As if the Greeks will listen to that!

Look, I'm a smoker OK, you may not like it but I am. i'm also British which means that I can't help myself followinmg the rules. So you ban me from smoking in pubs, I go outside and moan about how it's outrageous but I still do it. Don't even think of throwing that 'you're a burden on the NHS' line at me either, I have a private health insurance policy so that when my lungs decide it's time to cause me pain I will get treatment.

However, in following the rules the great ingenuity in this country means that pubs bought patio heaters so their outcast customers, who they don't want to lose, can at least avoid getting hypothermia. So what do the powers that be in Westminster and Brussels want to do? Ban the things, where a jumper they say. Ok, I can wear a jumper and coat if necessary, but why the hell should I if the proprieter of a private drinking establishment wants to keep me a customer and keep me happy?

It gets more absurd though, I have just learnt that also in the name of saving the planet they want to ban bloody aircon too. So those of us in the north with die of hyopthermia in the winter, whilst those in Greece and Spain will die of heat exhaustion in the summer. Thus the reduced population will take our carbon emissions down as there will be less people breathing. However, just go back to the rules thing for a second.

When this new law by directive eventually comes, and I don't doubt that it will, who thinks that the Greeks and Spanish are going to listen to it? Exactly. They'll just ignore it. Meanwhile, us 'oh we must follow the rules' Brits will happily enforce it because we just don't seem to get how Europe works. What was it Hague one said? in Europe but not run by Europe? That's the way the rest of them are with their picking and choosing of legal application.

I dream of the day when we finally have a politician that speaks honestly about Europe and just says 'if they write a directive we agree with we'll implement it, if they don't they can bugger off'. That is what being a 'good European' is really about after all. We're oftentold that Britain is awkward, we're only awkward because we falsely assume that everyone else follows the rules too. They don't, and we shouldn't either. Once we get it through our thick skulls that we don't need to create a law for every single EU directive then the world will be a much happier place.

Scottish Lib Dems in donor sleaze scandal

There appares to be a little trouble brewing for the Lib Dem in Scotland. According to the Herald there are allegation that the former Transport Minister, Tavish Scott, made changes to a proposed Aberdeen by-pass after meeting with a major Lib Dem donor who was lobbying for the change.

Apparently another by-pass opposition obtained a copy of his ministerial diary showing that he met with the donor, after which the route was changed. The former minister is has called it "outrageous mudslinging", and the donor, who owns First Oil, a donor I have written about here before, is threatening legal action.

Watch out Beadle's .... dead?

Oh what a cynic I have become but when I heard this I just thought "yeah right, he's hiding somewhere, has shaved the beard off, got a new hand, and will jump out all of sudden and point and and laugh at all the hacks reporting his death and shout 'Game for Laugh!'".

I could be wrong though.

Exclusive: The new 18 Doughty Street

Interesting job advert over on Work for an MP. Launching in Februrary apparently, a "definitive portal to the ongoing political debate, edited by some of the UK's leading political journalists and pollsters." It's name? PoliticsHome... original huh?

The domain (politicshome.com) is registered to Stephan Shakespeare, so clearly another offshoot from the ConservativeHome brand. Seriously though.... can we please please make this the last bloody "XXXXhome" website? It worked once, it's maybe even worked twice with LabourHome, but now it's just looks like a lack of creativity, don't you think?

Another day, another dodgy politician

Should anyone be wondering why I have not posted anything about Derek Conway it's because I have the perfect excuse, I'm still on Jury Service at the Old Bailey. Clearly Conway has been a very very naughty boy indeed. In fact what he did was bloody outrageous and it perfectly expresses why so many of us are now such cyncical bastards when it comes to politicians.

Conway's misuse of taxpayers money is no different in seriousness than the almost serial corruption at the heart of Government. It may seem 'less' to some but when Blair said the politicians need to be 'whiter than white' he was expressing a hidden truth. One bad apple does not of course ruin the entire harvest but when you keep getting bad apples, on all sides, then people start thinking they might actually prefer pears.

