Labour is considering making the retention of DNA samples ‘an issue’ for the election.

But if people feel they are being labelled as suspects by the police, even when they are not criminals, then this might make them less willing to cooperate with the police. The police are no longer an extension of ‘us’, the law-abiding majority, but become an alien power whom many of us fear and resent. But if the police get less cooperation with the public, won’t they solve fewer crimes?

The reason there’s so little progress in the popular educational policy debate is that teaching is something we’re very ideological about while also thinking that our own experience and common sense have already given us the right answers. It’s not because the academic evidence that already exists isn’t of the right kind.

The Digital Economy Bill is coming. The Lords have wasted most of their time wrangling over just how much they should support big business with laws, and now there are only a few days left to debate one of the most regressive laws to come to the parliamentary table. This is what the Government wants, to pass it without contest through the “wash-up” before an election.

We must stand up for our rights, and we must do it now. After all…if any of this was being forced on us in our “real” lives we simply wouldn’t stand for it.

Liberal Conspiracy has obtained a set of notes taken at a recent seminar which show that the Conservative Party is pushing ahead with plans to provide state funding to a network of independent schools with close ties to a controversial occult society.

The notes were taken at a recent seminar organised by the Steiner Waldorf Schools Fellowship (SWSF), an offshoot of the Anthroposophical Society, which exists to promote the occult philosophies of the German mystic Rudolf Steiner, and also suggest that a newly registered educational charity with close ties to the Conservative Party may be actively engaged in the promotion of Conservative education policy in such a way as to breach the Charity Commission’s regulations on charity involvement in political activity.

Israel’s announcement of plans for 1,600 new settler housing units in illegally occupied Palestinian territory has triggered both stern condemnation from Washington and rioting on the streets of East Jerusalem. And just to highlight their heartfelt regret over these adverse reactions, the Israeli authorities have today confirmed their desire to build 300 more.
It is difficult [...]

W process of technocratic economic management signed into law under the Maastricht treaty, under a particular set of economic conditions which the then policy makers assumed would last for ever, is now adding to an already considerable burden on people who did not make the crisis, and did not gain from the booms that caused it.

As a result there is a real possibility of major social unrest in many European countries, including explosions of racial hatred as workers take it out on themselves; this is the antithesis of what the European Union is supposed to be about. That, fundamentally, is the stupidity at the heart of the European Union, and reflects the key problem with it.

It’s a matter of common knowledge that the Daily Express has long since scraped right through the bottom of the barrel and is now busily digging its way to Australia.

Nevertheless, the latest entry in it ongoing ‘thieving foreigners’ series really takes the biscuit:

NOW POLES GET FREE ABORTIONS ON NHS

The best way to gauge weight and influence as carried by Lord Ashcroft vs the Unions is to check the relationship between donors and political parties. Not a single senior Tory has publicly said a bad thing against the Belize-based tycoon.

Now look instead at how Labour is actively laying into Unite the Union in the middle of a delicate industrial dispute with British Airways. There’s a trade union “proudly” handing around £3.6m a year to the Labour Party and publicly announcing that they made “tens of thousands of calls” to their members urging them to vote Labour at the forthcoming elections.

So what does the Labour Party do in return?

William Hague insinuates a future Tory government is prepared to invest in the military, to build new industries…but what about investment in higher education and research for the same purposes?

Under the Tories, though people may want for their basic needs, our army will still be free to kill johnny foreigner when he doesn’t do as ordered.

I have been a net beneficiary of government (and Bank of England) actions, not just in the last two years but possibly – depending on your view of how much policy contributed to rising house prices – in the preceding years as well.

This should put complaints about high taxes into perspective. It’s quite easy to dodge those taxes quite legally, if you arrange your affairs moderately well. Such complaints – at least if they come from someone around my age – tell us about how some people have an inflated sense of their entitlements, not about how onerous the tax system is.