Jacqui Smith - a hopeless woman!

She takes the biscuit, she really does. She rabbits on about not interfering. No apology for Mr Green. She just allows her permanent secretary to do his stuff so long as he doesn't tell her anything. That way she can say she isn't "controlling things in a Stalinist way".

The woman is a shambles and must go for all our democratic sakes.

BBC Andrew Marr Show

Blueberries 'reverse memory loss'

Good news for all democrats. Get your forgetful politicians eating blueberries. Gordon Brown should have them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner (both courses!).

It should be mandatory for all Senate and House Hearings for the witnesses to have blueberry muffins, with extra blueberries, of course.

Wow! We live in a world where the leaders have severe memory loss. This is brilliant. No more excuses. Give Jacqui Smith some. She needs double rations.

No credit crunch for the blueberry growers, then!

Ron Paul Warns Of Secret Plans To Create International Central Bank

You have to hand it to Ron Paul. He knows what they are up to. He is on Bernanke's case. "At the same time the G20 was meeting, we also had the central banks meeting in Europe. Bernanke was over there, and they are doing the same type of planning, so real planning will not be out in the open, until they want us to know about it."

There's more good stuff here. It's really going to be wake-up time for us. We must, in the US, Britain and in all democratic countries, elect politicians who will not connive to control. Otherwise it's more of the same!

Kilroy-Silk step down!

Here's a bit of online democracy! It's called Kilroy-Silk Step Down! It's a petition to get the MEP, former Labour MP, former daytime chatshow host, former UKIP leadership challenger, former Veritas Party founder and leader, recent celebrity in an Australian jungle, and erstwhile speaker in the European Parliament to step down.

I've added my name.

Police State Britain!

Undoubtedly, all New Labour ministers are either dissemblers of the truth or inept managers of prevailing issues. Some are both. It doesn't surprise anyone outside this rather self-serving band of irritatingly provocative busybodies, that an MP got arrested. Not only is it an affront to democracy, it is an affront to all of us as constituents.

Ron Paul got my support because he had the guts to stand up and expose the crass nonsense being peddled by Bush and his cronies. David Davies was right to stand up to New Labour's posturing on 42 days detention. Wherever and whenever governments seek to trample on the democratic rights of the people, we should resist them.

So it is no surprise to me that the ineffectual Jacqui Smith knew nothing about Damian Green's arrest. Of course, her mandarin at the Home Office was off doing his own thing. Sir David Normington should answer now to the people. Is he a cunning political operator? Is he out to subvert Parliament? Is he just paving the way to allow a smooth run for the gravy train? His actions, by giving the police time to raid the inner sanctums of Parliament during a recess, need to be answered. I hope there is a public enquiry, so that these democracy ursurpers can be questioned at length, possibly for more than nine hours apiece.

It is outrageous that this raid happened! Every opposition in a democratic society must hold the government of the day to account. The New Labour Stasi Machine thinks differently. They have no love of parliamentary democracy. They are mainly apparatchiks. So we, the people, suffer in the long run.

We are allowed our freedom to speak so long as it does not interfere with their running of democracy as they see it. Sounds a bit like what Mugabe told Morgan Tsvangerai. "You can sound off if you like, but you don't get any democratic control!".

Damian Green was fingerprinted, had his DNA taken, and thrown into jail. The police took a certain delight in the raid. Am I imagining it or are some officers pleased by being New Labour's poodle power? One officer told those present, as he plodded around Mr. Green's office, "You are at the site of a crime scene".

Sorry, chum, but the real crime scene here is the sight of our disreputable Prime Minister gulping in air as he feigns memory loss!

Ron Paul on the bailout - a bit more

Ron Paul is maintaining the good work in keeping tabs on various characters, Ben Bernanke being one of them. Here's Ron Paul's latest message (which I've just seen!).



I like this piece - "An essential element of a healthy free market, is that both success and failure must be permitted to happen when they are earned. But instead with a bailout, the rewards are reversed – the proceeds from successful entities are given to failing ones. How this is supposed to be good for our economy is beyond me." It's beyond a great many of us, but these fiscal phonies are really in some kind of dream world.

Here is Ron Paul painting a mental picture for Ben Bernanke. I'm surprised the Federal Reserve Chairman sleeps at night seeing as he's counting all those noughts on the end of the dollar sign!

