Labour have pulled a u-turn today with the announcement from everyone's favourite housing overlord, Caroline Flint, that they are now going to try and tackle the "problem" of "studentification". This is an issue that manages to branch all of the main parties as reprehensible with even supposedly student friendly MP for Bristol West, Stephen Williams, signing an EDM to tackle "studentification" through excessive planning regulations that would see local residents able to put a stop to student housing being created, certainly affordably so.

So common sense, or rather legal sense, has prevailed. Manhunt 2, after being restricted and restricted again is now finally able to be purchased as an 18+ game as it should always have been. The BBFC tried to step above it's station with this one, as they have with other games and films in the past, and to try and restrict adults from being able to get the game because of rather weak arguments about children still being able to get hold of them. As it's been widely criticised for, it's not really the BBFC's position to state that parents and people are so shit at self censorship that they are allowed to become overlords of entertainment where they decide what is and isn't good for us. That doesn't stop them sounding particularly peeved at this fact though...

Quick note also, click the link below to continue reading my thoughts, but I am now off for a weekend break and haven't had time, unfortunately, to write up some articles to be published over the weekend. I'll be back with Politalks some time on Tuesday and hopefully some more on the inside of the budget report.

How do you solve a problem such as "British Citizenship" and how to encourage us all to feel like we're British? Well you force them to stay in school or training until 18, at which point you "encourage" them to swear an oath to the country in one form or another before presenting them with a series of choices whereby the only realistic one is to sign up to a national ID database. From then on you're golden with plenty of opportunities to keep that individual under check and "British", in fact the only thing missing is a microchip for the brain that forces them to stand up and put their hand to their heart every time "God Save the Queen" is heard.

Here again I find myself in a situation with a few subjects I want to touch on but not really wanting to devote entire posts to each of them at this time. So this time the three subjects are BBC2's White season, your DNA and how little you need to do to give the police reason to put it on a database, and a rather sickening situation of trying to send an Iranian kid back to Iran where he is almost certain to be executed.

Politalks 4 is now up! This week we look at terrorism and how torture fits in with that particular problem, in particular George Bush's views on waterboarding. There is also a look at interesting ideas such as soldiers becoming teachers and frankly bizarre educational policy. The big stuff is at the end though, where we let those of you out of the loop know who the sexiest MP of them all is, afraid we have no news on what they'll be wearing to the ball. Video below, transcript even further down, right at the bottom we even have a roundup of the links we took in to consideration when making this

Not work safe unless you have headphones, enjoy!

What else can we make our kids do? We've already made it so that being out at night is probably a no-no with mosquito devices and police actively infringing on their liberties, we keep them in school until 18 and if not school then "learning a trade". We already have a culture of "you can't do that" with them and now we're moving fast in to interfering with just how they're educated as well. Quite aside from the genuinely positive move of cookery lessons (as long as they're state funded) we now have the government wanting kids to have a whole day of every week dedicated to "Culture".

We are telling our kids they can't hang around shops because of some middle age fear of all kids being out to attack us, children are now going to be forced how to be cultural and be forced to learn how to be a productive member of society for longer than ever before. They are going to be given unique numbers for lifetime records to be kept of their achievements and faults, their liberty enshrined within law ignored for the "greater good" in spite of any reality. Their parents won't even have a say in the future of their upbringing, the choice about how they will be conditioned is no longer in their hands, government retaining more and more control over censorship until it dictates what your children will see, what they'll eat, what they'll drink. Sounds familiar to me...

Probably not safe for work, here is our third effort. As always we welcome comments on the style and content in an effort to improve! Transcript below...

Finally in this trilogy of posts on the issue of poor and sometimes frightening governance by Labour, and in this case to a degree parliament as a governing body, I cover the now well trodden subject of MPs and just how much power the government should be giving them. In particular this post is spurred on by the recent news about bugging MPs, but stems from the wording of anti-terror legislation on several counts, the debacle over police pay and partly how the idea of electoral reform has been dealt with.

Let's first look at the most recent furore, that of bugging MPs...

First we banned smoking in pubs, and there was general gratitude. Liberals, in fighting this particular battle, had won the case for all around liberty, not only in that of the smokers rights but also the rights of those around them. So why is it then that the so-called "liberals" of the Lib Dems are now trying to ban something else in way that acts so contradictorily to that previous philosophy of liberalism, patio heaters?

It's about time people started realising that the aim of reducing emissions is not to become carbon neutral, the world has an ecosystem and the planet has survived even huge industrialisation by man kind. Putting some carbon dioxide in to the air does not matter, it is when those levels are too high and stay too high for too long. If you're going to start assuming that people are not taking responsibility then you are turning in to an authoritarian who can only be seen as attempting to micromanage millions of individuals lives on a mass level. People deserve the basic respect and trust of their governments to do the right thing and manage their own lives, while being influenced by duties and educational material. Painting all patio heater users as inconsiderate world killers is not necessarily the truth and it undermines the message that we should all be sending out about reducing our emissions.