With Bush and Blair gone (well I haven’t heard a murmur from Bush but Blair keeps cropping up like a jack-in-the box and I suspect has a considerable malign influence on all of this) I hope from what people have said that the “war on terror” had matured. Now the British government has revived it with a vengeance and a price tag to boot.
Hazel Blears (an arch-Blairite) is mixing it with Muslim communities deciding who or who not to talk to. If she doesn’t like the answer she moves on to someone else who might say what she wants to hear. When Brown first met Bush he seemed to be going out of his way to change things with the recognition that vilifying the whole Muslim community was likely to be counterproductive. But here we are again.
There’s a proposal to track everyone and everything on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. No doubt someone will be reading this blog. I was born the same year as Winston Smith, 1941, but it’s taken a little longer than Orwell envisaged as 1984 to reach this state.

Haaretz reports that Israel received an apologetic note from the British government saying that because of the changed climate legislation couldn’t be passed to protect Israeli personnel connected with the war from individual prosecution. Why should it still want to? What message does that give to to us, not just the Muslim community. This government under Brown continues to keep looking in the wrong direction. Instead of looking in Muslim institutions, Face Book or Twitter the need is all the more urgent to stop the atrocities committed against Muslims. Maybe they’ll learn that this is the recruiting agent for counter terrorism. Maybe, maybe not.