Yesterday saw the biggest terrorist attack on London in many years, as four bombs killed dozens and injured hundreds. Television schedules were cleared as an apparent power surge on the London Underground turned into something much more sinister, and the roof was blown off a double-decker bus. The contrast between the mood in London today, and the mood 24 hours ago is palpable even to me, 200 miles away.

The BMA’s building in Tavistock Square was left spattered with blood. An institution founded on the principle of helping the most needy made unclean in the name of a loving, caring religion. The G8, meeting to discuss action to be taken against many of the injustices Muslims try to fight, disrupted. Innocent bystanders killed, as specifically forbidden in the Koran. Is any further proof needed that ‘religious extremist’ is a misnomer? These people couldn’t be further removed from the very religious principles they claim to defend. They aren’t ‘religious extremists’ – they’re amoral murders who sully the good name of the religion they claim to defend.

Yet to fight a ‘war on terror’ and actively engage in combat with these people is not helpful. To do so gives them a true cause to battle against. By simply defending ourselves from their attacks, and recovering as quickly as possible when they manage to strike, we stop pro-actively providing them with reasons to attack, and make their job of recruitment much harder. Curbing our own civil liberties through ill-thought-out legislation and restrictions on our daily lives only serves to give these people hope, and a sense of achievement, to further invigorate their disturbed cause.

Dozens of people have been unexpectedly – and almost inexplicably – bereaved in this attack, and my thoughts are with them. But it is crucial that these poor people hold firm, and stand united with the rest of London against the people who committed these atrocities; and however hard it is, that means not seeking vengeance against the religion or people they claim to represent, as these are as innocent as their loved ones.

Our government must also respond properly, with correct measure, and should not try and restrict our freedoms further. As high as is the human cost of this terrible tragedy, is freedom not worth so much more? This country has certainly paid a price many times higher on many occasions during our history. Of course we should defend our country, but not at any cost. To do so simply increases the perceived success of these terrorists.

Image taken from heute.de

From the Times:

Hundreds of volunteers are being trained by police to trap drivers speeding on rural roads. The “village vigilante” scheme, which started as a local experiment in traffic policing, has quietly expanded across large swathes of the country.

I should be raging about this. I should be up in arms about the fact that the police are essentially sanctioning and aiding vigilante action. I should be pointing out that we pay police to keep law and order in this country, and they shouldn’t be out recruiting the public to do that job for them. But I can’t; it just seems like too much of a good idea.

Speeding is a huge problem in this country, and an area of widespread law-breaking. You’d think that this very fact would lead politicians to reconsider the law in the first place, but it hasn’t. That’s neither here nor there in this discussion, though, because a lot of speeding is senselessly dangerous. Therefore, to go back to a situation where people caught speeding are not issued with a fine, but instead with advice on why they shouldn’t be doing it, and thus increasing drivers’ education and understanding of the problem, can only be a very good thing. The fact that the police are asking volunteers to help out with this scheme so that they can concentrate on catching ‘real’ criminals should surely delight Daily Mail readers everywhere.

These volunteers have no police powers. They’re simply issuing advice to motorists. It’s no different to charities advising kids not to get into drugs because they can be seriously detrimental to health. So whilst I’m less than impressed with other ‘community policing’ measures such as CSOs, this doesn’t seem such a bad idea to me. So I’d broadly support the proposal.

Michael Portillo has written a piece in today’s Times that I almost entirely agree with. That doesn’t happen very often.

From the Sindie:

The cost of an NHS dental check-up is to rise sharply to help pay for a ceiling on the costliest treatments.

This government burying bad news amid all the Live8 coverage? Never.

During the election campaign, Mr Blair said

You cannot determine specifically how many people are here illegally

He even said it was impossible to estimate the number. I know, because I sat and watched the interview when he made these claims.

Also during the election campaign, John Salt came up with a figure of 500,000 illegal immigrants, which ministers called

grossly inaccurate

Of course, how they knew it was inaccurate when they were unable to make the calculations themselves is a mystery.

Now it’s quite understandable that the Labour party would be a little coy about admitting that 500,000 people are in the country illegally when an election is being fought in which immigration and asylum are central themes.

Yesterday, though, the Home Office declared that there are approximately 570,000 illegal immigrants in the country. Which is, no doubt, a help when we’re debating an ID cards bill, which is (nonsensically) supposed to tackle illegal immigration.

