2015

After five long years in a bunker the Liberal Democrats emerge blinking among the rubble, unscathed by the battles that have dogged the minority Tory government and ready for government.

...and that's why they shouldn't form a coalition with anyone.

General Election - can't make your mind up?

Just in case you're having a bit of a problem making up your mind as to who you're going to vote for on the 6th of May now that the Leaders' Debates have churned up our deep-rooted allegiances or, more importantly, you can't decide who to vote for in the Acid Rabbi poll (which is just there on the upper right hand side of the screen), here's a very handy little flowchart from b3ta.com to help you sort your muddled mind into a less chaotic state...

Friend of Israel = Friend of Jews?

Members of the European Parliament Michal Kaminski, of Poland's Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc, and Nick Griffin of the UK's British National Party have both faced accusations of anti-semitism in recent weeks. We can take some comfort in the fact that both have strenuously tried to refute such claims - it was, after all, within living memory that professing openly anti-semitic philosophies during an election campaign would guarantee plenty of votes and very little, if any, protest. Thankfully, in these times, even suspected fascists don't wish to be labelled Jew-haters because they perceive quite correctly that gaining such a tag amounts to political suicide in most countries. So Mr. Kaminski tries to deny he's an anti-semite (and the debate rages on) and Mr. Griffin tries to claim that although he was a Holocaust denier, he has moderated his views (come on - who does he think he's kidding?) and that he now thinks Jews are quite nice people, actually. Didn't he laugh matily when the rabbi's son spoke on Question Time, and how long before he turns up in Golders Green munching a lox bagel for the cameras?

Michal Kaminsky visited Israel with British Conservative friends. Does this mean he cannot be an anti-semite?

Both men have taken a similar approach - how can we be anti-semites, they ask us, when we are both supporters of Israel? Jewish Chronicle writer Miriam Shaviv points out, Mr. Kaminski has even visited our fair nation as a special guest of the Conservative Friends of Israel and he's even been to Israel itself with his Tory chums. The odious Mr. Griffin, meanwhile, claims that his equally unpleasant party are the only British political group to have "supported Israel's right to deal with Hamas terrorists." Surely we can't be both friends of Israel and enemies of the Jews, can we? they seem to be saying.

All around Britain and Europe, people both Jewish and otherwise listen and think, "Hmm. That's a point. Maybe they're really not anti-semites. I'm not a racist, but I am a bit worried about immigration - perhaps I should consider voting for these people?"

Here in Britain, it seems that most people can sniff out a fascist's lie from miles away. According to the 12 Marcheshvan JC, the vast majority of British people realise that the BNP are dangerous - a mere 9% of those polled expressed positive feelings about the party. 54% (64% in London) believe that Jews would have reason to be fearful if the BNP came into power. That is, thankfully, more than half. If we scale figures up to the same size as the entire UK electorate (approximately 40 million people) that's 1,600,000 more who believe the BNP is anti-semitic than do not - enough to make a lot of difference. But it does mean that 18,400,000 (46%) either think that the BNP is not anti-semitic or are unsure. That's a worrying amount.

So, back to the question in hand. Can an anti-semite support Israel? Are the two as mutually incompatible as they might at first seem? Let's have a look at the nation generally considered to have been Israel's greatest ally, the United States of America. Jewish Americans have long been afforded rights and freedoms kept from the Jewish populations in some other countries, but just as is the case almost everywhere else have also been used as a convenient scapegoat on many occasions - in the last century, Jews were popularly blamed for both the First World War and the Great Depression. In 1941, Charles Lindbergh - a man suspected of ideas both racist and sympathetic to the Nazis - stated his belief that a Jewish minority was pushing America into a war against its interests. There is no doubt that anti-semitism was rampant in the USA prior to the Second World War.

That war, of course, brought the Shoah. When the world discovered the full and almost unimaginable horror of what had taken place in Nazi-occupied Europe, there was widespread shock. Many people may not have liked Jews very much but nobody with even a trace of humanity ever wished for wholesale slaughter of innocent men, women and children. Anti-semitism and anti-semitic thought was widely considered utterly repugnant for the first time in history.

But deep-rooted beliefs and fears do not simply vanish overnight. People realised that anti-semitism needed to be held in check so that nothing like the Shoah would ever happen again, but they did not lose their own anti-semitic beliefs. Those beliefs have been a part of everyday life for so long that they are deeply ingrained in society, even within language, and it will take more than one or two generations until they are finally - if ever - eradicated.

