Screwing people honestly

There is a rather nice story from America this morning about porn star Stormy Daniels - winner of the 2007 Golden G-String Award - deciding to challenge Louisiana Republican Senator David Vitter for his Senate seat on a platform of 'Stormy Daniels - Screwing People Honestly'




This is because Mr Vitter is one of those anti-gay, God fearing, Christian values holy rollers who was caught with his pants down consorting with prostitutes back in 2007. There is little to compare with these smug self righteous zealots suddenly found wanting and Ms Daniels challenge has certainly stirred up a scandal Mr Vitter hoped might go away. Like all these sanctimonious Christian right wingers, Vitter -only when found out - confessed to a 'serious sin' but now 'had received forgiveness from God'. Presumably he has a direct line to the Almighty to be sure of these things. Whether that translates into forgiveness from the Louisiana electorate for his hypocrisy is another matter.

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Ms. Daniels is unlikely to win but the prospect of the competition must be sending Republican Party chiefs into the depths of despair and making Barack Obama's 'new' Democratic America appear even more attractive nationwide.

Meanwhile Ms Daniels is having a ball - or two if her quotes are anything to go by. She has challenged Vitter to a family values debate but says 'he hasn't got the balls' and says she decided to enter the political arena because she was looking for something that was dirtier than the job she already had.

If Vitter hangs on to his seat it will probably be a Pyrrhic victory with the spectre of his carnal sins brought up at every stage and the Republican Party just praying for the whole thing to go away.

A squalid shameful act

The Iranian government stands accused this week of a shameful, squalid - and cynical- execution of a young woman, Delara Darabi, who was convicted of murdering a relative when she was just 17. She initially confessed to the crime, hoping to save her boyfriend, and then retracted her confession. She had been in prison since 2003.

Amnesty International took up her case in 2006 when the facts of her trial came to light and which Amnesty does not consider to have been fair, her lawyer being denied the right to present evidence which, it is claimed, would have proved she could not have committed the murder.



Iran has ignored the international agreement to ban capital punishment for those who committed crimes as juveniles but , only on 19th April Delara Darabi was given a 2 month stay of execution while international appeals were considered. Despite this, on May 1st, with no notice to her lawyer or her family, Delara Darabi was taken out of her cell and hanged in the compound of Rasht Prison. The speed and secrecy was, of course, to avoid international protests until it was too late.

140 people have been executed in Iran this year, including another woman and one other who committed the offence while under the age of 18. Two more juvenile offenders are scheduled to die this week.

Amnesty International is launching world wide protests in front of Iranian emabassies and if any readers of this blog would care to add their protests in the form of a letter to the Iranian embassy in your location, to stop capital punishment particularly of child offenders, you will have my gratitude.

'Dark Forces' or simple incompetence?

I watched the Chelsea v Barcelona European Champions League semi final last night, which of course, as anyone who follows football now knows, Chelsea lost to an away goal scored deep into stoppage time.

I'm no great lover of Chelsea but it was hard not to sympathise with the explosion of anger after the final whistle, directed at a referee, many of whose decisions were incomprehensible. Chelsea had four penalty appeals turned down, two of which appeared absolutely clear-cut. It was perhaps unfortunate that two of them involved 'Dorothy' Drogba, the big girls blouse with talent,but who falls over if you blow on him. This, of course, leaves a mark on the minds of officials but a competent official should be watching the play not allowing such things to cloud his judgement. Drogba was furious with the referee at the end of the game and roundly abused him for some minutes,which will cost him dearly.




The referee, Mr Tom Henning Ovrebo was awful. There is no other adjective to describe his performance. What is amazing in a game at this level, Mr Ovrebo admitted later to EUFA officials that he had made serious errors - not all of them one sided. It was incredibly harsh to send off Barcelona's Abidal for a minor tangle of legs as well as his apparent lack of eyesight for many of Chelsea's appeals.

Doubly astonishing was the fact that the Barcelona manager and players, after the match, almost shamefacedly sympathised with their opponents over the referee's performance, Pique admitting that he had handled the ball and felt lucky a penalty had not been awarded.

All in all a shocking night for the referee. But of course there are those who see more in this. Some Chelsea players and the pundits in the Sky TV studio suggested that the referee may have turned a blind eye to Chelsea's appeals because EUFA did not want two Premier League clubs contesting the European Final again. I can well believe they didn't, and are happier with a Barcelona v Man United final but I think it demeans the accusers to make such allegations against the European Association. I think it is down to simple incompetence. Ovrebo was clearly not good enough to referee, under pressure, at this level and EUFA need to take heed of this. There needs to be a strict tier of high quality officials for games of this magnitude because last night did little for anyone's sense of justice.

Another step down the 'benign' authoritarian road

The government has published its list of people banned from entering the United Kingdom, based on the views they have publicly expressed. As I said once before when Dutch MP Geert Wilders was denied entry to the UK, I am becoming more and more concerned at the ease with which this government rolls over the established tradition of free speech in favour of some 'benign' - they think - authoritarianism.

OK most decent people dislike the views of homophobes, ranting racists and so on but hasn't it always been a part of our democratic system that we absorb those with views we don't like and only take action when a specific offence has been committed?

