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Mark Pack reports that the police have been called in amid claims of “fabricated allegations” and a “smear campaign” over Haringey Labour candidate selections.

"Water cannon in London would be a 'big mistake,' warns pensioner blinded by them" - David Churchill's report in the Evening Standard.

"Remarkably unreported this month ... is that four of private work provider A4e’s staff who ripped off the taxpayer and lone parents have pleaded guilty to 30 acts of fraud and forgery." David Hencke has the story.

"Just as child porn is used to justify broader porn filters, beheading videos appear to be the magic bullet into scaring people into accepting filters that move well beyond porn. According to the BBC, government-funded operations within the counter-terrorism referral unit will soon order UK broadband ISPs like TalkTalk, Virgin Media and BSkyB to expand filters to include websites declared to be promoting terrorism." TechDirt on the  government's "futile and ham-fisted attempts to purge the Internet of all of its rough edges".

Mario Kaiser writes for Guernica on the power of silence, submission to force-feeding, and the first suicides in Guantánamo.

The Walbrook Discovery Programme studies one of London's lost rivers.

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Who won the local elections? No one, says Mark Smulian on Liberator's blog.

Max Dunbar on the rise of UKIP: "Smart progressives who want to make a difference don’t go into politics, they go into public policy or advocacy or journalism or law or the police or the Royal Marines. Because smart people are leaving politics, the field is left clear for maniacs, illiterates, thieves, neo-Nazis and toytown power merchants."

"'Differences of reward must be large enough to induce people to do their best but the present differences are far too great. If we do not find some way of correcting that perversion of capitalism, our society will break down. We shall find ourselves back in some form of government without the consent of the governed, some form of police state.'" Jules Birch discovers the radicalism of the founders of the John Lewis Partnership.

The Guantanamo Bay hunger strike reveals the detainees growing desperation, says Ryan J. Reilly on Huffington Post.

"You can take a long, solitary walk around the place where the last Plantagenet monarch died in battle. You can have a low-key romantic picnic with a cultural edge. You can bring your kids to an exhibition that’s historical, educational and actually appealing to tiny people with five-second attention spans. You can wander around the exhibition yourself and smile at the affection so many people still have for this man who died more than five hundred years ago, leaping off his horse and into the middle of his enemies, brave and lonely." Planes, Trains and Plantagenets is impressed by the Bosworth Field heritage centre.

Letterology proves fruit wrappers are more interesting than you thought.

Sir Graham Watson MEP on Guantánamo

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Today George Osborne crossed fingers and hoped ‘steady as she goes’ will come good by 2015, says Stephen Tall on Liberal Democrat Voice. With graphs.

Paul Nettleton is impressed by Cumbria Day, in which the county’s six MPs put party difference to one side to support a showcase for local businesses.

"I really believe Guantanamo has created more true terrorists around the world then we've gotten rid of." Brandon Neeley - a former guard at Guantanamo Bay - is interviewed by RT.

"The attorney general of the United States has now admitted that the biggest American financial corporations have created such a labyrinth of their structures and practices that the Justice Department has given up trying to police them in matters of corruption or criminal malfeasance, saying that bringing down any of these mega-banks or businesses could cause crash the economy." Too big to fail? American corporations are too big to jail, says Dan Dewalt on Counterpunch.

Smashing Tops has photographs of the 10 most amazing abandoned railways in the world.

"For much of their lifetimes, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger never got the due they deserved. Powell was as English as you could get, had worked his way up through the film industry before coming to the attention of British film magnate Alexander Korda. Pressburger, meanwhile, was Hungarian Jewish by birth, who'd come to Germany in the 1920s to work as a screenwriter, moving to Paris, and then England when the Nazis came to power, and again was working for Korda. When the two met in 1939, there was an instant kinship. They shared a similarly uncompromising and original take on filmmaking, and were soon working hand in hand, sharing credit as writers, directors and producers under the banner of their The Archers production company." The Playlist takes us through the work of these remarkable filmmakers.

Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy

I contributed this review to Liberal Democrat News in May of last year. I am reposting it because Assange is in the news again - and because I think it holds up well.

WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy
David Leigh and Luke Harding
Guardian Books, 2011, £9.99

Leigh and Harding tell the story of Wikileaks and its release of 250,000 secret diplomatic cables and classified files from the Afghan and Iraq wars. Their own paper, the Guardian, was one of the newspapers that was given this material, and they dissect its often fraught relationship with Wikileaks’ moving spirit Julian Assange.

