New Labour loses old values

It seems that New Labour have begun to shrug off the last shackles of socialist ideology in Stephen Byers' announcement that the party's connections with the unions should be 'modernised', as he euphemistically put it.

Although the unions have for a long time played dead for New Labour, it seems they're not going to be 'playing' the part for long. New Labour doesn't want a "small, unrepresentative number of people" to affect Labour's policy making.

There is some hypocrisy here. Whilst the unions are being put out into the cold, New Labour welcomes the fat cats and consultants into it's loving tendrils.

Angry doodles

The clinically stupid and plain racist are up in arms, outraged that our boys in blue in London failed to bag loads of arrests at recent demonstrations against the so-called 'Muhammad Cartoons' in London. Apparently those protesters with the more militant bent should have been arrested for their threats of violence and revenge.

I don't believe that we should give in our rights to free speech every time someone's religious feelings are hurt. We've seen it with the efforts of the fantical Christian Voice's attempts to shut down "Jerry Springer - The Opera", and Sikh groups stopping the play "Behzti".

Anyhow, if your god or prophet is blessed and all-powerful, cartoons taking the piss aren't going to bother you too much. Besides, if it does get up your god's nose, he (assuming a your god is a man) can just send the cartoonists a plague of locusts, smite their asses, or simply wait until judgement day (or whatever day of reckoning your god has) to remind the doodlers of their evil deeds.

However, many fail to realise that protests like this are intelligence gold for the security services. Most demonstrations now, irrespective of the political purpose, have in attendance a contingent of police (and likely other security services) whose sole purpose at these events is to collect intelligence. Thousands of photographs and hours of video footage is taken and pored over by excited spooks.

Perhaps there is a point that the law should be seen to served. But any heavy handed attempts by the plod to wade into these demonstrations arresting folk would just scatter the radicals to whatever dark corner they came from.

So whilst it would be nice and suit our sensibilities to see these yobs arrested, it isn't the clever thing to do.