Winterton of discontent

February 18, 2010 — admin

Another day, another Conservative MP rolls up to the Stephen Nolan show on Five Live to commit political self-immolation. This time it’s Nicholas Winterton on trains and Pete Waterman he ain’t.

Just so he knows what it’s like in second class these days, I went into the City earlier on South West Trains and had to stand next to the toilet due to the volume of people aboard. It’s pretty difficult to get your laptop out or start leafing through reports when you’ve go no seat to use, despite paying the same fare as the people who have got seats. So I hope he’ll forgive me if I don’t share his “outlook on life” when on the train, it’s just that usually I’m having to listen to kids noisily playing I-spy or someone sitting across from me using a personal music device that’s anything but personal.

I’d love to have a “business environment” in which to work, but sometimes you just have to share your world with other human beings and make the compromises that that inevitably entails. He should try it sometime. My company doesn’t pay for me to travel First Class – and neither should taxpayers pay for MPs to do the same. Give them the regular fare – if they want to top it up from their considerable wages, so be it. But I suspect that some of them could do with a bit of second-class travel.

On the way back, I did manage to find a seat, open my laptop and do a few emails before the train pulled into Woking. You see, Sir Nicholas, some of us carriage-classers are capable of doing work on the train, despite being a different type of person. There’s no reason that MPs can’t do the same at certain times of the day.

There are many issues with our trains and overcrowding and punctuality are just the surface of a deeper problem, which the Wintertons might like to look into and lobby Andrew Adonis about. The fact that the most pressing problem in Sir Nicholas Winterton’s mind is that he wants to travel first instead of second class just demonstrates how much better off Parliament will be without him.

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May still a long way off

February 17, 2010 — admin

Teresa - know what you are going to say and what might be said back before you say it!

I drove out to Dorking this morning along the A25 via Send for a business meeting. The road, which I know very well from reporting days and past lives, is in a truly awful, appalling state. But that is Guildford and Mole Valley’s issue – the reason I mention it was that I was stuck for about ten minutes in the aftermath of a nasty car crash (at which I hope no-one was seriously hurt) that seemed to mirror what I was listening to on the radio.

Teresa May, shadow employment secretary, appeared on the Stephen Nolan Show, BBC Radio Five Live (you can listen here but need to fast forward), to talk about today’s unemployment figures (notice how the BBC allows Lib Dem Steve Webb to get in a pop at cutting the deficit at the bottom - no bias my foot), which are mixed. It is good that overall unemployment is down – but with the number of Jobseekers’ claimants up and long-term unemployment up it is difficult to argue that it’s a great day. Teresa presumably went on the air to point out the mixed message – specifically that the number of “under-employed” people – where they have been forced into part-time and reduced-hours work – stands at almost three million.

Instead, she allowed herself down a classic funnel by stating that Labour has closed Job Centres at the average of one a month since 2008. There was no need for her to go there – all she needed to do was talk about the Work Programme, express sympathy and understanding and stay calm. By raising the matter of closures, she prompted the inevitable comeback “so would you re-open them?”, to which she had no answer.

The funnel happens when you’re drawn to a pinch point from which the interview cannot go forward without an answer, usually a yes or no question. “I’ll ask you again, if you say that Labour was wrong to close the Job Centres, will you commit to re-open them?” Again she evades – it sounds very poor. Now she’s struggling because once you’re in the funnel, it’s difficult to climb back out again. “Look, you are hoping to become the next government in three months’ time, I think people have a right to know whether you will right a wrong that you say Labour has committed – so yes or no, will you re-open the Job Centres?” Crash, bang.

It’s not the point she has come on air to make (if it was, it was extremely ill-judged and poorly prepared). So why does an experienced politician like Teresa May allow herself to be dragged into the funnel so easily? By the time Labour minister Jim Knights is introduced into the proceedings, he could have danced around like a chicken and sounded more credible than Teresa. To be fair, she improved towards the end but the damage was done. And I don’t blame the BBC for being hard on her – if you make such basic unforced errors, you get what you deserve.

