I have a piece on Comment Is Free about Burnham’s proposals for smokers.

It’s clear now that my blogging days are over.There’s a number of reasons, of course, but primarily the need to avoid repetition – not just of my own work, but what others write too – becomes exponentially more challenging with every post. Like so many others before me, I’ve said what I wanted to say in this format. I don’t have enough material in me to sustain a blog of my own any longer.

Thanks for all your support and encouragement, comments, opinions and everything else. It’s been wonderful.

Caught briefly on the radio – the Government intends to use Emergency powers to bail out feckless, useless councils who’ve found themselves utterly unprepared for snow by raiding the grit and salt supplies of useful, competent well prepared councils who’ve still got supplies.

If this doesn’t entirely sum up the ‘you have something we want, so we’re going to take it’ approach to governing that we suffer, what does? Just be glad they’re not using Emergency Powers to confiscate grit from private companies.

Regretting spending my lunch break listening in to PMQs. Surely the point of this particular pantomime is to get the Prime Minister to answer questions. When this is attempted, the responses usually take the form of, “You mentioned the NHS? Well, here’s a barrage of statistics about how great the NHS is under my mighty rule!”

Today? Today this pretence of answering questions was utterly abandoned. Brown’s responses to Cameron were pure attack – ranting about Tory policies and plans, rebuking Cameron with the PMQ’s equivalent of “Oh yeah? Well YOU SMELL.”

Controversial, I know, but shouldn’t the speaker have the authority to slap Brown a bit for this? Isn’t that his job?

Coming soon to a Airport near you – Your naked body on a computer screen. As someone who’ll never be subject to these full body scanners, Gordon Brown has pledged his full support to the roll-out of these machines to every airport in the country – presumably focus groups are pointing to this as being a vote winner. In itself that’s horrifying enough.

And, as if to point out what I think most people already know about Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrats have added their support too, complaining that they should have been rolled out sooner. Thanks Chris.

It’s 2010 now. My dad used to tell me that by this time they expected us all to have flying cars and all that sort of jazz. Instead of that rather cheerful and optimistic vision of the future, what we have instead is onerous queuing, being herded through checkpoints by uniformed goons and  now the possibility that you’ll be randomly selected to be stripped naked by an electromagnetic scanner.

Bin Laden was reported as saying his mission was to destroy liberty in the West. I’d say he’s done pretty well. I was thinking recently about the Twin Towers atrocity and how, even then, we knew that this somehow heralded the start of much darker times. This last decade has felt obsessed with muslims, terrorism, war and oil and then, in the end, economic crisis. The result has been a monumental enlargement of the Government and its power – and almost no discussion or debate around this in mainstream politics. It’s difficult to be optimistic.