I find quite a few politicians a bit baffling – but this latest nonsense from John Hemming MP, who has a reputation for being quite bright, is just daft….
Political Scrapbook reports….
“Millionaire Liberal Democrat John “three homes” Hemming has told Radio 4 he would vote for a rise in tuition fees to punish students who occupied his constituency office. His extraordinary exchange with Eddie Mair came after an embarassing argument with a protester live on local radio……”
The global Assange / Wikileaks circus continues today with police arresting Assange when he walked into a London police station this morning. It appears that the judge refused bail – despite the paucity of evidence(*), it is asserted, but Mark Stephens, Assange’s lawyer, has the ‘thermonuclear 256 bit encryption code to decode thousands of documents now transmitted to thousands worldwide should anything untoward happen to Assange…like him being killed, for example…or, presumably, extradited from Sweden to the United States?
(*) Gerard Batten, a UKIP MEP, said the Assange case highlighted the dangers of the European arrest warrant, because the judge has no power to listen to the evidence to judge if there is a prime facie case.
Mark Stephens has suggested that the Swedish prosecutor should question Assange in London – a perfectly sensible suggestion on the face of it, but I won’t be holding my breath. We shall see.
A rather ironic postscript: Mark Stephens, not surprisingly, is concerned that the security and others services are watching him and that client confidentiality may be breached and leaked to the world at large. The attempt by US lawyers to elide the lawyers with Assange and implicate them is just primitive and should be easily resisted.
Read The Legal Week report
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