They Cannot Send All Of Us To The Gulag

"So, where ARE your papers?"
Soon, if we bury our heads
in the sand,
scenes like this will
come to a town near you

There are some of you out there who have not yet or affect not yet to have heard the crunch of Jackboot Jacqui's footsteps on the gravel drive outside. Time, one might think, for a visit to the Doctor to have the ears syringed, a record of which will swiftly wing its way to every civil servant, police officer, social worker and local government officer in the land.

There is a modest bit of good news in the struggle of Freeborn Britons against the oppression of the State today, to which we shall come in due course. But, one suspects, this will simply prove to be a case of 'reculer pour mieux sauter' as Labour strives ever harder, day by day, to install our very own homegrown 'Blockwärter' society.

'Blockwärters' were, you will recall, members of the Nazi Party who were selected for every block, every street and every quarter of every city town or village to receive denunciations of anti-state activity or other infractions deemed injurious to the Party or State.

Latest ominous signs that this is what Labour has in mind for us comes from Liberty who report one effect of the Immigration and Citizenship Bill:

Powers to examine identity documents, previously thought to apply only in UK ports of entry, will be extended through hidden clauses in the bill to criminalize anyone in Britain who has ever left the country and fails to produce identity papers upon demand.

Thus, by the time they have done with it, pretty well any Jobsworth with a mind to will be able to demand of you that you prove your right to walk the streets of England and if you cannot (or, as they may find will be often the case, have a mind to refuse such an impertinence), you will be banged up and given a criminal record.

What a truly appalling state of affairs that, without any reasonable basis so to do, an Apparatchik of the State will thus be given a power that is malodorously redolent of a Tin Pot One Party Banana Republic. It has been the hallmark of being British that we have (save during the obvious necessity of world war) been able to go about our business without having to produce at the whim of authority our right so to do. It is, for many of us (but obviously not for members of the Labour Government and many of their supporters) something which defines our Britishness.

Thus does our proto-tyrant of a Prime Minister make a mockery of his own claim to value 'Britishness'. His idea of 'Britishness' is one which comes shod with jackboots and armed with a whip to dragoon us all into line.

Well, for all that he pretends to be a student of history, one suspects he missed out on the bits about how we the people won our freedom from the mighty oppressiive power of the State. Thus he may well have miscalculated our power and willingness to refuse to comply with his tyranny. Let us therefore commit ourselves now to fill his gulag with dissenters who do not want to kowtow to his vision of Britishness. He cannot send us all to prison, after all.

Next comes this report in the Independent which reminds us of how Brown wants to treat us much as you would treat cattle. That is he wants to tag us at birth and collect every intimate detail of our existence to be shared about assorted Apparatchiks so that they can check that we are not offending against his Diktat in any way and if we are can quickly be put up before the Beaks:

Personal information detailing intimate aspects of the lives of every British citizen is to be handed over to government agencies under sweeping new powers. The measure, which will give ministers the right to allow all public bodies to exchange sensitive data with each other, is expected to be rushed through Parliament in a Bill to be published tomorrow.

The new legislation would deny MPs a full vote on such data-sharing. Instead, ministers could authorise the swapping of information between councils, the police, NHS trusts, the Inland Revenue, education authorities, the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority, the Department for Work and Pensions and other ministries.

It may well rush through the Commons, of course, wherein the Labour Backbenches are filled (though not entirely) with lickspittles and toadies who would like nothing more than to have the power to let any official look at our medical records, financial records or whatever. They may, however, have rather more of a problem getting this Orwellian prospect through the House of Lords which, for all its imperfections, is still something of a repository of resistance.

A modest victory in the struggle to roll back the overweening ambitions of Jackboots Jacqui and her desire to have us all microchipped, tagged and databased comes with the finding that the keeping of DNA samples of wholly innocent individuals (and, a fortiori, their fingerprints too) is a breach, on two grounds, of the human rights of our citizens.