So how to get out of the funnel? Firstly, avoid going there in the first place. Why bring up the mistakes of government on such a peripheral matter? The essence lies in Conservative policy, which in this case is very credible. Once you’re in, there are only two options – attack the basis of the question or tell the truth. In Teresa’s case, she could have done either.

Attack the basis of the question: “I understand why you as a journalist are asking me that question but whether or not we commit to re-opening the centres is not relevant. The damage has already been done and the people who those centres could have helped have not been helped, which adds to the problems that we face now. The time to save those centres was 2008, not 2010. Instead of talking about committing to re-open those centres, we have adjusted our policy to suit the needs of today’s unemployed people.” If nothing else, it looks less evasive and puts you back in control of the issue, dismissing the question as outdated.

Tell the truth: “I think it’s important to give an honest answer to you and that answer is that we are not in a position to re-open those centres given the state of the public finances. If they had been kept open in 2008 we wouldn’t now close them because that money would already be in our budgets. This government has ruined the economy and left us with huge debts and that means that as much as we’d like to, we simply can’t go and undo this and many other bad decisions that Labour has left us with. In the light of these tight resources, it’s important that we target them properly and that is what our new programme is designed to do.”

Neither answer gets you off the hook completely but it allows you to move on. There’s nothing the public hates more than politicians that blatantly won’t answer questions and evasiveness is not a good thing for voters or party members to hear. I don’t know who’s advising Teresa May on dealing with the media but they clearly have a lot of work to do.

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Fiddling the system

February 3, 2010 — admin

Tony Blair talked about it after his win in 1997 but soon kicked it into the long grass when civil servants pointed out the advantage that it could potentially give him during the next 10 years. I am of course talking about the first-past-the-post voting system, which has served the country well for 150 years by delivering strong governments in a two-party system.

Yes, it tends to flatter the winning party – enabling them to get legislation through that would otherwise be compromised by protracted negotiations with coalition partners. We haven’t had a hung parliament in this country since 1974 and you have to go back to 1929 for the one before that. In that time, the country has undergone radical economic and social change and the fact that we’ve had governments able to push through their legislation – both popular and unpopular – has been one of the factors that still allows us to be competitive nearly a century after the onset of post-Imperial decline.

Now Gordon Brown wants to change all that.  Isn’t it interesting that having thought about it in 1997 as Chancellor only now is he coming to realise that perhaps it might be a good idea after all? Or, more likely, isn’t he just after a chance to gerrymander the electoral system? He knows that if he wins the election in May, he’s very unlikely to deliver a fifth term for Labour in 2015 because governments just don’t stay popular for that long. So, he reasons, let’s change the system to make it tougher for the Tories, if they don’t win in 2010, to get in at a later point.

And it’s interesting that a graphic in the Guardian today shows how the House of Commons would have looked if the AV system had been in place already. We can see that while it appears to bolster the interests of the largest and smallest parties at the expense of the one in between, that isn’t really what happens. What happens is that Conservative voters are far more likely to vote Lib Dem as their second choice, Lib Dem voters far more likely to put Labour as theirs and Labour voters also likely to vote Lib Dem as a second preference. So with Conservative shorn of the majority of second choices, they have to win on the first preference votes alone, whereas the other two parties are more likely to win on second choices.

It, in effect, seals an unofficial electoral pact between the Lib Dems and Labour – even though a good many people who vote Lib Dem do so because they don’t want to vote Labour or Conservative and have little idea what they are voting for – except they “think that Vince Cable is ever such a nice chap”.

There is an issue with the first-past-the-post system in how it works in a three-party, not two-party system. The largest party is inflated, the smallest party negated. But the Lib Dems have always called for proportional voting out of self-interest and not because they believe it enhances democracy. I don’t remember it being quite so far up their list of priorities 100 years ago when they were forming governments on the back of the FPTP system.

