A blackmailers' charter. Change we cannot believe in

Thursday, 31st July 2008
A blackmailers' charter
7:24pm

The senior judiciary has made it crystal clear – in rulings such as the seminal Belmarsh judgment, for example, which laid down that foreign terror suspects could not be locked up without trial – that the driving consideration in formulating anti-terror legislation must be to do nothing that jeopardises the ancient rights and liberties of Britain. This is a refrain one hears hammered home time and again by the law officers, parliamentarians and other establishment types. Nothing, they intone, is more important than to uphold Britain’s fundamental values. To do anything else, they sternly warn, is to hand victory to those who want to destroy our way of life.

Yet the Law Lords have now ruled that the former Director of the Serious Fraud Office, Robert Wardle, was correct to ditch the bribery investigation into the al Yamamah arms...
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http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/869876/a-blackmailers-charter.thtml

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Change we cannot believe in
11:58pm


In his Guardian article this morning which has caused so much excitement today, David Miliband says the following:
When people hear exaggerated claims, either about failure or success, they switch off. That is why politicians across all parties fail to connect. To get our message across, we must be more humble about our shortcomings but more compelling about our achievements.
Two paragraphs later, he boasts of
a health service brought back from the brink
and scoffs:
The Tories say society is broken. By what measure? Rising crime? No, crime has fallen more in the past 10 years than at any time in the past century... Falling school standards? No, they are rising...
No broken society? No rising crime? Rising school standards? The NHS brought back from the brink?? And this is what he considers...
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http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/867801/change-we-cannot-believe-in.thtml