Rendition Memo in Full

What follows is the full and unexpurgated text of the Foreign Office memo relating to renditions through UK territory and airspace that was leaked to, and published by, the New Statesman last week – now in a usable format, the scanned PDF having been put through OCR software […]

One God Further

I did say in an earlier piece that I’d comment at greater length on Richard Dawkins’ two-part polemical documentary for Channel 4, The Root of All Evil? A few days on and I’m not so sure that there’s much about the two documentaries, themselves, that needs to be […]

Libertine Democrats

Let’s take a quick head count here. So far we have John Hemming getting jiggy with a Birmingham City Councillor and broadening his extended family, both the former Leader of the Parliamentary party and the Leader in the House of Lords on the ten-step programme and now former […]

Who’s watching? Not the public

Spy Blog has picked up on a clear but often little regarded anomaly in the Freedon of Information Act after issuing an FOIA request for information to the Interception of Communications Commissioner regarding the Wilson Doctrine. This is one of those things I’ve known about for quite some […]

Wake up at the back

Mick Hume of Spiked (formerly Living Marxism) writing for the Times, today: The streamlined vetting and barring scheme for those working with children or “vulnerable adults

Taking the CSA Challenge

Ok. Well its seems the challenge for this evening – courtesy of Rob Newman in comments – is to take a more positive view of the issue of Child Support and suggest workable alternatives to the current system; or at least some sort of proactive approach to solving […]

Polishing Turds

THe BBC headline reads ‘Private firms to chase CSA debts‘ – it might as well read ‘Government try to polish turd’. The report seems straight forward enough; the latest master plan to try and turn around the Child Support Agency looks set to be to try using private […]

Hyperventilating Headline

Bookdrunk does a first rate job of pulling to pieces the gross abuse of statistics behind the Daily Mail’s latest hyperventilating headline which claims that: Doctors ‘help’ 2 in 3 to die Which is, of course, a complete load of bollocks. Euthanasia is a difficult and emotive subject […]

The Land of Do-As-You-Please

Well, we seem to be heading for a showdown between the Lord and the Commons on the matter of the Terrorism Bill and the proposed new offence of ‘glorifying’ terrorism, which was removed from the Bill by a Lords amendment only yesterday. If, by any chance, you’ve been […]

Standing on the shoulders of idiots.

On Monday, Charles Clarke gave yet another one of his absurd assurances to Parliament – as chronicled by Spy Blog, of which the most interesting comment was this: Perhaps I can go even further. All of the many databases that are held about all of us in this […]