Chicken Yoghurt

Gone to a better place

2006-03-23T19:45:00.000Z

After 14 months of exemplary service this version of Chicken Yoghurt is heading to port for decommissioning. We barely knew her.

The new Chicken Yoghurt-B has set sail and can be found at www.chickyog.net - please adjust your bookmarks. Those receiving posts by email won't have to do anything nor will anyone subscribed to the Feedburner RSS feed.

This site will be left in place so that any links to the posts here will still work and as a floating museum. Like HMS Belfast.

Hope to see you over at the new place.

Mysterious Ways

2006-03-22T12:08:00.000Z

New Labour corruption is a little like religion. As with belief in God, more people believe that Tony Blair is bent than don't but they are unable to produce a scrap of evidence to back up their faith.

It's all so circumstantial (although circumstantial enough for the police to have a sniff, not that they'll do anything as vulgar as proscecute members of the Greater Good). And a bit like intelligent design - a lot of signs point towards the New Labour high command being a bunch of liars and wrigglers but as DSquared says in the comments over at Tim Worstall's blog:

Of course it's all a bit smelly, but I would not want to get my hopes up or stake material personal credibility on there being a paper trail linking the loans to the contracts in any way more substantial than just saying "phwoar, look at that, pretty dodgy".

It's the smoking gun that refused to bark and other such utterances. Until somebody produces a piece of paper saying "I, Tony Blair, offer you Mr X a peerage in return for a £1m loan" - much like God popping up and declaring, "it's a fair cop" - you can bet what's left of your pension that even if (and that's an if as big as the Ritz) Blair does go over this it'll be with "no stain of impropriety against him whatsoever". It won't be the Prime Minister's fault if he's put out into the street. Just you wait - it'll be the fault of the media and the cynics and the Left. Blair, like God, moves in mysterious ways and he may yet salvage his reputation on a technicality.

Not that saying any of this gives me any pleasure. It can't be emphasised enough that this government holds the public in utter contempt. If it didn't why would it feel compelled to continue to swathe itself in its thick cloak of deceit?

Real people can't be trusted enough to deserve an invite to question the Prime Minister - events must be stage managed to the nth degree. Bogus letters must be planted in newspapers and actors must pose as the public at rallies. Posters must tell lies when the truth would be enough. A parallel universe, never mind a parallel party-funding system, must be implemented so the proles don't get a whiff of the stink of high politics.

And then there are the lobby correspondents, those parliamentary journalists given precious access to our masters, charged with the responsibility of informing the public of what's going on in the ivory towers. Instead of showing their mettle and properly questioning our leaders, they bend their knee to them or else risk losing that precious access and the privilege of breathing that heady stench. To ask the questions that matter means risking being cast down. It seems the deal is - it's a good quote from Blade Runner so I'll use it again - "If you're not a cop, you're little people".

As for this business of New Labour and soft money, anyone with even an ounce of common sense could write a list of the questions that our media representatives on their six-figure salaries have failed to ask. The loans weren't illegal so why the cover up? If this wasn't about peerages in return for loans or influence peddling, why the secrecy?

(See also, Lobbygate. "THE LIAR" screamed the headline of The Mirror about Greg Palast, the journalist who broke the Lobbygate story. That was in more innocent times when the fresh-faced Prime Minister was still in the morning of his premiership and the newspapers were happy to cut him some slack. I think you can safely say that Palast's story would receive a more sympathetic hearing than it did in 1998 were it to break in 2006. His account of the saga is related in his book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, which I heartily recommend.)

Given that the party treasurer was ignorant of this second funding system, if the money didn't go through the normal Labour party channels then into which accounts did they go? Who set up those accounts? Somebody banked the cheques from the benefactors but not in the Labour party account, so where? Somebody wrote the cheques that paid for the election campaign - who was it? The 14 million quid that was raised by loans filtered into the party to pay for the General Election campaign. How was that facilitated?

That New Labour finances are in a parlous state has been public knowledge for years. That's what you get for hollowing out the membership. If the likes of Gordon Brown and John Precott say they had no knowledge of these loans, where the hell did they think the money was coming from for posters, adverts and softly-lit, televised Blair-Brown bonhomie sessions?

"You have to wonder how well he was doing his work" is a perfectly reasonable thing to say about New Labour treasurer, Jack Dromey, it just depends who says it. From someone like Charles Clarke it just comes across as a petty, vindictive smear - an exercise in blame sharing - to which you'd be forgiven for mentally appending "...while my boss was accepting numerous secret loans from millionaire businessmen". I also wonder if Clarke has had the courage to say that to Dromey's face as well as saying behind his back at a supposedly off the record lunch with women journalists.

