Pride of our alley?

Let Malcolm start with two confessions:

1. Yesterday’s Sunday papers got short shrift, mainly because of that long liquid lunch at Ye Olde Cherry Tree, a decent meal well lubricated with St Austell’s Proper Job.
2. He is distinctly ambivalent about the Bercows. Obviously, since John Bercow as Speaker gets up the noses of so many Tories, he cannot be entirely a bad thing. He seems to do the business; but doesn’t cut it along with the recent great Speakers of recent memory: say, Bernard Weatherill (recently the star of James Graham’s This House at the Cottesloe) and Betty Boothroyd (a great hoofer, never out-shone by anyone). As for wife Sally, well, she does seem a trifle OTT.

And it is of Sally Bercow of whom we now speak.

The story so far:

Back in the darkening days of last autumn a frisson ran through the British political establishment. Some well-rehearsed ‘revelations’ from decades gone by, about paedophile rings in high places, bubbled to the surface of the settlement pit. One particular name involved was McAlpine. Unfortunately two McAlpine cousins, “Jimmie” and Lord Alastair, were confused by the media, including the BBC (who later paid McAlpine £185,000 for the mistake).

In the course of which Sally Bercow tweeted:

Why is Lord McAlpine trending? *innocent face*

The noble Lord McAlpine (believed to be down to his last ten million) then set about cleaning up. He issued writs for libel against all and sundry, collecting large sums of moolah in the process:  the Guardian columnist George Monbiot coughed; and comedian Alan Davies is supposed to be down for £200,000. McAlpine then generously desisted from cleaning out the bank-accounts of lesser beings, making a special, public and explicit exception of Sally Bercow’s seven words and ornamental punctuation.

Sally, blessed her little convoluted heart, stood up to the bullying. Yesterday’s Sunday Times reminded us how things went from there:

The libel case is centred on whether Bercow’s tweet was defamatory. A key issue will be the level of innuendo implied by the use of asterisks in her comment. Such punctuation represents the mimicking of a physical action by the user.

Hold on!  There is a precedent for this, which — at first, even second sight — seems to contradict the old maxim de minimis non curat lex. When English law wants to, it could — as with Roger Casement, hang a man on a comma.

Back to the Sunday Times:

At a High Court hearing on Tuesday, lawyers for McAlpine, 70, will ask for permission for the case to be split into two parts: one to determine the meaning of the tweet, and a second, if required, to award damages. The peer is seeking up to £50,000.

If the case goes against her, Bercow fears a two-part trial will drag proceedings on for months, with legal costs likely to overtake damages. This is why she is thought to want a full trial to be heard in one go.

Bercow has instructed solicitors at Carter-Ruck on a no-win, no-fee basis and is believed to have taken out insurance to cover costs of up to £100,000 should she lose.

She will be represented in court by William McCormick, QC, a defamation and privacy expert whose previous clients have included Sir Elton John.

McAlpine’s barrister is Sir Edward Garnier, a Tory MP and former solicitor-general.

Andrew Reid, of the RPMI firm of solicitors, who is also representing the peer, said, “It is very disappointing that Mrs Bercow still wants her day in court. But there is a huge public interest in this. The sooner the meaning of what she said is settled, the greater the benefit to the public at large.”

Focus, if you will, on that last quoted paragraph.

What does it mean?

• One plain insinuation is that plutocrats, who can afford the bill for the thrill of the chase, might mulct lesser creatures through just a threat of action. But the lesser being is not supposed to use the proper legal remedy of “a day in court”. Of course, with verbose senior barristers involved, the chances of this being settled in a “day” are precisely zilch. Scattering writs like confetti was patented by such low-lifes as Robert Maxwell, to the great profit of his tame lawyers, who have refined the operation ever since.
• Second, McAlpine’s lawyers would clearly prefer not to have all that embarrassing “huge public interest”. Not in front of the serviles …
• Partisan politics, and a bully’s need to humiliate, seems a major contributory factor.
• As for “benefit to the public at large”, any sensitive and sensible mind boggles. We have here another of the myriad attempts by those with power to throttle and constrain each and every twitch, tweet and twaddle of the social media. Underlings’ sympathy for La Bercow derives from the good British principle of nil carborundum.
• The moral superiority of Lord McAlpine fades when we recall he was on the take, albeit on behalf of Thatcher’s Tory Party, from the likes of Asil Nadir. His love-of-country amounts to being a non-dom. His family firm, the construction giant McAlpine, made vast sums from Tory policies, and also operated the notorious black-list: since McAlpine started his career with the firm as a clock-watcher and pay-clerk on the South Bank site, his distance from victimizations cannot have been too great.

