An email has zoomed around the world and popped into my inbox – which admittedly would be more impressive if it hadn’t been sent by the person sitting next to me.
It links to a clip on YouTube featuring yesterday’s debate between London mayoral candidates Boris Johnson and Brian Paddick on the BBC Asian Network (pop fact: I went to primary school with one of the Asian Network’s presenters).
Boris tries to label Brian (who has three decades’ experience in the police force) as soft on crime – only to have to eat his words once challenged.
Here’s the clip:
I like the “Brian Paddick is the only candidate with a proven record of fighting crime” bit at the end – it makes him sound like Batman. Meanwhile, at stately Wayne Manor…
There was good news this morning when the High Court ruled that the Serious Fraud Office’s decision – under pressure from the Government – to drop its investigation into the Al-Yamamah arms deal between BAE Systems and Saudi Arabia was “unlawful”.
“The case was between two campaign groups and the director of the SFO. It concerned the legality of a decision made by the director of the SFO.
“BAE Systems played no part in that decision.”
The same article mentions BAE’s earlier position on the inquiry:
BAE argued that the SFO probe could “jeopardise” both this deal and “seriously affect” relations with the Saudi kingdom.
So they argued that the probe was a bad idea, but “played no part” in the decision to end it.
If I blog that the Government should do something and then they do it, I may or may not have played a part in that decision. If I were to write to the Government and ask they do something and then they do it, I may or may not have played a part in that decision – it certainly increases the likelihood that I have.
Now, given BAE’s closeness to Government, did no-one from BAE ever moan about this probe? It’s possible. But if they did, did they still “play no part” in the decision to drop the inquiry?
I was so busy thinking about how reprehensible it was of Labour to double the tax rate for low-earners yesterday (which I blogged about last year, including this telling quote from Gordon Brown), I completely failed to notice that it was this blog’s birthday. Happy birthday, blog.
As is now traditional, anniversary day (or, in this case, the day after) is the one day of the year when we do blog stats here. So here we go.
Previous three years’ figures are in brackets, last year’s first.
2 (2, 2, 2): number of servers this site has been hosted on
2 (2, 2, 2): number of blogging applications used
977 (873, 588, 226): total number of posts
1,518 (1,350, 774, 444): total number of comments
1.55 (1.55, 1.32, 1.96): average number of comments per post
269 (259, 192, 119): number of number plates spotted (playing since May 2004 – may be time to give up)
96,335 (70,993, 43,016, 6,322): total unique hits (counting since May 2004)
Top seven referring websites (excluding search engines):
As these are “all time” rankings, they do run the risk of changing less and less each year. Here then are what Google Analytics reckons are the same rankings for the last year.
Top seven referring websites (excluding search engines):
3: eurovision 2007 (and it’s nearly that time again)
2: clocks go forward 2008
1: clocks go forward
Phew! Those are probably the measurements to use in future as they’re marginally more interesting (in the way that having your smallest toe amputated is marginally more interesting than losing the fourth one).
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