This floated my way through an e-mail. Via, I’m told, a site I wouldn’t approve of:

Does Eden remind you of anyone, I wonder?

After a run-up that fell rather short of the hype a result which is less than stunning. David gets over 17,000, the Greens almost 2,000 and…What, exactly?

I wanted to write something on this matter but find myself with absolutely nothing to say. A remarkably uninspiring result.

David Davis threatened to resign if forced to vote for. In the event, despite the protests of the loathsome Gove, the party whipped against and Ann Widdecombe was the sole rebel rather than their leader.

Tony Benn last night expressed incredulity over the outcome and now I can whole-heartedly join him. If Labour is now so authoritarian that only the most embittered and deranged aspect of the Tory’s far, hard-right, so niche as to be embodied in a single solitary woman, is prepared to give them support then the political landscape is a gnarled and confusing place that holds no appeal to me; and has shifted from making little sense to no sense at all.

I shall enjoy peering across the Atlantic.

The Telegraph hosts a blog by Richard Barnbrook, it seems. A sample from his latest post:

Well let me tell you that times are changing. This is our city and we are going to take it back. We are going to take all the weapons of (sic) the streets even if that means sending in the Army to do it… if immigrants don’t like it then they know where the airport is

That’s it, you heard him - the army! Zieg Heil! Zieg Heil! Brutalise those fuckers to the max…

The Torygraph falls further in my estimation every day. Most of what’s in the wretched publication is bullshit. That they now host fascist bullshit is even worse…

The Tory Troll has a more thorough dissection than I’ve time for now, should you be interested in feeling ill…

Of all the writers for the Times William Rees Mogg is easily the most predictable. His content invariably and unwaveringly takes the right wing viewpoint and he serves as a firm Tory partisan irrespective of circumstance. When it turned out that the Tories were still incapable of winning his pronounced that Britain was conservative really {since it wasn’t radical} and it was just for some reason enigmatically unwilling to vote for any conservatives. Perhaps it was being coy.

More than most {which is saying something} he has struggled with the vast, towering popularity of the New Labour project and has proclaimed one Conservative leader after the other the saviour, only to be endlessly dissapointed and suffer from a severe instance of wolf-caller’s syndrome when Cameron arrived.

Just about every word of most of his articles can be anticipated: when Gordon was pondering over an election he proclaimed that if it happened Cameron would win, once it had passed he informed us that his family had been “Ready” and that his kitchen table was filled with Tory propoganda.

I actually found the ease with which I could previously forsee his articles precisely rather irksome, indeed given the low grade of his writing and frequently rambling style it was rather a mystery to me how he had retained so prominent a weekly opinion column. I am aware that he was previously editor but surely there must be some limit as to the amount of damage nepotism is allowed to do a newspaper?

However I should have known better as to be quite so dismissive. Mogg had sprung a grand surprise upon me before {although not in my lifetime} and was to do so again. The first was his elegant, eloquent defence of Mick Jagger after his arrest for canabbis abuse, describing him as “A butterfly crushed on the wheel of justice”.

This was a rather moving case to make, especially given the shock of seeing the epitome of the establishment was giving mouth to it. This, however, I expected not to be something ever to strike again. Even a glance over his articles throughout this decade have been comfortably predictable in the extreme, little to shock or stun present, nothing save that you would predict present.

Until, that is, today.

It seems that Mogg is simply the next on a long list of unlikely characters who are incapable of mustering up any fear or loathing towards Obama. Indeed his view actually seems to be positive. Furthermore he is actually making a striking and stark case against the overwhelming, suffocating Conservative orthodoxy that “Prison works”. He in fact explicitly attacks this doctrine, despite the essential core of the party line that it constitutes. Using, no less, solid and sound empiricism of the type us swarthy liberals with our bleeding hearts have been whining about for years.

Unfortunately he simply had to ruin it in order to avert the Apocalypse which my outright enjoyment of any article of his would surely herald. Secondly he defends the loathsome Conrad Black despite him having been found decisively guilty of the crimes that he was accused of. The establishment looks after its own and Bill does his best for Conny but his plea for us to pay attention to the vast sum {$60 million} that has thus far been spent in his defence serves only to draw ones attention to the fact that Black is not only a liar and a scoundrel but also filthy rich.

Firstly and foremostly, though, is his criticism of Bentham. From anarcho-communists to Millian Libertarians this seems to be something of a hobby of elitist idiots and I find it tooth-gridingly irritating. Mogg is simply following a trend, as Tories tend to, and he fares little better than any other:

This has been defended on utilitarian grounds. Jeremy Bentham, who coined the phrase “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” as the justification for social action, was himself a designer of prisons. His prison was actually built on the Millbank site that now houses the Tate Gallery. It did not work, but sent the prisoners mad.

He refers here to the Panopticon, a remarkable edifice concept but not one which the Millbank Prison was precisely a perfect example of. It certainly did not have the facilities required for a lone guard {or more} to observe the entire prison from a single location and although unquestionably inspired heavily by Bentham and his philosophy seems not the prime example of his greatest work on the matter.

The Sunday Times yesterday had a bizarre quotation from a Benthamite law professor from Utah, Paul Cassell. He argued that the Pew Report has “ignored the very tangible benefits” from reduced crime rates of jailing people. “It’s terrible we have to incarcerate so many so the rest of us can live safely,” he said, but that’s the price of living in the freest society in the world.

It strikes me that Paul Cassell makes a very poor Benthamite if he is of the view that confining people into a system which makes efforts to confine them and serves that function alone is what is beneficial to society. It is quite clear from research that rehabillative methods work far better than merely locking people away. This deprives them of pleasure and ensures that the rest of their lives will be led in this fashion, as prison has been demonstrated to have quite a counter-intuitive impact upon a life of crime.

Effectively the consequence is that those who are criminals of environmental influence rather than those “Born bad” are placed into an environment filled with…Criminals. Criminals and autocratic authority figures empowered by the state. The outcome is predictable when considered in such a fashion.

The consequences are more crime, more people returning to prison and a lot less pleasure. If you accept the hedonistic premise of Bentham’s utilitarian philosophy this is effectively indefensible.

Although Bentham did suggest non-consensual labour would occur within these prisons and headed one part of the original Panopticon document “MEANS OF EXTRACTING LABOUR” he had in mind far more benign methods than those you would imagine: he intended the jailers simply to appeal to the rationality of the prisoners through offering them a means to in some way profit from their time incarcerated. Indeed it seems that the measure was as much to keep them occupied while confined as it was to punish them or ensure that the costs of the prison were covered.

Furthermore for its time the document was immensely forward thinking and, as with so many elements of Bentham’s work, even progressive beyond the systems and views that we enjoy today. Proceeding the aforelinked article there was one on ensuring that the character in charge was incapable of mistreating his wards and getting away with it. It strikes me that so thorough a system may well be beneficial to our present prison system.

Perhaps, though, I am being overly harsh and tenacious in my pedantic criticism, and thus in my criticisms of the Moggish one simply sticking to habit, albeit a long-standing one: I should probably rejoice in that I am able to broadly agree with the content and core message of a Mogg article: there are far too many people inprisoned and for far too trivial offences to warrant what has proven to be a highly ineffective means of preventing further crimes. For once we agree entirely.

Or perhaps for twice…