Today marks a year since the evil terrorist attacks on the Tube and Bus system in London. Our thoughts and prayers go out to the victims of the atrocity, and to their families.
We also have sympathy with everyone else who has been stressed or terrorised by those futile attacks which can never achieve what the misguided terrorists hoped for.
However there are still a large number of unanswered questions, yet the Government is still resisting calls for an Independent Public Inquiry.
No doubt we will hear Sir Ian Blair and Ken Livingstone and the Labour Government spin doctors claiming that three or is it four major terrorist attacks have somehow magically been foiled since last July, but without any producing any actual details to back up these claims.
We would like to know just how many such attacks have been foiled by the abuse of the Terrorism Act section 44 stop and search
We wonder how may innocent people will be hassled today by the extra armed Police on the streets and the public transport system, who will be on duty simply as a gesture which will not make us any safer.
We can do without any more incidents like what happened to David Mery last year, or even the incident involving a metal detector at Highgate and Islington Tube station last Friday.
We can certainly do without another Police shooting and killing of an innocent man like Jean Charles Menezes.
We are no safer from terrorists as a reult of the Designated Area around Parliament Square, which restricts our freedom of assembly and of free speech, and in which it now seems that even simply reading the wrong newspaper can put you under suspicion.
What has our useless Mayor of London Ken Livingstone done for us in the last year ?
- He has ignored the results of even his so called public consultation and is set to press ahead with expanding his Congestion Charge zone.
- His has raised the price of the Congestiion Charge to £8 , simply to fill the coffers of Capita plc who have him and the taxpayer over a barrel, contractwise.
- He has insulted the US Ambassador over the Congestion Charge.
- He has spent his time slagging off various journalists and property developers with anti-semitic remarks, something which has led to his investigation by the Standards Board for England, and a month's suspension for bringing the office of Mayor of London into disrepute, a decision which is wasting time and money at the High Court.
- He has wasted taxpayers money on feting extremist Islamic preachers.
- He has spent his time praising the brutal police state regime in in China, and even sought to downplay the Tiananmen Square massacre by comparing it with Trafalgar Square.
- After wasting our money on feting the Venzualan caudillo Chavez, he also manged to get into an alleged "terrorism" row and another court case with a blogger who is an opponent of the caudillo, who he appears to have helped to silence through his use of a firm of expensive lawyers, presumably paid for by the taxpayer, against which a refugee blogger unsurprisingly does not have the financial resources to contest his case in court.
- Ken Livingstone has failed to fully endorse the Greaterr London Assembly's 7th of July review report into the response of the emergency services.
What has the Mayor of London Ken Livingstone done to make us more secure in the last year ? Nothing.
Sir Ian Blair, the Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis, has also not served the people of London very well since last year.
Apart from the obvious fact that his Police force failed to prevent the terrorist attacks last year, his media management faux pas are as bad, if not worse than those of Ken Livingstone.
- The media statements from Sir Ian Blair on the 7th July lasty year added to the confusion about what was going on.
- His performance on the 21st and 22nd of July , after the failed bomb attacks and the shooting of the innocent jean Charles de menezes at Stockwell Tube station was an utter disaster, and have led to him being personally investigated by the independent police Complaints Commission.
- His admission that he was secretely tape recording his phone conversations with the Attorney General, on the subject of phone tapping and interceptions, was ironic, utterly bizarre, and did nothing to inspire confidence in either the Metropolitan Police Service or the Labour Government.
- The fact that the majority of Metropolitan Police constables expressed a motion of no confidence in Sir Ian at their annual conference, is extrremely worrying.
- Sir Ian is personally responsible for the arbitrary way in which the Designated Area around Parliament Square has been policed under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 section 132
Why has he allowed the Metropolitan Police to be used for political supression and harassment of peaceful demonstrators ? Even if the NuLabour law is evil and stupid and badly draughted, he personally has the discretion to enforce it compassionately and without collateral damage to our freedoms and liberties, something which he has failed to do.
- Last year's utter media cockups obviously led Sir Ian to keep quiet on the day of the Forest Gate anti-terrorist raid, and allowed stupid rumours and conspiracy theories , to develop (sparked off by the use of Nuclear Chemicaical Biological Radiological proticive clothing) , when a quick and simple admission before breakfast that nothing dangerous had been found in the pre-dawn raid, would have eased the damage to community relations.
In the week after the raid, Sir Ian Blair allowed a damaging secret briefing war to break out bettween Police "sources" and MI5 inttelligence"sources" in the national media, each trying to shift the blame for the faulty intelligence away from themselves and also smearing the innocent man who was shot, but thankfully not killed, but who, together with his brother was still held without charge for a week.
It has been a bad year for London in the fight against terroism and ithe capital's response, has been strong, despite the poor performance by our public servants such as Ken Livingstone and Sir Ian Blair and the Labour Government.
