Krishnan Guru-Murthy usually makes a competent stand-in for Jon Snow on Channel 4 News, but he has his immature moments and last night he became quite hysterical during the interview attached to this report with Greg Avery of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC).

Avery is not allowed to answer any questions until he accepts that his organisation is no different to ‘Islamic terrorists’. And it’s not enough to answer, ‘Yes of course I do, I’ve done that hundreds of times,’ when asked if he condemns threats to a nursery serving workers at Huntingdon Life Sciences, the laboratory made famous following its infiltration by protestors who filmed abuses and secured the temporary revocation of its licence. ‘I’m struggling to see the difference between you and the Islamic clerics we ask whether they will turn in Islamic terrorists,’ says Krishnan Guru-Murthy. A sentiment Avery reasonably rejects, given his organisation’s killed nobody.

But when Guru-Murthy counters with: ‘It’s defined in law as terrorism; it’s not my definition, that’s the law of the land,’ he’s let down by the very next news item. We’re back to Walter Wolfgang, the 82 year-old heckler who really has been held under terrorism laws. And now, echoing my own thoughts, we’re asked if current definitions of terrorism aren’t just a little too wide with none of this ‘that’s the law of the land’ nonsense.

As Avery repeated points out, Krishnan Guru-Murthy’s determination to apply an increasingly meaningless label to his interviewee can only dumb-down an important and often complex moral debate. It’s a debate we’re going to have to have sometime, so we best end the name calling sooner rather than later and start addressing the real issues.

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‘…there’s a tendency to panic, particularly on terrorism and liberty, that causes the government to forget the bigger picture and drop principle…’

It’s sad that as I wrote that Blair should stay on (albeit for purely tactical reasons) yesterday, I felt a need to qualify support in the face of continued threats to civil liberties. But what’s tragic is that an 82-year-old who joined the Labour Party in 1948 was that day thrown out of conference for heckling (he was unconvinced by Jack Straw’s claims on democracy in Iraq). More importantly he was ‘issued with a section 44 stop and search form under the Terrorism Act’ (whatever that might be).

It’s not always wrong to throw hecklers out of meetings, but the response needs to be proportionate. A group’s a right to meet productively has to be balanced against others’ rights to protest and disrupt. On occasion it’s right to remove people from the scene and, but for that reference the Terrorism Act, it might have been possible to put this incident down to over zealous bouncers. Hecklers can be removed, if need be, for the relatively minor offence of being disorderly.

By invoking the Terrorism Act, the police illustrated a propensity to reach for the big guns. They proved that they cannot be trusted to use their new powers responsibly and that the government’s response to terrorism includes ill thought out panic measures that pose very real threats to our civil liberties.

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I’m not a particularly big fan of Blair, whose style tends to grate, but I should get over that. The main praise that comes to mind is that he’s done a great job of keeping the Tories out, which is a bit negative. But when you consider how bad things were under the Tories and how much worse they’d be (given that they’re now even wackier than before) keeping the Tories out is a big deal. And he’s hit them so hard that ‘Conservative values’ tend to be expressed hysterically (think Daily Mail) and are generally regarded as the products of elderly eccentricities or thinly disguised racism, misogyny and homophobia.

On the positives, it’s generally hard to fault Blair’s intentions but delivery constantly disappoints and there’s a tendency to panic, particularly on terrorism and liberty, that causes the government to forget the bigger picture and drop principle. Where the government has done well, it’s easy to credit Gordon Brown and I’d welcome a Brown administration. I don’t reckon he’d be that different from Blair, but I’d expect a bit more coherence and for government to raise its game in terms of delivery.

But what’s the hurry? The next general election is unlikely to be before 2009 and the electorate, with its famously short memory, will base its decision on events from 2007 onwards. So much of the opposition to government has been personalised (think Backing Blair) that Blair’s retirement (once he’s beaten Thatcher’s record, perhaps) will take the wind (breeze?) out of many opponents’ sails. For this same reason it doesn’t really matter that the Tories are currently leaderless. The soap opera’s going to have to take a back seat, despite Brown giving an heir apparent’s speech to conference.

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Last Days can be hard work – walkouts aplenty – but there are rewards for those prepared to relax into this portrait of a world that’s stopped. It’s the world of an apparently mad rock star who’s bored with it all and so contemptuous of the hangers-on that surround him, he speaks (mumbles) only to himself.
A ponderous 7 out of 10.
Director: Gus Van Sant……Starring: Michael Pitt
Red Eye……King’s Game (Kongekabale)

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There’s something strangely satisfying about having the place where you live slagged off by an almost famous author. And it’s an author I almost know. Mike Gayle and I have the same degree and were contemporaries at Salford University, not that we knew each other.

But that small connection is enough to ensure I’ve followed his career. It’s not been enough to make me buy any of his books because he’s very much a genre writer. Nothing wrong with genre fiction, of course, but chick-lit (albeit from a male perspective) isn’t me. I guess the closest I get is an okay Tony Parsons (and Parsons is a poor man’s Nick Hornby).

Mike’s whipped the South Manchester Reporter into a tizzy with the accusation that Chorlton’s a bit smug. The Reporter even followed with a second piece (not online) in which someone complained that Chorltonians drink too much imported lager, like Kronenbourg (which is brewed in Reading). This envious bitchiness is nothing new. For example, all of Katharine’s work colleagues have slagged Chorlton off at different times. And all of them have separately owned up to trying to buy in Chorlton. And all of them regularly socialise in Chorlton, which doesn’t suffer from hoards of drunken kiddies throwing up everywhere at weekends (like the city centre) and isn’t dominated by national pub companies’ concept bars (like Didsbury). And there are no students to speak of.

