Guarded Reason

Saw part of a programme about Childline last night. I didn't want to listen but felt compelled to hear a young man's account of how all the adults he had known as a child abused him. How the justice system had failed him, how he could not trust any adult because he had never been given anything except in return for sex. And the anguish of realising that getting justice meant reinforcing the total absence of love from his family.

This isn't in the past. This is now.

Instead of de-stabilising the world by launching imperialist crusades our government should be making things better here. Not talking about longer sentences to keep the gutter press happy; sentences punish individual offenders, they don't stop any other children getting abused. We need to find out what causes people to become so de-humanised that they use their own children as sex slaves and work out how to prevent it so that children stop suffering.

Isn't that what we elect a Labour government for ?

Tony Blair "There is no excuse for Iran or any other country to interfere in Iraq"

Quite. When are the British troops leaving, Tony ?

Pakistan made their own, gave out the recipe then said no-one else can use it
Israel claims it doesn't have any
India pretends its part of the big boys gang
No-one's seen North Korea for ages and China's playing on its own
Russia discretely helps out the new boy but won't say hello when the big boys are watching
Britain and America, their own pockets bulging, strut around enforcing rules

Its like watching children in the playground arguing over sweets.

So now we know why Blair ignored the UN Inspectors, ignored the UN Security Council, ignored the vast majority of the world's leaders, ignored his own legal advice, ignored all those who said it would make terrorism worse, ignored his own foreign secretary and large numbers of his own MP's and ignored the British people:

he was listening to the voices in his head.

So Jowel didn't know about hundreds of thousands of pounds ? Gurum-Murphy had her banged to rights when he pointed out that the status of previous mortgages would have been clear on the forms she signed for subsequent mortgages. But true to form he didn't press it home and draw blood; she couldn't possibly have thought that the previous mortgages still existed because even people with their income don't usually have three or four simultaneous mortgages on one property.

Menzies Campbell, also true to form, is happy to accept a whitewash because he doesn't want to criticise the civil service - so much for an alternative.

Like Campbell, Byers and Blunket before her she lied. Straw lied about CIA torture flights, Blair lied about WMD and Bush lied about the New Orleans disaster.

Why are we being governed by a bunch of liars ?

OK, you won't see this headline but effectively this is what is going on. The best way to ensure the success and popularity of the Holocaust-denying religious extremist heading up the Iranian state is for the west to threaten and bully the Iranian state.

The Iranians have done nothing wrong. Their nuclear industry was inspected at will by the IAEA until the west started to threaten them. There is still no evidence that they intend to build a bomb but it would be understandable if they did, given that Israel already has nuclear weapons. Jack Straw's explanation for this double standard ? Its OK for Israel to have them because they never signed up to the non-proliferation treaty. Iran did so they must be held to account. This moron, on the rare occasions when he makes a public appearance is our face to the world.

I'd like to see how the US would react if the IAEA turned up one morning at one of the secret nuclear bases in the Nevada desert and demanded unrestricted access(you can go on a virtual tour of an abandoned US nuclear base here).

Britain has a particular nerve in accusing Iran of hiding a weapons programme behind a civil programme - this is precisely what Britain was doing (see here for instance) when the Queen opened the first nuclear power station at Calder Hall in Cumberland in 1956.

I don't want any nuclear weapons or indeed any nuclear fission power plants. We've already got more of both than Iran could even contemplate developing. We need to put our own house in order and stop ressurecting nineteenth century imperialism.

excellent report from the south of Afghanistan on Channel 4 last night. just showed us the facts without telling us what we ought to think about them. a rarity indeed for British journalism. And what we saw was frightening. Schools being burned, teachers reputedly murdered ( I declare an interest) and a totally ineffective police service.

Tempting to think that the British Army are the solution.

First time I've actually heard the views of Talib fighters and their supporters. The gun men seemed most concerned about the schools imposing non-Muslim values on them. The farmer that economic support for agriculture was needed from the government before eliminating the poppy was an option. Either way they are not going to welcome the British.

We've actually been here before. When the Russians entered Afghanistan in 1980 they were invited in by a progressive government that for the first time provided opportunities for women in a secular, democratic society based in the larger urban areas. We all know what happened subsequently; not only did the red army fail to export this secular society to the rest of Afghanistan, it was eventually holed up in Kharbul and crawled back into the USSR in disgrace.

