A new wordpress theme you say? Yes indeed. Lots still to do, including the blogroll which I will be reconstructing as and when; please don’t think I’ve missed you out. You’ll reappear as if by magic some time soon. My wordpress installation has also been upgraded to the latest spanking new v2.8 release so I’m looking forward to getting my teeth stuck in to what it has to offer.
Toodle pip.
The long decline of New Labour’s ID card scheme continues:
As a result of Mr Johnson’s announcement, foreign nationals living and working in the UK will be the only group of people who will have to have the cards, with 50,000 already having been issued.
So we can, thankfully, look forward to not having to jeopardize our good characters by refusing to carry the damn things. This is a good thing, though New Labour’s foot soldiers of tyranny will no doubt disagree.
For a long, long time we have been pounded with all the terribly important reasons why compulsory ID cards are an absolute necessity. ID cards promised, we were promised, to tackle fraud, terrorism, crime, illegal immigration, fly tipping, power shortages, bad movies and hiccups. They were essential; the very foundation of our fight against everything. Now only conscientious terrorists will feel compelled to carry them.
I laugh to myself a little. A full throated guffaw prevented only by the monumental waste of money.
This from David Cameron on devolution must be tongue in cheek surely:
“But I think where we went wrong was we should have spent more time in government thinking, how do we give legitimate help to those people within our United Kingdom who want to have a greater expression of self-government?”
I mean, there’s no shortage of people within our United Kingdom who want to have a greater expression of self-government. Just so happens that a lot of this desire comes from people in England who are only asking for a measure of equality with the other nations.
But hey, why take your fingers out of your ears for us?
The news that a Tory MP was beaten when he confronted youths who were playing football in the street is distressing and an example of the measure of respect that many children and young adults have of strangers and their elders.
My hat goes off to Tobias Ellwood, Tory MP for Bournemouth East and he has my respect and admiration for making a stand for us all. It’s never an easy situation to be in as I found out recently and Mr Ellwood does seem to have come off rather badly which is not particularly surprising when one considers that the odds were stacked so heavily against him, as they usually are with us all.
Some police services do offer advice on how to deal with such confrontations. Take this for instance:
One of the most effective self defence techniques is screaming effectively. An effective scream involves making a loud, guttural roar, generated from the depths of your diaphragm. The scream should be aggressive and ‘roar-like’ indicating your anger at the attacker, rather than a high-pitched squeal of fear. An effective scream has the potential to achieve a number of results.Firstly, an effective scream turns fear of being attacked into anger, and in so doing produces an adrenaline rush. This will provide the defender with an instant energy and power burst. The adrenaline rush will allow the defender to move faster, think quicker and multiply their strength, in order to deal with the attack.
My emphasis.
I don’t know about you but I am not entirely convinced of the real world merits of the screaminig approach as an effective means of self defence. I mean, how loud must one scream to offset the advantages that a group of thugs are afforded by sheer weight of numbers?
Also, increasing the level of anger felt must surely diminish the level of self control. I wonder how well a magistrate would look upon an upright member of the public who is being accused of using excessive force as a result of a carefully crafted guttural roar.
“I screamed your honour. Guttural it was and I was filled with uncontrollable amounts of instant energy and a strong power burst came over me. I moved like lightening and, unfortunately, multiplied my strength so much that the poor blighter was on the floor before my ultra-fast thinking processes could reign in my super hero like ninja barrage.”
I’ve not really said anything about the mauling that MPs have been subjected to in recent times. Though I have rejoiced at their discomfort on a number of occasions (some under the influence) I’ve not really much to add that’s of any value and that hasn’t been said a thousand times by Scorched Earth bloggers over many years.
Fact is … they’ve been caught out … but we knew it was going on anyway. There’s no “How very dare they”. No “would you believe it”, and no “this is an outrage”. There’s just an opportunity to mumble, well, “we told you so” to nobody in particular.
