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There’s only one thing I want to know about the publicly subsidised second in line accident of birth wastrel marrying his broodmare: will we get the day off?

Today is a day that ‘you’ll never forget‘, say Apple. Why? Because it’s the day The Beatles came to iTunes.

Now, utterly knobheaded hyperbole aside, I’m generally cockahoop over any announcement about the Fab Four but this leaves me a bit cold. I’ve had The Beatles on iTunes for years – I ripped my CDs onto my computer.

The Red and Blue albums are 18 quid each on iTunes and yet for the same money you can get both from Amazon. The individual albums are 11 quid each on iTunes but on Amazon the remastered versions are only eight. Why would someone buy the digital versions when they can get the CDs and rip them on to their computers at a better quality?

I must sound terribly square. What am I missing?

Inspired by a recent news story, I think Iain Duncan Smith should start getting imaginative about the millions of jobs he’s going to have to create in order to get the slovenly masses off their backsides and making their rightful contribution to the bonuses of the super rich.

One idea is that you could give the jobless a bright orange lifejacket each, sail them out to sea and have them bobbing there looking out for and rescuing people in difficulty. Think of the headlines…

Dick Van Dyke rescued while surfing by paupers.

Flying Rodent:

And here we are in 2010, with a new breed of hairy-palmed Conservative revolutionaries making the world safe for royalty with an entirely ideological crackdown on public spending, pledging to create a bajillion jobs by hurling half a million onto the dole and forcing the unemployed to work for a bowl of rice a day.

Brian Barder:

This general complacency in the face of almost unprecedentedly repressive proposals for driving the undeserving poor into the workhouse is profoundly depressing. To demonise and seek to punish as scroungers and layabouts the great majority of the unemployed who are either unemployable, or else desperate for work at a time of high and rising unemployment, is nothing short of wicked.

Peter Mandelson:

Haven’t the rich suffered enough?

They assured us they were there. The intelligence said that pledges to abolish student tuition fees were ‘serious’ and ‘current’. A dossier was compiled showing watertight evidence of the pledges’ existence.

‘What I believe the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt is that Clegg has continued to produce tuition fee pledges…’, said the foreword.

They went into battle on the basis that those pledges presented a very real threat to student tuition fees and could be launched within 2,190 days.

But when the battle was over and victory assured, someone went and looked and the pledges simply weren’t there. They had been dismantled months before. The Liberal Democrats had taken us into coalition on a false prospectus.

When me and my then girlfriend – now wife – got together in 1994, she lived in Rochdale and I lived in Newbury. On a good day, the train journey between us took around six hours. You’ll know what the flush and rush of young love feels like and can imagine how those six hours felt like six days – the two weeks between us seeing each other feeling like months.

Each and every delay on that train journey, however brief, was hard not to take personally. The forces of evil are plotting to keep me from having amazing things done to me by that sensational woman, I’d say to myself. I remember simply aching to be with her. I remember the shortness of breath, the tightness in my chest. If smartphones and Twitter had been around, who knows what things I might have broadcast in my longing and frustration.

Which brings us Paul Chambers. Paul meets Crazycolours. He lived in England. She lived in Northern Ireland. Shortly before they were supposed to get together one week, the airport Paul was supposed to fly from was closed. In his worry that their rendezvous might be thwarted, Paul jokingly, flippantly, unseriously said on Twitter, ‘Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!’.

The next thing he knows, he’s being arrested and convicted for ‘menace’. Disgracefully, he lost his appeal today.

Basically, Paul has been punished for expressing his worry and disappointment – in a style of speech we all use every day – at the possibility he might not get to see the woman he likes. The 23 year-old me, on that train to Rochdale, his heart hammering in almost unbearable anticipation, understands and sympathises with every thumping beat.

I was a Paul once, wishing away the minutes and hours so I could be with Her. So were you, whether it was a Her or Him. Or maybe you are a Paul right now. Or will be a Paul one day soon. Can you feel that beating? We still break butterflies in this country. Take care, young lovers.

Drop a few quid in the defence fund.

Twitter joke trial: Paul Chambers loses appeal against conviction…

Paul Chambers, a 27-year-old accountant whose online courtship with another tweeter led to the “foolish prank”, had hoped that a crown court would dismiss his conviction and £1,000 fine without a full hearing.

