Sham Liberty

I must be a masochist. Having switched off the faction leaders' brain-deadening presentations, I later watched part of 'Question Time', a programme chaired by one of the Dimblebys, the royal family of BBC TV, in which a panel of public or semi-public persons answers questions from an audience carefully selected to exclude anyone with above-average intelligence, from a pool already self-selected from among those who do not have a life.

The other panellists included the Labour dauphin aptly named Balls, UK Independence Party Euro-MP Nigel Farrage - who was oddly muted - and the Tory Shadow Education Secretary Michael Gove. Then there was the gamine Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, a charity that says it is devoted to 'Protecting Civil Liberties' and 'Promoting Human Rights'. In fact, under Chakrabarti, it has become the leading advocate of unchecked immigration by those seeking to improve their economic lot without discarding the cultural deformations that made their country of origin a shit-hole, with an understandable bias in favour of those, like her parents, from the Indian sub-continent.

So, what did this champion of liberty have to say about the Tories' manifesto commitment to devolution? A bad idea, she said, because maybe somewhere British National Party members might form a majority. In the context, she was supporting the Labour Party view that only an omni-present central government could produce the 'right' results.

That's the Labour party that has abolished habeas corpus, the foundation-stone of civil liberties, eroded the right to trial by jury, permitted the privileged to prevent the exercise of freedom of speech and has presided over the most corrupt administration since Lloyd George's post-Great War government.

Nice one, Shami.

Gove just managed to get out a comment that the Tory policy was designed precisely to diminish the power of the self-annointed like Chakrabarti before Dimbleby cut him off. Not a matter for discussion old chap. Musn't break ranks in the presence of the plebs.

All in all, an encapsulation of all that makes British politics so contemptible, and British society such an oxymoron.