I should really pay more attention to local politics.

In my local borough of Croydon there has been some dispute over plans to set up a so called Academy schools. During a particularly heated public meeting on the matter the councils head of education, Maria Gatland, was forced to resign because of an indiscretion in her past. So far so typical except for the fact that the indiscretion in question was that in the 1970's Ms Gatland was an active member of the Irish Republican Army. During her time with that terrorist organisation one of Ms Gatland's tasks was to travel to Europe in order to facilitate a major arms deal. This deal went very badly wrong with the local police seizing all the weapons and coming close to arresting the entire network. Shortly after this Ms Gatland fell out with the IRA who court martialled her and sentenced her to death. She then fled to the UK mainland where she wrote a book about her experiences before settling in Croydon where she joined the Conservative party and was allowed to rise to one of the most senior positions in the local council. Even by Croydon's standards that's quite bizarre but does reinforce my belief that if you allowed the UK security services to control the world it would look a lot like Croydon.

On the subject of terrorism I've taken a closer look at the Mumbai attacks and decided that it's entirely possible that the attacks were carried out by just ten men if those ten men were very lucky and it appears they have been very lucky. One of the first targets of the attacks was Mumbai's main police station where the head of the cities anti-terrorist command was killed. This decapitation of the police's command and control structure would have been enough to paralyse their response and allow the gunmen to regroup and move onto their secondary targets. I also think that the gunmen were all members of Lashkar-e-Toiba a Pakistani group acting independently of both Al Qeada and Pakistani intelligence services using equipment and training they had stockpiled throughout the groups lifetime. The attacks were probably carried in order to provoke a confrontation between India and Pakistan to relieve pressure on Al Qeada groups operating on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The idea that these Al Qeada groups needed assistance was probably an unintended consequence of intelligence operations within Pakistani civic society designed to get people to switch allegiances to a more pro-western ideology.

The main winners out of the attacks will probably be the USA who have gained leverage over Pakistan, Israel who have gained leverage over India and German arms manufacturer Heckler & Koch who will probably now win a contract to upgrade the armoury of India's security services. The main losers will probably be India which has suffered the attacks and had it's image of a safe country damaged. Pakistan who will be under pressure to make more concessions to the US and being the host country for a proxy war between two opposing ideologies rarely works out well for a country. Al Qeada who will no doubt feel the effects of increased US power in the region. Lashkar-e-Toiba who have depleted their resources and will now come in for increased attention for Pakistan and India's security efforts.

Continuing the theme of making light of human suffering the UK has recently been gripped by the story of two conjoined twins called Hope and Faith, wondering when they will be born, when they will be separated and if they will survive. On Tuesday surgery was preformed and sadly Hope did not survive. This means that the image of itself that the UK's projecting to the world is that Hope's dead and Faith's on life support!