The fashionable left continues its attempt to co-opt and elevate gangsters and violent thieves by an extremely poor article in the Guardian on the Duggan shooting. The Guardian acknowledge that Duggan had a gun, and that it was loaded, but call him “unarmed” on the basis that it was in a shoebox. The police, incidentally, deny that.

It is still completely beyond me why so many commenters on this blog seek to conflate the genuine problems police confront as they are increasingly faced with violent armed criminals, with the genuinely indefensible police actions in cases like their killing of Jean Charles De Menezes. Refusal to acknowledge the difference devalues the arguments around what is and is not reasonable for the police to do. Duggan is not De Menezes. The police were quite right to believe that Duggan was armed. Something went wrong in that Duggan was shot – but it was not an action without reason.

At a banal level, I had a really horrible journey down from St Andrews yesterday on a very overcrowded East Coast train, with the now routine problem of people sitting on the floor between coaches. In the coach which I was in, two tables of young people were listening to extremely loud music on a boombox. It really was very unpleasant, and prevented others from sleeping, reading etc. Two or three passengers asked them to turn it down, which they would do for perhaps thirty seconds and then turn it right up again. One notably old lady who had the misfortune to be seated back to back with them was called a “stupid old cow”. The train staff seemed cowed and resorted to treating it all as a big joke. I tried to reason with them and got “Fuck off fat man” for my pains.

They were wearing sportswear. I pondered what a pity it was that they did not kick the old lady to death and go out and smash some more shop windows and steal some more sportswear. Then commenters on this blog could have explained to me they were an enlightened part of the revolutionary vanguard.

I am happy to report that at St Andrews the motion “This House Would Resort to War to Prevent a Nuclear Iran” was defeated by about 90% to 10%. More down to the students good sense than to my speech, I think. As St Andrews is not exactly a bastion of left liberalism, I was rather pleased by this. Particularly as the debate took place not far from the Werritty parental home…

The two British men executed by US drone attacks in Pakistan were not killed in combat. They were assassinated while going about normal life. This is a most barbarous practice, which amounts not just to execution without trial, but to inaccurate execution killing many who were never accused in the first place.

Being British does not make these particular victims more important than the thousands of others – including numerous women and children – that the US has assassinated in this way. But it does give the British government a standing to protest. Sadly there is no chance that the neo-cons in power will do anything about it. If there was one area where you might have expected the Lib-Dem presence in government to give it a slightly more liberal tinge, it was foreign affairs. In fact, there has been no evidence of that whatsoever.