UK politics – Page 40

Tits and Bums For Freedom

Published on October 6, 2008

Strange days indeed, when it takes a porn baron to keep an eye on Britons’ online liberty. Could Richard Desmond become the UK’s Larry Flynt, I wonder? He’s had a hand in politics before…

Back along I posted about the Interception Modernisation Programme and the paucity of the available information about it:

Speaking of IT clusterfscks…

Somebody tipped me off to the innocent sounding “Interception Modernisation Programme”, but what is this exactly? It’s mentioned in this “Security and Counter-Terrorism Science and Innovation Strategy” document (PDF) from the Home Office, which seems to be some sort of happy face p.r.-minded strategy overview to show how on the ball the government is in combatting terrorism through innovation and science . In this context, the “Interception Modernisation Programme” is only mentioned in an aside and it sounds like it could be anything:

Intercepting terrorist communications

Knowing the content of terrorist communications is vital to the UK’s ability to respond to terrorism. The cutting-edge interception technology required is therefore critical to building up our intelligence and to understanding the nature of the threat.

The Interception Modernisation Programme is a cross-Government programme which aims to maintain the UK’s world-class capability in obtaining and exploiting terrorist communications data. It is a key example of how Government is using innovative and ground-breaking technology to stay well ahead of the terrorists

Well, now I know, courtesy of the Daily Express, proprietor New Labour’s favourite pornographer, Mr Richard Desmond:

After the top-secret plans were leaked yesterday critics accused the Government of stalking the public. Michael Parker of anti-identity card group No2ID said: “It is a shocking intrusion into privacy. This is stalking. If an individual carried out this sort of snooping, it would be a crime.”

Shadow Home Secretary Dominic Grieve said the proposal marked “a substantial shift in the powers of the state to obtain information on individuals”. And after a series of embarrassing security blunders including the loss of child benefit records for every family in the country, he questioned Whitehall’s competence to keep such data. He said: “Given the Government’s poor record on protecting data and seeing how significant an increase in power this would be, we need to have a national debate and the Government would have to justify its need.”

ALL telephone calls, emails and text messages in Britain will be monitored under new Government snooping plans. A £12billion identity database at the GCHQ spy centre could even log every website visited by computer users nationwide.

Hundreds of bugging probes will be installed in the telephone system and computer networks to monitor communications traffic.

GCHQ has already been handed £1billion of taxpayers’ cash to begin developing the database.

After the top-secret plans were leaked yesterday critics accused the Government of stalking the public. Michael Parker of anti-identity card group No2ID said: “It is a shocking intrusion into privacy. This is stalking. If an individual carried out this sort of snooping, it would be a crime.”

Shadow Home Secretary Dominic Grieve said the proposal marked “a substantial shift in the powers of the state to obtain information on individuals”. And after a series of embarrassing security blunders including the loss of child benefit records for every family in the country, he questioned Whitehall’s competence to keep such data. He said: “Given the Government’s poor record on protecting data and seeing how significant an increase in power this would be, we need to have a national debate and the Government would have to justify its need.”

The plan for the biggest surveillance system in British history is being spearheaded by GCHQ director Sir David Pepper.

It is currently classified as top secret and is being developed under the title: Interception Modernisation Programme.

The aim is to set up a “live tap” on every electronic communication in the country. At present, security service MI5 carries out limited monitoring of email exchanges and internet use.

Ministers have been told that the latest computer technology lays the grounds of a massive expansion of monitoring.

The database is likely to be centred at GCHQ’s famous “doughnut”-shaped spy centre in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.

Further details will be released when the Government’s legislative programme is announced in the Queen’s Speech in December.

The plan is even more ambitious than the Identity Cards scheme being gradually introduced by the Government at a cost of £5billion. While a final decision has yet to be taken, ministers are understood to have agreed to the move “in principle”.

No wonder the Express is worried, considering how much money Desmond’s business empire makes from soft porn and technology – and considering some of the very dodgy people he’s done business with too.

Sometimes private (very private) interests and public interest collide – so shouldn’t Desmond put some of his porn-derived cash behind the privacy campaigns, if he’s so concerned?

Goodbye, Mr Plod. Oops Sorry, Sir Plod.

Published on October 5, 2008

Regular readers will know already exactly what I think about former Met boss Sir Ian Blair. As you can imagine, I’m happy as Larry he’s finally gone and this morning I was going to look at the cross-party politics that laid behind his figleaf of a ‘resignation’.

