Labour's bloodiest week

Political Comment
Daily Mail
By BLACK DOG
11th September 2006

Overheard explaining massive security arrangements for the Labour conference in Manchester later this month, the city's Chief Constable Michael Todd said the PM would be under 'constant vigilant watch' before adding mischievously: 'Normally it's terrorists we're protecting him from - not members of his own Cabinet.'

• This is not the first time Charles Clarke has made intemperate remarks about Gordon Brown. The ex-Home Secretary delivered a similarly brutal assessment of the Chancellor in front of a gaggle of Brownite MPs at a Pizza Express restaurant in Westminster. And as he ranted, he tucked into two man-sized pizzas.

• Brown's hitmen have their line of attack ready if ex-Defence Secretary John Reid throws his hat in the ring. Reid sent our boys back to Afghanistan in April saying it was such a piece of cake they would probably be back, mission accomplished, without firing a shot. Nineteen have been killed in the past week. 'We won't let him forget that,' said a Brown crony.

• Tory MP Nicholas Soames defended rebel leader fellow ex-Defence Minister Tom Watson, who was branded a 'traitor' by No 10. 'Watson did brilliantly when his toe-rag boss Des Browne missed a Commons statement on the deaths of five British soldiers and kindly arranged a posthumous promotion for an RAF officer who lived in my constituency,' said Soames.

• Mahmood's decision to resign as a Government aide in protest at the PM's failure to step down prompted Blairite loyalists to recall another occasion when he was accused of being unfaithful.

He dumped his Muslim wife over an affair with failed Tory Parliamentary candidate Elaina Cohen, above, who persuaded him to cut off his moustache. No. 10 must wish she had gone even further.

• Long-haired Labour MP Sion Simon, who signed the 'Blair must go' letter after being passed over for promotion, will have to take even more drastic action before he is made a minister by 'Prime Minister' Brown. The Chancellor thinks Simon's Byronesque flowing locks make him look like a 'beatnik'.

• If Brown takes over, Downing Street aides are threatening to copy a stunt by Bill Clinton's White House staff when they handed over the keys to George W. Bush. They removed the Ws from White House keyboards so Bush's name couldn't be written in full.

'We are going to remove the Bs,' vowed a cheeky Blairite intern.

• Hartlepool Labour MP Ian Wright's decision to resign as a Government aide over Blair's refusal to quit had nothing to do with his feelings about Blair or Brown. He was furious with Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt for welching on a vow to save his local hospital.

• Celebrations planned by Leftie MP Harry Cohen in anticipation of Brown replacing Blair in No10 hit an unexpected snag. 'I put some champagne on ice ages ago but the wife drank it,' he said.

Tories won't save us being

squeezed to death by the EU

Daily Mail Comment
11th September 2006

Gosh, the Tories have just discovered that the European Union is a threat to Britain's existence.

Tory MP Eric Pickles has unearthed a map showing that there is a Berlin-inspired master-plan to create a United States of Europe, in which the existing nations would vanish and be replaced by regions which deliberately ignore all the old national frontiers.

Congratulations, lads. This fact has been known, and obvious, for decades. If you support the EU, with its commitment to ever-narrower union, this is what you back. And the Tory Party continues to support it, pretending that we can negotiate an exemption from this fate. You might as well negotiate with a boa constrictor as it tightens its coils around you.

As it happens, in a couple of weeks we seem likely to lose our veto over criminal justice affairs, which means the end of this country's uniquely free legal system and its replacement by the continental one.

The boa constrictor squeezes harder every day, and the Useless Tories squeak about being 'in Europe but not run by Europe'.

They might as well argue for 'Being squeezed to death by a snake, but not eaten by that snake'.

How can walking free ever deter morons like Naseem?

Boxer Naseem Hamed was released from jail after serving 16 weeks of a 15-month sentence, imposed because of his unhinged, irresponsible driving, which could easily have led to many deaths and actually severely injured two people.

Hamed remarked as he walked to freedom: 'Thank God nobody's died.' Indeed, not that God had much to do with this moron's decision to drive as he did.

If anybody had died, he might actually have had to stay in jail for, let's see, at least six months.

The Anthony Blair who is now despised

The Anthony Blair who is now despised and reviled is exactly the same person who, nine years ago, was greeted with almost universal adulation. Nothing has changed except that time has revealed to the slow learners what the sharp-witted could see from the start. He's no good.