Some, who cannot see the wood for the trees, will opine that this will inhibit the solving of crimes. Yet it is a matter of some conjecture how many of the 850,000 people innocent of any crime whose DNA is unlawfully stored on the Database have, as a result, been fingered for a crime of any sort, let alone a serious one. I have not the citation for it but i do recall reading somewhere that the number of people from that group who have been caught for anything let alone a seriosu crime is statistically insignificant, so it is at best a very serious case of overkill.

In any event it is now unlawful to keep such samples and those thus affected may now have an action for damges for the brech of human rights thus caused. That, however, seems not to have occurred to Jackboots Jacqui who seems bent on perpetuating the unlawfulness of the database:

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said: "DNA and fingerprinting is vital to the fight against crime, providing the police with more than 3,500 matches a month, and I am disappointed by the European Court of Human Rights' decision.

"The Government mounted a robust defence before the Court and I strongly believe DNA and fingerprints play an invaluable role in fighting crime and bringing people to justice.

"The existing law will remain in place while we carefully consider the judgement."

There being no higher court than the European Court of Human Rights to which HMG might now appeal, the database is illegal as far as those unconvicted of crime are concerned and by keeping the DNA of those innocent people on it she is in flagrant and grave breach of the law.

That should come as no surprise from this second-rate functionary whose reaction to having evidence of her department's utter incompetence leaked to MPs was to set the Secret Police on the unfortunate individual who had had the temerity to broadcast her incompetence to the world.

Let us keep our fingers crossed and hope that the tide that is swirling about the buckled patent leather pumps of Mr. Speaker sweeps him and her away down the Thames like so much noxious mephitic effluent.

COMMENT THREAD

Unelected Peer Attacks MPs For Doing Their Job

The last person from whom we
need pontification about law-breaking
is unconvicted mortgage
fraudster Peter Mandelson

The MSM seem to think Lord Mandelson's intervention into the Damien Green affair over the airwaves this morning to be something of a masterstroke. That, one is inclined to think, is more of an indication of their fawning ways than of reality. Another view might be that it was, by way of change, a spectacular Mandelson misjudgement.

In reality it was a salutary reminder that Mandelson was, along with fellow Triumvirs Blair and Campbell (surely the most interesting Propaganda Chief since April 1945), at the heart of the debauching of truth and openness in government in the heyday of the Blair years.

Some may think his calculated intervention was, for once, singularly ill-advised:

Lord Mandelson told Sky News: "I understand the anger expressed by some MPs because it touches on what they see as their rights and privileges.

"I also have to say I think that for many Conservative it is a self-serving smokescreen, behind which to hide their own apparent collusion with a Home Office official who was allegedly systematically leaking Home Office papers to the Conservative Party, in order to pursue his own personal political ambition."

The Business Secretary added: "I would like to know from the Conservatives whether their frontbench and their leader knowingly colluded with that civil servant in riding a coach and horses not only through the Civil Service code but also through the law."

In the first instance he has chosen to launch his attack on Cameron and the Conservative opposition who are, of course, elected representatives of the people. Mandelson, on the other hand, has been elected by no one at all and is simply a Labour placeman planted in the Upper House to help Brown save his skin. He thus has very little democratic standing in this matter when compared to MPs.

Secondly his excoriation of the Tories might just as well be applied to Gordon Brown and any number of other Labour Ministers (and, who knows, someone may yet today dig up an instance of the nation's best known mortgage fraudster revelling in some leak or another in days gone past) who used leaks about Tory policy as so much grist to the mill.

Thirdly, as the chances of a prosecution being commenced, let alone succeeding, are almost zero, he is almost certainly going to end up on the losing side in this row. Not a battlefield that a wise man would elect to fight, some might think.

We also heard from Sir Paul Stephenson, acntingt Metropolitan Police Commissioner, who sought to deflect criticism of The Plod by claiming that the reason for the use of Counter Terrorism Branch was explained by the fact that this Branch subsumed the Special Branch a while back which explains the appropriateness of the deployment.

