42 days

In 2003, there were far too many Labour MPs who voted to invade Iraq not because they believed it was right, but because they lacked the courage to say they believed otherwise. Next week it's going to be the same from the sound of things, and our illiberal Government will pursue its quest to deprive us of hard-won civil liberties with ever more vigour.

Since I'm deeply cynical, I suspect that most of the MPs who end up supporting the proposals will do so in the belief that they will never get past the Lords anyway, thus providing further grounds for knocking that institution, as well as for accusing the Tories of being 'soft on terrorism'. They're gutless far beyond contempt, yet they still don't understand why people are not going to vote for them next time around.

Mugabe and the UN

Robert Mugabe's presence at the UN Food summit in Rome is an affront to civilization, and the UN should be held in as deep contempt as Mugabe for even contemplating inviting him, let alone doing so.

Mugabe is a murderous fascist despot and Italy should have told him that regardless of the diplomatic niceties of the UN's invitation he would be arrested with a view to trying him for crimes against humanity as soon as he set foot on European soil. As for our own Government, what on earth are they doing lending legitimacy to this farce by attending?

No internal armed conflict in Iraq

This story raises several issues. It is however one of many similar that shows the capacity of our government for self-delusion. I doubt if many outside the corridors of power would doubt the existence of 'internal armed conflict' in Iraq, the trigger for which was the ill-considered 2003 invasion.

It is not entirely surprising that our unprincipled government should attempt deportations to Iraq, since the most basic notions of morality seem to have been abandoned entirely, replaced with an overwhelming desire to pander to the Daily Mail readership. The willingness of their lawyers and the judiciary to play with words in order to support them in doing so however does no credit whatever to our legal system.

Too cheap to meter

Electricity. That's what they said all those years ago, and our politicians still appear to cling to the forlorn hope that it's true.

The context in which the Government is planning a new round of nuclear power stations is becoming clearer by the day. A succession of shutdowns recently has left British Energy with only six of it's sixteen facilities operating. The loss of Sizewell B meant that large numbers of homes were left without power.

The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority has just reviewed its estimate of the costs involved in cleaning up the UK's current nuclear facilities, and not surprisingly the estimate has increased by a very considerable amount, to £73bn, and admitted that there's a 'high probability' that costs will rise further.

Then there's Sellafield; if it weren't so deadly serious it'd be farcical. It's out of action more often than not, when it is 'reprocessing' it's not doing a very successful job - supposedly reprocessed waste is being returned as unsatisfactory; the Japanese recently sent back a batch of fuel that had falsified quality control documents. So Sellafield, far from making the promised profits, is needing to be propped up to the tune of £3bn a year. Because it's facilities are more often than not out of action, Sellafield is now running out of space for storing nuclear waste. This means that the AGR reactors are facing the possibility of needing to be closed until that problem is resolved.

If there's one thing that's for sure, it is that any nuclear power comes at a high price to the public. Any private company taking on such a project will do the same as we saw recently with the London Underground PPF deal - take the quick profit and then wind itself up when the expenses start to mount. The Government of course will be obliged to step in at that point, as it can scarcely leave nuclear power stations simply to rot.

In the end though the money is almost an irrelevance set against the environmental impact of our nuclear industry. The UK is one of the world's worst for radioactive pollution. Until Chernobyl pushed us into second place, Windscale was the world's principal source of radioactive contamination, and the 1957 fire the worst nuclear disaster. When the then Government responded to the aftermath of that catastrophic incident at Windscale, it was little more than to rename the site Sellafield in the hope that people would forget, and that just about says it all. It trivialises the surreal absurdity of it all to suggest the possibility that consultants would have been paid a very large sum to come up with that suggestion.

It may be that there is a way forward with nuclear power, although I very much doubt it. But the Government cannot continue to build their plans around the impossible dream that Sellafield will work as originally promised. It plainly doesn't and never will.

It's official. Harriet's hat is in the ring.

Funny, isn't it. You wait days for a Harriet post and then, just like one of Ken's bendy buses, two come along at once.

You know, Harriet's a smarter girl than she looks, and she's played a very clever game over the past few months. She's got her own vision, her own policies - basically let women run everything, that's about it really. Oh well, they couldn't make a worse job of it than the current lot.

