Yesterday, the Vatican published ‘Ten Commandments’ for Driving in a document apparently entitled Guidelines For The Pastoral Care Of The Road. Whether that’s a bad translation, or whether they genuinely think tarmac requires loving care and careful attention to its psychology and emotions is unclear to me. I’m also impressed by the number of times they’ve managed to squeeze ‘not’ into this ‘commandment’:

Charitably convince the young and not so young not to drive when they are not in a fitting condition to do so.

Also keep in mind that, according to the traditional commandments, thou shalt not not not not not kill, nor shalt thou never fail not to covet the woman who may or may not be your neighbour’s wife.

Perhaps more pertinently, it’s interesting to see that the Vatican are moving with the times. Yeah, cars have been around for some 250 years or so, but that’s moving quite fast for the Vatican. After all, condoms have been around for the better part of 3,500 years – much longer than the Bible – and yet the Church has still failed to acknowledge that they help prevent the spread of STIs.

But the most startling thing about this is that it’s like something you’d have read in the Daily Mail of the nineties, when they were still hot on promoting the so-called Christian values of middle England, and hadn’t relegated religion to a weekly 2cm box containing a Bible verse, hidden amongst the letters pages. Of course, they take great pride in reporting this as the Pope issuing new guidelines for road safety, when in fact this load of garbage was created by a Pontifical Council (about as accurate as saying that a Home Office press-release gives Tony Blair’s personal views), and also claiming that one of the commandments is that ‘Thou shalt not make rude gestures’, which is just blatantly false, but clearly reads better than saying that the document advises courtesy.

Gosh, I got distracted there. I meant to say, the most startling thing is that this is essentially a press release from an increasingly media-driven Vatican – the same Vatican which has a Da Vinci Code debunker – and the same Vatican which increasingly seems to be attempting to play to a modern (small-c) conservative audience, rather than sticking to it’s traditional values of – well, stonings, wars, and murders.

I think it’s pretty from the site as a whole that I’m not the world’s greatest fan of organised religion, but when the Vatican employs a Campbell-esque strategy to woo the media to gain converts at the expense of their traditional values, then we’ve really reached a new low.

A week ago today, Alastair Campbell gave a comprehensive and well-argued defence of Tony Blair’s speech about the modern media.

Whilst I don’t agree with Mr Campbell, much of what he says in his post is interesting, and I’d strongly urge you to read the whole thing. But I just wanted to pull out this little bit:

The PM went through some of the many changes that we put in place when I was at Number 10 to try to improve things. On the record briefings, Freedom of Information, TB’s monthly press conferences … Nick Robinson made a very revealing comment about this a while back … The trouble was, he said, that TB was so good at them they became boring. In other words, unless the elected politician was screwing up, saying something hugely controversial, or fitting into the media’s preordained agenda, they can cut to some pimply youth in Downing Street telling you what the politician actually meant.

You’ll note that Alastair Campbell thinks Blair was good because he wasn’t controversial. He thinks that the fact that Mr Blair never says anything to offend anyone is a good thing. It’s an interesting point of view.

If your aim in life is to get elected and stay elected – power for power’s sake – then never doing anything to offend anyone is clearly the best way forward. If you want to get elected because you have real beliefs, and you want to change the country for the better, then you’re going to have to tread on some toes.

Undoubtedly, Tony Blair has trodden on toes. But wouldn’t he be a much better PM if he engaged with the issues, and argued for his point of view, rather than saying nothing controversial, not engaging with the argument, and just using a huge Parliamentary majority to perform his wishes whilst never offending anyone?

Is it not better to engage the electorate and convince them of your argument, rather than merely placating them? Sure, you’ll alienate sections of the population, but you’ll have a loyal following of those who believe in your cause, and who support you because they believe you’re doing the right thing, rather than supporting you because you ‘don’t seem too bad’.

It might be the bigger political risk, but surely it’s the more noble course – and certainly not indicative of ‘screwing up’.

The greatest politicians are, almost without exception, divisive in their time – either in their country or their party. Thatcher and Churchill are probably the greatest Prime Ministers of the 20th Century, yet both were controversial in their own way. They certainly offended people – and it changed the country (arguably) for the better.

Have we really come to a situation where the hunger for power is such that our politicians want it for its own sake? Have we really come so far from political idealism? I fear so, but dearly hope not.

I know it’s wrong to laugh at this, really I do. I know it’s cruel, bad Karma, and just downright mean. But it’s also incredibly funny.

