Googling for Caroline Flint’s bits

Time for an update on the continuing saga of Caroline Flint’s body parts.

Regular readers will recall that I have a double interest in Caroline Flint (see the posts here). One was deliberate – as a libertarian smoker, I have a deep hatred of politicians and others who think they know better than I do what is right for me. She also gave me a model piece for testing theories about Google searching.

A useful role at last for Caroline Flint

The Times carries a story about pubs hiring strippers to try and woo back the trade lost as a result of the smoking ban. It wonders of this is an example of the Law of Unintended Consequences. I wonder if stripping in pubs might provide a useful occupation for Caroline Flint before she loses her looks entirely.

The spirit of the smoking ban

I don’t take the The Sun, so I missed its story of 14 July about the smoking snoopers of Maidenhead. I came across it in an American web site which charts world-wide excesses of power.

The story Mad council stokes fag-ban fire concerned a visit by smoking snoopers (that is “smoking ban enforcement officers”) to the Greyhound pub in Maidenhead. They ordered the manager to close the windows for the summer because smoke might drift in from those exiled outside by the smoking ban. I emphasise the “might” – there was no-one smoking outside at the time, still less any evidence that smoke was actually drifting in.

Brown meets the little people

At a party on Saturday, someone was talking about Leona Helmsley, the multi-millionaire American hotelier who went to prison for tax fraud in 1989. She achieved notoriety for her view that “only the little people pay taxes”, an aggravating factor in the lengthy sentences which were handed down.

Gordon Brown is pretty contemptuous about “little people” as well, as we know from his advisers’ views on grannies losing their blouses and the “losers” hit by his pension raid – see Brown tramples on losers and grannies. As Chancellor he could ignore them, skulking in the Treasury whilst Blair faced the cameras.

Gordon Brown Weather

It has rained almost continuously since Tony Blair announced the date for his departure and Gordon Brown’s succession was ensured. An augury, I think, for what we can expect now that this unpleasant man is Prime Minister.

In the days of the late Queen Victoria, fine weather was called “Queen’s Weather” because (according to the 1894 edition of Brewer’s Phrase and Fable) the sun usually shone when Her Majesty appeared in public. It seems wholly apt that the misanthrope Brown should bring down storms, floods and just perpetual greyness on us.

Wrong again about Hazel Blears

I said a few days ago (Not Blears, surely?)that I might have been wrong about Hazel Blears. I had thought she was the worst possible person of the six candidates to be Deputy Leader of the Labour Party but that, having watched them all jump through David Dimbleby’s hoops, I decided that merely being intensely irritating made her the best of a lack-lustre bunch.

Losing liberties to dim minions

I am not sure if Tony Blair was naive or self-serving in saying “I told you so” in this week’s Sunday Times. It seems unbelievable that he still cannot see why Parliament, reflecting a widespread view, denied him the powers which he and the then Home Secretary Charles Clarke sought to detain foreign nationals suspected of plotting terrorism.

Smoking Snoopers

Three apparently unconnected stories caught my eye in a single week recently.

• The Government has handed £29.5 million to local authorities to hire and train staff to catch people who smoke in pubs and other public places once the smoking ban comes into force.
• Police will no longer attend at the scene of a burglary unless the burglar is still on the premises
• Boys in South London are shooting each other in large numbers, apparently to enforce the “respect” they feel they deserve but do not get.

We see here a pretty clear statement of the Blair Government’s priorities, and a snapshot of the society it has created. We do not, apparently, have the money for proper policing, but we can fund an army of council snoopers to pry on smokers. Perhaps worse, there is no shortage of volunteers for the job. What does it say about our society that there are people keen to take the job of prying on people like this?

The Smoking Ban and Goodthinking

The smoking ban, like that on hunting, shows the censorious majority imposing its views on those whose lifestyles do not fit its morality. A clear head is needed to analyse what is important here, and what is at stake – which is very much more than the right to smoke or its corollary, the right to avoid smoke.