RandomlyEvil.org.uk

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them

Laurence Binyon (1869-1943), For The Fallen (1914)

Prague Panorama,
originally uploaded by Bryn_S.

I decided to get a photo of the view from my room during my recent stay in Prague. It’s been stiched together using the Hugin panorama tool. If you look, you can see the same van twice on the road on the right hand side of the picture.

I was slightly puzzled yesterday when I spotted the above message from PC Suite. You might wonder why, as it’s just saying that Ratbert (my phone) has connected via bluetooth. The problem is, Ratbert was in pieces infront of me (battery out, SIM out).

I did a scan for bluetooth devices using my Blackberry, then using my Nokia and found only one device had active bluetooth (my coworker’s phone), and that was named something completely different.

Given PC Suite was using Windows’ bluetooth stack, I worked on the premise that the fault lay at the door of Windows, so I gave it a little poke.

A search for active devices revealed:

You may ask “what’s wrong with that scan?”. Well…

• The Blackberry had its bluetooth disabled at the time of the scan.
• Wally (my old phone) is off, in a drawer, 25 miles away.

Clever that…

It gets weirder, I removed Wally from list of trusted devices and scanned again:

It seems to have picked it up again and implies it can be paired with.

Anyone else experienced simmilar oddities when dealing with Bluetooth?

B

I had the misfortune of catching the first two episodes of [Spooks] Code 9. I thought “well, Spooks was amusing enough, maybe this’ll be alright”.

It starts out with a decent enough premise, Terrorists detonate a nuclear bomb at the start of the Olympic Games in London (killing hundreds of thousands of people). The south coast of England is reduced to a desolate waste ground. The Government is relocated to the North of England along with the population (some now dying of radiation poisoning).

Sounds like a decent setup doesn’t it?

Well, it goes downhill shortly after it becomes a cross between Hollyoaks, Spooks and Skins.

The first episode centres on a plot to kill the Prime Minister. Throughout the show, the Scooby gang go around shaking down their sources, shooting arms dealers in the foot and tracking down the world’s most dangerous hitman through his favourite food order. The most dangerous hitman eventually turns out to be a 15yo hoodie armed with an AK-47 sniper rifle (yes, I know, the AK-47 isn’t a sniper rifle, I’m just telling you stuff from the show).

It eventually turns out that the Prime Minister wasn’t the target after all, the head of this new MI5 unit was! Shock! You didn’t see that coming did you?!

It’s unclear why they felt the need to do this (possibly some ham-fisted attempt to do replicate the effect of killing Lisa Faulkner in the second episode of the grown up version) beyond setting up the series story arc of some big conspiracy.

To be fair, the warning signs were there at the start. One of the main characters says during a selection interview that the reason she wants to be in MI5 is because the terrorists are getting younger. It gave me the rather silly image of two parents discussing pre-school:

“oh Darling, shall we send little Timmy to Osama in Diapers Nursery or the Security Crèche?”

I did also wonder how in this dystopian future, the defenders of freedom looked like they’d just finished a fashion shoot. Defeating terrorists whilst waiting for next season’s clothes to be made.

Watching the characters, none of them seem to be able to deliver any of their lines with any conviction. Paris Hilton could act as a quantum physicist with greater aplomb. The only convincing piece of acting I saw was when the maths geek was put in charge and froze in fear after being confronted by an emergency. I imagined a little voice in his head saying “OMG… they’re wanting me to act! What do I do?!”

My prediction is that by the end of the series, it’ll turn out that there’s a shadowy conspiracy which knew about the nuclear bomb and did nothing so they could subjugate the masses and make money (or something as equally cliché).

All in all, it served to be a pretty rubbish waste of potentially good airtime and concept. It left me wondering “Has BBC 3 actually delivered anything worth watching?”. I couldn’t think of any original programming it’d done which was any good.

*storms off*

B

We learn today that a computer was stolen from the constituency office of Hazel Blears (who looks to me like she’s permanently trying to suck the seeds out of a lemon). This in itself wouldn’t be big news as such, except for the fact we’re told that some classified Government papers were on them.

