"10 foreign nationals, who the Home Office says pose a threat to national security, were detained in the UK, pending deportation" – yes, we’re deporting people to be tortured.

If you can’t see why it’s wrong to deport foreigners, even dodgy ones whose opinions you disagree with, to uncivilised hellholes where they torture and murder people for having opinions that the government disagrees with, then there’s no hope for you. Even if we have procured lying guarantees from said uncivilised torturers and murderers that these particular individuals won’t be tortured or murdered…

To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, if you’re willing to sacrifice liberty for security, I hope you and your family suffer a horrible death at the hands of terrorists.

British Airways are undeniably an incompetent company. If I ran an airline and my contract caterers went on strike then I’d call up Pret a Manger or M&S and order 100,000 sandwiches, rather than leave long-haul passengers hungry and angry. And then cancel the caterers’ contract and sue them for my expenses…

Even so, British Airways’s employees appear to be marginally worse than their management. Going out on strike on behalf of work-shy tossers who not only thorougly deserved to be sacked [*], but who weren’t even employed by the same company, is utterly pisstaking behaviour. As well as hiring some caterers who don’t come from the 1970s, BA needs to sack every single employee taking part in its unofficial ground staff strikes, and preferably replace them with hardworking immigrants being paid the minimum wage.

In an ideal world, BA would be in a position to sack all the no-skill jokers currently being paid high wages to do fuck all in its non-engineering and non-flying operations, and replace them all with minimum wage contractors. Unfortunately, the still-too-powerful unions make this impossible – so BA is likely to go bust at some point thanks to competition from airlines such as Ryanair and Easyjet (which do exactly this).

It’s called (sort of) [**] capitalism. It works. Eventually…

[*] The contract caterers, Gate Gourmet, appear to be almost as incompetent as BA. Not being able to tell the difference between the people who’ve been on a walkout and people who’ve been on sick leave suggests the dodgiest HR policies known to mankind. This is yet more reason for BA to cancel their contract and hire someone less useless.

[**] As Jim points out below, the aviation industry is far from a good example of capitalism in action. The point is that firms run by incompetent idiots where workers hate the managers and vice versa tend to lose out, while firms with semi-competent management and less adversarial labour relations tend to do better.

To celebrate the fact that it’s Lords Reform Day, I’ve written a related article for The Sharpener. Read, slag off, etc.

Saudi Arabia and Pakistan have criticised the UK for ‘not doing enough to stop Islamist terrorism’. In other news, Jim Davidson has criticised Bill Hicks for ‘not being funny’.

In news which has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the news in the first paragraph, but which isn’t quite interesting enough to warrant its own article, The Magic Numbers are a humourless bunch of fat bastards.

Edinburgh is rather a sweet place. It’s clearly a pretty, middle-sized, rather middle-class Northern English market town – but one where the entire population suffers from the same quaint delusion as King Richard Booth.

For no discernible reason, the people of Edinburgh describe their municipal institutions as ‘national’, like the National Gallery and the National Library. They sometimes describe their town as ‘the capital’, in what can only be taken as an ironic reference to the real capital 300 miles further south (rather as many country villages refer to their more developed, more middle-class parts as ‘Little London’).

They even print their own money, in which little delusion local shopkeepers are happy to collude – although obviously, in other English towns, one who proffers Edinburghian pretend money is treated in rather the same way as would someone who proffered Monopoly money. And they refer to the local council as the ‘parliament’, although even the locals appear to treat this body with the derision it deserves.

Of course, there is a proudly, fiercely and savagely independent country that borders Edinburgh, where people mutter incomprehensibly through a haze of Irn Bru and whisky about how much they hate people from Edinburgh and the rest of the English. It sometimes even appears that Edinburgh’s delusion extends as far as considering herself to be the ruler of these woad-covered Celts. This is a far weirder conceit, almost as if the Tunbridge Wells Borough Council claimed jurisdiction over the tribesmen of the Amazon…

The death of Robin Cook is rather sad. Despite being a hideous little gnome, Mr Cook was honourable, articulate and generally correct. The Independent published a remarkably tedious article about why Labour dissidents like Mr Cook are needed, which isn’t worth reading. The headline, however, is spot on: "Unlike Robin Cook, the Tories have never mastered the art of opposition".

The death of Richard Littlejohn appears to have been made up by The Friday Thing, which is a shame.

The death of people’s right to say bloody stupid and offensive things in Britain without being arrested for them seems to be increasingly imminent. For fuck’s sake, people: people like Omar Bakri had absolutely nothing to do with the terror attacks on London – if they had had anything to do with the terror attacks on London, we could charge them with that. If you seriously think people should be locked up for treason for not liking our country and its values, then you should probably be locked up for treason for the threat that you represent to our country and its values.

Side note: people keep bringing up the case of William Joyce in vague justification of the ‘treason’ plan. This is not clever: Mr Joyce’s conviction was one of the darker moments of the British criminal justice system. There was no case in law for hanging him, since he was in no sense British, but some very, very dubious technicalities were concocted on the grounds that everyone concerned wanted to see him swing…

Your mission is to try the following drinks and provide a detailed report in the comments:

1) Ladyboy (lager, G&T, Baileys);

2) Turbo Spritzer (white wine, Smirnoff Ice and double gin);

3) Loudmouth Soup (Tennants Super and cava).

(via)

On abstinence campaigns, ‘Against the risk of disease, a Godless degenerate might argue, must be weighed the fact that many people find sex quite enjoyable’.

Unrelatedly, Virgin 1st Class is a highly civilised way to travel, not least because of the unlimited free booze. Hooray for bizarre yield management systems that make first class fares cheaper than standard class ones…

Everybody has to die; this can’t be stopped by anything. Millions have to live in misery; this could be stopped given the political will. So why are killings for political ends so universally (including by me) reviled?

Why are the NYPD leaking stuff about the London terror attacks? Is Ian Blair going to start leaking stuff about crimes in New York now? This would have the advantage for Mr Blair that crimes in New York tend to be more hilarious than those in London, and could therefore help him to find his true calling in life as a professional comedian.