You may wonder what the presence of Tony Blair before a foreign affairs committee, EDF renewing the cable close to my house, and the official closure of the UK phone-hacking enquiry all have in common….but bear with me, for all will be revealed.

I was both amused and appalled at the ‘evidence’ given by former Prime Minister Tony Blair this morning to a Commons Committee. Not only did he fail to make any reference to oil or geopolitics, he referred throughout to the Arab Spring as if it might be a reality, as opposed to an invention of arrogant Western liberals, woefully ignorant of the ways and mores of Arabia. Over and over, however, he spoke quite happily about ‘replacing’, ‘getting rid of’, and ‘deposing’ leaders he described as dictators, one of whom – Gaddafi – he had gone to see, and overtly enlisted in the dual process of dumping Sadam Hussein of Iraq and controlling the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood.

In the event, what happened was that former relatively stable middle eastern States became anarchic, and both the Brotherhood and Islamism generally went from strength to strength. But even had the early Blair-Bush lerrv-in been a success, Moral Tone was here rationalising policies that followed long after he was forced to resign as a result of Gordon Brown’s blackmail, sorry, encouragement. He was effectively treating both his inquisitors and TV audience as complete numpties.

Nothing reflected this assumption of observer stupidity more than the Janet & John childlike sermons he gave out on the subject of “how to deal with the Gyppos”, which he did not of course say, but his every utterance betrayed that superiority complex all those who Beeleeeve possess. Here’s a typical extract:

“Look….when dealing with the Middle East….you see, look, the thing is…..you’ve got a quite different landscape compared to, say, the normal way in which dictatorship is overthrown elsewhere. On the one hand, one has the ordinary People clearly desperate to embrace Western democracy, but on the other you have Islamism which, you know, wants to replace one tyrant with their tyranny. So one has to balance the differences – and they really are major, I might add – when making the transition. It’s not as easy as it looks”.

My reactions to that scales-from-the-eyes analysis range from at best “no shit Sherlock?” to “how dare you – a failed barrister and peddler of soundbite bollocks – talk to me as if it was my first day in Kindergarten?”  Overlaying my response is the sense of tooth-rattling superficiality designed to evoke the noddy-dog response from the Sleeple…which of course it always did.
But remember: this is the man that came within a gnats of introducing and passing a Bill to lift radical Islam in Britain beyond the reach of egalitarian law.
The Bottom line? No principles and no respect.

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Yesterday, EDF cut off my electricity for six hours. No advance warning was given. The blokes doing the work blocked my single-track road, and at first refused to budge when I tried to leave. Only fierce looks and threats of high-level phone calls from your correspondent eventually got them to do so.
When I came back, they had run a bulldozer through my back garden (undoing hours of levelling work I’d undertaken during the Autumn) and nailed a guy-rope into the tree-stump right next to the restored barn. They claim it’s temporary.
Basically, they ran roughshod over my basic citizen rights. EDF is a private company these days, and is an aggressive takeover merchant that is, as the ironic saying has it, “growing by getting bigger”, owning as it does much of the UK’s electricity distribution. When State owned, this outfit was  a nightmare to deal with…but at least the old EDF always gave one a week’s warning about work, always told one of potential destruction involved in the works being undertaken, and always sent receipts confirming the power supplied and paid for. Today, the Eldefrancais do none of these things.

The Bottom line? No principles and no respect.

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All the major UK websites and press titles today carry the depressing and disturbing news that the the press phone-hacking enquiry is now at an end, and there will be no further charges because (the CPS alleges) ‘there is unsufficient evidence to ensure successful prosecutions”. It’s hard to know how to contain one’s rage in the face of such dissembling drivel.

1. Having taken Newscorp apart and landed two big fish (the more wriggly of whom managed to get back in the river and live to lie again) the CPS left dozens of guilty Mirror Group and Teletubby hacks alone to breathe again – and start suing all those bloggers who named and shamed them.
2. There is insufficient evidence because the guilty destroyed its virtual existence. I do sincerely hope that the CPS tried a tad harder when it comes to religious terrorists.
3. The Lord Levitate Enquiry ignored much of the evidence against the hackers, and chose instead to demonise the very blogosphere and liberal press sources that had been instrumental in unearthing the industrial scale invasion of citizen privacy for purely commercial gain in the first place.

Well, whatever lines the utterly politicised and corrupt CPS wants to draw under press criminality (while pursuing its kangaroo Court vendettas against the Enemies of Murdoch Alliance) the dedicated page Hackgate will continue at The Slog….and update its records in the hope that one day, a 21st Century Elliot Ness might appear with a legal remit to stop, search and question the Corporacrats with the same powers of prosecution as seem to apply to NVEs and residents of Croydon.

The bottom line? No principles and no respect

Amoral geopoliticians, mendacious multinational energy groups and media mogul Truth-mashers are running everything today….almost always to the detriment of the Citzenry who voted for their interests to come first.  This is what Blair, EDF and Newscorp have in common. This is what drives Camerlot’s Syria policy. It is what drags the French, kicking and screaming, into line on the War on Terror propaganda. Beyond the job of hunting and gathering munneee, all of these suspects have no principles, no ethics, and no respect for us.