Down with Brown! Here comes- oh God it's the Tories...

The world, built partially out of rock, but mostly out of money, is melting. The ice-caps are bleeding away, swamping our lands with a flood that will take with it most of our capital.

Banks are tumbling down, their foundations shattered, and it's all down to dodgy mortgages. It makes many of us happy to see rich people lose their city bonus. It makes us less happy to see hundreds of jobs being cut at Northern Rock.

In this climate of bad debts and worse decisions, it seems painfully obvious that a Labour government, obsessed as it is with throwing millions of pounds at problems without planning how to fix them, maybe isn't what we need. Gordon Brown sold off millions of our gold reserves at the bottom of the market, and now criticises the Tories for advocating some spending cuts.

Has he looked out of his window? The mortgage market is tightening up to such an extent it is strangling even the most frugal of fledgling homeowners. Spend spend spend was the way of the 1990s, and now in a debt-laden demographic riddles with bad credit, we're saddled with the aftermath.

Of course some tax cuts would be nice, too. The Tories aren't committing to them yet, waiting to see whether the economic conditions suit tax cuts if and when they gain power. To an extent, they're missing the point too- because it's those very tax cuts that would stimulate the economy into behaving as they'd like in the first place. It seems to make sense; less outlay from government requires less tax. Less tax from the householder is less outlay; the nation tightens its belt and rides out the storm.

There is a time and a place for complex economic forecasting. There surely also must be a time and a place for some simple common sense. The Tories shouldnt be acting as though tax cuts are an act of benevolance; it is giving people back their own money. Labour, meanwhile, need to stop carping on about how the Tories would cut public spending- because for all their outlay, and with little to show for it, in this climate, they sound a bit silly.

A Tale of Two Departures

Politics is something we're, fortunately, becoming more and more desensitized to. We may approve of one of David Cameron's ties, or at a push, one of Gordon Brown's. Cameron's hair may look especially bouncy and voluminous. But we rarely feel compelled to invest anything in it, or rely upon it at all.

Yet this week, we are all forced to look to our leaders for something, anything, to reassure us that the senseless shooting of an eleven year-old boy is really the bottom of society's trajectory. That this, after all things, will be the one event that shakes us out of the malaise we find ourselves in.

It says much, and all of it horrendous, that a boy of eleven could be gunned down in a car park, by an assassin making his escape on a bike, weaving his way through the rat-run alleys of the estate he has spent his misspent childhood learning like the back of his hand for just this kind of occasion. Yet are we being foolish to imagine that this could be a turning point? We think back to Damilola Taylor, we think back to Kiyan Prince, and we think back to Sharlene Ellis and Leticia Shakespeare as examples of previous nadirs of our moth eaten social fabric.

Where the real problem lies is that one nadir seems to be quickly eclipsed by another event that we, in our naive blinkered way, can never imagine being outdone. But nothing is ever so quickly rectifiable; the vast estates which form the rat-runs dominated by gangs and their hangers-on will not be swept clean with any kind of political new broom.

The other notable departure this week, an almost polar opposite to the tragic murder of Rhys Jones, was veteran newspaper journalist and former Tory Cabinet member, Bill Deedes. Why I bring up this doyen of journalism now, is that, in 70 years of journalism, he had seen it all. And you can bet that he knew better than to look towards our politicians for real, on-the-ground help with societal evils that we can so scarcely comprehend. It is simply not enough, in this day and age, in our desensitized, apolitical society, to turn our gaze to Westminster and expect help when everything goes wrong. We whinge and we moan. We wax lyrical on the decay of moral fibre, the ease with which weapons can be come by, and the lack of conscience with which they can be used to brutal, savage effect. The problem is not with legislation imposed from the top- though perhaps the swathes of council estates built in the 50s, 60s and 70s, which started their decaying decline in the 1980s, have provided a breeding ground. Legislation and politics in general is a slow, reactionary process; to be proactive, people need to convince themselves of the necessity of change.

When Deedes visited South Wales, West Cumbria and Tyneside in the eighties, to compare these places with a previous visit decades earlier, he lamented that while jobs had gone, and new industries were slowly taking root with some hope for the future, the family bonds that had kept previous generations together were irreparably damaged. He also wrote, "our way out, our way to improve order in society, lies in a willingness to rethink attitudes and policies, and to admit that wherever each of us have has taken our stand on law and order, conceivably we have been wrong." We need neither strong bombastic leadership, nor aggressive militant Neighbourhood Watch zealots patrolling with pitch forks. Both of those approaches are too rigid; flexibility is what we, evidently, need. To persuade people that, for instance, a young black male from a single parent family in a London council estate is not a lost cause or an inevitable foot soldier of the future. Stereotypes help nobody. Arguably the most depressing thing is that Deedes wrote that in 1971. Here, in 2007, we are only just starting to see his sense.

