Hattix

In 1642, King Charles I got some soldiers, marched into parliament and attempted to arrest five MPs who were causing him a spot of bother. The outcome was not quite what he was expecting, England plunged into civil war and the King’s head plunged in a different direction to his body. Since then, MPs have been enjoyed a tradition of parlimentary privilege with little to no interference from the police.

That tradition, and our democracy itself, was plunged into doubt in late November 2008 after over 350 years. Metropolitan Police stormed the parlimentary offices of MP Damian Green (Conservative immigration spokesman), seized material, searched his personal homes and his official offices and detained him for nine hours.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith claims that the Home Office had no knowledge in advance of the raid, but former Home Secretary Michael Howard dismissed that claim, saying he would have been astonished if a police investigation into an MP was carried out without his knowledge. Obviously the Home Office instigated the investigation, how can it be that the Home Secretary did not know about it?

If, as his statement says, Gordon Brown nor any ministers were aware in advance and the Met acted “without either ministerial involvement or authorisation” (Home Office statement) then what the hell is going on? Michael Howard’s words speak best here “If nobody knew it tells you something about the way government is working at the present time, and about the relations between ministers and senior civil servants.”

The Liberal Democrats released a statement condemning in no uncertain words the actions and they have a very long history of disagreeing with practically everything the Conservatives have ever said. Nick Clegg, Lib-Dem leader, “This is something you might expect from a tin-pot dictatorship, not in a modern democracy” while David Cameron, Conservative leader said “If they wanted to talk to Damian Green why not pick up the telephone and ask to talk to him.”

It is the duty of the Opposition to keep the Government on its toes and MPs have the right to hold ’sensitive’ information just as doctors do. Indeed, it is the constitutional purpose of the Opposition to do just these. The Government must be held to account for its actions and information of the public interest must be put in the public record, it is the duty of all MPs to do this.

To have Special Branch police burst into the offices of an MP, arrest him and conduct extensive searches is unacceptable. Whoever authorised this needs to be out of a job very quickly and steps taken to ensure it does not - cannot - ever happen again. Perhaps without the civil war this time, though.

Give the government, regardless of what country you are, a power and the government will abuse its intent.

After the global financial crisis took down a few Icelandic banks, the UK government used anti-terror legislation to freeze their assets in the UK which further hastened their demise. They didn’t use an actual “terrorist” part of the law, but the part they used would never have got through commons if it wasn’t piggy backed on a knee-jerk bill. Where’s the connection between financial screw ups and bombs in streets? There isn’t one.

The US recently removed North Korea from “state sponsors of terrorism” because they agreed to a nuclear disarmament deal. Where’s the connection between nuclear disarmament and militia with AK-47s? There isn’t one.

If we give the government a power, they will use it. They do not care why or how. The “spirit” of the law is irrelevant, only its letter. The failure we make is that politicians sell their laws on that spirit, on the “it will save us from the jihadists” and don’t tell us when they use it for entirely different reasons. We didn’t give them these powers to abuse like this, to extort trade concessions.

Ten years ago, smoking-related illnesses cost the NHS (England) £1.7 billion per year on treatment. Today that figure is £2.7 billion. Anti-smoking lobby group Ash sees this as a success of their lobby, claiming at least a £300,000 saving per year as the number of smokers has dropped from 12 million to 9 million.

I’m not so sure. Smoking was in decline anyway, before the measures of the last five or so years (which have not altered the decline rate), public smoking ban or not, the numbers would have been about the same. Let’s take a look at those figures again, though. Adjusting for inflation we see that ten years ago, we spent £2.38 billion (2008 pounds) on smoking-related illnesses and in real terms, the outlay has only increased by £320,000 - Or about the price of ten years of care for two breast cancer (which isn’t smoking related) patients.

