9:53pm
I am just astounded by the Labour by-election campaign in Crewe and Nantwich. First, and most disgustingly, as has been ricocheting around the blogosphere, a Labour leaflet pretending to be a Tory party application form (subtle, eh?) asks:
Do you oppose making foreign nationals carry an ID card?
Since no-one has ever suggested that ID cards would be targeted particularly at foreign nationals, this appears to be a bizarre, indeed incomprehensible, attempt to play the race card.
But what’s really amazing about the Labour campaign is its strategy of portraying the Tory candidate Edward Timpson as a caricature toff, just because his family is wealthy. Reverting to class war like this really does show the depths of the party’s intellectual bankruptcy. It’s as if Blairism never happened. Labour are behaving like the apocryphal person who was stuck in the...
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2:30pm
The Evening Standard reports:
Boris Johnson today promised to be more careful on his bike after he was filmed cycling through six red lights, failing to stop at a zebra crossing and mounting the pavement.
I have lost count of the times I have been forced to fling myself out of the way of cyclists jumping red lights or failing to stop for pedestrians on crossings. Their antisocial and dangerous, not to say unlawful, behaviour is exceeded in awfulness only by their arrogance. The belief that unchallengeable (if self-appointed) moral superiority precludes any possibility of doing anything wrong, thus putting a halo on harmful behaviour, is a defining characteristic of the left. But here is the People’s Boris (not to mention Leader Dave, another cycling sinner) descending into this self-same pit of moral blackness. Just goes to show — put a cycle helmet on someone and the inner lunatic is suddenly revealed.
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2:02pm
Credit where credit is due: the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, got it absolutely right yesterday in his excellent article for the Mail on Sunday about the iniquitous Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, which is being debated in the Commons today. The headline row over the Bill during the past few days has been about the abortion amendments, a development which is as regrettable as it was predictable. It was always likely that these amendments — to bring down the upper time limit for abortion from 24 weeks to anything between 20 weeks and twelve — would overshadow other provisions in the Bill which are far worse. In particular, these are the go-ahead for ‘saviour siblings’, where babies are conceived for the sole purpose of using bits of their body to cure their siblings of disease; abolishing...
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12:28am
I’ve just caught up with Jeremy Bowen’s documentary on the birth of Israel which was transmitted last Sunday evening.
Sigh.
Most of what I want to say about it is said in this
critique by Honest Reporting. I would just make a couple of additional points.
The first is that, like so much journalism about Israel, this programme failed to acknowledge the true perfidy of the British in reneging on the terms of the Mandate they were given to (re-)establish a Jewish National Home in Palestine. First, in 1921/2 Churchill unilaterally gave away three quarters of Palestine to the Hashemites to create Jordan; then the UK sought to appease Arab terrorism (so what’s new?) by reneging on its undertaking to encourage Jewish immigration into Palestine, even while the Holocaust was unfolding in Europe, and...
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4:45pm
The charge that he is a bigot has clearly got under Johann Hari’s skin. In today’s Independent he writes a riposte to the torrent of criticism apparently provoked by his article last month — including my blog entry here — a rejoinder which he clearly believes boosts his case. On the contrary: he merely digs himself even further into the hole he has created.
He uses the tired device of screaming McCarthyism at anyone who says disobliging things about his views, wholly oblivious to the obvious and absurd paradox.
He cites as authorities for his views those paradigms of reason and decency Norman Finkelstein and Jimmy Carter. Finkelstein calls Holocaust survivors ‘frauds and hucksters’, says American Jews are ‘parasites’ and supports Hezbollah. You can gain some insight into Finkelstein’s fraudulent scholarship and...
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6:43pm
It was eminently predictable, but it is still a great victory. Today the Court of Appeal unanimously and emphatically declared that the ban under the Terrorism Act of the main Iranian opposition group, the People’s Mojahideen of Iran (PMOI), was illegal. Since the judges also refused to allow the Home Secretary even the possibility of an appeal, the government must now de-proscribe the PMOI as ordered by the court.
This not only brings to an end a shameful chapter in Britain’s long appeasement of the tyrannical Iranian regime but also offers a sliver of hope that that regime might now be toppled. One might have thought that this was an outcome devoutly to be wished for by the governments of the west. Far better, after all, that the ayatollahs should be deposed by popular will of the...
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