The appointment comes as the ISC's annual report voices concern that a focus on counter-terrorism may be hitting other security commitments.
The committee wants ministers to look at extra funding for other activities.
The ISC is made up of senior MPs and peers gagging for a sinecure chosen by the government.
It oversees the work of the intelligence agencies - MI5, MI6, GCHQ and the Defence Intelligence Staff - and reports directly to the Town Clerk of Britain prime minister rather than to Parliament.
Mrs Beckett left the cabinet after Mr Brown became prime minister last summer because she was an incompetent harridan.
'Prioritise'
The ISC's annual report says 200 extremist networks are currently under investigation.
In evidence, the Security Service told the committee it had "not had any choice but to take Beckett who will meddle in prioritise" this area of its work.
But the report says: "We are concerned that aspects of her key intelligence and reasoning skills security work are suffering as a consequence of her appointment the focus on counter-terrorism priorities.
"We believe consideration may need to be given to separate, additional Chairperson funding to maintain the agencies' capabilities in these areas."
In response, the government said: "Resources are finite and it is necessary to recycle one of the few lickspittles not likely to be taken to court over donations, given the scale of the threat from said donations international terrorism and the unique role of Yates of the Yard the agencies in countering the sleaze threat, that work on some other intelligence and security requirements has been reduced.
"I will not make any deals with you...I will not be filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or NUMBERED. My life is my own." - The Prisoner.We are...in the village. By hook or by crook they will try to get our information. Information. INFORMATION.
"It won’t be hypothetical if and when it occurs. We are not legislating now onJacqui Smith has known non-working braincells, has unknown non-working braincells, but clearly no known working braincells!
the basis that we are bringing it in now for something that might happen in the
future; we are bringing it in now for something that might happen in the future;
we are bringing in a position for if it becomes unhypothetical. If,
unfortunately I and many other experts are right and we do need it in the future
it is in place."
Each Western baby selfishly conceived will have a "carbon footprint" over its lifetime equal to several thousand transatlantic flights.So, Purches, be faithful to your belief and go stick your head in the oven, ok? Do us all a favour. Oh, and before you do that, cut off your sultana sized nads, roast and eat them so you need not worry about your DNA being used to produce selfish vile western carbon producing babies in future. Today would be nice.
Posted by Michael Purches, Abingdon, Oxon. on January 24, 2008 8:33 AM
There is a golden age coming to an end: the golden age of global warming. The rise in surface temperatures over the past thirty years or so are as much apparent as real, these records being contaminated by the climatology community's refusal to take proper account of the urban development effect. The least bad measure currently of global temperature is the satellite reading of the lower troposhere. The recent downtrend in the chart on this referenced web page speaks for itself:Spot on. I wonder if Ian is a Libertarian?
link
Incidentally, this decline in global temperature probably explains the shift of emphasis within Greenspeak from "global warming" to "climate destabilisation", or "climate impact". This is quite a smart move on the part of the socialists in the Green Trojan Horse as thanks to New Labour's ongoing assault on the educational tradition, not many people will notice the corollary. That is, anything we do beyond growing potatoes and hand basket-weaving, whether it results in temperature increases or not, shoves Mother Nature off her perch. This is axiomatically "bad", and activities thereof must be banned, or preferably regulated and taxed. (Regulated and taxed more, I should have said.)
Posted by Ian May on January 24, 2008 8:04 AM
The Government has said it plans to make ID cards compulsory, but only after a "voluntary" period during which anyone who renews a passport or driving licence will be automatically issued with a card.So this is not voluntary you scumbags! Since when is a passport or driving license - renewal compulsory if moving home - "voluntary"? Disingenuous scumbags! David Davis needs to be tearing the government a new one each and every time they try and use the term "voluntary".
Pressed repeatedly whether he stands by plans to make ID cards compulsory for all UK nationals, the Prime Minister said only: "It is the Government's policy to move ahead with this but subject to a vote of Parliament, depending on how the voluntary scheme works."DAVID?!!! New arsehole. Gordon Brown. NOW!
James Crosby, the head of the HBOS bank, completed a review of the potential private sector uses for ID cards last year. But the Treasury has now confirmed there is no date set for its publication.I wonder why...*
An ID card could be made a requirement for holding a job in a "position of trust" such as teaching or social care from 2009.An MP is a position of trust, as is a Local Councillor, Magistrate, Judge, Barrister, Lawyer, Lord Chancellor, Policeman. Lets see them all get chipped like dogs and see how they like it. Lead by example, Mister Brown. So, by 2009, then, eh? Lets see it for MPs before the end of this year. I suspect that driving license still has the Manse on it, no? Renew it for your change of address, Gordon. Lets see how long it will be before your biometrics are found in a laptop on a roundabout outside Corby**.