The Zionists, who had long sought a homeland for Jews, found they suddenly had a huge increase in numbers of people supporting their aims (and let me point out here that not even for a second do I wish to claim that Zionists benefited from the Shoah - Jews lost more than will ever be regained and will continue to suffer the Shoah's legacy for as long as there are Jews). Millions of non-Jewish people agreed that Jews needed a homeland and that the establishment of such a place would ensure non-Jews never again have to endure the horror or not feel the guilt for what the Nazis did. So they supported Israel, even though many still held anti-semitic beliefs.

What a handy way to solve the Jewish problem! Imagine you're an anti-semite for a moment. You hate Jews, you hate their religion, you hate the ways that they live. You feel that they are to blame for many of your country's problems; after all, they control the banks, don't they - and whoever controls the money controls the nation. But if people know you hate the Jews, they're not going to think much of you; they might even agree with you in their hearts, but they won't admit it because nobody dares to these days and hey - nobody wants to be called a Nazi. You want to get rid of them, but you don't want them to be killed obviously. If only they'd all just disappear...wait a minute! How about if they all just moved somewhere else, some other country altogether? Not your problem anymore if that happened.

You can stop imagining you're an anti-semite now - I hope you didn't get too into the role and start doing anything embarrassing that might lead to some awkward questions from anybody around you. You could find yourself in as much trouble as I did when my bubbeh found out I'd pretended I was a German while playing The Great Escape with my schoolfriends 25 years ago.

Thank G-d that Israel does exist, and may it do so forever - even if the only reason you can think of for doing so is that it provides democracy with a foothold in the Middle East. But, if you will, please use your imagination again to picture a world in which the land promised by G-d to the Jewish Patriarch was not a thin strip of Mediterranean coastline wihout any oil and previously inhabited by a group of Arabs who had not exactly made their mark on the world stage over the last few centuries and imagine instead it was Florida, or East Anglia, or the Dordogne, or Schwarzwald, or some other sizable chunk of any Western nation. Do you think our governments would have been quite so keen on a Jewish homeland then? Many of these nations had expressed no particular support nor love towards Jews before the Second World War and as the old saying goes, a leopard cannot change its spots - at least, not that quickly. Could it be that the real reason Israel was allowed to exist was not because Western nations supported the Jewish need for a land of their own but because it presented an opportunity to get rid of Jews without resorting to the abhorrent methods of the past?

That's why it is entirely possible to be both a supporter of Israel and an anti-semite. Those who call themselves Friends of Israel are not necessarily friends to those Jews that choose to live in other nations.

Let's keep Griffin and the BNP where we can watch them

Well, well, well. Didn't Nick Griffin do well on Question Time last night? Of course, when I say "do well," I mean he did well for us rather than for him and his disgraceful little band of bigots - he revealed himself as the poisonous idiot that he is.

BNP leader Nick Griffin, probably not listening to the latest Wu Tang Clan album.

For those who didn't see it (like, where were you?! See it right after reading this by clicking the Question Time link in the paragraph above), a large part of the show went something like this: David Dimbleby: "Mr. Griffin, how do you explain your comments concerning X, in which you stated that X is evil/unBritish/etc.?" Griffin: "Oh no, no, no. I never said that. The newspapers and the BBC said I did, bit I didn't." Dimbleby: "But Mr. Griffin - it's on video. There is a record proving you said it." Griffin: "Er...oh yeah. I did say it. [ridiculous smirk, possibly intended to look charmingly boyish but actually looking more like the exagerrated facial expressions of a man who realises he's being made to look like a fool]."

Time and time again, Griffin vomited up the revolting rhetoric we expect of him and his ilk, and time and time again the main party guests used the most effective weapon that those of us who oppose the BNP's policies have - they simply replied with cold, hard, logical common sense and facts. It works like a charm - nothing the BNP say can survive this sort of attack. Every single one of their arguments withers and dies if there's even the merest whiff of intelligent, empirical reasoning in the air.

Acid Rabbi was pleased that the BBC allowed Griffin a platform last night, despite the widespread attempts to stop them so doing. Not because of the right to free speech; which, it seems to me, should apply only to those who support such a right (Griffin, like all fascists, does not - he would prefer to silence those with viewpoints different to his own, and in doing so forfeits his right to that freedom), but because we need to keep these people out in the open where we can keep an eye on them. Did the National Front conveniently vanish in the 1980s after the Anti-Nazi League and other groups responded in physical terms? Unfortunately not - they just retreated underground where they festered for a few years and - once they'd had time to recover up they popped like the weeds that take over your lawn every summer. Many of them had decided to change their name, adopting that of 1960s far-right movement the British National Party and remain with that title to this day but they were the same old racist, homophobic, anti-semitic and, despite their own claims, anti-British Nazis that they always had been. Keep them where we can see them - and, what's more, it's much easier to attack someone when they're where Mr. Griffin was last night - a person on a podium is a very easy target.

