Go to the other URL, please

• This blog has been discontinued. Go to my new site which is much better and less silly, and which has slightly improved web design. Not much there at the moment, though. Have patience.
  
• Oh yes, the URL is www.jawbox.co.uk
  

Robin Cook 1946 - 2005

• I said recently that I had written my last post on this blog, and that was how I intended it, but I felt compelled to post a short tribute to Robin Cook, who has died of a suspected heart attack while hillwalking in the West Highlands. There have been few politicians I have respected more than Robin Cook, for his intellect, his integrity, his moral conviction and his eloquence. His courageous resignation over the Iraq war, when his peers would not, said a lot about him. Parliament has lost its most skilled debater, the Labour party has lost an intellectual powerhouse, The Guardian has lost a very fine columnist - indeed, many of his concise, intelligent yet forceful arguments constructed for that paper in the last months of his life are possibly what I will most remember him for - and the electorate has lost a man in which it could be proud.
  

So it's goodbye from me...

• Yes, this is my probably my last "proper" post on this site, as I'm going away now to set up a proper website, powered by WordPress and hosted by 34sp, in other words, an escape from the confines of Blogger. It's been fun, but when Simple Country Folk remerges, it'll have more pages, room, links and just better stuff generally. Bye now.

What I do when the weather's crap

• As the weather in Cornwall's gone from sun-drenched tropicalness to just drenched in the space of a few days, it's important to have something to do when the beach is not practical. Here, plastic model kits come in. I am currently modelling 1/700 Russian warships, and have just made an Oscar-II class guided missile submarine, of which some photos are on my Flickr page. It's a good passtime, if sticky and annoying at times, and I'd like to dispel the myth that modellers are predominantly middle-aged losers. Anyway, until the weather improves, I'll be indoors modelling the Northern Fleet. (Well, the Oscar-II and a Sovremenny class destoyer, at any rate.)
• In response to the IRA's statement yesterday, I can't summon up the annoyance, vigour and scepticism to blog about it now. Tomorrow's another day.
• Jean Charles de Menezes, the Stockwell shooting victim, wasn't acting suspiciously, was wearing a light denim jacket not a heavy coat, and used his Travelcard instead of jumping the barriers. In other words, all three reasons the police issued as to why he was shot turn out to have been lies. Great.
• Brian Haw wins his court appeal against being moved out of Parliament Square. Take that, you authoritarian bastards.
  

Desmond - must try harder

• Need I say more?
• Kachepa update: Home Office messed up their passports and other travel documents at Heathrow, so they're back in Weymouth for the time being.
  

A collection of cowards and scoundrels

• I refer, of course, to the Home Office, whose contemptable decision to deport the Kachepa family back to Malawi from Weymouth illustrates among other things the extent of the craven cowardice displayed by the Home Office (and in particular the immigration department) in the face of the right-wing, racist, anti-asylum gutter press.
• If you're unfamiliar with this case, let me explain. The Kachepas are originally from Malawi. They've been living in Weymouth for a few years now, after their asylum application was rejected, but are in danger if they return to Malawi, even more so since the husband decamped back to Malawi and shacked up with a relative of the former (nasty) President. They therefore have very good reasons to suspect that their lives will be in danger in Malawi. They are well liked and respected in Weymouth, and have made, according to everyone who's been asked, an enormous contribution to the local community. The campaign to let them stay has attracted high-profile support, from (among others) David Davis and Ann Widdecombe. Jim Knight, the local Labour MP, who before the election had a majority of barely 100, came out in support of the campaign and increased his majority to around 3000. Nevertheless, yesterday the decision to deport them was finalised, and they will be flying back to Malawi and possibly death as I write. Why? There was no opinion that wanted them deported, no reason not to let them stay. But the Home Office had to deport them anyway, because they must be seen as really tough on immigrants/asylum seekers/yobs/disabled people/foreigners/peace protestors (delete as appropriate). This is directly due to the tidal wave, to use their own phrase, of hatred and fear that the right-wing press whipped up a while ago about people coming into our country and taking our whatever. To see the scale of the influence that these people enjoy is terrifying, as terrifying as the agenda that it allows them to push.
  