Without American help, this time, the Taliban may not fare so well but neither will the British subdue them; it'll drag on and on with neither side gaining the upper hand as it did in the north of Ireland.

I don't have a problem criticising the Taliban just because Muslims in general are under threat. I have no respect for men that treat women like cattle but those women are not going to welcome the soldiers with open arms. Its their country, the Talib fighters are their men: their husbands, their brothers, their sons. If a foreign army invaded Britain no section of society would see it as an opportunity to gain advantage, why should anyone expect Afghans to behave differently ?

What would undermine the Taliban would be a prosperous, secular alternative that would provide a real pole of attraction to those under their influence. Unfortunately the power installed by the American and British armies, the former warlords of the Northern Alliance are scarcely any better.

I'd like to attach a health warning to last night's Dispatches. Peter Hitchins, like other right wing journalists who regularly pitch up on question time, adopts a simple tactic; champion a popular and worthy concern and load it up with right wing garbage.

Hitchens told us, for instance, that British police had, until now, been different from those of other countries. Having been on the picket line at Wapping in 1986 and been punched in the face and been dragged to the ground and kicked all the way to the van on a student demo in 1987 I beg to differ. From the miners strike of 1984, the Grunwicks dispute of 1977, the General Strike of 1926, and back to the Peterloo Massacre the British Police have done the government's bidding with whatever violence they deemed necessary.

Hitchens told us, with a benign nod to the Victorian ideal, that the Justice system no longer punishes criminals but blames society for their crimes. Probably the most blatantly dishonest right wing fantasy of them all, we lock more people up, per head of population, than any other European country with the exception of Turkey. The Victorians, of course, locked up and executed children for petty theft.

Hitchens also had the arrogance to suggest that only we British, unlike our European neighbours,valued and cherished freedom. The man is a right wing loon with no integrity; he belongs in the Labour cabinet which he so despises.

Having stripped away all the nonsense, there does remain a substantial point of course and one that has exercised many of us writing these blogs - the undoubted, persistent and frightening removal of our freedoms. I find it particularly loathsome, but not surprising, that this is being done by a Labour government but anyone who thinks Cameron would repeal a single line of legislation would be disappointed. The technology and expertise gradually being brought to bear in Britain was developed in the north of Ireland, at the request of the Tory Government of Margaret Thatcher, where the population has been spied upon for the last 25 years. Hitchens never spoke out against their freedoms being curtailed.

To take just one example, the experience of the young man accused of stealing mail. The local plod, not known for their recruitment of the sharpest tools in the box, decided that he must be guilty because they had a positive forensic result. Actually this crass and shoddy use of evidence isn't new. The Birmingham Six, after being beaten to a pulp by those kindly British Police of yesteryear, were convicted in exactly the same way. The police were told that they had traces of Nitro-Glycerine on their hands. This alone was used to convict them. That was over thirty years ago. The danger of introducing more technology is that it allows the Police to make their mistakes more easily and more often.

Richard Dawkins has written that people shouldn't worry about a DNA database because its no different from using an identity parade. I respect Dawkin's determination to protect objectivity and therefore to reject religion but he also rejects politics. To a scientist, DNA testing presents no problem. But most of the public and nearly all of the Police are not scientists. We know, intuitively, that an identity parade may or may not produce the truth - we all fail to recognise people sometimes. But presented with a scientific result, with a number, many people would tend to assume it had a greater weight. In fact DNA testing is quite a limited tool. It does tell you that a person was almost certainly present but it says nothing about when and it can't tell that someone wasn't there. It should only ever be used to corroborate over evidence. The police made a crude DNA test positive equals guilty assumption with the young man accused of stealing mail; in fact he was identified because he had posted some letters in the postbox. The Birmingham Six had been playing cards, coated with plastic containing Nitro-Glycerine.

We cannot stop technology being introduced. What will make the difference between having a country where a train spotter is assumed to be a terrorist or not will be the nature of the Police and security services. Remember these are people who can't even locate an 8 metre long, 3 metre high bright white lorry. If people continue to swallow the lie that there is a Muslim plot to overthrow our way of life and so accept the need for more and more security we will end up like those awful eastern European countries that the media used to tell us about. You know, where they had house arrest, detention without trial and the police spying on everybody...ah.

The alternative is to stop bombing people, find out why so many young people are attracted to terrorism and help them using our vast wealth and technology. But Hitchens would hate that; its not very Victorian.