Inappropriate and Immaturity Leads to Resignation

***Breaking News*** Damian McBride the advisor who has sent the immature and juvenile emails to Derek Draper has resigned.

The blogosphere has hit the main news headlines today over the news that Damian McBride had sent inappropriate and juvenile emails to Derek Draper to set up a new attack blog called Red Rag which looks like Draper was planning to set up the Sport type of blog to attack the Tories.

Derek Draper has since tried his best to distance himself from soliciting this sort of email, earlier today saying he had not received emails from McBride. However, even his apology throws up pre-meditation and others apart from him and Damian McBride appear to have sensibly steered clear of this:

"But I felt strongly that such gossip wasn´t suitable for LabourList and kicked around the idea of setting up another blog, Red Rag, where such stories might be published.

"I mentioned this idea to a few friends asking if they knew of any good gossip that was doing the rounds. Some of them said they weren't interested, but one of them, who works in Downing Street, responded by sending back some details of stories that were being gossiped about in Westminster."

Apparently the Prime Minister's Office has issued a statement saying there is "no space in politics for dissemination or publication of material of this kind".

Derek Draper has also just said on Sky that is a disgrace that anybody should wanted to read other people's emails. Maybe he should have a word with Jacqui Smith as surely this is exactly Labour policy. But maybe the point should be that you shouldn't be looking to receive such emails even if it is for an idea that fails to take off.

Sadly since Draper has come into the blogosphere the way his has acted means that this is not out of character. The fact that he has thus far failed to take this further doesn't mean that he may not in the future.

Derek Draper along with Damian McBride should be charged with attempting to bring the political blogosphere into disrepute. Yes in the past we have always had differences in political ideology but we largely had a friendly co-existence. In the post-Draper period there is sadly a new sense of suspicion in certain circles. The fact that today the blogosphere is dominating the news for all the wrong reasons is evidence of that.

Yabba Dabba Och Aye the Noo Time

Archaeologists have unearthed evidence of Scotland's earliest man in a field in South Lanarkshire.

Flint tools similar to those known to have been used in the Netherlands in 12,000 B.C. it predates the earliest evidence of human occupation in Scotland in sites such as Cramond by some 3,500 years. Stepping the MacFlintstones back in to the Mesolithic period from the Neolithic where the Cramond finds had resided.

The previous finds of this period in the UK had all previously been south of the Humber. Tom Ward of the Biggar Archaeology Group said:

"To push Scotland's human history back by nearly 4,000 years is remarkable.

"We didn't set out to do that. What we wanted to do was tell the story
of the landscape.

He warned that "a lot of people won't believe this. Not until they see
the hard evidence.

"But it'll be great fun proving them wrong. We've got the physical
objects, so we can just put them down on the table and say argue with that".

So Jock and Sheila MacFlintstone and Boab and Elsbeth Rumble may have been around for longer than we realised. Or at least where here in Scotland maybe for a bit some time before they were previously thought to have set up home.

Hillsborough (Doncaster Station) Twenty Years On (Almost)

At six minutes past three almost twenty years ago I was sitting in the pub on Doncaster station with a ticket for the Lepping Lane End of Hillsborough for the FA Cup Semi Final in my bag containing my athletics gear. A failure to delivery a timely urine sample after competing in an Athletics meet that morning meant I was still some distance away from my second sporting venue of the day; that time as a mere spectator and not a competitor.


The television in the pub went to the game I was at that time missing. But focused not on the football but on the fans. This was an age before mobile phones so I had no idea how the friends I was meant to have met up with in that terrace were. They also had no idea that I still wasn’t in the stadium, or Sheffield for that matter. We’re weren’t to know about each other until many hours later when we all returned to London to carry on our studies; unlike many others we were lucky. I saw fans being carried from the terraces on advertising hoardings by their fellow fans.
The train came for Sheffield but I still didn’t move: there was no point.


This the nearest Saturday to that match day twenty years ago I have been watching the build up to the game against Blackburn live on Football Focus the memories of that day are very fresh just now. Seeing the headlines from that paper, I still dare not mention by name nor do I read (unless I accidentally follow a link to the online edition), brought back some raw emotions to me as a fan who wasn’t even in Liverpool at the time. But a feeling that in the various times I have stood (officially sat) with my fellow Liverpool fans across London and other stadiums is that we are family, that we lost 96 brothers and sisters as a result of 20 years ago.


Football has moved on a lot from that day twenty years ago. We now compete in top stadia in all seater venues. But being a Livingston fan I still get a kick out of occasional trips to venues where I can stand, East Stirlingshire or Ross County with Livingston, or watching junior football at Bathgate or Linlithgow or somewhere.


Having been someone who should have been there that day I appreciate all that Lord Taylor did in his report as far as making it safer to visit a big match. Although in the tough financial circumstances it has forced many clubs into the meet minimum criteria in entry into the SPL hasn’t all been good news for football as a whole, the prerequisite for safety is sometimes coming ahead of the need for sustainability.


But still there are things that are not settled in Liverpool fans' eyes from that day. The things that were and weren’t done by the emergency services, when what they thought was mere hooliganism became something far beyond that and far more tragic; but even with fresh realisation the slowness to act. The lies propagated as ‘The Truth’ by a red top that still doesn’t sell well on Merseyside.