Thankfully, not everyone is taken in by the PM’s Saulian conversion to the cause of electoral reform. I’m heartened to see that the BBC reports (I’ll quote becuase it’s a long way down):

“Campaigners for democratic reform give a mixed reaction on Mr Brown’s proposals, with some, such as Power 2010 saying it did not go far enough: “Without troubling the public for their views, ministers hand-picked the voting system they favour in a cynical exercise aimed at wrong-footing the Tories ahead of a likely election defeat.

“The future of our democracy is far too important to be decided by empty gestures such as this.”

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

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Ten good things about the BBC

January 28, 2010 — admin

I’ve done two things today. Firstly, following a discussion on Twitter with @PaulTwinn, who took issue with my last posts and comments about Nick Robinson, I’ve added Biased BBC to my blogroll because it is a decent blog that has some insight into the very subtle way BBC bias manifests itself.

I accept totally that people within the organisation don’t detect bias or believe that they are on anything other than the middle ground. I’ve never worked for the BBC, but I do have a Master’s Degree in Journalism and Media Theory, five years in the industry and am studying for a Postgraduate diploma in Public Relations after three years in that industry. So I know how the system works. And it isn’t just me claiming there is bias in the corporation – they admit it themselves.

Anyway, enough of the BBC bashing, I think it’s important to remember that the BBC’s coverage of politics is staffed by many good journalists who are earnestly seeking to present the truth to people in the best way that they can. Taking it a stage further, the BBC is also graced with many very courageous and skilled reporters who risk their lives in war zones and undercover investigations to bring the news into people’s front rooms. It is not without reason that the BBC commands respect across the globe.

I am one of the few people I know who believe that the BBC’s investment in BBC3 and BBC4 and digital technology is money well spent – the corporation cannot afford to rest on its channels complacent in the knowledge the licence fee exempts it from having to make progress. It doesn’t and the BBC has been prepared to make risky decisions to stay with its commercial rivals.

So the second thing I am doing today is enforcing a bit of impartiality upon myself by listing 10 reasons why I am happy to pay a licence fee – even if I believe it could be cheaper!

1) The BBC carries British values and standards throughout the world and will remain the most trusted and respected trans-global broadcaster well into the 21st century. Such regard is not built up for no reason.

2) There exists a tradition of quality wildlife and natural world programming at the BBC that the corporation has maintained and even improved (the Planet Earth series was the best recent example). I hope this will continue even when Sir David Attenborough cannot.

3) The BBC has made a substantial proportion of its back catalogue available to the public first on VHS and then on DVD. Okay, this helps bolster its income but means that people born after Fawlty Towers was originally broadcast are able to enjoy it, along with other classics such as Yes, Minister and The Office.

4) iPlayer – the corporation has displayed a high degree of acumen and foresight by pioneering this technology and making it available on platforms such as Virgin, BT and even the iPhone as it doesn’t require Flash Player.

5) The BBC has one of the most accessed and wide-ranging websites in the UK, not to mention one that is fully customisable and has content from cookery to history. It is certainly a lot better than Sky’s and ITN’s and of the online newspapers, only the Grauniad runs it close.

6) Jeremy Clarkson. It’s fair to say that he is the antithesis of everything that the liberal BBC stands for. It’s not just that he’s there – ITV could have done that – it’s that an organisation with such a loud exponent of its collective political anathema gives him a platform that its instincts tell it should be denied. Long may it continue.  

7) BBC Parliament. Hardly anyone can receive it and of those that can, hardly anyone watches it. But as Sir Humphrey said of Radio 3, the countryside, the opera and the universities “It’s vital to know that they’re there!” Televising parliament was a huge turning point in our political culture and the BBC covers it well. It’s not its fault that no-one’s interested.

