Jack Straw

Ali Dizaei, guilty
So Ali Dizaei has been found guilty, is this important? Yes it is. Dizaei had reached up to the heights of the Metropolitan Police Force and made them his own territory. He was a relentless self-promoter but found plenty of help on his way from certain sections of the media. He was the darling of the race relations industry. As might be expected the fight back has begun.

The Guardian tells us - Ali Dizaei 'was investigated as though he was an enemy of state'

While the Times says - 'Ali Dizaei - ethnic champion in Metropolitan Police exposed as a bully'

The full Guardian story is HERE, and the Times is HERE. Take your pick.

Over the coming weeks television, radio and newspapers will wade in. Selections will be made from Dizaei's past to promote this or that point. The same will happen when the role of the Metropolitan Police is reviewed. What they did, or perhaps what they did not do, raked over and over again. What will be hard to hide is that the Met spent so much time, so by inference public money, furthering the cause of race relations.

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.