory former leader of the Commons, Lord Newton of Braintree, died recently. This was no surprise to anyone who had seen him in the previous months as his health and his lungs visibly failed, he became increasingly frail and he was reliant on an oxygen tank that he would take breaths from just outside the Chamber. Incredibly and admirably, however, he continued to attend proceedings in the Lords until a few days before his death and never shrank from taking on his own government when he thought they were wrong, and one area where he thought they were deluded was their changes to council tax benefit.

Lord Newton of Braintree: We are being told... that every local authority in the country is going to have to invent its own social security system. That is what we are talking about. Unless they get together in Essex or wherever it may be, then Braintree will have its own social security system, as will Chelmsford and Norwich. How much is that going to cost? “Is it sane?”, I ask, and hope for an answer...

Someone referred to factory closures. I had a lot of them in Braintree in the early 1980s. Courtaulds was one of the biggest local employers in the textile industry. It did me a lot of political damage but, leaving that aside, obviously it sent up the number of people on benefits, including whatever council tax benefit was in those days. The same thing will probably happen up in Fylde due to British Aerospace's intention to close its factories. However, there may be places where great new factories are being built. Is this going to bring windfall benefits? If there is a factory closure, [because the council tax benefit is capped] everyone else in the area on council tax benefit has to have their benefit cut to pay for the new arrivals on to the benefit. If a factory opens or Tesco takes on 400 people, either the council or every council tax benefit beneficiary gets a bonus. These questions need thinking through and need answers. [Hansard]

The answer took the form of a characteristically sour grin from Lord Freud and platitudes about impact assessments, but Lord Newton's basic point remained unanswered because it's entirely true. The coalition is introducing a “system” of every local authority running its own social security system with capped amounts of money—something that was tried for a few years towards the end of the 1930s and, predictably, led to the chaos that convinced people of the need for a national system in the first place.


2. Regional pay rates

It's a popular accusation among the usual critics of bold Tory reforms that marketisation always means a race to the bottom, so that privatising NHS services naturally means pay will be reduced to match the bare minimum that the private sector is prepared to offer. This criticism is, as ever, ill informed and Trotsykite. It's well known that the promise of even lower pay is exactly the sort of incentive that already low-paid workers need to stay in a given area; so well known, in fact, that the government don't even need to consult on it. And there's no escaping the harsh fact that the coalition is bravely facing up to: sick northerners are simply worth less than sick southerners.


3. EU fines

The government are actively pursuing the idea of passing on fines for contravening EU air quality directives to local authorities. That is, if pollution in one area of the country breaches EU levels, the authority in that specific area alone will be liable for the whole fine. I have to thank whichever wonk concocted this particular aspect of the wholesale abandonment of central government responsibility, as it has provided a rare glimmer of light relief in what has otherwise been an unrelenting torrent of shit. Too much pollution in, say, Lancashire and, instead of helping out, the government merely hand over the bill? Simple! Use some massive wind turbines to waft it over to Yorkshire. Yorkshire in turn might use its massive wind turbines to retaliate or waft the offending air onwards somewhere else, which in turn will have its own massive wind turbines, but whatever happens it will mean a boost for the ailing massive wind turbine industry.

4. Local elected police and crime commissioners

Katie Price intends to put herself forward as a candidate.

The race to delegate all responsibility is mainly so that central government can escape the blame for the car crashes they know are coming—after all, most austerity cuts still have yet to be brought in. It also fits with the libertarian position that all government is terrible and inept^[1], but it's an extreme reading of that position to claim that that should extend to even the most basic co-ordination of administration. Local social security! Local air quality! Local currency! Local prices! Local postage rates! Hey, why have you closed my village post office? If you voted for a member of this government and you ever use the term “postcode lottery” to describe anything other than Richard Desmond's flagrant scam, new regulations brought in this year state that you can legally be killed where you stand.


^[1] You might be tempted to assume that this ideology would explain some of the worst excesses of howling, blistering incompetence that this regime continues to display, but come on, look at these people—they're really not doing it deliberately.

Image © David Medcalf and tampered with under Creative Commons licence.

