Labour anniversary + Indian massacre

It is 43 days since Labour’s deputy leader Harriet Harman announced on television that disgraced bank boss Sir Fred Goodwin would not be allowed to keep his £700,000 a year pension. The payment was “not going to happen.” The hapless Gordon Brown, she told us, had “said that it is not acceptable and therefore it will not be accepted.”

So what has Labour done in the six weeks that have elapsed since to keep their promise to the British people? Er, can’t think of anything offhand. Maybe they’ve just been too busy making up lies to try to smear opposition politicians.

On this day.....90 years ago, British soldiers opened fire on unarmed Indian demonstrators in the Jallianwala garden in Amritsar. The shooting went on for ten minutes, and at the end of it, according to official figures, 379 men, women and children lay dead, though some estimates put the real total at more than 1,000.

The officer in command, Brigadier-General Reginald Dwyer, was officially censured and resigned from the army, though the House of Lords passed a motion praising his conduct, and an appeal run by a British newspaper for him raised £30,000.

A result!

In Saturday’s blog, I wrote about the way in which Labour’s attacks on our civil liberties were slowly but surely turning us into a police state, and I contrasted our MP’s relaxed inaction in the face of this threat with their enthusiastic hyperactivity when it comes to stopping us finding out about their expenses.

What do you know? Yesterday Gordon Brown announced he was shelving this latter plan. Even Disaster History blog doesn’t normally get results this quickly! But typically Labour has managed to seize defeat from the jaws of victory. Was the government dropping the idea because it had seen the light and realised it was outrageous to try to hide MP’s expenses from the rest of us who pay for them? No. The problem was that opposition parties were refusing to support the cover-up, grumbled the PM.

FACT. Labour’s Deputy Leader, Harriet Harman, was once legal officer for the National Council for Civil Liberties (now Liberty). What is she doing supporting the authoritarian changes I wrote about on Saturday?

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