I Can Swear If I Want To

I am a great fan of Janet Daley and read her articles in the Sunday Telegraph avidly. Janet is a Tory supporter but what helps to make her interesting is that she is originally an American and used to be a socialist. Her background therefore enables her to see things from a different perspective to most of us. It was a surprise therefore to read her blog in the Telegraph this afternoon in which she maintains a lot of Tories are extremely difficult to get on with because of their Mitchell like attitude and that it is the Tory modernisers who are the worse because most of them are toffs. Janet goes on to say that Labour members are infinitely more polite and likeable as people. My experience of politicians is nowhere near as extensive as Janet's but my take on them is that they are all as equally unlikeable as each other and can only think that Tory politicians behave in the way they do with her because they find her, as one well known political editor of a national newspaper told me unkindly, "Janet is barking mad".  Whether Mitchell told the Downing Street Gate policeman he was a 'pleb' or not is frankly neither here nor there but it is Mitchell's appallingly arrogant behaviour that deserves censure and he should resign as a result. Someone in Mitchell's position should set an example. The other thing that rings a wrong note in this affair is that under the Public Order Act the policeman could apparently have arrested Mitchell for swearing at him. Why shouldn't we be able to swear at policemen or anybody else for that matter? What puts a policeman above the rest of us that we all have to bow and scrape to them. I think it was a Labour measure that brought in this law and like a lot of Labour restrictions on the freedom of the individual it should be abolished. It was Blair who was responsible for bringing in law after law restricting our freedoms in order to demonstrate that Labour was even tougher on law and order issues than the Tories. He hoped that by donning some Tory clothes those on the left of the Tory party would continue voting for him and much to my amazement sufficient numbers did just and thus enabled him to win three elections. Blair is now trying to ensure that his son Euan is given a safe Labour seat at the next election so that the Blair dynasty lives on. Yuk. You can fool some of the people .............