A Labour Moderate

I am sure we all remember the snooper's charter, which will keep us even safer than MI5, MI6, Saudi Arabia's UK-enhanced interrogators and the Bullingdon Club's extrajudicial assassination programme have already made us. A previous version of the bill was blocked during the last parliament by the Liberal Democrats, who only spent five years in office and thus had insufficient time to sell out on that issue along with all the others. Now, of course, the mad old cat lady in the Home Office has at her disposal an absolute parliamentary majority, with the only potential rebels being a few "populist" clowns like the David Davis publicist David Davis. Hence the only real problem for the new, testosterone-pumped version of the bill is how to manage Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition; accordingly, the mad old cat lady has organised a neat little cross-bench stitch-up. The chair of the committee charged with scrutinising the bill, appointed by the mad old cat lady herself in order to prevent any conflict of interest, is a former security minister for that noted friend of civil liberties, Gordon Brown; a former chair of the intelligence and security committee when dossiers were being sexed-up under the Reverend Blair; and a board member at Thales, which manufactures surveillance equipment and can doubtless provide the same quality of disinterested advice on security as the private healthcare companies did on the NHS. In short, a Labour moderate.