But Judge Jacqueline Davies instead handed down a devastating finding at Doncaster which dismissed Chambers’s appeal on every count. After reading out his tweet – “Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!” – she found that it contained menace and Chambers must have known that it might be taken seriously.

This country is out of its fucking mind.

Update: This stupid, unpleasant prick is now presumably bricking it.

Update: Paul Chambers’ support fund is here.

Indeed:

If there’s a lesson in life we should all learn is that students must never break windows unless they’re members of the Bullingdon Club. You see, you get a better class of vandalism at Oxford, for example not a single student at today’s protest was sporting top hat and tails, nor was any on horseback – pathetic.

David Cameron has said the actions of a very small number of protesters were ‘unacceptable‘. He’s right. The knobheads arrested for smashing up Conservative Party headquarters must be rueing their fundamental mistake of not throwing some of Daddy’s cash at the wreckage and then having it away on their toes. That would have been acceptable. Cameron has called for the ‘the full force of the law‘ to be used against the knobheads in question. Who could disagree? Surely the full force of a night in the cells, a phonecall to Pater, a stern telling off and a safe Tory seat is in order?

…or so said Neil Kinnock. Further proof, if it were needed, that David Miliband is a horrible jackass thankfully now well away from power is his support for Phil Woolas. Once you’ve worked hard at covering up torture a little bit of local racial hatred probably doesn’t look so bad. That’s high politics, I suppose.

I liked this as well…

D Mili won’t be in Prime Minister’s Questions, however. I hear that he will only appear there again “when he’s asked” by his brother or the party to be helpful.

I suppose that means his constituents can go and twist in the wind. They’re only the chumps he was elected to represent at things like PMQs after all.

Update: Anton says No!

Update updated: Obsolete brings you Disgraces and mutinies.

Well slap my thigh and call me Roger, I take it back…

David Cameron will take a calculated gamble and tell China’s leaders today that they cannot shut down debate about democracy, urging them instead to recognise that political freedom, the rule of law and a free press represent the best path to stability and prosperity.

This comes with the caveats that this will be steeped in Downing Street spin and the fact that the state-controlled media will ensure the speech is heard by the fewest people possible. But still, on the face of it, it makes him more liberal on this than Gordon Brown.

New Labour made the smart move in cutting off race-baiting liar and former immigration minister Phil Woolas. If they hadn’t, instead of him hanging around like a bad smell reminding us all what an irredeemable bastard he is, he’d have been hanging around like a bad smell reminding us all what irredeemable bastards with their immigration policies (written by glorious leader Ed Miliband, no less) New Labour are.

‘In the last few days we have seen a complete lack of humanity in our approach to Phil Woolas,’ says former Labour Party general secretary Peter Watt. Well, now Woolas knows how it feels. There are countless refugees who saw the same complete lack when he was overseeing the UK Border Agency. The heart bleeds obviously but at least Woolas isn’t fighting post-traumatic stress disorder while being held in a government camp.

Still, it’s the same old story of the great and the good whining with undignified hyperbole when the forces of the state are brought to bear on them. Remember Labour grandees screeching ‘Stasi’ and ‘Gestapo’ when police had the temerity to investigate the cash for honours scandal? It’s not language they ever use when refugees are having their doors kicked in at dawn by the Home Office or being killed on planes.

Members of Parliament on both sides are worried at the precedent set by the Woolas judgement. As the Observer editorial put it: ‘Many people were surprised to discover last week that it is against the law for politicians to tell lies about each other’. ‘It will be virtually impossible for there to be really robust debate during elections,’ says Tory Edward Leigh of this upholding of the law. I don’t know about Edward but I think most people are capable of having a ‘robust debate’ without telling racist lies about one’s opponent.

Labour’s David Winnick says there is ‘some anxiety that the decision is being taken out of the hands of the electorate’ to which the only response should be if you don’t stir up race hatred to ‘get the white vote angry’ and make a ‘false statement of fact in relation to’ your opponent’s ‘character or conduct’ you should be all right. Or is this a pitch for continuing dishonesty in British politics?