And if the New Labour party finances are as knackered as everybody says, how is the party going to pay the money back? Or are these loans to miraculously become gifts when the stench blows away? Will Lord Sainsbury and the others eventually say, "Nah, don't bother paying it back"?

Were backs mutually scratched? All but one donor (Lakshmi Mittal, got the wooden spoon of the Romanian steel industry instead) giving £1m or over were nominated for honours. One of the 12 lending money to New Labour, Ron Aldridge, just happens to be the chairman of Capita, the beneficiary of huge government contracts (Nosemonkey has more).

Reform of the Honours system was nowhere on the Government's agenda two months ago. Why is it the hot topic now, if not because of the current scandal? When Lord Falconer says he is "bringing forward" legislation, doesn't he actually mean "making it up on the hoof"?

But I, like Nosemonkey and many others, have as much chance of getting our questions answered as we have seeing the likes of Nick Robinson or Adam Boulton ask them. The Budget may also go some way towards sweeping this all away. Nosemonkey, again in Tim Worstall's comments:

I've had confirmation from someone at the BBC this morning that most of their resources are tied up in preparing for the budget, leaving few people to investigate the other people behind the loans.

And let's hope this year's Budget is a more edifying spectacle than last year when there were quite a few New Labour tricks employed, including a leak of the statement's major points to the Evening Standard.

But it's much worse than that. As Matthew Parris says (via Jamie Kenny):

Political journalists love it. Lobby corrrespondents don't want to talk about Crossrail, nuclear-generated electricity, DNA fingerprinting, child poverty, Trident, congestion charging, a new North-South rail line. Lies and misdemeanours are our stock-in-trade. We rejoice when the worthy gives way to the unworthy and a boring but important centrepiece of the parliamentary session is elbowed to the margins by some slimy little half-truth or grubby impropriety.

Nobody's interested in the bigger picture. The media is feverishly all over the loans for honours scandal in the vague hope they might get a scalp. But it's the short game they're playing, like having a Mars Bar for a quick sugar-rush of energy when a big bowl of hearty, sustaining soup would be better.

Yes, allegations of corruption are important and should be investigated but the damage to public confidence done by bent, or seemingly bent, politicians can be repaired over time: New Labour are doing far greater, longer lasting and less easily repaired damage elsewhere.

This government and this Prime Minister are attacking our values and our way of life in a way no terrorist cell ever could: ID cards, the incipient totalitarianism being ushered in by the Legislative and Regulatory Reform bill (a subject deemed too dull by most journalists and their quest for tales of derring-do), imprisonment without trial and the abuse of anti-terrorism laws, to name but a few ways.

Journalists should realise that if you want someone's scalp you don't start by nibbling their toes. The pursuit of the public interest, it seems, is as ineffable as God and New Labour funding.

(Also published at Comment is Free.)

I don't get it

2006-03-22T08:10:00.000Z

Why all the fuss over Abdul Rahman, the Muslim who converted to Christianity? Some people need to grow up.

What are you complaining about? Isn't that why we bombed the crap out of Afghanistan and warmed the heels of the Taleban to the Pakistan border? So that Afghans have the freedom to put each other to death?

I mean, come on, you can't spend all that money on cluster bombs to improve a country's lot, to kill so many of them in order to free them, and then expect them not to act on that freedom. You can't have it both ways, greedy. Where's the logic and humanity in that, eh? Eh?

It would seem that current Western policy towards Afghanistan has been lifted from The Man Who Would be King, when Peachy Carnehan, realising that ruling Kafiristan is not all it's been cracked up to be, tearfully snarls:

Leave them to slaughtering babies, playing stick-and-ball with heads and pissing on their neighbours.

But I don’t want comfort

2006-03-19T17:19:00.000Z

In one of Alan Moore's lesser known masterpieces, Skizz, the eponymous hero is an extraterrestial crashlanded on modern-day Earth, captured by the authorities and subjected to terrifying experiments. Cornered, terrified and at the mercy of barbarians, Skizz, in his halting, hastily-learned English tells his captors, "Yuuu urrr veee aylens". You are the aliens.

"You tell him from me," says Van Owen, leader of the scientific team, "not here we're not. Not here."

This came back to me today after reading in The Observer that "[s]ix international terrorism suspects in Britain are negotiating a return to Algeria because they can no longer withstand the 'mental torture' imposed by the government."

'Here we are not tortured physically but mentally we are tortured. I don't feel human,' said the 39-year-old who can only be identified as 'A'. 'If I'm not going to have my freedom in this country, then I have to go back,' said the man whom Home Office lawyers have described as being involved in 'creating the climate, the motivation and the opportunity that led to the [London bombing] events in July'. 'A' said, if the Special Immigration Appeals Commission does not grant 'unconditional freedom' after an appeal this July, he will return to Algeria.

