Jacqui Smith

Wise, in prison

Two names, Tony Blair and Stephen Byers, are both in the news now. However, the glare of the spotlight is brightest on Byers. The Times has a story about Byers with a video clip showing Byers doing what Tom Wise did, remember him? Wise was the UKIP MEP who boasted to a journalist about his income and way of working the system. Eventually reality caught up with Wise and he went to prison, he's there now. If he is allowed newspapers no doubt there will be a booming laugh echoing around the building as he reads the detail. I've met both Byers and Wise. The latter a big booming bully ex-policeman, the former a small apparatchik prone, like his mentor Blair, to near permanent rictus smile. And of course for Blair that's the problem, Byers is like a stick of rock, he has the word 'Blairite' running all the way through his soul.

There goes our liberty
The rightly respected Henry Porter has set out his thoughts on why in terms of civil liberties we've never had it so bad, see HERE. It was Harold Macmillan who used the phrase “you've never had it so good” in 1957. At that time the UK was still recovering from the effects of WW2. Many people had suffered in the depression of the pre-war years and by the mid-1950s were desperate for a better life. Now 50 years later it is formally recognised that the good years, fought for and worked towards by so many ordinary people, have been replaced with a sustained period of decline of liberty.

You' re wonderful
The sad case of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith's husband working as her praise singer should now be judged against another case of a similar nature.That report of Home Secretary Smith's husband was put into this post to show off how fiddling is the rule rather than the exception in Nulabour. Smith's husband did it to help his wife and she did some fiddling with the statistics related to the Home Office's statement on knife crime.

From an article in the Independent we see that writing in to your local newspaper to talk up oneself and Nulabour is not as rare as it should be. Bournemouth man and Councillor Ben Grower did a bit of praise singing to help himself. The whole affair raises more questions than appear to be answered. Like many of his type, this includes Gordon Brown, Grower cannot admit to mistakes because he cannot see them.

Fibber and friend

Like milestones on a journey the route taken by Nulabour's descent is fixed by certain events and remarks along the way. For example we have Gordon Brown's comment of 'saving the world'. A simple gaffe some say, 'anyone might have said that', really? But the problem here is that our Prime Minister said it and in public; had 'the man in the pub' made such a remark the whole bar would have collapsed laughing with the man himself joining in. But our PM and Nulabour are made of different stuff, there is something sinister, unpleasant and flawed about them. In the Guardian today the Editorial has the title, Who's counting? In this the charge is made that Nulabour cooked the books on knife crime.

Jaqui's print

Jacqui Smith says public demand means people will be able to pre-register for an ID card within the next few months.The cards will be available for all from 2012 but she said:
"I regularly have people coming up to me and saying they don't want to wait that long."

Phil Booth, national coordinator of the NO2ID campaign, said Jacqui Smith's claim that people were saying they wanted an ID card "beggared belief" and would "come back to haunt her".