How to lose votes and alienate people

According to the Guardian, not only did Gordon Brown call Rupert Murdoch after the Sun attacked him over the allegedly misspelt letter,

"...he has the most enormous personal regard for Rupert Murdoch," the prime minister's official spokesman said.

The sympathy vote

Who knows how the Sun managed to obtain a recording of Gordon Brown's phone call to Jacqui Janes? But I agree with the Guardian's Michael White that what the paper did in publishing it was pure cynicism in its new campaign to bash Labour and back the Tories.

I also agree with Sue Arnold, writing on Comment is Free last night that Brown is being unfairly pilloried for something that is a combination of his own concern for people and his poor eyesight:

Personally I'm deeply impressed that someone who can only read large print and is gradually relying more on aides to help him at official functions writes personally by hand to the bereaved relatives of British soldiers killed in action. He could go for the sympathy vote by publicising his sight problem but he's not that sort of chap. Besides, who needs sympathy? I've given up using my white stick because I'm fed up with being helped to the other side of roads I don't want to cross. Maybe Jacqui Janes should try re-reading the PM's letter with her eyes, her perfectly good eyes, on the message not the medium.

What was that all about?

By way of a couple of quick updates on the Iraq Inquiry...

Yesterday, on Comment is Free, I did a blog piece on Thursday's seminar, hosted by the Inquiry on the evolution of international policy up to 2003. It seemed to me that the Inquiry members must now be in no doubt that the war was about regime change, not weapons of mass destruction (wmd). I suggested that if the Inquiry could get Tony Blair to admit this early on, it could save a lot of prevaricating, dissembling and contradiction.

Just posted on Iraq Inquiry Digest is an excellent piece by Brian Jones, formerly of the Defence Intelligence Staff, giving his view on the development of policy up to 2002. He takes the view that US policy was about a lot more than wmd and increasingly (if not always) about regime change and that UK policy was mainly about keeping onside with the US. Read more here.

Secrecy at the Inquiry

It looks as if the Iraq Inquiry is going to be a lot less transparent than was promised.

This morning, on the Iraq Inquiry Digest and Comment is Free, I have analysed the protocol that the Cabinet Office has published, setting out the terms on which the government will disclose information to the Inquiry and the circumstances in which the Inquiry will be allowed to publish such information.

In both cases, the rules are a lot more restrictive than the statements made by Gordon Brown when he set up the Inquiry in June. In spite of a promise that an Inquiry by Privy Counsellors will be allowed to see absolutely everything, the government is now saying that "confidential" information will be withheld.

Similarly, although it was promised that only national security reasons would prevent the Inquiry publishing such information, the government has now given a long list of reasons, beginning with the infinitely flexible "public interest", why it might block publication. The Inquiry has to seek permission to publish and every piece of information and the government has a veto.

I've asked the Inquiry how it reconciles this with its statement that

It is the Committee’s intention to publish all the relevant evidence except where national security considerations prevent that.

In my view, the two are entirely incompatible. We'll see how long the statement remains on the Inquiry website.

Helpful advice from the police

I've had a very helpful leaflet from my community police team, letting me know that there is drug dealing taking place in the local park. If I want to buy any drugs, I'll know where to go. Apparently the action the police are taking to combat this is to have officers (and CSOs) conducting high visibility patrols in the area...

A bit extreme

I've always had a problem with the idea of "extremists" and the corresponding, widely-held assumption that it is the job of the state to tackle extremism and to persuade people, notably muslims, away from extremism. The Guardian's story today about police monitoring of "domestic extremism"suggests that the police have completely lost the plot.

Senior officers say domestic extremism, a term coined by police that has no legal basis, can include activists suspected of minor public order offences such as peaceful direct action and civil disobedience.

It's obvious reading the Guardian's story that the police simple don't understand why they shouldn't monitor people who are simply demonstrating against government policy.

Anton Setchell, who is in overall command of Acpo's domestic extremism remit, said people who find themselves on the databases "should not worry at all". But he refused to disclose how many names were on the NPOIU's national database, claiming it was "not easy" to count. He estimated they had files on thousands of people. As well as photographs, he said FIT surveillance officers noted down what he claimed was harmless information about people's attendance at demonstrations and this information was fed into the national database.

He said he could understand that peaceful activists objected to being monitored at open meetings when they had done nothing wrong. "What I would say where the police are doing that there would need to be the proper justifications," he said.

The simple answer is that when the police think that it's their job to undermine demonstrations, as happened at Kingsnorth, we are on the way not just to a police state but one in which the government controls what people are or are not allowed to say.

Another joke

It's quite astonishing that Radovan Karadzic has managed to delay the opening of his trial at the Hague by the simple ploy of not turning up to represent himself. According to the Guardian:

Legal experts predict [that] further delays, perhaps of several months, are inevitable.
...
The judges have been criticised by lawyers, victims' associations, and human rights activists for allowing the war crimes suspects to set the agenda and manipulate the court.

Here we go again...