This Saturday is the hardest Saturday I’ve had in 10 years. This Saturday I should be supporting another team whose name begins with the letters ‘LIV’ but I just can’t bring myself to go. There will be chants that will start up that have emanated from Anfield.


Tuesday on the eve of the day itself see’s Britain most successful team in European club competition take on Chelsea. This set on Champion League fixtures were arranged around the request of the club not to play on the anniversary itself something that hasn’t happened in any of the 20 years since.

For the 96 you'll never walk alone.

Thanks to Caron for hosting my laptop this afternoon to allow me to post.

Temporarily Turning Out the Lights

As some of you who follow my Twitter feeds will know my poor Mobile Broadband Dongle is poorly and has gone off to the Docs. This means it is unlikely that I will posting anything new over the weekend either here, on Facebook or Twitter or anywhere in the known Interweb.

So have fun! Enjoy the weekend.

But in my risk assessor role I say don't hurt yourself rolling after too many eggs down too many hills.

Supreme DM has Rolled His Last Dice on this Spheroid

Dave Arneson one of the co-creators of Dungeons and Dragons has lost all his key ability scores and character levels and no magic will be able to restore him to the game of life. At least not on this board where you are reading this.

Having created the game that became the worldwide success and godfather and pinnacle of role playing in 1974 with Gary Gygax he sadly passed away to cancer in St. Paul, Minnesota on Tuesday.

In tribute his daughter, Malia Weinhagen, said:

"The biggest thing about my dad's world is he wanted people to have fun in life. I think we get distracted by the everyday things you have to do in life and we forget to enjoy life and have fun.

"But my dad never did. He just wanted people to have fun."

No doubt he'll either be rolling polyhedral dice with whatever celestial being you believe exists. But if you don't his dice will simply have stopped rolling although the millions of dice rolls either on tabletops on online will be a honour to live and D&D players will continue to have fun in his memory.

Dave Arneson 1947-2009

Right Wing Bloggers Need Beauty Sleep? - Mr Eugenides

Mr Eugenides jumped to the defence of the Right Wing Blogpsphere's silence over the Guardian's Ian Tomlinson video. In response to James Graham he said that they all needed an early night, or were out drinking, or as I did read from the Blogfather Iain Dale was at the movies.

Now the 8 o'clock publication time hardly holds much water on most weekday evenings. I've seen the right wing blogosphere light up at that sort of time when something that Labour or indeed the Lib Dems have said has be highlighted by someone at around that time. Their blogrolls will have been telling them that this news was breaking and was breaking all over the blogosphere. At various times gauging on my own tracks I was listed on CNN, MSNBC and ABC in the States as a blog about this particular story. Though with so many stories about it I appear to have not been there long on any of them.

8pm is not particularly late especially on a day when there is Champions League football on. The Tories with David Davis, championed of course by Iain Dale have been trying to say they are standing up for civil liberties. The fact that none of them took the time to even pass comment the evening of that breaking news story does show how 'seriously' they are taking them.

After I posted my own comments I went to Lib Dem Blogs to see that already there were a number of stories up from our side about this. I admit I was watching the football and got to the news late 21:56 but I got there. None of the right wing football fans did. Oh the argument that none of them know is hogwash I saw several of them Twittering away after the news broke on applications that would have given them feeds from some of their followees which would have told them it was going on.

Brake on Kettling

Peter Brookes from the Times 9 April 2009

In the Times today this is further reporting on the policing of the G20 protests last week, in light of the new footage that is emerging of just what happened to Ian Tomlinson.

Tom Brake the Lib Dem MP for Carshalton and Wallington was there as an independent parliamentary observer. Having already read his note on Facebook and seen his pictures to see his thoughts being brought into the mainstream media was a welcome addition.

Tom himself was detained within the 'kettle' and saw for himself that the detention of the peaceful with those in minority who were out to cause trouble ended turning ugly.

"'Kettling' is a tactic that should come under review. At the first sign of difficulty, the police present a wall of riot shields and batons around protesters — the peaceful alongside the problematic — and slowly squeeze them into a tighter space. People are allowed in, but absolutely no one is allowed to leave.

"Slowly the number of inmates increases. No access to food. No water. Young trapped with the old. Journalists trapped with anarchists. People, like an elderly couple I spoke to, who simply did not want to be there at all.

"It is not surprising that under such conditions an otherwise overwhelmingly relaxed and peaceful crowd can become agitated, then angry, and then violent. The tactic proved misguided and counter-productive. It served to alienate a whole mass of peaceful protesters."

It may be right tactic to deal with the violent in the mob, indeed as a football fan I have often been effectively in a moving kettle being shepherded away from an away ground into my means of transportation. But there is a difference from being moved along and being penned in, as journalists, MPs and friends of people who ended up needing hospital treatment were on that day.

If the police lose their sense of proportion, fairness and justice as well as the means to control a situation. If their actions exacerbate and pour oil on the coals of what they were trying to snuff out then there clearly needs to be a rethink. If innocent people (and today's Times indicated multiple) were without provocation hit from behind by baton wielding men in uniforms, we need to do something.

We don't accept thugs on our streets. Just because they have Her Majesty's crest on their gang's uniform or colours they should not be treated any differently.