Since 2005, the Home Office has had the power to expel or exclude people from the UK if they are considered to hold views which are likely to inflame. In whose view? The view of the government of course and this is a very dangerous road we are on. Jacqui Smith has already announced, last October, that there will now be 'a presumption of exclusion'. In other words, the British government makes up its mind it doesn't like the cut of your jib and then you have to prove them wrong. And there are inconsistencies and omissions. Why for example did they ban American lifestyle guru Martha Stewart? OK she had been jailed for lying about shares in her company but hardly a threat to the safety of the UK. A lot of this is nonsense and incredibly intolerant.

The current legislation and its enactment cuts across all the principles of British principles and behaviour and it worries me greatly that the government is so easily prepared to go down this road wearing such a morally self-righteous stance as it does so.

Come on Hazel - you're either with him or you're not!

Labour's permanently beaming little snugglebunny, Hazel Blears, popped her head over the parapet yesterday to voice her opinions on the lamentable state of the Government, of which she is a prominent member. She claims that Ministers have shown a 'lamentable' failure to communicate, that YouTube is not the means by which to launch policy initiatives , that 'slick presentation and clever soundbites' should be left to the Tories and that people don't believe what the Government says. Pretty damning eh?

Ah but wait a minute. This was not, says Bubbly Blears, any hint of an attack on Gordon Brown's leadership. Of course it wasn't, Hazel. We know that Gordon is just a figurehead on the periphery of events and absolutely nothing to do with any of the failings you describe.

They really are spineless these modern Ministers who seem to be so easily bypassed by their leader. If Hazel's article was not an attack on the way Gordon Brown has allowed this situation to come about, I don't know what is. But of course it's not as simple as that. The whole point of Hazel Blears's article is called 'positioning'. You don't say quite enough to get yourself fired...or at least I assume she took advice on how weak Gordon's position is re firing Ministers...but she set herself up for a key post in any post-Brown Labour Party by setting out her stall.

It's all posturing and in-fighting and, at a time when Britain needs its government to be pulling together, hardly a pretty sight

Preparing to desert the sinking ship is a mistake

A story is circulating today that some Labour MPs, we are not privy to how many, are preparing to ditch the Labour Party when (rather than if) the Party loses the next General Election, and to seek a political future with the Liberal Democrats. Lord Ashdown who broke the story says these centrist politicians fear a 'shift to the left' when Labour loses.



Well first off, instead of talking about shifts in any direction, why don't we talk about a return to some good socialist principles of fair distribution of wealth instead of trying to ape Tory policies in a vaguely anaemic way. Let's not be ashamed to talk about public services paid for by the taxpayer in accordance with his abilities. Let's have an education system and a social services regime we can be proud of. Let's back off these hideous defence commitments designed to make Britain look like a first division military power when it is clearly all kippers and curtains. Surely these are not reasons to defect or pin labels. The Labour Party should be going back to basics. It's what has sustained it for over 100 years. The New Labour bubble was clearly built on straw and has failed as it was bound to do as there was no belief to prop it up, simply the desire to keep winning elections.






And what if these milksops do defect? Do they think the Liberal Democrats are the answer? Oh sure their hearts are generally in the right place and they sometimes support good causes but the Party is really a hotchpotch of the disenchanted. It has no real creed. Do these people not remember the SDP? How that was going to be the saviour of Labour's middle-of-the-roaders and how the 'old' Labour Party would disappear? Never happened did it - OK it went through changes but it remained intact - and the same will happen again.



My advice to the currently disenchanted is to stay put and take part in a conscientious debate about where the heart and soul of the Labour Party really ought to be. Then you might make a sensible decision. Let's not talk about shifts to left or right, let's instead talk about the Labour Party discovering its true self once again. It can't come soon enough.

Swine Flu: A little restraint required with the warnings?

The world has been obsessed this week with the outbreak of swine flu, understandable when a new strain of flu appears for which there is no current vaccine and which has the capacity - and I choose my words carefully - to reach pandemic proportions. It does seem to have gone beyond confinement to national borders yet so far there is little evidence of the disease appearing in clusters unrelated to the source in Mexico, though I accept it's early days.



What concerns me though is the reaction, much of it initiated by the world's press who provide their usual mix of valuable reporting and headline irresponsibility. To know where the flu pockets are is useful information, but headlines about 'Killer flu strikes' are not helpful. All influenza is a killer to certain vulnerable sections of the population and a figure was quoted yesterday that 31,000 Americans, for example, die of 'normal' flu every year.






It worried me to see anxious tearful mothers clutching their offspring outside a Torbay school where one child had contracted the disease after a holiday in Mexico. You would have thought that it was the children's last day on earth, rather than them running a mild risk of a type of flu. I do think there needs to be a bit of calming here and reminders that, like any other form of flu, if your child is unlucky enough to catch swine flu then plenty of bed rest, lots of liquids and tender loving care should see them over it in 5-6 days just like any other flu bug. Statistically speaking their chances of coming though it without serious health damage is very high. People need to be warned and advised how to best avoid it, but they also need to be reminded that its not Ebola fever or Typhoid - it's flu.



And Ive just watched a rather silly manifestation of media hype on this issue where dear old BBC Midland News, ever desperate for a news story that doesn't involve cats up trees or a dog with three legs, sent a news crew hotfoot to a Staffordshire school where it was reported that a girl had shown the symptoms of swine flu. Live we went to the scene of this tense, gripping situation where the reporter rather sheepishly admitted that it had just been announced that the kid had a cold!