It is unclear at this stage whether or not Hazel Blears had employed any form of disk encryption, or had secured the documents in any meaningfully secure fashion. We’re told that the computer was password protected, by which I assume she’d bothered to set a password to log into, becasue we all know how hard it is to bypass that. There appears to be confusion as to whether this was her own personal machine or a government issued laptop that was stolen.

Within the last 10 months, there have been at least two other major incidents involving the Government losing sensitive information (Child benefit disks, Secret documents on the train - twice) within the last 10 months. It seems to indicate an apparent disregard for the nature of the information being held and a fundamental lack of understanding of the risks involved in its transport and storage. Back in the days of Station X (Breaking the Enigma), everyone understood the significance of the data being handled, and what it would mean if it were lost. It seems now that we have little or no idea of what data we have or how easily such things can go missing.

Do I expect anything to happen? No. We’ve seen it plenty of times before, a high level Civil Servant will get their wrists slapped and some low level Civil Servant will probably get the boot for sending her the documents without following procedure. There’ll be another review, and another new raft of data guardians appointed at great expense, no senior person will be held responsible. There’s speculation that Ms Blears may face action under the Official Secrets Act for failing to secure Government documents. What, if anything will happen on that front is anyone’s guess.

One would hope that the Government should at the very least be able to secure its own paperwork. If it can’t manage that, how can it expect us to have confidence in their assurances that everything else is going well?

B

Revisited after a re-read, tidied up to make a little more sense… hopefully

Yes, I know. I’ve gone from posting five times in as many months to posting three times in three days.

Speculation is mounting that voters in Ireland may have decided to vote No in the referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. What this will mean for EU expansion remains to be seen. As I understand, all 27 EU members have to agree to its terms for it to proceed. Will the Irish Government listen to the voters and go back to the EU and say “sorry guys, let’s look at this again” or will they do what they did last time and tell the Irish public “er, sorry… could you vote again on this?”

I don’t quite know where I stand on this issue of the Lisbon Treaty. I’m sure the UK has benefited from closer cooperation with Europe, but on the other it seems like we’re drowning in EU legislation about all manner of things, even down to how much time we should spend working.

It seems that we’re handing over more and more power to this body in another country, one in which we’re increasingly marginalised in favour of the German-French bloc. The Lisbon Treaty hands over another large chunk of powers from Westminster to Brussels, we’re reassured however that we have our “red lines”, which give us opt-outs in key areas like defence and criminal justice. Whilst defence was never going to enter the equation, our criminal justice system is increasingly deferring to the European Courts and to European Laws. I do wonder if these “red lines” would work when tested.

We were told that when the EU Constitution was due to be voted on that we’d have a referendum on it, as it was a substantial change in our relationship to Europe. That fell by the wayside when the French and the Dutch voted “No”. The Lisbon Treaty we’re told though is completely different (it used different sized font and everything…). From what I’ve read, it doesn’t seem a whole lot different. What I wanted was to be treated like an adult, to be presented with the facts and allowed to make up my mind. I guess that doesn’t fit in with the Government’s apparent desire to turn us all into meek clients of the state.

David Davis News

Reaction to David Davis’ resignation yesterday appears to be mixed. Most of the commentators in Westminster are following the “Er… what the hell is he playing at? are the Tories divided?” line. The Public (Well, the ones the BBC seem to be able to find) are behind him and admire the man for making a stand on principle.

It seems also that the ex editor of The Sun (Kelvin Mackenzie) intends to stand against him in the event of Labour not fielding a candidate. He argues that locking up terrorists is no bad thing (which I’m pretty sure everyone would agree with). He seemingly misses the point that the powers granted to the Police won’t be used to lock up terrorists, they’ll be used to lock up terrorist suspects (as in, people the Police are investigating but don’t have enough evidence to charge with anything). Meaning potentially innocent people could be locked up for 6 weeks.

It’s sure to be an interesting few weeks as the debate unfolds. The Campaign team is already up and running, if you want to help (and are on Facebook), have a look at the Facebook Group Fight for Freedom - Support David Davis.