One last thought …

This Sunday Times piece was illustrated by yet another from a photo-shoot of Lord McAlpine cruising (make of that word what you will) around Venice.

The chequered suit and a gaudy tie, guaranteed to bar any on-course bookie from frightening the horses, tells us all we need to know. This present image, arms propped on true-blue umbrella, Rialto Bridge and moon-faced cheesy half-grin to the fore, mushy-peas Grand Canal beyond, is the latest, and even least appealing of the sequence.  Even Sally Bercow, in her more flirtatious and ill-advised moments didn’t sink that low.

Marry and burn

A heart of stone is needed, not to mock the continuing havoc an eight-letter word is causing the Tory Party.

At a quick count, at toast-and-marmalade-time today, seven of the top eight (that number again!) items on ConHome Newslinks were about “marriage” — single-sex, the financial arrangements thereof, and other hokey-cokeys. There’s even one of those annoying rolling ads for the Coalition for Marriage.

From Institute to Coalition (across the hall-way)

This Coalition for Marriage deserves a moment’s attention. Its address is 5 Park Road, Gosforth. This takes us to a soul-less warehousing development on the outskirts of Newcastle — within whiffing distance of the big Greggs pasty plant across the hedge. Presumably no coincidence, it is bang next door to The Christian Institute of  Wilberforce House, 4 Park Road, Gosforth. For all the “Christian” ethos here, the “Christian Institute” seems to have a particular track record:

• it sought to retain Thatcher’s vindictive Clause 28, discriminating against the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality;
• it argued for an older age-of-consent in homosexual relationships;
• it opposed Civil Partnerships;
• it opposed single-sex adoption rights;
• it meddled in Northern Ireland’s attempts to draw up rules on gender equality;
• it funded a case in Islington, where a Council employee refused to work on the documentation of civil partnerships (and lost);
• it funded the boarding-house owner who discriminated against gays(and lost).

Not surprisingly, then, the Institute has repeatedly been warned off crossing the line between “charity” and political activism.

Oh, and the Institute are New Earthers, theocrats, and bigots:

The Bible is without error not only when it speaks of salvation, its own origins, values, and religious matters, but it is also without error when it speaks of history and the cosmos. Christians must, therefore, submit to its supreme authority, both individually and corporately, in every matter of belief and conduct.

Anyone for an auto-da-fé?

The Christian Institute is strong on discipline:

The Church’s calling is to worship and serve God in the world, to proclaim and defend his truth, to exhibit his character and to demonstrate the reality of his new order.

New order … where did we come on that before? Then, in the original, was it not more correctly Neuordnung?

And also hot on punishment:

Evildoers will suffer eternal punishment. God will fully establish his kingdom when he creates a new heaven and a new earth from which evil, suffering and death will be excluded, and in which he will be glorified for ever.

Ah, yes: bring back the old ways of glorifying for ever:

A Malcolmian solution:

Ever one to be helpful, Malcolm reckons he has a way to satisfy all but the most extreme theocrat:

• Allow whatever religious, denominational or whatever practices of human bonding to persist, but keep them at pitchfork’s length from the State;
• Recognise only civil-marriage sand registrations of relationships to be recognised for official State needs.

In other words, do as they do in France — a civil and (should the couple wish) a religious ceremony. But only the one has the official imprimatur — and it has to happen first. If the Château de Candé was good enough for an (ex-)King and Emperor, then the local Town Hall should suit anyone else.

“Popular”? With whom?

The Buckeye Firearms Foundation (as in Ohio, “the Buckeye State”) followed up the Sandy Hook child massacre with:

a program to provide firearm training to teachers free of charge…

“The long-term goal is to develop a standard Armed Teacher curriculum and make the training available to any teacher or school official,” said [Ken] Hanson ["BFA's Legal Chair"]. “To begin, we will use funds from our educational foundation and solicit donations from corporations to pay for the program. Going forward, we will seek funding from a variety of sources to expand the training.”

 No comments, please, on the possibility of an “illegal chair”. Or that the acronym “BFA” is ripe for umpteen alternative expansions, many of which are coarse or scabrous. Or, that in July 2011, the BFA organised its (somewhat ambiguously-named) 1st Annual Buckeye Firearms Foundation Youth Shoot, “north of Zanesville”.

