In a letter to the Daily Telegraph today 102 of them urge the Prime Minister to “opt out” of 130 EU laws, including the European Arrest Warrant, over the next two years. And this is no ordinary letter, signed as it is by the officers of the 1922 Committee – Chairman Graham Brady, Vice-Chairman Charles Walker, Secretary Mark Prichard and Treasurer Brian Brinley together with former Cabinet Ministers John Redwood and Peter Lilley

Crucially, the 102 warn Cameron that if he fails to get these powers back within this timescale, the transfer of powers to Europe will be irreversible.

This sounds to me very much like an ultimatum. The backbenchers apparently want Mr Cameron to use the “opportunity” provided by the Lisbon Treaty to repatriate up to 130 EU rules and regulations on policing. Since the UK opt out is due to end in June 2014, the Eurosceptics see this as their deadline.

Since the Tories have 210 seats in the House of Commons, 102 represents virtually half of the parliamentary Conservative party. To have half of your MPs against you on an issue they believe to be of the utmost importance is not a very comfortable place to be, to put it mildly.

As I have said many times before, repatriation of powers is a policy which cannot be achieved. I can see no reason why 26 EU member states should agree to the demands one country, especially when they do not agree with the demands being made by the UK. What is more, David Cameron has not helped himself in the EU by increasingly marginalising the UK. Taking the Tories out of the centre-right European People’s Party in the European Parliament, and not signing up to the treaty changes in December last year are just the two most significant of Cameron’s actions to have alienated our colleagues in Europe.   

Cameron’s position is made even worse by the fact that many of these Eurosceptic MPs voted for him to be Tory leader because they believed he was one of them.

The Eurosceptics are, of course, merely using the European Arrest Warrant (EAW) as a hook for their own agenda. It would be foolish to claim all is well with the EAW. One of the main complaints concerns proportionality. We know that the UK, and Germany as well, get more warrants than they issue, and nowhere does it state that the warrant must only be used for major crimes. This matter is indeed being investigated and Viviane Reding, EU Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship, has acknowledged that the warrant is being misused for low-level crimes.

Having only just got over being castigated for caving in on not opposing the “fiscal compact” countries having access to European Union institutions and the European Court of Justice, David Cameron is facing another onslaught. I tempted to wonder how long this war of attrition can go on, especially since the Tories’ Lib-Dem coalition colleagues have a very different, pro-European Union perspective.

Filed under: Labour Party Tagged: 1922 Committee, Brian Brinley, Charles Walker, David Cameron, EPP, European Arrest Warrant, European Commission. European Parliament, Graham Brady, John Redwood, Mark Prichard, Peter Lilley, Viviane Reding

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Nicola Fairbrother took home a silver medal in Judo (56kg weight) from the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. This was the first year that women were officially able to compete for medals in the sport, 18 years after its first appearance during the Tokyo Games of 1964.

Nicola was one of the first female athletes to compete in judo at Olympic level. Parity between men and women in the range of Olympic events has been a long time coming. At the Barcelona Games of 1992, 159 sports were open for men to compete in whilst there were only 89 in which women could take part. Following the inclusion of women’s boxing in the programme of London 2012, this year will be the first ever Olympics in which women and men can compete in the same range of sports.

Nicola’s silver medal at the Olympics was no mean feat but she just narrowly missed out on the gold. The following year, however, she became world number one when she won the World Title in Hamilton,Canada. Over the course of her 23 year career she also won gold at the European level.

Her performance was also recognised out of the dojo. In 1994 she was awarded an MBE for her contribution to British sport.  She was also named European Judoka of the year in 1993 and was runner up in the Sunday Times Sports Award several times.

Nicola has commented on the benefits of judo in all areas of life from promoting self confidence to developing respect for others. Nicola has praised the accessibility of the sport in that it for anyone of any size or shape; however, she has also raised the issue of the significant costs involved in taking part.