Older ones amongst you will recall that the Special Branch was established in the 19th. Century as 'The Special Irish Branch' to counter Fenian terrorism in Ireland (some evils are ever with us) and in between times was deployed against enemies of the State (genuine ones, that is) such as spies, terrorists and other assorted persons who operated against the interests of the nation.

Sir Paul's explanantion simply, therefore, does nothing to exculpate himself and others in the Met who have made a drastic error by, at once, conflating Damian Green (whose only crime has been to help embarrass the Government) with the likes of George Blake, Kim Philby, the IRA and assorted Islamic Terrorists and, by the pernicious use of the word 'grooming', with paedophiles.

The offence that these comparisons gives is entirely understandable and reflects very badly on Stephenson and all those whose flawed judgement has embroiled them in this particular piece of State-sponsored intimidation.

Meanwhile, if this ill-judged investigation is to continue, perhaps a formal complaint should be made to the Counter Terrorist Branch about the activities of one Gordon Brown betwen 1981 and 1997, there being no statute of limitations in this country. He could then become the second Labour PM in a row to help Mr. Plod with his enquiries, this time as to whether he "knowingly colluded with [a] civil servant in riding a coach and horses not only through the Civil Service code but also through the law".

On the subject of Mandelson we have this report on Coffee House of Dominic Grieve's view of the Noble Lord:

"This morning, Lord Mandelson has been banging on about national security. We don't believe there is any national security angle to it at all.

This is fantasy land, being spun by Peter Mandelson. This is what worries me so much. The political element keeps on creeping back in.

I don't trust Peter Mandelson. I don't think he should be in political office, I don't think he's fit for it."

I rather take it that Grieve is less than impressed with Mandelson. He is not, I think, alone.

Meanwhile we have had Mr. Speaker's explanation of how he and his staff managed to allow an MPs office to be turned over by the Police.

It is always unedifying to see someone in a position of responsibility and authority desperately shovelling dirt over subordinates and was no less so on this occasion. It may well be that others failed in their duty, but the overwhelming sense one gains from his pathetic explanation was that, instead of galvanising himself to ensure that the proper form was followed and the ability of Damian Green to serve his constituents was protected, he allowed the cock to crow thrice whilst sitting firmly on his hands.

I though, too, that he sounded like a broken man for whom this has all been too much. He is plainly well past his sell-by date and for most people who want a robust, impartial Speaker for the Commons (whether of humble or of aristocratic origins or mien), the next election and a chance to eject this failure from office cannot come soon enough.


COMMENT THREAD

EU Moolah for French Banks?

Sarko, living symbol of 'Le Coq Sportif',
plans to rip up EU State Aid rules.
This is not news, merely part
of his job description.

Europe's own Bantam Cock, M. Nicholas Sarkozy, has spoken: "France calls on EU to suspend state aid rules during financial crisis". Thus the Daily Telegraph's headline. But why is this thought to be news? It is surely the most predictable event since the sun rose this morning.

That Sarkozy should want to give French Banks an edge is what he does: he is President of France. What we should worried about, though, is the window of opportunity this would give France to prope up a wide range of French concerns under the guise of staving off depression, a window through which they will surely pour trillions of Euros as hard as they can.

Just as ZANU-Labour has died and been well and truly buried by Brown, so one of the of raisons d'être the EU will be quietly discarded, never to be resurrected, by the EuroNabobery which is more interested in electoral vanity than pursiung genuinely beneficial economic policies.

In time British taxpayer's money will end up being applied to propping up failed Euro Companies, with little complaint from the likes of Brown, Mandelson or David Miliband (who, in case you have forgotten, has both leadership ambitions and a sigularly bad dose of the EuroPox) who will do the usual compliant, complaisant lieing back and not thinking of England when they are asked to cough up to keep some dinosaur of a smokestack industry in an electorally sensitive part of France alive.

COMMENT THREAD

Perverting the Course Of Justice Is An Offence, Harriett

Organising a cover-up of matters
that later become the subject of court
proceedings may amount to perverting
the course of public justice.
Harriett the Harpy as a
QC should remember that.