I won't be sorry to see him go, though it will make little difference. But this festival of contempt is unseemly.

Everyone who ever praised him should now be forced to remember that praise, and have their noses rubbed in it, before they make the same mistake with David Cameron. How many of these empty, dim people must we endure before we get a proper government?

Parasites do the bitching as real men do the dying

While Westminster had its meaningless little squabble last week, real men were fighting and dying in Afghanistan. Each of those deaths was infinitely more important than the empty question of who leads this Parliament of dunces.

The soldiers and airmen were much more worthy of our concern than the failures and parasites who now make up our political class.

Badly paid, palmed off with equipment half a century old, the Forces sent to the world's most dangerous battlefield have done as they were told because that is their job. They probably know it is futile, which it is. But they live and work to a higher standard, where it is a matter of honour to do your work well, however idiotic the instruction.

The important fact is that the people who irresponsibly sent our soldiers to Afghanistan are so much less impressive than the men they have ordered into peril. And this is now the case throughout our poisoned, decaying society.

Those in charge are inferior to those Comrelations who actually keep things going. The chief constables are not as bright as the constables. The education chiefs couldn't control a classroom. The local authorities couldn't run an ice-cream stall, yet impose their will on competent small businessmen.

Spend time among politicians and you find people who are barely qualified to tie their own shoelaces. Many of them are in politics because they are failures in their chosen trades or professions - or never had any in the first place. Many are unrepentant anti-British Comrelations and their fellow-travellers. Many have never done anything else but hang around the pig-troughs of power, grovelling on the floor for greasy scraps until their sycophancy is noticed, and they are allowed to sink their own snouts into the swill.

Look at them. I have never been able to discover a single person who was represented in court by the supposed barrister Anthony Blair. His alleged rival and self-proclaimed heir, David Cameron, was a corporate public man, described by those who dealt with him as 'poisonous and slippery' and whose only real passion appears to be the watering down of the laws against dangerous drugs. Why's that, Dave?

By contrast, the men and women who make up our Armed Forces are personally courageous, invariably masters of their tasks, self-disciplined and diligent to standards long ago forgotten in the rest of this country. No, this isn't an argument for a military coup. For the other thing about our Armed Services is their conscientious refusal to mess around in politics.

It is an argument for a mighty clear-out of Parliament, not a palace putsch where one nonentity is replaced by another.

'Who is to do the clearing-out?' I am asked week after week by letter and e-mail.

Why, you are. First, you must withdraw your support from the discredited and bankrupt political parties - above all the Useless Tories - who have misgoverned us so badly for the past 50 years and who currently guard the gates to Parliament so that it is virtually impossible for a decent person to get in there, or to survive if they do get in.

Then you must build new parties that properly represent you. Don't wait for a leader to appear from the clouds. None is coming. Do it yourselves, or learn to like what you get if you won't.

Blair Spin Again

Stage-managed spin from start to finish Daily Mail Comment 6th September 2006 Nothing better sums up Tony Blair's time in office than his closest aides' toe-curling plans for his departure. In a leaked memo, they say the great man should appear on Blue Peter, Songs of Praise and Chris Evans's radio show. He should make a final tour of the nation, visiting "iconic locations" and celebrating the "triumph of Blairism". "He needs to go with the crowds wanting more. He should be the star who won't even play that last encore…". Lord, give us strength! There are five flesh-creeping pages of this, recommending the Prime Minister should be "carefully positioned" to distance himself from the "political village". So it is that Mr Blair's premiership is to end as it began - as an elaborately stage-managed public relations exercise, all style and no substance. Tellingly, the Prime Minister's aides come close to admitting Mr Blair has achieved precious little of what he promised. They write that his "genuine legacy" is not so much the delivery of his policies as the dominance of New Labour ideas. You can say that again! All around us - in schools and hospitals and on our crime-ridden streets - can be seen the evidence of Mr Blair's failure to deliver on the confident pledges he made in 1997. So what concrete achievements can he claim after all these years? The list makes dismal reading: All-out war in Iraq and Afghanistan; a Human Rights Act that jeopardises our security by protecting terrorists; record immigration; devolution that makes nonsense of the constitution; countless billions wasted on grandiose computer systems that don't work; an unprecedented crackdown on civil liberties; a preposterously expensive Millennium Dome, now mired in sleaze...Oh, yes...and a cash for peerages scandal. No wonder Mr Blair's aides prefer to live in a fantasy world, in which their hero is pressed by adoring multitudes demanding "encore!". Back on Planet Earth, with increasing numbers of Labour MPs queueing up at the door of No 10, Mr Blair finally caved in and named the date of his departure. But even so, effective government is on hold until the succession is resolved. And that is nearly a year away. What was it that memo said about the Prime Minister needing to go "with the crowds wanting more"? Sorry, Mr Blair, but it's far, far too late for that now. St Paul in the dock How can it be a crime to distribute leaflets containing quotations from the Bible? That, believe it or not, is what led police to charge Stephen Green, of Christian Voice, with using "abusive or insulting words", contrary to the Public Order Act. But the words complained of were not Mr Green's. They were those of St Paul and the prophet Leviticus, extracted from the Authorised Version of the Bible and distributed by members of Christian Voice at a gay rally in Cardiff. Why did the police object? For the same reason that they accused author Lynette Burrows of "homophobia" when she dared suggest that same-sex couples did not make ideal adoptive parents. And the same reason Strathclyde firemen have been disciplined for refusing to attend a gay parade. Mr Green's "crime" is to believe, along with St Paul and traditionalists of many faiths, that homosexual acts are sinful. Not so long ago, gay intercourse was severely punished by law. Quite rightly, that has changed. But what a slippery slope we tread if it is to become a crime to disapprove.