Clearly confused, some bright spark asked the Prime Minister’s Offical Spokesperson if it had come as a surprise to the Prime Minister that Home Office were able to produce statistics on illegal immigration given that he had said that such figures were impossible to calculate. The PMOS’s reply? That Tony Blair could not possibly have known the figure during the interview because it hadn’t yet been calculated. So why he said it was impossible to calculate, nobody really knows.

Putting to him that this was convenient that this figure had not been available during the General Election but was now being used to justify ID Cards didn’t get anybody much further. The PMOS simply replied that the figures were not being used to justify ID cards, and…

In all of this we should not lose sight that asylum applications are down 73% from the peak of October 2002.

See what he did there? He jumped from immigration to asylum, despite condemning the Tory party during the election for confusing the two in people’s minds. In answer to a question quite clearly about immigration, he tells us that asylum applications are down!

But we really shouldn’t be surprised at all this. Tony Blair’s public image no longer matters as he’s not seeking re-election, and thus is not accountable to the wider electorate any more. He can do what he likes, and get the dirty work done without having to worry about looking bad in public. And what did Alan Milburn say during the campaign?

I’d do anything to win the election.

Guess what? He has.

The G8 is one of the few groups which truly has the power to change the world at the stroke of a pen. But, despite their huge wealth, they won’t.

Even if these largely Westernised countries offer enormous aid to those most in need, their inability to see the world from the eyes of the desperate will hinder any attempt to help: They are far to focused on Western cultures and ways of approaching problems to provide genuine solutions. They can’t even agree that condoms are the best way of preventing the spreading of HIV, despite mountains of evidence proving this, so how on Earth do they hope to tackle the far trickier problems of poverty?

But just because these countries can’t get together and change the world for the better doesn’t mean that we should write the G8 off as useless. However unproductive, argumentative, and ineffective the meetings are, we should celebrate the fact that at least these eight leading nations are co-operating and even holding meetings in an age of cynicism, distrust, and warfare.

Achievements aren’t everything. The symbolism is just as important. That’s why, now more than ever, the G8 summit really matters.

Originally written for Channel 4 News

I’m disappointed, but not surprised, to see this on the BBC News homepage:

Government wins key Commons vote on ID Cards Bill by majority of 31. More soon.

With Labour’s majority severely reduced, I was hoping that pointless legislation would no longer get through the House of Commons. Yet, even after watching the debate for most of the afternoon, I still see no reason for ID cards to be introduced. Maybe I’m just stupid.

One of the main arguments for ID cards in recent days, and the one apparently favoured by Mr Blair, has been that biometric passports are being introduced, and we might as well have ID cards at the same time. To me, this makes no sense. Only people who apply for the new passports will get ID cards, so why not use their passports as ID?

Charles Clarke has now conceded that ID cards won’t really help in the fight against crime, but does claim that they’ll help against serious and organised crime – the example he chose to cite on the Today programme was drug smuggling. Why would anyone smuggling drugs do so with a fake ID? It would just be one further possible trigger for suspicion. Somebody trying to smuggle drugs into the country would surely do so in a way as to appear as inconspicuous as possible. If they’re currently trying to do that using forged passports, then I suggest their logic is slightly twisted.

As for terrorism: The people who commit terrorist offences rarely use fake ID. Again, using fake ID only increases the chance of getting caught. The key to successfully committing a terrorist offence is surely to use people who would not raise any suspicion in their day-to-day lives, but are under the control of the lead fundamentalists. Not to try and get through security checks with fake ID.

And finally, the argument put forward that this should serve as a single form of unquestionable ID is dangerous. The ID cards are to carry three pieces of biometric data, since using only one doesn’t provide suitable efficacy. Now Charles Clarke is making a big deal of the fact that this will mean you’ll no longer have to collect lots of documents together to open a bank account, get a library card, or get a copy of your criminal record in a CRB check. Unless he’s planning on equipping every bank, library, and CRB representative (which include thousands of members of councils, universities, churches, youth groups…) with an iris scanner, facial recognition software, and fingerprinting devices, then these people will not be able to check the biometric data, and so these cards end up being no more secure in day-to-day use than normal photographic ID. So to then announce that this will serve as a sole form of ID makes it much easier to commit identity theft offences, as only one document will need to be forged.