There were some worries that the show's audience would be taken over by BNP supporters, but this did not happen - rather surprisingly, because Griffin likes to have a few big men backing him up at all times. There were one or two, of course, but all in all it represented British society rather well. OK, a million people voted BNP in the last elections and that's a million too many. But there are 49,138,831 people in England alone. 11,132,847 of those are children. So assume there are around 38,005,984 adults able to vote - whether they do or not is a different matter - and we can see that far from being currently on the crest of a wave of popular support, only around 1 in every 40 people voted BNP (many of these people are probably not even racists - some will have voted BNP as a protest vote against the main parties and some may have fallen for the BNP's lies when it claims to be a democratic party that represents the nation's best interests). There is, after all, a big difference between voting BNP and being a member of the BNP - far more than is the case with the other parties (they have a total of members. If the BNP really spoke for the country's best interests, surely 11,560more than 0.02% of the population would scrape up the £30 a year it costs to join?). The audience at the very least approximately reflected this, and it shows that Griffin's attempts today to write off Question Time as no more than a "Let's all bash Nick Griffin" event is rubbish. It was not a carefully-planned exercise aimed at discrediting him - simply yet more evidence that if you take a random cross section of British society, the majority will have passionately anti-racist views.

The BNP have around 50 councillors at the moment, but it's interesting that those areas which elect BNP representatives very rarely do so twice. Perhaps it only takes a bit of apathy, one election with a low turn-out, for the BNP to get in - but once they are, the local electorate get rid of them again as soon as they have the chance. Maybe sometimes a sufficient number of people get fed up with the main parties' failings that they decide to vote BNP - but again, once they've had some experience of what life is like when the BNP get any power, they soon turf the fascists out again. This is reflected in the party's membership lists, which were once again laid bare for all to inspect this week following the appearance of a leaked one online (that's right - another one): of the twenty constituencies with BNP members, only four recorded an increase in member figure between the end of 2007 and April 2009 . With these facts in mind, it seems obvious that the BNP have very little real support, far less than Mr. Griffin tries to convince both himself and the world in general, and the only chance they ever have of getting into power is when people who are not BNP supporters vote for them. I'll bet a fiver that both Griffin himself and Andrew Brons lose their European Parliament seats in the 2014 EU election.

Let's keep Mr. Griffin right where we can see him so we all know what he really stands for. That way, his nasty gang of racist thugs will have to rely on the very limited numbers of true supporters they have. They won't get the message that they're not wanted and go away, unfortunately, but we will at least know that here in Britain, with its liberal, tolerant, multi-cultural, welcoming and above all decent society, they will never get the power they crave.

CCTV is rubbish, say criminals

Criminals of most persuasions are, understandably, not very keen on closed circuit television cameras - but they don't let a little matter like that stand in the way of them going about their business.

Professor Martin Gill of Leicester University asked 101 offenders (probably students forced to shoplift and burgle in order to pay of their student debt) to rate 13 different crime prevention methods in order of effectiveness. SmartWater - a liquid substance which can be used to invisibly mark both property and thieves came out on top. Bars on windows, locks and police patrols were all rated more highly than CCTV, which came sixth.

Image from Schnews - used without permission (so please click the link and go and have a look at their site - believe me, you won't regret it).

Some sources claim there are around 4.2 million public cameras (ie; not those in shops, private homes etc.) in the UK, with half a million in London alone - roughly one for every 14 people. Yet there is very little evidence of their being an effective crime-fighting tool - according to research carried out by Justin Davenport, writing for the London Evening Standard says that 80% of crimes go unsolved and that "police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any." In fact, of the five London boroughs with the most cameras, four have below average solved crimes. Even the Metropolitan Police admit that, in 2008, just one crime per 1,000 cameras was solved.

Liberal Democrat policing spokeswoman Dee Doocey says that her party estimates 10,000 CCTV cameras in London "have cost the taxpayer in the region of £200 million in the last 10 years." Sounds like a lot of money, doesn't it? Could it not have been better spent on new police officers, seeing as how they're known to be a very effective method in both preventing and solving crimes?

The basic rate of pay for a Metropolitan officer is £22,104 per annum during the 31 week training period, then £24,675 per annum when initial training is complete; so we can assume that a copper costs £23,142 for the first year and £24,675 each year thereafter - £245,217 for ten years. Therefore, £200 million would pay for just 815.6 coppers...and 0.6 of a copper is no use to anyone.