Attitudes can change. People can stand up for their communities, once they are given the reassurance that they will have support from the police to do so. So what we need, as we inevitably and misguidedly look towards PM Brown for a thunderbolt of a quick-fix, is less debate, and more encouragement. More promises of support for initiatives that can change attitudes and futures. More support for police and communities to stand up and do what they can to protect their communities; hopefully some erosion of the gangs' power, and some viable alternatives for the next generation of 11 and 12 year olds being recruited, can be the first step in reversing a steep decline. Deedes spotted it.

Britain develops gills; the news fails us

Apparently, so the BBC News tells me, Britian is under a bit of water. Ooh, not a bit, they cry- a lot. We as a nation are busily acquiring useful webbing around the digits, and in Gloucestershire, the first man in the world to develop gills is having, err, well, a whale of a time, swimming around evading the pitchfork-wielding "norms" who are jealous of his underwater prowess. When the flood receeds, he'll look like a prat, but for now- he's laughing. In more than one village in our sodden nation, there is a doomsday naysayers with a beard adding the finishing touches to the ark, which he has been busy building since retiring in 1982. They'll look a bit ridiculous when it all dries up, too.



This might all seem a bit flippant, in view of the enormous financial (and tragic human) cost of it all. But, I'm afraid, this is what the mind is pushed into by the way the crisis is presented to us. We get five minutes of serious discussion of water shortage and relief efforts, and then twenty minutes of gormless reporter in wellingtons interviewing a variety of wet labradors, and a quirky shot of a couple tying up their dinghy in the local short-stay car park. You wonder whether onlookers like myself, perched upon high in the relative safety of County Durham, might take it a bit more seriously if we had less of the human interest rubbish afterwards.



Because, in the time we've been frantically giving prime-time news slots to George Alagayah's anorak and squirrels backstroking through Tewkesbury, we have been told nothing of the tragic death of a South Korean Christian Missionary, held hostage by the Taleban, shot when his captors panicked en route to collecting a ransom for the prisoners' release. Nor have we seen anything about the team of Bulgarian nurses, finally returned home to Sofia after being held captive on death row in Libya for nearly a decade after being convicted of deliberately infecting hundreds of Libyan children with HIV, when they were in fact just there to help. The children were found to have had the HIV virus for up to three years before the Bulgarian nurses arrived; yet they were apparently tortured with electric shocks to force a confession which may or may not have ever even existed. It's not an exact science, of course- a news show is a TV programme like any other, and, unfortunately for the truth-hungry people who watch it to actually find out what's going on in the world, we get a pretty skewed impression. I for one would have loved to have seen those Bulgarian nurses kneeling down and kissing the tarmac at Sofia airport- surely much more of a feel good image than Worcestershire's wettest corgi being winched through an upstairs window to safety.

Black-tie Brown misses the point...

Good old Gordon Brown; he's so very in touch with what people want, isn't he? While the last few weeks of his tenure as Chancellor of the Exchequer drag on, and we are left to reflect on his choices on how to handle the nation's money, he is "making a stand" on the issue of- wait for it- the traditional black tie dinner suit. His ludicrous decision to sell off Britain's gold reserves at the very bottom of the market for a sickeningly low price to cover his own shortfalls, for instance, is brushed under the carpet so as to allow Gordon to discuss this most pressing of issues. Or his criminally careless mistreatment of the nation's pensioners, raiding pension funds left right and centre to impoverish thousands of our elderly, again to cover his own decisions. These are things which, all things considered, it would be nice to hear him defend himself against- but alas, we are denied.

Instead, this week, we are told that, groundbreakingly, dear Gordon will not be wearing the customary black tie attire for functions where it is required- he thinks it "smacks of privilege and elitism". Well good for you, Mr Brown- you no doubt think this is an easy way of sounding socialist and pacifying some of the "little people", and indeed Labour left who have become disillusioned with Tony Blair's tenure as Prime Minister. How about putting some money back into the pocket of the pensioners you ripped off, Gordon? Oh, I see, we haven't got any... because you've spent it all. Good lad.