Educationalists and parents will be delighted by the success of the BFA’s initiative:

So far, the Armed Teacher Training Program has attracted more than 600 applicants from all parts of Ohio and several from other states, including Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, and West Virginia. More teachers inquire about the program every day.

“We knew this would be popular, but the response has exceeded our expectations,” said Jim Irvine, Chairman of the non-profit Buckeye Firearms Foundation.

That press release is a truly enlightening document. Malcolm savoured much thereof, and here adds some choice quotations:

• While Ohio generally prohibits firearms at schools, the law includes a provision that allows teachers and staff to carry firearms if the school board approves it. The Armed Teacher Training Program seeks to help teachers get permission to carry concealed firearms on the job and provide advanced training that goes above and beyond the typical requirements of concealed carry.
• Irvine says the program is entirely voluntary. “No one will be forced to be armed if they choose not to. The strategy is the same as ordinary concealed carry. No one will ever know who is or is not armed. Those who would seek to do harm in schools should be met with armed resistance even before law enforcement shows up. Over time, schools will no longer be considered easy, risk-free targets.”
• Irvine says the idea isn’t new. “For 25 years, citizens in the U.S. have been legally carrying concealed firearms. A total of 49 states now allow concealed carry, some with no licensing or training of any kind. The concept has worked remarkably well. Most of those who were initially skeptical now admit that citizens can be trusted to act lawfully and responsibly. Millions of ordinary people carry firearms in malls, on buses and city streets, and in restaurants and office buildings. It works for average citizens even in highly populated locations, so why would anyone assume armed teachers in schools would be any different?”
• A few people have questioned the idea of arming teachers who have no firearm experience or may be uncomfortable with guns. “That’s a misunderstanding of what we’re doing,” said Rieck. “Applicants for the program are not firearm novices. More than half already have a Concealed Handgun License. About 40 percent of our applicants say they have previous self-defense training. Over 60 percent say they have moderate to extensive firearm experience. And over 80 percent have experience with handguns.”

Cue Tom Paxton (or failing him, Pete Seeger):

What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
I learned that policemen are my friends.
I learned that justice never ends.
I learned that murderers die for their crimes,
Even if we make a mistake sometimes.

That’s what I learned in school today,
That’s what I learned in school.

Or, here’s the nearest thing Malcolm can find from Paxton himself:

Hat-tip to Mother Jones.

Ex America semper aliquid novum

Malcolm reckons two elements should inspire a good blog offering:

• Serendipity: Horace Walpole’s invention, for:

The faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident. Also, the fact or an instance of such a discovery.

Well, so far, there’s nothing ‘happy’ to be extracted from the Newtown CT massacre.

• Bizarrerie, which Malcolm discussed at some length recently.

Somewhere in there comes this, from the New York Times:

Newtown, incorporated in 1711, takes its child-friendly, Norman Rockwell ambience seriously. The all-purpose landmark is the downtown flagpole, which dates to 1876. Fat and packed with small-town ephemera, including weekly equestrian news, The Newtown Bee dates to 1877. Scrabble was developed in Newtown by a local lawyer, James Brunot, in 1948, who adapted an earlier version and changed its name from “Criss-Cross Words” to “Scrabble.”

That article is topped-and-tailed by references to a local business selling Christmas trees.

Scrabble, Christmas trees … it all seems so reasonable, so normal in an unreasonable, abnormal context. One has to reach to grasp a vestige of sanity.

For the record, it’s about 75 miles — say, around a hundred minutes driving time — from Stockbridge, Massachusetts (the Norman Rockwell home) to Newtown, Connecticut. Malcolm has to wonder what the late-period Rockwell would have drawn this weekend. It would be telling, caring, gentle, and incisive: it would be infused by some of that quiet anger — liberal angst, if one must —  that went into The Problem We All Live With, the painting of six-year-old Ruby Bridges going to school in New Orleans (and which hung for a while outside Obama’s Oval Office).

Or perhaps it would reflect the earlier, Birthday Surprise:

Here’s to those dedicated teachers who gave their all on Friday.

Mr and Mrs Smith, indeed

Here’s a good ‘un from the BBC site, stripping out a bit of detail from the 2011 Census:

Blackpool is the divorce capital

The Lancashire seaside resort has the highest percentage of people who are divorced – 13.1%, compared with the average for England and Wales of 9%. This also includes those whose same-sex civil partnership is dissolved.