Now let’s take a look at demographics, the thing the anti-smoking lobby doesn’t want you to see. That’s right, we have the 1950s and 1960s baby boomers reaching their 50s and 60s, ages where smoking-related illnesses typically take hold. Why’s the figure increasing then? Because the population is getting older - There are more older people! Unless Ash would prefer us leading our senior citizens to the gas chambers, they’re just going to have to live with it.

The anti-smoking lobby and particularly Ash, have been traditionally a very deceptive bunch. They go on about how much the NHS loses a year and how it’d better be spent on other illnesses (appeal to emotion fallacy) but what they don’t say is that in the tax year 2007-2008, HM Treasury recieved £8 billion in tobacco tax of cigarettes alone, discounting things like hand-rolling tobacco, pipe tobacco and the smaller specialist tobaccos such as chewing and snuff which add up to around another billion. Smokers pay for their own treatment through tobacco taxes and, indeed, are perhaps the only group in the UK who cover their NHS expenses near-directly. They also turn the Treasury quite a tidy profit of £5 billion too.

If anti-smoking programmes are successful, that £5 billion hole in Treasury funds will have to come from somewhere else…like perhaps the NHS.

No part of this post should be seen as supportive of tobacco use. Repeated and valid scientific study has shown that there is no harmless lower bound for tobacco use, any regular use at all at any level is significantly harmful to health and in particular directly linked to chronic and fatal cardiac and pulmonary diseases. Indirect use (passive smoking) is another matter entirely, however.

In Britain, suicide is perfectly legal but assisting it is not, it’s prosecutable as murder or manslaughter (but almost always manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, carrying a maximum sentence of fourteen years) and it seems once every few years some terminally ill person gets it in their mind to challenge the law.

The last time this happened in Britain was two years ago and the House of Lords shot down the bill, Christians and Muslims (Lord Ahmed quoted the Koran “Do not kill yourselves. For verily God Almighty has been most merciful to you”) voting it down on faith grounds. You should all know my opinion of faith in politics. Our politicians are there to give their own insights, to apply the law and the principles of the land in a fair, neutral and unbiased manner. What the hell do they think they’re doing quoting whatever religion they think’s best? We want their thoughts, not the words on some dusty old tome written thousands of years ago by some uneducated cultist. I can’t think of a phrase suiting better than sheer professional incompetence. Values change in as much as fifty years (how many segregated washrooms do you see in even somewhere as intolerant as America these days?) imagine what they do in thousands.

Catherine Bennett is the latest (there, I linked to The Guardian, does that make me a spineless liberal puppet yet?) to become the mouthpiece for the assisted suicide movement, but I think she’s firing off base. She wants the right to get help in ending her life when she feels like it, but it’s the nature of that help which disturbs me. She’s not talking about the opinion of qualified medical professionals, but her husband. I can’t support anything like that! It’s just so incredibly open to abuse.

That’s where the line is drawn between “assisted suicide” and “euthanasia”. The first one is basically “murder with permission”, the second has medical grounding and requires medical advice and approval. The second is what we need to clarify, to make it clear that (with the go-ahead of a competent physician) someone incapable of ending their own life can get the help they need to end their suffering. In this we currently treat dogs more humanely than we do our fellow people.

Faith schools. A homogenous environment within which outsiders (the rest of us) are unknown and feared. We naturally fear what we don’t know and a child in a faith school fears those of other faiths or of no faith. They are schools in which science which contradicts whatever ancient book or soggy text has scribbled on it can simply be ignored. They are schools where reality is suspended and pupils are taught a religious fantasy. Your child who worked his balls off to learn real science and real mathematics can lose out on a college or university place to some kid who wrote “my god did it”.

Our Government PAYS FOR this horrendous breach of British and human values.

This must end. Of course these schools will only employ teachers of the “correct faith”. It’s racial segregation applied to the most vulnerable among us, our children. I’ve already covered in this very blog how our government doesn’t give a damned shit about REALLY protecting our children.

