A worrying sort of sense

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Just read a rather disturbing article by Mr Hitchens of the Mail on Sunday (hat tip to The Salted Slug). Disturbing because it makes an awful lot of sense in suggesting that if we want rid of Labour and a real change in politics then the best thing could be if the Tory’s lose and Labour get in. As many others comment I’m not sure I could face voting Labour but Mr Hitchens reasoning is sound. Here’s a taster but go read the whole thing.

I give myself a great deal of trouble by attacking the Tories, the party most of my readers want to support. Why do I do this, condemning myself to many angry and often personally rude messages from affronted people? I could easily make everyone happy by quietly dropping this campaign. It would save me hours spent writing letters and e-mails to Tory loyalists who absurdly accuse me, of all people, of wanting to keep Labour in power.

But I cannot, because I think we now have a unique opportunity to remake British politics and recapture Britain from the people who have messed it up and trashed it for so long. The next election cannot change the government. But it can change the opposition – from an ineffectual, useless, compromised one, into an effective one genuinely opposed to what New Labour is doing.

And such an opposition, no longer weighed down by the awful record of the Tories and their miserable reputation, could throw New Labour into the sea, perhaps within five years of coming into being.

The destruction of the Tory Party, which is now both possible and desirable, is the essential first step to this. In our two-party system, new parties arise out of the collapse and splitting of those they seek to replace. They cannot be created until that collapse, and that split, have begun. A serious, undoubted and decisive defeat for the Tory Party at the next election would make this possible and likely. Such a defeat is possible, despite the events of the past few weeks, and can be aided by voters simply refusing to waste their votes on a party that is both likely to lose, and certain to betray them if it wins.

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Snippet of Blair

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Having made the long and weary trek from the basement to the fifth floor in search of coffee and a fleeting glimpse of what the weather might be doing, I happened to catch a bit of our discredited glorious leader Mr T. Blair chatting to some inquiry that seems to be happening. The gist of what he seemed to be saying, and to be fair I wasn’t paying much attention as I was in need of coffee, was that a certain Mr Hussein had done lots of nasty things to people that weren’t us and Mr Blair thought that Mr Hussein probably had weapons which he could use to hurt other people who still weren’t us quite badly. Because of this Mr Blair espoused that it was not only reasonable but in fact quite sensible to go and do something really nasty to Mr Hussein before Mr Hussein did anything else nasty to people who probably still wouldn’t be us.

I’ll admit I may be over simplifying here, but that seemed to be the basic thrust of his defence of why beating up Mr Hussein was not only right but also legal. Now I’m not actually interested in if he was right or not, but I can’t help but think that sounds an awful lot like vigilantism, after all Mr Hussein already had an ASBO and had been told that if he was naughty again the UN would think about doing something else. But if this defence of Mr Blairs is accepted how does that mesh with people being told off for merely engaging in sabre rattling (well waving kitchen knives) at people that have also done nasty things to other people and will probably do so again and that are known for being nasty people. After all if our politicians are arguing that knowing someone is a wrong ‘un and will be naughty again is a perfectly fine reason for taking pre-emptive action against them before they’ve done a thing to you, surely the case for us taking action against wrong ‘uns closer to home must be much stronger?

(I know it’s one rule for them and another for us and that it doesn’t work that way – but the parallels are I feel rather interesting).

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UK Threat level RSS

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Given the recent change to our required fear level, I was some what surprised to discover that there’s no easy way to be notified as to when we should increase, or even decrease, our level of fear and underlying anxiety. It seems that by some terrible over sight our glorious Government and security forces haven’t made it easy to get notified of when the “current terrorism threat level” changes. As , and I was surprised at this, no one seems to have done so already I put together a little script that monitors the Home Office web site and publishes changes to the “current terrorism threat level” to an RSS feed. Which can then be pulled into all sorts of useful things, such as a blog side bar or anything else for that matter. The feed is deliberately very simple to make it more useful for feeding into other things.

I’ve just discovered the official historical record so I’ll back fill that data, and for future changes I’ll also grab the RSS feed from the BBC news site so we can know at least what was in the headlines at the time.

Anyway for more details either click on the link in the side bar or go here:
https://www.anonymong.org/alert/
or just subscribe to the feed here:
https://www.anonymong.org/alert/alert.rss

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