That's why CCTV is such good value, you see. It might be fairly useless as far as crime prevention/detection/solving goes, but the public are so worried about crime they're willing to vote for any party which promises to be tough on criminals. All those CCTV cameras are highly noticeable - especially now that the civil liberties people have unintentionally helped the cause by drawing attention to them - so the Government get to look as though they're doing something while in actual fact they're sitting back and doing what they always do - a combination of worrying about how they can get enough votes to win General Elections instead of trying to improves the lives of British people and bugger all.

Minister backs "primaries"

Now, we're not often in favour of anything that aims to make Britain more like the USA because it's very obvious that we have a far better way of doing things over here - for example: no death penalty, TV that's only 98% rubbish, ginger beer, Marmite, real cheese instead of yellowish stuff in an aerosol can and so on; while they have corndogs, the KKK, Kid Rock and Sarah Palin. No contest really, is there?

David Miliband. Despite appearances, he is not in fact 13 years old and is fully eligible to act as Foreign Secretary.
Copyright-free image from Wikipedia.

But, every now and again you come across an American idea that seems to make a lot of sense and you can't help but wonder if we ought to copy it (not least of all because everything we copy from them we also make a lot better - ie, rock and roll, techno, graphic novels and...erm...other things). One example is the primary election, whereby constituents get to choose from a list of prospective candidates from each party who will then contest the coming election; instead of only being able to vote for a candidate chosen by the party as is currently the case.

David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, has come out in favour and praised the US Democrats for the way in which they involve people who are not party members in the decision making process. However, any system which allows non-party members to take such an active role is likely to attract limited support from many politicians as it might lead to a fall in numbers of people who bother to join, a good source of party income: Labour's membership list numbers some 166,247 people, so with current membership renewal fees standing at £19 for the unwaged or £38 for those lucky enough to have hung on to their jobs in Brown's Britain, this equals a minimum of £3,158,693 for the party's coffers even if they all paid the reduced rate (in 1997, membership stood at 405,000 - which would have been £15,390,000). You can be sure of one thing - they ain't gonna be keen on losing over three million quid.

The Conservatives have been playing with the idea, which is unsurprising as they're doing their best to look as different as possible from Labour just so they can appeal to those voters who don't follow politics particularly closely but want to give their support to anyone but Gordon - it's surely significant that the recent "Totnes Primary," in which Tory Dr. Sarah Wollaston was chosen as candidate by the constituents, came so soon after the Norwich North by-election in which Labour's decision to rid themselves of popular MP Ian Gibson proved misguided when the Tory candidate won twice as many votes as the Labour candidate, a disaster for the party which has been partially blamed on Labour supporters choosing not to vote for a party-picked candidate they didn't want.

Neal Lawson, of left-wing group Compass, is not in favour and attacked Mr. Miliband who, we says, is one of those responsible for driving the party "to its death." He added, "This would be the death knell of the party." We can understand Mr. Lawson's wish to keep the party alive, of course - after all, he obviously loves it enough to have allowed it to become a very large and important part of his life.

It would be a little sad to see Labour die - just like it's sad when an elderly relative dies. After all, when it was performing at its best, Labour was undeniably a great institution which achieved an enormous amount in its efforts to improve daily life for a vast percentage of the population. But when you know dear old Great Aunt Maude has been fed up to the back teeth for the last twenty years since her legs gave up the ghost and put her in a wheelchair for the rest of her life, severely limiting her opportunities to go out on the piss with her mates, don't you feel that, despite the sadness of her passing, just a little happier knowing that she's gone to a better place where she'll suffer no longer? Maybe it's time to put Labour out to grass too, let it spend its last few years peacefully dozing in the sun. It might seem unfair that it cannot keep soldiering on forever; but new parties, spawned in response to the new needs of the modern world, will arise with new ways of doing things. That's just the natural order of things.

Whatever. Increasing constituents' participation in this way, by allowing them to choose for themselves who they want to represent them in Parliament, is quite simply more democratic. The cost to any particular party - be it a reduction in funds or even a threat to their very existence - is of very little importance in comparison. Anything that increases democracy and gives citizens more say in the way that their country is run is worthwhile.

Bercow's Cash Cow

John Bercow seemed an honest sort of gent for a Tory when he was elected as Parliamentary Speaker - he promised a new start and said that he would personify a "clean break" in the wake of Michael Martin's resignation following the expenses scandal.

John Bercow has a lot to smile about, it seems. Is he going to line his own pockets, just like his predecessor?