This is very much the Guardian’s side of the story, but it is clear that Assange, by turns charming and impossible, is difficult to deal with. The book has obviously been written in a hurry and each chapter carries a subheading like “Emergency Operating Station Hammer, 40 miles east of Baghdad, Iraq, November 2009,” as though the authors half imagine they are writing a screenplay. Perhaps they have never got over seeing Paddy Considine play a Guardian journalist in The Bourne Ultimatum?

Julian Assange’s childhood was spent in hippy communes and as a teenager he entered the world of hacking – gaining unauthorised access to government and commercial computer systems just for the fun of it. Like many pioneers in the world of computing, he dropped out of formal education before completing his first degree.

His hacking soon came to have a political edge, and he dreamed up the idea of Wikileaks – a way of allowing people to leak documents while being sure they would remain anonymous. Such a system, incidentally, would have been useful to Sarah Tisdall, who was gaoled in the 1980s for leaking details of cruise missile deployment to the Guardian after the newspaper revealed her identity to the authorities.

Assange was an idealist, believing that he need only lay bare the workings of international diplomacy and power politics for the world to rise up in anger. But things turned out to be more complex than that: material needs to be analysed and put into context before the public can understand it. So when an extraordinary collection of American cables and files came into his possession he put together a consortium of newspapers to publish them.

Even when this trove was published, Assange was probably disappointed at the reaction. The idea that US foreign policy is wicked is taken for granted by most Guardian readers. When they read of civilian casualties, corruption and arm twisting it confirmed their prejudices rather than roused them to action.

It was in the Third World that the revelations had more effect, with local journalists begging for the material on their own countries. The recent uprising in Tunisia has been called “the first Wikileaks revolution”. The Wikileaks website continues to make the most astonishing revelations, most recently revealing the files on numerous prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

Meanwhile in Britain, the drama of Assange’s remand and then bailing of allegations of sexual assault in Sweden has taken centre stage. While this does look very convenient for the Americans, no evidence of their interference in the process has emerged. Leigh and Harding suggest Assange has displayed rather Antipodean attitudes to women in the past, and the argument “I disapprove of American foreign policy therefore he must be innocent” is a pretty thumping non sequitur.

The real victim in this book is not Assange but Bradley Manning, the former pupil of Tasker Milward School in Haverfordwest, who leaked the material on Iraq and Afghanistan that made Wikileaks famous. It is easy to sympathise with a thoughtful young man, stationed in the heat and boredom of Iraq, who saw these secrets and horrors every day on his screen every day and wanted the world to know what was really going on. If nothing else, the Americans’ cavalier attitude towards cyber security is astounding.

Today Manning is being held under oppressive conditions in America – some believe the authorities want to force him to implicate Assange more deeply and give them a pretext to seek the extradition. Whatever the rights and wrongs of this, there is a support site for him at .

The new Liberator Songbook

A year ago, sitting in my hotel bedroom on Fifth Avenue, I wrote:

Far away across the grey eternity of the North Atlantic, my fellow Liberal Democrats are preparing to enjoy this evening's Glee Club. 

As ever, we at Liberator have produced a new songbook for the occasion, complete with an introduction from Rutland's most popular fictional peer. 

You can find last year's introduction and links to Lord B's earlier essays in this genre elsewhere on this blog.

This year I have to write "over the Warwickshire border", but otherwise all that holds true this evening too.

Bonkers Hall

Rutland

Telephone: Rutland 7

Welcome to the Glee Club – surely the most enjoyable part of any Liberal Democrat Conference? After all, it is much more fun than the Leader’s speech, though we did all roar the year that Charles Kennedy said “I won’t let you down.”

However, you may have noticed some changes to the security arrangements for this evening’s entertainment. In the past, if you were unlucky a particularly officious steward might have a Hard Look at your badge. I remember one year having some trouble convincing one fellow that my likeness had been taken whilst my moustache was benefiting from the lush pastures of the Welland Valley.

This year, I fear, your experience will have been very different. You will have been asked to show your passport, to recite your National Insurance number, to provide your mother’s maiden name, to open your bag, to submit to a pat-down search and quite possibly to remove all your clothes while members of the Federal Conference Committee pulled on rubber gloves with an intimidating snap.