Apparently Woolas is claiming the support of Gordon Brown and Cherie Blair. If they’re the best he can do in terms of character witnesses, he’d do well to keep his mouth shut.

Update: The Labour Friends of Race-baiting Liars had its first meeting last night.

I’m sure I’m not alone when I say that the thought that David Cameron might go to China and talk about the country’s human rights record never crossed my mind for a second. It’s like thinking a cat might fly a plane.

When New Labour abased themselves before Chinese despots there was disgust at the double dealing of a government that lectured others on ‘universal values’ and the ‘rule of law’. The Tories? Well, it’s what you’d expect. Getting angry about it seems perfectly futile.

Cast your mind back to September last year…

Liberal Democrat Conference today demanded an independent, public inquiry into allegations of British Government complicity in torture. [...] Commenting, Liberal Democrat Shadow Foreign Secretary, Edward Davey said: “With the police now investigating claims of complicity in torture against both MI5 and MI6, the Government can no longer resist calls for a full judicial inquiry. “Ministers must not be allowed to continue to hide behind ongoing police investigations.

A year is a long time, blah, blah, blah. Things change…

Nick Harvey, the Liberal Democrat armed forces minister, said the MoD should be allowed to investigate the matter itself, adding: “A costly public inquiry would be unable to investigate individual criminal behaviour or impose punishments. Any such inquiry would arguably therefore not be in the best interests of the individual complainants who have raised these allegations.”

It’s the new politics.

ITEM: Court to rule on Phil Woolas re-election.

ITEM: Phil Woolas authorised use of force to deport immigrant children.

ITEM: Phil Woolas is our fall guy.

BREAKING @ 11.25:

Guilty. Woolas’ rancid little political career ends in the disgrace it so richly deserves.

At the General Election the Liberal Democrat manifesto said:

Liberal Democrats will:

• Change politics and abolish safe seats by introducing a fair, proportional voting system for MPs. Our preferred Single Transferable Vote system gives people the choice between candidates as well as parties.

The bill to hold a referendum on the voting system has just been passed by Parliament. As Jim Jepps says…

Parliament had rejected amendments to allow voters a choice of what kind of voting system they would prefer, changing the date of the referendum so it did not skew the elections taking place on the same day and reducing the number of Ministers in Parliament to account for the fact that the number of backbenchers would have been drastically reduced.

There was an amendment to allow voters a choice of what kind of voting system they would prefer? Wow. A very real shame it was defeated but I bet the Lib Dems were all over it to push their ‘preferred Single Transferable Vote system’…

The Lib Dems voted as an extremely disciplined block throughout this process against all motions to improve the bill…

Oh.

Not surprising in the least but worth noting all the same.

Jamie explores the possible and amusing unintended consequences of giving prisoners the vote. It’s something I don’t really have an opinion on but lean towards favourably if only for the reason that – like the European Union – it upsets an unpleasant section of right-wingers, curtain twitchers and professional ignoramuses.

‘Someone who is working as a postman should not subsidise those who go on to become millionaires,’ says schools secretary Michael Gove in defence of rocketing university fees.

It’s all a little confusing. I thought the Tories absolutely bloody loved millionaires, even those subsidised by postmen and other professions regarded as downmarket and less worthy of esteem by the likes of Gove. Just look at the banks that Gove’s postman helped bail out that are shovelling billions in bonuses out the door.

When defence secretary Liam Fox said in 2008 at a BAE sponsored shingdig, ‘I don’t think we support our defence industry enough,’ he was talking about sending the postman round with a big fat cheque not with tea, cakes and a nice back rub. Ian King, the BAE chief executive was paid £2.6 million last year. How much more support does he need?

I wonder how many people graduate from university and actually go on to become millionaires. Is it many? Other than those dreamt up by a wrecking schools secretary or those that inherit the cash from Daddy like Gove’s bosses, I mean. Gove’s using the by now familiar Tory tactic of highlighting extreme cases in order to beat the system as a whole (see also the feckless but freakish benefit scroungers with 15 kids who live in mansions used as ammunition against the benefit system).

