The Lindsey strike has brought a colonic flush of sentiment about how entitled the British are to their rage, says David Aaronovitch. Some of the country's leading commentators have enjoyed one of their occasional joyous moments of getting down and dirty with the workers. There has been nonsense about the slow patience of the English ("but when roused to ire... blah, blah"), about how we should be more like the French, whose utterly pointless national strike paralysed that country on Thursday, about how the ordinary man should blame the bankers, the EU, the Government, the quangocrats or anyone else. David Aaronovitch The Times
Full article: Fabricated fear and loathing in Lincolnshire

Labour's Phil Woolas: "It's assumed that Labour is soft on immigration. In actual fact the largest influxes of migrants into this country came during Conservative periods of government - if you look at the 1950s and early 1960s and indeed the situation with Eastern Africa." "The situation with Eastern Africa"? He means the time when the Kenyan and Ugandan Asians were expelled, and arrived in a Britain for which they had passports, where they were called 'Paki', and where they became some of the most successful and dynamic citizens this nation has possessed. And this is used by a Labour minister, a Labour minister, to attack past Conservative governments for softness on immigration! I wanted to throw up. David Aaronovitch The Times
Full article: A revolting parade of who can look toughest

Egyptian writers called the shoe throwing a "clear response by Iraqis", Syrians that it was "necessary to invent a new language that Bush might understand" and that footwear tossing was it, writes David Aaronovitch. But they would have had to have been men of little imagination had they not somewhere wondered about the wisdom of casting a public clout at presidents Mubarak or Assad, or Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal, as well as the inevitable fate that would have accompanied even the expressed desire of skying a brogue at Saddam Hussein. Oddly, there was plenty in the occasion for me to be glad about. It was a shoe, not a grenade, and the whole Arab world now has had replayed to it, over and over again, how one may protest in Baghdad, but not in Damascus. That is a big thing. David Aaronovitch The Times
Full article: Yes, the shoe is mightier than the grenade

Employment is the key question, says David Aaronovitch: the need to keep people at work and earning, rather than to allow unemployment, and all its attendant moral, social and fiscal hazards, to soar. The habit of worklessness is one of the most debilitating vices that any people can acquire. The question should surely be whether Alistair Darling did enough stimulating. The truth is that we don't know what's going to happen. I have no idea which party will benefit from the recession, and, at the moment, I don't care. It could not be more irrelevant to millions who might lose their jobs. David Aaronovitch The Times
Full article: There's only one question: is this enough?

Walking around Manchester, I see far too many ex-ministers and perpetual backbenchers whose exciting years are past, and who know all too well what can't be done, writes David Aaronovitch. Though I used not to think so, I now see that there is a cycle of democracy, which allows generational change in our political system. The problem is that this desire for alternation is now so highly geared that Labour faces an absurdly humiliating defeat in 2010. The consequence of that might well be a long period of Labour's own descent into irrelevance and nostalgia, as the Left is strengthened and the Derek Simpsons and other mammoth-skin wearers become, once again, power-brokers in the party. In that case we could be talking about another missing generation of lost Labour leaders like Gaitskell or Kinnock, who never got a chance to serve. David Aaronovitch The Times
Full article: New leader required. Essential for next election
The Mole: Brown earns breathing space with competent speech
The Mole: Few fooled as Miliband pays homage to an inspirational PM

It seems impossible to counter the triumphal gloominess of the old Right with anything as feeble, as unconvincing, as facts, writes David Aaronovitch. The best figures available show crime has gone down, but we know, we know, we know it has gone up! The best figures available suggest improving performance at GCSE and A levels, but we know, we know, we know that this is because of a dilution in standards! Our Olympic success makes it clear, to me and to Boris Johnson, that we hardly live in some kind of brutalised, boneless pre-dystopia. The analysis of Britain as being a broken society manages simultaneously to be wrong, irritating and - worst of all - suggestive of a whole series of wrong and irritating policies to come. Britain is demonstrably less "broken" than it was in the late 70s and at the height of the Thatcher era in the mid and late 80s. David Aaronovitch The Times
Full article: If things are so bad, why are they so good?