These constant scandals are not the invention of the media, sleaze as it is colloquial known in the 'village' is a very real problem and no one is safe from it. It damages the value of democracy and it is exactly the sort of thing that pushes people to support the smaller fringe parties some of which leave an untold amount to be desired. Parties like the BNP will use these incidents and point out that they are not tainted by such things. You may think that people won't vote in droves for the bigots and that is probably true, but the more they see the non-bigots acting so appallingly the more they will ponder of spoiling their ballots or protesting.

It wouldn't surprise me if you could map the growth in the 'none of the above' vote against the growth in the 'sleaze' scandals of the past few years. No one can expect every politician to be pure of course, they are human after all and so by their nature flawed. But the system is clearly broken and needs fixing to ensure that they cannot pull off such dodgy scams in the future. Better to fix the system than have the result at the ballot box smash us around the head with the reality of unintended consequence.

ODPM's UK travel bill

I;m impressed, I really am, from 2002 to 2006, John Prescott's "Office of the Deputy Prime Minister managed to spend a total of £12,121,559 on travel in the UK. Must be those two jaguars guzzling up all that fuel and stopping off at the odd petrol station for a Ginsters pie!

Now some may say this an acceptable figure, but when you think about what his department actually did, which was bugger all for the most part, you have to wonder where it all went and how many people they were paying to sit in the back of a car.

Update: For anyone doubting the figure, it as established by adding up the yearly figures here.

A personal message to Michelle Hogg

This is a message to Michelle Hogg, the make-up artist that turned Queens Evidence in the Securicor robbery of the century trial resulting in yesterday's convictions. We only met each other once a couple of years ago and now we shall never meet again, just as you will not see your friends again either. I just want to say though that you have balls girl. Seriously. The biggest balls of anyone I have ever known.

Wherever you are, whoever you are, whether you knew what you had got involved in or not, you have shown courage that few people will experience or have to experience. When I first heard that you'd been arrested all I could think was 'surely not? Michelle?'. Your guilt or innocence will remain a question for many in your now infamous 15 minutes, what will never be in doubt for me will be your courage.

I hope that your new life will be quiet and that you don't have to look over your shoulder and fear knocks on the door for too long. What you did in court was the right thing to do, but I don't think I could have done it. Don't pay attention to those that question your motives. Politicans like Gordon Brown talk about courage a lot, they haven't got a clue what real courage is.

Government endorses drug taking?

So ermmmm it's OK to get off your head if you don't drive? Glad that's sorted then!
From the Glastonbury website

Purnell doesn't think Brown is doing a great job yet?

It would appear that James Purnell is not sure about Gordon Brown right now. In an interview with the Independent he was asked by reader why Gordon Brown had been such a disasterous Prime Minister. In response he said that Brown wasn't a disaster but then added at the end 'he has the strategy and determination to be a great Prime Minister'.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement then. After all he doesn't say he is a great Prime Minister he just says he could be. That's a bit like me saying that I could be a great weightlifter because of determination, whilst ignore the fact I'm quite a puny little thing and so cannot ever be great no matter how much i want to be. Purnell's answer is telling because of what he fails to say, and what he fails to say is what everyone knows.

P2P free music download goodness!

After a decade of fighting the music industry appears to have given in and in a few hours (midnight EST) you will be able download Qtrax that will give unlimited, no fee, no membership access to a 25 million back catalogue of tracks.

The files will have DRM on them, and it remains to be seen if you can play them on an MP3 player. Apple won't be best pleased about it when the OSX version comes out. Once you have so many people around the world stealing copyrighted material I guess they knew that they would have embrace it and find a way of making money from it (i.e. advertising).

Do you want fries with that?

My apologies for no posts for a whole day, strange I know, but I went out Saturday night and did not get back until Sunday lunchtime, then had to go out again, and now there will be another week of limited post as I continue with Jury service.

Now I know that many people will be excited about Alan Johnson and the fact that yet another minister in Brown's Cabinet has been found to be acting in a seemingly dodgy ways. Playing loose and fast with the law is certainly becoming endemic, and I imagine Blair is laughing to himself quite a lot. After all, he got out at the right time.

However, the best news story today is not Johnson but the this one in the The Times about how McDonalds are going to offer an A-level equivalent qualification in burger flipping. OH alright then, so it's not burger flipping but basic burger bar management but still, the thought of someone doing their CV and noting that they got an A Level from McDonalds is thoroughly bleak don't you think?