[flashvideo filename=”http://sjhoward.co.uk/video/skynewsflood.flv” title=”Stranded (Sky News)” picture=”http://sjhoward.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/altfloodshot.PNG” ratio=”14:9″ /]

My favourite quotes from the dippy reporter, who is clearly engaging mouth before brain:

Can you reverse?

Yeah, she’s climbing on the roof for nothing.

…six feet of water that she could be stuck in…

Do you think you’d be able to see her if she was in six feet of water?

And then the multi-angle split-screen… it’s fab!

If you’re worried about the poor lady, the Sky News website says she was rescued shortly afterwards by someone in a 4×4.

Please, somebody tell me that this is joke.

We have a country bursting with fantastic artists and graphical designers – with even more young talent, who could have been employed to widen the scope of the benefit of the Olympics. There are, of course, also people who couldn’t design their way out of a paper bag and struggle to recolour an existing logo without it looking crap at the top of a blog post.

But instead of employing either of those sets of people, we seem to have plumped for Fun House’s graphics people, having sent them on a fact-finding mission to China. I assume that this means that the Olympics are to be ‘wacky’, involve lots of messy gunge, and will be presided over by the inimitable Pat Sharpe.

There’s no other explanation.

Edit: Over on the PM Blog, Ian comments that it looks like somebody giving oral sex. It’s so true, and so reminiscent of this.

Since last Thursday, when the story of the refusal of Tul Bahadur Pun’s immigration application broke, I’ve been contacted by a quite extraordinary range of people asking me to support his appeal – from people I’ve never met, to fellow bloggers, to personal friends, to TV presenters. Mr Pun has, intentionally or otherwise, become the cause célèbre of students, social networkers, and bloggers nationwide (examples: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10), but I’m not so sure about his case.

Tul Bahadur Pun is an 84 year-old Nepalese citizen. He’s lived in Nepal for most of his life, and, like may 84 year-olds, has developed a collection of medical conditions – in his case, heart problems, asthma, and diabetes. In his home country of Nepal, medication is not regularly available for his consumption, and so he’d like to move to Britain.

Mr Pun has no family in Britain. He has no-one to support him. He wants to move here to use the services of the NHS, and no doubt rely on Social Services for his social requirements. He is the classical immigrant ‘drain on society’ that the Daily Mail is forever seeking to vilify.

Yet a huge amount of support has surrounded Mr Pun’s case, as he fought for 18 years with the Indian Army and was awarded the Victoria Cross for his efforts with the allied forces during the Second World War. Does that entitle him to British citizenship? By current immigration rules? No. Morally? I’m not sure.

If you read around his case, you’ll come across a lot of emotive stuff about him being denied entry to Britain on the basis that he ‘failed to demonstrate strong ties to the UK’. In immigration terms, this means he’ll be reliant on the state, and so saying that receipt of the VC ‘demonstrates strong ties’ is misleading. You’ll also note that this was only one of several reasons why his application was denied, another being that it was not demonstrated that regular medication would actually improve his condition. Try to find the full text of his rejection has beaten me, which makes it difficult to make an informed judgement on the case.

But more sinister about the whole campaign for which Mr Pun has become the poster-boy is that thousands of people are being urged to sign a Downing Street petition calling for all Ghurkas to have the right to come and settle in the UK. People who support this one individual case are being urged to support a campaign that has quite different aims to merely allowing Mr Pun access to healthcare. It’s extrapolation from one emotive case to the cases of many, and however sympathetic I might feel towards Mr Pun, the underhand way in which his lawyers are playing this game is despicable.

If we open our doors to all Ghurkas, who else are we to admit? Is every US soldier that has served alongside British comrades in Iraq to be entitled to NHS care because of the shocking state of medical care in their home country? And besides, why are we limiting ourselves to those who have made a military contribution to the country? Are there not many others who’ve made an equally large contribution, with equally large personal sacrifice, who deserve citizenship too? I’m sure as Brits we have plenty of our own examples of Clara Maass, but our national obsession with remembering and honouring militarian sacrifices means that they are tragically forgotten. Many, many people risk their lives for the good of this country day after day – only the tiniest proportion of them are military personnel.

Mr Pun fought for the wellbeing of a grateful nation, and did so with exceptional bravery. Nonetheless, he did so voluntarily, of his own free will. He now has health problems unrelated to his service, but would like something back from the country for which he gave so much. I’m not sure we’re morally obliged to provide it, but it seems mean-spirited at best to deny citizenship and care to the exceptional Mr Pun, and I will make those views known to the relevant people in the relevant ways.

