Nick Clegg's announcement today

Alan Johnson is a nice guy in some ways, he's like your friend's dad from school, you know the dad of that kid who could play football really well, but obviously he's just way way wrong.

In fact former Home Secretary Johnson's response to Nick Clegg's absolutely correct announcement today, much of which this little blog has campaigned for in the past, just goes to show how dangerously out of touch Johnson and Labour have been on this issue.

And this is what we have been saying here in the past.

Johnson actually calls the decisions to reign in Labour's police state as "rampant hyperbole" and suggests that Clegg has 'joined up different issues' re CCTV, ID Cards, DNA database, Contact Point child database etc.

But the problem is, as we've long talked about here in the past, is that these aren't different disperate issues, they are all part of an all too visible rock-solid trend, where one part of the trend, dangerously appears to reinforce the necessity for another, and that overall dehumanizes and degrades.

And if Johnson can't actually see that, it really does make you wonder about the rest of his judgment and what he was doing in office all that time.

By the way, I think this coalition with the Lib Dems, is all quite healthy and I think in principle a good outcome for voters has come out of the general election here. I really have no complaints about it at this time.

And it's absolutely right that Clegg and the Tories start to dismantle this pile of terrifying nonsense that Labour has willfully and dangerously created and put it where it belongs: in the dustbin of history.

Thank God

Things were looking pretty scary yesterday.

Hung Parliament/Gordon Brown etc

I just saw on BBC News, Gordon Brown has made this statement offering a time table for his standing down, in reality to provide a more inviting proposition for the Liberal Democrats, so that Labour can enter more meaty negotiations with the Liberals.

I'd just like to say this is outrageous. This is dangerous and indulgent nonsense by the Labour Party.

The General Election result, this hung parliament, can not, by any description, be interpreted as a vote for a 'coalition of progressives'' or 'rainbow coalition'.

That's just simply not what was voted for. This is completely illegitimate nonsense.

It is the height of shocking and juvenile opportunism to try to skew this, by interpreting a 'parliamentary democracy' as a green light, described as 'game on' by the SNP for pushing for this insane club, that actually seeks to exclude the party that won the most seats and got the biggest vote. I mean it's just nuts.

(And it's hardly a sign of the integrity of those now supposedely calling for 'more representative, more democratic voting reform'.)

No one voted for another go, another sickly manifestation, just one more time, just once more, of the Labour Party. This time with a rag bag of crappy vaguely-'leftist' novelty parties propping them up who for some childish bizarre reason have some pathological tribe revulsion to the Conservatives.

This isn't a 'mature' democracy. It's a disgrace to democracy. And it needs to stop.