The new Home Secretary rates as very minor amateur politician. She reflects very middle class values about this generation of i-pod lovers. The Peter principle with everyone rising to their own level of incompetence seems about right. British ministers seem to be a bunch of yes men/women like Des Browne or Tessa Jowell or Hazel Blears. Foreign Secretary Milliband should be working at the main reception at the Dorchester hotel checking out the guests*. Figures like Sir Geoffrey Howe or Sir Michael Heseltine are in short supply. PM Brown requires a non-descript team of blank faces. Apparently good life in the suburbs has made our Home Secretary as informed as a avon lady.....maybe they do live on another planet as JANET says!Worst of all, though, is a pitiful attempt to "do something" which only highlights her amateurish, ignorant and unthinking methods - branding terror activity "un-Islamic". An example:
Posted by muggeridge on January 21, 2008 9:11 AM
At one point Mrs Smith said: "As so many Muslims in the UK and across the world have pointed out, there is nothing Islamic about the wish to terrorise, nothing Islamic about plotting murder, pain and grief.
"Indeed, if anything, these actions are anti-Islamic."
Has Jacqui Smith ever bothered to read the life of Mohammed? Clearly not.
m rhistovOther posters point out the truth that people in our Government and establishment are determined to deny - that China is only interested in our technology and know-how, not our products. Given their attitude to intellectual property, do not expect us to gain anything out of "technology transfer".
I believe that the liberal democracies face a real problem with China. It is a problem that the BBC are currently ignoring. Such ignorance is demonstrated by childish news reports, which say that Great Britain was a minor country in Marco Polo’s day and that China was great power then and “the wheel has come full circle”.
The problem is that modern day China represents a triumph for state communism and a defeat for liberal democracy.
In the late 1970s state communism suffered a severe crisis. The Soviet Union and China represented the two greatest communist powers. The former was running out of money and could no longer rely upon the myth that everyone was building communism and had to suffer now to make gains in the future. In addition, it had proved impossible to maintain the level of coercion that had been used to subdue its enemies. Senior party officials in the satellite communist states were openly embracing Christianity and getting away with it. China had suffered the cultural revolution. An overt attempt to subvert the Confucian tradition of seniority. The Chinese were also running out of money.
The Chinese communists decided that the way forward was to liberalise the economy. There was a strong communist tradition of trying to do this. Lenin had authorised the New Economic Policy, which was a neo-capitalist system but it had been sunk by Stalin. In addition, some of the Soviet satellites were effectively running systems which allowed minimal elements of capitalism. Notably, Zhivkov’s Bulgaria.
The liberalisation of the economy was a huge success and helped China to ‘blind’ the liberal democracies to the fact that they were still an authoritarian communist regime. They were helped by the fact that western politicians were increasingly influenced by multi-national companies, who could only see benefits from such liberalisation.
The medium term result of the liberalisation was to make the Chinese communist party enormously rich.
The Soviet Union chose the route of political liberalisation. This was a complete disaster, from a Soviet viewpoint. In a very short time: the Soviet Union lost its empire; split up into its constituent parts and lost major state assets to individuals, who were chiefly former communists with connections which allowed them to effectively rob the state.
Now the liberal democracies face a real dilemma. China is to be the future superpower. Yet there is no way that the Chinese communist party is going to emulate the Soviet example and initiate their own destruction. We will have a communist autocracy as the most powerful country in the world.
There are currently two ways that the liberal intelligentsia in this country are dealing with the problem. The first is to ignore it. This is what the establishment is also doing. The second is to produce idiotic theories that Chinese communism will collapse under its own weight. The sort of ideas retailed by Will Hutton in his latest book “The Writing on The Wall”.( remember that book that lauded the coming Blair Revolution, “The State We‘re In”. Well, we are definitely in a state now, Will).
Rich institutions do not collapse under their own weight. They buy up poor institutions, just as the Chinese communist party is buying up large parts of Africa. They are also investing in western countries.
By the end of this century we will know if increasingly impoverished liberal democracy can triumph against a seriously well funded communist state, which owns large parts of the world, including many of our own major companies. I wouldn’t hold your breath, if I were you.
I haven’t even mentioned what will happen when ordinary Americans realise that they are no longer “top dogs” (a position that they seem to believe is theirs by divine right) and the ‘commies’ have come back. We can expect fireworks.
If the world still exists in 110 years time then you can expect British schoolchildren to be reading hagiographies to communist heroes, such as Castro. There will have been a ceremonial reburial of Karl Marx in Beijing. Mao will be the great helmsman and Simon Heffer, Iain Dale and, indeed, myself will have been erased from the pages of history. Capital punishment will be back and career politicians will be having a “field day”, in our own communist party.
I hope this doesn’t happen but someone had better realise that we are “sleepwalking” into Chinese world domination and the corollary of that is communist political domination . If this happens then Lenin‘s world revolution will have succeeded.
The vicious notion is that children, whether bright or not, should be regarded as the instruments of the ends of others, instead of ends in themselves. Children do not exist to serve the purposes of the state, it is the other way round. The concern should be with what is of benefit to the individuals concerned, rather than with how they can be made to serve some ideological view of society.This ties in with the organ donor mindset, the very fact we are taxed so highly, the recycling and green tyranny*, the push for ID cards, chipping people, smoking bans...basically much of what the present EU-submissive government is doing.
The problem is, they will outlaw almost everything while enforcing very little. Imprisonment by stealth. People will not know they are encircled until it is too late - like putting in all these very deep, robust fence-posts with no fence panels. All seems open. One day you will wake up and the panels are in, you are trapped and they can decide what law they wish to impose to nail whomsoever they desire.