She's tested her policies with the party members already (who can forget the deputy leadership election?) and knows they go down well, even if they don't with her parliamentary colleagues. And she's always out and about, an endless stream of walkabouts meeting and greeting (all recorded in mind-numbing detail on her blog) so she's got a strong recognition factor with the public. She's been photographed patrolling with the police in her stab-proof vest (she should have hung on to that awhile) so she's sent the message out - she knows there's a problem, particularly with knife crime, and she'll make sure the police get the resources to tackle it.

Then there's her personality; strong but not strident. She doesn't indulge in the dreary hectoring so often associated with female politicians. Actually Jack & Harriet are pretty much the Richard & Judy of the political world. I can see it now - PMQ given the boot entirely, and 'Policy Club' on Channel 4 filling the very slot left vacant by R&J's departure. If she's not already made it to Number 10, there's a pretty good chance that the highlight of Labour's autumn conference will be Harriet's boob 'accidentally' bursting forth; that'll certainly play well with the tabloids and the male voters.

And then there's loyalty. Party loyalty is an unwritten essential when it comes to leadership elections, and Harriet has delivered loyalty in spades. All those promises she made during the deputy leadership campaign appeared to have been discarded as soon as Gordon offered her a Cabinet post (I took her to task over that more than once, now I'm looking rather foolish). And now, when her colleagues are bunkered down just hoping they'll wake up and find it was all just a bad nightmare, she's out there fronting up to the media. With style, too. "He's the right man to see us through this crisis", "I don't think that will happen" (that in response to suggestions of a move against Brown, although she acknowledged "discordant voices"), the classic "We need to listen more and address voters' concerns" and "He'll still be in Number 10 come the next election".

The Guardian, who described her as one of Gordon's key allies (she's not, they can't stand each other) accused Harriet in their leader of platitudinous burblings. Now the Guardian fancies itself as the thinking man's paper, so how come they missed the subtext? 'No way, no man's going to see us through this crisis. A woman might, though'. 'I don't think it will, I know it will'. Gordon wouldn't know how to, but I do'. 'Only if I put him on the domestic staff'.

Harriet has another terrific advantage. She's posh, seriously seriously posh. Middle-class voters go for that (particularly when she's already been pretty forthright in denouncing the tactics used in Crewe) and Dave looks rather like an immature schoolboy set against her obvious class and style.

So, you read it here first. I got 16-1 yesterday, but you'll need to be quick.

I've surprised you, haven't I? I bet you thought Harriet was just another 'yes' girl, but you were wrong. Obviously this blog has already declared for Harriet, and will in due course have a series of Back Harriet posts. I wonder if she'll give us an interview?

Impressive new schools and children's centres - North West and Yorkshire.

Those who read my sidebar will no doubt have noticed that the lovely Harriet has now officially joined the team; I feel slightly guilty because I've been somewhat ignoring her since. However it's been a depressing week for politics (so far, at least) so it seems like a good time to make amends.

As impressive as all those new schools and children's centres no doubt are, it is difficult to believe that Harriet has spent more than five weeks hanging around Manchester, Bolton, Oldham and Sheffield being impressed. In other circumstances I'd think that she'd simply forgotten that a blog requires the occasional post just once in a while if it's to retain its loyal readership. Or more likely forgotten her new password. But of course she's rather busy right now making sure her campaign troops are on a full battle footing and ready to swing into action at a moment's notice. Maybe she's even planning to wield the knife herself.

I'm sure that she draws much of her inspiration from Maggie, and since she's considerably prettier than Maggie ever was it's a near cert that she'll be the next occupant of Number 10, probably before the summer's out. Think I'd better pay a quick visit to Ladbrokes while they're still offering odds.

Harriet, your hour has come. Your country needs you!

Crewe and Nantwich

WARNING! THIS POST CONTAINS LANGUAGE OF A DISTINCTLY WORKING-CLASS NATURE. YOU MAY WELL BE OFFENDED BUT THE LABOUR PARTY DOESN'T CARE ABOUT THAT.

Even if our current Government were making a fair fist of things, which obviously they're not, they thoroughly deserved the good kicking they got yesterday. If only it had been even more severe; I'd have happily voted Tory myself if I lived in Crewe. Labour's negative and frequently xenophobic campaign seemed to plumb new depths with its willingness to 'play the race card' and resort to personal attacks on the Tory candidate that were knowing and outright lies (at the same time 'sexing-up' Ms Dunwoody by misrepresentations that defied credulity), anything it seems that evaded meaningful debate on Labour's record, let alone its policies.