Bryan Appleyard penned a long piece entitled "Stoooopid... why the Google generation isn't as smart as it thinks". Appleyard fears that we are now "infantilised cyber-serfs", whose lives the internet has made easier, "but only by destroying the very selves that should be protesting at every distraction, demanding peace, quiet and contemplation". Yes, we should all be monks. Matins, then work in the fields, then simple food, then Compline, some contemplation, then up - slowly - to the Scriptorium to illuminate some manuscripts, supper, prayers and bed. How often do such weh ist mir arguments rest on an idea of our "natural" selves being alienated by the world of progress? Wasn't it better when we all skinned our own rabbits and made our own music? David Aaronovitch The Times
Full article: The internet shrinks your brain? What rubbish

There isn't an American president since Eisenhower who hasn't ended up, at some point or other, being depicted by the world's cartoonists as a cowboy astride a phallic missile, writes David Aaronovitch. It happened to Bill Clinton when he bombed Iraq; it will happen to Barack Obama when his reinforced forces in Afghanistan or Pakistan mistake a meeting of tribal elders for an unwise gathering of Taliban and al-Qaeda. Anti-Americanism is inevitable. The author Andrew O'Hagan defines their exported popular culture as "Spite as entertainment. Shouting as argument. Dysfunction as normality. Desires as rights. Shopping as democracy." This in the country that has sent Big Brother, Pop Idol, Wife Swap and Location, Location, Location over the Atlantic in the other direction, while taking delivery of Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Wire.  David Aaronovitch The Times
Full article: Eventually, we will all hate Obama too
Andrew Roberts: The decline and fall of the American empire

Instant experts rush to offer solutions to the latest moral panic, writes David Aaronovitch. The truth is no one really knows what is happening. But we start, don't we, with offended masculinity, fear and peer pressure, and work from there? We might look at actually giving the recent £3 million anti-knife advertising campaign some time to work, at developing non-prison forms of deterrence, at televising court procedures in cases of violence, at simultaneously diminishing the amount of violence-as-entertainment on television and in cinemas, at outlawing violence against children, at reinstituting civility in the public sphere, starting with ourselves. Anything but the present pathetic apology for a national discussion. David Aaronovitch The Times
Full article: We are all stabbing blindly at knife crime
Frank Furedi: Media obsession risks normalising knife crime

There is a superficially pleasing symmetry about the resignation of mayoral appointments in the Great Wen, writes David Aaronovitch. A few months ago the right-wing press scalped Ken Livingstone's black man, Lee Jasper, and last week the liberal press bagged Boris Johnson's, Ray Lewis. Major tales of minor Labour scandals are to be replaced by overblown stories of Tory ones, for the moment at any rate. The score is Labour 1, Conservatives 1. Or press 2, politicians 0. The laying low of political figures (and some others) through non-scandals, is becoming something of a scandal itself. Far from leading to good government and good politics, it is in danger of creating neutered government and supine politics.

David Aaronovitch The Times

What seems clear is that the Zanu (PF) military-security group has no intention of allowing any transfer of power to an elected opposition, no matter what a whingeing world says about it, writes David Aaronovitch. The regime represents that astonishing phenomenon, the ideo-kleptocracy, which believes that its enrichment and corruption is a historically necessary reversal of colonialism. After initially ignoring the repression and violence, we have for two decades applied the same strategies of pressure, minor sanction, condemnation, talks, aid and buck-passing, only to enjoy the same flickering hopes, to bemoan their subsequent betrayal and to start anew. “Military intervention,” said one BBC person yesterday, expressing the views of the consensus, “is not a realistic option.” It might be better if it was. Instead, the suffering people of Zimbabwe (life expectancy, 37) get what the Foreign Secretary called yesterday “the worst rigged election in African history”.   David Aaronovitch The Times
It's time to send in the troops
Zimbabwe Today: Nobody is doing anything

