Jack Straw and the Probation Service

Jack Straw 'takes full responsibility' for the failings of the probation service.

Unfortunately (but not surprisingly) there's a considerable gap between what you and I might understand by 'takes full responsibility' and what Jack means. David Scott's excellent article in The Guardian.

MPs - repaying those expenses.

The public doesn't want MPs just discreetly paying off those excessive claims under cover of darkness, they want to know they're doing it. Thankfully our 'Justice Secretary' has for once come up with the perfect solution:



Tony McNulty, another of the miscreants, is keen to join the queue:

Shamed

Later in 2002, some months after MI6 sent its advice, the recently arrived British ambassador to Uzbekistan inquired urgently of the Foreign Office what its legal justification was for receiving information from Islamic dissidents who had been boiled alive to produce it. Craig Murray records his astonishment on being recalled to London to be told that the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, and Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, had decided that in the ‘War on Terror’ we should, as a matter of policy, use intelligence obtained through torture by foreign intelligence services. A follow-up memo from a Foreign Office legal adviser in March 2003 explained that it was not an offence to do so.

Gareth Peirce, writing on the UK's involvement in torture in this month's LRB.

The public interest

Am I alone in suspecting that Jack Straw is not really quite the best person to be offering an entirely objective judgement on whether we should get to see the Cabinet minutes on the meetings that led up to the Iraq invasion?

Still, it's nice to know that he's been keeping on top of his data security brief and practicing what he preaches when it comes to data sharing.

Those minutes

I'm not going to hold my breath.

Jack Straw again

I'm afraid Jack has scarcely paused for breath after scrabbling around in the dirt hoping to find Cardinal Newman's earthly remains (not that it did him any good). Now it's the Coroners and Justice Bill, presently being debated by Parliament.

Jack Straw is of course the Justice Secretary, whatever that means. Jack's notions of justice are not what you and I think of as justice though. More important to Jack that the Government be spared public embarrassment than that the families of soldiers killed in Iraq or Afghanistan get justice. More important that the Government be spared public embarrassment on anything come to that. More important that MPs be spared embarrassment. He tried again a couple of weeks ago.

But there are bits that have been included in with the Justice & Coroners Bill that are not even directly relevant to justice. Data sharing has nothing whatever to do with justice nor for that matter with coroners, so Jack has included clauses that allows the Government to share our personal data with anyone it feels like. In his role as Justice Secretary Jack has responsibility for Freedom of Information; I think he takes this to mean that the Government should be free to do whatever it likes with information about us (unlike us even getting information about them).

I'd like to pick up on one of Jack's other ideas. Ministers who misled Parliament obout the existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Make them wear orange bibs emblazoned with 'I LIED ABOUT IRAQ'. That'd be some sort of justice at least.

Russell Brand, Jonathan Ross and Jack Straw

One certainly doesn't have to be a Daily Mail reader to agree with their view of those answaphone messages. The 'humour' the two served up was of the sort that would appeal only to the sort of morons so lacking in decency that they would find entertainment in watching a YouTube clip of a man urinating on a dying woman.

As it happens, I'm someone who has enjoyed JR's Saturday morning radio show over several years, but hopefully no more. The BBC, equally at fault over all this, have been shamefully slow in confronting their misjudgement; hence thankfully the sheer scale of the public anger. Hopefully when Ross departs (as he surely will) the notion that any entertainer justifies an £18 million contract will go with him.

Over on 'Comment is Free', Jack Straw has been sharing his opinions. Yes, that Jack Straw. The one who resigned so promptly as soon as his "cynical premeditated" statements about WMD in Iraq were shown to be just that. I'm afraid Jonathan Ross is not the only public figure who should "no longer be paid a penny by the rest of us."