It's hard to comprehend, but Labour seems to be sinking into the same stinking electoral cesspit as the BNP. Right now, they appear rotten to the core, and quite unfit to govern.

The irony of course is that the voters did exactly what Labour asked them to - they voted for the thoroughly decent local candidate and told the toff to f*** off back to Burke's peerage and her Welsh mansion. Good on them, I'd have done the same.

Human Fertilisation and Embryology

There's been a fair amount said about this week's big parliamentary debate already, but not enough I suspect. Gordon Brown has offered his personal opinion in The Observer today, in an effort to drum up support from the uncertain for the uncertain.

I'm no pro-lifer, don't think myself unduly conservative on such matters, and have a certain amount of apprehension about the amendment to shorten the period in which women can obtain an abortion (apprehensive because I fear that it might be supported). But I object most strongly to the proposal that IVF should no longer require clinics to consider the child's need for a father. It's not that they're saying that a child has no need for a father (they'd have difficulty providing evidence for that proposition particularly as they regularly blame 'absent fathers' for teenage delinquency). It's this curious belief that in some way they're denying human rights to gays and lesbians. Whatever happened to the notion that it's the child's need that should be put first?

However my biggest anxiety is over the main focus of the bill, the proposal that scientists should be allowed to create animal-human hybrid embryos. Whether MPs are ever likely to have sufficient grasp of the scientific arguments is uncertain; For myself, I'm deeply suspicious of them. The scientists say (in effect) that if we permit this technique they'll solve all known illnesses before Christmas comes around. And that if the MPs reject the proposal they are condemning the ill to suffering and that would be immoral. It's an absurd argument, driven by scientists' desire to experiment regardless of consequence. The success of existing stem cell treatments is wildly overstated, and published research is about as one-sided as the stuff emanating from drug companies. But the politicians seem to have bought into this misplaced conviction.

Bad science always promises the moon; just look at the Nuclear industry. Governments are very reluctant to appear sceptical, they remain ever hopeful that those promises will actually deliver, and they will benefit electorally.

It worries me how the debate is being conducted not least with its undue haste, and it's all too reminiscent of the Iraq farrago from four years ago. Scientific breakthroughs are more likely to be made than Saddam Hussein's WMD were to be found, certainly, but only marginally. Gordon's zeal in pushing this through is not unlike Tony's was, and his assessment of the outcome is likely to be about as deficient.

There's worse though. "Britain is at the forefront of this research and responsible for much of the worldwide progress" Gordon writes. So that's what it comes down to. Money.

Telly Addicts

You'd have thought that it was the job of the police to be out there catching criminals, and the CPS to be prosecuting them (or, all too often, deciding not to). Not one bit of it. In the West Midlands they have different priorities; they seem to fancy themselves as TV critics. Literally. Really.

It's a rather curious case that seems to have been rumbling on for some time now, where the West Midlands police and the CPS took exception to a C4 Dispatches programme Undercover Mosque. They referred the programme to the TV regulator Ofcom, and issued a very strongly worded statement accusing the programme makers of 'inciting criminal activity' through malicious editing of undercover footage. You'd have thought that they'd just have got on and prosecuted the broadcaster, given that incitement happens to be an offence in the UK. But not a bit of it, just a well-publicised press conference. Now the affair has finally reached some sort of conclusion, leaving several unanswered questions in its wake.

Presumably the police originally issued their highly critical statement because they preferred to turn a blind eye to what was going on in a few mosques in their patch, and weren't grateful to the Dispatches programme for screening fairly damning evidence. So who was it who took the decision to refer the programme to Ofcom, let alone issue that statement? It's hardly likely to have been PC Plod returning from patrolling the streets of Brum, far more likely Sir Paul Scott-Lee, the Chief Constable. And who from the CPS decided that they should lend their support? Most importantly, what are the police and CPS now going to do about those three preachers, and others of a similar bent? Don't hold your breath.

A very considerable sum from the public purse has been wasted on this scandalous exercise in evasion and resignations should follow. But they won't, of course; that sort of thing went out of fashion years ago. Sir Paul, prove me a cynic for once.