From FreeDigitalPhotos.net, with permissionAirport security is increasingly becoming a hassle these days.

Just today, as well as removing my laptop, mobile and camera from my hand luggage, and everything from my pockets, I had to doff my belt, shoes, suit jacket, and overcoat in order to pass through security.

That’s a hassle, and with eight personal possessions slipping through a public security area separately, it’s a wonder that it all gets returned to its rightful owner at the other end. In fact, experience tells me that it doesn’t – I can’t remember the last time I was being screened and didn’t see someone called back as they’d left an item behind.

Add in the ludicrous arrangement that liquids can no longer be carried through security except in a clear plastic bag of specified dimensions and in bottles of specified volumes, and catching a flight has really started to become a serious hassle.

With the introduction of charges for carrying hold baggage and, with some airlines, even for checking in, we’re becoming used to being squeezed for every last penny when travelling by air.

So, given the combination of increasing numbers of reports of the utter uselessness of airport security as it is, and the increasing proliferation of schemes like this (UK) and this (US) which – for a fee – ease the burden of security checks on individuals, is the notion that airport security is being exploited to make money really such a foolish one?

After all, it’s hard to conclude that risk assessments will ever reduce the security hoop-jumping as long as airlines and airports are profiting from it – certainly a change in their fortunes since the measures were first introduced.

You have to admire the entrepreneurial ingenuity of airlines – after all, who’d have thought there was money to be made in allowing people to queue jump? It’s the perfect money-making scheme: Charging big bucks for something which costs the airline absolutely nothing.

Yep, £3,500,000 of taxpayers money – your money – is about to be presented to Marks & Spencers for some teacakes.

You may have thought that teacake expenditure would have decreased now John Prescott is no longer in Government, but there really is a very good reason for the increase.

In 1973, M&S decided to start selling teacakes, and the VAT man decided that they were biscuits, and so insisted on collecting VAT on them. The clue was in the name, really. They’re teacakes, not teabiscuits.

Then, a little over twenty years later, another VAT man realised that the teacakes were, in fact, cakes, and that VAT shouldn’t be collected on them. But between 1973 and 1994, £3.5 million pounds of VAT had been wrongly paid to the Government.

In its infinite wisdom, the government decided that this £3.5m shouldn’t be given back. They reasoned that people had paid for their teacakes, not to give a donation to M&S, and so to give the money back to M&S would be deeply unfair.

So they gave M&S a cursory 10%, and kept the rest for themselves.

Now, a further thirteen years later, the European Court has decided that this was a little unfair, and insisted that the government give the wrongly collected taxes back – costing us all £3.5m.

But then again, they weren’t just teacakes – they were M&S teackes.

This Labour Government is a tenacious beast.

For some time, the Government has wanted to extend the period for which terror suspects can be detained without charge from the current 28 days to something a little bit longer. Quite how much longer doesn’t really matter.

Proposals existed for 56 days, 58 days, and 90 days. All fell flat on their face. This left Labour embarrassed.

Liberty pointed out that the law already allows for detention for 58 days if the government declare a state of emergency – and surely an emergency would be the only time in which we’d want to tear up the principal of innocence without proven guilt on which we have relied for most of modern history.

Yet even this wasn’t good enough – Labour hadn’t got its way, and so announced that declaring a state of emergency would mean that the terrorists had won. Rewriting the basic principles of criminal justice doesn’t do that, apparently.

And so, Labour’s Home Secretary du jour Jacqui Smith is trying again, proposing that detention without trial should be allowed for up to 42 days. There doesn’t seem to be any particular rational reason why 42 days rather than the defeated 56 days. I guess she’s just hoping to be lucky this time. You’d think opposing such a measure would be more a case of principle than a case of quibbling about 14 days, but maybe we’re wrong.

