Henry Porter has a brilliant, brief and revealing polemic, a must read! It's on the Kim Howell's call to turn the UK into a fortress state Howell says

Our police forces, intelligence and border agencies have mammoth tasks. Their budgets already are much larger than they were in the years prior to the attacks on New York and London in 2001 and 2005, but they will have to grow larger still if they are to prevent further atrocities, not least when the eyes of the world will be on London during the 2012 Olympics.

And Henry wraps up his argument with this:

It's been clear for some time that Britain's Olympics will be used to introduce irreversible changes to our country and place it in a new category of society, which through fear and inattention has slipped from freedom into a new form of police state. That is where we will end if people such as Howells are not called on their errors of judgment, their bogus humanity, their refusal to admit responsibility and their barely hidden contempt for liberty.

Yet his article achieves something really rather remarkable. In the unconscious fluency of the idiot savant, Howells has unified New Labour's failure at war and its attack on freedom and laid it out for all of us to see, and for that we should be grateful.