Image from Wikipedia, used in accordance with Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 license.

Mr. Martin famously claimed around £724,600 in public money to pay for the upkeep of the Speaker's residence, a grace-and-favour apartment upon which the occupant pays no rent, along with another £992,000 to improve the garden and security. £1,716,600 - not bad, eh? That could do a lot of good for an entire housing estate, never mind one apartment - it must be absolutely gorgeous in there after all that and now that Bercow's the speaker he gets to live there. Wonder what he thinks of it?

He thinks it's a "fantastic apartment but it's not altogether child friendly," apparently. Of course, none of us would ever wish to see any harm come to the Bercow offspring - but the £20,659.36 he's claiming just a month and a half since his appointment (22nd June 2009) to carry out further improvements seems a little excessive. Especially when you remember he gets paid the same amount as a Cabinet minister - £141,647 - and, as we've already pointed out, doesn't pay rent on the place. We can't help but wonder if just maybe he ought to pay for his own £6,764.30 sofa, £90.95 mattresses and sheets, £760 window seat cushions and £275 lampshades; none of which are strictly speaking essential in making a home child friendly - in fact, he'd be a lot better off getting the cheapest sofa possible, since he'll need to replace it in a year or so once the little darlings have drawn on it with felt-tip pens, smeared melted chocolate biscuits over it and done all of the other horrible things that kiddies do to furniture. Let's not forget the £80 clock, £86.73 noticeboard and £620 television aerial socket with Sky box he's claiming for either.

That would leave him with a cool £132,970.02 so he could probably have afford the £3600 he spent on window locks (this apartment must have a lot of windows), £47.88 on a hob guard, £3380 on planters to improve terrace safety and £1087 on changing a study into a playroom too. Like I say, nobody in their right mind wants to see any child come to harm; but most of don't get paid anything like that sort of money, but if we want to make our homes safer for our children we have to pay for it ourselves. And he'd still have £124,855.14 left over - quite a bit in excess of the average British annual income, which is around £24,908, only £1300.17 (about the same as a month's rent for many of those who have to pay for their accomodation) more than what Mr. Bercow is paid every two months.

According to a Commons spokesperson, Mr. Bercow says that he is "happy that this information is in the public domain, that the public know how this money has been spent." Will he be surprised if the public don't seem favourable?

BNP beats up man outside pub?

Here's an interesting story. The BBC report that David Drew, the MP for Stroud, says that British National Party supporters gave a man "one hell of a hiding" after spilled beer on party leader Nick Griffin.

Nick Griffin - with some beer. We hope that it was only St***a Ar***s that was thrown over him - we'd hate to think of nice beer being wasted on a neo-Nazi.
Image from Wikipedia, used in accordance with Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 license.

According to Deputy Leader Simon Darby, Mr. Griffin and guests were having a meal in the pub when an unnamed man spilled beer on him. Both Mr. Drew and Mr. Darby agree that there was an altercation in the pub and the man was asked to leave by the landlord, but at this point the stories differ. Mr. Drew says that the man was then taken out of the pub and beaten up by the holocaust denier's supporters, while Mr. Darby says that the man then lay in wait outside where he threw the beer over Mr. Griffin, at which point he was "restrained by our [the BNP's] security because he had a glass in his hand..." Mr. Drew is "trying to distort and warp the situation," he claims, adding that the party "have yet to decide whether to report it to the police." Notice the difference in the two stories over when the beer was spilled - was it in the pub, resulting in the man being ejected, or outside the pub as Mr. Darby claims? Was beer spilled twice, and if so why hasn't Mr. Darby emphasised this, if only to make his version of events watertight?

Hmm. Definitely worth keeping an eye on. Mr. Griffin is always, when in public, accompanied by group of rather large and tough-looking men: "I am not prepared to accept that any politician has a private army," Mr. Darby says. Bodyguards are one thing - even we would agree that Mr. Griffin - who is most certainly more likely to be attacked or even killed than most of us - has the right to exist, even if we do hate everything that he and his party stand for; but if it is shown that they really did give the man "a hiding" rather than merely restrained him to prevent injury, it shoots rather a noticeable hole in their claims to be a legitimate, democratic party.

There is no mention of whether or not the unnamed man is also considering pressing charges. If he does, however, it may well be the case that he has witnesses. If he does and the BNP do not, it will be very hard to believe Mr. Darby's claims. Like we say - worth keeping an eye on.