Now, it's quite possible that this man is the Devil. For all we know he may have been plotting to napalm a nursery school, although being the apologist for terrorism that I am, "creating the climate, the motivation and the opportunity that led to the [London bombing] events in July" sounds more like thoughtcrime to me than filling coffee tins with nails. Whatever the story, the authorities apparently don't have the evidence, or the balls, to prosecute.

But aren't we supposed to be the good guys? Y'know, better than those who blow themselves up on tube trains and fly planes into buildings? Let's not forget that the Foreign Office's own profile of Algeria says:

Alongside the violence committed by the Islamic armed groups over the last decade are numerous documented allegations of human rights abuses by the security forces and state-armed militias, including the enforced disappearances of at least 4,000 people, abductions, torture and extra-judicial killings.

"A"'s control order stipulates he must "stay indoors for 22 hours a day and places very tough restrictions on visitors and access to the outside world."

According to The Independent:

"A" telephoned the Algerian embassy to open negotiations after it emerged that ministers were trying to broker an agreement with the Algerian government that would allow the UK to deport suspects there. That deal, which would involve the Algerians promising not to ill-treat the deportees, has stalled.

Deals with torturers. Enforcing conditions on suspects, suspects mind you, that make them say, "sod it, I'll take my chances with the savages."

But you tell him from me, not here we're not. Not here.

One fine day in the middle of the night

2006-03-19T08:14:00.000Z

So much of what this government does turns on the sixpence of semantic deceit. Why else are city academies allowed to select 10% of students by aptitude in a given subject but not ability. I've yet to hear a clear explanation of the difference that did not um, er and wriggle.

No logical contortion is too ridiculous. It's this most malleable of mindsets that allows the likes of Jim Murphy, sponsor of the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, to acknowledge the concerns people have about the bill but still refuse implement adequate safeguards against the new law being abused.

It's the same deal with ID cards. It's being sold as a voluntary system but from 2008, when renewing your passport, you will be automatically issued with an ID card. It's a voluntary system where you must have a card.

I offer this exchange, from the most recent debate on ID cards in the House of Commons, between Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, and his Tory opposite number, David Davis:

David Davis: Does the Home Secretary think that foreign travel is voluntary for diplomats, soldiers and other Crown servants and their families?

Mr. Charles Clarke: It is not compulsory.

Six impossible things before breakfast? When it comes to believing utter rot, New Labour make the White Queen look like Richard Dawkins.

Blog on Blog

2006-03-18T07:53:00.000Z

Bit late with these (apologies to Gary) but over at Coffee and PC are a couple of good pieces on blogging. Here and here. I'm quoted in the articles but don't let that put you off.

first up

2006-03-17T10:08:00.000Z

My inaugural post is up at Comment is Free.

Anybody who's read my stuff for any length of time will recognise some of it. Consider it a setting out of my stall...

Bill and coup

2006-03-16T10:16:00.000Z

More on the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill - if you're not a fan of democracy look away now.

Remember, the Government say this bill is to reduce the burden on business: to cut red tape. As the Minister for Incipient Totalitarianism and sponsor of the bill, Jim Murphy says:

The real danger is what happens if we don't introduce a bill of this sort. We are trying to do all we can to maintain UK competitiveness, business competitiveness, economic growth, employment levels in a global economy where we face challenges from the emerging economies.

That being the case, take a look at this list of Acts or Parliament (via Nosemonkey) that will not be exempt from part one of the LARR Bill - the part that allows government ministers to change whatever law they like without arguing their case and putting it to a vote in Parliament.

Doesn't look good, does it? The Identity Cards Act 2006 isn't even law yet. If the Government don't want it to be a burden on business, why not draft it properly right now? You know, to save on all the fannying about later. And the Habeas Corpus Acts 1679 to 1862 is a real hindrance to business is it? The Succession to the Crown Act 1707? Magna Carta 1215? What about the Official Secrets Acts 1911 to 1989? "Well, profits wouldn't be down by 50% if it wasn't for that meddling Official Secrets Act".

Everybody knows Digby Jones and the CBI are interfering porkers worried about the contents of their troughs but I don't remember them saying the Church of Scotland Act 1921 is a threat to jobs and economic stability.

I think it's now clear what Jim Murphy meant when he said, "But our ambitions are wider than that!" This list gives lie to the insistence that the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill is merely a device to cut the red tape supposedly throttling British business' ability to compete with Far Eastern sweat shops. It's not hyperbole to suggest that this constitutes little short of a coup d'etat.

Kill the bill.

there goes the day again

2006-03-16T10:04:00.002Z

This (via Dave).

