She did nothing wrong either

The all-pervasive saintliness of Labour MP’s has claimed yet another victim. “Treasury Minister” Kitty Ussher (of whom it was once said…”who?”) is the latest to resign because she was only obeying orders, er sorry, because she has done nothing wrong. (see also my blog of May 28).

Of course if you really HAD done nothing wrong, it would not be difficult to imagine how sickened you might feel to find yourself surrounded by the people who brought us Iraq, a police state, a bankrupt country etc etc (see my blogs passim). Ms Ussher is accused of temporarily flipping the designation of her main home just before she sold one of her abodes in order to avoid paying tax of at least £9,750. Her resignation letter does not deny this charge. If it is true, surely even Labour can see that it is completely unacceptable behaviour for a senior figure in the ministry responsible for making the rest of us pay tax. If Gordon Brown had any sense, he would make this abundantly clear in his reply.

How typical of Labour to get the worst of both worlds. The minister goes, but her refusal to offer even the most grudging apology to the British people means the resignation does nothing to begin the lengthy process of rehabilitating the party’s reputation.

Note to any further MP’s/ministers considering standing down. Please spare us any more of the sanctimonious, self-pitying, “I have done nothing wrong” drivel. If you have think you have done nothing wrong, but the dreadfully unreasonable British people seem to think otherwise, call a by-election and let your electors give their verdict.

Carry on shooting + number crunching

Another mass shooting in the United States. This time a man walked into a room at Binghamton, New York State, where people were sitting exams to become US citizens. After killing 13 and critically injuring four more, the gunman, said to be of Vietnamese origin, shot himself.

Last Sunday, a man gunned down seven patients and a nurse at a nursing home in Carthage, North Carolina, before police shot and wounded him, while on March 10, a 28 year old Alabama man killed 10 people before shooting himself. (See my blog of March 12)

President Obama pronounced himself “shocked and saddened” at the latest shooting. Will he do anything significant to tighten up America’s gun laws? Same safety advice as yesterday – don’t hold your breath.

Number crunching. £300,000 - amount Labour MP Sir Stuart Bell claims mystery person is trying to make from selling details of MP’s expense claims. £93,000,000 – amount of our money MP’s claimed in expenses last year.

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?

INTERESTING BLOG. Witty and stimulating thoughts on music, art, language and liners at http://www.speaktheculture.net/blog/

Police state - a disaster in the making

Reasonably free societies do not turn into police states overnight. It is a journey of many steps. We have already taken some. Cardinal de Retz said back in the 17th Century that of all the emotions, none clouds the judgment so much as fear, and fear – especially fear of terrorism - has been the main weapon used, wittingly or unwittingly, by Labour to move us along the road to tyranny.

Labour has created something like 3,000 new crimes, and imprisoned tens of thousands more British people. “Anti-terrorism” legislation allows people to be locked up for longer without trial, and it has also been widely misused against, among others, a leading opposition MP, a Holocaust survivor who dared to question what the then Foreign Secretary was saying, and a staggering 7,000 (!) trainspotters.

More steps are planned – like identity cards, logging everyone’s emails, and holding inquests in secret. Our MP’s meanwhile do not bother to scrutinise much of this destruction of our liberties, allowing the government to use so-called secondary legislation to bypass the increasingly irrelevant House of Commons – for more details see
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/henryporter/2009/jan/14/statutory-instruments-parliament

Thank God our MP’s have time for much more important matters, like making sure we can’t find out about their expenses.

We can still stop and reverse the drift to a police state, but if we don’t take the opportunity now, one day it will be too late.