...according to this Labour attack ad:

So much for the right having a monopoly on anti-crime populism. As for the actual merits of the attack - where to start? Well...

1) 'Even the Daily Mail' concedes that "just one in 350, or 0.3 per cent, of the 1.3 million crimes solved by police" can be credited to the DNA database.

I'm editing the openDemocracy front page this week, and alongside the regular articles I've featured a video from contributor Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of Internet law at Harvard Law School who was until recently also a professor here at Oxford. It's a presentation on 'The Historical Record in the Digital Age' in which he discusses the effect of the web on the preservation of information for future generations, and the politics thereof:

I've just discovered this screenshot of what Twitter used to look like (Creative Commons, from prolific flickr screenshot-uploader factoryjoe):

Recently - which in the context of this avowedly 'occasional' blog means last month - I posted on Merseyside police's ill-fated use of an aerial drone to track down a teenage car thief. They ran into legal troubles, for the relatively trivial reason that the Civil Aviation Authority, which is concerned about the threat these devices pose to other air traffic, had not granted the appropriate license.

It sounds like police drones are spreading like flies in summer. By the look of this report from Texas' Local 2 TV news, they have crossed the Atlantic:

Speaking as someone who has described this issue with phrases such as 'repressive science fiction dystopias' and 'Judge Dredd', I take my hat off to the delightfully excitable tone of the reporter in this clip. I don't think any non-American could compete; it's just something about the accent. You can tell he had fun ambushing the "secret test".

Towards the end of January, I quoted from a Guardian report on police plans to use aerial drones - more famous as flying assassins for the US military - to monitor the British population. As I commented at the time, "sometimes it is hard to avoid the suspicion that the powers that be are just trying to see how many elements of the repressive dystopias of recent science fiction they can imitate without anyone complaining". A story in today's Guardian suggests the complaints are likely to come sooner rather than later:

For Merseyside police, the "eye in the sky" arrest was a landmark moment in policing history. The force had managed to track down and apprehend a teenager who had fled from a presumed stolen Renault Clio, senior officers revealed, by using a remote-controlled flying robot equipped with thermal imaging cameras.

But the attempt to claim credit for the UK's first arrest using a surveillance drone backfired tonight after it emerged the force itself could face prosecution because officers flew the surveillance aircraft without permission – a criminal offence.

You may recall the 'climategate' scandal that erupted last November after a hacker broke into servers at the University of East Anglia and leaked e-mails and data from its influential Climate Research Unit.

Whatever your opinion of Prime Minister's Questions, it at least provides an opportunity for the opposition parties to put the government on the spot and require its leader to defend his or her policies. Conversely, it allows the Prime Minister to respond to these criticisms, so that if they are themselves dishonest in some way they will be less effective than if they had simply been distributed through an uncritical media.

America, with its President separate from the legislature and often removed from the legislative process, has no such institution. John McCain promised to introduce one during the last presidential campaign. But for a taste of what it might look like, and how healthy it could be, I recommend that you watch this riveting and almost unprecedented exchange between President Obama and the congressional Republicans at the GOP Retreat in Baltimore on Friday:

Tomorrow, at 10:23 a.m., I will overdose on pharmaceuticals, taking forty two times the recommended dose - so if you do not see me in OurKingdom thereafter, you will know why. However, those of you who have been immunised against pseudo-science can take comfort in the fact that the 'pharmaceuticals' are homeopathic: the very canister of Boots own brand sulphur that you can see to the left. They come with an injunction to take no more than two 'pillules' every two hours, but a more appropriate warning would be "may not contain sulphur". As with all homeopathic medicines, the chance of this product containing any of the substance it is advertised as containing (in the large, unmistakable letters you can see in the picture) is vanishingly small - less than the chance of winning the lottery. The '30C' on the label indicates that you would expect on average one atom of sulphur for every 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules of sucrose in the canister, far more than it contains. (That's sixty zeroes.)

Why did Tony Blair decide to go along with, and even cheerlead for, the invasion of Iraq almost seven years ago? I don't pretend to know the full explanation. But ahead of his testimony to the Chilcot Inquiry today - which I would guess is more likely to devolve into a media circus than to provide a truly satisfying answer to this question - it is worth considering one factor many informed commentators consider key. I have in mind the imperial temptation in British politics - the desire to "punch above our weight", reshape the shaken kaleidoscope of the world, or whatever description you favour (there is no shortage of purple prose to choose from). In his illuminating history of twentieth century UK politics, Britain Since 1918: The Strange Career Of British Democracy, David Marquand illustrates how leader after leader has fallen prey to this temptation, Blair included.

I was reminded of this history by a recent exchange in the higher-browed reaches of the American blogosphere which is well worth your time. The debate was prompted by a thoughtful but flawed essay by conservative Jim Manzi in the journal National Affairs which made the following claim:

From 1980 through today, America's share of global output has been constant at about 21%. Europe's share, meanwhile, has been collapsing in the face of global competition — going from a little less than 40% of global production in the 1970s to about 25% today. Opting for social democracy instead of innovative capitalism, Europe has ceded this share to China (predominantly), India, and the rest of the developing world.

Critics of Labour's record on civil rights are sometimes accused of hysteria when they talk of Britain becoming a 'police state'. This time last year, the day before the Convention on Modern Liberty, Jack Straw felt it necessary to write an op-ed for the Guardian entitled "Our record isn't perfect. But talk of a police state is daft".