Reclaim the flag. Remember that notion? The idea that the Cross of St George was, in a manner of speaking, stolen from the rest of us by a few thugs and louts. We’ve worked hard on that reclamation, and flags are not the only things we’ve worked hard on and need to continue to work on. For instance there are still those who consider the people of England to be inherently racist. Every now and again, I am subjected to an email full of vitriol explaining to me why I’m a racist with no justification or explanation other than the fact that I have the word England in my blog title. The level of immigration into England should be a big hint to people about how welcoming we actually are but hey, why let facts and figures stand in the way of a good bit of hate.
Of course there are always those that make it just that little bit harder for us. They strive to represent us and then tell ‘jokes’ that are anything but representative. They use tragedy to make political points where no point exists. They consider their own view of what’s good for England to be the only valid view.
So here we are. Blogging every now and again about England’s raw deal, taking the stick and the abuse, while others around us behave like stars in a sitcom.
Well, that was exciting. I just got caught up in a vandalism incident which culminated in me and two rozzers trying to chase down two yobs. The police were excellent, with about a 6 second delay between me reaching the open station gate, opening my mouth and the chase ensuing.
It’s the first day of a new UK. An awakening spreads throughout the shires of England. Britain is revealed as the administrative concept that it is, a concept that smothers one nation while fanning the breeze of devolution over others. The idea of England as a real country, an idea taken for granted by millions since they first drew breath, is suddenly seen by those very people as ephemeral. Spread thin. In peril.
It takes hold.
At first the corridors of Whitehall are dismissive. Then they are aggressive. Then they turn to denial. In a decade and a half they are shown the door. A door made from English oak.
You were one of the first. You were ignored, then you were laughed at, then you were branded a racist. Yet you have always known that it’s the very tolerance that you have shown, the openness, the acceptance of others that has been one of the pillars of your England. Your once quiet, once sleeping England.
How things have changed.
You are now the minister for English Civic Reconstruction. It’s the most important brief in the new cabinet … and the question on everyone’s lips is “What would you build first?”
Kevin writes to the bunker about his on-going novel which he is blogging over at www.shipburialnovel.com.:
It is a leap of faith from Anglo Saxon Kent to cyberspace but here I am! This poet has had many lives but I want to tell you about a particular life. One where I found myself on a royal diplomatic mission to the kingdom of the East Angles among men both witty and barbarous. How long ago was that? At least 1400 years. So we are in Kent, we are in Anglia around 600AD…….
Take a look why don’t you?
We’re very excited over here in The England Project bunker. Excited and a little concerned that all the excitement just confirms our fanboy status when it comes to all things War of the Worlds. More explicitly, all things related to Jeff Wayne’s musical version. We have posters, most of the recordings, the DVD of the live stage performance and an original piece of art in the paint on canvas genre.
We are, as you might say, very sad indeed.
All our excitement relates to the following:
The peeps over at Concert Live are scheming to professionally record the live performance and release it as a 3CD set. Oh yes. And they are taking pre-orders over here. ULLA and all that.
Well, happy St. George’s day everyone. For my part celebrations are to be held belatedly on Sunday afternoon at a house just up the road. Traditionally lots of beer and wine will be drunk and, come to think of it, so will I.
Councils should not use surveillance powers for minor offences such as allowing dogs to foul pavements, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has said.
Yes, we know but you allowed it to happen. The political blogosphere was quick to point out that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act would be abused but hey, what do we know?
Another New Labour suggestion:
Communities should use more empty shops as neighbourhood resources to help prevent town centres becoming magnets for crime, the government is to say.
Actually, how about reducing business taxation and increasing in-town parking facilities?
One has to assume that this article is intended as a joke:
While that help seems to be forthcoming in Scotland and Wales, insurers based in England have been laying staff off. Perhaps the focus on London by English Parliament has blinkered them to the rest of the nation’s plight?
Either that or it was written by someone that has no idea how the Government of the UK is structured.
