I Think it's Time to Accept.

That save for major emergencies I won't be posting again until after Christmas. However before I go there's a couple of things I should clear up.

December 20th Demo. The planned December 20th student protest didn't happen which is often how these things work out. Someone calls a demonstration and then people either turn up or they don't. On this occasion the person calling the demo did so without prior permission from student or the established protest groups. In response the established groups started a stupid rumour that it was a front for either the state or the English Defence League (EDL) in order to discourage people from attending. This is of course nonsense because the EDL are currently busy with their own things at the moment and there's nothing the state would have achieved that they haven't achieved already at the four previous student protests. However the whole thing does rather prove my point about the student protests that there's been perhaps a bit too much action and not enough thinking.

Anti-terror Arrests. Also on December 20th British police arrested 12 Muslim men to prevent an alleged Christmas terror attack although no weapons or explosives have yet been found. What appears to have happened is that someone started a rumour that there was going to be a terror attack in the UK over the Christmas/New Year holiday. This forced the police to arrest 12 randoms so when no attack took place it would look like the result of successful policing rather then the security services not knowing their elbows from other parts of their body. The police themselves have been trying to kill the story presumably so it doesn't cause them further embarrassment in the future.

Knives Out. Senior Liberal Democrat MP and Business Secretary, Vince Cable has been stung by undercover reporters working for the Telegraph newspaper. During the secretly taped conversations Mr Cable can be heard claiming that he is the most powerful man in government with the power to bring down the ConDem coalition and that he has declared war of Rupert Murdoch's takeover of broadcaster BSkyB, apparently pre-judging the report of the supposedly independent broadcast regulator, OFCOM. Apart from being forced to take political ownership of the increase to tuition fees Vince Cable has also been a discreet opponent of plans to cap immigration. Therefore this seems like part of the wider attempt to silence the LibDems. You see the Conservatives needed to give them a dozen Cabinet posts and entertain some of their policies in order to get the LibDems to join the coalition. Now that's done efforts are being made to sideline them and their policies to the backbenches and out of the decision making process. On the wider issue I should point out that while I'm strongly opposed to Rupert Murdoch taking over the BBC I have no problem whatsoever with him taking full control of Sky. In fact I think most people assume that he owns more then 49% of the company anyway.