Reading Blair's extended answer to ChickYog's question (my emphasis):

I am quite sure, based on the experience I have had in government, you cannot solve some of these law and order problems unless you are prepared, quite profoundly, to change and rebalance the system of criminal justice so that you have more summary justice, more summary powers, more ability for quick and effective action to be taken, even if it will cross the line that most people normally think of as there in terms of civil liberties. And my view is that you can decide that you are not going to do it for civil liberty reasons, decide it, but then don’t say to the politicians and all the rest of it, you have got to deal with this problem, because you cannot deal with it in my view by the normal processes of the law, you just can’t do it. The way the world has changed means that the only, and this is why we only started to get any action on antisocial behaviour when we introduced the power to get Antisocial Behaviour Orders, summary powers for the police, and the ability to take swift action.

rang a few bells with me. It took me a while to work out what they were. I thought about examples of societies changing from ones where decisions were made with thought and care, taking multiple views into account, to ones where frustration with the time this takes leads to demands for summary action without the nicities of getting the edge cases right, and an example popped into mind:

ANAKIN: We need a system where the politicians sit down and discuss the problem, agree what's in the best interests of all the people, and then do it.

PADMÉ: That is exactly what we do. The trouble is that people don't always agree. In fact, they hardly ever do.

ANAKIN: Then they should be made to.

PADMÉ: By whom? Who's going to make them?

ANAKIN: I don't know. Someone.

PADMÉ: You?

ANAKIN: Of course not me.

PADMÉ: But someone.

ANAKIN: Someone wise.

PADMÉ: That sounds an awful lot like a dictatorship to me.

ANAKIN: Well, if it works...

This is exactly what Blair is proposing. The I'm right; I know what needs to be done, and will do it no matter the casualties along the way school of thought. I'm guessing that Il Duce's commitments to targets in train punctuality is all part of this.

I realise incidentally that I'm running the risk of invoking Godwin's Law here, but consider The 14 defining Characteristics of Fascism — I'm counting 10 out of 14 at present.

It had to happen. But we never expected it so soon. Morgan apparently has a girlfriend. The other week, he and his friend Molly spent about an hour sitting together, arm-in-arm, gazing into each other's eyes, in our local soft play centre. On the way home, Lucy asked Morgan about Molly, and he answered I really lo...like her.

Now yesterday, we were at the park, and so was Molly. When I called Morgan to go, he was sat apparently on her lap, with her arms round him on a wee roundabout, which was being pushed round by their mutual friend Maya.

Awww, bless.

Overheard from a guy coming out of the cinema the other night — at the Metro Centre, hence the Geordie Accent:

That Mission wasn't Impossible, just Reeeeaaally Hooooooaaarrd.

Morgan and adventure Ted, originally uploaded by Pollianicus.

Morgan made a decision last night: today he will take his Teddy Higgins into preschool, carrying him in a sling. As long-standing sling users ourselves, we have a small size sling for Morgan so he can join in.

Morgan starts in P1 (ie 'real' school) in August. How long will our bright, enthusiastic, caring little boy feel confident taking a Teddy into school? How long until the Lord of the Flies society that is boys' peer pressure drums it into him that this is not cool, not hard and not acceptable? This is a precious, short window where he can behave as he wants to, not how his mates tell him he ought to.

As spotted on Blairwatch, the list of ID Card Processing Centres has been announced.

With a wee bit of data manipulation (many thanks to those nice chaps at mySociety for their geocoding API), here's a first cut map of the locations:

Or, take a look at the full map.

This is a first cut - there are a couple of dupes where I obviously couldn't work out which was the correct place from the lat/long. There are also a few which the API didn't return data. In both cases, I'm too lazy/it's too late at night for me to manually correct them. I'll return to it on Friday night, when I'm back at home again. Now mostly fixed up with help from Tom's eagle eyes.

So, here we have a Home Office who are failing in the management of an existing task:

Trial judge recommends the offender should be deported on sentence completion. Home Office makes a formal decision to follow that recommendation, then fails to carry it out.

(Note that the judge recommends that the offender be deported, not be considered for deportation. HMG's description is spin.)

Rectifying this requires the Home Office to simply be better at keeping records and communicating between its various Directorates (ie Prison Service tells Immigration that someone's coming to the end of their sentence. Immigration turns up on release day with a plane ticket and a taxi to LHR).

Not rocket science, is it?

But in a desperate attempt to get ahead of the headlines, Ol' Jug-ears decides that what is needed is not better implementation of existing legislation (which is more than adequate - Home Secretaries already enjoy the broadest of discretions to deport people who are non-conducive to the public good), but new, more draconian legislation.

Again.

With apologies to la Hewitt for the title.

To start slightly off centre, this week saw two major scope increases for the National ID scheme (conveniently after the legislation has passed):

1. The NIR is to function as a complete population register with cross-functional data sharing that far exceed the stated strictly limited circumstances mandate. As previously predicted by the Fiend, myself and others, this is child's play once you have foreign keys to all the government's databases stored on the Register
2. Contrary to previous promises, the Card is to store your medical info. So as well as the inevitable Civil Liberties problem here, every provider of medical services is going to need the Card Reading Kit (previously estimated by the Home Office as £4k - £6k plus connectivity for each reader workstation). Whose budget is paying for this? Can't imagine the Dept for Health is jumping at the idea.

So I'm beginning to think that maybe the best way to keep tabs on the population isn't to give each of us an ID Card, but instead to lock the lot of us up in a secure location, and then HMG will know exactly where we all are. Oh, wait...

Continues below the fold »