The Metropolitan Police may have apologised to David Hoffmann for arresting him over the poster in his window labelling David Cameron a "wanker", but there's every chance that it will happen again, not because the police are particularly worried about bad language or the reputation of politicians but because, as countless confiscations and arrests across the country have shown, most police officers are convinced that cameras are intrinsically evil and terrifying, and therefore any and all photographs are suspect by definition.

I suspect that this is just the start and we will see the campaign escalate into full-scale raids on newsagents and roadside billboards, with entire families charged with possession of photo albums. In time, only trained police wizards will be allowed to ccnsort with the demonic entities that can create these slavishly faithful graven images, mainly to surveil the population for signs of any illicit camera use, while civilians wishing to insult David Cameron will be forced to make do with crude figurative representations.

Sometimes these things just fall into your lap. A couple of weeks ago I nipped out from work to the Tesco over the road. I went to get a yoghurt and there, on top of them, lay a photocopied A4 sheet. For sheer attention-grabbing panache, I can't fault its headline:

Our correspondent mentions a website, so they have at least dipped his toe into the rapids of the internet, but they are apparently persuaded that secreting their information in supermarkets next to Parliament is a far more effective information delivery system. And to the extent that I am now passing it on to you, they're right.

( Full text under the cut, if you can face it )

EDIT: Hmm, the more that comes to light about Sister Ruth, the more i'm persuaded that this screed may be a revelation sent directly from the good Sister herself... [Thanks to clanwilliam for the legwork.]

Lordswhips is, as the name suggests, the website run by government whips in the Lords, containing information about forthcoming debates, recess dates and so on. Right now, though, according to Google, the Lords appear to be diversifying their online business a bit:

(It's possible that Google is accurate in its assessment that the site "may be compromised", but you never know.)

So today we get to witness something we don't often get to see: changes being made to the most startling public-sector edifice ever created that will lead to an irrevocable and fatal shift in its priorities and the end of its functioning as we know it—a proud boast for any government, but particularly for one that made such a point of saying that that edifice was safe in its hands.

It's always been known that the Conservative party are like a dog on heat with the NHS; they just can't help themselves—it's a “60-year mistake”, and so on—and the trick has always been simply not to bend over in front of them. One day maybe someone's memoirs will reveal precisely why the Lib Dems decided to kneel on the NHS's neck and hold it down so the Conservatives could finally get on with it, but for now it mystifies everyone (including quite a few gratified but baffled Tories) why we're faced with the unedifying sight of a shoal of Lib Dem peers, many of whom know precisely what these changes mean, nonetheless trooping glumly through the division lobbies in support of them because their leaders and whips have told them crossly that it's for the sake of the party.

It's said that the Lib Dems have calculated, as has No. 10, that the opposition to this step in the privatisation of the NHS will blow over and waft away after the bill is actually passed. It's this kind of brilliant and canny political calculation that neatly sums up all the strengths of this government.

The day before the bill is due to be passed in the Lords—after which it will skip gaily back down the corridor to the Commons, to be welcomed with open arms by the government who intend to start implementing it almost immediately—Baroness Thornton, Labour front-bencher on the bill, went public with an assessment of the government's conduct that would get her sternly told off by other noble Lords if she were to voice it in the Chamber:

“This is an ideologically driven bill and the Lib Dems capitulated. Ministers lied to get it through. I know it's unusually unparliamentary language but I am really horrified. They have sold us a pup."

[She] says that although the bill has been amended more than 300 times, its pro-market measures remain largely intact and the health service will be end up as "a terrible bureaucratic, expensive and fragmented NHS"...

Her ire is particularly directed at the Lib Dem peers Lady Williams and Lord Clement-Jones. After weeks of working with the pair on defeating the government over the pro-competition parts of the bill, Thornton said the two had pulled out just before the crucial Lib Dem spring conference...