Brian Micklethwait writes from the heart about Guido and the recent trouble that New Labour has caused for itself. The section in Brian’s article that I’d like to repeat here cuts to the bone of why I’ve a keen interest in what Guido gets up to:
He believes in a world as little deranged by scumbag politicians as he or anyone else can possibly contrive. He does his “they’re all at it” stuff for a reason beyond the reason of it being fun to wipe the smirk off these people’s faces. He does it because the meta-message, the meta-context, as our own Dear Leader would put it, is that these people should not be running our lives. Look at them. Is this the world you want, the world you get when these people, all of these people, whatever label they stick on themselves, are deciding everything. You want the government to regulate everything? So, you want Derek bloody Draper telling you how to run your life, do you? Do you? Because that is what you are saying. Some lady cabinet minister recently said (again sorry about the missing link) that Guido is a “nihilist”. Wrong, wrong, wrong. This is all part of how these people, in his words, “don’t get it”. Just because Guido doesn’t believe in what they believe in, which is them being in charge of everything, that doesn’t mean he believes in nothing else beyond stopping them being in charge of everything. Guido is not just hacking away at the world as it is. He wants a massively better one in place of the world we have now
Brian gets it. I get it and there are a whole heap of bloggers out there that get it too. Left wing, centre, right wing, independent … the point is it’s not about where you stand on the political spectrum, it’s about where you stand on a personal one. How do you want to lead your life? Do you need an instruction manual passed down from people who have dedicated their lives to a particular political point of view? Are you on board with the team, whatever team that might be or do you look entirely to yourself to make the choices on what is right and what is not?
For me it was an easy decision to jump off my particular ship. It was the day that the Tories declared their support for ID cards in principle. Like a pet dog biting its owner’s hand for the first time … from that point there’s no going back. I was accused of being a Scorched Earther then and that particular accusation is one I am entirely comfortable with.
It makes me chuckle when the MSM says things like “Guido, the right wing blogger”. They miss the point entirely. The point is there is no wing.
The Government tries, bless it, to be serious about data protection. With the roll out of each new Government database they assure us that security is their primary concern. Our data is safe with them. Only those that need to know will have access. We have nothing whatsoever to worry about. And yet they can’t get the simplest things right.
The news that a stolen blackberry device containing sensitive contact information belongs to an ex-council chief comes as no great surprise. People lose things. They have devices such as this stolen every day. It’s human nature and inevitable. So where is the Government policy that bans officials from carrying around unencrypted data on portable devices? Certainly I am not aware of one and if one does exist where is the enforcement?
I find it very hard to believe that there was any kind of security measure in place on the device itself. Even the use of a simple unlock code seems to have been ignored. How can we be expected to take seriously the soothing noises about our personal and private data when government officials can’t seem to come up with a coherent plan for their own sensitive data.
They really don’t get it do they?
In his resignation letter, he [McBride] said he was “sickened” that Mr Staines had put the e-mails in the public domain and that he regretted embarrassing the government.
Interesting. A public servant, paid by the public, on official bublic business, during a working day that we pay for, on a subject that has nothing to do with national security and he’s sickened that information on his working day was released to his paymasters.
About this time each year, Hazel Blears comes out in support of St. George’s Day and gets herself a little patriotic showing in the papers. For instance, the Daily Mail this year, The Sun last year. Then nothing until a similar time next year.
Blears is the Community Secretary and she knows very well that it’s simply not good enough to come out in support of a yearly event once a year if the idea is to encourage participation and to discourage the imposition of barriers to the event. It requires continuity, campaigning and for a person that moves in her circles, a few words in the right ears.
I don’t for one minute believe that there is any real sincerity behind her yearly statements in support of St George’s day. She certainly isn’t interested in making it a bank holiday.
Via Iain Dale comes a quote from Guido that simply warms my heart:
“Not a penny is changing hands. This is for pleasure, not profit.”
The quote, taken by Iain over the phone comes riding the crest of the wave of this building story; a story that has us over here in The England Project bunker as excited as a career politician watching his muse prancing semi-naked around his Westminster office.
It’s been fascinating watching Guido rise from a blogger taken seriously by other bloggers to a blogger taken seriously by the political establishment and old school media. I wonder, at what point, will Guido become simply unbearable to the denizens of Westminster and their media allies?
From the Front Rank to the Solent,
From the Solent to the Samizdat,
Then Across the Atlantic to Lileks,
And back again for The England Project.
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