Dear Nick Hogan, Thanks largely to the efforts of a few bloggers, you are now back home following a stint in Forest Bank jail in Pendlebury.  A huge amount of credit for this must go to Anna Raccoon and Old Holborn, who rallied to your cause and did some seriously speedy fundraising in order to secure your release [...]

Harry Cohen has benefited from Guido’s attention in the past.   The chippy left-wing MP who disgraces the Leyton parliamentary seat once held by Winston Churchill claimed substantially more for his second home  and expenses than any other MP in London, in fact his annual expense claims of £123,718 are £30,000 higher than neighbouring Walthamstow [...]

All views are welcome especially from lurkers In conjunction with Woodnewton Associates we are carrying out a survey of PB users to find out more about ourselves, how we might improve the site and also to get a feel for the political make-up of the PB community. This is the first time we’ve ever attempted anything like [...]

Taliban gunmen have stormed into an office of the charity World Vision in Pakistan. They took the staff into a separate room and executed them one by one, according to a news report on ABC. The charity said they thought the office was targeted because it was running programmes to help women. World Vision has decided to suspend its programmes and pull out of [...]

YouGov’s daily poll has figures of CON 37%(+1), LAB 32%(nc), LDEM 17%(-3). It looks as though that sudden 20% for the Lib Dems yesterday was no more than a blip, and we are back to a 5 point Conservative lead. We are still within the margin of error of the 6 point Tory lead that [...]

YouGov daily poll (The Sun) Mar 10 Mar 9 CONSERVATIVES 37% 36% LABOUR 32% 32% LIB DEMS 17% 20% LAB to CON swing from 2005 4% 3.5% And the Lib Dems slump after last night’s boost So the Labour share remains stable tonight with the Tories edging up and the Lib Dems taking quite a hit. This will bring some relief to the blue team which yesterday touched a two and [...]

There are some of us, Mr Chairman, who have always known that Labour MPs are a bunch of unilateralist humbugs
I've seen the Major angry before, but never like this.

"How dare they? How dare they! Those lowlife communist scum... how dare they say the top brass are only complaining about the lack of kit because they're Tories! Where were those yellow-bellied vermin when we were standing up to the Ruskies and the IRA? I'll tell you where - supporting the Queen's enemies! CND, Troops Out... oh yes... while our boys were dying for us, that traitor Foot even worked for the KGB - a known fact. And our current Defence Secretary - that ridiculous little town councillor chappie - started out as a Marxist - A MARXIST! Scum - scum from the sewer."

"Well Major, they were young and foolish, and probably poorly educated... they can't be expected to understand concepts like patriotism and loyalty to Britain. They probably believed communism would help the working man, and the IRA was a force for good. I mean not everyone had the benefit of your upbringing..."

"Upbringing?! I'm beginning to wonder about you, Tyler. You shouldn't need upbringing to…

1. Ambush Predator gives Mary Dejevsky from the Independent a lesson in geography. 2. Constantly Furious has found an excellent way to get rich quick. 3. 13th Spitfire thinks Britain should tell the EU to Foxtrot Oscar. 4. Daniel1979 produces some helpful graphs to explain why the Conservatives are a bit rubbish. 5. Heresy Corner discovers that some Lib [...]

The petty fascists at Indymedia are wet with excitement because some of their number have smashed up a few Tesco stores, apparently in the name of “anti-Capitalism”. This is the new breed of authoritarian. Unlike earlier incarnations, they wear the symbols not of the far-right, but of the far-left. They are utterly undemocratic. They cannot accept that people [...]

Clearly I’m no expert on foreign policy. That’s why I’m typing this in the spare room and not ordering the bombing of villages in Afghanistan. That said, something bothers me about Foreign Secretary David Miliband’s plan for peace in the country: This involves three things. First, the reintegration into Afghan society of low-level insurgents prepared to [...] Related posts:David Miliband’s elegant slumming David Miliband: A beacon of hope David Miliband declares the war on terror over

Just what tickled my fancy in the last few days… [EDIT: More like months, obviously.] David Miliband – The War in Afghanistan: How to End It – '…only politics will end the War in Afghanistan'. And to think it only took Miliband eight years and countless dead to think of it. The boy's a genius. BBC News – [...] Related posts:Links and stuff from between March 9th and March 11th Links and stuff from between March 23rd and March 31st Links and stuff from between March 17th and March 18th

Nick Hogan, the publican who let his drinkers smoke, is a free man tonight, back behind the bar rather than behind bars, thanks to blog readers and libertarians who raised the £8,664.50 to spring him from jail. Anna Raccoon has the full story, Old Holborn organised the fund raising and Guido was more than happy to [...]

