The Trouble with Rape

The statistics are shocking – and getting worse. The truth is that sexual assault in Britain has become a low-risk crime. In 1985 there was a 24 per cent conviction rate in rape trials. By 2003 it had fallen to 5 per cent. Here, in conjunction with Glamour […]

Here we go again – Safety Elephant style

Well we now have a list of the Safety Elephant’s plans for deporting foreigners alleged to have links with or be supporting terrorism – which, as usual, makes for pretty depressing reading: long on knee jerk rhetoric and extremely short on having thought things through properly as usual. […]

Faith, hope and clarity

It’s been a struggle trying to hold out for an incipient signs of common sense on the part of the British public in recent weeks, but just when it seems all hope is fading, up they pop and announce that two-thirds of them oppose the state funding of […]

Piss-artists and planning policies

Neil at the Brighton Regency Labour Party blog makes some interesting points on the subject of the relaxation of licencing laws and the ‘curse’ of ‘binge drinking’, questioning the current received wisdom that longer opening hours will inevitably lead to more problems. While he makes some good points […]

Well that turned out to be a waste of time

The Independent Police Complaints Commission will complete its report on the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes by Christmas, an inquest has heard. But the report will not be published until all legal and disciplinary proceedings in the case are complete. In other words, we’ve more chance of […]

Case for the Prosecution

A fair few bloggers have now called for the resignation of Metropolitan Police Chief, Sir Ian Blair, as a result of the information contained in the documents leaked, this week, to ITN… …and some haven’t mentioned it all; not even a letter in the Grauniad from their number […]

All she wrote…

Met chief tried to stop shooting inquiry Britain’s top police officer, the Scotland Yard commissioner Sir Ian Blair, attempted to stop an independent external investigation into the shooting of a young Brazilian mistaken for a suicide bomber, it emerged yesterday. Sir Ian wrote to John Gieve, the permanent […]

Have you no sense of decency?

It was on June 9th 1954, during the course of a US Senate hearing into allegations of lax security at top secret US Army facility, that the political career of US Senator Joseph McCarthy effectively came to an end, destroyed by those same six words which are the […]

You’re not singing any more

Interesting split in today’s blogosphere. Tracking through my regular run of RSS feeds using the Sage plug-in for Mozilla, its noticable what while a significant number of blogs that I know to be, by varying degrees, either opposed to the Iraq war or at least sceptical of the […]

Backing [Ian] Blair

Some things just have to be done, don’t they… Full size image here… Oh, must just say, feel free to use the images from this post as you like. Oh, and then there’s this, courtesy of Neil from B3TA… And one more of my own – it’s subtle […]