Smiling in the face of justice

Daily Mail Comment
5th September 2006

What a sickening spectacle it was, when 'Prince' Naseem Hamed was released from Moorland Open Prison in Doncaster yesterday after serving only 16 weeks of a 15-month sentence for dangerous driving.

Waving and smiling like a lottery winner, the boxer strode down the road and stepped into a silver Rolls-Royce. Behind was a stretch limousine, blaring loud music and fitted out for a riotous party.

Hamed's brief mention of his victim seems wholly inadequate beside the hideously reckless crime that put him in prison.

Just to show off to his friends, he had driven his £230,000 McLaren Mercedes at 90mph on the wrong side of the road over the brow of a hill, straight into a VW Golf.

The crash very nearly killed 39-year-old Anthony Burgin. It left him with crippling injuries from which he may never recover.

The real scandal, however, is not that one brash, self-obsessed boxer - and his family and friends who laid on that hero's reception for him - seem to lack any sense of decency or shame.

What is really shocking is that thousands like Hamed are being set free after serving the merest fraction of their sentences.

His release, after barely a quarter of his 15 months, epitomises the state of British justice under a Labour Party embarrassed by prison overcrowding but too short-sighted to build the jails the country so desperately needs.

Every drastically reduced sentence like his makes a mockery of the Government's repeated promises to 'rebalance' the system in favour of the victim.

Hamed is not the only ex-convict smiling today. Criminals all over the country are grinning their contempt for a justice system that has lost all its power to instil fear and respect for the law.

March of progress?

It is just as well that the Victorian Duchess of Leeds is no longer around to discover what became of the girls' orphanage, run by nuns, which she built in the heart of the Sussex countryside at the height of the Empire in 1868.

We can guess she would have understood it when the massive gothic pile later became a Catholic junior seminary and then a ballet school.

After all, not only did fewer women want to become nuns as the 20th century progressed, but the state began to take over the charitable work for which the orphanage had originally been built.

But what would the old Duchess have made of the building's present use - as a run-down school for a mere dozen Muslim boys, in which half of every day is devoted to learning the Koran? Wouldn't she have been utterly bewildered?

And wouldn't she have been horrified to learn that the mansion and its grounds would become the focus of today's massive police investigation into a group of terrorists intent on destroying the British way of life?

One other aspect of modern life would surely have puzzled the Duchess.

How incredible that over the past year, the Sussex police have been sending officers and civilians to this bizarre school for 'diversity training' - in spite of the fact that the security services had been warned more than seven years ago that terrorists might be using the building or its grounds.

Doesn't that tell you everything you need to know about security services so obsessed by 'multiculturalism' that they don't dare investigate what goes on under their very noses?

What a great deal the history of one building has to tell us about developments in Britain since the Duchess built her orphanage.

Is this what is known as progress?

Mission impossible in Afghanistan?

