Day 2509: Gone West

Wednesday:


Simple Sailor or Silly Sausage?

ALMOST the most worrying thing about the case of Mr Lord Admiral West is that he is credited as a former head of the Intelligence Staff. It makes you worry for the security of our agents if "M" himself cannot stand up to a five-minute grilling from Mr Frown. I mean what are they going to do when Mr Goldfinger has them strapped to the table with the industrial laser pointed at their "handwash only" labels? Assuming Mr Frown DOESN'T have an industrial laser set up in Downing Street for this very purpose…

But what is REALLY the MOST worrying thing is that Mr Frown does not want to listen to the advice about terrorism from the very person he hired to advise him. He would rather be all SECRET STALIN and have the poor man eat his own words on live television than admit that it might be worth THINKING for a bit before doing ANOTHER stupid slash and burn of our once precious liberties.

Mr Frown says that he is looking for a "new consensus" on terror.


He cannot be looking very hard: as Liberal Democrat acting leader Mr Power Cable said:

"Yoo hoo, Mr Frown, the consensus is over here saying 'not one day longer'."

Anyway, it seems to me that the way the law is set up here is that if you think that someone is QUITE LIKELY to try to explode people then you arrest them and charge them and bring them to trial and if you can prove it convict them.

But if you are NOT SO SURE then you lock them up without charge or trial and if they are innocent – which is MORE LIKELY than in case #1 – then you seriously p… annoy them off.

What kind of a law is FAIRER to the BADDIES than the potentially innocent?

Of course the POINT of Habeas Corpus – oh yes, THAT old thing – is that NO ONE should be randomly locked up AT ALL. And we seemed to do perfectly well for many, many years with the police only able to pick someone up and hold them for not a MONTH but a DAY.

Of course, things WERE different back then – in those days we had the I.R.A. armed not with sugar and fertiliser but with semtex and aiming to explode large London landmarks backed by the oil billions of Libya (and a lot of dollars from America too). Oh, and they were QUITE GOOD at their EVIL job, and very rarely set themselves on fire instead of their targets.

Nor do I buy all of this "oh it's SOOOOOO difficult to track them down now that they can use the Internet and laptops and Xbox 360s and stuff". It is hardly like the technological advances are all ONE WAY, is it, what with us being the non-dictatorship (daddy, please check that we ARE still a non-dictatorship) that is MOST SPIED ON in all the WORLD.

(Note how Germany has put the Nazi and Stasi days behind it to become the LEAST spied on nation in the world. How did THAT happen?!)

And our government having the LARGEST DNA database of its citizens on the planet BAR NONE. (Be the envy of Damascus, Phnom Penh and SPECTRE Island; impress your friends, cow your enemies, or vice versa; free PIRANHA POOL with every million DNA subscribers!)

In fact, mobile phones and Internet laptops – which leave mucky I.P. address fingers all over their connections – should make it EASIER to track people, especially if the government isn't too fussy about observing its own data protection laws.

Besides which, the Labour have BROADENED the definition of "terrorist" so much that even having the VAGUEST idea of how to do some harm – do NOT for goodness sake Google how to start a FIRE with two TWIGS!!! – can get you locked up for "acts preparatory to explodingness".

No doubt Mr Frown REMINDED Lord "trained killer" West of this during their (possibly laser-armed) chat!