This Labour Government's assault on Parliamentary Democracy proceeds apace. How astonishing it is that they have managed to attract unfavourable comparisons with (a) Richard Nixon, who was a dab hand at setting the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service on political and media opponents (b) Stalin, who simply liquidated them; and (c) Mugabe, who is a byword for political thuggery.

Now they are trying to ensure that the fix is in. Iain Dale has brought us details of the leaked email which Harriet The Harpy sent out to various co-conspirators. It is this email which the Conservative Party claims, with considerable justification, demonstrates that Government Ministers are being corralled into a cover-up of how Police came to be permitted to ransack the office of a member of the Opposition Front Bench.

Let us start with the Harperson's profferred explanation for this summons. It is said that the requested meeting was merely to discuss matters of procedure arising from the planned making of a statement by discredited Speaker Martin on his part in this affair.

For a number of reasons that explanation simply does not stack up, as seems now to be admitted by the Government who have given Nick Robinson a revised explanation.

Firstly, if that was even remotely true, a discussion about Parliamentary Procedure does not require the presence of The Justice Secretary, The Home Secretary, The Head of the Cabinet Office (and a sidekick of his) and a representative of No 10 Downing Street, none of whom has anything whatsoever to do with the running of the House Of Commons and its procedures.

This is not an agenda to discuss
Parliamentary procedure but
it is one that is a framework
for a cover-up

Secondly, if this meeting was only to do with matters arising from procedure concerning the Speaker's Statement, why does Harriett Harperson's amanuensis set out in extenso an agenda that can only be germane to a discussion of the substance of the Speaker's proposed statement, under the heading 'Parliamentary Privilege: Four Principles'?

The only reasonable inferences be drawn from the presence of that agenda are (a) the parties are to be invited to discuss how to frame the Speaker's storyline so that, as far as possible, it has him striving manfully to uphold those principles & (b) that the initial proffered explanation by Harperson's Office is a straightforward lie.

That latter point is now implicitly conceded by the fact of the reported new explanation recorded by Robinson who sensibly queried why the Head of the Cabinet Office was needed to discuss parliamentary procedure. Now the line is that :

"they just needed to check the lie of the land, that they all understood each other's positions".

Given the mix of invitees and that admission, the only proper conclusion to draw is that Harriett Harperson was specifically trying to co-ordinate a cover-up to save the skins of the likes of Jacqui Smith and the Speaker from the wrath of the Commons when it reconvenes.

In addition she is responsible for lying to us all when her office suggested that the meeting was simply concerned with procedural matters. The phrase 'all understood each other's positions' is but shorthand for 'let's make sure we get our stories straight before the shit hits the fan', i.e. a cover up to you and me. That is fundamentally a different explanation from the one first offered up and thus the latter was a bare-faced lie.

Harperson is, of course, a Barrister. She should have a care lest she be involved further in this disgraceful cover-up so that she does not engage in conduct incompatible with her status as a member of that profession. Since a criminal investigation is involved here she must be most careful to ensure that she is truthful at all times about what has happened and that she does not become embroiled in cobbling up an untrue explanation of events which might later become the subject of evidence under Oath in the Crown Court.

If someone does that, it is called 'doing acts tending and intended to pervert the course of public justice', an offence contrary to the common law, just like 'misconduct in a public office'. Perhaps we may yet see her office being raided by the Counter Terrorism Branch, her dabs and DNA being taken, her house being turned over by Mr. Plod and all that has happened to Mr. Green being visited upon her.

The pleasure that that would give so many in the nation is unquantifiable........

COMMENT THREAD

Emperor Barroso of La-La Land

Mandy: Is he thinking about
life after ZANU-Labour and
where the next Thirty Pieces Of Silver
is coming from?

In the La-La Land occupied by the EuroNabobery and other assorted EuroLuvvies and those with a serious dose of the EuroPox, lives a particularly ludicrous oaf called Emperor Barroso. At the risk of causing this blog to be placed on an EU Blacklist, I shall go further. As well as being an oaf, he is also a fantasist with a deep streak of imperial arrogance. He may also be quite barking mad.

