You know, I can sum up my thoughts regarding Jacqui Smith quite succinctly. In bullet points, even!
Political lightweight.
Promoted to a job that is quite obviously beyond her.
Already feeling the knives in her back.
Destined to rise no further.
Working the system shamelessly. (I’m being generous here.)
Possibly a pawn, probably ignorant of the fact.
As damaging to this country as the rest of her buddies.
Time for her to go, along with Brown and that weird bottom lip of his (his wife really should tell him to stop breathing it in like that — it’s annoying.) My feeling is, however, that Jacqui’s political demise will come a lot sooner than Brown’s. I give her a couple of months at the most.
A few weeks ago, I was watching the above video on YouTube (I was researching conspiracy theories for The Yesterday Tree at the time — that’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it 😉 ) in which Noam Chomsky points out, quite correctly, in my opinion, that every authoritarian government (i.e. every government — it’s a matter of degree… of what they are allowed to get away with) benefits from incidents such as the 911 attacks in that it allows them to rein in their populace more effectively (“effectively”, that is, from their point of view.) This is not to say, of course, that the Bush administration planned and implemented the attacks as some (idiots) would have us believe, but it is very much an observable phenomenon, and one which I was reminded of when my friend Lou today sent me the article below.
Now I’m not disputing that we have some very real social problems, in part centred around under-age-drinking, in the UK. The behaviour of some of these young people impacts severely on whole communities and, yes, it has to be addressed — or more to the point, the underlying problems that prompt this kind of behaviour need to be addressed.
But is this the way to do it? No. Absolutely not. We have enough existing laws in place to deal with this problem without taking such an extreme approach. As far as I’m concerned, the comment form Inspector Neil Mutch of South Yorkshire Police pretty much hit the nail on the head:
“The Act was brought out for terrorism but it suits us very nicely.”
Lazy policing. This Act was implemented to protect the UK citizen from serious crime and terrorism, not to make Inspector Mutch’s job that little bit easier.
Our current sorry excuse for a government (and, I’m sad to say, I suspect it would be the same whoever was in power) and the private firms that they employ to do research for them et cetera are quite simply incapable of responsibly handling large amounts of personal data.
Once again NO2ID will be holding fringe meetings at the party conferences taking place this year, which will take place in September/October. We will be holding a TUC fringe meeting in Brighton on Monday 8th September at the Brighthelm Centre, chaired by our Union Liaison Christina Zaba. We have a presence at the Green conference and our General Secretary, Guy Herbert, will be speaking at fringe meetings at the Liberal Democrat and UKIP conferences, both in Bournemouth. At the Conservative conference in Birmingham we have a stall (highly prized, now the Conservatives are widely seen as winners by lobbyists) on the Home Affairs day, and we will be at the Labour conference in Manchester.
Volunteers for all these events are needed. If you are available to help at one or other English Party conference please contact office@no2id.net or the relevant NO2ID local group. If you can help at Scottish Party conferences please contact NO2ID Scotland (scotland@no2id.net), and we would be delighted to hear from people involved in Welsh or Irish politics (particularly the latter where our contacts need developing) – email (office@no2id.net).
Today came as something of a relief. I have not succeeded, due to a number of distractions and research requirements, in progressing any further with the chapter outlines for We Are Watching, but last night I found myself telling my parents all about it — what I had so far, where I hoped it would go, why I wanted to write it and so on — and the simple act of speaking it, of hearing the story in outline form, rekindled the flame. With this kind of novel, there can be a tendency for it to sound a little silly in an unplanned oral presentation. But it stood up remarkably well. My parents, who are the perfect critics (direct and, yet, well aware that the novel will have a stronger plot foundation than a spoken outline) got it right away. A very productive conversation.
It also helped me see where I didn’t want to go with the story. In many respects, it is an allegory for the current surveillance situation in the UK — but I saw quite quickly that it is fairly vital that it remain an allegory. I do not want becoming a “government conspiracy” novel involving databases etc. All of that will be there, but as a subtext.
RT @jimalkhalili: An excellent, sober assessment of the physics behind the stupid screaming headlines claiming 'physicists create negative… 4 years ago
