Conservatives don’t like Europe.  In fact, they don’t like abroad generally.  However, it is also clear that they don’t care about Britain’s place in the world.

Hence, the cuts in the BBC World Service.

Jeremy Paxman in today’s Guardian sums it up:

In 2010, five UK police officers lost their lives in the course of duty or on their way to or from being on duty.  All five died as a result of road traffic accidents.  They are remembered here.

Contrast this with the experience in the United States:

“In just twenty-four hours, at least eleven cops were shot around the country. The most recent incident at a fugitive’s house in St. Petersburg, Florida, left two officers dead and a U.S. marshal wounded Monday. Hours earlier, an Oregon officer was critically wounded after being shot multiple times during a traffic stop. Monday’s violence followed a bloody Sunday that left an officer in Indianapolis critically wounded during a traffic stop shooting, four officers in Indianapolis wounded after a gunman opened fire in a precinct and two more officers in Washington wounded in a shootout in a Walmart parking lot.”

According to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, over the last ten years there have been on average 163 US police officers killed each year, 16,041 injured and 58,821 assaulted. 

Thank goodness the UK is so much less violent than the US.

Hat-tip: Team Cymru

err ……. Yes!

We are told that there will be a revamped National Cyber Security Strategy published in the next few months.  This will explain what the £650 million of new money allocated for cyber security in the spending review will actually be used to deliver (I understand that Whitehall Departments are still bickering over who will get their hands on this money - the Ministry of Defence and the Home Office both believe it should come to them rather than the Cabinet Office).

However, I wonder whether it will also propose legislation.  In the United States a number of members of Congress are putting forward what they are calling the “Homeland Security Cyber and Physical Infrastructure Protection Act of 2010”.  This will give a statutory basis to the Office of Cybersecurity & Communications based in the Department of Homeland Security and would, in particular, create a new Cybersecurity Compliance Division to oversee the establishment of performance-based standards responsive to the particular risks to the .gov domain and critical infrastructure networks.

This is an interesting model.  In the UK, the Government bodies that are responsible for protecting the critical national infrastructure do not have a statutory basis and do not have any formal powers.  In my view, this hampered the effectiveness of the old National Infrastructure Security Coordination Centre, which is now incorporated into the Centre for the Protection of the National Infrastructure and falls under the ambit of the Security Service.

I have long advocated that underpinning the “voluntarist” and consensual framework Government needs to have a statutory frmaework that – in extremis – can be used to require Government agencies and those private companies that supply much of the national infrastructure to meet certain minimum standards and can direct action effectively in the event of some major problem arising.

This was drawn to my attention …..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eBT6OSr1TI&feature=player_embedded

The House of Lords is about to start its consideration of the Bill to cut the number of MPs in the House of Commons by around 8%.  So far the Conservative Coalition have resisted suggestions that if the Bill is passed the number of Ministers sitting in the House of Commons should be reduced pro rata.  Such a reduction would prevent increased domination of the House of Commons by the Executive – a point argued in the recent report of the House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution.

Meanwhile, over the weekend in France President Sarkozy has restructured his Government and cut the number of Ministers by a quarter from 40 to 30.

So the French President has shown that it can be done, will the Conservative Coalition make a similar commitment?

Probably not, while they have to keep all those Ministerial slots available for their LibDem “friends”.

My invitation to attend the Nobel Prize presentations in Oslo seems to have gone astray again.

However, perhaps that’s just as well.

The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that:

“This weekend, staff at CPJ received a personal invitation to attend the Oslo awards ceremony for Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo. The invite, curiously, was in the form of an Adobe PDF document. We didn’t accept. We didn’t even open the e-mail. We did, however, begin analyzing the document to see was really inside that attachment, and what it was planning to do to our staff’s computers.

NGOs and journalists who work or report on human rights issues in China now regularly receive e-mailed attachments, often PDFs, which on closer examination prove to be malicious code sent from unknown sources. These attachments contain embedded programs that execute when the file is opened, and take advantage of local security flaws to install concealed software on their victims’ machines.

This secret software can delete or create files, commandeer the computer for cyber-attacks on other targets, or just sit and record keystrokes and network traffic, which it will then report to a remote “command-and-control” server elsewhere on the Net. A computer with this malware installed is an open book to whoever is controlling the program.

Malware is a problem for everyone. We’re all used to shady characters spamming us e-mail with enticing subject titles. But vulnerable journalists and activists receive far more sophisticated, customized messages that use narrow intelligence about their contacts and interests in order to trick their recipients into opening them. This Nobel e-mail, for instance, was sent from a colleague at a known NGO who I’ve personally met and who has invited CPJ to events in Oslo previously. The PDF, when opened, showed a legitimate-looking invitation with the organization’s logo and the signature of the NGO’s founder.”

I would probably have opened the attachment without thinking, despite being aware of the dangers. What would you have done?

As my previous post reported, there is jus a little uncertainty about what the detailed outcome will be of the Shadow Cabinet elections that are about to take place. However, I have spoken to a large number of delegates today about how they would like the top few jobs distributed.
There was unanimity that people want to see David Miliband remain in the Shadow Cabinet and after much discussion the following consensus emerged on the ideal line-up.
And here are the top four posts:
Shadow Foreign Secretary – David Miliband;
Shadow Chancellor – Yvette Cooper;
Shadow Home Secretary – Ed Balls;
Shadow Costitutional Affairs (opposite Nick Clegg) – Alan Johnson.

You will have seen the adverts:

Apparently, there is a new Sky TV programme called “An Idiot Abroad” in which Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant send someone who hates foreigners on various missions abroad.

I am all in favour of satire, but I didn’t know that Iain Duncan-Smith was auditioning for the Foreign Office.

Or have I got the wrong end of the stick?