1 - Most hated food.
Avocado or prawns. Foods of the devil.
2 - Most Hated person.
Neil Warnock
3 - Most hated job.
Mucking out my Dad's pigs for 10p an hour.
4 - Most hated city.
Sheffield
5 - Most hated band/song.
U2
6 - Most hated website.
Guess.
7 - Most hated TV program.
Heartbeat, which I am forced to sit through every Sunday night.
9 - Most hated British politician.
Iris Robinson.
10 - Most hated artist.
Any modern artist. I'll say Tracey Emin purely because she's the only one I can name.
11 - Most hated book.
Das Kapital. It's done more damage to the world than any other.
12 - Most hated shop.
Harrods. Because of who owns it.
13 - Most hated organisation.
The BNP.
14 - Most hated historical event.
Fall of Lady T.
15 - Most hated sport.
Horse Racing and synchronised swimming, if you can call it a sport.
16 - Most hated technology.
Apple Macs. Waste of space.
17 - Most hated annual event.
One of the big four winning the Premier League
18 - Most hated daily task.
Getting up.
19 - Most hated comedian.
Jimmy Carr. Just because he isn't funny.
I now tag Paul Burgin, Donal Blaney and Nich Starling.
1. Subrosa on the cost of 18 phantom MEPs.
I see John Bercow has done a Hazel Blears and decided to voluntarily pay Capital Gains Tax on a property he sold some time ago. Will that 'do' for his Speakership prospects? Maybe, maybe not. But I am told the Sunday papers will not make happy reading for him tomorrow.
Following a conversation with David Cameron this morning I have decided to step down as candidate for Bracknell at the next general election. I believe I could be a distraction at a time when he is working to get elected as prime minister with the good working majority necessary to take the tough decisions to turn this country around. I hope my decision to step down goes some way to showing my constituents how sorry I am about my own situation. I would never forgive myself if my candidature distracted voters from the key issues and particularly David's rousing call for change. It has been both a privilege and huge fun to represent the people of Bracknell for 26 years. I understand why people are angry. I hope my decision to step down goes some way to showing my constituents how sorry I am about my own situation.
Lawyers acting for the Barclay brothers, Withers, instructed the takedown to Acidity via mail last night, citing the Acceptable User Policy. The takedown will be bolstered by the Godfrey vs Demon precendent, where an order can be made and it will be done instantly. Of course, if the website was being hosted in the USA it would be much harder to order the instant takedown. You'd think though, that if the allegations were moonbat untrue there would just be a "point, laugh and call them ridiculous" strategy rather than ordering a takedown to gag Nadine from saying it. This is especially the case I would've thought because once Recess is over, Nadine would be free to say such things in the House and be protected by Parliamentary Privilege. By taken her down like this the Telegraph will have fed the very idea of some sort of hidden agenda. Suppression, whether it is of speech that is right or wrong, is usually counterproductive.
"One more squeak like that and he will have the whip taken away from him so fast his feet won't the the ground. It's just incredibly frustrating when people say things like that".The Telegraph is reporting that Cameron is also deeply displeased with Nadine Dorries for comments on the media today. That would be a very loose interpretation of his comments indeed. He actually said nothing of the sort. But his warning to other MPs who are minded to speak out was stark - in effect he said, do it, and prepare for the consequences.
Michele came with me to meet Mr Fletcher in the Fees' Office. he was friendly and helpful and advised that we should register London as our main residence (which it is anyway), because that'll work to our advantage with the mileage allowance...My salary is going to be just £30,854 which is a nightmare. Michele is not amused. 'You didn't think about the money did you? You were so desperate to find yourself a seat you rushed in regardless.'OK, the system has changed a lot since 1992, but the culture of the Fees Office has not. It was they who advised Labour MP Ben Chapman on his mortgage arrangements. Apparently they have privately apologised to him. Meanwhile, he's been forced out of politics. Yes, politicians are ultimately responsible for their own actions, but let's not lose sight of the fact that the Fees Office system of audit and advice is not fit for purpose.
Looking back to the days before 1997, if you had asked me then whether I would consider myself a natural supporter of the campaign group Liberty and its director Shami Chakrabarti, I would likely have answered in the negative. But those days are long gone. In the space of 12 years the Labour government has carried out an assault on liberty so vicious that the values that form the bedrock of this great society are not simply under threat, they actually face the possibility of extinction. The argument put forward by Labour was a simple one, and rendered all the more appealing by the spectre of global terrorism. If we wanted to protect ourselves from threats, both foreign and domestic, we had to be prepared to sacrifice a little liberty at the altar of security. The two concepts were put forward as mutually exclusive alternatives, with the implicit contention that when it came to a choice we should naturally favour the latter over the former.
On the back of this argument, Labour has passed more criminal justice laws than were passed in the previous 100 years. More than 3,000 new criminal offences have been created, the use of stop and search has exploded and at every opportunity the government has attempted to increase the amount of time a terrorist suspect can be detained for questioning without trial. Not content with this alone, it empowered everybody from the police to local councils to spy on private citizens with greater ease, little oversight and for almost any reason. It has constructed enormous databases containing every aspect of our lives while failing resolutely to consider the risks associated with the accumulation of such data in a format for which security is anything but guaranteed. As if all of that were not enough, it continues its efforts to introduce ID cards despite the lack of public support. And in the week when MPs' expenses claims were laid bare, legislation was quietly laid before parliament that would enable the Inland Revenue to use ID cards to access details access details of anyone's major financial transactions.
Never before has our liberty been under such threat. Even during our darkest hour, when we faced a very real, defined and specific threat from the Nazis, the restrictions placed on our liberty were imposed with reluctance, and removed as soon as practically possible. Indeed it was Churchill who, in a letter to the home secretary upon the release of Oswald Mosley, indicated that the willingness of the executive to yield extraordinary powers granted by parliament at times of emergency, was "really the test of civilisation". And yet now, in the face of an infinitesimally smaller threat, we have a government resolutely failing the test of civilisation by creating powers for the state that fundamentally infringe liberty and are designed to have permanent effect. And having sacrificed our liberty in return for the hope of security, what do we find? A society with some of the highest crime rates in Europe, violent crime skyrocketing, personal information held on databases being mislaid and, by MI5's own admission, a frightening growth in radicalisation of young Muslims across the UK.
The zero-sum game Labour has played with liberty and security actively ignored one fundamental truth in the relationship between the two. Security exists not simply to protect us from injury or death at the hands of those who would seek to do us harm, but rather to protect our way of life and the values enshrined therein. As Benjamin Franklin put it: "Those who would give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." If we allow ourselves to place life above liberty, then that is precisely what we shall receive; a life without liberty.
So it will fall to the Conservatives to implement a radical civil liberties agenda when they get into power. There will be enormous pressure on them to restore freedoms to the individual. They are already committed to axing identity cards and a whole host of intrusive government databases, but they need to go further and ensure than innocence before the law is considered a right, not a platitude.