Seaside resorts are often near the top of the divorce league – but no-one is really sure why.

Well, here’s a clue, from Ross McKibbin (crazee name, crazee guy — © Glenda Slagg, though sadly missing this issue):

Divorce, therefore, remained expensive, demanding and often sordid. Increasingly, those who were determined to divorce arranged for one of the partners, usually the husband, to be caught in a well-staged ‘adultery’ with a professional co-respondent in a hotel room [*]. This was not a practice the country could be proud of and the 1923 Act never satisfied most feminist groups, divorce law reformers, proponents of a more relaxed sexual morality, or even some churchmen.

The footnote there [*] reads:

Seaside resorts were favoured, particularly Brighton. Divorces procured this way came to be called ‘Brighton quickies’.

Malcolm adjudges Mr McKibbin there guilty of some remarkably-talented nudge-nudge, wink-wink innuendo.

The Brighton Museum actually (and this is from Slow Sussex, believe it or not):

celebrates the resort’s role as a venue for a dirty weekend. This famously was the place a couple could get ‘a Brighton quickie’ divorce. the husband would hire a private detective to observe him signing into a hotel, with a hired ‘mistress’ acting the part as ‘Mr and Mrs Smith’. A chambermaid would ever so accidentally open the door to see the couple, and the deed was done.

Even more bizarrerie: the only reference to all these shenanigans in the Oxford English Dictionary takes us to Rodney Quest’s dubious The Cerberus Murders of 1969 and the other end of the country:

I get reasonably well paid—enough to enable me to … have a dirty weekend in Scarborough now and again.

Err … wrong decade (by at least three) and wrong location.

Why else was the Brighton Belle so busy — and charging ‘supplementary fares’  — on a Friday night?

Browne study

Bishop Michael Browne of Galway would almost qualify as a “not-so-great and not-so-good” had not “Bill” done a previous, and better hatchet-job:

Michael Browne was catholic bishop of Galway in from 1937 to 1976 and seemed to exemplify everything that was wrong with the church… He was among those who led the hierarchy’s objections toNoël Browne’s mother and child health scheme. He supported a boycott of protestant businesses in Co. Wexford during a dispute over a protestant woman married to a catholic man who refused to educate her children at the local catholic school. He described Trinity College Dublin as “a centre for atheist and communist propaganda”. He forced the segregation of the sexes on Galway beaches. He seemed so perpetually angry that his episcopal signature — “† Michael” – was popularly rendered as “Cross Michael”. He supervised the construction of a grandiose new cathedral in Galway that local wits dubbed the “Taj Micheáil” (pronounced Meehaul).

That post also involves the late Brian Trevaskis, a perverse and interesting character who was a feature of TCD, overlapping Malcolm’s time.

The Fethard-on-Sea business was nasty in the extreme, and contributed mightily to the sectarian prejudices of Northern Protestants well after the original episode. Tim Fanning’s The Fethard-on-Sea Boycott is probably the fullest account. A summary of the main events is on Gareth Russell’s blog.

Anyone of a fair mind (and even other) would surely recognise that Browne was off-piste in oh-so-many ways. Or, “The Irish bishop stands on ceremony and sits on everybody,”as Seán O Faoláin put it. However, let’s pass on all that.

Going through the motions

Once upon a shitty time, when Galway hadn’t made much effort to filter its effluents, that was the experience of swimming in Galway Bay. To be strictly honest, across the city and county, there remain ample opportunities for improving water-quality. In 2007 it was cryptosporidium. In 2008 it was levels of lead. In 2011 it was oily waste. In 2012, e-coli.

Anyway, allegedly Bishop Browne liked to swim. Unencumbered by swimming costume. And to air himself in the Galwegian sunshine thereafter. Doubtless among males of similar disposition. He had a sign put up on the beach at Salthill, prohibiting women therefrom.

Elsewhere Bishop Browne was very much against any mixing of the sexes, even clothed, on beaches:

“Everywhere has changed in my life time”, [Christie Moore] says. “I remember Galway winning three-in-a-row; the Bishop of Galway banning “mixed bathing” — the dirty minded bollocks; Des Kelly and The Capitol being Number 1 in The Irish Charts; when there was only one De Danann; Michael D presenting me with a platinum disc; Moving Hearts falling asunder in St.Patrick’s Hall, and reforming two hours later in The Skeff.”

