No 2 AV campaign ad

Bad enough to make you want to vote yes whatever you thought before.

They should have cut straight to the chase and brought the fluffy kittens out.

I'm such a smug liberal

Just been reading this - right-wing Arizonan vigilantes kill two Mexicans (a nine year old girl and her dad) in cold blood.

These 'minutemen' are everything I hate. Vicious bigoted rightwing gun-loving nutjobs. Who killed a nine-year old girl, ffs. But I still don't think they deserve the death penalty. No matter what the wrong they've committed, executing them would still simply compound it.

At the risk of total solipsism - the important thing here is obviously the people who were murdered - cases like this create interesting dilemmas. Do we only oppose the death penalty in cases where we can feel some understanding for the social, structural and/or medical reasons why people end up committing the 'ultimate crime' (even if we might not want them living next door). Or do we oppose it in all cases, no matter how egregious the crime or ideologically repellent the murderer?

This is why I find Amnesty International and Liberty so admirable - they seem to consistently oppose the wrongs committed by governments and states no matter how individually unpleasant are some of the people they help. Human rights if they are to mean anything apply to everyone, including people who we should loath on almost every count.

At the personal level, though, such cases seem mainly to serve toward reinforcing smug liberalism in its ultimate Guardianista incarnation......

Votes for prisoners

I don't get it. The court judgement is that there should be no blanket ban, not that all prisoners should have the vote. So instead of everyone getting all het up, surely the right response is to sort out a system in which, say, people imprisoned for non-violent crimes get to vote, and those that were, don't. Or whatever. Seems pretty sensible when you look at some of the pathetic things for which people can be sent to prison (why should someone imprisoned for shoplifting be denied the vote, while those found guilty of more serious crimes that don't result in a prison sentence retain it).

Anyone would think this issue was being used as a political football by people with other interests. And that's before we start to think about the example being set by a political class which seeks to pick and choose which court judgements it wants to follow.....

David Cameron and multiculturalism

It's not very often I wholeheartedly agree with a Guardian editorial - usually a bit too wishy-washy - but I think this just about nails it.

Of course, as the leader writer kind of says, it's become difficult to even talk about this in a sensible way because on this issue we're all Humpty Dumptys. Multiculturalism means exactly what we want it to mean. But two particularly problems I have with the 'anti-multi-culti' brigade are these.

First, the fetishisation of Britishiness and 'British values'. If you look at the evidence, people from almost all ethnic and religious minorities, including da Muslimz, feel more British than those from the majority White British group, who are increasingly likely to say English, Welsh etc. Two exceptions tend to be White folks from the US, Australia etc. and Buddhists, a large number of whom are, er, White British, but nobody seems to worry too much about them. Can't think why.

What does this tell us? Perhaps that 'British' is such a broad church (no pun intended) that it's almost meaningless. In a sense this is obviously true and always has been. National identities are imagined communities that enable people who otherwise have absolutely nothing in common (think welders in Tyneside and hunting squires in Devon) to feel a sense of togetherness. But more likely I think is that British is an aspirational term for people from minority groups - saying you feel British is part of making it so. People in the US have always seen this - part of becoming/being American is hyphenating your original identity to Irish-American, Italian-American etc. On this measure alone 'multiculturalism' has been a resounding success. An overwhelming majority of people from minority groups want to and indeed do feel British.

The second issue is the implicit, and increasingly explicit, suggestion that if 'they' don't accept 'our' values they will be excluded in some sense (this is ultimately of course a go back to where you came from argument, but we'll leave aside the difficulty of sending people born in Walthamstow or Lancashire  'back'). Cameron mentions women's rights and democracy. But the essence of living in democracy is precisely that we don't expect everyone to think the same. We expect them to act according to the law, but that is something different. So it's admissable to think that women should be chained to the kitchen sink, but not to act on that belief and, for example, deny women jobs on the basis that they might get pregnant at some point. If people are going to get pulled up or excluded on the basis of a dubious commitment to gender equality we'd have to sack the entire editorial staff of the Daily Mail, for a start.

The suspicion must be that 'they' are being held to a higher standard than 'us' because they are inherently different and have something to prove, while being one of us means automatic inclusion whatever the particular views one holds. I think you'd be hard put to find a better way to proving to people they're different, excluded, and dissuade them from entering in open and rational discussion of differences of opinion.

I don't wish to sound panglossian here - there are problems with some young Muslims in terms of violence extremism, and more widely in terms of some pretty antediluvian attitudes to gender, sexuality etc. But with regard to the latter at least that makes them no different to some Hindus, Sikhs, Catholics, or right-wing Tories. To blame multi-culturism for linking political incorrectness (which is, of course, what Cameron was talking about, even though he'd never say it in those terms) with violent extremism seems to fly in the face not only of the evidence concerning how multiculturalism 'works' but also any sensible consideration of the actual distribution of 'wrong-thinking' in our society.

Crime maps

Not much to disagree with here. One thing I can't quite grasp is how these maps are supposed to empower people (in any straightforward way at least). How do they do this? Answers on a postcard please.

But more pertinently, why do they have to? This is information collected using public money, and, unless there is a good reason, it should be publicly available. This should be the principle involved, not any dubious claims about the utility of the data. Would it not have been released if it wasn't 'empowering'?

Not good

This incident has been doing the rounds on the blogosphere. And now, as is usual these days, some video footage has come to light.

To me, the issue is actually less the use of CS gas - although this certainly seems to have been disproportionate - but rather the initial arrest. Arresting someone for criminal damage for pushing leaflets through a gap in a door (which is allegedly what transpired) is plainly ridiculous and was bound to increase tension. Events then took their course and, to give him the benefit of the doubt, an officer felt threatened enough to use the spray (less generous assessments certainly suggest themselves, but it's hard to see from the footage).

Whichever way you look at it, this seems to have been a situation created by the police. The range of powers available to the police at demos is very wide, and they don't need to use arrests like this to manage situations, which is what I suspect they thought they were doing (presumably to protect property).

Police have a duty to maintain order that is at least as powerful as their duty to protect property - and it certainly seems to be the case that here they've taken one course that directly affected their ability to maintain order at what seems to have been, up to that point, an entirely peaceful demo.