Blair loses it - big time!

Tony Blair has finally accepted, it seems, that he will not be able to ram through Parliament his plans for detention without trial to be extended from the current 14 days to 90 (!!) days, but we have undoubtedly not heard the last of this pernicious idea. Rumours are that a period of 20, 28 or even 30 days will be attempted. Fourteen days is already far too long - the old period of seventy-two hours is where we want to get back to.

Mr Blair rabbiting on about the police 'needing' this time is just so much hot air - and dangerous nonsense, which is the really sinister part. Does Tony Blair really want his legacy to be having turned this country into a 'police state'. A lot of people disliked Margaret Thatcher intensely (I was never one of those quite obviously), but I think it fair to say that not even her worst enemies ever thought she would have liked to emulate the worst excesses of petty and not-so-petty tyrants everywhere, as our present Prime Minister seems increasingly determined to do.

A small mercy is that the latest addition to the incitement to terror laws were defeated by one vote in the House of Commons last week. Although I have been away, I have been following what has been going on in Airstrip One quite closely, although weaving one's way around the constant government propaganda announcements about new 'policy initiatives' has gotten so boring - do they really take the average citizen for the complete morons their agitprop methods imply? Seems very like it!

(As you can see, I'm plunging straight back into more serious matters without preliminary - my trip went well and I'll probably write a little about it here in due course.)