Lynne is a typical modern-day politician. Her job is to divert, rather than focus the public’s attention on anything substantial. She’s a shill, just like the rest of them.

We (much of the public) know what’s going on here, where our society is gradually heading. You don’t even have to have read Brave New World or experienced Soviet Russia to appreciate what’s unfolding. Day by day we see it – yet those who supposedly represent us conveniently do not. Our MPs are either amazingly thick, or laughing behind our backs.

Let’s just hope they don’t push too hard and live to regret their arrogance.

“We have abandoned the idea that there is an independent reality which is out there and subject to independent verification – and adopted instead a different kind of political epistemology. The purpose of public argument has moved right away from truths that can be proven to narratives that can be constructed. This is formally recognised by the ruling elite.

Peter Mandelson, one of the inventors of the new politics, speaks of the need to ‘create the truth’. Apologists for the new ruling elite celebrate this proposition. Here is the Cambridge University lecturer in political philosophy David Runciman in his recent and very well-received book on political hypocrisy: ‘it is never a question of truth versus lies; it is, at best, a choice between different kinds of truth against different kinds of lies.’”

Is there a transcript anywhere?

How do we recover these freedoms, so hard won and so readily thrown away? I believe that they are the basic elements of society, without them nothing good can be achieved. The current government believes that its subjects do not need to be free, they just need to do as they are told by a government that knows best. Who will champion fundamental freedoms, not David Cameron I fear?

This is a disgraceful attack on both freedom and parliamentary democracy and yet it appears no MP cares. Much the same as few MPs seem to care about the use of anti-terrorist laws by local councils. MPs who stay silent as freedoms earned over centuries are stripped away by this government are complicit in its guilt.

The government can’t keep changing the classification every six months as that would send out an even more confusing message than already exists – they already look incredibly weak and such a U-turn would obviously damage them further.

Not that I agree with Johnson’s conduct in the slightest, but to blame absolutely everything on him and to fail to even mention Smith even once in the article (or even hint that the problems were caused by a predecessor) isn’t really on.

His hands are tied in terms of changing the policy, so we can’t really be sure how he feels on the issue either way.