Exclusive: Mandelson has reconstructive surgery

The Archimandrite Mandelson, leader of the Starveling Cult and probable Most Evil Man in the Universe (Darth Vader lists him as a reference on his curriculum vitae and claims he was "the bestest teacher what I ever had" on Rate My Teachers.com), is already known for his chilling appearance and bloodthirsty ways. Some years ago he famously had his genetic code altered so that his eyes became a terrifying red colour; he has also had his skin lightened and is believed to have had a number of changes carried out to his genitals, allowing him to inject any combination of an assortment of different chemicals - including truth serum - into his partners.

As if all that isn't freaky enough, a recent photograph appears to show that the First Secretary of State - who is widely said to have been the architect of New Labour - has had further surgery in order to radically redesign his hands so that each finger is now tipped with a smaller, fully-functioning hand of its own. This leaves him with a total of 40 fingers and ten thumbs.

Don't worry - we're not going to make you look at a photo of his genitals.

News has come in today revealing that Lord Mandelson is a member of around 35 separate Cabinet committees that have been created in order to cover matters related to economic, domestic and foreign policies. There are 44 committees in total, of which Prime Minister Gordon Brown is a member of fewer than Mandelson, leading Conservative MPs to criticise what they term the unelected minister's "powerbase." "It is obvious that Peter Mandelson is the real unelected prime minister pulling the strings at No 10," says a Tory party spokesman.

Acid Rabbi nipped down to Westminster where he was lucky enough to bump into one of the Lord's many under-secretaries who, once we'd finished with the thumb-screws, was happy to act as an unofficial spokesman as long as we guaranteed anonymity since he was afraid his boss would punish him. "It's no secret now that Lord Peter sits on almost all Parliamentary committees," he told us. "He's involved in all sorts of things from those that discuss Africa to the Olympics to immigration. Basically, once he reached ten of them he found he was spreading himself a bit thinly, so he's had the reconstructive surgery on his hands so that he can keep a finger in 42 pies simultaneously."

Acid Rabbi - undoubtedly the finest investigative journalism on the Internet.
Yarmulkes off to Iain M. Banks, who we hope won't be offended at us nicking his ideas and adapting the cover of The Algebraist (having some idea of his politics, we suspect he won't).

Grayling: Take yobs' mobile phones

Shadow Home Secretary and MP for Epsom and Ewell Chris Grayling proposes giving police the power to confiscate and keep for one month mobile phones belonging to vandals and others who behave in an anti-social manner. The move is just one part of a whole selection of new powers the Conservatives want to give the police, following the realisation that ASBOs have little positive effect in society.

Take yobs' mobile phones? Most people are more worried about their knives.
Image from Wikipedia, used in accordance with Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 license.

This will, he says, "go to the heart of what matters to a Nokia generation of young people" and serve to disrupt gang activity and make a point to those committing offences of this type.

Have you ever heard such a load of rubbish in your entire life? Yobs who have just had their phone taken away are going to do one thing - go straight out and get a new one. It costs £20 for a brand new Nokia 2610 in Argos - you'd only have to do one mugging to afford one of them and you'd still have change for a portion of chips on the way home, just to make sure you've got something to tell your grandchildren about in the future. Then you just meet up with one of your crew members, spend five minutes copying the numbers for all yo' bredren (you're not getting Bluetooth for twenty quid) and you is proper back in business bruv.

"In areas where there is a genuine gang culture, such a step could also give police an additional tool to disrupt gang activity," says Mr. Grayling, who also suggests that juvenile offenders have their bicycles taken away. So, if you live in London or anywhere else that suffers from a high level of petty crime, expect to get your bike nicked twice a day instead of twice a week as soon as the Tories are in power.

Lords sides with Muslims over MPs

The Government has suffered yet another defeat in the House of Lords after peers voted in support of establishing a new independent commissioner for terrorism suspects.

This is not the first time the Lords has opposed the Commons over anti-terrorist legislation, much of which has been highly contentious, with notable past defeats including Tony Blair's attempt to increase the maximum time a terrorist suspect can be held without charge from 28 days to 90 in 2005. In 2008, another attempt to extend it to 45 days was made, briefly accepted and then overturned by the Lords. Law Lords led by Lord Philips of Worth-Matravers have also recently attacked controversial control orders which can be used to prevent a suspect from seeing evidence being used against him or her, effectively denying them the right to make an appeal. The Common's opposition to the creation of the new post was backed by MPs from the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and some cross-party members.

A group of peers led by Lord Lloyd of Berwick (pictured right), a retired Law Lord, demanded that the new post be created and won the vote by 145 votes to 102. He said that the commissioner would act as the "the eyes and ears of the judge," entirely independently, in those cases where the police try to extend a suspect's detention prior to a charge being made.

