Wardman Wire Magazine

Amongst all the excitement and speculation about the story, there was an interesting and sober conversation about the possible legal and constitutional implications of the arrest of Damian Green MP and the process of the search of his House of Commons office on the Insite Law Magazine podcast:

Today I am talking to Carl Gardner, a barrister, ex government lawyer and author of The Head of Legal blog about the extraordinary arrest by Police of shadow frontbench spokesman on Immigration, Damien Green MP.

Click through on the title to listen.

I have the Top 30 Wikio UK Blogs for November.

I am going to Twitter them in reverse order at 5 minute intervals starting at 6pm.

You can follow my Twitter Feed here:

http://twitter.com/mattwardman

I can reveal now that about 28 out of 30 are political blogs.

As the dust settles and the hard numbers start to become available, it increasingly looks as if key parts of the grand picture painted during the US presidential election were wrong. This picture – of unprecedented interest by ordinary people in the election – was repeatedly illuminated with stories of record numbers of people voting [...]

Via Damian Thompson’s Holy Smoke blog, a report of a plan by Scientologists to swoop on Mumbai with their “educational booklets”, as previously happened after the New York World Trade Centre attacks after 9/11, in London after the Bus and Underground Bombs on 7/7 in 2005, at Virginia Tech after the shootings and on other occasions.

He has confirmed the existence of a plan to despatch of Scientology Booklets with the headquarters of ABLE UK. ABLE UK is a Scientology front organisation, Association for Better Living and Education:

I can confirm that. I’ve just rung ABLE UK at Saint Hill Manor, the Scientology HQ, to be told that Hubbard booklets are being rushed out “in order to pour oil on troubled water”. I think I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions.

The Conservatives are beginning to really start pushing the online battle back towards Labour. I commented a while back on the Labour’s far more web-orientated economic propaganda - even though it was pretty useless, as it was too large to be embedded in a blog, even in the main post!
But since then, the Conservatives have [...]

You can read my detailed assessment here.

I’d suggest that the crucial aspects here are process issues:

1 - The violation of Commons privilege.

2 - The facts taken behind the “the police have operational control and have not overstepped the mark” position taken by the Cabinet Ministers. Politically the next question is obvious:

Just who moved the mark to a place where this became possible, Mr Brown?

Practically, the question is different:

How do we move the mark that the police did not go beyond to somewhere more suitable for an advanced democracy?

Realistically, that is only going to happen in 2 scenarios, either a Tory majority, or a hung Parliament as a condition of Lib Dem cooperation with a minority administration.

Yes, I know the story is old now. But it’s funny.

By the way, we’re planning a series of articles about the BNP in Local Politics from a range of political viewpoints. They will include analysis, and also experience of those in local politics in areas where the BNP are active.

It was inspired by this thread, which was unusually analytical for a cross-party conversation on Labour Home.