Others have made their observations on his latest pronouncement and I will try not to go over ground already heavily marked by their ammunition boots. But to claim thus:

"people who matter in Britain are currently thinking about"

joining the Euro is surely to be ranked along with the sort of thing a pubescent youth might dream of before he has his first girlfriend.

If there are indeed wacko Labourites out there planning to take us into the Euro, one wonders if they have perhaps arrived recently by Flying Saucer from the planet Zog.

Before this could happen there is the little matter of having a referendum (unless, of course, Gauleiter Brown dictates that such a referendum is unnecessary because it is a different Euro we are joining from the Euro upon which all parties have heretofore promised such a referendum) which, however tricky our situation might be, is unlikely to be won by the Federasts. Labour would be utterly mad to embark on trying to persuade us into the Euro at the moment, though I readily concede they might just be stupid enough to try and distract us all from the shambles they have already created and the wasteland that is to come by doing so.

But it is the sheer arrogance of Our Divine Emperor that takes one's breath away. It is, surely, a sign of just how much of an antidemocrat he and his kind have become that the only people who matter to him in this land are a few discredited politicians of the governing party who are batty enough to think that the Euro is the answer and mad enough to tell someone else of their loss of the old marbles.

Unfortunately for him, and despite the best efforts of our very own antidemocrat, Gordon Brown, there are many millions of people in this country who also matter (they are called, quaintly, 'voters') who are definitely NOT thinking of joining the Euro as they have quite enough to be thinking about with the mess into which the said Brown has dragged us all. And if they do think about the Euro at all, it is but to curse Brown and his troupe of performing chimps for so mismanaging things that it now costs an arm and a leg to go to Europe for momentary relief from the misery they have inflicted upon us.

Brown, who may well be pretty incompetent (and, I suggest, a nasty bit of work to boot), is not, however, entirely stupid and has swiftly ruled this piece of nonsense out. But we should remember that there is at least one person in Government who is a potential viper in the nest: Lord Mandelson, who brings an enormous conflict of interest (his Fatcat EuroNabob Pension) to the heart of Britain decision-making processes. It would be entirely unsurprising if this nasty little crook tried to sell us down the river now that he has a clear idea of how the ZANU-Labour experiment is going to be brought to an end in 2010 and he will be out on his ear looking for a new job. He must be the prime suspect for whoever has been billing and cooing into The Emperor's lugholes about us wanting to join the Euro. Still, Mandelson will comfort himself that inflation has turned thirty pieces of silver into something altogether more agreeable.

COMMENT THREAD

Light in The Darkness

Winner of The Month: David Davis
might permit himself a wintry smile
this week as his position on English
Liberties is spectacularly vindicated.
And, to boot, the battle field is
littered with the bodies of many
enemies, all of whom have inflicted
grievous wounds upon themselves

As the world has unravelled lately a profound depression of the soul has set in, making it impossible at times to articulate the fear that all the hard work of the years 1979 to 1990 was on the point of being pissed down the drain by this truly awful government. But, imperfect though Cameron & Osborne may be, perhaps we have turned a corner.

I have found it very difficult to blog of late. I loathe Socialism with a very considerable passion and the very idea of this particular Vampire which sucks out the lifeblood of our nation rising from the grave wherein we thought it had been consigned by Margaret Thatcher has been simply too awful to contemplate. For a moment it has seemed as if we had returned not to an era of managed decline such as we saw between 1945 and 1979 but to an era of decline actively desired by most of the Labour Party and much of the Left Commentariat. Into the slough of despond one drifted.

Slowly, though, common sense and clarity are focusing people's attention on the real reasons why this country's problems are unique and are not attributable to factors which arose outwith the UK and one begins to have a feeling that Gordon Brown's emulation of Josef Goebbels' theory of the 'Big Lie' has, as people have picked away at the reality of what has happened and what is being done, not succeeded in pulling the wool over the eyes of the electorate.