David Davis is no defender of freedom, says David Aaronovitch. Whereas he lays claim to being a civil libertarian, he is most certainly a social authoritarian, perfectly happy that the State should interfere in matters of adult sexuality. Mr Davis was one of the last defenders in the Conservative Party of Section 28 of the Local Government Act, which, as a classic piece of paranoid authoritarian populism, purported to prevent the non-existent "promotion" of homosexuality, or of the teaching of the acceptability of homosexuality as a "pretended family relationship". Not one successful prosecution was brought under this clause, and yet as late as 2002 Mr Davis was lobbying for its retention. One gay Conservative described him as "a vicious Don Quixote" emitting "the nasty squeak of mental authoritarianism". David Aaronovitch The Times
Why I am standing against David Davis

This week the Government has announced that it will allow Manchester to bring in a congestion-charging scheme, notes David Aaronovitch. Immediately the "no" lobby, as it did in London, concentrates it opposition on the supposed impact on "poor" drivers. Crocodile tears! Nearly a third of Greater Manchester households - the poorest - have no access to a car, and might benefit from improved public transport. A young Cabinet minister once told me that the principal problem in his constituency was that the poor made too few demands on the system, not too many. They failed to claim benefits, where middle-class folks were assiduous at claiming theirs. They tended not to vote, not to complain, not to write to local papers. They lack a sense of entitlement.
David Aaronovitch The Times

Is there significant evidence that the foetus is now significantly more viable at up to 24 weeks than was the case in 1967 or 1990, when the law was last changed? "No" is the answer to that, says David Aaronovitch. Camera technology has certainly advanced, and we can capture the foetus in the womb, and from the images sentimentally imagine that we know its "thoughts" or "feelings", but the latest study has established that the survival rates for severely premature babies have not improved over the past 18 years. Hardly a single baby born at 22 weeks or under manages to leave hospital alive, and at 23 weeks 82 per cent fail to make it outside, the same percentage as in the mid-1990s.
David Aaronovitch The Times
For many women, abortion is no big deal

There has been, right from the first day of this crisis, a wing of the anti-interventionist movement that has sought to shift blame for the aid debacle from the Burmese generals to the West in general and America in particular, says David Aaronovitch. The junta (this apologia suggests) is just paranoid, this paranoia is justified because of the West's hostility, and therefore it makes sense from the Burmese point of view not to admit foreign aid workers, who might be CIA spooks. This is adamantine daftness. The issue isn't whether we have the right to intervene - because the consequences of vicious dictatorships usually catch up with us in time - but whether or not, practically, we can. Everything else is a polite conversation in a sunny church. David Aaronovitch The Times
The latest from Burma
In pictures: cyclone devastation
The pros and cons of intervention in Burma

You get a better write-up in the Guardian if you are Fidel Castro or the leader of Hamas than if you're the Labour Prime Minister, says David Aaronovitch. Despite them rooting for Mr Brown when the hated Blair was in power, they now seem to concur that GB ought to be someone else, someone able to emote over the plight of mortgage-holders, someone as decisive as Tony Blair was over, say, Iraq. The current noise is coming from the moaning, hoary-lock-shaking chorus of ex-ministers, a decade's political detritus, upset that their questionable sagacity and their undoubted impatience seem never likely to be rewarded. These characters essentially agree with the bullish Tory commentators about something. It is that the inversion of the natural order, represented by Labour rule and Conservative opposition, should come to an end; that the long exile of the ruling classes from their birthright should be terminated, to the relief of all.   David Aaronovitch The Times
The Mole: Labour left talks up leadership challenge
New Labour has been a trillion-pound folly

Four million fewer of us use post offices this year compared with three years ago, but when it comes to the question "who killed the postmaster?" we all point at someone else, writes David Aaronovitch. If Post Offices were run as a straightforward commercial operation like, say, Tesco, then only about 4,000 of the existing 14,000 or so offices would survive. Yet the current closure plans still envisage 12,000 offices surviving, which will receive a subsidy (or "investment") of £1.7 billion of taxpayer's money between last year and 2011. So, in essence the Government is already letting parts of the post office system run as though they were social services. No one, absolutely no one, from one end of the spectrum to the other, seems to have the courage to call this spending into question. There is no counter-pressure on the Government whatsoever. David Aaronovitch The Times