Daily Mail Comment
4th September 2006

Less than five months ago, John Reid suggested British troops could be withdrawn from Afghanistan in three years 'without firing a shot'.

Did he actually believe it - or was he just trying to pull the wool over the public's eyes?

Either way Mr Reid's remark, made when he was Defence Secretary, has proved tragically wide of the mark.

So far, 15 of our servicemen have been killed in action. And now Saturday's terrible plane crash has brought the total British death toll to 36.

The fate of that ageing Nimrod MR2 reopens vital questions about the adequacy of our troops' equipment in the toughest prolonged battle since Korea.

We know they have nothing like the manpower they need. Some exhausted units are having to fight continuously for up to 40 days in temperatures of 120F.

Even when the latest reinforcements arrive in Helmand, barely 4,500 troops will have to police an area four times the size of Wales. And their job becomes less clearly defined every day.

Not only are they being asked to fight the Taliban and other jihadis seeking to sabotage the Kabul regime. They are also expected to tackle opium production and the warlords who control it.

This weekend's UN figures, showing a record poppy harvest, prove how impossible that task is.

Meanwhile, the repercussions of the war on terror continue to be felt at home. Police warn that thousands of radicalised British Muslims are being monitored, while an alleged jihadi training camp is uncovered in the Sussex countryside and 14 more suspects are arrested in London.

How long will the fight go on in Afghanistan? The omens are not good.

Yesterday, it emerged that rules of engagement have quietly been changed. British servicemen are now effectively on a war footing, with all that this implies for an open-ended and increasingly bloody and expensive conflict.

Will Ministers now tell us exactly what our 'war aims' are, how they see the conflict developing, and how they propose to give our troops the reinforcements and equipment they need? And will they be honest this time?

Betraying our future

A year ago, the Government caved in to union pressure and ditched plans to raise the pension age for public sector workers from 60 to 65.

Already it is becoming clear what a massive price future generations will have to pay in tax for that act of cowardice.

Last year the total liabilities of six of the seven largest public-sector pension funds rose by a staggering £50billion. Accounts for the NHS Pension Scheme could bring the figure to £70billion.

How typical of Tony Blair that when he had the chance to put fairness and the national interest first, he flunked it.

Wiped off the map

On its website the EU has a list of more than 150 'Euromyths', from a Brussels ban on curved bananas to an edict that barmaids should cover their cleavage.

They're all nonsense, claim Eurocrats - just nationalistic scaremongering.

Now cartographers have redrawn the map of Europe, proposing new regions lumping Kent and Sussex with northern France, parts of Scotland and East Anglia with Scandinavia, and Wales and western England with Ireland.

Is this the work of Eurosceptics, trying to frighten us all? Far from it. The maps have been commissioned by the EU itself.

Funny, isn't it, that no matter how mad the scare-stories of the Eurosceptics, the EU always manages to come up with something far madder?

Casino saga that would shame a backstreet bookie

Daily Mail Comment
3rd September 2006


How hollow ring the words of the Prime Minister's chum Lord Falconer, who, back in 2002, promised that the sale of the Dome to corporate giant AEG, headed by American billionaire Philip Anschutz, would create 20,000 jobs.

How empty now sits the pledge from John Prescott that it would 'create a new identity for the Peninsula'.

Indeed, there are jobs to be had. But they are low-paid tasks filled not by a local workforce, but Eastern Europeans working illegally, using forged National Insurance numbers.

Certainly the area is getting a new identity - one dominated by the spectre of a Government in hock to Las Vegas gambling interests determined to secure the right to operate Britain's first super-casino inside the Millennium Dome.

Last week saw an inauspicious start to hearings by the Casino Advisory Panel, led by Professor Stephen Crow, to determine which of seven rival cities should host the giant casino.

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Professor crow airily dismissed the fact that John Prescott was the beneficiary of hospitality and gifts of cowboy regalia from Philip Anschutz as a 'silly story', ignoring a blatant conflict of interest and the Parliamentary reprimand that it earned him.

And it was soon clear that the panel was not even-handed in its interrogations. Soft questions were directed at Greenwich Council, a supporter of AEG's scheme, while rivals such as Blackpool received a hostile grilling.

To further muddy the waters, an official from Greenwich Council is working part-time for AEG.

It would be nice to believe that this was part of the much-vaunted job-creation scheme, were this person's salary not already being met by local council taxpayers. His job is to help fill jobs at the supercasino, a task which seemingly entails providing work for the illegal immigrants that the Home Office has now caught during raids on the site.

