Very kind of you but I am feeling guilty and shifty now because I am half and half so actually French and English are the same to me 
there’s definitely no merit I’m afraid.
This is not good:
.
I’d expect nothing less from Shitty Patel. Only a clown like Johnson could ever have given her the Home Office.
The Home Office has always been found unfit for purpose so she should fit in really well.
LoL 
But who is going to stop Johnson’s govt? No-one. Especially after this bill is passed.
The Mirror says : " Clause 60 has already been dubbed the ‘Steve Bray’ law, after the man who spent years shouting ‘Stop Brexit!’ at Parliament in his long running one-man anti-Brexit protest.
The Home Secretary will have the power, through secondary legislation, to define and give examples of “serious disruption to the life of the community” and “serious disruption to the activities of an organisation which are carried out in the vicinity of the procession/assembly/one-person protest”. These regulation-making powers will clarify ambiguous cases where, if they arise, it would not be clear whether the threshold for the use of such powers have been reached. This will enable the police to make use of their powers with the confidence that they are doing so legally.
I have just had this from the Good Law Project:
Hi
Last night’s Panorama gave us the extraordinary tale of a dog food supplier turned PPE broker bagging herself millions acting as a ‘bridge’ for a Hong Kong supplier. Details of the largest contract - worth £178m - came to light only after the BBC’s probing prompted the Government to publish.
It sought to explain its failure as an “admin error.” But even if true - which we doubt - this doesn’t justify a further breach of the law on transparency. Despite the High Court ruling in our favour last month that Matt Hancock had broken the law in failing to publish pandemic contracts the failures continue. Meanwhile, Boris Johnson and his Minister mislead Parliament about the scale of the breaches. And refuse to come clean about the beneficiaries of its ‘VIP’ lane.
In his judgment, Judge Chamberlain said “The Secretary of State spent vast quantities of public money on pandemic-related procurements during 2020. The public were entitled to see who this money was going to, what it was being spent on and how the relevant contracts were awarded.” We agree. And so we have today written to Matt Hancock launching new legal proceedings for his continuing failures to comply with the law.
Our grounds focus on two key issues:
- First, the Secretary of State’s failure to comply with his obligations to publish Contracts Finder notices (CFNs) within the requisite 90 days. In relation to contracts entered into on or before 7 October 2020, he had failed to do so in well over 50% of cases.
- Second, the Secretary of State’s decision to obscure the key provisions in contracts. Many contracts are being published in heavily redacted form - one example from December shows the quantity, unit price, size and colour of gowns being redacted; another contract entered into almost a year ago but published only this month is so heavily redacted that no information whatsoever is visible regarding what was even purchased. Publication in this form isn’t transparency; it is advertising the lack of it.
“One unfortunate consequence of non-compliance with the transparency obligations…is that people can start to harbour suspicions of improper conduct… .” said Judge Chamberlain in last month’s judgment.
We agree. If they have nothing to hide why won’t they publish?
Jolyon Maugham
Director of Good Law Project
This just shows how much this government values legal procedure. It spits on it and it will do the same to decent people needing to take to the streets to bring their problems to the attention of the general public and to tell this government that they need to do something about it.
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In a bizarre way that may be good news. The more the Bojo-ers push their luck the sooner they’ll get their marching orders. The problem for me, as ever, is that bad as they are (and they are very bad IMO) there’s no confidence inspiring alternative.
Marina Hyde’s typically interesting, and humourous, take…
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You’re right. Starmer turns out to be a wet lettuce.
Yes, very disappointing. I think he’s trying to please everybody, which just means he pleases nobody.
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One of her best IMHO 
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This is also surprisingly good (I don’t usually rate Owen Jones - but there is some fine writing here)
No, Jones is normally un peu trop for me too but this was well written. My only question mark is that I’m not that there wasn’t “menacing authoritarianism represented by Corbynism”.
Of course, the main point at issue here is, 'Who is defining the ‘serious annoyance’ or ‘serious unease’ and who defines serious annoyance?
Serious to one person could be completely different from someone else.
“ministers were wrongly trying to claim credit for the success of the programme”
Yes - I still think the big lesson of the pandemic for the UK is that when the politicians or private sector led they made a complete hash of it (lockdowns too late, PPE scandals, test and trace, eat out to help out, and assorted other fiascos) but when the NHS and voluntary sector were allowed to just get on with it (treating the illness, supporting the bereaved, vaccinations, etc) it tended to work out well.
But I still prefer France’s approach - even to vaccinations. I like the fact that France suspended the AZ vaccine when the blood clot issue arose, then immediately resumed when the proper medical body reassured them, and I like the fact that it is sticking to the recommended spacing of first and second jabs (and has done twice as many complete immunisations than the UK) - in short that they are following the precautionary principle and proper medical procedure.
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Any excuse to halt AstraZeneca vaccines.
And in the meantime there are enormous numbers of new cases (35,000 yesterday compared to 6,300 in the UK), Paris and other regions in lockdown and ICU’s overwhelmed. France doing a stellar job on vaccines! 
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But 35,000 cases is still half the case rate in the UK before its lockdown, and deaths well under a quarter of the UK rate. There is still no comparison.
Comparing the rate in France now, before lockdown, with the rate is the UK now, when they’ve been in lockdown for 10 weeks, is meaningless (unless what you’re arguing is that lockdowns work - which I think is pretty obvious).
The real question on how good a job Johnson has done is why he let the UK case rate get to 70,000 (rolling average 55,000), and daily deaths to almost 2,000 (rolling average over 1,000) before the UK lockdown.
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Unless I’m missing something the AZ vaccine spacing is 12 weeks in the UK as it is here and France hasn’t done twice as many complete immunisations.