Yours,

B

Updated after Jon pointed out that the Banana rules were infact a gross mis-interpretation of what was in the document. I’ll do more research in future…

Following on from yesterday’s piece on the vote for 42-day detention without charge, a follow-up piece seemed in order.

The media is in an absolute frenzy following the narrowness of the Government’s victory over 42 days. Many are describing it as a pyrrhic victory, that Brown has given so much away in order to win, he’d have been better off not trying.

During his monthly press conference, Brown sought to ridicule those who opposed the Anti-Terror bill as not understanding the threat faced by the country, the complexity of the evidence that needed to be processed and the determination of those who would do us harm.

I don’t claim to be an expert in International Terrorism and I am not privy to the intelligence gathered by the security services. I do however think that it’s ludicrous to try and beat this enemy we face by dismantling the legal protections that allow us our liberty. I find it repugnant that Government ministers claimed to be all knowing entities over the Conservatives, several of whom have faced the far more menacing spectre of Irish Terrorism back in the day. A point rammed home by David Cameron yesterday:

Increasingly in this country, we’re told that we face the very real threat from an enemy out to destroy our very way of life, an enemy who hate us for the freedoms we enjoy and the way in which we live our lives. Surely by extending detention without trial and allowing coroner’s inquests to be made secret on national security grounds (a rule which could have been applied in the de Menezes case) does the work of the terrorists for them? The country I fear is a lot further down the slippery slope and is sliding further down with each passing day. We learnt during The Troubles that we beat terrorists by not letting them get to us. We carry on, we taunt them by showing we’re not going to change our way of life to suit them.

David Davis (the Conservative standard bearer on the 42 day detention issue) resigned today in order to fight a by-election on the issue of 42 days. He intends to make a stand against the erosion of the liberties many have fought for over the years.

I had always viewed membership of this house as a noble endeavour, not least because we and our forebears have for centuries fiercely defended the fundamental freedoms of our citizens. Or we did, up until yesterday.

He went on to say:

And because the generic security arguments relied upon are ones that will never go away, this government will be tempted again in the future to try for 56 days, 70 days, 90 days.

But in truth 42 days is just one albeit perhaps the most salient example of the insidious, surreptitious and relentless erosion of fundamental British freedoms under this Government.

I admire the stand he’s taking on this issue, but I fear that it may backfire. The Lords still haven’t voted on it and Davis was a formidable opponent to a whole raft of useless Home Secretaries. I fear that by resigning, he’s giving Labour the opportunity to paint a picture of discord within the Opposition. So rather than being able to focus their attention on getting the Lords to put this heinous bit of legislation down, the Conservatives will be fighting a rear-guard action, denying rumours of splits in the party line.

A dark day.

B

The UK Parliament votes in a few hours on new legislation to allow the Police to detain suspects in terrorist offences for longer than the currently allowed maximum of 28 days (the bill before Parliament gives provision for up to 42 days).

Various bits and pieces have been written about how this is necessary measure to protect national security, or how it is an unacceptable attack on civil liberties guaranteed since the Magna Carta.

I side on the latter, and I’ll detail here why. Firstly, it’s expected to work like this:

A Terrorist Outrage is committed on British soil. After a few days, suspects are arrested and questioned. So far so good. The days tick away until eventually…

Day 28

The Director of Public Prosecution has to decide if the Police have enough evidence to charge the suspect with the crime or order his release.

The decision is made, there isn’t enough evidence. The Police need more time and go to the Home Secretary to say “er, Guv… we need more time”. The Home Secretary goes to Parliament (within 2 days) and says “There’s been a Terrorist Outrage and the police need more time to question this bloke”

Parliament then has to vote whether or not they’re allowed to do so within 30 days of being told by the Home Secretary (with the image of body bags fresh in their minds). A Judge then decides whether or not the suspect can be held beyond 28 days. If the Police applied on Day 27 and Parliament couldn’t vote for two weeks, it makes no odds, the Police can hold them for an extra two weeks. The ability to hold people for an 42 days then remains active for 60 days until either Parliament quashes it (through the vote) or until the 60 days run out.

