So much to talk about today. Firstly, the snow. Or rather, the lack thereof. Nottingham seems to have got off relatively lightly in terms of snowfall. In spite of that, I was still astounded by the general inability of the driving population of this country to remember how to drive in snow from one winter to the next.

Next up is the statement Abu Bakr, one of the men arrested in the Birmingham 'beheading plot'^[1] that the UK is a police state for Muslims. It's hard to see how that statement is anything but accurate. It seems that the police now have carte blanche to harass Muslims and arrest them without good reason. What seems like racial and religious profiling has real potential, in my view, to lead to an even more worrying scenario: the harassment and unnecessary arrests of those who speak out against the racist policies of the Blairite government.

Linked to this is yesterday's visit to the Houses of Parliament by Shilpa Shetty. This cynical move by Blair and that exemplar of good government, Keith Vaz was a desperate attempt to hide the fact that the mother of a serviceman killed in the illegal, racist war in Iraq was denied an audience with the PM^[2] while giving Blair a chance to appear to stand against racism. The irony of this is painful more than it is amusing.

^[1] See also comments by Roger.
^[2] Sorry, I couldn't find a link to this story, but it was all over the radio yesterday.