But who else, out of the thousands of people who apply for immigration each year, is exceptional? How do we define who ‘deserves’ our help and who doesn’t? The fact is, we condemn an awful lot of people to receiving poor medical care every year, and every one of those cases is a tragedy – but a necessary tragedy if we want to retain the level of health and social care we universally provide to citizens of our fine country.

The question is not about Mr Pun, and certainly not about allowing Mr Pun and all of his comrades have open access to the UK. The question is much bigger than that. And I have no answers.

Tony Blair wants to introduce legislation that will give the police the legal prerogative to stop anyone at any time for questioning, regardless of whether they have, or are suspected of, doing anything wrong. Should we fail to co-operate, we will be charged.

This will remove the right of citizens to go about their lives unhindered by the police. It removes the long-held principle of policing by consent. It fundamentally and irreversibly changes the nature of justice in the UK. It extends a two-tier system of control from prisons to the nation as a whole. Altogether, it just isn’t a good idea.

It’s such a bad idea, that outside of the Reid-Blair partnership, it’s hard to find anyone who supports the idea. Peter Hain – cabinet minister and deputy leadership candidate – has all but come out against it, the Lib Dems are against it, and the Conservatives are leaning in the same direction.

Yet despite the obvious problems with criminalising a nation, this plan has somehow made it to the stage of public consultation. Somehow, there’s a worrying disconnect between the top of government and the people – The government are hell-bent on winning an illogical war on ideology, while the people would quite like to stick with centuries of precedent of how a free country is run.

Gordon Brown has, of course, disappeared, and so cannot comment on this plan. But for the sake of us all, I hope his heads more screwed on than Blair’s, or I just don’t know where this madness will end…

Gordon Brown has enough nominations to ensure that he will not face a challenger for the Labour leadership. So now he has to fight a six-week election against, erm, nobody. To me, that seems a bit silly. But maybe that’s why I’m not a politician.

[flashvideo filename=”http://sjhoward.co.uk/video/pat.flv” size=”small” picture=”http://sjhoward.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/hewitt.PNG” /]

MTAS has been ditched. It will no longer be used to match junior doctors to specialist training posts. Ministers have realised that it is simply not fit for purpose.

Let me remind you what Patricia Hewitt said on Question Time on BBC One on 8th May 2007 (or remind yourself using the video mini-video on the right, or see the full-size version here):

If a minister is responsible for a major policy blunder or acts unethically then of course they should go.

Patricia Hewitt oversaw the introduction of a massively expensive computer system for matching junior doctors to specialist training posts. It has failed. It has spewed out intimate personal details of applicants onto publicly accessible parts of the web. And now it’s been ditched.

How is that not a ‘major policy blunder’?

This morning, Tony Blair was ‘delighted’ to back Gordon Brown as the next Prime Minister. I bet it hurt, and probably stuck in his throat a little. Nothing could have pained him more.

So not surprising, then, that Blair decided to get back at Brown by scheduling a speech for the same time as Brown’s campaign launch. It’s no accident – Alistair Campbell’s famed grid system tells us that. It’s clearly a spoiler.

Yesterday, Andrew Neil was practically running a book on when Blair’s first coded jibe about Blair would happen, and one commentator suggested it would be today. Looks like he was right.

Everybody with the ability to communicate appears to be commenting today on Tony Blair’s legacy today, after he announced that he would resign on 27th July.

It’s easy to point out that he’s buried bad news to the end, choosing to use the day of an interest rate rise to announcing his ‘departure timetable’, something perhaps more familiar to a steam train than a politician. Not to mention the burying of the news that the cost of the ID card scheme has increased by £840m.

It’s easy to point out that he’s the King of Soundbites to the end: “The best nation on Earth”.

It’s easy to point out that his departure had the same theme tune as his arrival, Things Can Only Get Better, and wonder when it was most true.

It’s all-to-easy for people like me to knock Blair’s achievement. We can criticise him for his sofa-style of government, his five wars, his failures.

But for all his faults, he is the first Labour Leader to secure three successive election victories. He has introduced policies which have made the country better – the minimum wage being a case in point. He is the first ‘celebrity’ Prime Minister. And he’s a very successful politician.

His legacy will be the war in Iraq – his biggest failure. His defence of his less successful policies – “I did what I thought was right” – reveals, perhaps, his biggest failing: Government should not take decisions based upon the whim of the Prime Minister – however well intentioned – but on the facts, considered opinion from experts in their field, Cabinet discussion and debate, and Parliamentary process.

It’s a legacy, but not, I think, the one he wanted.