Some inkling of that has emerged in some polls which point to the likelihood that voters understand only to well who it is who has thrust them into the ordure. Whilst the Conservative party of 2008 leaves a lot to be desired in terms of policy and robustness, it is, surely, a better answer than the wizened lump of putrefaction that is the Brown Government. It may well be that a Cameron government proves to be less than wonderful but it would have to try very hard indeed to plum the depths of incompetence and nastiness exhibited by Labour.

The latest spasm of the Stasi State, the brutal turning over of an opposition MP's office and home in an unsubtle attempt to intimidate the Opposition will have, I believe, a considerable effect on voting intention. Scales will fall swiftly from people's eyes as they contemplate this piece of Jackbootism on the part of Gordon Brown and his henchpersons and they will recoil in distaste and revulsion from conduct which most associate not with the home of Parliamentary Democracy but with the likes of Soviet Russia, Castro's Cuba, Mugabe's Zimbabwe or Hitler's Germany. Thus will this shabby government have destroyed itself and thus it will be recalled in years to come.

One breathes a little more easily.

The greatest winner this week? David Davis whose apparent emulation of Don Quijote tilting at windmills seemed to have trashed his political career and influence has been demonstrated to have been utterly right about the true nature of this government. Who now can deny, unless they are supporters of the Jackboot Tendency of the Left, that he now occupies the moral high ground?

COMMENT THREAD

Nooks & Crannies of The Common Law

Mr. Speaker Lenthall who,
when faced with an overweening
King bent on intimidating
Parliament, told His Majesty,
ever so politely, to take
a running jump. Today's
Speaker is an unworthy
successor to him, but is representative
of the small, second-rate
people at the heart of
this piece of nastiness.

With the widespread publication on the Web of Gordon Brown revelling in his use of leaks back in the 1980s the tiny possibility of a conviction for any offence - let alone one carrying a theoretical life sentence - of anyone in the Green affair has metamorphosed into the absolute certainty that any reckless attempt at prosecution now will be met with derision and contempt.

Anyone listening to the howls of such derision which greeted Geoff BuffHoon's specious, mealy-mouthed casuistry on the issue on Any Questions last Friday could be in no doubt that the public already knows what is going on here well in advance of being told once more and a thousand times more by Leading Counsel for the Defence: that far from being a legitimate and worthy attempt to ensure the Ship of State is well-caulked against potential enemies of our interests, this is a cack-handed attempt by a tired, shrivelled and gimcrack group of individuals (I hesitate to use the word 'government' of the people who hold office at Her Majesty's pleasure as Ministers of The Crown) to intimidate Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition into not holding it to account.

Thus the various individuals involved in this unsavoury matter find themselves in a very deep hole. It behoves them to recall the old aphorism about getting themselves out of a hole, the first step of which requires them to stop digging.

Sadly this does not seem to have occurred to any of the cast list of utter second-raters who have had a hand in this imbroglio. In particular Jacqui Smith, the incompetent,whining ex-comprehensive school teacher who has somehow ended up holding one of the great Offices of State, has skilfully manoeuvred a top-of-the-range JCB into her own personal hole wherein she is digging as hard as she can for the Antipodes.

Of these, more here and elsewhere in due course.

What has caught my eye in this affair is the use of the Common Law offence of 'misconduct in a public office' to be the sledgehammer with which to crack the nut.

There is nothing wrong with Common Law offences. There are several of them, some in daily use up and down the land on a daily basis: perverting the course of public justice comes readily to mind. Most were developed long ago to deal with conduct which all jurisdictions find objectionable. There is no magic nor malice in them.

Since the heyday of botched prosecutions for leaking in the 1980s (though when it really mattered, such as the leaking of defence secrets, Juries were perfectly happy to convict), most acts of leaking have essentially been confined to the realm of civil not criminal law. The reform of the Official Secrets Act 1920 occasioned by the passing of the Official Secrets Act 1989 had, everyone thought, put the dissemination of the merely embarrassing revelations of government incompetence or dishonesty outwith the criminal law and into the realms of breach of contract as between the Civil Service and Civil Servant. Until, that is, someone came up with the bright idea of using 'misconduct in a public office' as a means of intimidating leakers and leakees alike.