• Why is it that any "keep them out" campaign must be appeased, fuelling the fire of ignorance, bigotry and prejudice that they run on, but any campaign that says that "we would actually like them to stay because they're nice people" must be ignored? What rule is there that dictates this, acting as some kind of conscience-blocker to those who must make the decisions? I don't know, and frankly I think the truth of it might be more alarming that what we already think. All I know is that the Home Office, run down by years of Blunkett and his hate-filled rhetoric, is a rotten organisation, staffed by cowards and morally-bankrupt scoundrels, and needs throughly cleaning out.
  

Pixels for public consumption

• Yeehah! I got me a Flickr photostream! (Hopefully, I'll get round to uploading some photos onto it tomorrow.) Also a Flickr profile.
  

The very worst thing that could have happened

• As I completely failed to document yesterday, the armed police (or SAS) shot a guy in Stockwell tube station, someone they'd had under surveillance and followed to the station, where he jumped a ticket barrier after having been challenged. They chased him onto a Northern Line train, where he tripped over. They then pumped 5 bullets into him. The theory at the time was that he was a suicide bomber, but the longer they went without saying that he was carrying explosives on him, the less certain this seemed, coupled with my suspicions that this could very easily have been someone who simply panicked, was in the wrong place at the wrong time, or fell victim to a scared armed police or overzealous Special Forces. In other words, an Asian guy who was not a threat or connected to the bombings at all, but has been killed anyway. It has just been announced that he was, just as I feared, unconnected.
  
• I don't suggest that this was the sort of 'shoot a coloured person' activity that's been engaged in in the past, and nor do I doubt the fear of the authorities that this man was a suicide bomber who was about to attack a tube train. But as we now learned, he wasn't. And it is an enormous propaganda coup for the jihadists - the websites will be salivating at this. It will be painted as part of the "War on Islam." It is, as one former Met officer said, "an absolute disaster" in every respect. A human tragedy, a self-defeating blunder, and somwhere in Britain, some new jihadists will have been recruited because of it.
• Update: Reports are circulating that the guy was Brazilian. I suppose that's not as bad as it might have been (a Muslim being gunned down would have been catastrophic at this point, as I said earlier), but still utterly horrible and tragic.
• Further Update: Jean Charles de Menezes, 27 years old. He lived for three years in Brixton previous to this, speaking perfect English, and worked as an electrician. Since it was chillier than usual in London yesterday, he wore a coat, obviously feeling it more being from Brazil, and since he was from a country where the police have a reputation for shooting people pretty randomly, he was probably disposed towards running away. The Brazilian Foreign Minister will meet Jack Straw and demand an explanation. Incidentally, the reaction to this tragedy from my favourite bunch of right-wing nutters, Free Republic, bears a look - fuckwits.
  

Not this shit again

• Oval, Warren Street and Shepherd's Bush evacuated. Small, pathetic bombs, and some pretty pathetic bombers too, the guy at Oval legging it before it went off. No-one killed as yet, 1 person injured at Warren Street. Apparently, small bomb on a bus in the Hackney Road. Several tube lines closed - Hammersmith and City, Victoria and Northern, possibly Bakerloo as well. In the absence of my being arsed to liveblog, here are some good ones: Nosemonkey, Londonist, The London Line, and The Guardian. Reports of nail-bomb at Warren Street seem unlikely, as do reports of smaller bombs in the City.
  
• Increasingly credible reports of something going on at University College Hospital, however, where according to Sky and now 5 Live armed police have been deployed, although to what end is unclear. Apparently a guy was seen running towards the hospital from Warren Street tube. COBRA committee has met, with Blair due apparently to speak at about 3:00.
  

Good news

• PledgeBank's "refuse to register for an ID card" campaign has hit it's first goal, in that 10,000 people have signed the pledge, and now the money pledged by each person towards a legal defence fund can be raised (10 pounds each, meaning that a fund of 100,000 pounds ought to be available). This could not have come at a better time - the government is showing every sign of using the current anti-terrorist climate to push through even more badly thought out, illiberal legislation, and we need desperately to beat them on this front in order to salvage what is left of the liberties and rights that make us better than those we are apparently at war with. Congratulations to everyone who signed - you are the true defenders of our society, not Blair and Clarke.