Recently by Tom Scotney

The legal system is cold, heartless and takes no account of the feelings of victims and the vulnerable.

Thank god for that.

We've heard a lot about respect in recent days over the Lisbon Treaty - which hopes to reform the EU and which was approved by parliament yesterday.

Gordon Brown said he respected the Irish people's decision to reject the treaty, which by all rights should leave it dead in the water. He added he had to respect the wishes of other countries that approved the treaty, and also respect the House of Commons, which also approved the treaty.

Here's an idea. How about some respect for the people of Britain?

I bet you're thinking to yourself, this has all been done before. Complaining about the Olympics is nothing new. Well I don't care, I'm going to do it again.

The Olympics is a gloriously obscene, corrupt, grotesque, pointless, wasteful woolly white mammoth of an event.

I was at a meeting of the West Midlands Police Authority today, the body that oversees the actions of the local force. A group of top cops and politicians all talking about how the police force will pay for the extra effort of the London 2012 Olympics.

What a waste of Midlanders' money. And what a waste of police officers - officers previously in action in Birmingham will be taken down to London to help out the Met.

I've written before here about extremist politics and the oxygen of publicity when the BNP capitalised on the 40th anniversary of the 'Rivers of Blood' speech to put across their dubious creed. But there are worse groups than the BNP.

Earlier this week at Birmingham University, there was a bit of a kerfuffle when an officer elect for the students guild promoted an event organised by the extremist group Hizb-ut-Tahrir. (Post article here, thanks to the excellent Ministry of Truth blog where I heard about it first)

I spent this afternoon with BNP leader Nick Griffin watching a re-enactment of Enoch Powell's infamous "rivers of blood" speech. Not for fun, obviously. I'm a political enthusiast, yes, but my Sundays are more likely to be taken up by the Hollyoaks omnibus than a tricky political tract and hanging out with the BNP.

It was work of course. As expected, the 40th anniversary of the incendiary speech that killed Powell's career and has tainted race relations ever since brought out the political people, from both right and left. And the Birmingham Post was right there to cover it.

The story of West Bromwich East MP and e-government minister Tom Watson and his family's work in politics - netting them a total of £300,000 a year between them - appeared in the Birmingham Post's sister paper the Sunday Mercury a week or so ago.

Taxpayers pay MP and his family £300,000

It flew under the radar a bit. Until, that is, it was picked up by blogger and scourge of politicians Guido Fawkes, who claimed the story as a 'Sunday Sleaze Special' and described the Watson family as setting a record 'for snouts in the trough'