I do not believe for one moment that the Counter Terrorist Branch came up with that wheeze. After all it is not an obvious fit with their remit of dealing with mass murder, bombings, plotting, possessing and making explosives and other assorted forms of mayhem as practised by real enemies of the State. It is not an offence which Mr. Plod goes round thinking about on a daily basis in the way he might think of burglary, robbery, rape and murder. No, this is one for the lovers of the more arcane nooks and crannies of the criminal law, those who delight in thumbing old law books rather than having to deal with the real world.

This was an idea that germinated somewhere in the bowels of the Home Office or Cabinet Office as some civil servant with a legal background (there are plenty of these: a few are absolutely first-rate but many are but the dross of the the legal profession who could not hack it in private practice. It is one of the latter I suspect in this instance) thumbed an old copy of a criminal law text book and lighted upon this offence. Upon which the idea was spun out to Mr. Plod who, one strongly suspects, failed to take any or any adequate advice on the chances of a conviction for an offence that is occasionally used (I recall a police officer being potted for it not so long ago after he was found to have been using his Police Car for his bonking hobby) but is really quite esoteric.

'Misconduct in a public office' was held in Bembridge (1783) 3 Doug. 327 to be an offence at Common Law whereby ' a man accepting an office of trust concerning the public is answerable criminally to the King for misbehaviour in his office.....by whomever and in whatever way the officer is appointed' (per Lord Mansfield LCJ). Now one can see that on paper the act of leaking confidential documents might fall within the ambit of this offence. But I do not believe for a nanosecond that any Jury would convict anyone of such an offence for the act of leaking documents which catalogue the government's deceit, dishonesty, disingenuousness and rank incompetence and which were received and used by an MP to expose the government's failings. If you doubt that, then listen to the reaction of the audience on Any Questions to Geoff Hoon (as I noted above). He could hardly get a word in edgeways as the audience howled its contempt and derision for his position. After that, pop down to the bottom of the garden for a chat with the fairies that live there.

Thus I am reasonably certain that the decision to pursue this offence has not been subjected to any sort of proper scrutiny by anyone who actually knows what they are doing. In failing to do so someone in high office has managed potentially to trash the careers of an astonishing number of other people in high places: the Speaker, The Serjeant-at-Arms, The Clerk of the Commons, the head of the counter-terrorism branch, the acting head of the Metropolitan Police, the chief civil servants of the Home Office and the Cabinet Office, The Home Secretary and even the Prime Minister himself.

What this tells me is that those involved in taking the decision to deploy the offence as the means by which to intimidate the opposition have not the slightest judgement whatsoever, as the fall out from the affair amply demonstrates.

The whole incident may well become, in years to come, an apt metaphor for the end of the Blair/Brown years. We have finally arrived at the predictable conclusion of a government which is deeply incompetent, riddled with dishonesty, has all the hallmarks of a tendency towards an antidemocratic impulse to bully the opposition, is paying the price of politicizing the Police and the Civil Service and which, rather than tell the British people the truth, reaches for a whole armoury of deeply unattractive weapons from the Blair-Brown-Mandelson-Campbell school of political gangsterism when it is caught out.

Much has been made of Mr. Speaker Lenthall's confrontation with Charles I during the last few days. Perhaps we might now remind ourselves of the words of one of his contemporaries when faced with a Parliament which had long passed its sell-by date. Thus Oliver Cromwell to the Rump Parliament on 20th. April 1653:

"You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately...Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!"

This was devastatingly deployed by Leo Amery during the vote of no confidence that toppled Chamberlain in May 1940, making the Prime Minister flinch, it is said. A modern Parliamentarian might now brush it off and use it once more to wound deeply the rotting cadaver that is the Brown Administration.

COMMENT THREAD