Like many professional sports, judo can be expensive to take part in, especially when youngsters are first starting out. The price of classes and equipment can act as a barrier to potentially successful competitors even trying the sport.

When it came to power in 1997 the Labour government recognised the benefits of access to sport at every level. From the beginning of its tenure it sought to improve the strategic direction of organisations such as Sport England to ensure accessibility for all. 

In 2009, the then Labour government set aside £10.2 million for the development of Judo at the grass-roots level to be channelled into the sport through Sport England over the following four years.

Nicola is a strong supporter of judo at grass-roots level, and is helping to inspire a whole new generation of judokas in her role of owner and editor of Koka Kids magazine, as well as through her work with schools, judo clubs and national governing bodies.

Nicola also now works as a judo commentator for the BBC and reports on the sport for the World of Judo magazine.

Filed under: Labour Party Tagged: Barcelona Olympics, Judo, London Olympics, Nicola Fairbrother, Sport England

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• Brennan and Booth are talking about whatever case they are investigating.
• Brennan’s phone rings. It’s Hodgins, who has found something interesting.
• Brennan asks him what it is.
• INSTANTLY Brennan and Booth are in the lab, and Hodgins is telling them whatever a normal person would have just said over the phone.

I wonder if you get to set the code phrase yourself? I mean, it usually seem to be something along the lines of:

tell me what you’ve got *ZAP-TELEPORT*

… but if you can set it to be what you want it to be then I think I’d set mine to be “FLYYYYYY MY BRAVE HAWKMEN!!!”

In other news: I am finding this episode of Bones I am watching a bit depressing. They’re being very trying-to-hard inclusive of The Gays but there have been two instances so far of bi-erasure

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BBC journalist Paul Mason in a blog post early in 2011 titled Twenty reasons why it is kicking off everywhere, which almost instantly filled my Twitter feed and discussion on multiple email lists. You might have called it the History 1.0 version of explaining the Arab spring, Occupy, the indignados of Europe – everything important from 2011. He has just returned to the subject, with Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions. You might call it version 1.3 – a few initial kinks ironed out, a little more perspective obtained, a few more experiences added.

Wisely, he very explicitly says this is journalism, not history, and he disavows any claim to be trying to provide a unifying theory of events, or to be the movements’ guru.

Nonetheless, he does provide a useful perspective for thinking about the current state of world protest – in simple terms, what is the best historical parallel, and what lessons might be drawn from it? He looks at 1848, which followed an economic crisis, the politics starting in Paris where the Parisian workers overthrew the monarchy (“a shock because, like Saif Gaddafi and Gamal Mubarak long afterwards, King Louis-Philippe had counted himself something of a democrat”) and the subsequent wave of revolutions in Austria, Hungary, Poland and states in what is now Germany, with monarchies forced into constitutional form elsewhere.

His general conclusion about what then went wrong then? “Once the workers began to fight for social justice, the businessmen and radical journalists show had led the fight for democracy turned against them, rebuilding the old, dictatorial forms of repression to put them down. conversely, where the working class was weak or non-existent, the radical middle classes would die on the barricades, often committed to a left wing programme themselves.” (p171) He doesn’t explore how that translates into modern times, but the possibilities are obvious.

Other options he proposes are 1917, but these were events led by “hardened revolutionary socialists” and involving a “large industrial working class”; 1968, but that was more “surge of protests with students in the lead, workers and the urban poor taking it to the verge of insurrection only in France, Czechoslovakia and America’s ghettos,” and 1989′ but that occurred, with the exception of Romania, by “demonstrations, passive resistances and a large amount of diplomacy”. (p171)

Soberly, he concludes 1848 is the best parallel, events which ended of course in widespread war and the general triumph of reaction.

If he does provide one simple philosophical framework for understanding today – and I think it is a pretty good one to be working with – it is that 2011 is “a revolt against Hayek and the principles of greed and selfishness that he espoused”. (p207) (his explanation of Hayek runs “he said that social justice was unachievable and that the inequality and misery produced by capitalism we both moral and logical”.