Polls in northern Ireland are very rare creatures, not least because they have a rather poor record. There is a strong tendency for them to under-report the proportion of people voting for parties at the more hardline ends of the political spectrum, and over-report those in the centre. I am not aware of any recent published [...]

Author:  Tomas Mowlam Summary:  Tomas Mowlam reports on a six-year court battle surrounding Britain's flawed stop and search legislation

In 2003, two people were stopped and searched outside London’s Excel Centre and prevented from attending a peaceful protest against the arms fair taking place inside. Journalist Pennie Quinton was forced to stop filming despite showing her press card, and Kevin Gillian was stopped for 20 minutes when riding his bike.

Together with pressure group Liberty, the pair refused to accept this horribly commonplace police interference and challenged the government over the legal basis for this stop and search – Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000.

The case went through several defeats in the domestic courts, but in January 2010 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the use of Section 44 violated Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights – the right to privacy.

“I was personally quite confident – I seemed to be the only one,” laughs Corinna Ferguson, Liberty’s legal officer on the case. “Logically when you’ve lost every attempt in the domestic courts then there’s not much grounds to be confident in the European Court, but we always said that the House of…

There's an amusing story in the Telegraph about a LibDem PPC, Jeremy Hilton, being caught out asking his local council leader in an email to write a letter to his local paper saying what a good chap he is. Clearly he is in need of friends. Idiot that he is, Mr Hilton accidentally sent the email to his local paper at the same time. Comrade Pickles has now weighed in and asked Nick Clegg to reprimand his candidate. Here's his letter.

Dear Nick
I am writing to you about your prospective parliamentary candidate for Gloucester, Jeremy Hilton, who has been exposed this week for trying to fool voters by drafting a complementary letter about his character and having it signed by another politician.

Newspaper reports suggest Mr Hilton’s public relations staff wrote the letter and then asked a former county council leader to sign the text as his own before submitting to a local newspaper for publication. Mr Hilton’s deception was revealed when he mistakenly sent the letter to a local newspaper.

Mr Hilton is alleged to have written to his council contact: ‘Attached is a draft of a letter for you to send to…

Some days, I imagine that Bozza’s life is just, well, a bit weird. Take yesterday, for example. It began with him launching a competition whereby musicians or singers aged 16-25 can compete... This is a summary of another excellent Boriswatch.com post.Visit the site for the full post!

Why is it that I have this feeling in my bones that John Bercow might come to regret his all out attack on Conservative MP Simon Burns at PMQs today? He accused him of being a "bore and boorish". It's not the first time the two have clashed.

It's just a feeling. That's all I'm saying.

The proposal that dog-owners should be forced to buy insurance against their mutt attacking someone encapsulates pretty much all that is most wrong with New Labour. There’s the over-reaction to media scare stories; the use of the law to “send...

Book now to beat the rush
As that man said, if you're going to tell lies make sure they're big ones. And this morning we've been treated to a further generous helping of whoppers from the Great Helmsman.

Once again he claims he can simultaneously keep the economy growing through more public spending, protect the NHS schools and police, sort out the deficit (which BTW resulted entirely from global forces beyond his control) through taxing the rich and other undeserving elements, and deliver fairness for all.

He presents a slew of going green and scaly false alternatives including:
Do we let the progress of recovery be overwhelmed by an ideologically-driven programme to cut the responsibilities of government regardless of economic circumstances - or do we hold firm to our carefully constructed deficit reduction plan?Do we undermine our frontline public services - the NHS, our schools, front-line policing - with arbitrary cuts - or protect those frontline services and instead reduce the deficit by taking tough and fair decisions on tax and spending in other parts of our economy?Do we unleash famine and plague to stalk the land - along with doctrinaire slaughter of the first born -…

This is not an attack on the baby-boomer generation;  it is instead an appeal to the better nature of the boomers – an appeal to Edmund Burke’s understanding that a nation is “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are [...]

Author:  Thomas Ash Summary:  Labour's disgraceful new attack on the Conservatives' opposition to their DNA database

...according to this Labour attack ad:

So much for the right having a monopoly on anti-crime populism. As for the actual merits of the attack - where to start? Well...

