The pornography of distraction ?

Isn't it funny that Home Secretary Jaqui Smith's husband apparently a Mr Richard Timney, was paying for porno films and at the expense of the tax payer to boot. A funny and small comeuppance for this ridiculous cloth-headed gorgon at the Home Office, and fittingly ironic for these anti-privacy ghouls in the tinpot regime; just a tiny hint of what the kinds of retained records they want everyone else to be chained to as a 'privilege of living in a modern society' can dig up. Smith is one of several New Labour gorgons, which all blend one into another as far as I'm concerned, I can barely even tell them apart.

Certainly there's a lot of media interest in MP's spending at the moment, and there is something seemingly of insanity about some of the things MPs can claim in their expenses, and for sure there are some grotesque examples of this that the press and other politicians will dig up.

Other than it underlines the particularly dismal and inevitable Animal Farm scenario for Labour, I don't believe it's a particular 'problem' though, and typically all this general talk of sleaze and abusing expenses and so on has a very corrosive and distraction-inducing effect.

Instead of talking about the horrendous, vile and very real policies of this government, including the burgeoning police state apparatus and policies being feverishly assembled, with the Home Office at the forefront of, we end up talking about their expenses and making that the 'bad' thing that they are doing. And this just totally trivializes the real issues of the day.

Unless we are to treat this case as some kind of serious warning shot at those Labour politicians hysterically trying to dismantle privacy and liberty in the UK, which include but are no means limited to mass internet data storage, driving surveillance, the National ID Register, the uploading of medical records and so on.

Great if that's the case, I certainly hope it is, and frankly it should be seen like that anyway despite the general focus on politicians' expenses at the moment.

But it would also be appropriate if this media, rather than solely trying to catch a politician out over some minor rule, or find some embarrassing expense just tell the truth about what's going on and what the government is trying to do to the population.