Yet the analysis is only a small part of the book. What it is primarily is an informative, colourful wander through many of the flashpoints of the past year – in which Mason’s journalist’s eye is used to full effect to allow small anecdotes to throw light on a big picture. He’s in London at the student protests and early Occupations, in Egypt as Mubarak falls, in Greece as riot police and protesters clash on the bloody steps of parliament, he drives from Oklahoma to New Orleans through “jobless America”, and visits the astonishingly educated slums of the Philippines.

I can say from personal knowledge that he sometimes lets the quality of the anecdote overcome the strict facts. (There were police “in attendance” when the Trojan Horse went up in flames on Oxford Circus on the 26 March union march – I was about 100 metres away and there were police between me and it.) But still I basically trust the impression he gives, the meanings he allocates.

He’s something of a technological determinist, convinced that Twitter and Facebook are key to this all. And he certainly has some interesting evidence, like the fact that by the third day of the News of The World hacking furore “one in every four tweets mentioning the News of the World hastag (#notw) also mentioned the brand name of a company advertising in the paper.” (p. 146)

But he’s certainly right about the non-place of conventional politics in this narrative. “There is a dangerous disconnect between the mass of people, especially the young, and the political structures in place.” (p209)

I was talking today on the Green Party Women stall at the Go Feminist conference in London with a young woman trying to work out where she wanted to focus her energy. “Conventional politics feels so hopeless and irrelevant,” she said. I sympathised, but replied that this was where the decisions are made, so ultimately we have to get in there. But it isn’t an easy sell, particularly not to young people in the UK who voted Lib Dem on their no-increase-in-uni-fees “pledge”.

Mason sees in the young a whole new political approach “it is satisfied with the conquest of space within the system rather than seeking to smash the system.” So he says “the impulse to create areas of self-control has led … to an almost mystical determination by protesters to occupy a symbolic physical space and create within it an experimental shared community … the hardcore activists have read their Chomsky, Guy Debord, Hardt=Negri and Gene Sharp, and understand the principles; but more importantly the ideas therein have become ‘common-sense’ to a much wider layer of people who have never read any of it. They see the various ‘revolutions’ in their own personal lives central to the change they’re trying to make”. (p. 82)

But as Mason says, “the system is not in stasis, it is in crisis. After the economic meltdown of 2008 it is highly capable of smashing itself.” (p. 83) He quotes Alexis de Toqueville from 1848: “I believe right now that we are sleeping on a volcano. Can you not sense by a sort of instinctive intuition … That the earth is trembling again in Europe? Can you not feel the wind of revolution in the air?” (p 190)

Mason’s certainly done a pretty good job of capturing that movement in the air.

One hundred years of identifying ourselves as radical, anti-establishment, even quasi-anarchist, has meant that being thrust into Coalition Government has created all kinds of conflicts and tensions within the party. I’m not just talking about the sometimes fraught relationship between Conference reps, the Federal Policy Committee, and the parliamentary teams – complicated as that is – no, I’m referring to the internal struggle that all Lib Dems experience (or perhaps should experience) when faced with power.

Of course, the issues have been played out already over the last 30 years or so in town and county halls across the land. As Lib Dems have gained control of Councils we have had to face the challenges of using that power responsibly. It’s uncomfortable, for a start. Many of us would prefer being in opposition, where we can tear into the administration without the need to actually put together a coherent policy programme.

But controlling Council groups have gradually learned to distinguish what is feasible from what is merely desirable or crowd-pleasing. They have achieved some real successes which have both improved the lives of residents and made the places where they live more liberal and more democratic.

However, they are not always good at communicating those successes to the population at large, nor even to their own members. Sometimes they are accused of spending far too much time in meetings when they should be knocking on doors and campaigning on the ground – and indeed that may well be true.