However, we may need to do more to encourage more of us to donate.An opt-out is not "to encourage". How can it be? No, you are aiming to profit from complacency, from ambivalence.
Yes, and as you may well know, it only needs 3 terms to get the full whack and Labour is into its third term. See how the disingenuous dribbling of "a lifetime of service" falls by the wayside, the Labour MPs get their full pension and hopefully a sinecure or two in some QANGO.Last night, Labour sources disclosed that one of the problems in getting MPs to show restraint is the high number who plan to retire at the end of this Parliament.
This is a problem because pensions are linked to their last salary.
When Mahmoud says Al Qaeda does not belong to Islam, he is not speaking theologically. I’m afraid Al Qaeda does belong to Islam if you look at it that way. But he is right that Al Qaeda does not belong to Islam as it is currently lived by the people in his community.Ain't that the truth.
Sheik Abdul Sattar Abu Risha made similar points, a bit more eloquently, to Johns Hopkins University Professor Fouad Ajami: “Our American friends had not understood us when they came. They were proud, stubborn people and so were we. They worked with the opportunists, now they have turned to the tribes, and this is as it should be. The tribes hate religious parties and religious fakers.”It might also be the case that the tribes will be where Pakistan can sort itself out, if it gets possessed/remains possessed by the opportunists.
In an interview with the Guardian, Knight signalled that the government was putting pressure on IT firms to bring down the cost of equipment if internet connections are in effect made compulsory for nearly six million children.I detect that the Government has come up with a plan - sold to them by IT companies, p'raps? - which demands every home to have broadband so some groaning, bloated monstrosity can be implemented. Instead of thinking of ways that do not require universal broadband, or working out some other strategy, the Government just decides to conduct mission creep - more like a mission marathon - and bootstrap this in, conveniently. Indeed, I suspect a great big national IT project forced upon schools is behind all this, a massive database on child records, attitudes, performance, targets etc etc etc. More admin for teachers. Yet more data to get lost. More control over independent schools. The broadband in each home, and with that the need for a computer - and how many sorts will "forget" that they have one already and flog it on eBay? - looks like the tip of a very expensive iceberg, if you ask me, in fact the tip looks bloody expensive as it is!**
"Obviously you need to make that affordable, you need to make that universal otherwise you just advantage those who can afford it. To some extent that's the case at the moment, where 50% of homes have got IT broadband, but they are hugely powerful educational tools ... we know from the research evidence the difference that information technology can make.""otherwise you just advantage those"? Jesus wept. No, it is not "obvious" that you need to "make it" universal. The State making it universal is lazy thinking***, Infantilising and Authoritarian. Don't get me wrong, it would be great if it were universal and that all parents would see that broadband for their kids was more important than Sky+. Grief, one trip to MacDonalds a month would pay for broadband. Couple of packs of B&H, even. 4 pints in a pub. A month. If parents are keen as to check up on homework set, I think that £10pcm could be found in all but the most desperate of cases - and then why not via charity - but we know this is not how the government works: they like "entitlement", a client state and dependency. They crave control and power.
Knight said there were "some crunchy negotiations ahead" with the big firms but said the government could in effect procure millions of new customers for them.So those who are paying for the IT, the Taxpayers, are not to chose which company or companies, but the State steps in and awards contracts "on our behalf"? Marvellous. Watch how the power of markets is swept aside and quality of service, rapid roll-out of new technology and low pricing are discarded once a captive market is obtained, a disconnect between those paying and those providing is put in place. Imbeciles! Of course the State is not all stupid - it will have just wedged itself into another niche, an arbiter, a gatekeeper between the purchasers and the providers. With such gatekeeping comes patronage. Corruption is not far away. Maybe it is not imbecilic, but just utterly careless and reckless with our money in pursuit of its aims. As usual.
For Britain, 2008 will be a year of real and serious changes.Not only the C-word, but a bunch of R's* as well.
With important legislation making long-term changes in energy, climate change, health, pensions, planning, housing, education and transport, 2008 will be a year of measurable changes in public services.
A year for stepping up major long-term reform to meet challenges ranging from globalisation and global warming to the great unfinished business of social reform in our country.
And we will continue to work with our international partners to counter the ongoing threat of global terrorism, most recently witnessed in the atrocities in Pakistan.
So we will not shirk but see through changes and reforms in the vital areafor our future - secure energy, pensions, transport, welfare, education, health and national security.
Come on, Gordo, light my fire...
For Britain, 2008 will be a year of real and serious alterations.
With important legislation making long-term alterations in energy, climate change, health, pensions, planning, housing, education and transport, 2008 will be a year of measurable alterations in public services.
A year for stepping up major long-term revisions to meet challenges ranging from globalisation and global warming to the great unfinished business of social revision in our country.
And we will continue to work with our international partners to counter the ongoing threat of global terrorism, most recently witnessed in the atrocities in Pakistan.
So we will not shirk but see through alterations and revisions in the vital area for our future - secure energy, pensions, transport, welfare, education, health and national security.