8 ) Local radio. In many places, it has been marginalised by commercial competitors but it still serves a small but significant part of the population who if it wasn’t there, would have little or no access to local news. Local radio plays a part in helping communities define themselves.

9) The Reith Lectures, which have been commissioned by the BBC since 1948 and most recently broadcast on Radio 4. The 2008 lectures on China were particularly fascinating – it’s a shame that they are not put out on TV; BBC2 is an obvious home for them.

10) Charitable events, notable Comic Relief and Children in Need. The corporation has helped raise more than £1bn since the 1980s with these two charities and that is something to be very satisfied by. Some may think it’s all got a bit too much but in this case I believe the end justifies the means.

So there we are – ten very good things about the BBC. I don’t oppose it, I don’t want to see it privatised, it has an important place in the nation’s fabric. I accept that it will always be an organisation with a culture that prefers a particular way of presenting things. But I won’t just ignore that fact.

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BBC – Broadly Bashing Cameron

January 27, 2010 — admin

In the dark - Broadcasting House seems to have its own view on economics

Apparently two separate blog entries in lightning succession trying to make hay out of the Hatfield House meetings clearly wasn’t enough for Nick Robinson, who surely won’t still be BBC Political Editor by the end of the year. The fact that no other media saw fit to run with this story in a big way shows how isolated he is, how drawn into the Labour spin trap.

We now have another blog post on Tory cuts that tries to have it all ways – saying the Conservatives will cut and if they don’t painting that as a U-turn and another slight on DC. He then helps perpetuate the myth that government spending boosts growth and will therefore aid a recovery. Government spending doesn’t boost growth - it creates its own growth, which then disappears once the subsidy is withdrawn. The UK would still be in recession without the Car Scrappage Scheme – with that scheme over, the car industry can expect a significant downturn in the months ahead.

Today, the Labour group on the LGA announced it would push for a 1% pay increase for the least well paid rather than exercise restraint. Again, the money that goes into propping up more and more public sector wages is a massive ongoing subsidy and one that cannot be withdrawn now it has been enacted without devastating unemployment. The reduction of the public sector headcount must be a target of a Conservative government because it is not healthy for our economy, society or democracy for such a large proportion of the population to be employed by the government.

But now so many are, reducing that number is a hugely painful and expensive thing to do. We mustn’t make the same mistake with the economy by using more government money to prop it up – it needs to be nurtured and kicked into a recovery of its own and the only way to do that is to reduce our debt. Yesterday Bill Gross told investors across the world to avoid the UK because of our huge debts, weak currency and fragile recovery. Like George Osborne, he sees that debt reduction – preferably quickly – is the only way to restore confidence, maintain our credit rating and keep interest rates down.

It’s all very well pumping money into the economy – even if it doesn’t actually promote sustainable growth. But if people’s mortgage rates go from 2.5% up to 6% within 12 months, it isn’t going to leave them with much money to aid the recovery; in fact, many of them will be worse off than they were while we were in recession.

So the BBC needs to stop chucking the last dice all over the place in support of Labour and start understanding that more borrowing and spending in the short-term is going to make the problem far, far worse. If they leave everything as it is, we will fingernail into a slow and drawn out recovery process during which many people will be worse off than they have been for the past two years.

Only by committing to reduce the deficit can we carry the confidence of the markets, which are the real force behind recovery. We need to cut public spending while keeping as many people as possible employed, to raise taxes for those that can afford it most and keep interest rates down while selling on as much of our debt as we can. It’s not going to be easy.

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Economy’s off the scale

January 26, 2010 — admin

Well, don’t you feel better now? The UK is officially out of recession (link to The Times because the BBC’s coverage reads like a Treasury press release), so we can all get back in our cars, go back to shopping in Waitrose and start thinking about re-mortgaging the house. Not quite. Because the government has been pumping so, so much money into our economy during the past 12 months that anything other than growth – however pitifully small – would have been utter humiliation. It’s also worth pointing out that we still have January and February’s figures to come before Q4 2009 growth is confirmed.