Cabinet Office bans people taking mobile phones out of Government buildings

We all heard about laptop losses this week, and The Register has a leaked email with the new rules that the Cabinet Office has sent out. The new rules are that no mobile storage devices of personal data can be taken off secure premises, and personal data is defined as

Any information that links one or more identifiable living person with private information about them” or “Any source of information about 1000 identifiable individuals or more, other than information sourced from the public domain.

So that includes the mobile phones of civil servants and spin doctors doesn't it? UNless of course they use silly names. The email also states that

Clarification has been given that this applies to any mobile device with storage capacity, including mobile phones and PDA’s.

So the next time you see a spAd walking along the street talking on their mobile, remember that they may in fact be breaking Government data security that have gone from one extreme to the other.

Smartphones patented - everyone sued a minute later

This has to be one the funniest things I've read for ages. Apparently a company called Minerva took out a US patent on essentially a "mobile phone with removable storage, an internet connection, a camera and the ability to download audio or video files". It was accepted and formally made live on Tuesday.

At one minute past midnight on Tuesday, the patent holding company then simultaneously filed lawsuits against Apple, Nokia, RIM, Sprint, AT&T, HP, Motorola, Helio, HTC, Sony Ericsson, UTStarcomm, Samsung and others. More info here.

Technical Support Offered

I'd just like to offer my technical support to Justin McKeating, Tim Ireland, Sam Coates at the Times, Three Line Whip, Kevin Maguire and Tom Watson MP.

Before leaping to conclusions next time, stop, think for a minute, and then learn to read email headers. And that doesn't mean just obsessing over the "To" address and the "From" address and whatever labels are next to them. It means looking at what MTAs the mail passed through to reach its final destination. Then what you do is find out what MTA and packages the originating server might be running.

For extra credit you could perhaps read RFC 821 as well just to get a feel of how mail actually works, and then perhaps you could ask someone that knows about computers to set-up MajorDomo for you! You can start sending email with manipulated content to distribution lists too! It's quite exciting really. Just imagine the fun you could have? You could let people email an address and then change the content of their email and put a footer in it. How awesome is that?

If by this point you're feeling particularly hardcore perhaps you could open up a shell and learn to use telnet and send your own "hacked" emails to people, you won't even need a '1234' password to do it either!* I won't tell you how to do it, consider it homework. Just think what it would mean if you followed some of these tips though. First of all you'd stop making yourself look silly, but even better for some of you, you might actually get close to being the technical wizards that you like to make people think you are!

On a serious note though guys, it doesn't take a genius to look at that mail posted by Three Line Whip and realise its gone through a distribution server and had content inserted.

This post was brought to you by Dizzy Technical Support - Opening the bonnet of teh Interroadsuperwebway.

* Should you find an Open Relay when doing your homework you should do the right thing and contact the server admin and tell him he's an idiot for leaving it open to exploitation. It is what he deserves, it will probably be a Windows box.
** Here's a tip for your homework. Try pressing Alt and F4 at the same time. Go on.. try it, it;s a well guarded techie secret easter egg function in all operating systems I swear.

Hague at his very best?

Notice that even Miliband is laughing at the Brown piss taking?

The AleXander Files

One down, Wendy next?

Whatever happened to....?

Does anyone know what ever happened to this brilliant political satire website? It was well known a long time before there were lots of blogs, but sometime in September 2005 it just died, possibly due to finanical problems.

The old stuff pre-September 2005 is very funny.

Cover version of the Day

Have to love Fridays!

The non-answer answer

Back in December, Conservative MP Michael Fallon tabled a question to the Chancellor which appeared in the Question Book for answer on January 7th 2008. The question asked "what fees have been paid by his Department for advice on Northern Rock to (a) Goldman Sachs and (b) Slaughter and May." Has the Treasury answered yet? Nope.

Obviously when you don't get an answer the best thing to do is ask them when they will answer the question as he did yesterday. This time they said there answer was that they would answer "[v]ery shortly. The Treasury regrets not having done so earlier."

Think they might have something to hide or be embarassed about? Aftr all, Northern Rock and the taxpayers money goes hand in hand. How much more has had to be spent of the taxpayers money to get advice that the solution would lie in taxpayers money?