Of course, what is blindingly obvious to even the most obtuse of observers is that nobody could care less what he wears. To be blunt, a bloated Scotsman with a few too many chins isn't really meant to think too much about sartorial matters. A further problem is that one of the functions which Brown is refusing to dress up for is a forthcoming dinner to honour the Queen. The danger is that, while taking a half-hearted stance against elitism in clothing, he becomes the focus of attention, instead of our dear old Queen. And he will, no doubt, look like a petty attention-grabber, stealing the limelight at an event that has little to do with him.

And if black tie dress smacks of elitism and privilege, then what about the tailored suits his image consultants have had him buy from London's most expensive (dare I say it) 'elite' tailors of Savile Row. You would think that, all in all, the kind of people who would object to black tie would also object to the lounge suit he will be wearing instead, given that it cost more than your average blue-collar worker's monthly wage. Perhaps a better idea would have been to forego the stand against elitism and instead humbly comform for the sake of the occasion; but let it be known that his dinner suit and bow tie came from Matalan. His campaign to prove that he can, in fact, fill Tony Blair's shoes has seen him indulge in all the horrendously spin-doctored PR rubbish that characterised all that was bad about Blair. The saving grace for Blair was that it quite worked for him. The term "polishing a turd" comes to mind with Gordon.

Try telling the scores of secondary school leavers who, in the coming weeks, will enjoy indulging in the anachronism that is the black-tie dinner that they are indulging in something which is elitist. My own leavers' dinner at the particularly un-grand Staincliffe Hotel in Hartlepool surely makes a mockery of this. One female PE Teacher brought a change of clothes because, halfway through, she disappeared upstairs with a man- noone's quite sure who he was- and returned an hour later looking slightly dishevelled. The pupils and half the staff alike had smuggled bottles of vodka in to avoid the prices at the bar. The poorest of kids from the poorest of schools will still, on the whole, quite enjoy the irony of dressing up like Edwardians, in their suits hired for the weekend from Greenwood's.

Fun, it appears, and indeed irony, are not things that el Gordo is particularly familiar with. If ever a turd was worth polishing, he is surely not it.

Any government making David Icke sound sane needs to look hard in the mirror...

Sometimes it takes a madman to make you see truth.
A case in point was last Christmas time, and was brought about by none other than David Icke, who, for the uninitiated, is a somewhat enigmatic character who was written numerous book espousing the view that all the major players in the world’s history have been descendants of- and there’s no easy way to put this- reptiles. A reptilian master race, apparently, spawned The Queen, George Bush, in fact any major player in world politics, past and present.

I need surely say no more to convince you that the man is mad. Should you remain, for whatever reason, unconvinced, however, peruse if you will the title of just one of his many books- Tales from the Time Loop: The Most Comprehensive Expos of the Global Conspiracy Ever Written and All You Need to Know to Be Truly Free. Oh, and he once told Terry Wogan, on air, that he believed himself to be the Son of God (what Jesus Christ might have to say about this- and whether Jesus was himself a reptilian- he didn’t say).

Yet Icke’s flagrant insanity isn’t what made Channel 5’s “David Icke: Was He Right?” a chilling piece of documentary television. It’s the fact that he, for a while at least, made sense. Not about the Reptiles, and not about the myriad other conspiracies he’s convinced of. Before he got onto this stuff- his bread and butter material- he was making convincing noises about the nature of modern government, and in particular whether ours may be considered a Police State. It was convincing not particularly because of what Icke was saying, but because of footage of Brian Haw, an anti-war demonstrator who has been camped in Parliament Square since 2001. Haw has been a thorn in the side of Parliament and the Police throughout his five-year vigil, falling foul of numerous laws and legal tussles along the way.

Police succeeded in denying Icke’s wife, filming him talkin to Haw, the right to film, despite there being no legal basis for doing so. It made uncomfortable viewing .This was right before the Lizard conspiracy was discussed at length, reminding the viewer of just who it was that we’re dealing with here. The question is, why did the Police bother? What harm was the filming of that one already well-publicised man going to do? Even if they didn’t like the idea of it, what happened to shrugging the shoulders and accepting people’s right to do things that don’t break any laws?

