Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit): Two years ago Democratic Audit and two of our partners, Helen Margetts and Peter John, provoked a storm when we suggested that the British National Party had a far larger potential electoral support than specialist political scientists believed.  The conventional view was that far-right parties in the UK were an insignificant political force. We compounded their ire by getting a front-page article in the New Statesman and a great deal of media coverage (but see our report, The BNP- The Roots of its Appeal, for the full story up to then).

Now Stuart Wilks-Heeg, joint author of Whose Town is it Anyway?, has published a cogent article in Parliamentary Affairs, that builds on our analysis and takes the story up to the 2007 local elections where the BNP secured 300,000 votes for 754 candidates.  There are currently 55 BNP councillors, spread across 22 local councils. While the BNP’s overall share of the vote was small, at around 1 to 2 per cent, geographical concentrations of their vote have enabled the far right to establish unprecedented levels of representation in local government.

Catherine Stephens (International Union of Sex Workers): Yesterday the Home Office announced new proposals intended to “protect the thousands of vulnerable women coerced, exploited or trafficked into prostitution in our country, and to bring those who take advantage of them to justice”. It’s a great story, with drama, heroism, anguish and a big white horse for Jacqui Smith to ride as she swoops in to rescue tearful hookers from foreign countries.

Unfortunately, it’s pretty much fact-free and bears no relationship to the reality of the sex industry: it will in actuality increase the vulnerability of all women who sell sex, even privileged, educated, white, British passport holding women like me. How come?

Geoffrey Bindman (London, BIHR): My old school in Newcastle, founded in 1545, was proud of famous former pupils. Several of them were mentioned in the school song. Eldon was the procrastinating judge caricatured by Dickens in Bleak House, Armstrong an armament manufacturer, Collingwood was Nelson’s second-in–command at Trafalgar. Absent was John Lilburne, leader of the Levellers at the time of the English Civil War, who I discovered years later had been at the school in the early 17th century.

Lilburne is only now coming to be recognised as a fundamentally important figure in our political and constitutional history. He was also a man of extraordinary personal courage and determination. Cromwell thought highly of him and made him a colonel in his army but he became disillusioned with Cromwell when he abandoned the democratic programme which Lilburne passionately advocated.

Damian O'Loan (Paris): It is not only in the UK that the introduction of Taser electronic pistols has ignited controversy.  As Amnesty’s Patrick Corrigan has highlighted here, the weapons’ implications for the Right to Life have been called into question by a judicial review to be decided in Belfast in January.  Directly comparable issues are also coming before the courts in France.

Over here, however, it is the distributors of the weapons, SMP technologies, who have been initiating the actions.  The French company has launched defamation and slander lawsuits following citations of Amnesty International figures citing up to 290 fatalities following exposure to the weapons’ 50,000-volt force.

Tom Griffin (London, OK): Under Siege: Islam and the Media was the theme on Saturday for a half-day conference at the LSE organised by Media Workers Against the War. Among the speakers was Daily Mail columnist Peter Oborne who talked about his own experience of disillusionment.

I found it very profoundly shocking in the lead-up to the Iraq War, to be lied to systemically by the British state. I thought it was something which was foreign to our traditions and our experience. Oddly enough, it radicalised me. I went through the opposite journey to what Nick Cohen went through.

Tom Griffin (London, OK): The debate about Cornwall's constitutional status seems to have taken off over at Comment if Free, where Truro and St Austell MP Matthew Taylor responds to Peter Tatchell's call for self-rule:

Mebyon Kernow support in Cornwall isn't low because we have an unfair electoral system. The simple truth is that Cornwall is not full of people who want a separate parliament – nor, incidentally, did they want one in 1497. In both cases what is wanted is a genuine recognition that poor rural communities such as ours have not had their problems taken seriously, let alone addressed, in decades. We don't need a separate parliament, we simply need genuine local autonomy over the things that matter locally rather than nationally, and fair funding to go with it.

Gareth Young (Lewes, CEP): It’s taken seven months from petition end but finally the Prime Minister has gotten around to replying to my ‘Say England’ petition. Since it’s been a while I will remind you of the details of the petition:

“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to stop saying ‘Our country’ or ‘This country’ when he is talking in relation to devolved issues such as health, education and housing. If Mr Brown is talking about English matters then he should say ‘England’, even if it is politically inconvenient for him to do so.”