No state funding is acceptable for any school with ANY form of discrimination based on whichever ghost in the sky (presumably dodging planes) is biggest. Religious schools are an evil establishment aiming to indoctrinate the most vulnerable. It cannot be allowed to continue in this day and age.

“The prime minister says the economic situation isn’t as bad people think and that Britain is well placed to weather the economic storm, but the Chancellor says we are at a 60-year low.” - George Osborne, Shadow Chancellor.

That’s all you should need to hear about the Conservative Party’s sleight of hand. So the Chancellor says we’re at a 60 year low (in some unstated economic measure - may well be the sales of playing cards for all we know). Does this mean that the economic situation is worse than people think? Does it mean we’re not well placed to weather it? No, it doesn’t.

When the Tories are this openly desperate to try to deflect scrutiny away from themselves, you have to wonder why. It was Descartes who said that a compelling pars destruens must be followed by an equally compelling pars construens, that is a argument against must be followed by an argument for something better. The Tories are full of the destruens but have precious little construens. They have lots of attack against the Government, but nothing of substance to add themselves. Are they willingly trying to make themselves unelectable?

What kind of an idiot votes for someone who so openly engages in deception and trickery? They clearly have no idea about the economic problems the world is undergoing so they try to distract us from the problem. Solutions, Tories. We want solutions, not whining.

The military doctrine during the Cold War and continuing today is MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction. It states that were one side to attack the other, overwhelming and immediate retaliation would result. It was MAD which kept an uneasy peace in the post-WWII years and continues to keep Russia and the US from blowing each other up to this day.

However, the US are tired of keeping the peace and want to achieve something which destroys the concept of MAD: A first strike capability. First strike capacity means that one side is able to launch a strike on the other without fear of crippling retaliation. It makes war all the more likely. The side lacking first strike would feel extremely threatened and the side with first strike would feel they could attack with impunity. The end result is a massive breakdown in stability.

It’s exactly this that the US is seeking to achieve. Under the pretense of defending against missiles from Iran (what missiles?), the US are building missile interception installations in Czech Republic and Poland. Which, I may remind the reader, are nowhere near Iran (nor on a ballistic flightpath from Iran to the US, should Iran ever have that capability) but very much near Russia.

For their part, the Russians are very annoyed and correctly state that the goal is to undermine the global balance of power and global stability. Of course, claims like this need some justification, so let’s give it.

The US counts among its enemies Iran, North Korea and a few others. Iran have missiles with a rough 1,000km range, not enough to even threaten Turkey, let alone Poland. North Korea’s missiles have a greater range but still only regional. They could threaten South Korea and Japan, but that’s about it. North Korea are also entirely in the wrong hemisphere. Iran’s threat is very real, Israel and the US have been trash talking them for the last five years. However, Iran lacks ballistic missiles and the expertise to produce them. The only power in the vicinity with the expertise, the resources and the hardware to warrant anti-missile defences is Russia.

I’m no fan of Moscow, but I find it very hard to disagree with the Russian president when he says “The deployment of new anti-missile forces in Europe has the Russian federation as its aim”

Following the tragic deaths of Catherine and Ben Mullany on the island of Antigua, Antigua has had itself in quite a hard place. The island is reliant on tourism for it’s entire economy and it has to protect its reputation.

Instead, the idiots want to destroy it. While Antigua already has capital punishment for murder, new legislation is to permit it for any crime involving a weapon which lead to death or serious injury.

Great work, geniuses! Are you not aware that most of your trade comes from Europe which has very negative views on capital punishment, indeed outlawing it in the European Union? The very first time a European is burgled there and defends himself using whatever he can find, perhaps killing the burglar, the media will be all over it like a dog on a steak. “Burgled Briton in Antigua faces possible death sentence” - Is that the kind of headline that’ll help your tourism industry?

All they’ve done is confirm that they’re a backwards hell hole that isn’t safe.

I wonder if “Well there’s really nothing we can do, it’s already illegal” is even within a politician’s vocabulary?