Damian Green update

I've just heard Geoff Hoon on Radio 4's "Any Questions?" trying to defend the arrest etc. of MP Damian Green. I can only think he was chosen because he is somehow politically expendable. The transcript will be available in a few days here.

His Wikipedia entry says "His notorious skill is 'stonewalling' - deflecting difficult questions by 'playing a straight bat', or appearing to do so." Maybe so. But all it did - for me and the audience - was pretty much to damn him, and by implication the government.

A warning from history

Charles I attempts to arrest five Members of Parliament, 6 January 1642

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" - George Santayana

I can't hope to improve on Cranmer's piece regarding Speaker Martin's betrayal of the proudest tradition of his office; I can only echo his cry of "Shame!"

UPDATE

Yet, alas, even Speaker Lenthall had his regrets:

In his will, Lenthall asked to be buried without any state and without a monument, 'acknowledging myself to be unworthy of the least outward regard in this world and unworthy of any remembrance that hath been so great a sinner'. The most he would permit was a plain stone carved with the Latin inscription Vermis sum, which means: I am a worm.

What epitaph will Speaker Martin cause to be inscribed for himself?

Handy-dandy, the pigs are the farmers

Place your political parties in the schema below:At first, I wondered what Hatfield Girl was talking about. Now it's one of the news headlines on the morning radio, and in the papers: the Government has taken to arresting members of the Opposition, like tinpot dictators in faraway countries that it's difficult to believe really exist.

Difficult to believe; that's part of the process. Honestly, I have felt since 1997 (and I am no natural Conservative voter, please believe me) that something was obscurely wrong, that we were all inside someone else's dream. It's like that feeling you get that you've forgotten something, but haven't a clue what it might be.

Before 1997, the Government was Them and we were Us: British, muddling through, ready to heave a brickbat at these clowns who pretend to rule us, but all of us bound by habit and tradition. But in Tony Blair's revolution, the Government claimed to represent all of us: it was the political wing of the British people as a whole, or some such typical Toni verbalfluff.

This is how Nazism took hold - and my mother lived through it. No need for the unions, we the national socialist State represent the worker's best interests, etc.

Fascism, Communism - it's all the same, structurally.