BBC wins - The Times loses - It's Mumbai!

The BBC, with its slavish attachment to calling Bombay Mumbai, has caused The Times to bow out gracefully and, from 1st December, refer to the city “formerly known as Bombay” as Mumbai.

Richard Dixon, chief revise editor of The Times, says, "Key to policy at The Times on the usage of place names is that they are adjudged to be recognisable to a majority of our readers. After the events that started on Wednesday the name Mumbai has been used extensively in other media to which our core British readership is exposed. It would be foolish to ignore that context. We also have a global online audience to consider." I would think that when all this has died down, many in the UK will still think of Bombay as Bombay.

I wonder if anybody who said Bombay on a BBC broadcast would be corrected or whether it would be allowed to pass. Maybe there's a naughty room for those who prefer to say Bombay. It is a sad reflection that such an insiduous adherence to this perceived political correctness has caused The Times to consider this move. I'm not convinced that a "majority of our readers" at The Times are helped by the change.

If the BBC is of the opinion that this name-changing is important, let them revise every Italian city for starters. That would be a sign of consistency. They won't, though.

I realise that this is of minute importance compared with the other problems in the world, not least the outrage in Bombay itself. However, I am miffed by the ever-so-slightly pompous way this has been brought about in this country.

I think The Times should have stood firm, but there you go!

PS - Another interesting take on this in The Guardian. And this gem from a BBC blog - "As a regular traveller to Bombay, it has been impressed on me many times by Bombayites, that Mumbai is a politically invented name and as such is deemed by a large majority of Indians to have racist conotations. General chit-chat in the bars of Bandra or Worli will always refer to the Anglicised Bombay when English is the language being used." So much for the BBC's local knowledge!!

What's with this Mumbai ya stuff?

Here's a man after my own heart. He quotes Winston Churchill as saying "Everybody has a right to pronounce foreign names as he chooses".

So how come the BBC is so slavish to all this Mumbai talk? Would Indians be offended if we said Bombay? I suppose some would, but as Paul Battley says, "I don’t call Paris ‘Paree’ unless I’m speaking French."

I see The Times Online refers to Bombay still. Funny old world!

Tory MP arrested and Government is "unaware"!

It beggars belief that a senior Tory MP can be taken from his home by police, questioned and arrested, and that not one single government minister got an inkling of it. I simply do not believe Gordon Brown. He has cloth ears when he wants them. The Queen is still waiting for an answer to her question "Why did nobody see it coming?", referring to the credit crunch!

Brown's rather odious little bag carrier, Phil Woolas, said he was "taken aback" by the arrest. He's the immigration minister who knew that a Home Office official had been suspended from duty ten days ago over a number of leaks and the matter had been referred to police. This person was arrested but not charged. So is Woolas saying he was never told by police that they were thinking of interviewing Damian Green, the Tory immigration spokesman? Surely not?

And are we to believe that the senior police officers monitoring the case just buttoned their lips? Woolas says "As far as I am aware no ministers had any knowledge of this". I like his use of as far as, because this allows him to deny now facts he may know so at a later date he can unravel his dissembling. I do not trust the man. Neither does the whole Conservative Front Bench it seems. What on earth did the police have to ask Mr. Green for nine hours? Was he just put in a cell to make him sweat? Surely a simple set of questions would suffice?

Stalinist behaviour is how it has been described. New Labour is a troublesome outfit. All pompous pretention on matters of unimportance and severe dithering over serious things that should be done. Mandy Rice-Davies had one of the best lines in the 20th century, during the Stephen Ward trial arising from the Profumo affair. When the prosecuting counsel pointed out that Lord Astor denied an affair or having even met her, she replied, "Well, he would, wouldn't he?".

Gordon Brown denies knowing about Mr. Green's arrest and nine hours in detention. Well, he would, wouldn't he?

Birmingham and the bmibaby blues

Birmingham Airport has made much of vast numbers of passengers wanting to go on flights all around the world. That is the reason for their desire to expand. Sometimetimes I think the management can only see as far as the end of the not yet extended runway. Yes, we in the area have a lot to thank them for, but are we being taken for a ride?

bmibaby is not so sure that passenger numbers stack up. They say that on five routes they have seen a weakening of consumer demand. So you can't blame them for not wanting to fly empty planes. The airline is not a charity. And think of the unnecessary fuel wastage and pollution if they did.

