Verdict of the Week


Parliament Raided by Police As Tory MP Is Arrested

Westminster is in shock after the police raided Parliament to ransack the offices of Tory MP Damian Green. Martin then Not since 1642 have the Houses of Parliament been raided like this. Four centuries ago, such an invasion was re-buffed by a courageous Speaker who risked his life by throwing the King and his soldiers out on their limbs.

Today we have the slightly less heroic figure of Michael Martin, the Speaker who denied all knowledge of it, then passed the buck onto a junior colleague and now refuses to accept responsibility for it.

There seems to be no real crime committed here other than a civil servant leaking a document that the Government would rather have kept quiet about because it is embarrassing to them. All Mr Green did was to expose the Government's sham immigration policy, by highlighting that they were in breach of it themselves by hiring cleaning staff who were illegal aliens in the country.

This all seems rather hypercritical of Gordon Brown, especially as he used leaked documents many times when he was a young MP to embarrass the Tory government in just the same way.

These were not documents that threatened national security and it seems that the sovereignty of Parliament has been violated without reason. These are the actions of a police state hell bent on political intimidation, not of a democracy.

This invasion demands proper answers from Paul Stephenson, the acting head of the Metropolitan Police, the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith and from the Speaker himself, Michael Martin.

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