It’s almost September, and, let’s face it, now that the X Factor’s back, tithe countdown to Christmas has begun, so I should probably forget all these leisurely Sunday morning lie-ins and actually start having a look at what’s in the papers again.
When terror threats are raised, for me the first question is not “Is something awful going to happen on our streets?” It’s “Which of our precious freedoms are the Government planning to take from us?” With Liberal Democrats in Government that anxiety is considerably less than it would be if there were none, but it is still there. Scotland on Sunday tells us how David Cameron and Nick Clegg are having talks today to finalise the Government’s response. The Observer reports that Paddy Ashdown warns against knee jerk reactions, which is a good sign. We’ll cover that separately.
In the Observer, Catherine Bennett cites the recent dire Better Together commercial and Austin Mitchell’s comments to argue that it really is time for All Women Shortlists:
Without Labour’s all-women lists, parliament would resound, indefinitely, to the grunts of its Mitchells, Soameses and Fabricants. Unrecorded in the YouGov poll are people who dislike all-women shortlists but dislike yet more the reason for their continued existence: the very culture that just created the execrable, the relentlessly mocked Woman Who Made up Her Mind.