Do we need an ‘Armed Forces Day’?

Saturday, I learnt from watching the news yesterday, was our first ever Armed Forces Day. According to the official website “The first Armed Forces Day is 27 June 2009, and is an opportunity for the nation to show our support for the men and women who make up the Armed Forces community”

The tradition in the United Kingdom has always been that we do not celebrate the military or have parades of armed men in our town centres if we can help it – unless we are in Northern Ireland. We conquered, or not, when duty called, and commemorated the actions and their dead.
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Introducing Magna Carta 2.0 – our way forward

You want to know where we go from here? We need a new Magna Carta. Sunny recently said he wanted “an insurgency to take our rights back from the state”. This now includes our right to honest government, though I think we always knew that. The emphasis needs to be on achieving this.

In February the Convention on Modern Liberty in London and across the UK showed a clear public concern with the threat of authoritarian power and a hunger to debate and confront it in an intelligent and democratic way. Guy Aitchison, Clare Coatman and Tom Ash are, from today, launching Magna Carta 2.0 with the aim of taking the spirit and intelligence of the day to the country.
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Can the Staggers return to its glory days?

I have had the strange experience of publishing an article in the New Statesman, once a familiar home. It’s a reply to Conor Gearty’s absurd attack on the Convention on Modern Liberty.

Does the Statesman have a future? If the question continues to be asked for as long as it HAS been asked, since the 60s in fact, that gives it another 50 years. I’ve not met the new editor Jason Cowley. His magazine faces three problems: socialism, the Labour Party and the Guardian. Historically, ie before the 1960s, the NS appealed to a broad liberal as well as left readership as well as enlightened Conservatives.
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Where do our liberties go from here?

I’ve never been part of anything that got so many congratulatory messages than the Convention on Modern Liberty, and enquiries about what next and “how do we turn the energy into action?” So, how do we?

Jack Straw in his sniffy Guardian article said, “My very good constituency office files show no recent correspondence relating to fears about the creation in Britain of a ‘police state’ or a ‘surveillance society’”. Can we answer Straw by taking the energy of the Convention to the country?
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Canvassing in Haltemprice and Howden

“It’s a total waste of bloody money!”; “I have not made my mind up yet”; “I’ve voted for him already” (one of 10,000 postal ballots requested, 59 per cent sent them in); “I just don’t know about politics, I don’t vote.

A lady somewhere will be turning in her grave” (clearly meaning her mother); “I never thought I’d vote Tory, but this time I will” (an enthusiastic Lib-Dem); “Look at all these leaflets!”; Definitely I’m voting for Mr Davis … I don’t need a car thank you, my son will walk me there”.

I canvassed for David Davis on the eve of the by-election. The uncertain did not want to discuss. We had a single conversation with a man who did raise 42 days – he was for locking them up, but not, on consideration, if they were innocent. Davis’s core team is very competent. But it is hard for them. Many voters are puzzled about why David Davis has done it, especially Conservative voters. I’ll come back to this, his core problem at the moment. But also party activists who worked especially hard to ensure he won the constituency in 2005 to frustrate the Lib-Dem’s “decapitation strategy”. They backed a leader. They wanted him to be Home Secretary.
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