PIN: The tail on the donkey

2006-03-16T08:25:00.000Z

24dash.com: National identity card to come with PIN number

The controversial new national identity card may come with a PIN number like existing bank cards.

The Home Office Minister, Andy Burnham, said a "chip and pin" style code number could be used to verify cardholders' identities in some cases, rather than fingerprints, face and iris scans which will be encoded in the card.

So what does this mean? The biometric data readers have too high a failure rate? That they're too expensive? Whatever the reason, this sounds like an "Oh shit, think of something quick" moment. It looks like the belt isn't going to be enough to keep these trousers up - we need braces as well.

We're told ID cards are going to be handy in that they'll do away with having to carry bank cards and cheque books and drivers licences - you know, all those heavy, unwieldy items - in order to identify ourselves. They'll also be handy in that as well as your bank card pin and your credit card pin and your work door lock pin and your bank account security pin you'll now have to remember your ID card pin as well. No great shakes for most, I'll agree, but then I'm not an 84 year-old woman with no grasp of technology and fading faculties, or a young man with learning difficulties, or a woman escaping domestic violence, fleeing to a refuge in the middle of the night and leaving the scrap of paper with my pin on it at home.

So you go to the doctor and if he's affluent enough to be able to afford an iris scanner, you're asked to present your iris. Ah, he can't get a match. Never mind, let's try the fingerprint reader. No? Tell you what, can you enter your pin number please? Cashback, sir? Are you collecting the schools tokens? You can't remember your pin? Then I'm sorry sir, your baby daughter's antibiotics will have to wait.

Aren't ID cards supposed to be making our lives easier? It depends who you are and what you do with your life. If you're a government bureaucrat then yes, ID cards are going to make your life easier. That's if they work. At this rate, expect Andy Burnham to announce that ID cards will have to be accompanied by a utilities bill or a Blockbuster video card in order to prove your identity.

Biometric ID cards. Their time has come you know.

Fancy that.

2006-03-15T21:49:00.000Z

Pure coincidence. Complete coincidence.

That pearl/swine interface again

2006-03-15T21:23:00.000Z

So anyway. It turns out that this bunch of boffins are working on bacteria-powered fuel cells. Could have important ramifications for cheap energy production, you might think. Particularly in these days of thirst.

But hold your horses. The project is funded by the US Department of Defence because "[t]he Air Force has long been interested in micro-scale air vehicles – some as small as insects – but it has been stymied by the lack of a suitable, compact power source".

Now excuse me, but isn't this a little like finding a previously undiscovered Van Gogh in the attic and, instead of lending it to a museum where the most people can appreciate it, hanging it in the outside bog?

Micro-scale air vehicles. As small as insects.

Donald Rumsfeld is 73.

The All New Chicken Yoghurt

2006-03-15T18:04:00.000Z

After much screaming, weeping and a use of profanity that would make Dennis Hopper whistle with envy, the new WordPress version of Chicken Yoghurt is approaching completion.

Apart from a doohicky that will send posts to subscribers by email (can anyone suggest a good one for WordPress?) the place is just about there. I'm aiming to make the move on April 1 - it seemed apposite.

If anybody has a spare five minutes and would like to have a look at the new place (looks-wise it's same as the old place), make suggestions, post some test comments and generally try and break it, please drop me a line.

The End of the Peer Show

2006-03-15T13:45:00.000Z

Take the pledge:

"I will purchase a Virtual Peerage but only if 10 other people will too."

And unlike buying a real peerage, the money will be going to a good cause. Prices start at a very reasonable £7.50 for a Baronetcy. Baronet McKeating of Yoghurt. I'm having some of that.

You can buy the peerages here. Peasant.

At last the 1983 show

2006-03-15T10:35:00.000Z

If you're not reading Dr John Crippen's blog then you bloody well should be. As well as having lots of children to look after you when you get old and saving for a trip to Dignitas when it all gets too much.

Some will remember a speech Neil Kinnock gave in 1983 when, on the eve of the General Election, he said that under a Thatcher Government, "I warn you not to fall ill, I warn you not to get old." (Owen has a transcript of the speech.) Well, its 23 years later and we have a Labour Government. Would you want to be sick and old now? Maybe not.