However, the airport is still hoping to have planes on these routes. It's a kind of "management with rosy specs on" which has got us where we are. Birmingham Airport has responded by suggesting that they are trying to reinstate the routes, although they recognise the economic downturn has meant challenging times are ahead.

The truth is that these 30 million passengers are never going to materialise because people will not take the trips required to sustain the numbers, fuel costs will always be a concern, and the green issues will not go away.

We need to get away from pie in the sky economics and management dreams and provide the flying public with truthful information about what will be best for all of us.

A tale of two cities - Bombay and Bangkok

I was struck by the happenings in two cities of Asia and how different they the appear. The first was the taking of the airport in Bangkok by demonstrators fed up with the shenanigans of the Thai government. These people wore yellow headbands and clothing to show that they were peaceful people. They were just stating that they wanted real democracy in their country. Apparently all flight passengers were treated well and got on with their "captors" who gave them food and sustinence. As one Brit said "It's the airlines who are telling us nothing!".

Contrast this with Bombay, now renamed Mumbai and described by the BBC as "The Indian city of Mumbai" as if we don't know where it is! "Mumbai? It's Bombay, mate! Ah!" is a typical snippet of conversation you might hear down the pub. I'm still waiting for the BBC to speak of The Italian city of Firenze, but I'm not hopeful. Anyway back to Bombay. Here we have automoton terrorists trying to destabilise a democracy by attempting to round up American and British citizens whilst scaring the living daylights out the city as a whole.

Democracy is worth fighting for. Not with weapons or warfare but with words and wisdom. The Bangkok demonstrators have left their mark by being firm but fair with their cause. Al Queda is neither firm or fair. They have a self-righteous narrow view of life based on hatred and the desire to hurt in order to control. In this they should be resisted absolutely.

The Indian government is handling the situation well it seems. However the US and British governments should not be tempted to intervene. The Indian authorities are quite capable of flushing out these terrorists and bringing matters to a satisfactory conclusion.


PS. This film is nicely titled - Bombay to Bangkok! One up to the Bollywood producers.

Have the police gone mad?

I'm beginning to wonder if the chief constables of this country want to get along with us or whether they think they are there to change our minds. It appears they have become very political and rather prone to doing what they think is right and proper.

So it is that if you come across two gay men having a sexual encounter on a footpath you are advised to take an alternative path! The ludicrous deputy chief constable of Lancashire, Mike Cunningham, has called for police to turn a blind eye to outdoor sexual activity. So to hell with the fact that it breaks the law. He is judge and jury now. He knows his mind and his mind will be our mind. I wonder if George Orwell is getting this beamed up to him?

It is outrageous! Under the Sexual Offences Act anyone who takes part in 'dogging', where couples meet for sex in car parks, and cottaging, where men meet for sex in public lavatories, face arrest for outraging public decency, voyeurism and exposure. But Mr. Cunningham isn't outraged. So why should we be? The Daily Mail has a full report, as they say.

However, when the police get uppity about other peoples' political activity they pounce. As I mentioned before, they seem to think that causing the BNP grief by spending thousands of pounds chasing them round the streets, knocking them up at 6 am and generally letting them know that they are "after them" is what they are expected to do. Actually, it does the political system no favours. Mike Hume in The Times has a good article on this. "Free speech means freedom for fools, too".

He writes that, in reference to the Liverpool arrests, "It doesn't take a conspiracy theorist to see a connection between the appearance of a Merseyside officer on the leaked list of BNP members, and Saturday's arrests. Being able to claim that its members are victims of political persecution is the best publicity for a small outfit that gains support from disaffection with the political class. The best weapons against the BNP are democratic debate and free speech, not censorship and blacklists."

When will these chief constables learn?

Bailing out the British way of life?

It seems Alistair Darling is keen to bail out bankers and corporate failures at the expense of hard working business people and the struggling entrepreneur. Even today he blinks like an owl at the thought he was in any way part of the sleazy money washing culture.

So whilst the banks get to board the gravy train leaving Number 11 Downing Street (or should that be the gravy bus?), others can go hang. These include sub-postmasters/mistresses (not PC I know!), village pubs, village schools, rural bus services....the list goes on.