Instead of shielding the NHS from the full force of EU competition law, Clement-Jones did a deal with the government so that ministers would offer a “strong statement” on the need to take patients' interests into account—arguing that this would insulate the health service in court against legal challenge. Thornton said a minister's “strong statement” was not likely to be “worth much”, adding it would mean “the proposed protection comes when legal action starts to take place. I would prefer the protection to be in the bill to stop it ever getting to court.”[Guardian]

It's not clear exactly why Lord Clement-Jones was chosen for this job in the first place. He is perhaps best known for having tabled on behalf of the entertainment industry an amendment to the Labour government's Digital Economy Bill that was actually more hawkish than the government's own proposals, and which posed a direct threat to ISP freedom. The government delightedly accepted his amendment on the spot. A fortnight later he tried to amend his own amendment, after uproar not only from ISPs but from his own Lib Dem colleagues who understood more about the implications of his proposals for internet freedom than he did. However, the government weren't interested and he had rather ignominiously to withdraw. This debacle led to Lord Clement-Jones being nominated as the ISP Association's Villain of the Year, for introducing his web-blocking amendment “without sufficient research or understanding of the consequences”.

Heroic failures aside, though, It's not as if this is a straightforwardly partisan issue. In fact, if Members of all parties, in both Houses, with interests in private health companies were barred from voting on this legislation—that's any interests at all, not merely troughing so blatant that it even provokes the ire of the Daily Mail—then you'd likely see an extremely different result today. But then Parliament has never been very good at shame.


Oh look, an American trying to persuade fellow Americans of a thing that this country already knows to be true but is preparing to fling to the winds for some fucking reason:

A pure free market model simply cannot work in providing health care unless we're willing to let people who can't pay die #SavingHealthCare

— Fareed Zakaria (@FareedZakaria) March 19, 2012

Thanks for this slightly confusing front-page headline, i, which left me reeling with the image of the US unexpectedly declaring an end to the special relationship by firing Leon Panetta at a compound of British troops. Is he close range or guided long-distance?

Hotdog magazine used to run a splendid throwaway feature: short reviews of shitty B-movies by funny people. Since I lost the actual clipping long ago, I don't know if this was Viz's Chris Donald or Viz's Simon Donald, but either way it was a Viz's Donald.

Blood Surf - available to rent now

A television producer believes he can make a fortune by filming two of his surf buddies riding the waves with deadly sharks snapping at their ankles. But things start to go wrong when a giant crocodile eats their boat. They end up trapped on a remote Pacific island with only the giant crocodile and a gang of sex-starved pirates for company. Their only hope is that a hard-drinking, crocodile-hating sea captain—hell-bent on revenge after an earlier boat-eating incident—happens to be passing by. The old sea-dog still bears the scars from his previous encounter with the 40-foot monster (although one of them, on his neck, very nearly falls off in one scene). He's made it his life's mission to hunt down the beast and yet, when the opportunity finally presents itself, he's found to be somewhat lacking in crocodile-slaying ingenuity. The best he can manage is to kick it in the mouth and call it a “fucking bastard”, which doesn't work, and it promptly bites him in half.

Hotdog, January 2001

On the weekend I came across this postcard, which I bought in my final year of school, 1990. How apt that I should happen upon it in time to commemorate the month when the Conservatives—to the eager applause of Labour's Alan Milburn and with the baffling and suicidal support of the Liberal Democrats—were finally able to bring their long-term plans to fruition and begin to parcel off the NHS, the free-marketeer's nemesis, to their loyal friends and supporters.

Coincidentally I now live very close to the hospital in the photo, which is why I can vouch that about 12 years ago it was, with wearying predictability, converted into luxury flatlets.

The most common response of this government to critics of its largely ideology-based and evidence-free legislation, more popular even than “We're a listening government” hissed through a rictus smile or intemperate yelps of “You're all Trotskyite bastards!”, is the simultaneously wheedling and patronising “You clearly haven't understood. Let us explain it again”. Never mind that everyone involved understands it all too well; the fiction must be maintained that there's a positive social dimension to the health and welfare changes, that the government's austerity measures are objectively sound and not just an article of monetarist faith, that the bunch who once earned themselves the title of “the nasty party” have transformed themselves into a force for good for all. (A leg-up not a hand-out, runs the strapline, which is perfectly true so long as you understand that the leg in question is headed at speed up towards our collective crotch.)