Third patient in is Mary, one of the local speech therapists. She is approaching retirement. I sent her husband into hospital three weeks ago in rip-roaring heart failure. He was on CCU for three days but now is on the far flung corner of Dixon, one of the medical wards. He is partially sighted due to an old stroke, and is hard of hearing. The nursing care is appalling. He has developed pressures sores on his sacrum and heels and, oddly, a suppurating area above both ears which Mary thinks is due to the oxygen mask he uses being too tight. He is losing weight because he cannot really manage to feed himself. Mary was in each day over the weekend. Uneaten food from Saturday was still on his bedside table on Sunday. Mary went to the nursing station at the end of the ward. The nurses were all eating take-away Pizza. Deep Pan pizza from Pizza Hut. Mary remembers that particularly. Mary thinks her husband is dying. She is not sure which consultant he is under, and has not been able to find a doctor to talk to. The nurses over the weekend do not speak English. She tried to tell them that her husband is partially sighted but they do not understand. They show here the nursing assessment. Under "visual problems" it says "none". Mary is in tears and asks what she should do. I suggest she phones the Chief Executive and makes a formal complaint.

We're told we shouldn't use one case to damn the whole system. We can't go into detail about individual cases. I'm sure that's a comfort to Mary and her husband, not mention the man Dr John talks about who the hospital sent home "to his eighty year old wife with one of the worst pressure sores I have seen in years."

Individual cases. Isolated incidents. Apart from ones that aren't. "It goes on all the time. I have had two bad ones today alone," says Dr John in his comments of other pressure sore sufferers.

Still, they can console themselves as their infected sacrums are treated that it would have been much worse without the "unprecedented" investement under this Labour Government.

Myrmidons are made of this

2006-03-14T12:27:00.000Z

Bit late with this but I thought it worth noting. Simon Carr, the Independent's parliamentary sketch writer has been one of the - disgracefully - few journalists to cover the passage of the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill (another excellent summary here) as it blazes, white hot, through the firmament of democracy. It would be no exaggeration, in fact, to to say Carr's been all over it like Charles Clarke with a pork scratching he's found down the back of the sofa.

Carr wrote twice last week about the Bill's passage through its committee stage. Tim Ireland has a transcript of the first article. The second one is reproduced here (with apologies).

Carr has an interesting point to make about Jim "offers long and detailed assurances about how the Act will and won't be used. When asked to put these assurances into the Bill, he refuses" Murphy, the minister steering the bill:

This extraordinary bill has been introduced by Jim Murphy. Slim, smiling, aquiline. Jim is usually the best-looking person in the room. But he is one of nature's sub-alterns and to give him this monstrous regiment was an act of brilliant cynicism by the business managers. Call the Bill something people don't even want to remember and give it to a nonentity who won't survive a 2 per cent swing at the next election.

Murphy should be careful. The way this government's careering out of control a 2 per cent swing might end up being wildly conservative. He could find himself back on Civvy Street and on the rough end of his own legislation, like the rest of us. As Harrison Ford's boss says to him in Blade Runner: "If you're not a cop, you're little people".

He's something of an enigma, is Murphy. Entered Parliament in 1997 aged 30 and used to be president of the National Union Students (and we know how far some of them they - Straw, Clarke - went). And that's it. No word of what he did before he became an MP or what life experience qualifies him for kicking the legs out from under democratic accountability. I smell professional politician but may be wrong.

(It also shores up my theory that we're entering a new Dark Age - yet another young prince unwitting or uncaring of what he's doing.)

Carr continues, chillingly:

The crucial clause will slip through, masked by the insignificance of the sponsor and the anaestethic properties of regulatory regime merger clauses. "But our ambitions are wider than that!" Sunny Jim said, inadvertently. How wide? Only time will tell.

But our ambitions are wider than that! Tomorrow belongs to Jim. It really can't be stressed enough that this is a dangerous, undemocratic piece of law dressed up as dry, dusty and dull parliamentary procedure and sold as a wonderful cure-all for business red tape. It's a medicine show and Murphy is the snake oil salesman.

The Bill passed its committee stage on Thursday which means it now passed to the House of Lords for consideration. You can only hope they've the energy for another fight. It's not enough just to be angry or worried or "Bloody New Labour!" about this. It's time to Save Parliament.

Charles Clarke is unwell

2006-03-13T10:59:00.000Z

Fears are mounting for the mental wellbeing of the Home Secretary, Charles Clarke. According to an unnamed source*, many people are alarmed at Mr Clarke's increasingly passive aggressive behaviour towards the victims of the July 7 bombings and their families. "It's like that Earth, Wind and Fire song, 'After The Love Has Gone'," one is thought to have said.

Relations between Mr Clarke and the victims and survivors began cordially enough. On the eve of the vote on the Terrorism Bill in November 2005, the Home Secretary had coincidentally attended to the memorial service for the victims of the bombings. He spoke of how moved he had been and how the families' wishes were paramount. "It was very powerful," he said. "I talked to a lot of families afterwards. They made it clear that we must back the police." He also said that liberals' attempts to undermine the demands of the victims' grief was "pathetic".

