As an aside…

Is it just me or does the proposed Labour smear web site The Red Rag seem a name more appropriate for a site talking about menstruation or possibly even menstruation porn rather than politics?

Update Mope seems it’s not just me.

Events elsewhere

Today Guido Fawkes claimed another scalp assisted by the mainstream media, even if Mr McBride did reign in advance last night to try to limit the damage. I’ve not really got anything much to add to the excellent commentary that can be found elsewhere.

Being horribly meta and doing the whole blogger talking about blogger thing which is terribly dull here’s a bit of a round up. It’s great to see Tom Harris talking a lot of sense:
We screwed up, big time. We have no-one — absolutely no-one at all — to blame for this but ourselves.
Sadly he seems to be a lone voice from that area of politics, with others such as Tim Cheetham bemoaning the fact that this story of interest (apparently) only to “the political in-crowd” has driven more important news, that wasn’t being reported much anyway, from the headlines. With the added compulsory moan of how easy it is for people not working in politics to just moan and bitch without offering ideas of how to fix things (which oddly I thought was what we paid the politicians to work out, as we can’t actually do anything), but it seems it’s our fault that we don’t have decent politicians as we’re not following the agenda he’d prefer. Hopi Sen at least admits that it “looks bad for Labour” but again we should all be more interested in other stuff – Look there’s a wooki! Hopi then moves on to attacking the messenger failing to see that the standards a private individual such as Guido can be expected to be held to are different to those that a senior Civil Servant such as Mr McBride are held to. If nothing else as has been observed elsewhere we don’t pay for Guido, we did pay for McBride and the systems used to send the emails in question, hence it’s reasonable to have a lot more interest in the latter than the former.

Mr Draper has been alleging that someone’s emails must have been “hacked” for this sorry mess to have been found out, which as Dizzy observes is amusing given this week the Government is requiring all ISPs to record the envelope of every email we send and are on record of wanting to log everything. This of course is unlikely to be the end of it, as if ntohing else Douglas Carswell MP is asking Tom Watson (Labour MP & colleague of Mr McBride) what he knew. Of course as Anna Raccoon reminds us we were told that:
In future, under a Gordon Brown regime, we need to have no spin, no briefing, no secrets and respect for parliament
So that went well then.

There’s is a rather good/amusing analysis of Mr McBrides resignation on the Ranting Penguin and a better summary of events than this by Devils kitchen.

To end on a cheerer note for a sunday Iain Dale has the now compulsory downfall video, and as both Samizdata and Gaby Hinsliff observe today may well be the day when UK politics sees blogging make itself really felt and we all have the ability to create a blog and write about what matters to us and potentially to make a difference. Finally LegIron has a somewhat cheering review of the general unravelling of things.

Footnote: Contrary to what several people linked to above the Government still don’t have the right to read our emails (much less the ability if you’re careful), they just get to see the envelopes.

Update Far more thorough list of saturdays coverage of this story over at Iain Dale

Conspiracies and incompetance

Coincidences are wonderful things and I regularly give thanks to the fickle whims of serendipity . So this morning as work required me to be awake at a time I consider far too early for an Easter Saturday, I was presented with three unconnected articles which wonderfully answered a question I’ve often asked myself.

Why aren’t deniable/false flag activities more common?

After all for tarnishing reputations or spreading a bit of dirt they should be the easiest things in the world to carry out, a few trouble makers at a demo and the media can dismiss the entire thing. Free throw away websites or journals and anything can be made public. It really shouldn’t tax anyone’s brains too much.

So it seems that according to an updated journal on the New York Times, that “agent provocateurs” were indeed in play at the G20 protests until challenged at which point they appear to have readily revealed themselves. Following on from this there is the developing story concerning Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes regarding a deniable website that the powers that be “considered” setting up to do their dirty work. What both these stories show is that whilst such activities should be simple they remain beyond the competence of at least part of our current regime. The G20 incident due to the official mendicant having more ID on them than even a normally cautious protester, and cutting and running far too quickly and for the website story it’s yet more proof that groups of people (especially in government) can’t keep secrets and that they still haven’t learnt about the dangers of paper trails.

So the answer to my question is that out with specialist groups that make such matters their business, there simply isn’t the competence to carry out such simple tasks (something all the failed IT projects in Government should have tipped me off about really). This lack of competence is also why there probably isn’t a conspiracy. Which is quite cheering really.

Some what unrelated: From comments on Guido’s journal by Joe Gormley’s Grandson I’m now aware of http://www.newssniffer.co.uk/ which lets you track how news stories change on line over time within the same article.