Among the many changes that we "haven't understood" are (I know I've gone over this ground time and again but I can't help it if the truth remains the same tedious truth) the move away from the concept of disabled people having “rights” to a decent, or even normal, life, the removal of legal aid from cases of clinical negligence in children—a provision that the government initially defended fiercely but eventually, to its “credit”, reluctantly caved in on—and the opening up of the NHS to private interests.

You can picture the original Health and Social Care Bill as a slimly built, keen-eyed assassin, dispatched with the single mission of killing off the NHS. Many months later, after repeated and clumsy attempts to disguise it in order not to alarm the populace, the bill is a shambling bloated mutant, Frankenstein's first draft, with extra limbs and organs grafted on every which way, blundering howling and unloved through the corridors of the House of Lords. Don't be fooled; its mission remains the same, but thanks to the last few months no-one can now be under any illusion about what it's here to do, and we will all be watching as it does it. Honestly, Minister, we really do understand.

In fact, at the moment I could just run a form template for this blog:

Name of government wheeze

Brief description of how wheeze is targeted at the vulnerable.

Rundown of how coalition claims furiously but unconvincingly that wheeze is not targeted at the vulnerable.

Scattered profanities.

Angry assertion that the government will get its own way via transparent manoeuvres and laughably ragged procedures in the Commons, possibly in

VERY LARGE LETTERS.

Update a few weeks later of how the government indeed got its own way in the Commons. More profanity.

I shall not be doing this, though, for the sake of your sanity and mine. On the contrary, it's important to keep spirits up in these relentless times. Um... so what's the deal with airline food?

Collect the set!

       

       

Yesterday the government suffered further defeats in the Lords, this time on the legal aid bill. In all fairness to the coalition, there are plenty of positive things that they are putting in place to try to deal with domestic violence, as the minister was extremely keen to stress during yesterday's debate, but that can suddenly count for very little if someone spots that your reforms mean, for instance, that someone who has made use of a women's refuge will no longer be able to use that experience as evidence of domestic abuse. (Yet another Con Dem “tough decision”, by the way, designed and expected to have zero impact on the people who took it.)

And who was the minister sent out to ferociously defend this plank of government policy? It was, of course, Lord "Fall Guy" McNally. The theory about his officials' evil template gains ground.

I wonder if I would be more readily fooled by click-me spam banners pretending to be Facebook message windows if they didn't consistently misinterpret my London address.

What, now? Um, okay, I guess... I mean, it's 1.30am and there's no direct train, but if I get a cab to Marylebone there might be an overnight service to Wolverhampton. I can't imagine the local services will still be running at that time so I guess it'll be a long-distance cab from there. I should make it to Telford by maybe 5am, more likely 6am, so I don't know if you want to get an early coffee and maybe go halves on the cab fare? Let me know!

Cardinal Keith O'Brien is the latest senior churchman recently to rail against the legalisation of gay marriage, calling the plans “madness” and accusing the government of trying to “redefine reality”. Leaving aside the reality or madness of the cardinal's own chosen beliefs (virgin birth, transubstantiation, mandatory celibacy has no adverse consequences etc), he and his fellow protestors such as the Archbishop of York are following in an ancient clerical tradition of admonishing and scorning their errant flock, and as they become shriller and more strident over the next few months it's worth placing them in their proper context:

Eminent Victorians ... backed the idea [of an underground railway], though there were also voices ranged against such godlessness. At an open-air meeting in Smithfield, a preacher called Dr Cuming warned, “The forthcoming end of the world would be hastened by the construction of underground railways burrowing into the internal regions and thereby disturbing the devil”.

Stephen Smith, Underground London

See also: this.

Baroness Cumberlege: This poor [unsupervised] executive is an orphan; he or she is operating without a parent. In the model proposed, Public Health England is in the cosy embrace of the department, with a civil servant directly accountable to the Secretary of State. It is a model that produces a fire blanket to extinguish any spark of innovation or risk-taking.

A fire blanket… for the orphan? Is the orphan on fire? Who's burning orphanages? Are the Lib Dems supporting that now as well?