Icke’s job is made easier, when speaking to groups of hundreds of paying devotees at a time, because he can so easily dovetail conspiracy theories in with the post-9/11 climate of suspicion, human rights infringements, and press restrictions. Global politics is now easy pickings for someone like him, given the climate of mutual mistrust between governments and people. He can push the “Bush is a terrorist” argument. He can prey on people’s suspicions about Blair. He knows that we don’t really trust what we’re being told from day to day.

In a lot of ways it’s a lot like listening to George Galloway. The man is, to be frank, frightening. He has, over the last five years, been accused of being complicit with Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime, after his name was found in documents following the Allied invasion in 2003. He has been ejected from the sanctity of the Labour Party for bringing the party into disrepute after speaking out against the invasion (which hardly made him look innocent of the prior accusation of impropriety). He formed his own party, Respect, and managed to become MP for Bethnal Green. He was then accused of deserting those very constituents by ludicrously entering the Big Brother house, ostensibly to spread his political message to a new audience, but in reality ended up dressed as a cat, crawling around at the feel of Rula Lenska.

Yet to hear him speak is a troubling affair. He is obviously convincing enough, even in his new Respect guise, to win a constituency election. He speaks uncompromisingly and skilfully on all manner of Middle Eastern issues, and sticks to his guns fiercely. The problem for the listener is, that both he and David Icke, men who few would choose to agree with if they had the choice, have got so much ammunition. Galloway will have a constant supply of material on which to rally because of the simple fact that, on many topics, he is right, and is certainly not shy about telling us so. Our government has failed to listen to its people with regard to the War in Iraq, and as such, men like Galloway become to the torch-bearers for the people. His Talk-Sport weekend phone-in is evidence enough of that, and all the more worrying for it.

Even the lunatic Icke. Ninety-nice per cent of his credulity-stretching tirades are nonsense. But it doesn’t matter if you are a mad ex-Coventry City goalkeeper turned conspiracy theorist and holocaust denier , as Icke is- the footage he presented spoke, worryingly, for itself. Not, perhaps, enough to make you start examining Blair’s face for reptilian features. But enough to make you think.

How does White Van Man become an environmentalist?

If we are to believe what we are told, in fifty years time, our gardens will not grow. Our common English plants will simply dry up and topple over in a sad horticultural capitulation, and green-fingered enthusiasts will be tuning into Radio 4's Gardening programme to find which varieties of Meditterranean and desert plants would best suit our new, baked climate. We will tan like Spaniards during the Summer, and soak like Mancunians all through the Winter.

This seems a tale of sad, nostalgic love for the good old English Country Garden; and little more. Yet there are many prongs to this onslaught of environmentalism, which mean worse for out poor, gasping little Earth. Oil reserves, for instance, are running out. The Peak Oil theory- that the world's oil production would peak and thereafter be in terminal decline until it runs dry- was advanced in the sixties, but seemingly nobody can actually agree on when this hallowed peak will occur- the world's scientists seem to have spent fifty years deciding that the only true way to see the peak will be in retrospect.

Others maintain that the world's oil has already peaked, as 33 of the 48 largest oil producing nations are already in decline. This, I think we can all agree, is a "bad thing". The world's scientists no doubt will take another twenty years to make that quote official, but I stand by it. This has brought our own dear Prime Minister Blair to the forefront of environmental concerns, they being so close to his heart these days (they must serve as a nice distraction from all those unpleasant foreign goings on). Alternative energy sources are being championed; soon PM Blair will be spotted riding a solar-powered chariot around London on his farewell tour.

This is all very well and good, of course, and admirable to boot. Even the token gesture of standing up to George Bush over his Kyoto Protocol violations is a positive move, albeit a hollow one. Yet the fact remains that for all this posturing and campaining, there remains an almighty battle on to actually convince the grass-roots folks of this country that environmentalism is for them. Take, for instance, that doyen of British grit, the White Van Man. He has spent the last nine years being outraged at the rising cost of fuel for his beloved white van; this seething bitterness has never abated, and now, he of the White Van and his white-collar equivalent Mondeo Man, are being asked to consider alternative fuels.

General Motors, under the Chevrolet badge, yesterday unveiled their great white hope- a family car powered entirely by hydrogen, emitting nothing but harmless water droplets where we are used to gushing thick, Victorian black smoke. Yet this project flounders when it's considered- it relies on the assumption that people actually want to help the environment. Will White Van Man really see the difference in his lifetime? No? So why would he change his van and his family cars for one of these silver homogenous eco-pods? Certainly the Government of the day will tax the old fuels to hell and back to encourage a crossover, but when it's done so grudgingly, noone will be willing to embrace this as a cause. A resistence movement could even develop, defiantly driving old American Supercars around and delighting in their fuel consumption, while picketing and sabotaging Hydrogen stations. That'd be a turnaround for the environmentalists, wouldn't it?