So as far as I can see, our elected representatives have voted to divulge far more about our lives than ever before to governmental departments, and allow them to store this data on computers that will probably not be as secure as they should be, and that will probably cost more than the government says, for no tangible benefit. And the majority wasn’t even that narrow. Good one, guys.

When the Daily Mail starts trumpeting the cause of failed asylum seekers, it’s clear that something is seriously wrong. The issue at hand is the proposed deportation of a hundred failed asylum seekers from Zimbabwe, back to Robert Mugabe’s deplorable regime, where they will almost certainly be presumed to be British spies. They have been on hunger strike now for six days, in protest against their deportation. The Mail is against their deportation (quote from today’s Wrap):

Mail readers who are accustomed to the paper’s demands for a crackdown on asylum seekers may have to pinch themselves today. “FOR PITY’S SAKE LET THEM STAY,” splashes the paper. “How, in all conscience, can the Home Office deport more than 100 Zimbabweans to face torture at the hands of Mugabe’s evil regime?”

Three Zimbabweans involved in the opposition Movement for Democratic Change describe the torture they suffered under President Mugabe’s regime. The Mail wants to know why they are not allowed to remain in Britain while “hundreds of thousands of other would-be refugees” whose asylum applications have been refused are allowed to stay.

The difficulty here is that the asylum seekers are unable to prove that they personally are at risk of persecution. The political difficulty is that one can’t let one set of asylum seekers that don’t meet the necessary criteria stay, whilst deporting others in similar situations. Except, there have been special rules on Zimbabwe for a number of years now, preventing the deportation of failed asylum seekers. Up until the last few days, I wasn’t aware that this rule had been removed, and I can’t begin to understand why it has been changed: The situation in Zimbabwe is clearly not improving, so why remove the protection these people have been offered for so long?

Regular readers will know that I’m incredibly cynical, but is it going too far to question whether this rule was removed in order to improve the figures on deportation of failed asylum seekers in the run-up to a General Election? I have looked around quite a bit, and can’t find any other reason for the decision. But the Prime Minister’s press conference is just beginning – let’s hope that someone asks the pertinent question, and then we might know.

The public sector workers’ union, UNISON, has rejected the very idea of ID cards, and suggests that their members may even refuse to implement it. And the LSE are about to announce that, by their calculations, the estimates of how much the scheme will cost are far too low. It’s all less than good news for the government, who seem intent on forcing through the costly (and largely useless) legislation. The current situation is put most eliquently by Krishnan in today’s Snowmail:

Tonight this is where we are: the government does not know how much ID cards will cost, nor do they know how much it will save in reduced fraud, nor do they think it will prevent terrorist attack. But they want everyone to think ID cards are a good idea. I am left wondering if ID cards are the answer what is the question?

I was going to use this opportunity to make a big post explaining why I think ID cards are a bad idea. But, other than the fact the cost has now almost tripled, my objections are largely the same as they were more than a year ago. So you may as well just read that. And while you’re reading it, perhaps you can come up with the reason I called it ‘ID cards and the constitution, when it doesn’t even mention the latter. Because I’ve no idea.

I’ve pointed out before that, for me, one of the worst aspects of the Blair government is that ministers who resign in disgrace are almost invariably rehired, making a mockery of the idea of resigning because it’s the ‘right thing to do’, and removing all honour associated with standing down because you’re not worthy of office. What had never occured to me until today, thanks to a good journo asking an intelligent question of the Prime Minister’s Official Spokesperson, is that these ministers get payoffs for resigning from their posts, and then get rehired. And, on top of that, there’s not any wish to reform the system.

So not only is there no honour to resigning in disgrace any more, but it’s actually incentivised. The politician who’s done something so inescapably bad that they are forced into resigning gets a nice fat pay-off, and then is rehired. So they are, effectively, paid for being naughty. Even Dr Tanya Byron can see that’s not a good idea. And, frankly, it’s disgraceful.

Look at Estelle Morris, for example. Her mistakes put thousands of teenagers’ life plans off course, and caused untold worry and stress in families across the country. So she resigns, apparently very sorry for the mess she’s made. And I truly believe she was sorry – she seems a very open and honest woman. And yet, I guess it’s not all that difficult to be truly sorry when you know you’re going to get a nice big pay-off and a job back in government, with the associated huge salary, within a matter of months.

Tony Blair may have aspired to heading the washing-powder ‘whiter-than-white’ government, but his government is, at the very least, as soiled as the last. He should be ashamed.