This therefore could mean that the poor sod locked up could have been released by the time Parliament has debated the measure. The safeguards are largely unworkable. The Government insists that this would only be used in the most extreme of extreme situations, that it’s an insurance policy so that if something were to happen, the Government doesn’t need to rush to Parliament to pass a law to hold suspects for longer, denying the terrorists the “Oxygen of publicity”…

Because as we know, having Parliament rush through new legislation will give terrorists more publicity than say a large bomb going off in central London. I can imagine the next terrorist meeting:

Osama: “Guys, since we won’t have the British Parliament passing laws in the event of an attack by us, it’s pointless for us to go after them, we’ll be deprived of the oxygen of publicity… I’m going to give up and take up needlework”

The argument about this being an insurance policy seems to me at least to be a spurious one. We could pass such “insurance policy” laws until the end of time and we’d still be none the wiser. To be on the safe side, I say we pass a law that says if aliens turn up; we should provide every citizen of the country with little flags to welcome them (feel free to suggest your own). I don’t see that Parliament could be given anything close to the time necessary to look at such an issue in any great degree of detail without prejudicing the trial.

Returning to the Civil Liberties aspect, we all have basic rights in this country . The Police can’t detain you just because they feel like it. You have the right to know why you’re being detained and have the right to be tried before your peers. To lock someone up for 6 weeks whilst you look for evidence of their guilt seems to run counter to the whole notion. If the Police find no evidence after 6 weeks, they turn you free and you find that no one of your friends will talk to you, no one will give you a job. Solution? “here, have £3000 for every day we held you over 28 days”.

Little comfort if you have to start your life over again.

The Government claim that the complexity of such cases requires the increase in days. Whilst this may be the case, why not give the Police more money to hire more people and buy better equipment? It seems to me that if you double the number of people working on a case, they’re going to get through the evidence more quickly.

It’s also claimed that various high-profile Police and Security Service officials want this power “just in case”. I wonder what other powers the Police would like “just in case”? The Security Services even took the unprecedented step of saying publically that it was indifferent to the proposals. Even the man responsible for bringing such cases in front of the Courts has said it isn’t necessary.

Word reaches us today that Brown is buying off rebels with promises to take a softer line on Cuba, to give more money to Miner’s compensation causes, not to mention apparent shady dealings in Northern Ireland. A poll today says that a 69% of the public support the detention of terrorist suspects for 42 days in an emergency. I’m pretty sure that you could also have asked “do you think terrorist suspects should be given the death penalty” would have had a similar outcome. All I need to tell you about opinion polls is that it is possible to get any answer you want by asking the right question, as this clip from “Yes Prime Minster” demonstrates:

I hope that this goes the right way, but sadly I fear that we’re on the slippery slope.

B

Updated - 22:16
315 votes in favour, 306 against. The Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland help Gordon Brown from a tight spot. There’s talk that they were bought off with promises about military base sell-offs. It’s a sad day. Now we’re left to watch The House of Lords kick this horrible afront to our hard won civil liberties and the rule of decent law back into the waiting lap of Dear Leader

Sources
Counter Terrorism Bill 2008 in detail [BBC]
Brown buying off Rebels [BBC]
MI5 Speak Out [Guardian]
Deals on Cuba? [Spectator]

The title pretty much sums up what I intend to talk about, so feel free to skip over it if you prefer. This also ensures my average of one post a month this year is maintained.

Lenses

Yes, I have now gotten rid of my old eyeglasses and replaced them with a rather neat set of contact lenses. Given a rather high astigmatism in both eyes, I’ve had to take the toric based lenses (which are only available in the 30 day continuous wear lenses). It was quite odd to fight the reflex reaction of my eyelids to put in and take out a thin sliver of plastic, but I’m getting better at it (Although on Election Day, I found myself at 4AM trying to put the lenses in, poking myself in the eye a few times before realising the lens wasn’t even on my finger…).

Having worn them for a week, I’ve found my eyes have adjusted to them to the extent that I worry they may not even be in. I’ve found that when walking outdoors, they do dry out on occasion, but a quick few blinks sorts it all out. Next week, I need to wear them all day and then sleep in them, which I suppose will be the real test.