I believe that 0.1% is rather convenient for Gordon Brown and will be revised downwards in a few weeks when the fuss has died down. But there is a fundamental distinction between the two parties on how to maintain recovery – and remember that a second “after-slump” in the face of first recovery is something that has characterised nearly all the post-war recession. Labour wants to continue to prop up the economy with taxpayers’ money and there’s nothing particularly wrong with that in such dire circumstances.

The BBC's graph is stastically nonsense

But at some point, the props have to be taken away – and at the moment, the whole thing would come crashing down if that were the case. This is the graph that the Treasury and the BBC wants people in Britain to see. It looks like we are out of the woods. With another 18 months of quantative easing and borrowing, the figure could quite easily be pushed up to 2 or 3 percent and the government given credit for not just a full recovery but a new boom.

The Guardian's graph not only shows us where we actually are but compares with other recessions

This, though, is the Grauniad’s somewhat more realistic assessment of the situation that shows the recession has wiped out all the growth in the British economy since 2005. I have heard both George Osborne and Phillip Hammond in the media today say that the only thing that will keep us out of recession is the private sector’s profits, jobs and tax revenues and that interest rates must stay low to stimulate that growth. We need to cut the defecit to bolster our credit rating and boost our floundering currency.

A rise in interest rates, which would have an adverse affect on people’s spending power, is the most serious threat to our sustained economic recovery – apart from a fourth term for Labour. More borrowing could mean a softening of Britain’s credit rating and devaluing of the pound, which would make government guilts and bonds less attractive to investors. The government desperately needs to harden these investments to pass Britain’s debt onto those with the money to buy it; cuts in spending alone coupled with tax increases will not be enough to pay off our borrowings.

I want to see Ken Clarke and Phillip Hammond blast through Labour bluster about recovery and remind people that whatever Labour has done to bring us out of recession – and you can argue about the effectiveness vs cost of that – it’s nothing compared to the damage they have done to British business and trade, as well as landing us with a huge debt to pay off. I want to see people reminded about this until Gordon Brown doesn’t want to talk about the economy anymore. Brown’s plans to continue to spend his way out of recession and worry about the economic consequences later should convince that he can’t be trusted on this.

He’s been saying for ages that the Conservatives have made the wrong call on the economy every time. It’s not true and it’s time we hit back. He wants to continue to mollycoddle the nation and extend the pain for longer. The Conservative approach is not just a self-flagellating short, sharp shock; it makes absolute economic sense and it’s about time we said so.

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Security threat

January 22, 2010 — admin

The Home Secretary has revealed that the level of terror threat to the public has been officially increased to “severe” by the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre. This comes a few days after flights to and from Yemen were suspended. Does anyone else see a pattern emerging here?

I have said before that I anticipate more and more security alerts as we run up to an election as Gordon Brown appeals to us to believe that he is the only person able to look after us.

But let’s look at how likely this really is. Today, the threat level gets raised to “severe”, meaning an attack is “highly likely”. Yet Alan Johnson accompanies this move by stressing “there was no intelligence to suggest a terrorist attack was imminent“. Eh? Of course we wouldn’t expect him to release details of operations being picked up by GCHQ or MI6 but it’s still an odd thing to say given that the reason that the threat level is raised in the first place.

In addition, the threat level has been set at “severe” or higher since August 2006. In that time, we have had one very amateurish attack on Glasgow Airport where the perpitrators were the only victims (and they were only 50% successful in that given that they had both intended to die and only one did). Another very unsophisticated attack in London was foiled - both were also probably connected to Gordon Brown becoming PM that week and so might not have happened but for that event.

Nothing else has materialised that even comes close to the level of violence seen on the mainland at the height of The Troubles. During that time, there was no terror threat indicator made public via the BBC and Prime Ministers made speeches not outlining in the gravest terms actions that were being taken against a perceived threat but of defiance in the face of enemy action and sympathy with those killed.

