Excellent piece by Cath on Comment is Free taking Mad Nads Dorries to bits... Nads is round the twist all right. Time for her to push off.

While you're enjoying that, which you will, check out our new campaigning website coalitionforchoice. This is a campaigning pro-choice liberal left website and a great example, if we say so ourselves, of why the web IS SO GREAT. Coming together to take down god-botherers and tories - doesn't get much better than that... truly is bloody great...

PLUS:

Abortion Rights has called an emergency protest for Tuesday 20 May at 5.30pm.

MPs will debate and vote on the anti-abortion amendments to the Human Embryology and Fertilisation Bill that day - the key amendments being the ones that aim to lower the time limit for abortion. We've written about these moronic proposals plenty.

This vote is taking place a lot earlier than expected and with very little notice.

What a pack of showers.

Back soon - off writing something fabulous.

Or not. 

Etc.

This is cross-posted at liberalconspiracy.org:

An abortion rights update for you all:

Tis the 1967 Abortion Act's enactment birthday this week, people, and our friends over at Abortion Rights are suggesting a number of activities (no off-colour comments, please) to mark this major occasion.

One excellent way to observe the anniversary yourself is to send a stiff letter to your MP, telling them to vote against any anti-abortion amendments to the Abortion Act that conservative political opportunists try to sneak onto the agenda as the now-famous Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill progresses through parliament this spring.

Here and over at LC, we've argued - correctly - that the HFEB has absolutely nothing to do with abortion law (it's about regulating the sciences of fertilisation and embryology, and - that's it. The End).

Alas, the pro-life loonies keep refusing to make the leap.

Cross-posted at liberalconspiracy:

So glad to hear that the world can't get enough of the mayoral election, but I for one am finding the whole scene tremendously depressing:

It's a cold little night in Bethnal Green, and yours truly and about 20 other people - mostly OAPs, it appears - are sitting in a near-empty hall in Oxford House on Derbyshire street, readying ourselves for a London assembly candidates' hustings.

The OAPs and I are peering stagewards. There, various remnants of the tattered Left sit - three City and East London assembly consitutency candidates, and one mayoral hopeful in the form of Lindsey German - all set to convince we of the apathetic mainstream to get off our useless behinds and vote, etc.

I'm not convinced that tonight is going to be the night, tbh. We're already 15 minutes past kickoff, and there's still - well, almost nobody in the audience. Those who are present are either running for office themselves (Weavers ward Left List council candidate Shamsun Murshid is there with a couple of supporters), or part of the small, ever-present bunch of batty-looking Greens that you inevitably find at these meetings - the wild-haired, ranting, cardiganed diehards from which Sian Berry is such a carefully-constructed and buffed departure.

You know - there are days when I wonder whether you English are quite the racist, chauvinist pisswits that your mainstream media so passionately holds you to be.

I don't think you are, tbh.

I'll tell you what has put me in mind of this.

I spent the whole of last weekend at the Butlins holiday camp in Bognor Regis - a move which seemed to strike the fear of god into my nearest socialist dearest. 'God, don't go there,' everybody said to me, horrified. 'White working-class on holiday... booze... racists... singalongs... line-dancing... racists... racist comics... blah blah blah...'

The thing is - it was absolutely nothing like that at all. It was one of the most integrated experiences I've had. Was that wrong? Butlins in Bognor Regis was more of a melting-pot than the UN. There were black families. There were white families. There were asian families. There were even - get this - muslim families, with all the props - blokes with the long, black Muslim beards, and women and girls in those nutty ground-length gowns and veils, etc.

Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves and getting along fine, so I could only assume that they were. I could also only assume it was always like that, and that working-class persons of different hues and faith, etc, tend to get along better than those of lofty mindset think. Butlins holidays are fairly intimate events - everybody eats together and swims together and pisses the nights away together at family entertainment sessions, so you need to be in a fairly neighbourly groove at all times.

So - it seemed unlikely that black, asian, and muslim people would set aside annual leave and pay good money to spend a week at a holiday camp where they were likely to get abused and beaten up by drunken white trash, etc. Surely, they could just stay at home if they wanted that. Although - maybe home is all right, too? Maybe nobody hates everybody else to quite the extent that the MSM tells them they do?

The English class system confuses me. I am CONFUSED.

Wow, man - some freaky dude just dropped a piece of paper with a handwritten cross and a 'happy easter' message on it thru the door. Don't think it was Nadine...

They could at least have left an egg. CHEAPOS

Hello all,

Discussing benefits and welfare over at liberalconspiracy at the moment. Head over and get stuck in.

Was going to have a rant about the Prince Harry/pro-war propaganda that readers of the mainstream press were, alas, assaulted by this morning upon rising, but chicken yoghurt has done it better than I ever could... anyway, what Justin said...

This is cross-posted at liberalconspiracy.org. 

Another majestically irritating contribution from pro-life sympathisers today: Dave Cameron, who should know better, tells us that he likes the idea of cutting the time limit for abortion from 24 weeks as the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill progresses through the House.

A few thoughts:

I wonder if I can stand much more of this tripe from these persons. We're not even talking the real world here - just Nadine Dorries and Ann Widdecombe and other leading lights in Dave's menopausal mafia claiming - I think my notes are correct - to have seen pictures of foetuses walking/dancing/voting conservative at 24 weeks' gestation, and being moved observe that we should save babies of this age simply because we can.

I've never quite got my head around this aspect of the pro-life argument, but let's give it another whirl: as far as I can gather, they're trying to imply that because we're at a point in medical history where doctors are able to save babies born at 24 weeks, aborting other babies at 24 weeks is giving the big finger to human technical advance.