But I see that Rory Baxter of civil service blog Public Servant Daily has saved me the trouble:

We didn’t want Blair to go, Smith said. Oh please …

[…]

What was the government going to do, this guy had accusation after accusation being thrown at him and he was refusing to go, holding press conferences to say “I deny everything, I just want to get on with my job”? Sacking him was out of the question, how would that look? So the problem would not go away and, with Blair insisting he wanted to stay in post for the 2012 Olympics, Blair’s sores could well be running right across a general election, putting the Home Secretary – and therefore the government – in a very difficult position. You don’t want this kind of scandal hanging around at election time. No, Blair had to go beforehand, that was certain. But how?

Along comes Boris Johnson and hands the answer to Smith – and Blair, it has to be said – on a plate. Johnson had already made noises about wiping the slate clean at the Met when he gained power and Home Office officials had talked at the time of how Smith would almost certainly not oppose such a move. According to one report, when asked some time ago if Smith still had full confidence in Blair, a senior Whitehall official said: “No one is indispensable.” Funny how she now feigns disappointment and surprise.

Read whole thing

Exactly. He had to go before the Jean-Charles De Menezes inquest lays bare any more of his and New Labour’s policing and policy fuckups. Blair was New Labour’s creature; they made him, they ran him, and now they need to get rid of him. Boris is happy to go along because it makes him and his party look good. ‘Who will rid us of this troublesome plod?’ said No. 10: ‘Me!’ said Boris “More tv face time! Huzzah!’

This is a rare outbreak of bipartisanship dressed up as an interparty spat. Ian Blair walks away without the opprobrium of a sacking, with his retirement benefits intact, a nifty knighthood, and a future pension-enhancing career in daytime tv; Boris looks like a decisive leader, Labour gets rid of a liability, the public gets revenge of a sort. Everybody wins.

Actually, thinking about it, Labour gets rid of two liabilities; Blair and Jacqui Smith, who has been an embarassing failure as Home Secretary and who’s alternately alienated rank and file coppers and sucked up to the grandest, most expensive paramilitary anti-‘terror’ fantasies of a few wannabe J. Edgars in the senior ranks.

Her worst moment came when in January she admitted in a newspaper interview that she felt unsafe walking alone in London at night, at the same time as bragging about the success of her neighborhood policing team strategy and her 5 million pound anti-knife crime initiative. This was not helped when one of her few female colleagues in the cabinet, Harriet Harman visited her constituency wearing a stab vest and cowering between a praetorian guard of those very neighbourhood police officers. Very reassuring.

It would be too embarassing to sack her outright, there’s few enough women in the cabinet as it is, and Harriet Harman might kick up a stink. No what Brown (or should I say Mandy, now they’re ‘joined at the hip’?) has done is to install Margaret Beckett so the sexism jibe is neutralised.

So let her take a public humiliation in the Blair affair, then a couple of months later give her her reward – a peerage, a pension and a kick upstairs, and hey presto, the way’s open to bring back yet another Blairite to push ID cards and Titan prisons through against public resistance. My money’s on Blunkett.

UPDATE

Gordon Brown has stepped in personally to block Sir Ian Blair from receiving a peerage when he steps down as Metropolitan Police Commissioner, The Independent on Sunday has learned.

Sources said yesterday that allowing Sir Ian a seat in the House of Lords would fuel controversy over his resignation, and the Prime Minister would prefer to distance the Government from the row surrounding it.

If the outgoing police chief is denied a peerage, he will be the first retiring head of Scotland Yard not to get one in almost two decades. It had been expected that Sir Ian would be given a peerage within months of stepping down. But a Downing Street source said yesterday that had been ruled out.

I think that proves Public Servant Daily’s point.

Can’t I Turn My Back For Even One Bloody Day?

Published on October 4, 2008

Due to a trip to IKEA on Thursday and Martin’s consequent attack of bookcase building and orgy of shelf filling, there’s been no pc access and therefore no posting since Thursday morning.

Sorry, couldn’t help it, but the bookcases do look nice.

Typically, the moment I walked away from the keyboard, Ian Blair got canned, the bailout bill passed (thus enabling the world’s biggest robbery with menaces EVAR), and WTF? What fresh hell is is this? Peter Mandelson’s back in government?

Well, bugger me three ways to Wednesday with a technicolour hedgehog. Sideways. I thought I’d lost my capacity for surprise.

We know why Brown’s done jumped the shark – he’s desperate, that’s obvious. But why would an egoist like Mandelson accept an effective demotion to accept a position under someone he’s known to loathe?

That brings me to my comment of the day, which comes from the responses to Michael White’s column in the Guardian:

Newsed1

Mandy did this for one reason.

He will become Lord Mandelson.

A man who wanted to live the life so much he took a secret loan, can’t believe his luck. No amount of spin or ‘borrowed’ money could have bought a title.

And Gordon snared a man whose self-preening is such that’s it’s worth 18 months onboard the HMS McTitanic for a lifetime of being a Lord

Mandy gets Ermine and Gordo gets the arch shit-flinger.

