Nanny's Schizophrenia

I have a feeling that dear old Nanny is getting a little "past it" in her dotage, and that she is becoming a tad schizophrenic.

My chief concern is her obsession with pushing her much derided, dangerous and ill considered control orders bill through parliament.

This bill seeks to give the Home Secretary, Nanny's chum Fungus Clarke, powers to place suspected terrorists under house arrest and restrict their access to the net and telephones.

Indeed Nanny and Fungus and are so fed up with the opposition that this bill is receiving that they are letting their guard down, and showing their exasperation.

Fungus said:

"I have spent decades of my life being patronised by lawyers, and I do not appreciate it".

Does that mean he does not respect the law?

Rather worrying I would say.

Despite the sound bites being put out by Nanny and her chums, about safety over liberty, there does seem to be some confusion as to who exactly would be placed under "house arrest" if the bill were to be passed.

On the one hand the ex Met Chief Sir John Stevens happily tells the press that there are around 200 terrorists in Britain, waiting to blow us all up; on the other hand, Nanny says she doesn't think that anyone would be placed un house arrest yet.

Then, for good measure Blairy Poppins herself said that she would consider using the control order on protesters expected at the Gleneagles G8 summit later this year.

This last threat is quite bizarre, given the fact that Blairy's chum Gordon "Smiler" Brown made a speech a few days ago asking people to go along and protest about poverty at the G8 summit.

Erm if anyone can tell me what the hell is going on there, I would be greatly obliged!

Now the real problem I have with Nanny's "twin track" approach to control orders is this.

Nanny is still trying, admirably enough, to achieve a full and final peace settlement in Northern Ireland. To do this she has bent over backwards dealing with a variety of "interesting" characters, from that very broad political church that inhabits Northern Ireland.

One of the organisations that she deals with is Sinn Fein, you know, that organisation headed by Gerry Adams and his mate Martin. These two guys were recently outed by the Dublin government as being leading lights in the IRA, we all knew that anyway; but it was nice to have it confirmed.

Now the IRA announced yesterday that it would be happy to shoot, yes shoot, the people who murdered in cold blood Robert McCartney. Robert's sisters are campaigning to have the murderers brought to justice.

The sisters have, quite rightly, rejected the IRA's kind offer of "summary justice"; preferring instead to have the courts deal with the matter, if any one of the 60 witnesses have the bottle to come forward and tell the police what they saw.

Nanny might like to take a lesson from these ladies; specifically Nanny should note that they prefer to follow "due process", via trial and jury, rather than dispense summary justice sanctioned by the "executive".

Herein lies the problem; on the one hand Nanny is happy to impose house arrest on people who she deems to be a threat, eg protesters at the G8. Yet she will not place Gerry and Martin under house arrest, even though the IRA have for decades been happily killing and maiming both British and Irish citizens.

A tad schizophrenic wouldn't you say?