This story from the Telegraph, if true, marks a new low-point in the descent of the current government into moral backruptcy. Britain is seeking to convince the son of Libya’s leader, Col Muammar Gaddafi, to act as an “independent” watchdog to ensure that his father’s regime does not […]

The Indy are reporting that another batch of government e-mails have been leaked to the New Statesman, this time regarding which is alleged to be an attempt by Tony Blair to ‘bounce’ Charles Clarke into banning two Islamic ‘political parties’, one of which being Hizb-ut-Tahrir. Charles Clarke, the […]

During last week’s heavily moderated (i.e. no hard questions) webchat with Home Office ball-breaker-in-chief, Louise Casey, on the Respect Agenda, several bloggers, including Nosemonkey, noticed what looked to be a fair blatant bit of astroturfing going on involving a ‘Jimmy Devlin’, who posted this… Jimmy Devlin: Louise, empowering […]

Another Day. Another Home Office Bill. Another example of badly drafted legislation: The New Police and Justice Bill includes this gem of an amendment to Computer Misuse Act, which is intended to criminalise the development, distribution or possession of ‘hacker tools’: 3A Making, supplying or obtaining articles for […]

A new audit of American financial practices in Iraq has uncovered irregularities including millions of reconstruction dollars stuffed casually into footlockers and filing cabinets, an American soldier in the Philippines who gambled away cash belonging to Iraq, and three Iraqis who plunged to their deaths in a rebuilt […]

Back in my own university days, pretty much the only attention that the Student Union paid to its various clubs and societies was to use them as a means of exercising their slightly perverse sense of humour during Fresher’s week. Fresher’s week, of course, meant the obligatory ‘Fresher’s […]

What follows is the full and unexpurgated text of the Foreign Office memo relating to renditions through UK territory and airspace that was leaked to, and published by, the New Statesman last week – now in a usable format, the scanned PDF having been put through OCR software […]

I did say in an earlier piece that I’d comment at greater length on Richard Dawkins’ two-part polemical documentary for Channel 4, The Root of All Evil? A few days on and I’m not so sure that there’s much about the two documentaries, themselves, that needs to be […]

Let’s take a quick head count here. So far we have John Hemming getting jiggy with a Birmingham City Councillor and broadening his extended family, both the former Leader of the Parliamentary party and the Leader in the House of Lords on the ten-step programme and now former […]

Spy Blog has picked up on a clear but often little regarded anomaly in the Freedon of Information Act after issuing an FOIA request for information to the Interception of Communications Commissioner regarding the Wilson Doctrine. This is one of those things I’ve known about for quite some […]