Tommy Gun

Once again the Home Secretary has made a speech about necessary "temporary curtailments to freedom" (cf "temporary state of emergency"), for the proverbial greater good.

Once again the next day there's a series of police raids and arrests on people's homes, looking for evidence to back up "intelligence" (accusations) of terrorism.

This time, the "intelligence" is of a plot to blow up 9 or 10 planes travelling from Heathrow to the US. Presumably the point of doing this is to scare the British government into withdrawing it's military support for the US. Ironic, as the effect would be the opposite. But terrorism usually does have that same irony - which is why it's so little used as a political tactic.

If events continue to form, those arrested will turn out to be bearded muslims, no evidence will be found despite special pleading that household items could in principle be bomb parts, intensive interrogation will yield contradictory confessions - later retracted - and Tony Blair will reassure us that the price of freedom is a paranoid police state.

It is just possible that there really was a plot, and it's even possible the plotters were capable of carrying out their plans of suicide bombing. Judging from the last few years, if the plot isn't a complete fiction, we're either looking at the kind of ineptitude of the London attacks - bombs too weak and mispositioned to have the intended effect, half of which don't go off anyway - or yet another sect that's big on bloodcurdling rhetoric but short on action. My suspicion is the latter.

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I'm writing this to you from a brand new wireless router, with wonderfully high signal strength and bandwidth, and a security system so byzantine none of us can figure out how to turn it on.

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Oh yes, the other political story is that Tommy Sheridan is officially not a swinger, user of prostitutes or frequenter of orgies. Or rather, he probably is, but the jury thinks his accusers are a bunch of backstabbing sewer rats and the News of the World is a scummy rag, which is much worse, so they've awarded him lots of money in damages.

If that paragraph meant nothing to you, read on. If on the other hand you're sick of the whole cretinous affair...read on anyway because this is my take on the dratted thing.

Tommy Sheridan is the highest profile member of the Scottish Sociaist Party's central committee. He wanted to steer the SSP more into anticapitalist/antiwar politics, while the rest of the committee mostly wanted to continue pushing for strikes and class politics. He had a lot of support from rank-and-file SSP members, including the SWP platform within the SSP, but was pretty isolated at the top.

The conflict became more and more vitriolic and personal, until it was leaked to the News of the World that he'd confessed in a meeting to visiting Cupid's swingers club. And then that he's used a prostitute. Or several. And had 3-in-a-bed sex. Which became 4, and then 5. All of which presumably made his analysis of globablisation untennable.

Sheridan sued the paper.

The party's co-founder went to jail for refusing a court order to release the minutes of the meeting, while someone else released the minutes anyway. Different players say the minutes are unreliable or doctored in various ways.

Exactly why anyone expects the minutes to be reliable is a bit of a mystery. Minutes are never an accurate record, they're usually "tidied up" after they're made, and we've all seen minutes that are complete fabrications. Anyway...

Things got really dumb when Sheridan's comrades testified against him for the paper they nominally hated. What had started as a disagreement over policy in a party with 1500 members, had become a public slanging match between supposed socialists for christ's sake over the completely irrelevant issue of sexual morality.

The feminists in the SSP accused him of oppressing women by sleeping with more than one of them, the presbyterian-influenced members seemed to think monogamy relavent to leadership...and the BBC interviewed his mother.

Well, after all involved had perjured themselves, the jury came to what is known in legal circles as a Perverse Verdict - letting a man probably guilty of a trivial crime go to punish his accusers for being bastards.

So now...the original conflict within the SSP is still unresolved, and Sheridan is standing for leader. Either he wins and purges his rivals, losing their supporters in the process. Or Sheridan loses and is purged, and his supporters leave. Or the party splits in two.

So whatever happens, socialism is Scotland has shot itself royally in the foot.