When I queried these new arrangements with the bigwigs at Cowley Street (as it then was) I was told that if we, as a party, wish to fight against the database state and the infringement of individual rights, then we must insist that our members suffer every possible indignity and packed off to Guantanamo bay in orange jumpsuits at the slightest excuse.

Well, I am a Liberal and, in the immortal words of Clarence “Frogman” Wilcock, I am against This Sort Of Thing. I expect you are against This Sort Of Thing too. And the best way for us to fight This Sort Of Thing is to sing ‘The Land,” “Jerusalem” and “Lloyd George Knew My Father” as loudly as possible.

Bonkers

Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy

My review from Friday's Liberal Democrat News.


WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy
David Leigh and Luke Harding
Guardian Books, 2011, £9.99

Leigh and Harding tell the story of Wikileaks and its release of 250,000 secret diplomatic cables and classified files from the Afghan and Iraq wars. Their own paper, the Guardian, was one of the newspapers that was given this material, and they dissect its often fraught relationship with Wikileaks’ moving spirit Julian Assange.

This is very much the Guardian’s side of the story, but it is clear that Assange, by turns charming and impossible, is difficult to deal with. The book has obviously been written in a hurry and each chapter carries a subheading like “Emergency Operating Station Hammer, 40 miles east of Baghdad, Iraq, November 2009,” as though the authors half imagine they are writing a screenplay. Perhaps they have never got over seeing Paddy Considine play a Guardian journalist in The Bourne Ultimatum?

Julian Assange’s childhood was spent in hippy communes and as a teenager he entered the world of hacking – gaining unauthorised access to government and commercial computer systems just for the fun of it. Like many pioneers in the world of computing, he dropped out of formal education before completing his first degree.

His hacking soon came to have a political edge, and he dreamed up the idea of Wikileaks – a way of allowing people to leak documents while being sure they would remain anonymous. Such a system, incidentally, would have been useful to Sarah Tisdall, who was gaoled in the 1980s for leaking details of cruise missile deployment to the Guardian after the newspaper revealed her identity to the authorities.

Assange was an idealist, believing that he need only lay bare the workings of international diplomacy and power politics for the world to rise up in anger. But things turned out to be more complex than that: material needs to be analysed and put into context before the public can understand it. So when an extraordinary collection of American cables and files came into his possession he put together a consortium of newspapers to publish them.

Even when this trove was published, Assange was probably disappointed at the reaction. The idea that US foreign policy is wicked is taken for granted by most Guardian readers. When they read of civilian casualties, corruption and arm twisting it confirmed their prejudices rather than roused them to action.

It was in the Third World that the revelations had more effect, with local journalists begging for the material on their own countries. The recent uprising in Tunisia has been called “the first Wikileaks revolution”. The Wikileaks website continues to make the most astonishing revelations, most recently revealing the files on numerous prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

Meanwhile in Britain, the drama of Assange’s remand and then bailing of allegations of sexual assault in Sweden has taken centre stage. While this does look very convenient for the Americans, no evidence of their interference in the process has emerged. Leigh and Harding suggest Assange has displayed rather Antipodean attitudes to women in the past, and the argument “I disapprove of American foreign policy therefore he must be innocent” is a pretty thumping non sequitur.

The real victim in this book is not Assange but Bradley Manning, the former pupil of Tasker Milward School in Haverfordwest, who leaked the material on Iraq and Afghanistan that made Wikileaks famous. It is easy to sympathise with a thoughtful young man, stationed in the heat and boredom of Iraq, who saw these secrets and horrors every day on his screen every day and wanted the world to know what was really going on. If nothing else, the Americans’ cavalier attitude towards cyber security is astounding.

Today Manning is being held under oppressive conditions in America – some believe the authorities want to force him to implicate Assange more deeply and give them a pretext to seek the extradition. Whatever the rights and wrongs of this, there is a support site for him.

Camden toilets recall Richard Attenborough's Pinkie

Exciting news from the new Fortune Green Blog:

West End Lane toilets are set for a starring role in a new film of the Richard Attenborough classic Brighton Rock.

The toilets were scene of a famous Spotlight victory when the Lib Dems re-opened them as one of our first acts of getting the reigns of power in Camden in 2006. (Blair gave independence to the Bank of England, Obama closed Guantanamo, we reopened the toilets!)