Money saving expert Martin Lewis has started a Number 10 Downing Street petition to call upon the Prime Minister to follow the Bank Charges Reclaiming Charter, which aims to end both the current suspension of reclaiming & the financial misery caused by unfair penalty charges.
This piece by Mike Read explaining why he’s Backing Boris Johnson for London Mayor is one of the funniest things I’ve read in ages especially some of the comments.
I’d swear it was a spoof written by Harry Enfield if I believed that Enfield was still funny.
It’s essential for Boris to be much, much tougher on the persistently antisocial, making sure that rapists, murderers and paedophiles have no place, and never will, on the streets of London, and will not threaten civilised society.
I’ve spoken to lots of young kids in gangs or “crews” as they prefer to be known and most want to get out of a way of life that gives them nothing. Get in there … understand their problems and give them access to sporting facilities and the chance to make music, act, dance and write. Get them integrated into society and to realise its value.
Admiral Sir Alan West has been appointed to the newly created Home Office post of Under-Secretary for Security, Counter-terrorism and Police of the United Kingdom.
The former First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff will need to be made a Life Peer in order for him to serve as a Minister in Gordon Brown’s government.
I’m bothered that we now have a former senior military officer in a post as a Government Minister without him ever having to be elected by the voters. He will however have a great deal more experience in matters of security to call on than his colleagues at the Home Office.
Somehow our media turned Ahmedinijad’s benign statement “As the Soviet Union disappeared, the Zionist regime will also vanish and humanity will be liberated.” into the menacing “Israel will be wiped out”. Our media also conveniently ignored the statement by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that “We will never start a war.”
Adam Curtis director of the brilliant The Power of Nightmares has a new three part documentary series titled The Trap.
The series consists of three one-hour programmes which explore the concept and definition of freedom, specifically, “how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today’s idea of freedom.”
Blairwatch has a synopsis of the series Parts one and two.
Metafilter has an interesting discussion about the series and another about The Power of Nightmares.
Brian Haw has been named as the winner of the Channel 4 News award for Most Inspiring Political Figure.
Mr Haw received 54 per cent of the votes cast by the public in the channel’s political awards for 2007.
Gen Sir Richard Dannatt, the head of the British Army, who embarrassed the Government by saying troops should be withdrawn from Iraq, came second with 18 per cent.
Tony Blair was backed by eight per cent and David Cameron by six per cent.
Clearly the British public have lost all respect for their political representatives in parliament.
The Guardian: The director of public prosecutions, Sir Ken Macdonald, put himself at odds with the home secretary and Downing Street last night by denying that Britain is caught up in a “war on terror” and calling for a “culture of legislative restraint” in passing laws to deal with terrorism.
The use of the term War on Terror only serves to justify in the minds of the terrorists that they really are waging a holy war rather than committing and conspiring to commit what are essentially criminal acts.
The Guardian reports that due to National Security issues a major SFO investigation of BAE Systems has been halted.
A major criminal investigation into alleged corruption by the arms company BAE Systems and its executives was stopped in its tracks yesterday when the prime minister claimed it would endanger Britain’s security if the inquiry was allowed to continue.
The remarkable intervention was announced by the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, who took the decision to end the Serious Fraud Office inquiry into alleged bribes paid by the company to Saudi officials, after consulting cabinet colleagues.
It would appear that the lobbying of the company and the Saudi government has finally payed off and the government has pulled the plug as it were on the inquiry. The Serious Fraud Office issued this statement.
The Attorney General had apparently consulted with the prime minister, the defence secretary, foreign secretary, and the intelligence services, and they jointly decided that “the wider public interest” “outweighed the need to maintain the rule of law”.
So BAE Systems can now in my opinion be considered above the law, but then that has seemed always to have been the way when it comes to British arms companies, at least under the previous Conservative government.
I suppose naively I had thought that this government would be different especially given that we’ve a prime minister who once taunted his predecessor as someone “knee deep in dishonour” over an arms deal and who promised that he would be “purer than pure” in office.
I feel like one of the animals looking in at the pigs and men at the end of Animal Farm.
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Edit: Garry Smith of A Big Stick and a Small Carrot apparently feels exactly the same and beat me to the punch with the quote.
The Guardian reports: Police want power to crack down on offensive demo chants and slogans
Present curbs are too light, Met chief to tell Goldsmith
This seems like nothing more than a power grab and an appeal to the right wing members sections of Britain that are incensed by these uppity sandal-wearing Lefties and Muslim types voicing their displeasure about various things.
The country’s biggest force, the Metropolitan police, is to lobby the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, because officers believe that large sections of the population have become increasingly politicised, and there is a growing sense that the current restrictions on demonstrations are too light.
It seems to me that Tony Blair’s government has recently freaked out about something which has been going on for quite a few years and that is issue politics. The populace seem generally apathetic about the political parties but a number are passionate about singular political issues be it marching in opposition to the Hunting Bill or demonstrating against the Iraq war etc. Also there has been a rise in political views being expressed online as the number of fora has increased where such views can be aired.
I think that they have freaked out because virtually all these views being expressed are anti-government. You’d be hard pressed to find any Joe Public commenter expressing a pro-Iraq opinion for example.
Most worrying is the following bit of it.
The police want powers to tackle a “grey area” in the array of public order laws. At present, causing offence by itself is not a criminal offence.
Causing offence is not a criminal offence and it never bloody well should be.
He talks about respecting freedom of speech.
We also need to think more laterally around how we police public demonstrations where ‘offence’ could be caused, while still respecting the British position around freedom of speech.
But this sounds like just a piece of management speak that means nothing.
But then I’m part of the problem not the solution aren’t I.