The behaviour of AEG raises questions, too. A faked letter of support from religious leaders turns out to have been drafted by a woman previously employed as a tourism officer by Greenwich before being hired by the US firm.

Plans have been distributed of the 'casino roof', raising questions about why Mr Anschutz should already be so confident of receiving permission.

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The government's obsession with supercasinos beggars belief. There has never been a public demand for them. The evidence is that they are a malign influence on those who can least afford to gamble.

For a Labour Government, whose roots lie in defending the most vulnerable, this obsession with foreign gaming entrepreneurs is distasteful.

To suggest that it is all in the interests of jobs and regeneration is disingenuous, while Professor Crow's defence of John Prescott's fraternising with Philip Anschutz and his panel's apparent bias towards Greenwich is unacceptable.

Plans for a supercasino should have been abandoned long ago.

If we are to be forced to have this gambling carbuncle, then at least make the process to determine who should provide it above reproach.

A mug that says it all

Daily Mail Comment
2nd September 2006

Anthony…your refined inner voice drives your thoughts and your deeds. You're a man who's in charge, others follow your lead. You possess great depth and have a passionate mind. Others think you're influential, ethical and kind.

Thus Mr Blair presents himself to what he presumably believes is an admiring world as he poses for a carefully managed photocall at Chequers, clutching the tea mug that bears this toe-curling message.

Was he perhaps engaging in a bit of self-mockery? Attempting a little joke, to cheer us all up? It would be charitable to think so. But it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this most vain and self-deluding of politicians means every word.

Even as that picture was being taken, Mr Blair made it clear that he regards himself as indispensable. Though much of his own party aches for him to go, he refuses point blank to name a date for his departure, insisting he has great reforming work still to do.

Not surprisingly, his declaration has provoked a furious reaction from those Labour MPs who can't wait to see the back of him. With no obvious mechanism to force him out - short of a Cabinet revolt - they are stuck with a leader in denial, who simply won't accept his time is up.

So now we are back in miserably familiar New Labour territory; Gordon Brown frustrated yet again; mutual loathing between No 10 and the Treasury; the Government all but paralysed by rivalry at the top; drift and indecision everywhere.

And for what? Is there the slightest advantage to Britain or anyone else (apart from his best buddy, George Bush) to have a lame duck leader clinging like a limpet to office?

At home, he presides over a shaming litany of sleaze. Investigations continue into the cash for peerages affair and Mr Blair may yet suffer the indignity of becoming the first Prime Minister to have his collar felt by the police.

Meanwhile, despite all those wasted billions, his administration has become a byword for incompetence on everything from immigration to the NHS and the criminal justice system.

Reform? The bitter Labour feuding over Mr Blair's education plans - which had to be watered down to such an extent that they became virtually meaningless - exposes the emptiness of his ambitions. This Prime Minister is incapable of imposing real change, when his own party no longer respects or trusts him.

And now it seems the public feels the same way. The latest polls reveal that Labour support has slumped to just 31 per cent - its lowest rating in 19 years. Support for the Tories is at 40 per cent.

It gets worse. Labour MPs are bracing themselves for shattering reverses in Scotland and Wales next May. Many fear for their seats at the next election, unless the leadership issue is resolved soon.

But if Mr Blair is a sadly diminished figure at home, could he yet make a significant contribution on the world stage? He certainly dreams of it, talking grandly of embarking on a new search for peace in the Middle East.

Sometimes you just have to wonder what planet he inhabits. So damaged is his reputation over Iraq, Lebanon and his 'Yo, Blair' subservience to President Bush that the UN had to tell him to keep his nose out of negotiations for a Middle East ceasefire, fearing that he would make matters worse.

No, if any progress is to be made in that unhappy region of the world, it won't come from the discredited, distrusted and embarrassingly vainglorious Tony Blair. He is as much a busted flush abroad as he is at home.

And the longer he hangs pointlessly on, the more Britain will pay the price.

Another empty stunt

Daily Mail Comment
1st September 2006


Back from Barbados to find his troops downhearted, demoralised and just aching for him to go, President Tony tries to change the subject by producing yet another eye-catching initiative.

Yes, in the latest in a long line of Blairite wheezes - none of which has worked - he wants to take charge of babies even before they are born, by forcing pregnant teenagers to accept state help.