What Gove really seems to be saying here is someone who is working as a postman should not subsidise those who go on to become doctors, nurses, teachers, scientists and cabinet ministers despite it obviously being in his or her interest to do so. What next, the postman should not subsidise the dustman? The dustman should not subsidise the policeman? All these things need doing and they need paying for.

(But Gove’s got a point because, as everybody knows, those bastard doctors, nurses, teachers, scientists and cabinet ministers will only hoard their expertise. There’ll be no doctoring, nursing, teaching, sciencing or ministering for the postman from those selfish sods once they’ve pissed their university years up the wall. Plus, they’ll only squirrel their ill-gotten cash away instead of making their rightful contribution to the economy by paying their taxes. Well, the cabinet ministers will at any rate. There is absolutely no public good in educating and training these jackals so why make it any easier for them?)

It makes you wonder if Gove and his chums really want people other than the upper orders to do those jobs. Surveys say poorer students are put off going to university by higher fees and Gove has little more to say than an unsupported ‘nah, that’s bollocks‘ and that he’s got his fingers crossed that the big universities will be ‘imaginative’ in finding space for a few proles.

Some might say it’s a good thing that someone like Alan Johnson (an ex-postman no less) would these days be unable to rise to cabinet government. But we should hope that someone like him from a poorer background also with a functioning moral compass might one day make the same great journey. At the end of the day all students are subsidised by somebody whether it’s Mater and Pater or the postman. Fewer people from the working classes in these professions seems like a bad thing to me.

We’ll also see how much love Gove and his colleagues has for his postman after cuts are made to make the Royal Mail attractive to private investors. Where will poor postie be then, downgraded from undeserving subsidiser to undeserving recipient? At the tender mercies of the Big Society one expects. We can probably expect a lot of postmen to be no longer in a financial position to subsidise anyone.

Friend of Chicken Yoghurt, Anton ‘Steven Baxter’ Vowl asks: ‘Should we mourn the decline of the British libertarian blog?‘

No.

‘Life after No 10 can be tough for former prime ministers,’ says the Guardian’s political courtier Michael White.

Define ‘tough’.

Rob Jubb:

Politics is about holding and wielding power, and having integrity gets in the way of seizing it, keeping it, and using it appropriately. It may be politically useful to be thought to have integrity, but that’s quite different from having it.

Alexander Cockburn (via Jamie):

The President’s aides are already confiding that the White House will move right.

With the Yemen printer ink cartridge bomb plot (if that what it turns out to be – we’ve been here before) it looks like Obama might have got himself a little October Surprise just in time for the mid-term elections.

Not that desperate Democrats facing a hiding in next week’s elections engineered the plot of course but Obama’s talking it up for all it’s worth. The plot was a ‘credible terrorist threat’ says the President. Not that credible though if it’s been thwarted as heroically as we’re being led to believe. ‘Sources’ in Dubai say ‘a Hewlett Packard printer in the box contained a hidden suspect device’ and that ‘the bomb was “cleverly disguised”‘. Not so cleverly disguised that it couldn’t be found and disarmed.

All in all it sounds like a victory for intelligence and international co-operation. That and what is becoming known as a consistently crap brand of Islamist terrorism. Richard Reid and his shoes that wouldn’t ignite, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab scorching his cock on Christmas Day, the Tiger Tiger pillocks and their bomb that could never have exploded, Kafeel Ahmed setting himself on fire and then getting brayed by John Smeaton, Dhiren Barot and his dirty bomb that needed 10,000 smoke alarms. Then there’s my personal favourite, the guy who failed to assassinate a Saudi prince with the pound of explosive shoved up his arse. As Chris Morris says, ‘terrorism is about ideology, but it’s also about berks’. Even Bin Laden himself isn’t above the farce, dyeing his beard in his hideout.

And now they’re reduced to posting stuff? (If it does prove to be a false alarm, someone’s getting negative feedback on eBay right now.) Maybe al Qaeda are feeling the financial pinch like the rest of us and the price of international air travel is currently beyond them. Surely it can’t be long before some herbert tries swimming towards his 72 virgins with a bomb down his trunks.

It’s very possible the Yemen bombs had the potential to cause real harm (and hopefully we’ll find out for sure when the hysteria dies down and cooler heads prevail in the media than the ones providing the coverage right now) and of course the next consignment might just get through which will teach those of us ground down into weary cynicism by nine years of The War Against Terror’s scaremongering hype and bullshit.