Secondly, and in a point that is no less important, all this saving the planet nonsense comes over as, quite frankly, a little bit girly. Men will be very slow on the uptake of alternatively fuelled cars, as to jump on such a green-minded bandwagon would seem in some circles to be the ultimate abandonment of one's masculinity. This isn't just a "car-as-phallus-extension" scenario, it's a more innate conservatism. Let others do the radical bit- it won't become "normal" until it catches on with all walks of like. But it won't appeal to all walks of life until it becomes normal- there's the paradox.

White Van Men across the nation will still be driving their gas-guzzling vans long past the time that these cars come on the market- they will no doubt be highly-priced, they will inspire little or no excitement, and they will make men feel like hippies. They will also still be tending their English plants in their English gardens well beyond the year when our new climate has baked all the azalias to potpourri, and all the grass to straw.

Governments and lobbyists can press all they like, but people will not change until there is a noticeable difference to be had for themselves and their families. If it's a long-term fix to a problem that isn't really causing too many problems just yet, how many people will embrace that as a cause? There are more reasons to change garden shrubs than there are to change vehicle fuel- the dead flowers are at least visible. A hole in our wheezing O-Zone layer isn't.

Animal Wrongs

Today, the Daily Telegraph reports that at a fly-fishery near Lancaster, "A gang on masked animal rights activists attacked a group of anglers", spreading their web of intimidation now into purely recreational territories.

Has this done their cause any good? Are animal testing facilities going to close their doors and set free all the creatures within, because of this group of thugs masquerading as crusaders for a cause. I wonder if they're proud of themselves, knowing that they successfully set upon and threatened a body of fishermen and women including several families. Would they have spared the toddlers with their nets, splashing around near the waters edge? By the sound of things, this group, which found it morally justifiable to chase a young woman (a nurse, no less) with wooden bats shouting "Get her!" while punching another woman in the face, have no grasp whatsoever of what would help their cause.

These pathetic wannabe guerrillas paraded around shouting things like "It's the easy way of the hard way....You've been sabbed!", which sounds more like a cartoon battle cry than the rallying call of genuine dissidents; but the fact that such a rag-tag, frankly pathetic group of people could become violent towards women simply for fishing, says something about the desperation the animal rights cause evidently now must feel.

The real animal rights lobbyists, and it must be acknowledged that there is a genuine lobby to be listened to, somewhere within the melee of masquerading idiots, tirelessly petitioning Parliament for the improvement of animal welfare standards must be ashamed to see their beloved cause taken on by such snivelling, cowardly amateurs.

In a year where animal rights protestors in the city of Oxford have largely been laughed off the streets and treated with widespread derision due to their objections to the new building of an animal testing laboratory, you would hope that the Animal Rights lobby might keep their profile low for embarrassment; all they seem to have achieved is assaulting a young woman angler (who presumably would have been throwing back whatever fish were caught anyway) and necessitating the builders on the Oxford project to wear balaclavas to prevent their being identified and targeted.

This is a group of, though I hesitate to use the word again, "wannabes". They dress as though they're an offshoot of a Paramilitary organisation, wielding bats, presumably attacking families of anglers because it's much easier than the early mornings favoured by the activists of old when attacking testing centres and laboratories. One would hope that some of them would think of examples close to them, where relatives or loved ones have been saved by medication tested safely on animals- but, judging by their apparent braindead recklessness, that might be a forlorn hope.

Why Shouldn't Party Donors Have Knighthoods?

Today's Labour Government is, as we are persistently being told, in turmoil- and not least of which among the reasons is that a scandal has erupted around party funding. The Government is accused of a "Cash for Honours" scenario- where their party donors are rewarded by a place in the Honours List.

The Honours List is an opportunity to reward those who have given great service to their particular field- and by doing so have helped the country in some way. So, the victorious 2003 Rugby World Cup Team were honoured; as have numerous footballers. However the same prestige is given to lollipop ladies who have given decades of service to their local community; headteachers, councillors, charity workers, and many more walks of life besides. Often in amongst these worth folk spring up the names of rich successful business people who can be honoured for "Services to Industry" or the like.

