Peter Rhodes on buying cars, hunting down dissent and Russians who threaten us with tsunamis
Aware of the towering importance of the car-finance ruling in the Supreme Court, I sat down to watch the entire judgment, delivered by Lord Reed. And promptly fell asleep.
The judgment is complicated, yet the basics of buying are very simple. If you have willingly entered into a deal, whether it's to buy a car or any other product, you shouldn't be entitled, many years later, to suddenly claim you were robbed and therefore deserve a huge wodge of compensation. The essence of any contract is a willing seller and a willing buyer. And back to sleep . . .
People in power have always used eavesdropping as a means of holding on to power. What shocks us this week is not that a secretive government unit is tracking down criticism of migrant hotels and “two-tier justice.” No, the shock is that this unit, known as the National Security and Online Information Team (NSOIT), is focusing solely on the internet and issuing chilling warnings to social-media over the sort of comments that you might easily find in newspapers, on TV or even down the pub.
For example, according to the Daily Telegraph, one of the comments flagged up by NSOIT referred to small-boat migrants as “undocumented fighting-age males.”
This sort of talk may rattle the curtains in Downing Street but is it disinformation, or the robustly held opinion of many people? It is certainly a view expressed by commentators in the mainstream media, and yet they seem untroubled by the spooks of NSOIT as it goes about its solemn task of shooting the messengers. Why so? Can it be that Whitehall sees social-media users as low-hanging fruit, to be bullied at will, while the mainstream broadcasters and publishers are more powerful? Shoot these messengers and we shoot back.
Some Russian ultra-hawks, the sort who regard Putin as a bit of a softy, have for years been threatening Britain with tsunamis. They warn darkly that Moscow's mighty Poseidon drone, if detonated off the UK coastline, could trigger a vast tidal wave and turn Britain into a wasteland. And then, to their great surprise, the tsunami-threateners are whacked by the real thing. Last week's Far East tsunami gave Russia a pummelling and damaged one of Putin's nuclear-submarine bases. Poetic justice, comrades.
Britain turned into a wasteland? Would we notice the difference?