1) 'Even the Daily Mail' concedes that "just one in 350, or 0.3 per cent, of the 1.3 million crimes solved by police" can be credited to the DNA database.

2) It goes without saying that the burglar into whose mouth Labour puts the arguments of its opponents is a straw man - there can rarely have been so definitive an example of one! Would the advert have been so persuasive had it featured a stronger opponent, such as Henry Porter or for that matter the European Court of Human Rights?

3) Criminals aren't necessarily the only ones worried about the new system, either. Yesterday's Metro reported that fears of being added to the database are reducing organ and blood donations.

4) Last but not least, the attack dishonestly suggests that Labour's DNA database covers only criminals, whereas it in fact includes 850,000 people who should still be presumed…

George Orwell, who famously, and wrongly, concluded that the Billy Bunter oeuvre was too vast to have been written by one man (Frank Richards), would have had a similar problem with the output of Ralph McInerny, the American Catholic scholar and writer of detective fiction. For not only did McInerny write 81 novels, including 28 [...]

Dear Sirs, We regret that the House of Lords last week adopted amendment 120A to the Digital Economy Bill. This amendment not only significantly changes the injunctions procedure in the UK but will lead to an increase in Internet service providers blocking websites accused of illegally hosting copyrighted material without cases even reaching a judge. The [...]

George Osborne has said that “a sustainable recovery must be led by private sector investment and export growth.” Today’s figures show how far away we are from the latter. These show that our non-oil goods deficit in the last three...

Nick Watt, who has forgotten more about Northern Ireland politics than I will ever know, has an intriguing tale in today’s Guardian. The gist is that the Americans are worried about the position the Conservatives have got into on Northern Ireland, so much so that the White House asked George Bush to call Dave and [...]

I enjoyed Boris Johnson’s column in the Telegraph today. It refers to two recent books: David Willetts’, “The Pinch” and Matt Ridley’s “The Rational Optimist”. Willetts’ book is a somewhat pessimistic presentation of the baby boomer generation and their consumption. Ridley’s title speaks for itself – Boris himself comes down on the [...]

I have written this post for the Public Finance blog:

The Conservatives’ shadow schools secretary is finding himself in an increasing muddle as he starts to put flesh on his schools’ policy. One day Michael Gove is extolling the virtues of free schools, liberated from the shackles of Whitehall, with the touchy-feely charms of Goldie Hawn jostling alongside Swedish companies to deliver. Days later he is laying down the level of detailed knowledge that every youngster should have of their kings and queens, their classical poetry by heart and their algebra under the tutelage of the Tories’ Maths mistress Carol Vorderman.

Gove’s confusion on education policy, one of the few areas where the Tories have at least done some homework, seems to mirror his party’s wider confusion as it wobbles in the polls. This is exemplified in planning, where Gove has pledged to railroad through new local school plans in Whitehall regardless of local objections while his shadow cabinet colleague Theresa Villiers apparently wants every parish council to have its say on any high speed rail link.

Meanwhile, the funding problems that I outlined last month in Public Finance have been exacerbated by a

Are the Tories going to live to regret trying to cover Lord Ashcroft’s back by questioning the tax status of a number of high profile Labour donors? After last week’s news that Lord Ashcroft is a ‘non-dom’, the Tories were quick to accuse Labour of hypocrisy in accepting donations from their own allegedly non-domiciled supporters. Ashcroft’s own [...]

David Willetts and his new book The Pinch v Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist “Forget the prophets of doom – I’m proud to be a baby boomer” says Boris Johnson Oh the shame of being a baby boomer. What a bunch of shysters we seem to be. We are the most selfish, greedy, job-hogging, pension-grabbing bunch of egomaniacs [...]

I’m not sure Richard Whiteley would have stood for it. Contestant: “I’ll have one from the top and five from anywhere else, please Carol.” Carol: “Now you... This is a summary of another excellent Boriswatch.com post.Visit the site for the full post!

Let’s try again, shall we? Last week was mostly a write-off for the Tories. You will remember it started with Dave’s Brighton speech that was supposed to steady the blues after several weeks of wobbles. The idea was to move swiftly on to a week spent demolishing Labour’s economic record and in particular the dire [...]

All elections leave a lasting legacy, but if there was one election in modern times which has influenced more or less everything that has happened in British politics since then, it is surely 1983.

