The PM Glass Box.
In a real glass box every evening at 18.00, the PM production team meets to discuss the programme that's just finished. You're encouraged to do so here in this virtual glass box. Tonight's editor Eloise Twisk will read the comments and may well add her own.
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I wouldn't believe everything I read in The Guardian either.Was that Mandy's dulcet tones I heard to start? Presumably the noble lord didn't object to the Sun's support for New Labour and the particular pact they had.
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PS I heard Mrs Janes on channel 4 news last night and she came across very well. She eventually accepted the belated apology when she thought he actually had made it.He hadn't when he phoned - indeed he denied he had made mistakes at all.
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Can we move on from Brown's letter now?
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Yes, please.
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Child rapist detained for second attack
This on top of the disclosure yesterday about the use of ‘Cautions’ I can only think that the British people put up with a lot, they will take so much from Government, they will take so much from the local abusive and antisocial idiots, they will put up with ineptitude from the police and the courts . . . for so long and then just as we had a uprising over Poll Tax, a campaign against high petrol prices and a shift in voting for the BNP, the people will say enough is enough. It could start like this, a rapist gets summary justice from a victims family member which lands them in court, a jury of good upstanding people will say not guilty (on the basis of natural justice). A burglar breaks in to house and is ‘dealt with’ by the occupant, a good solid upstanding citizen who has had enough and their peers may say ‘not guilty’. This is a road to anarchy, but unless the Police, the courts and politicians get a grip with Justice and stop the stupidity in sentencing, the release of prisoners because we are short of room, and the constant bleating about criminals ‘human rights’ it will come. Sorry but to me a crime deserves punishment, habitual criminals should lose their ‘rights’ from society. I’m not and never have been one of the ‘Hang ‘em High’ brigade but if my family was raped or murdered and not given due justice by the courts I’m afraid I may think of how else justice could be achieved. (No doubt by thinking such thoughts I will now get a visit from the thought police)
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I may be feeling some sympathy for Gordon Brown as it took me several times to read that headline for the Sun thread before I realised Jacqui Janes wasn't Jacqui Smith. I read twice thinking 'What's Jacqui Smith got to do with this'?
Gordon Brown has been stitched up. He may be well intentioned, but he doesn't have my respect. He doesn't have my respect because of his actions and that of his government.
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A non-custodial sentence for rape - what is happening in the justice system? Does the judge who sentenced this young criminal send anyone to jail?
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Answer to # 3 - Yes! Eloise (editing PM today and tomorrow)
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I wouldn't trust a word the political editor of the Sun says, he was very smug.
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When they don't incarcerate people when they commit crimes what use is having the DNA of people that have done nothing wrong? Are plod being rewarded for harvesting the DNA of Joe Public on the lamest of justifications?
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Am I the only one finding the American/Canadian chaps accent not very accessible? Or I am just not interested?
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Oh, Eddie. You *know* you're going to get a load of complaints here about the length of this item, just like last time. You could have said it was going to be a long piece and to beware of wandering attention...
...or did you say that and my wandering attention missed it?
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About that "we will only keep your DNA for six years if you are arrested".
Great. How many years are they planning to keep the DNA they take from people they question as witnesses, for example, but don't arrest or charge? They've been known to take DNA from children for the offence of having been in a cafe where a crime has taken place, or seen a fight.
How about the people facing a statutory charge for speeding, whose DNA has been taken in the past, on the basis @we will arrest you for obstructing the police if you don't give it to us"?
Good start that they plan to keep something they were never entitled to in the first place for a mere six years, but isn't it time they got rid of the rest too? And stopped the whole wretched business *before* they leave the database on a train and it is found and misused by some villain?
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L_M 11, Racist are we?
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Toooooo much Janes. Move on.
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Why can't the English and Welsh have the same DNA retention system as the Scots? I'll wait while assorted police officers lick their fingers and stick them in the breeze while they invent some justification for it.
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More Annual Remembrance Day Misery
I'm beginning to truly dread this annual gratuitous and overblown demonstration of smugness. In recent years, every one of the BBC's programmes that mentions it takes on a pompous and formulaic approach, rife with insincerity. The simple fact that WW1 resulted in the deaths of a million men, while not exactly forgotten, has been reduced to a mere central fact around which a bizarre and complex annual ritual has been constructed.
