27 December, 2008

Here they come

An extraordinary piece in the Telegraph, an interview with Andy Burnham. Mr Burnham, and this will shock some people, is a cabinet minister, with responsibility for culture and the media. One of the surprising parts is this: ‘Mr. Burnham also uses the interview to indicate that he will allocate money raised from the BBC’s commercial activities to fund other public-service broadcasting such as Channel Four.’

So: we pay for the BBC and if it does anything to make a profit this is allocated towards Mr. Ahmadinejad’s fee for his Christmas Message. I hope he is paid less than Jonathan Ross.

But the really gripping part was Mr. Burnham’s views on the internet. ‘If you look back at the people who created the internet they talked very deliberately about creating a space that Governments couldn’t reach. I think we are having to revisit that stuff seriously now. It’s true across the board in terms of content, harmful content, and copyright. Libel is [also] an emerging issue.’

I think we can see where this is going, can’t we? They will use the excuse of child porn or some such to enrage the Sun and the Mail, and then restrictions will be quietly extended to anyone posting anti New Labour ‘unhelpful’ propaganda. At least we know where the battle lines are.

Just to be clear exactly where this blog stands, Mr Burnham is a diminutive junior fascist, probably bullied at school. His boss has wrecked the British economy and will be seen as the worst Prime Minister of modern times.

In order also to fall foul of the pornography excuse I may publish lists of body parts in later posts.

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