In essence, the new commissioner will help to ensure that innocent people will not be detained for any longer than is necessary. Fears that it might lead to guilty people being freed are dismissed by former Chief Inspector of the Constabulary Lord Dear, who says he believes "that the greater good that may be achieved by the creation of the commissioner post far outweighs any potential disadvantage." The commissioner will be granted access to secret evidence, available to neither the suspect nor the suspect's lawyer, in order to be able to advise the judge on the best course of action.

Although Lord Lloyd points out that the creation of the post will reassure Britain's 2.4 million strong Muslim community, of which some members have been feeling (not without reason) distinctly alienised and even criminalised by various legislation and the extreme opinions of a small minority of the non-Muslim population, it will be of equal service to anyone of any other background who is unfortunate enough to be falsely suspected of plotting or carrying out terrorist offences.

The Guildford Four were wrongly convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in the 1970s. After many years in prison, their convictions were overturned. The people who carried out the bombings for which they were blamed remain free. Had the commissioner for terrorism supects have existed then, these innocent people might never have been convicted - and the police investigation would have continued, perhaps eventually capturing the real perpetrators before the trail went cold.

Had the commissioner have existed in the 1970s, the trial of the Guildford Four - wrongly convicted and imprisoned for a number of years after being sentenced to life for bombing attacks they did not carry out - may well have had a very different outcome. When an innocent person is convicted of a crime they did not commit, the investigation into that crime ends which allows the real perpetrator to remain free. The police are, unfortunately, not infallible and in some cases may be too keen to be seen to be achieving results which can lead to wrongful convictions - the new commissioner will decrease the likelihood of innocent people ending up in jail and increase the likelihood of guilty people facing prosecution.

House of Commons ministers have argued that one commissioner will be insufficient to cover the entire country and that the plan will cost far more than Lord Lloyd claims. How much is too much to ensure innocent people remain at liberty and terrorists, who seek to or may even successfully kill large numbers of men, women and children, are removed from society and given the long sentences they deserve?

Nice work if you can get it...

Jim Hood (pictured right, in an image that rather reminds us of Godzilla attacking Tokyo), the Labour MP for Lanark and Hamilton East, has another job outside the Commons of which many of us would be envious - because it pays him money even when he doesn't do any work.

Mr. Hood receives a £7500 per annum retainer from Scottish Coal to act as its Parliamentary Advisor, which is paid to him in monthly installments. Under new rules, MPs must declare all money earned from second jobs, rather than just in £5000 increments as was previously the case. The MP's latest declaration reveals that he worked "nil hours" for one installment.

That's £625 for doing bugger all. Not a massive amount of money, all things considered, but like we say - nice work if you can get it.

Malloch-Brown attacks PM

Lord Malloch-Brown, the Home Office minister who announced his decision to step down from the Government earlier this week, has delivered a stinging attack on Gordon Brown despite having been considered one of the Prime Minister's closest Parliamentary allies.


The minister's career in UK politics was short and marked by controversy. Enobled and brought into the Government as part of the PM's "government of all talents," he caused a rift between No.10 and George Bush's White House administration almost as soon as he joined the Home Office. He is widely credited as being largely responsible for the success of the G20 Summit held in London earlier this year, an event which had a massive beneficial effect on Mr. Brown's reputation as a world leader and his resignation is seen by many as another blow to the PM's already precarious position as leader of the Labour party.

Malloch-Brown says that Latin American and South-East Asian countries - nations known for corruption, unrest and revolution - exhibit better "strategic thinking" than Mr. Brown's Government and that British politics are "disappointingly shortsighted." He is also said to have become angry when it was first announced that the enquiry held into the Iraq war - a conflict that he opposed - would be held in secret, a decision that was later reversed in an embarrassing U-turn for the Government.

According to colleages, "Mark [Malloch-Brown] had never worked in Whitehall before, and it is fair to say he was shocked at how everything was cobbled together at the last minute and no one took the time to plan ahead. It was not uniquely a problem with Brown, but a feature of the British political culture." He had previously put his decision to quit down to what he called "personal and family reasons," but his recent statements seem to suggest that he has always had severe misgivings about Gordon Brown, his abilities as Prime Minister and his style of politics - which is likely to be seen by the electorate as confirming their own, similar, views.

Jacqui Smith knew of husband's porn viewing habits

Former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, who stepped down from the Government earlier this year, has admitted that she knew her husband watched pornographic films before the scandal that arose after the press discovered that she had put in an expenses claim for two examples he watched on pay-per-view television.