Out of the strange came forth sweetness

Which isn’t quite how Judges 14:14 has it, nor (as is better known in every British kitchen to the present day) how it appears on the Tate & Lyle golden syrup tin. Yet it has a relevance here.

Bishop Browne’s prurience was the contrarian inspiration for an early Seamus Heaney poem, Girls Bathing, Galway 1965:

The swell foams where they float and crawl,
A catherine-wheel of arm and hand.
Each head bobs curtly as a football.
The yelps are faint here on the strand.

No milk-limbed Venus ever rose
Miraculous on this western shore;
A pirate queen in battle clothes
Is our sterner myth. The breakers pour

Themselves into themselves, the years
Shuttle through space invisibly.
Where crests unfurl like creamy beer
The queen’s clothes melt into the sea

And generations sighing in
The salt suds where the wave has crashed
Labour in fear of flesh and sin
For the time has been accomplished

As through the swallows in swimsuits,
Brown-legged, smooth-shouldered and bare-backed
They wade ashore with skips and shouts.
So Venus comes, matter-of-fact.

That now appears by the Galway Bay Hotel, opposite the beach — still ‘the Ladies’ Beach’ — on the Salthill Promenade, one of half-a-dozen bronze plaques celebrating poems along the Cúirt Literary Trail.

The poem seems  superficially a slight thing, almost a piece of juvenilia. That’s Heaney’s deception: it anticipates so much of what Heaney’s later work would become. It is highly complex in its allusions and, appropriately in this context, in its undertow.

The incident is, on one level, from Marie and Seamus’s honeymoon.

The form is almost a ballad: quatrains of four-stresses to the line. There is the characteristic Heaney conflation of past and present, the classic and the work-a-day: So Venus comes, matter-of-fact. The implied visual references include Botticelli’s Nascita di Venere and St Catherine with her wheel: that, along with in fear of flesh and sin, must imply continuing martyring of women in Browne’s gynophobia.

Strange meeting

There is is the nod to Irish tradition and history: the pirate queen in battle clothes is Gráinne Ní Mháille/Grace O’Malley/Granuaile/The Sea-Queen of Connacht.

Gráinne, another woman of strength, is depicted in the frontispiece to Anthologia Hibernica, no humble suppliant. She had been summoned  in  September 1593, to Greenwich to  encounter Elizabeth I. The Queen acquiesced with all of Grace’s demands — to the profound disgust of Richard Bingham, Lord President of Connacht, who regarded her as nurse to all rebellions in the province for this forty years.

All that without the implicit physical sexuality: Brown-legged, smooth-shouldered and bare-backed.

Bishop Browne knew not what he had provoked.

How to distort “news”

The Daily Mail is a low-down, dishonest, corrupting Tory rag — and needs constantly to be exposed for that. Fortunately, the Mail itself does so on a daily basis. Its whole existence is predicated to the Big Lie:

… the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.

Malcolm deliberately disguises the source of that quotation, lest it fall foul of Godwin’s Law.

Today’s front page is a magnificent example of the Big Lie:

The essence of the Mail piece is:

Prescott loses police commissioner poll in his own back yard of Hull to a TORY

Except the election wasn’t just for Hull: it was for the whole Humberside Constabulary area. Here is the difference:

The political complexion, as of 2010, of the parliamentary constituencies of Humberside looks very skewed:

Ten constituencies, five Tory, five Labour, which might seem an even balance. The County seats all Tory: the Borough seats tending Labour, as one might expect. A closer look at the numbers suggests the Humberside area is safe Tory country: David Davis’s Haltemprice and Howden is regarded as the second safest Tory constituency in Britain, and has never deviated from that loyalty since 1837.

Add up the 2010 results and we have 40.8% Tory, 34.2% Labour and 25% Lib Dem:

Now consider Thursday’s results of the Police and Crime Commissioner election (though Malcolm never did get the hang of how to ‘commission’ crime):

Accepting that Prescott lost on the Second Round (39,933 to 42,164 or a 48.6/51.4% two-party split), on that first count:

• Prescott caned the Tory — it is, in crude terms, a four or five per cent swing (and it has to be accepted that the “county” types turned out far, far better than the urbanites);
• the Tory vote went AWOL, barely squeaking in ahead of the independent — even the egregious Godfrey Bloom (surely one of the more disreputable and bizarre UKIP types, which itself is saying something) splitting off a sixth of the total poll;
• the Tory candidate was only rescued — just — on that second round by rolling up the odds-and-sods vote: those 19,375 who did express a second preference split for the Tory 2:1;
• the Lib Dems were totally creamed: even proportionately, more than a third of their vote evaporated.