Labour has put forward no convincing arguments as to why we’d want to detain people for 42 days without trial – longer than any other country in the world. The CPS, Police, Security Service, and Former Attorney General have all said that 28 days is perfectly adequate. But the Labour Government doesn’t like not getting its way, so is trying again.

So why, out of all the possible numbers, would they pick 42 days? Therein lies the mystery…

Of course, perhaps Jacqui Smith is a fan of Douglas Adams. After all, 42 is the answer to the ultimate question about life, the universe, and everything. Maybe she’s Kabalistic, and sees herself as recreating the universe following God’s plan.

Or maybe – and this is the theory I prefer – it’s an allusion to the Valenzetti Equation. After all, once we’ve lost our basic sense of justice, surely the distruction of all humanity can’t be too far behind?

It’s been an extraordinarily bad few weeks for Mr Brown. I can’t actually remember the last bit of positive press, or even of genuine policy, that he managed to get out.

Even today, his government’s faintly ridiculous announcement about introducing a ‘skills check’ for single parents has been buried by news of more Labour sleaze, leading to the resignation of the impossibly young-looking ex-nurse Peter Watt, who was the party’s general secretary.

With the infamous lost discs, the floods, bluetongue, the ongoing saga with H5N1, the high price of petrol, the Northern Rock scandal, and so much more all obscuring the message, he’s in a bit of a pickle.

Yet, before he came to power, commentators may well have suggested that it was exactly this sort of baptism of fire that would give him a boost – after all, he’s always seemed to be excellent in a crisis. But it now appears that he’s pretty crap when he’s in the middle of the crisis himself.

If he continues to crash his way through crisis after crisis, announcing ridiculous policy after ridiculous policy, then the next government of this country will be Conservative.

Given Mr Brown’s lacklustre performance, I foresee a winter of discontent – amongst the Labour Party, at the very least – and Mr Brown’s position as PM may not seem such a given by the time it’s over.

They’ve lost half the country’s bank details, can’t keep track of our cars, publish doctors’ intimate personal details online, drop customs documents in the street, misplace laptops with personal data on them, and don’t even bother with passwords on their computers.

They lost this most recent data by sending it on couriered CD-Roms, which is certainly against policy, and possibly illegal. It’s also the way they lost Standard Life and another banks’ customer details earlier this month, and UBS’s customer details in 2005.

Of course, we already know that Government can’t learn from mistakes, since they rehired the company behind the ‘not fit for purpose’ MTAS computer system.

Now they want us to trust them with our health records and even our identities.

Is this Government serious?

You may have noticed that Dawn Primarolo, Health Minister, has asked for a report into the ‘unacceptable’ and ‘unethical’ situation whereby recovering drug addicts are given extra doses of methadone or shopping vouchers in return for clean drugs tests.

Perhaps she should start by investigating the advice endorsed by her own Government, and published by the Government-established NICE three months ago. If she does, she’ll come across this:

Principles of Contingency Management

• Offer incentives contingent on each drug-negative test, usually either:
• vouchers that can be exchanged for goods or services of the service user’s choice, or
• privileges, such as take-home methadone doses.
• The value of vouchers should start in the region of £2 and increase with each additional, continuous period of abstinence.

You see, that’s one of the many problems with evidence-based medicine – it doesn’t necessarily fit in with the Daily Mail‘s ‘druggies are scum’ agenda. Sometimes, the most effective thing to do isn’t the most popular.

But presumably, since NICE advice is now officially unethical, the government will now be performing a spectacular U-turn on all NICE guidance, and issuing drugs regardless of ‘cost-effectiveness’ – and the dementia patients who so vigorously campaign for drugs (in a way that fits in with the tabloid agenda) will now be granted all they want, as the government will no longer be able to hide behind NICE Guidelines.

Note: I was sent this book to review by the publisher, and have reviewed it in compliance with the review policy of the site. Other companies are welcome to send me stuff to review – email me using the details on the right.

