Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick, Metropolitan Police anti-terror ‘supremo’ ‘promptly’ resigned yesterday after he was photographed outside 10 Downing St clutching a top secret document listing UK Al Qaeda suspects atop a sheaf of papers. “YOU CAN’T QUIT QUICKER THAN A THICK QUICK QUITTER” screamed the Sun, referencing the cheery advertising slogan of KwikFit, a tyres [...]
Category Archives: Law and order
UK anti-terror chief resigns after literally losing the plot – four months too late
April 10, 2009 – 1:07 pm
What Michael Portillo saw in Basra
March 27, 2009 – 12:25 pm
. . . highlights the tragedy of a wasteful adventure which cost the lives of soldiers, civilians and insurgents, and ended in unnecessary and undeserved ignominy for the British Army “Our departure from Iraq ends a dismal period in our military history” writes Michael Portillo, former (Conservative) UK Defence Secretary, in this week’s excellent edition [...]
Iraq is a failed state. Here's why . . .
March 25, 2009 – 9:57 pm
“You guys want to be men? Why don’t you go down there and beat some people’s asses. You’re supposed to be Iraqi police but you’re too scared to do your jobs” . . . . . ”Get into a gunfight, and I guarantee you’ll fuck some people up . . . . . Having returned from [...]
Torture scandal reveals a fatal flaw in the UK-US 'Special relationship'.
March 21, 2009 – 6:36 pm
“British policy fails because we behave too much like an ineffective old Jeeves, even when Bertie Wooster has gone berserk.” By Timothy Garton Ash. Britain’s Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, responded to my article about possible British complicity in the torture of Binyam Mohamed (Thus passim) with a reader’s letter in the Guardian, disputing its accuracy. [...]
Your mentally challenged, sociopathic Big Brother is hacking Facebook
March 19, 2009 – 5:24 pm
“Britons, never, never, never, shall be slaves.” UK National Anthem (to be replaced with ‘Do the Vernon Coaker’) A few posts back I wondered whether M15 and its master, the CIA, Twittered. Well, not for the time in the world of Thus, fact has rapidly overtaken fiction. The inept and authoritarian UK government is actually [...]
Torture is naughty, barbaric and illegal – except when we do it
March 18, 2009 – 4:09 pm
This week, Britain’s foreign minister will present the Foreign Office’s annual report on human rights violations around the world. For anyone who cares about Britain and human rights, it will feel difficult to ask about anything except the British government’s own entanglement in a case of torture. By Timothy Garton Ash The evidence, so far [...]
An open letter to Gordon Brown, saviour of the world's banks, apart from Iceland, the UK and . . .
March 17, 2009 – 12:52 am
As Gordon and Alastair puff out their chests and iron their M+S Let’s Pretend We’re Businessmen suits (made in Indonesia) to host the G20 Global Summit on the global economy, a letter from Steven Katirai, whose Google search reveals him as a capital markets consultant based in the North East of England, has been doing the rounds [...]
Yes, the middle classes are revolting, but I don't predict a riot
February 25, 2009 – 4:50 pm
Riot shields ready to dodge the flying quiches. Set tasers to stun those unemployed analysts. Truncheon the bourgeois materialists. They no longer matter. We’ve bled them dry. By John J Kelly. Recently, The Guardian reported police warnings of a ‘summer of hate.’ Sources of Intelligence (in short supply in the police) ‘indicate’ that middle class [...]
Liberty in Britain is suffering death by a hundred cuts
February 19, 2009 – 11:24 am
I still cannot quite believe this is happening to my country. It feels like a bad dream. But it is happening, and we must stop it. Now. By Timothy Garton Ash For thirty years I have been travelling to unfree places, from East Germany to Burma, and writing about them in the belief that I was [...]
Most Americans rate Bush as one of the worst five Presidents
January 14, 2009 – 8:58 pm
Rasmussen Reports, 13 January 2009 President George W. Bush in a final press conference on Monday 12 January, 2009 acknowledged he made some mistakes in the White House, but most Americans – at least for now – are a lot more critical than that. Fifty-seven percent (57%) of Americans say Bush is one of the [...]