In twenty years time our villages will just be commuting communes with no sense of neighbourhood. The BBC has a depressing report on the dwindling number of village pubs. Soon England will be a place where nobody talks to anybody other than to get something out of them. Paul Shenton, who used to run the Lord Nelson in Holton, Suffolk, puts it down to a cultural and economic shift. He says that villagers are now happy to stay at home watching DVDs and enjoying cheap drink from the supermarket. How sad!

Lord Nelson would have been proud to see so many pubs named after him. But did he fight the Battle of Trafalgar so that we could become a nation of grasping bonus chasers and cheap booze lounge lizards?

Surely not?

Sorry Bishop, no actresses!

Yes, it seems official. There are no more actresses. At least, that's what BBC News would have us believe. Every thespian is now an "ACTOR" regardless of "gender". Of course, it is this political correctness thing. An actress is probably deemed to imply an airhead. Can't allow that.

It is all getting horribly muddled. Everyone is having to appear on a scale of sexuality from the campest of the camp to the tightest-lipped straight guy. We all have a sexuality from the Twilight Zone as far as the authorities are concerned.

So, with certain elements of the Church of England clamouring for female prelates, the old joke about the actress and the bishop is moribund. It will in future entail sexually dubious bishops with sexually dubious thespians.

Of course it is all nonsense. As Lord Hailsham famously remarked, when telling Norman Fowler about grammar (re AIDS leaflets), "You can't "have sex" - sex is what you are, either male or female". In today's world, there are plenty who wish to deny this fact. For their own reasons everyone has to have an occupation of sexless recognition and we are actually supposed to have no definable sex. Male and female is too easy. Gender (a word hijacked from the grammatical sense) is now supposes to give the impression that there are several genders available.

Whilst there may be quite a few lifestyles practised, only male and female humans exist. Anything else is a figment of the imaginations of those that peddle these ideas.

Police versus BNP

It seems there is now a concerted attack on BNP activists by certain police forces. If there is illegal activity it should be stamped on and dealt with accordingly. I just think that the police are being used to make the BNP go away. If this is so, they are extremely mistaken. All it does is embolden them and make it all the more likely that additional BNP councillors and possibly MEPs wiull be elected.

If police chiefs think dawn raids on political activists is what their job is all about, then we live in sorry times. This sort of activity could end up with them answering to elected police authorities consisting largely of BNP members. A nightmare too far for them?

BNP unmasked?

In all this hullabaloo about the BNP membership list, I see that there are ironies all round. First is that the BNP are going after the Human Rights Act to safeguard privacy. Then there are the democrats behaving undemocratically. And we have people talking about the BNP as if the oxygen was running out of their lungs but they say that others should desist because it "gives them the oxygen of publicity".

The truth is both sides seem to need each other. If the moronic tendency in New Labour stopped its prissy approach to the BNP, by debating with them rather than resorting to backroom arm-twisting blackmail, we might not see so much of this.

Alan Duncan, the Tory frontbencher, is right. He'd debate with Griffin, and win hands down. If you can't win with words, then it's a poor sort of politics we have.

I saw on the BNP website that Nick Griffin has a stop press letter. Nothing unusual in that. But the advert that clicked up underneath read - "Expose Liars and Cheats - Expose your ex, your boss, a celeb or even a politician". Griffin needs to be more careful!

Strictly Andy Mandy

Peter Mandelson has let it be known that he is slightly envious of John Sargent's dancing technique. He's also got an eye on the ratings. So Peter wants to be considered as a Strictly Come Dancing competitor. I think this is an excellent idea. Whilst I deplore his political habits, I must confess that there is a bit to be admired about Mandelson. Now I'm not going overboard, just recognising that he does have an element of star quality about him.

Peter is no shrinking violet. More a rose with thorns in the wrong places. However, I strongly suggest that the BBC gives serious thought to this. Mandelson on the floor will be a ratings success for the BBC. Detractors and fans will watch in equal measure. Can you imagine the brilliance of it all?

