Sunday 15 June 2008

The real reason why David Davis resigned

There has been a lot of speculation on this topic. All sorts of ulterior motives have been imputed, and all sorts of guesses made.

If you watch the interview that was on the Andrew Marr show this morning (transcript here), it must be quite clear, David David does not really exactly know himself why he did it. He just did!

Let us not forget, that DD has long spoken out in favour of downright sensible things, see for example an article he had published in the Yorkshire Post just a week before his resignation.

And what is Plan DD?
- allow use of phone tap evidence in terrorism trials;
- allow the police to question terrorist suspects after they have been charged with an offence;
- take a zero-tolerance approach to those who foment hatred and violence against Britain;
- implement proper visa controls to prevent anyone entering this country to incite violence in the first place.
Hardly radical, is it? Not headline-grabbing, but sort-of-sensible. Shouldn't we just try Plan DD first and see what happens?

Heaven knows what it was that finally made him snap, but something did, and maybe he'll never know himself, even if he still doing the rounds and being asked the same daft question in ten or twenty years' time. But I am quite sure, that in some small way, he has made the world a slightly better place*.
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* Of course he has made the world a slightly more awkward place for UKIP. Rather embarrassingly, our sole MP voted in favour 42 day detention, in direct conflict with para 7.9 of our law'n'order manifestoUKIP would abolish Control Orders, as we regard detention without trial as an improper state of affairs. UKIP would also allow the use of phone tap evidence in terrorist cases unless the security forces or police have overriding objections.

Which is pretty close to Plan DD anyway. 

Now, read on in the Andrew Marr transcript; DD talks about "the sort of snooping on our people, even by local governments, a thousand surveillance operations by, not by MI5, but by local government. Snooping on people's bins, snooping on their, the way they take their kids to school. All those issues have led to a sort of corrosion of freedom in this country. "

Right. let's talk bins. This whole bin-snooping all goes back to the EU with their lunatic recycling and anti-landfill targets. UKIP could, if they had the nerve, outflank him on that.

Let's talk schools. For sure, some people bend the truth about where they live in order to get their kids into a good State school. If we had education vouchers (see UKIP's education manifesto, top of page 7) - which would allow more parents to get their kids into a good school, whether State or private - there'd be no need to snoop on the route they take...

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

What did Davis mean by "I am just a piece in this great chess game"?

Mark Wadsworth said...

It's a Rumsfeldism. He means that he knows he doesn't know.

Anonymous said...

He means that he is but a humble prawn.

Anonymous said...

The man has principles and political courage, two things that Gordon Brown has been shown to be rather short of. I don't buy the tactical argument because the Lisbon treaty would have been a more popular issue to make a stand on. Perhaps if you're a lone voice in the wilderness, you need to occasionally return to the civilisation of ordinary people to straighten yourself out a bit.