Soon after, however, it was apparent that something was amiss. After having listened so assiduously to the victims' demands for 90 days detention for terrorist suspects and spoken so forcefully on their behalf, Mr Clarke's warmth dissipated somewhat. While admitting that victims of terrorism deserved to be given special laws he admitted that he saw being injured in a terrorist outrage in much the same light as being "stabbed outside a pub".

The victims' opinions, so vital in drawing up anti-terrorism legislation and in selling the case for the new laws, were regarded as less important when it came to actually finding out why and how the bombings took place. In December last year, when refusing to instigate a public inquiry into the events of July 7, Mr Clarke said with pre-emtive reassurance (it was revealed three days later that MI5 had deemed two of the bombers to be no threat), "Certainly, there is no question of a cover-up of any kind."

This see-sawing behaviour towards the victims reached an alarming conclusion last week at a clergy meeting at Norwich Cathedral in his constituency. Mr Clarke was approached after the meeting by a parish priest who happened to be the father of one of the survivors of the bombings, who asked:

Congratulations on fixing the meeting so that nobody can ask questions! You will have heard about Rev Julie Nicholson who is so angry she cannot forgive the bombers who killed her daughter on 7th July, well, I have a question, my daughter was feet away from the 7/7 Kings Cross bomb, and she and some other surivors have said they are not angry with the bombers, but with the Government, because there was no public enquiry. Why is there no public enquiry?

Mr Clarke is said to have looked at the priest "in a very nasty way", and replied: "Get away from me, I will not be insulted by you, this is an insult".

A nutritionist suggested that Mr Clarke might have been hungry. Famous for his double lunches, Mr Clarke may simply have been too long away from the table. His low blood sugar level may have excerbated his "weakness, mood swings, headaches, nervousness, irritability, or nausea" as well as his "visual disturbances, shaking, sweating, confusion, palpitations, anxiety, dizziness, aggression or severe fatigue".

Psychologists, however, say** Mr Clarke's behaviour may be symptomatic of deeper problems. "The passive agressive man protests that others unfairly accuse him rather than owning up to his own misdeeds," said one. "To remain above reproach, he sets himself up as the apparently hapless, innocent victim of your excessive demands and tirades." It's also possible that Mr Clarke is "feeling put upon when he is unable to live up to his promises or obligations," the psychologist added. "He retreats from pressures around him and sulks, pouts and withdraws."

A tragic fear of intimacy may also be fuelling the Home Secretary's increasingly eccentric public displays. Mr Clarke, suggested the psychologist, may be "out of touch with his feelings, reflexively denying feelings he thinks will 'trap' or reveal him, like love. He picks fights to create distance."

This inability to love or form lasting bonds was also echoed by a relationship counsellor*** who added that Mr Clarke's behaviour was often seen during the break up of short-term relationships. "This is classic behaviour from a promiscuous alpha male after a one night stand," she could have said. "He's had his fun, these people are no longer any use to him, and now he's not returning their calls."

Unnamed medical sources**** also expressed concern about Mr Clarke's "epidermal density". "Such a thin skin coupled with obviously enormous internal pressures could be nothing short of disastrous," a doctor might have said.

Voiceover: If you or a member of your family been affected by any of the issues mentioned in this post, then Charles Clarke would very much not like to hear from you.

*Am I peddling unattributable gossip or making it up here? You decide. If you read newspapers regularly, are you even bothered?
** Maybe.
***See *.
****And again.

(Why don't you write to the Home Secretary and ask him why he refuses to hold an public inquiry into the July 7 bombings? It's a game for all the family and couldn't be simpler. First you write to the Home Secretary and ask him why he refuses to hold an public inquiry into the July 7 bombings. Then, a month later, you write to the Home Secretary and ask him why he has failed to reply to your letter you sent to ask him why he refuses to hold an public inquiry into the July 7 bombings. Then, a month later...

Or, you could sign the petition)

I love it when a plan comes together

2006-03-09T13:52:00.000Z

It's beautiful, it really is. Elegant in it's simplicity, fiendishly brilliant.

First we have the Democratic Process Bypass Bill ("Jim Murphy offers long and detailed assurances about how the Act will and won't be used. When asked to put these assurances into the Bill, he refuses.") allowing government ministers to do that they darn well pleasey - introduce new laws, change existing ones and other such trifling matters - without recourse to Parliamentary oversight.

Then, we have Geoff "what's wrong with managerialism?" Hoon proposing the curtailment of parliamentary scrutiny, the coup de grace, if you will:

The Guardian: Hoon plans curb on MPs' questions

The right of MPs to table questions is to be curbed for the first time in the history of parliament, according to a confidential document being circulated to ministers by Geoff Hoon, the leader of the house.