Bruce: "Craig, your comments, please."
Craig: "Well, you do surprise me! Not exactly a star performance, but you managed to come back from your early mistake. I'd say you've gone from Prince of Darkness to Queen of the Dancefloor!"
Bruce: "Nicely put, Craig, I'm sure. Bruno?"
Bruno: "He took the words out of my mouth! What more can I say? A tour de force, darling!"

It will be fantastic. If the BBC is worried about political balance, then Vince Cable is desperate for a go too. That leaves the matter of who the Tory Twinkletoes will be.

Any suggestions?

Meddling or motivating?

Prince Charles had a good line. He prefers to say he motivates rather than meddles. The same can't be said of the Prime Minister. In fact, the reverse could be true.

He meddled in the economy. Sir John Major is right to be peeved about that. Now he is meddling as PM. He has some odd thinking at the moment. I assume his "spokesmen" know what's what.

In this tragic Baby P case, Gordon Brown and his Children's minister, the rabbit-in-the-headlights-of-a-car impressionist, otherwise known as Ed Balls, are engaged in all kinds of convoluting sentences to describe what they are doing or not doing. Enquiries are going on they say.

Now the Tories unearth a whistleblower who tried to warn the government six months before Baby P's death in August 2007. A Downing street spokesman said the correct procedures had been followed. Is this about the whistleblower or the whole of Haringey Social Services.

A baby being constantly battered and bruised is not exactly something that anyone would or should ignore. If a minister was told of this, it beggars belief that nobody thought fit to raise a finger to use the phone or right a letter!

Certainly no motivation. Meddling? Doesn't seem they did anything, so if "the correct procedures had been followed" what does it say of the procedures? Gordon Brown needs to "meddle" in things that are going wrong and keep out of things that are going right.

Brown and Cameron in ding-dong over baby death

At PMQs today, David Cameron asked a simple question about the death of Baby P in the Borough of Haringey. Gordon Brown, hoping that the questions would be about the economy, began to sound edgy and defensive. He accused David Cameron of playing party politics. Not a good thing.

John Cruddas has just said on Andrew Neil's Daily Politics show that the Labour backbenchers did not do themselves proud. No, they didn't. The Speaker was dismayed at their attitude.

Gordon Brown needs to get a grip over what really is important. Instead of hiding behind a gobbledegook brief, he should have been far more empathetic, far more considerate of public feeling. It seems his straightened Presbyterian thinking disallows him from communicating human passion.

David Cameron was right to demand an apology for being accused of making party political capital out of this. Brown didn't apologise. He will probably rue the day, because the tabloid press will be all over him tomorrow like a dose of the worst disease.

Let's hope he will learn from this sorry episode.

Self-appointed moraliser as Daily Mail chief

Paul Dacre is the editor-in-chief of the Daily Mail. He's currently up in arms over the Max Mosley case. Mr. Dacre apparently thinks he should be the moraliser to the nation. "Now, some revile a moralising media. Others, such as myself, believe it is the duty of the media to take an ethical stand". Wow - high and mighty Dacre. The Moralising Laureate, no doubt! The trouble with his argument is that he wants impunity. Impunity to write half-truths and dissembled claptrap when it suits him.

Now I've got no time for Max Mosley's ideas of sexual happiness. Not really for me. But Mr. Mosley deserves to be protected from scurrillous attacks. Also, whilst we have the Human Rights legislation, he also needs to be protected from holier-than-thou lawbreakers like Mr. Dacre. Because Paul Dacre's Daily Mail has broken the law according to the judge in this case.

Mr. Dacre asserts that the judge, Mr. Justice Eady, is "unelected". Well so is Mr. Dacre, who effectively is positioning himself as moraliser-in-chief. Not an elected office, I believe! Mr. Dacre told an audience at the Society of Editors' annual conference in Bristol that most people would consider Mr. Mosley's activities to be perverted and depraved. So they may. A lot think homosexuality to be the same. A goodly number are offended by oral sex. As are those who condemn sexual activity outside marriage. Some think bare-breasted women in tabloid papers to be perverted and deparved. Almost all think paedophilia to be so, except the paedophiles themselves. However, none of this justifies reporters from the News of the World or any other paper making stuff up.