The accusation is, however, that rather than being congratulated and recognised for their "Service to Industry", these people are being honoured for something else- for having given part of their wealth to the government as party donors, and are being directly rewarded with a title. The precedent for the legal investigation that seems to have followed is Maundy Gregory, who in 1925, set up an office where he literally did sell honours to all-comers. An OBE for £100 sounds like a decent deal; it obviously was at the time, too, as 25,000 are reputed to have been sold. This is all a bit silly really though, isn't it? It's hardly the same.

If a rich steel magnate wants to give money to the political party he supports, then good for him. Figures released last week detailing the 25m worth of debt incurred by the last General Election suggests that there could be few causes that would need the money more; and although certainly our hypothetical magnate might expect to hold a bit of sway in return for his contribution, so what? If he's so willing to give money to the cause, he obviously thinks the party to be at least competent; and if so, he probably doesn't expect to gain all that much influence
because of his generosity, else the party themselves wouldn't be worth supporting.

As Marcel Berlins of the Guardian wrote last week, aren't people who give the gift of finance to a political campaign more use to it than people who simply ponce around giving "the gift of rhetoric"? Why should the financial donors be frowned on as though they're engaging in some seedy practise, when in fact they're being genuinely useful? And if money is all they have to give, then who should stop them? You can't just think up millions, they're earned- and it's alot harder to give out cheques with multiple zeroes on them than it is to give out soundbites and verbal support.

Newspapers this month have been busy lauding Warren Buffet, super-billionaire in the classic American mould, who plans to give away his fortue to the Gates Foundation, which, set up by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, gave (for example) $287 in one go for aids vaccines. An excellent cause, one of the most admirable foundations, founded by an incredibly admirable man (Gates) and now supported by another (Buffet).

Would we have liked him so much if he'd been British and given a few of his millions to the Labour party? Philanthropy's a noble and admirable thing- surely an act worthy of a place in the UK Honours List. Yet giving to the political party of your choice has now become a filthy, dirty thing to do.

Certainly post-Cash for Questions and post-Major, it's understandable. But during the discussion over whether parties should be forced to name their donors, it was illuminating to see the dismayed reactions from some donors involved. Some said they would withdraw support after being named- some said they'd have turned down an MBE if it had been offered to them. Perhaps it is these shadey donors who'd rather stay in the dark, pulling strings from behind with their financial muscle, that should be frowned on- not the actual act of giving to a political party.

If you don't want to be named, don't give millions to a party. And if you get honoured for it, all well and good- the Honours system is widely regarded as an archaic one, and the benefit of being honoured is questionable, especially when they're given to someone who has already climbed the slippery pole of British industry. Give them a Knighthood if you want, it's unlikely to make an awful lot of difference! Although it is just conceivable that there may be some Lib Dem donors out there who simply want their names off-record for reasons of pure, simple, unadulterated embarrassment....

Jean Charles Menezes must be remembered; and as one of us.

Today's date cannot have escaped your notice. 7/7 is now the most emotive date in the calendar of the British consciousness; it is synonymous with sadness, loss, and pure, bitter shock. Yet it must also be said that in the year that has passed, there has been much we can be proud of; shows of strength, resilience, and fortitude. London's circulatory system, if you'll allow the analogy, was hit hard- but its heart beats stronger than ever.Today, as around the country, we observed a two minutes' silence in memory of the victims, their families and their loved ones.

Dozens were killed on three trains and one bus around London. The nation stopped; this was our 9/11.However the week after 7/7, there was a second attack; one that mercifully failed in its aim of echoing the first wave of attacks. We can be proud of London's response to this second attempted assault, and also the Police's reactions- a Europe-wide manhunt for the failed bombers was successful and brought them to justice, plucked from London flats and an Italian hideout to face justice. The search was relentlessly pursued, and during this search, constant news updates followed the search's every lead- and as they were reeled in, we felt safe again.

Yet in this furious search for these unsuccessful second wave bombers, there was a casualty- a young, innocent Brazilian named Jean Charles De Menezes. Lest we forget, he was shot dead at point-blank range at Stockwell Tube Station; the most bitter tragedy after his own was that it was a Police Officer who shot him. He was caught up as a suspect in the frenzied Police activity that followed both 7/7 and the follow-up.In these times of instant-gratification justice and blame, who on Earth do we point the finger at?