The thing is it can be hard not to be appear smug about living in Chorlton-cum-Hardy. We Chorltonians have good reason to be pleased with ourselves and being too obviously pleased can look smug. We can’t help it if our quality of life is so much greater than everyone else’s. It’s hard to imagine, but think how nice it would be if only everyone (not just we Chorltonians) could be so pleased with their choice of neighbourhood.

No doubt Mike could live in Chorlton if he chose but, I recall from previous interviews, he prefers to live close to his parents in Birmingham (altogether now; ‘ahhh, bless him!’). Mike’s previous novels are set in London, Brand New Friend is set in Chorlton. So why not set this one in Birmingham?

‘I was always envious of the fabulous lifestyle in Chorlton,’ he tells the Reporter. ‘In Birmingham we haven’t really got anything like it,’ he admits.

If only Brummies could be pleased with where they live. Oh yeah, and Mike hasn’t updated his publicity shot in more than a decade, so I reckon he’s as bald as I am.

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Wes Craven’s slash horror pedigree pays off in the end for this by-the-book thriller, which makes for an excellent Friday night popcorn movie. But having glimpsed the terrorist’s target performing on TV, it’s hard not to hope they’ll get him.
A unchallenging 7 out of 10.
Director: Wes Craven……Starring: Rachel McAdams……Cillian Murphy……Brian Cox
Crash……Last days

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Those of us lucky enough to be born well after the Second World War could be forgiven for thinking that the Allies were motivated by a desire to save Jewish people from genocide.

Today it’s inconceivable that a British Prime Minister would dismiss Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia as a, ‘quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing’, but Chamberlain did. Britain declared war because it had no choice.

Yet collectively Britons (and others in the West) decided that the war would be for so much more. British soldiers returned home and kicked Churchill’s Tories out demanding a new world order. It’s hard to believe today, but the Beveridge Report was sold on newsstands and became a bestseller.

Attitudes to war changed too and this where Wiesenthal comes in. The Allies were often lax in tracking down war criminals and Wiesenthal picked up the slack bringing more than a thousand war criminals to justice. Hopefully Wiesenthal’s legacy will be to ensure that those who continue to commit crimes against humanity will forever after live in fear of being brought to justice.

And just today a Serb accused of war crimes is to be deported from Canada, so perhaps that hope is to be realised.
What the war was for

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Christmas is coming early and I’m jumping on the bandwagon, delighted to bring you a fabulous opportunity to get your hands on a set of Little Britain Dolls (or perhaps just the one). Not in the shops just yet, you can order Little Britain Dolls here at GadgetStuff and as you’d expect they are already available on eBay.

There are five in the set and top of the range is Lou and Andy, who I’ve now heard are named after Lou Reed and Andy Warhol. (I can see it now.) They’re 12 inches high and say stuff like ‘What a kerfuffle!’ and ‘Don’t like it! Ah want that one!’

More vocal is Vicky Pollard who says, ‘No but yeh but no what happened was, was you know the Redmond sisters, they found a verruca sock in the girls bogs and put it in Carrie’s bag and she completely had an eppy and turned up to Carmel Sharma’s party with a compass and stabbed Carmel Sharma, and anyway Shelly Bentley gave Craig Harmen a blowie in the shallow end for a bite of his Funny Foot’ or, when she’s calmer, ‘Shaddup cos I never done nuthin’ nor nuthin’ and anyone says I did is well gonna get beatens’. Enjoy.

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An Altmanesque exploration of LA’s clashing sub-cultures that appears to be about race, but is actually much more. People judge each other, live up to their stereotypes (often knowingly), but are occasionally surprised or challenged. Perhaps surprisingly, Crash is never judgemental. It observes rather than lectures.
A must see 9 out of 10.
Director: Paul Haggis……Starring: Don Cheadle……Sandra Bullock……Matt Dillon……Brendan Fraser……Ryan Phillippe
Frida……Red Eye

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Reading that Trinny, as in Trinny and Susannah, has fessed-up to spending £1200 on tights in two months immediately led me to ask: ‘just how many pairs of tights does £1200 get you?’

Not surprisingly, that turns out to be one of those ‘how long is a piece of string?’ questions. Bottom of the range Perfectly Natural tights by Pretty Polly which come with non slip sole, so you can wear them with sandals and other slip on shoes (apparently) at eight denier(?) these tights provide a flawless, yet natural look that can be worn with utter confidence. Sounds good to me and at £3.50 a time £1200 buys 342 pairs (plus £3 change) and Figleaves offer free delivery and £20 off your first order. That’s five or six (mostly six) pairs of tights a day.

At the other end of the scale are La Perla Hosiery’s Puccini crystal tights. Denier undisclosed (I expect it’s off the scale), these all over the leg (eh? aren’t all tights ‘all over the leg’ and isn’t that what makes less sexy than stockings?) tights offer a chic, subtle, polka dot pattern. At £58 a pair, they must be really special. Nevertheless, £1200 still buys twenty pairs, so I imagine Trinny’s to be custom-made and she must, at the very least, be following trends set by our boys in Iraq and have them silver plated.

I suspect I speak for many though when I say you can’t beat a good stockings (not hold-ups) and suspender set.

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