Boris Johnson for mayor? Visit the website. In general Boris will do everything that anybody wants, and all for less money, notes David Aaronovitch. There isn't much that is specific, but such stuff as manages to declare itself includes bringing back the old, dangerous Routemaster bus - the steam train of the bus-nostalgia world - and a commitment to “rephase traffic lights”, which is code for giving pedestrians even less time to cross the road, and motorists even more. This is almost the exact opposite of what we need to do, and might best be described as a uniquely anti-green and anti-child measure. The man is chaotic. The notion that a Boris administration will, as his website promises every few lines, subject London's finances and procedures to the most rigorous of scrutinies, is beyond parody. David Aaronovitch The Times

Here are the likely consequences of retreat from Afghanistan, writes David Aaronovitch. The Afghan Government would collapse, to be replaced by an overt civil war fought between the Taliban and local governors in the various provinces. A million or more Afghan refugees would again flee their country, many of them ending up in the West. Deprived of support from the US, President Musharraf or a successor would effectively withdraw from the border regions, leaving a vast lawless area from central Afghanistan to north central Pakistan. Al-Qaeda and other jihadists would operate from these areas as they did before 9/11. This time these forces - already capable of assassinating a popular democratic politician - would seriously impact upon the stability of Pakistan, which is a nuclear state. Jihadists everywhere, from Indonesia to Palestine, would see this as a huge victory, democrats and moderates as a catastrophic defeat.   David Aaronovitch The Times
News in Pictures: Taliban rising

So Barack Obama is described (like Reagan) as making Americans feel good about themselves, as though the US was electing a therapist, not a president, says David Aaronovitch. It's an appropriate guide, maybe, for choosing a constitutional monarch or a symbolic president, in which the glad-handling, ambassadorial role is the most important. Presidents, however, inherits a world full of Musharrafs, Ahmadinejads, climate changes, economic slowdowns, unemployment, housing slumps and other problems unsusceptible to therapeutic generational transcendence. David Aaronovitch The Times
New Hampshire debates: who said what

A Liberty report says that Britain has the most draconian detention laws in the Western world, notes David Aaronovitch. But they say that Italy's pre-charge detention figure is a mere four days, when Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito have spent 43 days in custody in connection with the Meredith Kercher case. In overstating the differences between Britain and other countries, Liberty provides the ammunition for the very forces it describes. So you will find its report approvingly quoted on the Islamist Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain website as providing "another reason why the Muslim world rejects the imposition of Western 'liberal' values, desiring the implementation of Sharia for the wellbeing of all its citizens". David Aaronovitch The Times

David Cameron's foreign policy proposals, says David Aaronovitch, involve securing his home base and swapping Tony Blair's doctrine of liberal interventionism for "conservative interventionism", which would be distinguished by taking a more "sceptical attitude towards the ability of states to create Utopias". Doesn't this sound attractive? Haven't we all been exhausted by the politician of No Man is an Island, the busybody king? Perhaps not. Would Cameron have considered it less utopian to replace the Taliban with a federated warlordship in which Islamic fundamentalists could impose their enjoyment of their own cultural security on their womenfolk, Buddhists and men without beards? Conservative interventionism sounds like no interventionism at all, and one wonders how it would cope with Third World nuclear proliferation. David Aaronovitch The Times

Dear reader, you know what Mr Cameron and company think about a referendum: they call for one. They demand one. They argue that life cannot go on without one. But what do they think of the Lisbon treaty itself? Remember that the Conservative party in power has taken us to accession, the single market and Maastricht; as Vince Cable summed up: "in office, supporting European integration, but in opposition, supporting the worst features of anti-European populism." And now backbencher Bill Cash has tabled an early day motion on a referendum before or after ratification. That would pose the prospect of leaving the EU altogether. David Aaronovitch The Times
The EU treaty

The obesity crisis is not helped by stories of scientists on the verge of finding a magic cure for over-eating. And there's little point blaming the food industry, "as if they forced us to consume pizzas against our will". The task is to raise public awareness, and it's a big task. "Following Jamie Oliver's campaign on school meals, Ofsted has discovered that the number of children taking the improved school meals has fallen. Analyse that for a second: the meals are healthier so the kids turn away from them…We are going to have to convince ourselves that overfeeding and underexercising the kids amounts to neglect." David Aaronovitch The Times
Liberty, equality, obesity