Newspaper Review on Newsnight?

Not sure if anyone watched BBC Newsnight tonight, but when Kirsty Wark got to the front page of the papers we had. The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Morning Star and The Mirror.

Yes, you did just see the Morning Star in that list. A newspaper which, according to a BBC report has a whopping great circulation of 13,000 to 14,000. There are local rags with better circulation but they don't get shown. Hell I imagine some UK political blogs have more readers too. It's all very odd.

Update: A comment was left suggesting that maybe blog headlines should be on Newsnight. May I just say that I think that is a universally stupid idea on par with making a root password, password.

The problem is that he does look weird

I've just read this post on Political Betting which was inspired by this post from Paul Linford.

it's a deadly serious attempt by the right to fix the idea of Gordon as a "weirdo" in the public mind..... you can see also see it happening on all the leading right-wing blogs.

I would just like to confirm that I have no sense of humour and every time I post and take the proverbial out of Brown and his wonky eye; the utterly creepy false smile; the weird shifty look; the surreal bouncing around like he's on valium; and the obsessive compulsive hand movements I am acting under orders.
Every morning I receive a telegram from CCHQ. This morning's said - "Welcome to the vast right-wing conspiracy stop you have been chosen because we think you can help stop please send us £5000 so that we can release funds in Liberia worth £25bn that a complete stranger called Piere emailed us about stop remember to say that Brown is a weirdo today stop this telegram will self-destr"
Image montage by Political Betting

Home Secretary puts her foot in it again

What is about politician's opening their mouths trying to save their own previous gaffes and then making another one? On the weekend the Home Secretary confirmed that she was not a streetwalker, and now today, in an attempt to take her foot out of her mouth she has stuck the other one in instead. She told the Today programme this morning that it was official Government advice not to walk the street after midnight whilst stressing that we're all actually quiote safe honestly and that crime is down blah blah blah. Is this woman on crack or something? Oh no wait, she's not a streetwalker so probably not.

This 'Government of all the Talents' is fast becoming laughable. We have Peter Hain labelled incompetent by his own boss and at the same time praised as a great minister. We have Harriet Harman taking illegal donations to cover her debts. We have a Chancellor who has dithered over the biggest banking crisis for over a century. A transport minister who loses people's data, as well as a former Chancellor doing the same. And now we have a Home Secretary who tells us the streets are safe and unsafe at the same time and then issues a kind of tacit curfew on our movements?

Government of all the talentless is more apt. Frankly an X Factor audition reject has more talent than this lot.

Cyclists Be Damned!

Seeing as everyone right now is talking about Peter Hain I'm going to talk about something else instead. David Cameron and the running of red lights by cyclists - it may get a little ranty. I first read it in the Indy diary column this morning and it has now made it to the Evening Standard as a news story, but apparently, David Cameron ran a red light on his bike outside Parliament and got shouted at by a pedestrian.

What I will say is this, she shouldn't have shouted at him she should've stuck a stick through his spokes. That is what all cyclists deserve. If they think bendy buses can be dangerous they should see what pedestrian backlash can be like. Look, you might think that you're ever so environmental in a hippy tree-hugging way but compared to us bi-peds who use no machinery other than our own power you're not. Not that I walk to be a tree-hugging hippy you understand, perish the thought!

Cyclists are a law unto thembloodyselves and the way they ignore lights on pedestrian crossings shouldn't see them charged with road traffic offences it should see them beaten to within an inch of their lives. Just because you have a cycle lane it does not mean that the rules governing the crossing designed for those of us on foot do not apply to you. Luckily you wear a helmet so when you do crash after I lock your wheels up at least you will bounce comfortably. Perhaps though you should wear skateboard pads too though just in case.

Right, I feel much better now that I have got that off my chest.

Quick comment on Hain

All the best stuff happens when you're away huh? My only comment on Peter Hain that can spring to mind right now is if you're innocent why do you need to resign? The house of cards with Harman and Alexander are now looking dicey.

Oh I'd never have guessed that!

OK I've come to the conclusion that I'm definitely on some permanently bad LSD journey. Page 13 of the The Times today under some story about how we're going to give fatties money to diet (will they buy chocolate?) is a small filler piece titled 'The coffee that can contain a third of daily calorie intake'.

