The Socialists will celebrate their success in the French regional elections this week, but the combined forces of Villepin, voter apathy, and the National Front’s exploitation of white working class problems should not be underestimated as they look ahead to 2012.

Jimmy is a web developer and cheekily took advantage of the non-existent security on the Cash Gordon website’s twitter feed to tweet a segment of Javascript that, for a very brief period of time, redirected visitors to the Tory’s site to his own personal site. Sparkle Interactive.

Not long afterwards, Jimmy got a call at work, supposedly from CCHQ, threatening him with legal action.

I am not sure where I stand on this issue, but our youthful cabinet minister with the responsible for drafting the Labour manifesto, Ed Milliband, says that one of the policies in the next Labour manifesto will be a “reduction in the voting age to 16”.

It is clear that we have a mish-mash of laws identifying the age of when a young person becomes an adult and some rationalisation must be carried out, but is the place to start the voting age?

As always, the best place to start is sex.

By all means, people should object to unions being used as the vehicle for the policies of the Union Modernisation Fund – and I haven’t made up my mind yet, though I’m leaning towards a separation of unions as agitational bodies of workers from educative and training bodies paid for by the State. They can object to the specific policies as being inefficient or poor uses of money. But they can’t reasonably object that this money is a bung to union allies of a Labour Party.

Nine times out of ten I get the bus home like everybody else. But on those rare occasions when I pile out of Ronnie Scott’s or the 100 Club and it’s a bit too late or a bit too cold to be hanging around for the N73, I jump in a taxi to Stoke Newington. [...]

As the nation prepares to go to the polls in just a few weeks’ time, this week’s Guardian Politics Weekly podcast, recorded live at Manchester University, took a snapshot of the political landscape as seen by our friends in the North. Whether it was from the three Guardian panellists, from the members of the audience or from interviews with the public, strong opinions emerged on the issues that look set to dominate the public discourse in the coming weeks – and listening to these contributions I saw a theme emerging.

Given the now clear bias of the police against the UAF, and the media’s supplicant willingness to uphold that interpretation, we must all trend incredibly carefully from now on. This is not an even battlefield we find ourselves upon.

Along with “paedophilia”, the term “child” has become so expanded as to risk losing coherent meaning.

In terms of child protection legislation, a child is anyone below the age of 18 years. That you can drive, have sex, get married and go to war whilst still a “child” is just to highlight our decidedly convoluted views on these matters.

I got this highlighted to me while travelling and thought it was worth flagging up.

Expose the BNP points out what happened in Bolton and how the media help and aid fascists from the BNP and EDL…

If they stand in my area, I’ll vote for the Pirate Party not because I believe in everything they stand for, but because I want this issue to get the scrutiny and focus it deserves. The Digital Economy Bill should be scrapped, and parliament should start again from scratch, drafting a law that has the propagation of knoweldge at its core, not the profts of big media.