Of course it is true we have a major problem, as this paper has so frequently pointed out. Britain is the European capital of teenage pregnancies, family breakdown, fatherless children and the miserable social consequences that follow.

But hasn't New Labour made matters much worse by skewing our tax and benefits system in favour of single parents? By showing hostility to marriage and the family? And by scorning the teaching of traditional moral standards?

Mr Blair doesn't begin to address the real issues. This is self-serving stunt from a politician who won't accept his time is up.

Silly' stories and the smell of sleaze

Daily Mail Comment
31st August 2006

So that's all right then. It seems we're just imagining the stench of sleaze surrounding plans for Britain's first 'super casino' at the Millennium Dome.

Yes, according to Professor Stephen Crow, head of the casino advisory panel, the public can be reassured.

He insists he is independent. He says he hasn't decided whether this gambling monolith should go to Greenwich or one of its rivals. And he is scathing about the 'silly stories' over the Dome bid.

But the smell won't go away, even if we set aside the reckless way this Government - a Labour Government, of all things - is encouraging gambling.

Yesterday, for example, the inquiry into the bid was condemned as a 'farce' when so few opponents spoke out, because they believe Professor Crow's panel isn't interested in principled objections. But then, many people - like this paper - suspect this casino is already a done deal.

Just consider some of the issues. Why did the American billionaire pushing for the the casino, Philip Anschutz, offer hospitality at his ranch to John Prescott, give him presents and entertain him seven times in the last five years? For the pleasure of his scintillating conversation?

It doesn't stop there. Astonishingly, all five members of the casino advisory panel have so many vested interests that at one time or another they have each had to withdraw from discussions.

Who decided they were the right team to oversee a gambling explosion? Yes you've guessed it. . . Mr Prescott.

The story grows murkier. Mr Anschutz's company AEG produced a document purporting to show that local religious leaders favoured a casino at the Dome. To put it bluntly, that was a lie, for which the firm (now it has been caught out) has been forced to apologise.

More pertinently, AEG has already started building its casino, even though a gambling licence hasn't been granted. When he heard the news, Professor Crow said 'it's something we have to take into account', which many took as a nod and a wink to the Americans.

Though the professor now insists this isn't the right conclusion to draw, there is an obvious problem.

Mr Anschutz is described by Fortune magazine as America's greediest executive. So why on earth would he go to the huge expense of starting to build his casino if he hadn't already been tipped the wink that his bid would succeed?

Sadly, there is nothing remotely silly in such questions. Aren't they the inevitable response to a Government that has always been up to its neck in sleaze?

Clear this hornets' nest of extremists

Daily Mail Commentt
30th August 2006


Which country poses the greatest threat to America's homeland security: Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea?

None of the above, according to a growing body of opinion across the Atlantic. The answer, say many American pundits, is the United Kingdom.

At first sight, this looks outrageously ungrateful. After all, aren't British troops dying every week, both in Afghanistan and Iraq, for an American foreign policy slavishly followed by Tony Blair?

Yet the more you think about the charge - spelt out in the current New Republic magazine and echoed by American think-tanks of every political persuasion - the more truth you can see in it.

Hasn't Britain indeed become, in the words of Nile Gardiner of the Heritage Foundation, 'a hornets' nest of Islamic extremists'?

How have we let this come about?

Much of the answer lies in our authorities' spineless refusal to confront Islamic extremism for fear of being thought anti-Muslim.

Americans gape in disbelief when our senior policemen's first reaction to every terrorist atrocity is to try to appease religious extremists. Or when Ministers employ apologists for terrorism as special advisers at the Foreign Office.

Tony Blair is forever promising crackdowns on preachers of hatred. Yet what actually happens, after he has got the headlines he wants?

Not a single person has been charged under his new law against glorifying terrorism since it came into force in March. Not one.

Yet here is Abu Hamza's sidekick Abu Abdullah, free as a bird, announcing he would 'love' to kill British soldiers and making excuses for suicide bombings.

Certainly, you can expect trouble from the police if you are an 82-year-old heckler at a Labour conference or a woman who stands by the Cenotaph, daring to read out the names of soldiers killed in Iraq.

But the real warmongers face nothing harsher than a grilling from Newsnight's Jeremy Paxman and get the chance to broadcast their views.

No wonder the Americans are nervous, with more than four million Britons flying to the U.S. each year under the privileged visa waiver programme.

