It's one of the basic tools of any magician — control of the audience's attention. It's said that a good magician knows at all times where the audience is looking, and controls it. Misdirect the audience into looking at your right hand, while your left hand palms the coin. Or, if that fails, use the Glamourous Assistant as the focal point.

Today's lesson in stage magicianship comes from our old friends, the Labour Party. While you're all looking at the left hand waving goodbye (or the Glamourous Assistant), the right hand is busy palming £400m of my money and yours.

That 8% cost slippage (that's £2.4bn so far, or 76% of the original budget for those keeping count) came out in the Gateway Review, a month past the required deadline, and just happened to be published within a few minutes of the Dear Leader's Resignation Speech. Mind you, the only reason it came out at all was because the courts ordered to be published.

Yes, it seems that even in its death throes, the Blair Project cannot resist spinning for all its worth. It's another Good Day to Bury Bad News — an open goal so wide that we should have seen it coming a mile off.

Oh, we did.

So here's the theory — a couple of senior labour bods, panic about the idea of El-Gordo as Dear Leader. In a desparate attempt to derail the expected coronation (and the gentlemen's likely permanent sinecure on the back benches), they launch a debate on the future of the Labour Party (my emphasis).

Now while this is as obvious a piece of astroturf as the gamut will allow, you'd think that if they had a modicum of sense, Haystack and Hairdo would ensure that the related website would do mad, off-the wall, distracting things like... ooh, debate ideas for the future of the Labour party.

Visiting it for the first (and likely only) time today, I discover this as the front page:

(Again, my highlighting)

Yes, it's Clarke, continuing to punt ID cards. And the forward looking bit (so far forward looking that even Tone hasn't suggested yet) is that the National Register should include a DNA database, presumably to support the Dear Leader's fondness for fishing expeditions.

Leaving aside that even this cowed Parliament balked at the idea of DNA inclusion, I'm just failing to see the 'future of the Labour Party' element here.

Anyone? Buehler? Anyone?

So, The Dear Leader and Shaven-headed Sidekick have given up on the burden of proof of the criminal law...

The Al Capone Bill (yes, it's been at least a week since a Serious Crime Bill was in the works) is positing that the necessity of proof is just a fiddly little thing that plain gets in the way when you're trying to get those Nasty Mr Bigs.

Oh yes, we're reducing the burden of proof in Criminal matters to that of Civil cases because it's easier that way.

Insert your own A-levels joke here...

So I'm sure you remember the big kerfuffle about foreign ex-prisoners not being deported from a month or three ago. And how Big Hard Dr John was going to personally track them down and sling them out of the country. All (approx) 1,000 of them, but 43 of the most serious ones in particular.

This was so high a priority task that a special taskforce was set up to set up networks of informers, knock on doors in the middle of the night, bundle people off on unregistered flights to unacknowledged prisons in regimes with a laissez-faire attitude to death squads and so on.

You might therefore think that — given this was such a high priority of public safety — we could rest assured that a newly vitalised Home Office would complete the job. Ah but no. No, no no. It turns out that the Snatch Squad has been disbanded already, having failed to deport perhaps half of the 1,000 total, and to find 1 in 6 of the most serious offenders.

Which raises an interesting question — now that the Eye of Sauron (aka the editorials of Murdoch owned newspapers) has moved on, can we infer that the taskforce was never more than political window-dressing?

(Hat-tip: lebwog)

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 »

Listening to the recent debates about party funding, there seem to be two camps emerging:

1. Let's leave all the funding limits in place, and just make it more transparent
2. Let's further limit the amounts individuals and/or corporate bodies can give/lend to political parties, and make up the gap with state funding that won't come with the taint of political favour for sale.

Now let's be clear - I think that people should be allowed to give money to promote their political beliefs. Parties are at their heart voluntary associations, and should be allowed to rely on their membership to fund them.

However, both of the above camps make the same assumption — that parties should be allowed (no, sorry, encouraged) to maintain their current spending levels, particularly in election season. But I have two very good reasons why this is a false assumption:

1. Campaigns should be fought on the basis of who has the best ideas and policies, not who spent the most on advertising. Does anyone really actually believe that the national poster campaigns make a valid contribution to that debate? The Devil Eyes poster? The Fagin poster? Are you thinking what we're thinking? At least we don't have paid-for political TV ads here...
2. If a party can't muster a mass membership that can fund its activities, doesn't that suggest that they're not connecting with the electorate? If one or two large donations can outweigh the entire membership fees and donations of the party membership, then of course it's going to bring undue influence with it, whether that's for good old fashioned pork barrel, or fittings for ermine.