It suited the News of the World to spice up the story by adding the Nazi overtones. Recently John Prescott was, rightly in my opinion, berating the press for making up stuff about his meeting in London with model Jodie Marsh. "Does Pauline know?" said some of the tabloids. As Prescott said, "yes she did!" because it was all part of his two-part series on class in Britain. But the impression was made totally from the headlines that Prescott was a philanderer again. Found out once, tarred with the same brush every time forever after, whatever the facts.

A free press is one thing - to be cherished and desired. A lying, cheating and distorting press, only out to sell newspapers is quite another.

Jacqui the Joke!

What is it with our Home Secretary? She is fixated by things she can't changed and in a dither about the things she can and should change. Everyone knows Labour are hopeless managers. Any form of identity information in their hands - well, I'd be very sure to know all I could about their motives.

Ms Smith is hung up over ID cards. 2012 is when she will have the cards available. She now has the brass neck to say, ""I regularly have people coming up to me and saying they don't want to wait that long." Who are these people? Has anyone been in her company when Joe Bloggs has popped up to advised her of his ID cravings?

She's in a parrallel universe! Anyway, by 2012 the people of Redditch will hopefully have given her the political needle, and we will all be saved from her fantasies.

Glenrothes gift for Brown!

Who'd have thought it? Well, not the pundits, the SNP and the Blairites. They all thought Glenrothes was a gonner for the Labour Party. They were wrong, as were most of us, it seems.

Credit where credit is due. A win in elections is a win. By one or or million, it doesn't matter. And to be honest this win was quite considerable. OK there was a swing away from Labour to the SNP, but enough people decided to back Labour.

Now I'll revert to type! I don't think they voted FOR Labour so much as they were voting AGAINST Salmond and his independence fantasies. One word came up - ICELAND!!! - and Salmond was stuck like a limpit on a wall, fearful to come out and say what was what. Can you imagine the idea of Icelandic savers losing their money in Scottish banks? No, and so that was uppermost in many Glenrothes voters' minds.

The truth is that Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling have been absolutely appalling in this crisis. They blame everyone but themselves, they claim to be in charge but each day sees more woes, yet they got off the hook in Glenrothes. If it had been a Labour seat in England it would have been a whole lot different. There's no Salmond strutting about, there's no bogeyman to blame or to be wary of. I'm all for fair devolution (having been a staunch Unionist) but independence means separation however much it may be dressed up as a different form of a cosy relationship.

Brown will be dining out on this until the New Year. I'm beginning to think he's a better dissembler and obfuscator than Blair. At least with Blair we knew he was telling porkies. Brown makes it all sound like he's a Stanley Baxter incarnation of a Presbyterian minister trying to calm a family dispute. Far more dangerous to my mind.

Come the New Year we can console ourselves with the thought that "by the end of next year he will be gone!". We too need a change.

Daughters of the Revolution?

As most people are still talking about Barack Obama's win and what it means to them, I was struck by something George Bush said yesterday. He came out of the White House to congratulate the winner and to commiserate with the loser. The also-rans were not mentioned! Bush praised Obama and then went on to say "....and their beautiful girls step through the doors of the White House....". Now that got me thinking. Obama has daughters. So for the next eight years (I assume) the White House will have only female support from the Presidential family.

It remains to be seen if the two girls will be of prominence, but given the past, I think they will, at least by 2016, have a few things to say. Guess who the last son in the White House was? It was George himself! He did have Jeb & co in there too, but Dubya was the last.

Does this tell us something. That a man with daughters only is more likely to succeed in becoming president? George Bush has two daughters, before him Bill Clinton was there with Chelsea. Richard Nixon only had daughters, so did Lyndon Johnson. Jimmy Carter had sons, but it was Amy everyone talked about.

In the years since World War II, there have been twelve presidents, from Truman to Obama. Six of them have or had only daughters. If it had not been for Gerald Ford becoming president due to the circumstances of previous resignations, then the boys would have been well outnumbered.

And it is not only the daughters. The wives, mothers, and dare I say it, other women have all been far more newsworthy than the menfolk. Only Billy Carter managed top billing for a few weeks. So as Barack Obama heads for the White House will he really be in charge, or will Michelle and the beautiful girls be running the show?

Obama wins big!

I awoke this morning to hear an excited Jim Naughtie talking about Obama's win. My hopes have turn out right. Just as they have for millions of Americans and millions more around the world. Whatever else the last couple of years have taught us, the most important lesson is that we are one world. A few irresponsible loan sharks can bring down the entire economic system! Wow, what a challenging life it all is.