Now, we're not going to go into a discussion over whether or not porn is OK - there are several convincing arguments both in favour and against from writers of both sexes, a fair percentage of whom would describe themselves as feminists.

Jacqui Smith is the former Home Secretary. Is she a former feminist too? Recent comments and actions seem to suggest so.
Copyright-free image from Wikipedia.

What interests us is that when asked by the Guardian if she had ever watched porn with him, Ms. Smith replied: "No, no, no. In fact, I would argue with him. I would say to him I think porn is wrong because of my feminist background."

Is this the same Jacqui Smith who, when she was asked in an interview with Elle magazine if women "should be worried about we drink?" replied: "We know that the excessive consumption of alcohol by young people can cause real harm to their health, but we also need to consider the impact it has on women's personal safety - one in three rapes occur after the victim has been drinking." That sounds rather as though she feels that rape victims are at least partly to blame for their rape - excessive drinking is, as we all know, bad for us but any woman who chooses to get drunk has the right to do so without fear of rape. Drinking is not the cause of rape in any way at all.

Elle was also interviewing author Anna Blundy, who was asked whether she thought that concerns over women drinking were disguised misogyny. "I think there is a horrible misogyny," she said. "In general, it is not women committing crimes when they are drunk - they're more likely to have crims committed against them." Ms. Blundy is quite rightly saying that rapes carried out on drunk women are not the victim's fault, but of the attacker and the society which creates people who feel they are entitled to exert their physical dominance over others. Ms. Smith scores: 0 Feminist Points.

Where would you feel safest at work: in this dark street...
Image by Thomas Claveirole, used in accordance with Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 license.

With her Policing and Crime Bill, Ms. Smith sought to transfer legal blame from prostitutes onto their clients, especially in those cases which involve what the report terms "a prostitute controlled for gain," presumably with the aim of enabling prostitutes to report crime carried out against them to the police without fear of being prosecuted themselves. However, while prostitution remains an illegal activity this is likely to drive it further underground where it will be even further from police scrutiny as the pimps and the johns try harder to escape attention for fear of harsher penalties. There are already thousands of prostitutes in this country - some of them brought here from other nations - who are kept as sex-slaves, never allowed to leave the brothel within which they are imprisoned so that they cannot seek help. The crimes and suffering that these unfortunate human beings must regularly be forced to endure do not bear thinking about. The only way to make prostitution safer for the women and men who sell sex is to stop pretending we can make it go away, stop pretending it doesn't exist and for the trade to be legalised and licensed. If prostitutes worked in licensed brothels, where they would be subject to regular health checks and protected by law and security, the numbers who suffer beatings, murder and disease would be all but wiped out. Ms. Smith's law, though well-intentioned, will only increase suffering and so she scores: 0 Feminist Points.

...or in this clean, licensed, legal brothel where you are protected by both law and large security guards?

The bill also seeks to tighten up legislation on pole-dancing and strip clubs, which have noticeably increased in the last few years (many of the so-called burlesque events, which seem to have become considered almost family entertainment recently, are burlesque in name alone and in actuality little more than strip joints), making it harder for establishments of these types to be created. We can fully understand Ms. Smith's point here - they are thoroughly unpleasant, seedy little places and most of us would far prefer it if they didn't exist. But enough people want them, and so they do. You may be the sort of person who wouldn't dream of walking into such a place or you may be a regular, but either way it is obvious that they are by far the least harmful aspect of the sex trade. The people who work in them are not forced to do so and can leave at any time. To keep hold of their licenses, the proprietors must ensure that all of their performers and customers are over the age of 18. Few people want to be strippers but for those that are the job is an easy, if unpleasant, way to make money which can be abandoned whenever they want or as soon as they've made however much money they need. What happens if we criminalise strip clubs? Precisely the same as happens with criminalised prostitution and drugs or the prohibition of alcohol - it goes underground, where it is run by shady characters far more interested in lining their own pockets than the welfare of their employees. Of course, we are not suggesting that all owners of legal clubs are philanthropic altruists (we rather doubt that any are, in fact), but at least while their activities are out in the open air where we can see what they're getting up to the police and health services can keep check on them. Ms. Smith scores: 0 Feminist Points.

So all in all, we very much doubt that Jacqui Smith can reasonably call herself a feminist at all. While we have no doubt that she is not an Acid Rabbi reader and as such will not defend her statement here, we hope that this post will inspire comments from those that do read it - especially women - and would particularly like to hear feminist support for her and her bill.

With thanks to Feminist Bite which picked up on the Elle interview and published an article on it. It's a fascinating site full of intelligent opinions and arguments that is well worth a click.