But the fact remains that councillors are elected to make life better for their electors, and this can often only be achieved, when in power, through lengthy negotiations in meetings. I think back to some of the campaigns that I was involved in when I was a councillor – for the Hook Centre, pedestrian crossings nearby (about to happen, at last!), a new bus for pupils attending Hinchley Wood, funding for the new Chessington Community College, childrens’ centres at Castle Hill and Lovelace schools, the medical centre in Merritt Gardens – all of these were brought to fruition through many hours spent, by me and my colleagues, in committees and meetings with council officers.

And yet some party members might have thought that I had gone over to the dark side, by being drawn into the internal politics of the Guildhall and aligning myself with the establishment. I worked hard to avoid that, to always maintain an edginess, to remind myself that I represented the people to the Council, not the other way round.

Here is the dilemma for Liberal Democrats. We are conscious of the dangers of power, so we tend to talk down those who have it, rather than grasp the opportunities it brings. We do not wish to become part of the establishment, but we find that we have to work with and through large institutions in order to bring about change. We dislike conformity to the extent that it is written into our constitution, yet we have to work within the constraints of formal decision-making processes to achieve anything.

All this is a long preamble to a statement about Edward Davey and his new role. On the one hand I am ridiculously pleased for him. And I know him for a decent, stable person who will not let it go to his head.

On the other hand, can the rest of us understand and cope with proximity to real power?

One of the great things about the Olympics is the opportunity it provides for sports with lesser media coverage to take top billing. Karina Bryant began practising Judo at the age of 10 in Camberley Judo Club in Surrey.  This was where she earned her black belt and where she continues to train to this day.

Karina enjoyed success in Judo early on taking silver at the Junior European Championships in 1995 before going on to become Junior World Champion in both 1996 and 1998.

Since then, Karina has won over 20 major medals including six at the World Championships and four European Championships golds.

Karina’s success led, in 2003, to inclusion named European Female Judo Player of the Year.  This in turn led to her being named in the Sunday Times’ top ten sportswomen of the year.  She gained further recognition in 2004 when she was named as one of the top 100 unsung inspirational heroines by the Daily Mail.

Karina did not have much success at the Beijing Olympics in 2008, going out in the first round.  Later that same year she suffered a serious neck injury and had to go through a great deal of rehabilitation to recover.

She made her triumphant return during the 2009 World Championships in Rotterdam, claiming the silver medal.  Karina narrowly lost in the final to Chinese fighter and reigning world champion Tong Wen.  What made this even more extraordinary was that it was thought that she would not even be able to compete in the competition due to her injury and only joined the 14-strong British team at the last minute.

Karina was Britain’s only medalist inRotterdam and said at the time:  ‘I feel great. I had a good year because I did not expect to be here. I am very happy.’

Karina Bryant is clearly a favourite to take home a medal at London 2012.  I hope to see her in the final against her old rival Tong Wen, the current Olympic champion in this category, where I’m sure she’ll use her home advantage to turn the tables and take the gold.

Filed under: Labour Party Tagged: Camberley Judo Club, Daily Mail, Judo, Karina Bryant, London 2012, Olympics, Rotterdam

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Of course, the fact that it’s Ed Davey who has been promoted to Huhne’s job is, as the fabulous Epps points out, just the polish on the turd.

The stench of hypocrisy adhering to the leadership of my party is really getting pungent now. I didn’t get into politics to make the disabled suffer for no good reason, or to cause people weaker than me pain just because I could, and I didn’t do it to pay lipservice to diversity while all the time maintaining the status quo either. If I wanted to do that I’d have become a member of the Cornerstone Group of the Tories.

I didn’t do that. I joined the Lib Dems. And increasingly, these days, I’m wondering why I bothered. I keep coming back to this one thing: what’s the point of a democratic conference if the parliamentarians just ignore it? I’d like to hear a convincing answer to that.

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