The story details the shocking truth that a Vente White chocolate mocha with whip and whole milk from Starbucks is quite fattening according to a survey by Which? Magazine. Am I seriously being told that someone actually spent money on finding out that a coffee with chocolate, whipped cream and full fat milk might actually make you put on some weight? What next a survey that confirms Mohammed was a Muslim, the Pope really is catholic and Jesus was a Jew?

Left-wingers call for windfall tax on energy profits

Whenever energy prices go up you can always guarantee that the usual suspects on the Left will start talking about vulnerable people and nasty profit driven companies. Hence we have a motion signed by Abbott, Corbyn et al calling on the Government to introduce a one-off windfall tax on energy company profit in order to fund an increase in the winter fuel payment that the oldies get.

How about this for a better idea though. How about sorting out the system so that someone who retires to the Mediterranean doesn't get the payment to keep them warm in the winter for a start? In 2005/06 £4,215,000 in Winter Fuel Payments was sent to claimants in Greece, Spain, Italy, Malta, Cyprus and Portugal.

I simply do not understand the way the Left always see the creation of a tax as the solution. Why not start managing the systems you have properly and stop wasting money on pointless IT projects that fail to deliver? There is plenty of money in the system, its just the way it's being spent that is the problem.

Suicide, the Internet and group psychosis?

When I read the tale this morning of "copycat suicides" in Wales I was a little mind boggled by it. The notion of suicide is a pretty difficult thing to get you're head around when it just occurs once, but when kids who know each other start killing themselves over a short period of time you can't help but wonder what's going in.

The reporting seemed to imply that the Internet might to be blame because the teenagers in question all used Bebo. Danny Finkelstein over at Comment Central has written an interesting piece on this wondering if the Internet is not to 'blame' then might it simply make the possibility of copycats suicides more common instead?

I'm not sure it will necessarily, but the Internet and suicide is by no means knew. I can remember a few years ago when there were people actually committing suicide live online back when webcams first became affordable and bandwidth in the home started expanding.

I think, the interesting point in Fink's piece is that "birds of a feather flock together" and that the Internet simply means that even more birds of a (suicidal) feather can flock together instead.

Has Brown used taxpayer money for Labour Party political videos?

The following is an still from a video on the Labour:Vision YouTube Channel.
The next still is from a video on the Downing Street YouTube channel.
Same suit? Same tie? Same place for filming? Looking the same strange direction? Only difference is they turned the lamp on in the Labour one and he's standing a little further along the room.

So.... who paid for the party political Labour:Vision video? The taxpayer? Or did the Labour Party loan a camera to the state? Questions, questions, questions!
Hat Tip: Via email from reader.

When did we stop doing these things?

Excuse me for sounding so terribly naive, I am only 32 and I left school but some 17 or so years ago, but when exactly did they stop teaching kids how to cook in school? If, as Ed Balls has now announced, all the little ones are going to learn how to cook then they must not be doing it now, so when pray tell did that actually happen?

I can remember when the name changed from 'home economics' to 'food science' - both utterly absurd names I hasten to add - but the content of the lessons were the same. Sausage Rissotto, fairy cakes (is that a politically incorrect name now?), how to boil an egg (dear Edwina!) and the like. The point was that we were still doing bloody cooking so when did it stop?

There is a little bit of me that suspects it will be the Tories fault of course, the last Tory government is almost always to blame for everything, including AIDs, the end of white dog poo (how we marvelled at it!), and the total destruction of life in the Universe before the Messiah Blair saved us all from eternal damnation and death. Having said that, that would still mean that for ten years Labour did bugger all about it.

Was I just lucky with the state school I went to? Both of them in fact, because I ws expelled from one, but I still remember doing cooking lessons there. You see this is where I start to get confused daily with the Government and Labour in general. They are constantly creating initiatives that say we must do X, Y and Z more, and yet almost always I find myself thinking 'but we were doing all that in the 80s and early 90s so when did it stop?'

Kids are getting fat and not doing enough sport in schools, we must have more sport they say. I can remember two double PE periods a week at both my secondary school and the grammar I ended up in. That's four hours a week of potentially shameful time in your M&S underpants (sufficient support unrequired due to late puberty), so tell me how is that different to what the Government is saying we must do today?