Barack Obama is the catalayst for change. He's the match that will light a new torch. However, we must not expect him to do it alone. The rest of us have to help in that change.

I was wondering this morning what the Founding Fathers would have thought of it all. In fact, those that settled in America 400 years ago would not have envisioned anything like it. Not even FORTY years ago, to think about it. I can remember George Wallace remonstrating with hecklers - "You punks get out of the auditorium!", he rather delicately declared. And another famous line - "Anyone who lays down in front of ma car gets run right over!" (His grammar by the way!). Those days have really gone.

The truth is that Obama represents not just black people, whatever that means. He is mixed race. His mother was white, his father a Kenyan on a student exchange. Obama is truly African-American. He has family in Kenya. But he is more than being a stereotype. He is the representative of immigrants, of the middle classes, of the socially mobile, of the aspirant, of the educated, of the poor, of whoever. Because of that the vast coalition who voted for him and the vast coalition around the world who support him and wish him well, anyone can claim his representation as being for them.

I would hope we can stop referring to the "black president" (however important his election is) and just support President-elect Barack Obama as a human being with a vision for change.

McCain pollster reckons it's not over!

I've just heard on Newsnight a Republican pollster saying to Jeremy Paxman that if McCain lost the popular vote (by two percentage points he reckons) but takes the Electoral College, then McCain would be happy to be president. Paxman thought this a bit rich, but the pollster said "it's how the game is played".

Now, as I contemplate bed, does it all come down to being a game? The worst case scenario for American politics is precisely this conundrum. A president esconced in the White House with the help of the Electoral College in defiance of the popular mandate. The crafty Founding Fathers, themselves not given much to democracy, were keen to promote freedom at the expense of democracy. Ever since, it seems to me that American history is about Democracy trying to find equality with Freedom. I find it very peculiar that in the modern United States there have to be Zimbabwean type lines in order to cast a ballot. Surely the powers-that-be can rustle up a few more polling places? Freedom to vote but a struggle for democracy!

My hope that Obama wins is that for Americans they will get a new broom to sweep aside the corporate abuses, the manifestation of government corruption, and the denial of easy ballot access. Freedom for the average person to count in the process.

I hope it is a clean win, but apparently there are bevvies of lawyers waiting to pounce should a hanging chad be found. An Obama win should be some sort of guarantee that this will be cleaned up. After all, as the BBC is saying, we (meaning the British) don't have a vote, but it affects us anyway. And France and Germany and Canada and Mexico and..........................

Jonathan Ross escapes prosecution?

I was not surprised by the furore over Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand. Both have a lavatorial sense of humour. In Brand's case, it is mixed with whatever the reverse of sexual innuendo is. That is not much of the innuendo more the sexual overtones.

I admit I watch Ross on his TV show. Not so much for him, but to see how he fares with the guests. Some he does better with. He has a good way with American actresses, who have probably been yearning to get out of the Hollywood and TV world of prissy pretention. With Ross they can get an hour's worth of therapy that they are being paid for rather than paying good money to some fake shrink in Los Angeles. Ross is entertaining and you know what you get. I know I can always switch off.

However, making rude suggestions and leaving them on an answering machine is somewhat different. I won't repeat all that has been said whilst I have been half-terming. But I did read an interesting point in the Guardian letters. Peter J Smith says that Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 would render a person liable to imprisonment of up to six months or a fine of up to level 5 on the standard scale, or to both for sending lewd messages to an answering machine or to someone in person. However, if someone sent offensive messages in the course of providing a programme service within the meaning of the Broadcasting Act 1990 then they would not. Mr Smith asks a very pertinent question - "If the radio programme had not been broadcast, would the terms of section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 apply to the offensive messages?"

As the offending stunt was pre-recorded did some legal officer at the BBC fear that Ross and Brand could be prosecuted if the programme was no aired. If so, it is hard to see why they are in the frame when it is some faceless BBC bureacrat who may be hiding a guilty secret. After all, if it was not aired, would the possibility of two stars being prosecuted cause more anguish for the BBC? Who knows!

When the root-and-branch inquiry is conducted perhaps Mr.Smith's question could be the first to be put?