Right now Britain has just finished fighting a war that killed probably hundreds of thousands of civilians and hundreds of soldiers for reasons people still don't understand. We are now in the process of doing a similar thing in Afghanistan. Very little broadcast by the BBC appears to attempting to directly connect these annual celebrations with what is still going on on our behalf. Why? There seems to be a fascinating correlation between the annual growth in the amount of abstract ritual being applied to Remembrance Day and the new depths to which Britain's bloody military involvement in questionable foreign campaigns sinks. Is it because the BBC is more interested in appearing to represent all opinions (an impossible aim of course and one which it singly fails to do) than it is in taking controversial positions on the basic wrongs of aggressive wars.
How about some straight forward questions being asked about how it is we can 'remember' past mistakes in this extraordinary annual ritual while simultaneously conducting a military campaign which is far more questionable in terms of its political rights and wrongs than the one Britain engaged in nearly a century ago?
Remembrance Day should be a deeply political event and it is a great shame the Establishment, for it's own ends and with the BBC's help, has emasculated it in this way for it's own ends. Wasn't "Never Again" once the motto linked to this event? Who, if anyone, decided that had to go?
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Angela Merkel addressed the joint houses of Congress in Washington a few days ago,
calling for the institution of a “global economic order... under global
law.”
Pope Benedict xvi in his encyclical “Caritas in Veritate” called for a
global order to address the world’s 21st-century challenges.
Which "global order"? Whose "global law"?
Answer: Theirs. The one they have been imposing on the EU these fifty years.
What Merkel and the pope are pointing out here, is, we need one system. "The greater the number of systems and their constituents, the greater the disorder." (As proved by the bank collapses.)
But it will be their system.
Maybe you think that's old hat and you've heard it all before. Of course. Consider this: “Watch for developments
suddenly to speed toward European political and military union, through
religious union! … [I]n very few years at most, it must start. And when it does,
events will flash by with a lightning speed that will astound the world …. This
sudden blitz toward union … once triggered will move so swiftly the whole world
will be caught by surprise. Yes indeed! They shall wonder in amazement!”
Herbert W Armstrong (he's on google) wrote that in The Plain
Truth, November 1965.
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This story about Brown's letter surely it's about whether the government support our military? Given that can a researcher listen to the Westminster Hour and follow up on that comment that despite the back pedaling on the TA training funding they have reduced the number of training sessions. Someone said it on the Westminster Hour. I'd like to know.
Isn't the TA staffed by people that do support the military, something this government has tried to get the whole country to do before undermining by chopping the TA training funding?
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Now that we've exhausted the PM's letter to Mrs Janes ... two important issues:
1) DNA of innocent people will be retained for six years. Why?
2) People who kill will be imprisoned for up to 25 years - five fewer than those who use a gun. Why?
Not quite so important: welcome back, Chris the Fish!
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I thought the Sun journalist (Newton Dunn)? acquitted himself well and sounded a hundred times more honest than any politician - Brown especially.
Trust me, I am no Tory, but if any of my kids at age 10 had written so poorly such an important letter I would have employed a tutor for extra help for them!! Seeing that letter shocked me - He had written Jimmie James (instead of Jamie Janes) apart from the rest of it that I could not read... The obsession with the handwriten letters seems a contrivance I fear... What is the experience of other bereaved parents getting these letters? Can you find out for us? and do listen or read the recording of the phone call to get the measure of this unelected Prime Minister. Why was he calling her MISS Janes?
Plus Eddie's insinuation that Mrs Janes might not be in her right mind was very very patronising and unnecessary, I hope she complains about the comment/question.
My only criticism of her would be that she allowed her son to join up in the first place. I have four sons and one daughter and were any of them conscripted even I would lay down in the road if necessary to prevent them going let alone that they would be volunteers! As Harry Patch said, no war is worth one life! There ARE other ways.
And what's this about Brown's failing eyesight? cAN WE KNOW PLEASE? How then is he reading all his reports etc? I have a friend with one eye too and who just this afternoon while we were out, he purchased a pair of no 4 plus specs in the pound shop - for £1. With them he can see any print no matter how tiny, as well as me! It sounds a bit BS y! Perhaps I will send him a pair!
One more thing, why wasn't BBC PM at the French remembrance in Paris today- given that Germany was there (which was interesting to learn) And I have always thought it wrong that the Uk holds this occasion on the Sunday rather than 11/11 at 11am as is done in France and Belgium (others too)?- where it a national holiday so that everyone can turn out in every village, town and city. Is the UK too mean to sacrifice a work day for this??????!!!!
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Why can't we have the Scottish system of DNA retention?
Do we have more innocent people on our DNA database than the French and German have on theirs in total.
Does retaining the DNA of people that have done nothing wrong help the way the public view the police and their relationship with the police?
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LN3, "That would great if we could" But it looks as like it will rumble on for many days to come..!
