Yorkshire Bitter

I’d always thought there was something strange in the water in Howden, going by the foul-tasting coffee from the vending machine where I worked until just recently.

I wonder if it can be blamed for two resignations on points of principle within a week in Howden. The first was my own, which of course is a sideshow compared to the spectacle of shadow cabinet minister David Dabis dramatically resigning his seat and fighting to win it back on a matter of civil liberties.

It’s not often that Howden, a tiny market town in the East Riding of Yorkshire, features prominently in the news. Normally the only time the media feature much in conversation there is when locals blame the Press Association’s northern office in the town for the lack of parking space. So I dread to think of what they’ll make of the media circus that will soon roll into town, robbing them of even more parking spaces.

As someone who has never voted Tory, it’s an odd feeling to find myself backing David Davis, but it’s not so much about him or his party, it’s about standing up for what is right.

All the rights and freedoms that we have enjoyed for centuries had to be fought for by our ancestors - Magna Carta, the Peasants’ Revolt, the English Civil War, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Peterloo Massacre, the suffragettes and so on. These brave men and women made great sacrifices - and more recent generations fought to protect those hard-earned freedoms. It completely dishonours their memory to just piss it all away for nothing.

So it’s disappointing that Kelvin MacKenzie, the former editor of The Sun, is threatening to stand against him, backed by the media might of Rupert Murdoch. Now Kelvin may be the anti-Christ in the folklore of the left but he’s a legend among real journalists for his sheer brilliance as a populist editor who instinctively understood his readership. I had the privilege of working briefly on a few casual sub-editing shifts there when he was still at the helm in Wapping. But you’re wrong on this one, Kelvin, sorry.

Kelvin said on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme:

I don’t feel my civil liberties as being at risk, but I view my life as being at risk if I am on the Tube or the train and some bad guy wants to blow me up or blow my family up, so I am willing to do anything to avoid that.

Well, I can’t fault his ability to articulate exactly what many people fear about ‘do-gooders’ undermining the fight against terrorists. But come on, the IRA killed far more people and damaged far more economic targets than al-Qaeda have ever managed in this country.

The threat from the IRA was real, they were deadly and could have killed many thousands more people if their remit was to be as reckless with civilian lives as al-Qaeda wants to be. In comparison, there has only been one successful Islamist bombing in this country and many, many failures by pathetic social misfits who are all mouth and no trousers. If we could resist the IRA by carrying on our lives as normal, just as people did during the Blitz, why do we need all these new laws now?