Six of the Best 453

What You Can Get Away With completes its series of posts inspired by Conrad Russell's An Intelligent Person's Guide to Liberalism.

On British Politics and Policy, Mareike Kleine provides three suggestions on how Lord Hill can be a good European commissioner and still serve the British interest.

China is setting up fake social media accounts to give a false impression of life in Tibet, reports Andrew Jacobs in The New York Times.

Ben Goldacre, in an editorial for the British Medical Journal, says true informed choice will require wholesale changes to the way we gather and communicate evidence: "When we offer a preventive drug to such large numbers of healthy people, we are a long way from the doctor treating a sick patient. In some respects, we are less like doctors and more like a life insurance sales team: offering occasional, possibly life changing, benefits, many years from now, in exchange for small ongoing inconvenience and cost."

"Audiences in 1949 didn’t see the film as fanciful. Vienna may have been badly bombed, but so had Coventry, London and Liverpool. Crime was a UK problem, too. Shortages and rationing meant plenty of people knew a man who could get a hold of extra petrol, sugar or meat. Fellas like Lime had their stories in the papers and their pictures on post-office walls." Gerald Heyes celebrates the 65th anniversary of Carol Reed's The Third Man for Spiked.

London Reconnections explores the Connaught Tunnel and Silvertown Station.

Ten stories from ten years - 24 March

Taking my lead from Caron Lindsay on Liberal Democrat Voice, here are snapshots of 24 March over the years here on Liberal England:

2013 - Marianne Faithfull sang for us while I wrote about her grandfather's libido-liberating Frigidity Machine.

2012 - I visited the Portland Enclave, which lies off the London Road in Leicester. The picture above is taken from this post.

2011 - A guest post by Ruth Kinna offered a beginner's guide to anarchism.

2010 - Rory Stewart had compared Liberal Democrats to the Taliban. I remarked that I would be more outraged at this if I had not once begun a Guardian article as follows: "Fierce, bearded and wedded to an impenetrable ideology. Not a description of the Taliban, but the average commentator's view of the Liberal Democrats."

2009 - On Ada Lovelace day, I paid tribute to the woman herself.

2008 - I congratulated to the pro-Tibet activists who attempted to disrupt the lighting of the Olympic torch in London.

2007 - An amusingly shaped parsnip had made it from the pages of the Shropshire Star to the Guardian.

2006 - As so often in those days, my House Points column dealt with Labour's attempt to give the government more powers against terrorism: "Never mind traditions of local accountability and mistrust of an overmighty state: whisper the word “terrorism” and we are supposed to throwaway everything we believe in. The problem with today’s world is not that terrorists believe in their cause so strongly: it’s that the democracies’ belief in theirs is so weak."

2005 - Responding to reports that Mark Thompson had bit a colleague when working as editor of the Nine O'Clock News, Lord Bonkers said: "I knew Lord Reith well and never saw him bite anybody, but there were persistent reports in the 1960s that Hugh Carleton Greene had eaten a junior researcher."

2004 - "Twitchy local authorities, obsessed with safety and frightened of compensation claims, are turning urban areas into 'fun-free, soulless' spaces," said a campaign launched on this day.

Lord Bonkers looks forward to the first Ashes test

Hurry over to Liberator's blog to read his views.

Would an independent Scotland panda to China and Murdoch?

One of the political stories of the day has been Alex Salmond's refusal to meet the Dalai Lama during his visit to Scotland this week.

On Liberal Democrat Voice Caron Lindsay asks:

Could it be that Salmond’s discourtesy has something to do with a visit he received at Bute House two weeks ago from the Chinese Consul-General as reported in The Times? We know from reports in the Independent and the Courier that the Chinese authorities have been visiting local councils from Leeds to Inverness to discuss their involvement in the Dalai Lama’s visit. Only SNP-run Dundee City Council and the First Minister seem to have taken any notice of them.

And Caron also quotes the condemnation of Salmond's decision by Willie Rennie, the leader of the Scottish Lib Dems:

This is a missed opportunity. By failing to meet with the globally respected spiritual leader and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate the First Minister may leave the impression that he is more concerned with pandering to the diktat of the Chinese government than promoting human rights. We ignore China’s human rights record at our peril. I appreciate that China would be sensitive about such a meeting but the First Minister should stand up for what’s important.