In my view, the decision to make public the UK terror threat level is little but a publicity device that keeps terror in the news and in people’s minds when actually the security services would be much better left to their own devices to fight the issue out of the limelight. What possible use can it serve to tell people that they are in danger when you absolutely can’t tell them why? During the Second World War, the very opposite approach was used by the government and people were told that they should simply keep calm and carry on.

And why were they not given more information? Because the government believed, rightly, that the result would be a scared and frightened population. Which can be the only reason therefore that this government has chosen the approach it has - and we ought to ask ourselves why.

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Gardeners question BBC

January 12, 2010 — admin

Many of today’s papers carry the story about the BBC having to back down over the new series of Gardener’s World, due to begin in March. I had read about the controversy surrounding the changed format of the show for 2009, especially from the established viewers. But I think the corporation should have stood its ground.

I never watched the show before 2009 because I never had a garden to speak of. Last year, I designed beds, cleared turf, dug over, planted, fed, watered, fretted and harvested like millions of other gardeners across the country. I derived that same therapeutic enjoyment and experienced one of the great glories of England – working in one’s garden on a warm spring day. I can’t imagine ever giving that up now for as long as I am able.

But to me, Gardener’s World in its current form was superb. Yes, it was a bit ridiculous that the team was able to move onto a wasteland and seemed to have unlimited resources to create walls, glass and beds that most people can only dream of. But I like Toby Buckland and his team and particularly that the show was  not aimed at people who knew the Latin names of everything growing on their property.

And I take exception to the notion that the amateur kitchen gardening that I did is not the ”proper, grown-up gardening” the GW viewer wants to watch. For thousands of years, kitchen gardeners on differing scales have kept their communities alive. By comparison, flower gardening has only been a working man’s pursuit since the war.

Not that I don’t like flower gardening – I’m sure it’s something I’ll turn to in due course. But by then, I shouldn’t need a programme each week to tell me how to do it and I’ll be happy to leave GW to those just beginning to experience the pleasures of the garden. For the serious gardener surely moves on to RHS reference books and, of course, Gardener’s Question Time.

I wish the BBC had kept the current format for a second year – people need time to get used to change as with Top Gear, the programme to which the new GW was sneering compared (and another programme that I enjoy very much). What we are likely to end up with is a compromise that will neither be accessible enough to entice the “new guard-ners”, nor pure enough for the “Latinistas“.

Another great British Broadcasting Corporation compromise.

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I should hope not

January 3, 2010 — admin

The man who nose - Ken Clarke

As well as spinning madly about security, Labour’s press team has also been trying to get stuff into the paper along the lines that the Conservative will be cutting spending and raising taxes after Ken Clarke said it would be “folly” to rule out tax increases. The BBC has dutifully responded with just such a story.

First of all, I should hope that no promises whatsoever will be made on tax increases or otherwise until George Osborne is able to see the proper and full government account – including all the off balance sheet PFI liabilities. It would be totally stupid to make any pledges on the overall tax burden until the Conservatives know just what a state the country is in. Ken Clarke is absolutely right and I hope that even tax-cutting Tories can see the logic in that position – or at least appreciate the total illogicality of promising to maintain or cut tax rates at this stage.

Secondly, the BBC has a long memory when it comes to Mrs Thatcher and the poll tax or John Major and sleaze but a very short one when it comes to recalling just who on earth plunged this country into near-bankruptcy to begin with. Every economically active person played a small part, certain larger players in the economy such as the banks and the regulators played a far more significant role but the one institution that has to carry the can for such throwaway mismanagement is HM Government.

For two years, Labour has spun that the banks were to blame and the price of the banks readily shouldering that blame has been £60bn of taxpayers’ money to make them competitive again. Those that wouldn’t play ball, like Sir Fred Goodwin, were fed to the media in a frenzy of inflammatory briefings that if they had been conducted by a private citizen on another private citizen would have been on the edge of legality.