The catastrophic defeat suffered by Michael Foot’s Labour Party in that year began the process of self-examination and reform which eventually begat New Labour in the 1990s and shaped the politics of today.

In the wake of Mr Foot’s death aged 96 this week, the most intriguing tribute came from the lips of Tony Blair - “he was as far removed from the techniques of modern politics as it was possible to be.”

Only Mr Blair with his silken charm could have made this sound like a compliment. In truth, he dedicated moreorless the whole of his career to wiping out all trace of the Labour Party which Mr Foot represented.

Labour went into that 1983 election with so many weak spots it must have been hard for Margaret Thatcher’s Tories to decide which one to target.

The 700-page manifesto with its raft of left-wing policies – later dubbed the longest suicide note in history – was not the half of…

Although its been widely reported that the Electoral Commission has ruled that the £5.1 million in donations that the Conservative Party received from Bearwood Corporate Services were made legally and within the rules set out by PPERA, very little has been said about the detail of its findings beyond noting that the Conservative Party were [...]

There seems little to add to the reams of material that has appeared both in print and on the airwaves about the death of Michael Foot. He was undeniably a great parliamentary figure and his death moreorless severs the only remaining link with the days in which politicians were expected to command the House of Commons by the power of their oratory rather than command the news media by the succinctness of their soundbites. As Tony Blair said yesterday, he was as far removed as it is possible to be from the techniques of modern politics, and maybe that is no bad thing to have inscribed on your tombstone.

Nevertheless....I have to say I have been struck by the degree of sentimentality in some of the tributes, notably from Lord Kinnock, about Foot's contribution to the Labour Party in the period after the 1979 defeat. To listen to some of what has been said, anyone would think he saved the party during that grim period. The truth was he actually came close to destroying it.

In my view, Foot would have gone down as an immeasurably greater man had he not succumbed to the vain belief in 1980…

That the Electoral Commission - despite a disgraceful boycott of their requests to interview senior Tories - has ruled that Lord Ashcroft's Bearwood company is entitled to pour money into buying the election in marginal constituencies does not absolve the party from the questions that arise after William Hague's astonishing admission on BBC Radio last night.

Hague effectively admitted that Lord Ashcroft had misled him - to put it politely - about his tax status. As Lord Turnbull, the former Cabinet Secretary, has indicated, ignorance is no defence when Hague had given clear undertakings as a condition of Ashcroft's peerage. The Electoral Commission maintains - despite their boycott of its interviewers - that the Tories had in all probability done their 'due diligence' over the Bearwood donations. Yet since Lord Turnbull is quite clear that Hague had not done his 'due diligence' with respect to Ashcroft's supposed willingness to pay his taxes as a UK resident, it is hard to see on what basis the Electoral Commission has decided to give his party colleagues the benefit of the doubt.

The facts appear to be these. Lord Ashcroft led Hague to believe that he would pay…

There was an interesting comment piece in The Independent on Sunday by fellow Cornerstone member and member of the Defence Select Committee Adam Holloway on the subject of Afghanistan and “Operation Moshtarack”. Unfortunately he paints a rather bleak picture of the current state of affairs, but also offers a four step strategy on how we [...]

Last Monday after SEC’s town hall meeting I commented that the chairman, the BBC’s Stephen Sackur, had failed to be objective. I said: He referred to the Conservative team as “you lot”. He called the Glenkerrin Arcadia scheme an “insane idea” (compare this with the language of the planning inspector: “The evidence to the Inquiry [...]

Wow. I’ve just seen what Conservative education spokesman Michael Gove said about Lord Ashcroft: KW:  Joining me now is the shadow schools secretary Michael Gove. Michael Gove I want to read you something: “The party’s unhealthy reliance on Ashcroft puts its entire electoral strategy at risk. Move over Jim Davidson, there’s an even more high-profile comedian [...]

With the elections over and to save duplication of effort, Unity News is ceasing operations to allow the administrators to concentrate on the Norfolk Unity website, which will carry all the news that would have appeared here. Click the graphic to go to Norfolk Unity Update your links now!

Centre for Social Cohesion reveals BNP’s online fascist network Centre for Social Cohesion Press Release 13 July 2009 On the day before two leading British National Party (BNP) members take their seats in the European Parliament, a new Centre for Social Cohesion report reveals that members and supporters of the BNP and its online activists display significant [...]