I’ve found that some people are rather squeamish about the idea of sticking a bit of plastic onto your eyeball (I tormented my poor sister over the weekend by discussing some of the problems I’d had). Still, it’s an experiment, and a worthwhile one I think.

Elections

Election Day - May 1st
I took a few days and volunteered for the Chester branch of the Conservative Party during the local elections. Several good friends of mine were standing for election to the new Cheshire West and Chester Unitary Authority. A 4AM start on Election Day to deliver leaflets reminding our members and those who’d intimated their support for us during canvasing that the elections were today and they should vote.

After two hours of walking about delivering leaflets, I returned and was send out to Tell at a poling station (for those not in the know, a Teller is one of those people who asks to see your voting card on the way in to make a note of your number. This is then used to mark off the people on the pledge list compiled by the canvasers. Those left on the list are then either given a phone call or visited by a party worker to remind them to vote).

The rest of the day was spent pounding the streets going door-to-door giving out leaflets and talking to voters from 11:00 in the morning, through to 21:00 in the evening. Our count had the margin in the 100s. During the latter stages, we spotted Labour members out knocking on doors within the city, having decided to branch out from their “strongholds” out of the centre of the City to try and capture some last minute floating voters.

At 21:00, we called an end to it, and all of us from the CF retreated to the bar to take the weight off and discuss the day. The entire campaign team went out for a meal togther and waited for news to come in from London. We got wind of an Exit Poll in The Sun which called the race as a win for Boris, by 10 points.

Following Morning… May 2nd

The sounds of Evan Davies on the Today Programme woke me up to the news that the elections had been a bloodbath for Labour. Harriet Harman was being dragged over the coals by John Humphrys. I lost count of the number of times she said that Labour were now “Listening” (seems to be that whenever they’re in trouble, they keep repeating some reassuring keyword, “Prudence”, “Stablity” and now “Listening”). Mr Humphrys retored with “A bit late now, isn’t it?”. Spoke for us all I think.

The BBC had been projecting a 44% share of the national vote for The Conservatives, against a poor Labour showing of 24% (with the Liberal Democrats on 25%). Several Labour commentators had suggested that we needed to score 47% to have a really good day (this was based on their successes in ‘95, when Tony Blair landed a massive blow to John Major’s ailing Conservative Government by taking 47% of the vote in the local elections).

Noone was buying their line, they’re in trouble.

I went on to see the count at the City Hall, which was a lot more tense than I’d expected. I spent my time monitoring the count for the Hoole & Newton ward, a former Liberal stronghold. As the votes stacked up, it was looking like a close one. We were ahead on the block votes, but it came down to the wire with the split votes. Two of our guys got in, but a tie for the 3rd seat resulted in the Lib Dems gaining the 3rd after a recount. (Hoole & Newton Ward).

City Ward fell (electing Richard, Tom and Max as their new Conservative Councillors - scalping two high profile Labour candidates), 88 votes the margin (our estimate had proven to be more or less accurate, and justified the last minute push for votes). Within Blacon (previously a strong Labour ward), Charlie came close to overturning a massive Labour majority (the votes recorded a 10% swing away from Labour, the best result within that ward for a generation). Damned fine work, and a brilliant platform to go again in 2011.

Birthday

In the middle of all the Election hoo-hah, I found time to have a Birthday… I seem to have reached the ripe old age of 25. Spent the birthday evening with the family, who’d gotten me a Dalek cake :).

Thanks to all of you who got in touch via the various methods, there are far too many of you to be able to answer individually, so I’ll just say thanks on here. You’re all ace.

Moving House

Yes, I have now also completed a house move. I’m still in Chester, but moved down deeper into Boughton. That’ll mean more to you if you know Chester or have the ability to use Google.

Well, that’s enough from me. Should keep you going for another month.

B

Humphrey Lyttleton, Jazz musician, radio presenter and all round legend died today.

The world is a sadder and whole lot less funny place without him.

A tribute to Humphrey Lyttleton [Daily Telegraph]

B