There is this constant narrative of a society on the brink and in need of social engineering and yet almost every solution we get told about appears to be things that we were already doing, or at least I can remember being made to do by teachers with Napolean-complexes. Is the entire country on a collective acid trip impacting it's short-term memory?

Why the surprise about lost laptops?

If ever there was evidence of mainstream media complacency then the latest lost laptops at the MoD should provide a lesson. There appears to be, quite rightly, serious concern about data loss but the news that laptop and computer theft goes on is not new and the shock of the media ought not be there if they made a habit of reading Hansard.

A quick use of it's search facility online will produce ample questions and answers on the subject over the past year or so. The Home Office has theft problems, so does the DWP, and HMRC has lost 44 laptops in the last twelve months. The only reason this has suddenly become an issue for the media is because of 'Discgate' but it should have been an issue much earlier.

Theft and loss of Government computer equipment is endemic across the board. What might have been on stolen equipment is completely unknown, but hey, it might be nothing right?

Youtube launches UK Politics channel

Interesting development over at YouTube, there is now a UK Politics channel. Currently it included Respect in the channel but for some reason no wanting is fighting with each other in their video.

Brown has done a launch video for it (although I was contacted about the channel by someone at Google directly with no mention of it being a Labour/Brown initiative) and his video is... errrrm... well it's boring and he's looking.... oh I don't know what he's looking at or where he's looking, it's just odd, especially the bizarre bounce and smile at the beginning.

There are some great comments under the video though. "You Be Wrong" said

To be honest, this really isn't all that suitable as a YouTube launch video. It doesn't 'engage' anyone really. If you are aiming the video towards the younger generation then why use the same style that disuades [sic] youth interest in politics.

Another says "look at me when you are talking to me." (that one made me snigger). But really, the best comment given that Brown is blathering on about YouTube and the Internet like he knows about it has to be the one that says "paperlilies for PM!".

Nothing to see here

Still on Jury Service, so no posts for today. Normal service will probably resume soon.

Will this hang in Downing Street?

Back in November I pondered whether Brown was blocking the hanging of Blair's portrait in Downing Street as per the convention of having portraits of previous PMs on the staircase.

At the time an anonymous comment appeared saying "no. it's just not been hung yet". That is to say it had been painted but was simply waiting to be hung. However, as the papers showed yesterday, the first ever portrait that Blair has sat for by Jonathan Yeo has been revealed. Is this the one that will hang in Downing Street?

Note: It's a bloody good portrait.

Ming Campbell's role in scam revealed!

According to the last Register of Members' Interests, the former Lib Dem leader Ming Campbell has taken a remunerated directorship with Scottish American Investment Company - quoted on the markets with the label.... SCAM.

They seem to quite like oil, gas and mining too, which I guess must sit quite well with Ming's much boasted about green credentials. Or perhaps all his environmentalist talk was really just a big scam? (pun thoroughly intended)

Home Secretary confirms she's not a street walker and shows she's out of touch

If a Home Secretary said that the streets were safer after 10 years of her political party governing the country and then went on to say that she wouldn't walk on them at night on her own, you'd have to wonder about the credibility of the first claim don't you?

Well that is exactly what Jacqui Smith told the Sunday Times in an interview she gave. She was asked if she would feel safe walking around Hackney at midnight said,

"Well, no, but I don’t think I’d ever have done. You know, I would never have done that, at any point during my life..... I just don’t think that’s a thing that people do, is it, really?"

What planet is she on to think people don't walk around at midnight? What about people who don't own a car and work in a pub? Does she think they have the ability to fly or something? She even said she wouldn't feel safe walking around in Kensington and Chelsea at midnight.

Lying robots and silly trademarks

This has to be the freakiest technology story for a while. Apparently, scientists have created robots with neural pathways that can "lie".

The team at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Federal Institute of Technology created the little experimental learning devices to work in groups and hunt for "food" targets nearby while avoiding "poison." Imagine their surprise when one generation of robots learned to signal lies about the poison, sending opponents to their doom.

HAL is coming, he really is!

Meanwhile, there is apparently a lawyer in the US who is trying to trademark the term "cyberlaw". He runs a company called CyberLaw and practices errr cyberlaw, and wants the trademark. As is noted on the link, "[t]hat's like a soda company claiming a trademark in the use of the word soda in connection with the sale of soda".

