Come on you couldn't really have thought I was going to fall for that whole

"It'll all be sorted out in September just as long as he doesn't comment on the Climate Camp!" Routine

I mean altering my behaviour before the state alters it's would just be silly now wouldn't it.

Today the Climate Camp has had it's mass day of direct action. From what I can gather in the absence of any mainstream media reports it appears that the climate campers have marched all the way up to the Kingsworth fence, listened to a few speeches and marched all the way back again. Hardly and example of terrorism at it's most violent.

In the run up to the main event the police changed their tactics dramatically on Friday. Firstly they made sure that the police, the ones in front of the TV crews at least, changed out of their riot gear and appeared in the much softer dress of the traditional British Bobbie.

The second thing they did was to announce that the entire police operation for the climate camp only cost £1million. I find this hard to believe because in my Stewarding days the Metropolitan police were invoicing the company for police assistance at a cost £25 per police man hour. With some 1400 officer being used in the climate camp operation this would put their costs of staffing alone at a rate of about £750,000 per day over 10 days. That is before you even get into the costs of housing them and feeding them for that period.

The third thing they did was to place the entire Hoo peninsula, where the camp is located, under a Section 60 of the Public Order Act notice. This means that they gave themselves the power to stop and search anybody and everybody without any reasonable suspicion that they were involved in a crime. This was done in an attempt to give their previous use of Stop&Search a veil of credibility.

This is a nonsense because it was the powers of Section 60 which were tested in the Iraq war cases and the ruling was the same. The police can only detain people for a "brief and reasonable time" in order to carry out searches. The police will attempt to argue that a wait of 1-2 hours per person is reasonable because of the high number of people they needed to search. I find this very hard to believe because when I was doing Stop&Searches at the Oval cricket ground we had to thoroughly search 18,000 people within 1 hour with no more then a 10minute wait for any one person and we did it consistently over 5 days. Of course then we were only having to do searches because of a specific and credible threat by the Real IRA, the group which caused the Omagh bombing.

Yesterday there was some story about the Evening Standard apologising for printing stories about Prince Phillips health. This could not be considered in reference to me because it was the Evening Standard would have simply re-printed the same story on it's front page that night and continued to do so every day for a very long time.

There is also a growing conflict going on between Georgia and Russia. My comments on the issue have somehow been considered themselves to be a act of war which is strange because I was perfectly happy to stay out of the issue right up to the point that people started using my silence on the issue to attack my credibility. That is something which is not acceptable at the moment and as they say every action has an equal and opposite reaction, if you want to avoid the re-action you will have to alter the course of your action.