It is simplistic and straightforward to blame the Police; criticism have ranged through trigger-happy, bungling, all the way to institutionally inept. Yet the same Police service, all things considered, managed to reel in four desparately dangerous men- people who had proved themselves willing to strap explosives to their body, and detonate them, purely to harm others.I personally don't think any of us can know what goes through the head of a Police Officer confronted with the possiblity that they may be the only person able to stop a suicide bomber; the adrenaline, fear, and responsibility is something noone could ever be prepared for. A mistake was made; a tragic mistake.

But let us remember Jean-Charles Menezes as a victim of 7/7, or of the follow-up attack- not simply a victim of the Police. He deserves to be thought of as a part of this nation, part of the glorous multicultural patchwork that makes Britain what it is; he was taken from us too, by circumstances created by four men with rucksacks, trying to change the world for the worse.

Let us also remember the human stories that have moved us since; the priest who gave up her job because she found she simply could not forgive the bombers that killed her daughter. You can only hope that she reconciles her faith and her situation; if not, she becomes another tragedy to add to the list.As we observed our two minutes' silence, we remembers everyone lost on that awful day. Yet the fallout claimed one more victim; he should have been in our thoughts today. If not, then mark the 22nd of July with a moment's reflection on another tragic victim of Terrorism in the UK. He deserves our thoughts; and let us think of him as one of us.

Hillary Clinton, the blogger, doggers, and a whole boatload of jargon...

People in the UK tend to look at American Politics with a slightly snooty, raised-eyebrows kind of condescension, and let's be honest for us to be so dismissive of the political engine driving the biggest economy in the world is, at best, patronising, and at worst, pig-headedly arrogant.But- and there is indeed quite a "but"- we have to concede that American politics doesnt do itself many favours; and as a simple example, take their President, the erstwhile Mr Bush Jr. Competent and passionate he may be; surrounded by a well-stocked cabinet of political thought he may also be (that's not for this article to comment on, however). Yet as a representative of his nation, he is undoubtedly far from eloquent and hardly a figure of dynamism; when we think of all that is synonymous with the American nation, he doesn't quite seem to fit.

The main focus of this post, however, is another example of US Politics appearing slightly out of kilter. Hillary Clinton's recent recruitment of a leading political blogger, Peter Daou, as part of her "team", presumably in the run up to her seemingly inevitable run at the White House, is on the surface not a bad move. Daou himself has written on his Daou Report that he wishes to "close the triangle"- meaning his perception of the three prongs of mainstream media, the political establishment, and.... here it comes.... "the blogosphere".While it may seem odd for me to write, in a "blog", to criticise the use of the word, I just don't feel it lends any credibility to the man or what he can no doubt bring to the Democratic Party.He calls his mission "joining Senator Clinton’s team as a blog advisor to facilitate and expand her relationship with the netroots". Why must he use such ridiculous, convoluted net-jargon to describe his post- he is now moving into the mainstream media, which may find it hard to take him seriously if he insists on using such language.

We all know what he means, of course. Perhaps he is just a little bit too wrapped up in the "blogosphere" to realise that outside of its keen and committed enthusiasts, such terms aren't going to win him any fans, and indeed I can imagine that some prospective readers of his online missives could be put off by him speaking as though representing an online cult of "bloggers".Maybe in the UK we find a problem with the term "blogger" because of its alphabetical proximity to "dogger"- one who drives to shady spots at night to engage in anonymous sex acts with strangers of a similar disposition. Just a thought.

My main point is this, however; the man is a political consultant. He talks at length on his site about how he tries to fuse the two worlds- the world of the blogger, and the world of the consultant. Is he too stubbornly steeped in his own jargon that he can't call himself Sen. Clinton's "online outreach consultant", or something else that would actually mean something in the real world?Just like President Bush seems slightly incongruous when we look at the nation he is meant to stand for, the idea of a man being drafted into a Presidential Candidate's inner circle using words like "blogosphere" just doesn't sit right.

It either seems like a good idea but wrong choice of man (perhaps Sen. Clinton will take Daou to one side and give him a heads-up that he sounds like a teenage computer games enthusuiast) or a fairly cynical attempt to bring Daou, a well respected man in his field, "on-side".The commendable but sad thing is, you can't help but feet Daou's earnestness in everything he writes.I hope for his sake that he gets to bring his points of view to a whole new crop of "netroots" enthusiasts. I just wish he wouldn't call them that....