Brown to create new Government department?

Received wisdom says that Brown will hold his first Cabinet reshuffle after the elections in May. What changes might come then though? Most people presume Hain will be out on his ear, but what about the creation of new departments? Take a look at this advert (advertised since Thursday) looking for something called an "Employee Relations Secretariat" on Total Jobs.

My client in Central London has a vacancy for an Employee Relations Secretariat. The aim of this role is to facilitate effective employee relations in a new government department. This will be through the establishment of a system for managers, colleagues and trade unions meet [sic] and discuss issues affecting staff.

Duties will include taking informal minutes but "also ensuring staff are informed of legacy issues". Sounds like a new department being created which is going to be taking on roles of an existing department doesn't it if there are going to be "legacy issues" - read "redundancies".

My guess is that he's going to merge the Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland Office into one single department for the devolved nations, hence the "legacy issues" that an HR person is going to have to deal with. This will also neutralise all those "two jobs" accusations if there is just one person responsible for all the nations together - not that there is much to do anyway.

Feel free to speculate wildly and further though.

Publish and be damned?

I see Guido has been naughty and published the names of a broadcast journalist and two commentators in a matter The Skimmer says is covered by an injunction. Mind you, Guido says the failure to write about the story is more about a wall of silence amongst journalists rather than it being about an injunction that exists to stop it being reported.

The story does involve the parentage of a kid though, well I presume that the child is still a minor anyway, so it may just be a child protection issue more than anything else. At least that is what I imagine the court would probably say its reasons for an injunction is anyway.

Carving up the BBC licence fee is dumb

I'm sure there will be quite a few right-wingers out there that will be pleased with news that the £3.4bn the BBC receives from the licence fee may be carved up with commercial operators. Obviously those that say they "believe" in the BBC will think it's the end of the world and someone somewhere will note how it is caving into profit and the talk of funding right-wing propaganda will probably appear.

Personally, I don't think that it should be done. After all, commercial outlets operate under heavy regulations already which stop them really being allowed to have an opinion. As such, there is a mythical notion of impartiality pushed throughout the broadcast industry.
What would it mean for those commercial enterpruses if they started receiving public money?

If a commercial operator gets public funds how will they be governed to prove what is and what is not being funded by the public in their output? You can imagine what will happen already, if, for example, a documentary that goes against the grain of received wisdom is shown there will be all manner of crowing from people saying it is a misuse of public funds.

It already happens with the BBC from the Right as it is. If public funds are spent on commercial operators you can guarantee that accusations of bias programming using public funds will appear from the Left. What would be far more effective is to scrap the BBC Charter altogether, lose the licence fee and move some of the corporation's output to a subscription based service.

Daily Mail Hyperbole of the Day

Pupils at private school discover their teacher in 'shocking soft-porn' advert on YouTube

Shocking soft-porn? How does that work then? I thought if it was soft it was so that it wouldn't be shocking. What I wonder would that make hard porn? Vomit-inducing? If it's shocking I hate to think what they would make of 9 1/2 Weeks. The shocking bit lasts about two seconds with the teacher, possibly not event that. It's the sort of thing that you see on Tarrant on TV that has come from Italy.

Perhaps the Mail should have the headline "No sex please. We're uptight"? Shocking soft porn my arse!

MG Rover probe costs spiral

I've just read a Parliamentary answer from the DTI or whatever it is called now that says that their investigation into the collapse of MG Rover has so far cost the public purse just over £10 million including VAT and they have bugger all idea when it will conclude or a report will be published. Now doubt the cost will be called an 'investment' by some press offcier somewhere.

PPER offences have no sentencing guidelines?

As has been well reported over the past few days, the Electoral Commission is currently consdering whether to pass the Hain Affair over to the police. This is primarily because as a regulator it has no real power of censure and when it finds the law - in this case the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 - to have been broken its only option is to send it to the Police.

As already mentioned, the Times leader this morning note that PPER is seen as a bit of an inconvenience by the people that passed it into law and should you need any evidence of that look know further than the Lord Chancellor, Jack Straw and the Ministry of Justice. When asked what sentencing gu