For the record, Paul Davison — who ran that close third —  is an ex-Police Superintendent, and probably the best qualified of all the candidates.

The real determinant was tthe total failure of second preference transfers (which, as every aficionado of Irish politics knows, is key to the whole operation). Only 27% of the odds-and-sods ballots bothered to make a second preference. That is either a failure of voter education or a clear statement by a majority to vote “neither of the above”. 51,665 second preferences did not go for either the Labour or the Tory in the final run-off — which amounts to an absolute majority of those who turned out. We should not forget the “alternative vote” was the preferred option in the Great Constitutional Débâcle of 5th May 2011. If we needed concrete evidence that AV is a sham, and no substitute for proper proportional representation, here is the concrete evidence.

Yet the Daily Mail says it was all about Prescott, and the Daily Mail is a dishonourable rag.

And the Daily Mail says it was all about the city of Hull, and nothing to do with the other lands north and south of the estuary, and, for sure, the Daily Mail is a dishonourable lie-sheet.

Guido Fawkes out-done!

Get this: Paul Staines’s little pus-pile has found a limit of its grossness!

Staines’s empire inflated, and continues to exploit what he terms as “Pilgrims”.

A “Pilgrim” is any employee who is afforded management approval to spend time representing fellow employees.

Lest we forget — for one passing example — those lasses and lads dumped overnight under the bridges of London, in the hope of a “job” at the Olympics, were non-unionised and unrepresented. They had no “pilgrim”

Got that?

Seems almost reasonable —  perhaps.

Thanks to Milady Thatcher and her derivatives, trades-unionism is mainly a feature of the public sector. Everybody else is either too grand, too frightened, or too out-sourced to feel free (good word, that!) to join any kind of mutual representation and support.

Therefore, to the convinced believer in capitalist “free-enterprise”, any vestige of trades-unionism must be extirpated.

So Mr Paul Staines, the onlie turd true begetter of Guido Fawkes, has set his drunk-driving hat at overturning this impediment to the return of decent authoritarian society. Now, he claims total victory!

Trades-union representation must go!

And so, paean of adulation! — A  TransAtlantic Tunnel Hurrah!

Hold on , Malcolm: that’s SciFi!

Well, perhaps not.

For, you see, even in the empire of “Guido Fawkes” (whose original was a Catholic, terrorist, Spanish /Euro stooge) things are quite not as “libertarian” as its progenitor claims.

Commentators are free to blaspheme, curse, abuse — provided they choose the right (especially left) targets, use foul language, lick windows … whatever. But “libertarianism” has restrictions.

Try this:

So, Mr Paul Staines (by name and by nature), of Ealing, but conveniently claiming to be a good Irishman, who went un-libertarian there?

[By the way: the last response Malcolm had from Mr Staines amounted to a four-letter word of abuse.]

Not quite a farrago of Fawking rubbish

There comes a moment when even the most avid devotee suffers disillusion. The true socialist had it early on with the whole Blair “project”. It has taken longer for loyal Tories (in part because that is the “stupid party”, but more so because the scales are more encrusted on the eyes).

So this morning the inimitable Paul Staines (by name and by nature) treated his window-lickers to a breakfast treat with this:

Dave’s government is now proposing to allow the security services to monitor every single email, Facebook status update, text and tweet. This is such an about turn, which will ramp up the surveillance state so much, that one wonders if it is deliberately being set out to be defeated. Libertarian Tories and the LibDem left will form a parliamentary coalition against it which a cynical opposition will surely join. The more Machiavellian-minded might suspect that the purpose of the proposal is to be dropped and thereby demonstrate that the government is listening to its backbenchers. Surely when we already have Google already monitoring everything, we hardly need the state to get in the game…

 Sancta simplicitas!

Google is good — it is a regular staple of Malcolmian trawlings — but not that good.

There’s something flattering  and weird in itself to assume our ConDem Leaders (who can’t keep a budget secret, unless it’s £1 billion fleeced from OAPs) are capable of being “Machiavellian”. The notion that this bone-headed lot are up for a double-bluff against their own parliamentary support is beyond bizarre.