There’s no more to it than that.

BANG. Hits the nail right on the head.

Interested as I am in the minutiae and the niceties of politico-social etiquette, I have a small protocol question. Mandelson has a long -term partner who lives with him in Brussels. If they marry, as they are entitled to, do they become Lord and Lord Mandelson?

There Is No Obe Wan

Published on September 28, 2008

With the news this morning that the Bradford & Bingley building society is to be nationalised, no wonder people are getting exceedingly jittery and very, very angry.

The banking system as it stands is a crumbling edifice of avarice, dishonesty and jaw-dropping incompetence, on the verge of falling apart and hurting millions. No amount of panicky governmental tinkering and emergency taxpayer-funded bailouts will slow the accelerating collapse; the foundations were rotten from the start. That rock of financial security? Just shifting sand.

How tempting it is to want to wipe it all out and start again. Let’s blame it all on Gordon Brown and vote in the Tories! That’ll show Labour, the hypocritical bastards.

But although no one has clean hands in this, least of all the Tories, Cameron, his sidekick Osborne and the Conservative Party are actually precipitating the bank crash to ensure their own political and financial survival:

The Tories were accused last night of being bankrolled by a City ‘wolf pack’ after it emerged that the party was receiving hundreds of thousands of pounds from hedge fund managers who have been making vast sums of money from plunging bank shares.

After the Financial Services Authority had, in effect, barred the controversial practice of short-selling bank stocks and the Treasury was forced to draw up a rescue package for Bradford and Bingley, it emerged that a small group of City financiers who have made fortunes from falling stock markets are paying at least £50,000 a year to the party.

The Labour party should wish they had such donors. No wonder Brown & Darling banned short selling; it’s been directly enriching Tory party coffers. Remember Bush’s Pioneers’ Club?

Bush Pioneers are people who gathered $100,000 for George W. Bush’s 2000 or 2004 presidential campaign. Two new levels, Bush Rangers and Super Rangers, were bestowed upon supporters who gathered $200,000+ or $300,000+, respectively, for the 2004 campaign, after the 2002 McCain–Feingold campaign finance law raised hard money contribution limits. This was done through the practice of “bundling” contributions. [1] There were 221 Rangers and 327 Pioneers in the 2004 campaign and 241 Pioneers in the 2000 campaign (550 pledged to try).[1] A fourth level, Bush Mavericks, was used to identify fundraisers under 40 years of age who bundled more than $50,000. [2]

Nineteen of the original Pioneers became ambassadors in 2001. Three Pioneers have been convicted of politics-related crimes.

David Cameron, aping Bush, has a Pioneers Club of his very own:

Their donations entitle them to membership of an elite supporters club called the Leaders Group, which bestows invitations to functions attended by David Cameron, something that has prompted allegations that the Tory leader is supporting ‘cash for access’.

[…]

Hedge fund managers whose donations entitle them to membership of the group include Michael Hintze of CQS, who has given £662,500 and whose organisation shorted shares in Bradford and Bingley. Two other men who qualify as members of the group are Paul Ruddock, who has given almost £210,000, and David Craigen, who has donated £50,000. The pair’s investment firm, Lansdowne, was exposed last week as shorting shares in HBOS.

[My emphasis]

The Tories are profiting directly from and are implicated in bank collapses, and it’s a below the fold squib? Shows how Labour and their rapidly dwindling gang of media supporters have lost the plot: once they’d’ve been on a story like this like white on rice.

At least the Lib Dems noticed:

Yesterday critics were quick to attack Cameron for taking money from hedge funds. ‘Now we see that the same hedge fund wolf pack who brought HBOS to its knees are bankrolling the Tory party,’ said Lord Oakeshott, the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman.

Ah yes, the Lib Dems. Help us, Vincey Wan Cablekenobe, you’re our only hope!

Not:

The Liberal Democrats are facing an embarrassing High Court battle with a lawyer who says that the party wrongly accepted £632,000 of his money as part of a donation. Robert Mann, 60, claims that the party failed to carry out adequate checks on the money which was received as part of a £2.4m gift from the financier Michael Brown.

So much for Lib Dem fiscal integrity. There are a couple more words that suffice to sum up the totally useless Lib Dems: Nick and Clegg.

Oh gods, we really are in the shit, aren’t we, and voting won’t make a ha’porth of difference.

Quidditch Announced For London 2012

Published on September 20, 2008

Not really, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

Labour is going to have to keep sucking up to JK Rowling though. A measly million won’t clear Labour’s debts – it’ll barely cover Hazel Blears’ handbag habit.

But the remaining rank and file at conference and in the constituencies are chuffed and the press has their juicy weekend nugget of politics, cash and celebrity, so everybody’s happy.

Not.