Until we clear these hornets from our nest, they will remain a deadly threat to the entire free world.

Dirty politics

Revelations about Charles Kennedy's drink problem cast the LibDems and their new leader in an ugly light.

When it suited their purposes, Ming & Co campaigned to put into Number 10 a man they knew to be an often-incapable drunk. So much for their sense of responsibility to the nation.

Now it suits senior LibDems to blacken Mr Kennedy's name, at the very moment when he is planning a comeback, by reviving memories of his past troubles.

We have long known that many LibDems like to play dirty - as much in politics as in their private lives.

That didn't matter so much while they were stuck in the political wilderness. But the way the polls are going, they may well hold the balance of power next time.

Isn't that a terrifying thought?

Give us a break

Prezza gagged. John Reid back in his box. Blair in Barbados and Brown on extended paternity leave. How peaceful the political world has been with the big guns out of action. And how serenely the ship of state has sailed on without them.

But now they're getting back into the fray, itching to bore us with their speeches and bombard us with fatuous laws.

Roll on next summer, when they clear off again.

Centre Stage Productions

Centre Stage Productions

The Final What's On 2006
Centre Stage Productions - Palma de Mallorca
**********************

3rd & 4th November At 9pm (21.00)
5th November At 8pm (20.00)

The Full Centre Stage Chorus And Dancers

La Magia Del Musical
(The Magic Of The Musical)

The Song - The Dance - The Spectacle

Sala Mozart - Auditorium - Palma
Tickets From The Box Office

This show was a total sell out last year... BEFORE the show even opened.
If you want seats - Be Safe - Be Sure - BOOK NOW!

**********************

17th & 18th November At 8pm (20.00)

Centre Stage Junior Company Presents
A Christmas Concert

At the Coleman Hall - Anglican Church - Palma
Tickets From The Centre Stage Office: 971 22 15 30

**********************

10th December At 5pm
For The 8th Year Running:

A Celebration Of Christmas

A Choir of Young People
From the International Schools of Mallorca

Under the direction of Conway Jones

Held in the awe inspiring:

Palma Cathedral

Free Admission
A Collection Will Be Taken In Aid Of The Ecumenical Movement

Centre Stage Productions

Centre Stage Productions

The Final What's On 2006
Centre Stage Productions - Palma de Mallorca
**********************

3rd & 4th November At 9pm (21.00)
5th November At 8pm (20.00)

The Full Centre Stage Chorus And Dancers

La Magia Del Musical
(The Magic Of The Musical)

The Song - The Dance - The Spectacle

Sala Mozart - Auditorium - Palma
Tickets From The Box Office

This show was a total sell out last year... BEFORE the show even opened.
If you want seats - Be Safe - Be Sure - BOOK NOW!

**********************

17th & 18th November At 8pm (20.00)

Centre Stage Junior Company Presents
A Christmas Concert

At the Coleman Hall - Anglican Church - Palma
Tickets From The Centre Stage Office: 971 22 15 30

**********************

10th December At 5pm
For The 8th Year Running:

A Celebration Of Christmas

A Choir of Young People
From the International Schools of Mallorca

Under the direction of Conway Jones

Held in the awe inspiring:

Palma Cathedral

Free Admission
A Collection Will Be Taken In Aid Of The Ecumenical Movement

The Final What's On 2006
Centre Stage Productions
**********************

3rd & 4th November At 9pm (21.00)
5th November At 8pm (20.00)

The Full Centre Stage Chorus And Dancers

La Magia Del Musical
(The Magic Of The Musical)

The Song - The Dance - The Spectacle

Sala Mozart - Auditorium - Palma
Tickets From The Box Office

This show was a total sell out last year... BEFORE the show even opened.
If you want seats - Be Safe - Be Sure - BOOK NOW!

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17th & 18th November At 8pm (20.00)

Centre Stage Junior Company Presents
A Christmas Concert

At the Coleman Hall - Anglican Church - Palma
Tickets From The Centre Stage Office: 971 22 15 30

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10th December At 5pm
For The 8th Year Running:

A Celebration Of Christmas

A Choir of Young People
From the International Schools of Mallorca

Under the direction of Conway Jones

Held in the awe inspiring:

Palma Cathedral

Free Admission
A Collection Will Be Taken In Aid Of The Ecumenical Movement