No. This is an exemplary case of “going native”. As soon as a minister starts to open a red box and find documents headed “top secret” and “for your eyes only”, or even just confidential briefings, the blue mist rises. An epistle from Jonathan Evans at MI5 or (Genuflect! Genuflect! Genuflect!) Richard Dearlove at MI6 means senses of proportion are forever mis-shapen.

Look to the lady

There’s a nice set-to between David Davis (whom God preserve) of Haltemprice and Howden and Theresa May in The Sun. Now, stop sniggering at the back that Murdoch’s phone-hacking organ asks a Daily Mail-type question:

Are GCHQ about to spy on you?

John Rentoul insists such things are the world-famous series of Questions to Which the Answer is No — as of today, up to #783 and counting. Even so, Theresa May’s input is instructive

THE internet is now a part of our daily lives — it’s where we book our holidays, buy our Christmas presents and chat to our friends.

But new technology can also be abused by criminals, paedophiles and terrorists who want to cover their tracks and keep their communication secret.

Right now, the police and security agencies use information from phone records to solve crime and keep us safe.

Looking at who a suspect talks to can lead the police to other criminals. Whole paedophile rings, criminal conspiracies and terrorist plots can then be smashed.

Notice the use of “paedophiles” (stroking a Sun reader’s erogenous zone) and “criminals”.

Hold it there, Terry Girl! They’re not “criminals” until they’ve been incriminated by a court of law. Which brings us to James Brokenshire … parliamentary under secretary of state responsible for crime and security, sixth out of six in the Home Office pecking order, and — sent out yesterday to hold the fort. He came up with a formula: the proposals were not a “snooping exercise”, because they were concerned only with the “who, where and when”.

So, Malcolm wonders, how is the ”who, where and when” relevant without the “what”?

Say Macolm rings for a pizza to a parlour which is under suspicion for … oh, say, drug-dealing. How do the snoopers know whether Malcolm is part of the dastardly doings without checking out his “Two twelve-inch Quattro Formaggi, a dough balls, if you please”?

Anyway, since intercept evidence is apparently not going to be available in Court, what is the purpose of such an all-purpose scanning of decent, law-abiding folk and their daily dealings?

The gorge rises

Staines/Fawkes may be capable of finding obscurantist excuses for this Cameroonie dementia (Heaven knows he’s done it often enough); but he is right that all this is beyond any acceptable bounds.

• But this is Britain, after all.
• We don’t do the surveillance society!
• We don’t do oppression!
• It couldn’t happen here!

Oh, yeah?

Remember, should you doubt, the striking miner at Orgreave, given the full tromping, stamping, and stomping, then arrested and charged with “damage to a policeman’s boot”.

Malcolm had a recent experience, escorting a couple of Californian ladies through Covent Garden. When they looked askance down one darkened side-road, the question timidly came, “Is it safe here?” Malcolm pointed to the CCTV cameras — there were seven in clear sight. Curiously, such over-kill didn’t reassure the ladies.

We could have recited DORA here, and the unspeakable Jix. Or how a later Home Secretary had a young man hanged, despite the urgings to leniency from the jury and the presiding judge, because there was likely to be a vacancy for the premiership, and that Home Secretary fancied his chances, provided his could bolster his law’n'order creeds with the Tory right.  Or how another Home Secretary intervened (behind the scenes) in a later capital trial, in part because it eased the Government’s political difficulties in industrial troubles with the medics.

But there’s a stronger clincher.

The Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Acts (Northern Ireland), 1922 to 1943

The Special Powers Act (as it was generally known) remained in place for the full period of Unionist hegemony in Northern Ireland. Although all that time the overall power rested with the Westminster Parliament and the Home Secretary, only after direct rule were the powers revoked.

Hitler was an admirer of the Special Powers Act, and regretted in 1933 that he lacked the ability to introduce similar measures in Germany (he certainly and speedily sorted that small difficulty).

In April 1963, the South African “minister of justice”, Belthazar Johannes Vorster, introduced the Coercion Bill,  the nub of the apartheid laws. In making his modest proposals he stated he “would be willing to exchange all the legislation of this sort for one clause of the Northern Ireland Special Powers Act”.

Suck it and see

The Special Powers Act starts:

The civil authority shall have power, in respect of persons, matters and things within the jurisdiction of the Government of Northern Ireland, to take all such steps and issue all such orders as may be necessary for preserving the peace and maintaining order, according to and in the execution of this Act and the regulations contained in the Schedule thereto, or such regulations as may be made in accordance with the provisions of this Act (which regulations, whether contained in the said Schedule or made as aforesaid, are in this Act referred to as “the regulations “):
Provided that the ordinary course of law and avocations of life and the enjoyment of property shall be interfered with as little as may be permitted by the exigencies of the steps required to be taken under this Act.