Crap: A Guide to Politics is a major update on Terry Arthur’s famous book from the 70s, 95% is Crap. It aims to deconstruct ‘political speak’, and expose it as ‘crap’ of one of twelve kinds, each of which is given a chapter in the book.

The book is certainly entertaining – it’s written with humour, and certainly made me smile. However, the clear anti-government stance of the author became wearing in parts, and there was often a strong feeling of him criticising every option without offering a solution.

That said, the book does highlight some quite startling U-turns by politicians, and some fairly worrying half-truths (and worse). It highlights the way in which the political process has become corrupt, and reliant on influencing the news cycle and assuming that the voter will forget last week’s news in favour of today’s.

However, the book itself has been published at an unfortunate time, which (thanks to the turbulent political times of late) makes it appear outdated as soon as it has hit the shelves. At the time of the book’s writing, Tony Blair is leading the Labour Party, much is made of Menzies Campbell’s leadership of the Liberal Democrats, and Cameron’s Conservatism is still seen as new and exciting. Clearly, things have moved on from there, but the central messages of the book hold true.

Arthur points out the core duality of any political process – the politican must represent both their constituents’ interests and their own, which are often disparous – and highlights some fascinating (and hilarious) episodes on which this has been clearly exposed to the public. But whilst maintaining a humour, there is a serious message underneath about the damage such approaches can have on the political process as a whole.

This book is both humorous, and also a serious deconstruction of the state of political play. That duality makes the book untidy and repetitive at times, and the humour sometimes comes across as juvenile, but it isn’t a bad book. It’s certainly accessible enough for the general reader, but perhaps not quite heavy enough for the political junkie. It’s worth a read.

Win My Review Copy

To comply with my self-imposed policy of not accepting payment for reviews, I held a competition to give away my review copy of Crap: A Guide to Politics. But it’s closed now – you’re too late.

Buy Your Own Copy

If you’re not feeling lucky, Crap: A Guide to Politics is now available to buy from sjhoward.co.uk/shop.

A single sentence in Mr Brown’s conference speech could have saved him a huge humiliation today. But he tried to keep his options open for too long, and look where he’s ended up. A huge climbdown following an unnecessary build-up, in the face of a terrible poll.

The number of mistakes that have been made in the handling of this situation is staggering.

He’s announced this decision in the face of a poll showing a Conservative lead, meaning that the poll gets more attention that it otherwise would have.

He’s done it on a Saturday so he gets a bashing in the Sunday papers and the Monday papers.

He’s done it in an embargoed interview, so the only pictures to accompany the story for the first (almost) 24 hours are those of Mr Cameron criticising him.

He’s done it in a BBC exclusive interview, pissing off every other broadcaster and guaranteeing himself a rough ride.

In fact, I don’t think there’s anything right about the way he’s done this. Yet he’s supposed to be one of the greatest political strategists of our time. What’s gone wrong? Is the pressure of being PM taking his eye off the political ball? And if he makes this much mess of not having an election campaign, how will he manage the real thing in a couple of years’ time?

Help me – I’m agreeing with Alastair Campbell.

There are many, many reasons why Mr Brown won’t call an election in the next few weeks. These include…

• It would be difficult for him to ‘win’ – only an improvement on Mr Blair’s last performance will be seen as a ‘win’, and that’s not the current trend.
• The latest polls – Labour has virtually lost its lead.
• The postal strike – Potential for electoral chaos.
• Electoral register – Because the new register only comes into force from 1st December, thousands will probably be disenfranchised.
• Technology – Much of the technical equipment that failed in the May elections hasn’t been fixed.
• The defence against not calling an election is stronger than that against calling an election. And not calling an election when the Conservatives have called for it makes Cameron look powerless, which is a reasonable swap for Brown looking a bit wimpy.
• The Brown honeymoon period is now well and truly over.

I’d be surprised if he called an election against that background. My history of predictions is pretty terrible, but poor ability doesn’t stop anything else I do…