But posting stuff? It’s a bit all fur coat and no knickers. It’s a big comedown from all the apocalyptic stuff we were promised back in the noughties (thank goodness, I hasten to add). Not that I go anywhere near such theories, but you can begin to see why some people think the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks were put-up jobs by the US and UK governments. From this distance Bin Laden’s mob really don’t look as if they were ever capable of such spectacular acts of atrocity. Maybe they contracted out the jobs, Milo Minderbinder style.

About the only thing we can be sure of right now is that this is probably a bad time to invest in real estate in downtown Sana’a. Wait a few weeks until the unmanned drones have been and gone and then pick yourself up some real fixer-uppers at bargain prices.

#1. The chief political commentator for the Independent on Sunday asks of the leader of the Labour Party: ‘what is he: Wallace, Gromit, the Panda or Watto?‘

He also says The Phantom Menace is his ‘favourite film of the six’ Star Wars movies.

Further comment is unnecessary.

Update: It looks like the mighty John Rentoul thought better of comparing Ed Miliband to the Watto character from The Phantom Menace and pulled the post without comment. You now get a ‘page not found’ error when you click on the link. Particularly piquant was when Rentoul noted Watto is ‘scuzzy’ and ‘enslaves little boys’. And he deleted his tweet advertising his insightful blog post (we know it was there because somebody replied to it). What a shame, denying future students of journalism this exemplary example of the craft.

Update update: Mr Rentoul’s next blog post is one called ‘Origins of a tasteless metaphor‘ in which he compiles a list of other people making unpleasant and simplistic comparisons.

…and he likes the taste…

I will say, we’re all in it together, including, deliciously, the BBC, who in another negotiation agreed a licence fee freeze for six years.

Good to see someone’s enjoying their job, I suppose. He clearly thinks pissy, petulant gloating over the slow destruction of just about the only thing this country ever produced worth a damn is becoming of Prime Ministers. You can take the boy out the Bullingdon Club etc. etc. Perhaps Cameron will pause to vomit on the wreckage before throwing some of Daddy’s cash at the mess and running off.

Of course, deliciousness is in the tongue of the beholder. Young Master Cameron shouldn’t be too surprised when one day – and the day will come – he finds himself ignominiously out of power as unloved and laughed at as a Blair or a Brown or a Thatcher. He’ll have to forgive those us is who find that a lip-smacking prospect. I’ll be drooling like Hannibal Lecter at a nudist camp.

Looks like we’re winning The War Against Terror…

Just 504 people out of 101,248 searches under counter-terror powers last year were held for any offence, Home Office reveals.

More than 100,000 people were stopped and searched by police under counter-terrorism powers last year but none of them were arrested for terrorism-related offences, according to Home Office figures published today.

The statistics show that 504 people out of the 101,248 searches were arrested for any offence – an arrest rate of 0.5%, compared with an average 10% arrest rate for street searches under normal police powers.

I suppose if you throw enough shit at the wall some of it is bound to stick. Though if only 0.5% of it sticks you probably want to see a doctor about your diet. And that 101,248 was a 60% reduction on the year before as well. People whine about there not being enough police on the beat and the rozzers having too much paperwork. I wonder how much of that griping would go away by simply and cheaply abolishing section 44 of the terrorism act.

Then there’s this: remember back in the day when people who were against plans to introduce 90 days detention for those suspected of terrorism were called ‘traitors‘? Remember when Tony Blair said he hoped opponents of 90 days detention ‘do not rue the day‘ and that the arguments for internment were ‘vital’ and ‘compelling’? Well…

The figures show that since the limit was raised from 14 to 28 days in 2006, 11 people have been detained for longer than 14 days. In the last two years nobody has been held without charge for longer than 14 days.

For future generations, as history slips out of focus, I can see Blair and his crew becoming the cast of cautionary fairy tales. Not so much The Boy Who Cried Wolf (who after all was punished at the end of the story) and more like Creepy Anthony who frightened the children with terrible stories about monsters and then flew away with a big bag of money when the children found out he was a bastard.