Rolled-up Trousers

Another police officer admits defeat to terrorists

  Superintendent Brett Lovegrave:

"Last year's Glasgow airport attack proved Scotland isn't immune to the threat of terrorism. Unfortunately, it isn't a case of 'if' there will be an attack on Edinburgh but 'when'.

"... It is important not to be complacent. Just because Edinburgh had not been attacked doesn't mean it won't be. However, I don't have specific intelligence that Edinburgh is going to be the next target."  

This follows Strathclyde Police chief Stephen House making similar comments.

Michael Nazir-Ali's "no go" areas

The Bishop of Rochester has remarkably claimed that there are no-go areas for non-Muslims in Britain. Many have already pointed out that this is absurd and that it requires him to provide evidence.

In Michael Nazir-Ali's Sunday Telegraph article, the passage in question contains complaints about the Islamic call to prayer being broadcast around the country's towns and cities. This is of course bunkum. There has been some controversy lately in Oxford about this (I don't know much about the specifics), but this is not vexing people the length and breadth of the nation.

Pakistan: fixing leadership

A couple of years ago, Tony Blair was putting up a number of possible heirs as alternatives to Gordon Brown. This saw a procession which included Alan Milburn, John Reid, and Charles Clarke all being dispatched as fast as they arrived on the scene. What we know now is that Blair missed a trick - he should have anointed Cherie, with Euan the longterm successor. The Labour Party would have clapped it through.

Those eulogising about Benzair Bhutto's democratic credentials must have been severely embarrassed when the contents of her will were read out. I have to at this point share something - before the succession was announced, I was half thinking that Mohammad Sarwar might announce he was going for the Pakistan People's Party leadership. As the PPP's highest profile UK supporter, he's standing down as an MP here, he was over in Pakistan when the assassination happened, and he enjoys a lot of popularity in the country as the first Pakistani to make it in Westminster.

Giuliani: Muslims "a people perverted"

Hat tip: TCP via the Guardian

Mehdi Hasan on the media

One of the rising stars in the media is interviewed in the Independent:

Hasan believes that television is less hostile towards Muslims than the print media, and is keen to lay the blame for Islamophobia at the door of ignorance rather than racism. "Over the years, at the BBC, ITV and Sky, I have worked with countless producers and reporters who had never met a Muslim before they met me," he says, "or if they had, it was invariably an unrepresentative and loony extremist who they were interviewing or profiling for a story."

Hasan calls for more moderate Muslims in Britain to abandon traditional career paths towards medicine or engineering and to instead join the media and help influence the industry's coverage of issues such as terrorism and integration. "I see people like myself – who happen to be both a professional journalist and a practising Muslim – as a bridge between the Islamic community and the media, and by extension between Muslims and wider society," says Hasan.

Callaghan's government gerrymandered the sea to take Scotland's oil wealth

I don't normally post up whole articles from the press, but the issue of Scotland's oil is very important to me, and the Herald don't seem to archive their old stories:      

Alex Salmond yesterday claimed there is now "proof positive of Westminster deceit" over Scotland's oil wealth.

The First Minister was speaking after documents released under the 30-year rule showed the thinking behind the decision of Jim Callaghan's Labour Cabinet to create a specific region called the UK Continental Shelf so that oil revenues would not accrue to Scotland.

Trade Secretary Edmund Dell wrote a briefing for the Cabinet on March 30, 1977, stating: "There was no agreed way of allocating the North Sea area to the indigenous regions, and the attempt to do so would inevitably distort the regional accounts.

"The great majority of the profit would accrue to Scotland, and would represent almost a doubling of the Scottish GDP, which in 1974 had been about £6.5bn."