Private virtues, public vices

I feel sorry for David Blunkett because of the tragedy in his personal life. But I’m delighted he’s no longer in government because he was the most authoritarian Home Secretary in living memory. Writing in the Guardian, Roy Hattersley got it about right:

“Mr Blunkett despised the ‘liberal intelligentsia’. That is a reasonable enough position if it amounts to contempt for people who support social democracy as long as they are not required to pay for it in their taxes. But Mr Blunkett went further. When I joined the Labour party, I believed that it represented the best instincts of the working class. Too often Mr Blunkett reflected and articulated its worst emotions.

That made him careless about liberty and cavalier about the rule of law, suspicious of foreigners and willing to use the authority of the state to create the sort of society – rigid and regimented – he wanted to see. His resignation will reduce Labour’s appeal to the men and women who, like him, rejoiced at the news that Harold Shipman had committed suicide. Let us hope that his successor attracts a different constituency.

David Blunkett was – and gloried in being – a hard man. That is what his personal circumstances made him. But today he deserves, whether or not he welcomes it, our sympathy. His resignation is a personal, if not a political, tragedy.”

“The stuff of nightmares…”

In one of those wonderful coincidences, the day after the Home Secretary fell on his sword, Britain’s Law Lords — the UK’s supreme court — delivered a stinging rejection of his anti-terrorism legislation, specifically section 21 of the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act of 2001 used to justify detention without trial of 16 alleged terrorists. It’s an unprecedentedly tough judgment, with some amazing passages. Here, for example, is Lord Hoffman:

“This is a nation which has been tested in adversity, which has survived physical destruction and catastrophic loss of life. I do not underestimate the ability of fanatical groups of terrorists to kill and destroy, but they do not threaten the life of the nation. Whether we would survive Hitler hung in the balance, but there is no doubt that we shall survive Al-Qaeda. The Spanish people have not said that what happened in Madrid, hideous crime as it was, threatened the life of their nation. Their legendary pride would not allow it. Terrorist violence, serious as it is, does not threaten our institutions of government or our existence as a civil community… The real threat to the life of the nation, in the sense of a people living in accordance with its traditional laws and political values, comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these. That is the true measure of what terrorism may achieve. It is for Parliament to decide whether to give the terrorists such a victory.”

And here’s Lord Scott:

“Indefinite imprisonment in consequence of a denunciation on grounds that are not disclosed and made by a person whose identity cannot be disclosed is the stuff of nightmares, associated whether accurately or inaccurately with France before and during the Revolution, with Soviet Russia in the Stalinist era and now associated, as a result of section 23 of the 2001 Act, with the United Kingdom.”

The Lords’ judgment is that the 2001 Act conflicts with the 1998 Human Rights Act. (In the UK, even the highest court in the land cannot strike out legislation as unconstitutional.) Which means that the new Home Secretary has to decide what to do next.

What’s on your iBod, er, iPod?

The new iPod enables one to store photos as well as music files — and to display them on TV using the special cable supplied with the device. This has given Playboy.com an idea. Yes, you guessed it…

“No favours but slightly quicker”

Nanny trouble strikes again: David Blunkett has resigned as home secretary after an e-mail emerged showing a visa application for his ex-lover’s nanny had been fast-tracked. The e-mail had said “no favours but slightly quicker”. Blunkett said he had not been aware of its contents and insisted he had done nothing wrong.

So what happened then? Did a civil servant send the email on her/his own authority? If so, shouldn’t s/he be sacked?

In the meantime, I can see the phrase “no favours but slightly quicker” entering the British comic lexicon — like “Up to a point, Lord Copper” (denoting total disagreement) from Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Scoop. Or Mandy Rice-Davies’s “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?” (Uttered while giving evidence at the trial of Stephen Ward when the prosecuting counsel pointed out that Viscount Astor had denied having met her.)

Kook of the Year!

There’s a wonderful story on Slashdot about a crackpot who wrote a Wikipedia page about himself, only to have it, er, rendered more objective by other contributors. This then drove him wild, with predictable results. The current version of the page seems admirable to me, but it’s had to be locked to prevent further vandalism. Opponents of Wikipedia will doubtless try to use this story as evidence that an open project like this cannot work. To me, it proves the opposite.

Caligula’s horse — contd.

“The story of Mr. Kerik’s nomination is one of how a normally careful White House faltered because of Mr. Bush’s personal enthusiasm for Mr. Kerik, a desire by the administration to quickly fill a critical national security job and an apparent lack of candor from Mr. Kerik himself.” [ New York Times .]

I like that bit about “a normally careful White House”. That would have been in, let me see…, Harry Truman’s time?

Google to digitize millions of books

Many years ago, Howard Rheingold asked an interesting question. He was trying to get people to think about the possibilities of a world in which everything that was published was accessible on the Web. “Where is the Library of Congress”, he mused, “when it’s on your laptop?” In the old days, people had to come to the information. But one day it would be the other way round. Now it seems that day may be closer than we thought — thanks to Google.

Today’s Mercury News reports:

“Google is launching an ambitious effort to make digital copies of some of the world’s largest university library collections and will incorporate the texts into its vast Web index, apparently the largest project of its kind ever attempted.

As envisioned, almost anyone with a computer could instantly tap into enormous academic libraries — some with texts dating back centuries.

Stanford, Harvard and Oxford universities, as well as the University of Michigan and the New York Public Library, are participating in the program, which could span years and involve scanning and indexing well more than 10 million books and periodicals.”

One of the side effects of this project — as my friend Gerard points out — will be to reinforce the dominance of English as a global language. If I were the French government, I’d be negotiating with Google to digitise the contents of the Bibliotheque Nationale.

Head gear

Photographed at a school bazaar last week. The kids had been dressing up in Tudor costume.

Kerik redux

More on Bernard in today’s NYT. “In June 2000, two months before Bernard B. Kerik was appointed police commissioner, New York City’s top investigative agency learned that he had a social relationship with the owner of a New Jersey construction company suspected of having business ties to organized crime figures, city documents show. The city’s Department of Investigation took two days of testimony from Frank DiTommaso, the owner of the company, Interstate Industrial Corporation. It also formally interviewed Mr. Kerik himself.”

It goies without saying, of course, that “there is no indication that Mr. Kerik did anything illegal or improper”. Naturally. If there had been, surely St Rudolf [Guiliani] would never have appointed him New York’s Top Cop.

End of an era

My Observer column reflecting on IBM’s decision to sell its PC business to a Chinese company.