The BBC, Grauniad and others have happily swallowed that line to the point where most of the British public believe that the banks were more or just as responsible as the government for the recession. Rubbish.

A few banks don’t make a recession, no matter how dodgy the loans. The recession was caused by a framework of poor decisions, insufficient regulation, faulty economic plans and over-optimistic projections. It was also caused because western governments were too complacent and arrogant to understand that their economies must shift to work around the emerging markets of the East rather than just continuing as per the past 50 years. The person responsible for the poor economic planning, the lack of realpolitick, the poor regulation and stoking up of the boom was not Sir Fred or any other banker. It was Gordon Brown the chancellor and Gordon Brown the PM.

Yet somehow it will be the fault of the Conservative Party if, after the next election, taxes need to rise and spending be cut. Well, spending will be cut after the next election because our national debt needs to be controlled. And taxes will rise as well because cuts alone won’t deliver the massive amounts of money that need to be raised.

DC is concerned that people will see the Conservatives offering only a decade of downbeat austerity and vote for Gordon who wants more borrowing to keep spending. It is a worry but in the end you have to trust the electorate to do what is right. And I think they will understand that a decade of different economic behaviour – most of it bearable, much of it positive but some of it unwelcome – is the price of the Noughties Boom.

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A matter of security

January 3, 2010 — admin

It seems that there were a few hacks back at the BBC yesterday and today as someone has had time to stitch together a toadying news story about Gordon Brown, giving him carte blanche to attack everyone else based on a tepid interview he gave to Andrew Marr. He’s also led the bulletins throughout Sunday by announcing the new full body scanners at airports – steering us gently back onto a massive over-reaction to a very specific and concentrated terrorist danger.

I had to laugh at the headline – not “Full body scanners on the way” or “Airports to get full body scanners” but “Gordon Brown promises full body scanners” as if the PM and the PM alone has the power to do this as opposed to the companies that operate our UK airports. It goes to show the subtle yet insidious bias that remains within the corporation’s coverage of UK politics.

The fact is that people have been getting on board aircraft and hijacking them for years. They have been planting bombs on them and evading airport security for even longer. If the UK government had been serious about this issue it would have acted far more strongly after Lockerbie to ensure that aircraft departing from this country are subject to far stricter and no less time-consuming security specifications. The Lockerbie bomb – if you accept it was such – could have been contained within bomb-strengthened luggage containers that are readily available but not commercially preferable to airlines.

The PM has had 12 years to bring forward these full-body scanning measures and although the technology in this field is advancing all the time, why has he waited to an election year rather than 2001 and 9/11 or 2005 and 7/7 to announced this? We’ve already had the case of Richard Reid when nothing was done. The sudden focus on tightened security is just a get-tough measure that Brown hopes to use to propel himself back into No 10.

What you won’t find on the BBC website is two things. Firstly that among the 

“Experts [who] have questioned the scanners’ effectiveness at detecting the type of bomb allegedly used on Christmas Day in an attempted plane attack over Detroit.”

is a Conservative MP who has advised companies on the design of such things and who no doubt knows a great deal more about the subject than Gordon Brown.

You also won’t find reference to the fact that the PM claimed he had spoken to President Obama about the “new” Yemeni dimension to the terrorist threat, something that turned out to be totally untrue. Funnily enough, there’s no story on this – apparently body scanners are more important than a PM who’s a liar – but you can unpick the angle from the interview transcript.

So we’ve got Yemen, the closed embassies, the airport scanners and top-level US co-operation. It sounds to me very much as though the Labour Party is spinning madly on the security line for a political hit to get the year off to a decent start. We can expect more bogeymen and women hiding in the shagpile – from Yemeni extremists to Conservative MPs – as this government enters into its final throw of the dice; a general election of fear.

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