3875 days ago
The papers are full of lurid details of the personal activities of the lads and lasses who work at the Conservative Policy Unit. Apparently gay and straight alcohol fuelled orgies are par for the course. I do not care. What folks do behind closed doors is 100% their own business. So what if some Tory researchers and MPs like casual gay sex? Who cares? This is 2014 not 1914. It is not as if what they are doing is even illegal anymore.
Yes I find some of their activities distasteful. It is very brave of them to “come out” and admit that they work for a party that contains Maria Miller, wants to gag the press, supports secret courts and intervention in Syria and pisses away tens of billions on welfare, joke University degree courses, foreign aid, etc., etc. Being one of Cameron’s conservatives is pretty embarrassing but they are consenting adults so, though I find it distasteful they have every right to be 2014 Tories.
But there is a scandal here. And as ever it is the brazen way that the political classes abuse the taxpayer. The CPU is funded
4190 days ago
Recorded on the occasion of the first anniversary of this site, a day when it attracted a record 42,020 page impressions, this is a short message of thanks but also on one of my big themes of the past twelve months: free speech and the increasingly Orwellian nature of Britain
I start with the Downing Street affair and what it says about how the establishment want certain information kept within the political classes and the “bubble.” I do not care who shagged who but I care that “they all know” and are using taxpayers cash to stop “us” knowing. They will fail.
I move onto Secret Courts and the way the Police are used to clamp down on freedom of expression in Airstrip One.
Thank you for watching.
My weekly financial video postcard appears on Shareprophets.com here
4274 days ago
I am not sure what the Lib Dems are meant to stand for these days and in a couple of years’ time they will be an electoral irrelevancy anyway. But I always thought that a party with the word Liberal in its name might have some sort of core beliefs in the liberty of the citizen against an all-powerful state. Unless I have read my John Stuart Mill very incorrectly I think that should be the case.
However, under current plans which the Lib Dems in parliament have largely supported, the law will change to extend secret hearings across the civil justice system. In a secret hearing defendants or claimants will not be allowed to be present, know or challenge the case against them and must be represented by a security-cleared special advocate, rather than their own lawyer. Right now these procedures are used in tiny numbers of immigration and deportation hearings, but the Government wants to extend them across the civil courts in cases deemed to involve national security.
Now, I am sure you can spot the flaw in this proposal. It is the State that decides when the security of the State is threatened. In a country where burning a poppy on twitter and where calling a police horse “gay” have both been deemed by the State to be offences, I simply do not trust the State.
That may trivialise the point. What about the whistleblower? The David Kelly figure. As the law stands now he is just murdered in the woods, sorry I meant allowed a public trial if charged. But as the law may stand in future someone who exposed how a crazed leader started an illegal war with a pack of lies about Weapons of Mass Destruction