He proposes in the consultation document that MPs be limited to 10 questions a day after a huge rise in queries, particularly since the last general election. Part of the blame is being put on MPs' researchers drawing up a lot of questions.

You have to admire its perfection. If this plan was a car it'd be a jet-black needle-thin roadster that did 500 miles to the gallon and had room in the back for three kids and a grand piano.

Damn those MPs and their insatiable quest to get to the bottom of what the Government is up to. And if only they'd do something meaningful with the largely worthless, and yet jealously guarded, information they're able to glean from ministers.

But couldn't the Government just hire some more special advisers or build a bigger instant rebuttal machine? They haven't been overly concerned about the cost of government before now. How long does it take to write prevaricating and misdirecting answers anyway? Does Adam Ingram get a sore wrist writing:

We make every effort to minimise any impact of the coalition's military action on the Iraqi population. We have no means of ascertaining the numbers of Iraqi military personnel or civilians killed during the conflict.

He, along with other ministers, should stick a list of such stock answers up on his office wall as a cheap and easy labour saving device.

The thing is, when Geoff Hoon frets that Ministers are being deluged by questions what he means is they are being asked too many questions like, "how many civilians did we cluster bomb today?" and not enough like, "minister, why are you so great?". I doubt he'd be complaining very much if every question could be answered with a friendly, "everything's smashing, thanks for asking".

It's like his recent kite-flying exercise suggesting that the Salisbury Convention (the agreement by which the House of Lords do not vote against legislation that featured in the government's election manifesto) should become legally binding. If the Lords, and as an advocate of Lords reform I'm writing this with gritted teeth, weren't doing such a bang up job preventing our New Labour overlords from establishing a junta, I imagine Geoff wouldn't even have heard of the Salisbury Convention.

Democracy, I suppose, is all well and lovely until it's not working for you. In fact, that would make a good line in a speech given by the New Labour minister of your choice: "Democracy - if it's not with us it's against us". "DEMOCRACY: TRAITOR" the Sun headline will screech. Efficiency is our friend now. It's the roughage that will ease the passage of so much New Labour legislation.

The real worry is that Labour MPs are permitting these excesses four years out from a General Election. God knows what they'll be prepared to vote for on the eve of election, with sub-zero polling figures, when Blair/Brown says "back me on this measure [pensioners to be turned into Soylent Green, restrictions on the consumption of Victory Gin or whatever] or lose your seats".

To steal a phrase: I know why the sun never sets on New Labour: God wouldn't trust them in the dark. Geoff's doing his best ARP warden impression.

Meanwhile, elsewhere...

2006-03-09T07:44:00.000Z

I was asked to write a piece for this week's Press Gazette which you can see on the Press Gazette blog (one of whose contributors is the estimable Martin Stabe). The article is a comment piece in which I try very hard to be nice about newspaper blogs. Go and have a look and then come back and rip me to bits.

As I say in the piece, I've also been invited to write for the Guardian's new über-blog, Comment is Free. With 200 contributors (199 better known than me) it remains to be seen how prominent my guff will be, but hopefully I'll be in there somewhere.

I don't have any details on when the blog actually launches other than it's very soon. I haven't seen the site yet either but will give the heads up as soon as I can.

Right, I'm off Up North for the weekend to have a decent pint and one of my Dad's fry-ups. Back Monday.

2006-03-08T13:06:00.000Z

wednesday, march 8, 2006

Tim Ireland: The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill must die!

Be afraid...

A certain ratio

2006-03-08T12:16:00.000Z

Some regular vistors will have noticed that a troll has taken up residence in the comments here this week. If he'd been witty or gained responses from other commenters I would have been prepared to let it go. Unfortunately, he forgot to bring the funny in any sense, has been studiously ignored by the rest, and seems determined to derail any debate or conversation.

I've been deleting his comments but can't police the place 24/7. So, very reluctantly, I've turned on the blog's comment moderation facility. Nobody's comment will appear until it has been approved by me.

I hope this won't put off other commenters. Until this week I've been flattered and fortunate to have a class of commenter who have been generous with their time and thoughts and made this blog immensely satisfying for me.

I also hope this won't be a permanent measure. Rest assured it is just to weed out the comments from the one spoiler and I shall not be deleting any other comments.

Apologies to all (-1).

PS. If any other bloggers would like to share tales of similar inadequates and how they dealt with them, I'd be grateful.

2006-03-07T20:00:00.000Z

tuesday, march 7, 2006

Reuters AlertNet: New catch in Baghdad as fisherman haul out bodies

Iraqi leaders, struggling to form a government of national unity, have been trying to play down the extent of violence since an eruption of sectarian bloodshed in the past two weeks.

