The Policy Blender

So it’s day three of the Government’s latest drive towards the New Labour totalitarian utopia. Day One gave us the ID cards vote. Day Two gave us a ban on smoking. Today the government passed more needless legislation on terrorism through the commons. The legislation adds nothing to existing laws; indeed as it’s drafted by morons it actually serves to obfuscate the current powers which were used to successfully convict Abu Hamza.

The Conservatives and LibDems have highlighted the above facts and stated continuously that the Government is politicising a serious issue by picking a fight that doesn’t need to be fought.

Charles Clarke has let it be known throughout the course of the day that he believes the Conservatives and the LibDems only opposed the use of the needlessly ambiguous word “glorification” in the legislation because they were siding with the terrorists.

It’s a shameful indictment of our media class that the Government have been able to spin this issue to this extent. Indeed, following a constructive interview with Dominic Grieve and Charles Clarke this morning on Radio 4’s Today programme, the BBC then used only a clip of Clarke’s paranoid and delusional ramblings for their half-hourly bullet-ins.

A laughable if not worrying example of the slapdash conception and implementation of this legislation is that under the new laws Bertie Ahern, Irish taoiseach could be arrested the next time he comes to the UK if he commemorates the 1916 Easter Rising this year. Whilst Grumpy Gord was playing at being PM earlier this week, Tony Blair was at the opening of a memorial to former terrorist group the ANC with Nelson Mandela in Soweto.

To further underline this irony, Clarke gave further indications of his delusional grip on reality by indicating that a terrorist group was defined as “anyone who opposes or wants to overthrow a country's government”.