Which is a pretty wide scope. That latter sentence, in the light of how the Acts were interpreted “on the streets”, is little more than weasel-words.

And then there’s section 25:

No person shall by word of mouth or in writing, or in any newspaper, periodical, book, circular, or other printed publication —

• spread false reports or make false statements; or
• spread reports or make statements intended or likely to cause disaffection to His Majesty, or to interfere with the success of any police or other force acting for the preservation of the peace or maintenance of order in Northern Ireland; or
• spread reports or make statements intended or likely to prejudice the recruiting or enrolment of persons to serve in any police or other force enrolled or employed for the preservation of the peace or maintenance of order in Northern Ireland, or to prejudice the training, discipline, or administration of any such force; and no person shall produce any performance on any stage, or exhibit any picture or cinematograph film, or commit any act which is intended or likely to cause any disaffection, interference or prejudice as aforesaid, and if any person contravenes any of the above provisions he shall be guilty of an offence against these regulations.

If any person without lawful authority or excuse has in his possession or on premises in his occupation or under his control, any document containing a report or statement the publication of which would be a contravention of the foregoing provisions of this regulation, he shall be guilty of an offence against these regulations, unless he proves that he did not know and had no reason to suspect that the document contained any such report or statement, or that he had no intention of transmitting or circulating the document or distributing copies thereof to or amongst other persons.

So Mrs May and Mr Cameron have a ready-drafted Bill.

Merely add the odd reference to electronic communication.

From my cold, dead hands

Let’s start elsewhere.

Malcolm is uneasy about “Sarah’s Law“, particularly when its proponents’ website has to warn:

Please do not use names  in your posts.

We will not tolerate the recommendation of vigilantism or violence of any sort, please do not attempt to instigate this through the forums on this website. If you attempt this your IP (computer address) will be noted and you will be banned and may be reported.

Please register on this site, your real name is optional.

Admittedly, much of that unease stems from the ambivalent News of the World‘s campaign and the double-standards Rebekah Brookes applied to exploiting it.

Now consider this:

Number 10 has rejected calls for the Government to revisit gun laws after the fatal shooting of four people in Easington over the New Year.This morning, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: “The firearms laws we have in place are among the toughest in the world. The purpose of that legislation is to protect public safety and at the same time, ensure that controls are practical and proportionate.“On the specific case [Easington, County Durham] it would not be appropriate to comment on an ongoing police investigation.” However, No 10 added that it was still looking at the Home Affairs Select Committee report on possible changes to implementation of the law, rather than the law itself.

Local MP Grahame Morris had called for a debate on gun control in Parliament, saying there were some “big issues” arising from the police investigation and that there should be a “considered and measured look at the outcome”.

The case certainly deserves considerable attention:

Police investigating the deaths of three women and the man who shot them before killing himself are expected to focus on why he owned six guns.

Michael Atherton, 42, had licences for the firearms despite police revealing they were told three years ago that he had threatened to harm himself.

He shot his partner Susan McGoldrick, her sister Alison Turnbull, 44, and her niece Tanya Turnbull, 24.

Officers found the bodies inside the house in Horden, Co Durham, on Sunday.

I’m sorry, says Malcolm, let me read that a bit further:

Assistant Chief Constable Michael Banks said Mr Atherton was licensed to own six weapons, three of them shotguns and a further three “section-one” firearms.

The latter required a greater degree of authorisation than a shotgun licence, he said.

Mr Atherton had been a member of a gun club in the area but it is not known if he was still an active member.

Is there not an argument here for a “Susan, Alison and Tanya’s Law”? Should family, neighbours and friends not be aware that that odd guy at Greenside Avenue, the one drives the taxi, has a licence for a whole armoury of firearms? Should the register of weapons not be an easily-accessible public document?

At a tangent, Malcolm knows from direct experience that it is not unusual for a slip to pass between American parents, before children are allowed to “go and play”, assuring one party that strong liquor is not kept in the other house. Note well: no strong liquor, but arms and ammunition acceptable. Curious priorities there.

And the last time Malcolm posted on a parallel topic, he had a wrathful and abusive response from a Second Amendment fanatic.