Here’s an idea for making the goings-on in Parliament more accessible: podcast them.

Questions to ministers would be a good session to use it for. Set up an automated system to record the half-hour/hour long sessions of question times for the various different departments, encode them into MP3 files and make them available online. Set them up with categorised feeds so that listeners could subscribe to all of them or just the departments they’re interested in. This doesn’t just apply to the UK Parliament, of course: it would also be a useful service for the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly and London Assembly.

Turns out that the ever-innovative theguardianunlimited have this set up already for PMQs – search the iTunes podcast directory for “pmqs”. I guess they make it available manually, but I’d be interested to know otherwise.

Buckingham Palace is quite canny about the way it releases its royal spending figures. The BBC reports today:

The Queen and the Royal Family cost the UK taxpayer £37.4m in the last financial year, her financial public accounts reveal. The cost, equivalent to 62p per person in the UK, rose 4.2% over the previous year, accountants said.

By doing the “How much do they cost each person?” calculation (and that’s every man, woman and child, not every taxpayer), the cost seems very reasonable.

And yet the story seems to come across differently when we hear about MPs’ expenses – £80.8m in 2004-5 is the best figure I can find – when it’s made out to be a huge sum (and, of course, for most of us it is). Compare it with the Royal Family figure, though, and bear in mind that it’s paying for over six hundred of the blighters. Perhaps Parliament should adopt the Royals’ cost per person calculation: using the same population basis, it indicates that £1.33 from each person in this country funds MPs’ salaries and allowances. Suddenly it doesn’t seem to much – perhaps only proving you can do anything with statistics…

Ladies and gentlemen, David “Dave” Cameron.

Thank you, it’s lovely to be here. Now, I’d like to you about my cunning plan to sort out the Human Rights Act.

You may recall that we Conservatives previously suggested we’d scrap the Human Rights Act. This, it turned out, would be problematic as we back the European Convention on Human Rights. So, we’ve come up with a great way of resolving this: repeal the Human Rights Act, but replace it with something called the British Bill of Rights – a sort of “Human Rights Act”.

But our version would be different – oh yes. For a start, it wouldn’t apply to “humans” but to “British people”. No more of this Johnny Foreigner using our own laws against us nonsense. It will be for British people to use in British courts. By using the word “British” several times, we have convinced The Sun, formerly opposed to human rights, to back us. Clever, eh?

Now, I know what you’re thinking. The Human Rights Act is already a British law, codifying a largely British view of human rights, and what’s more the UK already has a Bill of Rights. Ours will be better than that, though. Ours will be a British Bill of Rights. There, I said it.

What will be in our British Bill of Rights? All the good stuff that makes us British. Obviously I can’t yet precisely say what this will be – these things have to be looked at – but I plan to set some lawyers on to the case. Lawyers are, of course, the best people to define Britishness, because having spent so much time in criminal courts they’re familiar with British life first hand. So big up the lawyers.

Some people – let’s call them pro-Europe crime-loving terrorists – will critcise me for being so vague. They may even suggest that this is a desperate attempt to have a policy on something without actually putting forward a proposal at all. Well tish, I say. Tish and pish. I shall deal with that criticism by giving an example of what I would change.

Section 12, for example, of the Human Rights Act 1998 enshrines Freedom of Expression into British law. This sort of recklessness allows Jonathan Ross to be rude about myself and Mrs Thatcher. Well that’s not very British, is it? So Section 12 would be replaced by something more precise, detailing rights and responsibilities. For example, “Subjects shall have the right to go to Wimbledon and to make lovely jam, and the responsibility not to say “wank” to the Leader of the Opposition on BBC One.” The current law is just too vague.

As it stands, the Human Rights Act upholds the rights of foreign criminals to murder us in our beds. I can’t remember which clause precisely does it, but we all know it does. My new British Bill of Rights will make clear – probably, once we’ve decided what’s in it – that we have the right not to be murdered in our beds by foreign criminals, and to demand that any violent death to which we find ourself subject should be at the hands of proper British criminals.

We need to reframe the law to promote a British view of rights, balancing liberty with security. These fancy-pants notions of inherent freedom confuse the public, encouraging them to think they have some sort of ingrained rights rather than passively accepting those the state chooses to give them. This sort of continental nonsense has no place in a country where hundreds of years of tradition dictate that people are ruled by their betters and their children ruled by the children of their parent’s betters, and their children ruled by the children of the children of their parent’s betters’ parents. Thank you.

Peter Black and Richard Allan have more.

It was one of the ironies of the end of the original run of Doctor Who in 1989 that the final serial should be called Survival. Watching the first couple of episodes this evening, I couldn’t help reading into it similarities with the new series that began 16 years on.

Survival has that very down-to-earth feeling that the current series pursues, trying to ground adventures in the real world. Ace returning to visit her friends in Perivale has strong parallels with Rose’s trips home. Sergeant Patterson even mentions that Ace’s mum reported her missing – just like Jackie Tyler in Aliens of London.

Superificial similarities between the Cheetah People and the Cat Nun Nurses in New Earth aside, there’s also a more refined portrayal of Anthony Ainley’s Master, who finds himself at one point in a London council flat: very Russell T. Davies, and very New Who.

Like all Doctor Who stories, it has its weaknesses, but the script is so strong that these are easily overlooked, resulting in probably the best story of Sylvester McCoy’s run. As is often noted – because it’s true – Survival is the pacifist antithesis of the “stand up and fight” message of the second Doctor Who serial (which introduced the Daleks), and as such can warm the cockles of wishy-washy liberals everywhere.