"How about the issue of youth unemployed rising to nearly one million"..?
There's nothing like storing up problems for the future..!
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There are some flippant remarks here re the Brown letter debacle... presumably from some hard nosed party hacks?
And to the PM editor Eloise @ 8: the Mother's analysis of the coroner's report indicated that her son could have survived had there been a medical helicopter available, surely this deserves PM's coverage?(if Lord Snooty Mandy allows of course)! Imagine how you would feel....Ms Pithy
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Sid (20) - is that kill with knives? I think that was the distinction, but may be wrong.
And, yes, welcome back Chris G.
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Am I a racist? Perhaps it's was the intonation? Perhaps I wasn't interested? It seemed to go over my head rather like the great PM weather forecast debate.
I don't think I've anti American, or anti Canadian streak. I do think sometimes that Dubya gets a hard time, and it seems pretty obvious to me that rednecks originate from Europe.
Lucien flagged up that odd American woman staging her brown eye, blue eye segregation experiment on Channel 4 a few weeks ago so people with blue eyes could perhaps get some grasp of racism, but I'm not sure it worked.
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Re pithywriter at No 21
Perhaps the difference is in the number of deaths of French and Belguim soldiers who died in the Great War compared with the British. This morning we remembered the 43 young men from my village who were killed. At that time the population was about 1000. ie about were 500 men. When you subtract the boys and older men you have, perhaps, 200 men suitable to become soldiers. Thus about 20% of men of that generation died. This percentage is reflected in other villages around here (one village it was nearly 50%).
Never again ! If only that that was so.
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In addition to my 27. I forgot to add that most of those surnames on the war memorial have still families represented in the village, including my own. Is it any wonder that we do, indeed, remember them.
Note that our village is 700km from the sites of the battles of 1914 - 1918. Those who lived closer suffered more.
I hope that my english has not let me down as I am feeling rather emotional at the moment.
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I've not worn a poppy for a few years now, I have placed coins in Poppy collection boxes without taking a Poppy. Last week I paid a cheque into the Help for Heroes account when I was passing a branch of Lloyds, perhaps prompted by someone from an organisation I work with running a marathon raising funds for them.
I have real issues trying to reconcile commemorating the war dead whilst we fail to adequately equip those we send to war today. It doesn't wash with me. It seems contradictory.
I also don't buy into many values of Britain today, so perhaps I'm also at a quandary wondering what exactly we're fighting for?
Last month I worked for 54 hours contributing my time for free making a small difference to an organisation that is deemed important and an important British institution but I have balance that with that organisation doing things that I don't agree with and don't think work. I mention that as despite not being entirely comfortable with the way the country is run, or some of the basically dodgy, undemocratic and freedom eroding actions committed by the state I give up my time to it.
It is bizarre the tiny amount of coverage that woman flying into Liverpool airport with a USB stick full of 7,000 manuals on weapons and improvised bombs.
Gordon Brown has been demonised by The Sun? Well white kids terrorising neighbourhoods are demonised and Vanessa George and her deviant friends are demonised by the press but a woman arriving at Liverpool Airport with a USB stick full of weapons manuals gets hardly a mention? We're fighting in Afghanistan so wannabe Jihadists can set up home in the UK? It doesn't make sense to me.
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Nice programme Elouise - my highlight was John Tavener's introduction to Upshares!
Just loved that :-)
Can we have the long version tomorrow? Ansolutely fabulous!
Oh and Happy Birthday Eddie.
Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday to you,
Happy Birthday dear Edddie,
Happy Birthday to you!
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Thanks Frances O - yes, with knives.
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Hi thanks for all the comments. The Jay Winter essay was the subject of much discussion in the office, but I'm glad most people seemed to enjoy it. As Eddie says, it's important for PM to break out sometimes and do things which are different and challenging. We were pleased to get the interview with Tom Newton Dunn from the Sun and put listeners questions to him. Sorry if it felt like going back to an old story, but we thought it was important to get those unanswered questions answered -- like how Ms Janes recorded the conversation with Mr Brown.
Eddie's birthday today and still no sign of him...
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Oh dear, Eloise - premature celebrations, perhaps?
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pw 21, I didn't like what Eddie insinuated about Mrs Janes either just because she is taking medication and is stressed.
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L_M 26, I was just joking. I'm from Ohio and have a bland midwest accent. What you don't want to do is mistake a Canadian for being from the US. They get furious. Americans, on the other hand, don't mind being mistaken for being Canadians. I get that a lot now having been in GB for 25 years. Oot and aboot.
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