'Likeable but clueless'

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Mr Johnson is a likeable man, but charm is no longer enough
They did not bother to listen to the arguments but Labour MPs yesterday voted en bloc against the lone, vulnerable form of computer hacker Gary McKinnon.

The Blair/Brown House of Commons is not a place to look to if you are a British subject seeking sanctuary from a foreign power.

If New Labour had been running the nunnery in The Sound of Music they'd have blown their whistles and handed the von Trapp family over to the Germans.


Licence to Kill(joy)

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Taking a stand against the hyper-regulation of life | spiked
It is not so much that the state is remoulding civil society. Instead, the state is demanding that we live our everyday lives through it. We are invited for a walk with the state; we are invited to eat with the state. More and more of social life is now lived through the state as an intermediary. Our everyday actions are supervised – and authorised – by an official bureaucracy.

The emblem of this peculiar situation is the licence. Obviously in pubs, you need a licence to sell alcohol. Now, however, you also need a licence for just about every other activity you might want to perform inside a pub. You need a sporting license to play darts. If somebody wants to watch the darts, you need a sporting events licence. There is a licence for dancing, which can be strictly enforced: undercover council officials spotted people ‘swaying’ in a bar in Westminster and chastised the owners. There is a licence to play music. There is even a ‘spoken word’ license, to cover poetry readings and plays.