I am instinctively sympathetic to the idea of small nations, but today's events have done nothing to make the prospect of an independent Scotland more attractive.

They have reminded me of Alex Salmond's appearance before the Leveson Inquiry. You can read his evidence on the inquiry website, but this quote from a Daily Record report is telling:

“I have no responsibility for broadcasting policy, I have no responsibility for plurality in the press but I do have a responsibility for jobs and investment in Scotland.”

I don't find the idea that the provision of jobs in Scotland trumps concerns of media plurality or media ethics appealing. And if you heard Salmond you would have gained the impression that he would have little time for such considerations even if they were his legal responsibility.

It is easy to imagine an independent Scotland, at least one with Salmond and the SNP in charge, being a little too keen to placate the powerful and unattractive, whether it is Rupert Murdoch or the Chinese government, out of a fear of losing jobs.

If Tessa Jowell doesn't like a free press she should stay in China

From the Guardian:

The Olympics minister, Tessa Jowell, today criticised the British media for running too many negative stories about China that failed to recognise the progress the country had made.

"You can get big headlines back home for slating the repressive regime - and there are some aspects that that are profoundly repressive - but there is a great risk of going too far," she warned in an interview with the Guardian.

The paper's website has a video of her saying it.

Meanwhile in Tibet:

a picture is emerging from various sources of Tibet as a country in lockdown. The Free Tibet campaign has provided a briefing detailing huge military build-ups in many areas of Tibet, with checkpoints on almost every corner and early evening curfews imposed. Undercover Channel 4 footage has shown snipers positioned on rooftops in Lhasa.

Respected China analyst Willy Lam today suggests the Chinese regime's pre-Olympics security build-up has been planned to enable a major crackdown on dissent after the games are over.

An Olympic-standard hoofing for Tessa Jowell

It comes from Marina Hyde and can be found on the back page of this morning's Guardian sports section:

"I'm on the record repeatedly being very hard on China on its human rights record," she claimed. "Every time I have been to China I have raised human rights with the relevant ministers."

The minister is also on the record - on film, in fact - looking rather awkward as the tracksuited guards muscled in on Gordon Brown's photo opportunity. So she can hardly claim not to have had a clear view of any incident from her position in the dug-out. Yet despite this, you could not persuade her to utter a word against them in the aftermath.

Her appearance on the next morning's Today programme contrived to make her position even more ludicrously inconsistent. "Would it have been better if the torch had passed smiling crowds and cheering children?" she wondered aloud. "Yes, it would."

But of course it wouldn't. Even for an expert in double-think - Jowell recently joined a campaign to keep open a post office in her constituency, despite having voted in the Commons to shut it - this is a logical breakdown too far.

Armed foreign police may patrol London during 2012 Olympics

The Evening Standard reports:

The Olympic flame fiasco has ignited a row over foreign security services helping to police the 2012 Olympics, the Evening Standard can reveal.

As alarm grew over the Chinese guards who accompanied the torch through London it emerged Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair has approved a plan to hand over some of London's Olympic security to visiting countries.

Although a final decision has yet to be made,it is understood police officers from abroad accompanying their own teams may be allowed to carry guns.

It has not emerged since the torch fiasco at all. The story was reported by the BBC in June of last year and I pointed you to it at the time.

Still the Standard does quote Norman Baker later in the story:

Norman Baker, the Lib-Dem frontbencher and UK president of the Tibet Society, told the Standard: "The streets of London must be policed by the police of London, not by Chinese security forces.

When it comes to Tibet, the people of Britain want a strong moral stand. But it seems the Government is prepared to kowtow to the Chinese at every turn."

Mr Baker, who has held talks with the Dalai Lama at his refuge in northern India, added: "Gordon Brown seems more interested in trade deals with China than the fate of Tibet."

Norman Baker holding talks with the Dalai Lama? I'd love to have been a fly on that wall. Perhaps the two outstanding figures of their time together in one room.