But the fishermen's tales and other anecdotal evidence add to suggestions that the death toll may well be higher than officially recorded in a country where statistics are erratic.

more...

Bliss on the move

2006-03-07T14:27:00.000Z

Jim Bliss has moved from London to Dublin and from Where There Were No Doors to The Quiet Road.

Get over there and say Hi.

The rough with the smooth

2006-03-07T12:09:00.000Z

Marina Hyde in the Guardian today on Foreign Office's satellite phones stolen in Iraq (one of the phones was used to run a sex chat line, running up a bill for £594,000):

Freedom-wise, forget hearts and minds. Everyone knows groins and pockets is where it's at. Downtown Baghdad naturally has yet to reach the heights - or indeed the depths - of the San Fernando valley, the Los Angeles suburb known as the pornography capital of the world and which contributes billions of tax dollars a year to the US kitty. But watching Iraq take its first teetering steps on a journey that we know ends in Red Hot Forty Plus - well, the PM ought to be weeping public tears of pride, as opposed to getting in a tizz about a phone bill. Pretty soon we'll be able to take off the Iraqi people's stabilisers and marvel as the line representing their electoral turnout begins its sharp descent, in exact counterpoint to the line representing the number of Temptation Island reruns being watched in the region. Clearly, they are currently far too interested in politics, so the sooner the debate shifts to whether or not the first Iraqi Big Brother contestants will have sex live on TV, the better.

You could run and run with this. So I'm going to. Would "Iraq has the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the Middle East" headlines be deemed a victory for Western values? Shouldn't we be encouraging the country's young men to put down their AK47s and turn away from thoughts of insurrection and pick up their cheap cans of Stella Artois and turn to thoughts of vomiting, headlocks and grunting bunk-ups?

What about telling Al Qaeda that there are those who find the concept of happy slapping almost as, if not more, terrifying as televised beheadings? The sooner Baghdad develops its own curtain-twitching, reactionary and paranoid middle class, the sooner Al Qaeda can switch from a campaign of terror based on bombing and beheading to one of being gay, claiming asylum, scrounging from the benefit system and hanging around in groups on street corners. I mean look at it over here. A bunch of knobs blow themselves up on the tube, the nation shrugs and turns back to Eastenders. But tell them there might be a nonce at the local school or asylum seekers are moving in across the street and it's like the ballroom scene in The Poseidon Adventure when the water starts coming in.

I wonder if it crossed the minds of the Greater Good when they drew up their plans for Iraq that you can't export democracy without some of the more unsavoury aspects stowing away in the shipment. Liberation with sexlines via stolen satellite phones. Voting with binge drinking. The rule of law with poor sexual health. A free media with happy slapping. The freedom to walk to streets with the freedom to be accosted by a screeching hen party.

We should go the whole hog. Why not send bunches of squaddies into downtown cafes to glass the regulars? Start a range of "cheeky", not-at-all misogynistic, "empowering to women" magazines so Iraqi parents can't take their kid to the newsagent to buy them a comic without the child being presented with an eye-level image of Abi Titmuss on all fours offering herself to the viewer. Make sex the cornerstone of Iraq's popular culture and then refuse to give its children the emotional and educational tools to deal with the information. Why should it be just us that suffers? (I'll shut up before I start to sound too much like Rorschach from Watchmen.)

It just goes to show that you can't build a new Eden without the slugs and the snails and the cockroaches getting in and chewing on the flowers. Tony Blair should embrace this fact and give a speech, "Only when the streets of Baghdad are slick with Bacardi Breezer vomit and its gutters lined with inebriated teenagers having emotional episodes will we bring the troops home. We owe it the Iraqi people." Then we can bomb them again when they start exporting anti-social behaviour and refuse to implement a culture of respect.

One born every minute.

2006-03-07T10:38:00.000Z

So I'm in the big Sainsbury's in Portslade this morning picking up a few bits. As you walk through the bread and cakes section, there is a gorgeous warm waft of the sweet-spicy smell of hot cross buns. The bakery is pumping the aroma from the ovens into the air conditioning system. As you walk under each vent in the ceiling another blast hits you.

It's much the same psychology, I suppose, as the one that dictates you should put a pot of coffee on just before a prospective buyer comes to view your house. A comforting aroma helps create an atmosphere more conducive to purchasing.

The cynical inventiveness of the application of this psychology to the marketing of food is amazing, however. Some misanthropic master of manipulation had the original idea. His ravening colleagues laughed and high-fived at the idea's fiendish simplicity. The designer of the store and its systems had to arrange the air conditioning just so. All to sell baked goods, in this case, hot cross buns. The time, planning and money behind this swaying of the weak-minded borders on the sinister.

I bought two packets. They were lovely.