She's Got A Little List

Our charming and talented Secretary for the Prosecution of Extraneous Commoners and the Termination of Rebellious Entities has brought off another triumph, this time over her list of sixteen people who have been banned from entering the country, which she published so that people in Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, Israel and so forth "could better understand what sort of behaviour Britain was not prepared to tolerate". There is another list of six more people who have been banned from entering the country on the same grounds, but Agent Smith has decreed that publishing this list would not be in the public interest; perhaps because the prohibition helps to give the whole exercise its characteristic New New Labour bouquet of a foot being pointlessly shot at and then arbitrarily chewed.

Anyway, one of the names on Agent Smith's published list was that of Michael Savage, né Michael Weiner, who has responded by calling Agent Smith a lunatic and threatening a lawsuit. Savage, who has the customary American difficulty in telling England apart from the United Kingdom, regards it as defamatory for Smith to lump him in with "skinheads who are killing people in Russia" and "mass murderers who kill Jews on buses"; though what he thought about being lumped in with solid American citizens like Fred Waldron Phelps and a former Great Sheety Conehead of the Ku Klux Klan is, regrettably, not recorded. Savage states that he has "never avowed violence"; which, if true, makes him one of the very few right-wingers to have refrained from supporting the Iraq mission at its most accomplished or the kind of mass murderers who kill Palestinians in schools and hospitals. This being the case, Agent Smith's characterisation of Savage as someone "who has fallen into the category of fomenting hatred, of such extreme views and expressing them in such a way that it is actually likely to cause inter-community tension or even violence" becomes immediately understandable.

Savage's lawsuit, if it goes ahead, could be a bountiful source of good clean fun over the months till Daveybloke takes over; but Savage is white, American and a public figure, not just another Pakistani student. Whether Agent Smith gets lost in a reshuffle or snatches a typical New New Labour victory by caving in and then lying about it, I fear the matter will not go far.