Still I have to admit that, even for someone as clueless about cars as I am, the BBC production Top Gear has considerable charm. The presenters of Top Gear are Richard Hammond (‘the Hamster), James May (‘Captain Slow’) and Jeremy Clarkson (no nickname for him – he’s just deliciously politically incorrect).  One of the most intriguing characters of the show, however, is The Stig,  a white-clad, white-helmeted “tame racing car driver” with a glistening black visor, who trains celebrities in doing laps for the show’s competition and who sets test times for various cars. Until recently the Stig’s identity was a secret, and there has been much speculation as to who he is.

British newspapers outed The Stig last last year as F3 racing car driver Ben Collins, and news outlets confirmed the hunch earlier this year by inspecting Collins’ company’s financial records. Now it appears Collins is planning to release an autobiography with HarperCollins which would reveal his identity for once and for all. The BBC recently headed to the UK High Court to prevent the publication of the autobiography, but it failed in its bid.

A number of the reports mention that The Stig is subject to a confidentiality agreement with the BBC. If the Stig is Collins, if Collins is subject to a confidentiality clause in his contract which he breaches by publishing the autobiography, and if Collins makes a profit from his breach of contract…then he might need to watch out. It might be hard for the BBC to rely on breach of confidence as an action because it seems that the information is no longer really confidential, but there is a possibility that the BBC could rely on an action in contract to make The Stig disgorge his profits.

Attorney-General v Blake [2001] 1 AC 268 provides that courts in the UK can award accounts of profits for breach of contract in ‘exceptional circumstances’ where the plaintiff has a ‘legitimate interest’ in performance of the contract. The contract in Blake itself involved an undertaking in a contract of employment to the effect that, even after his work had ceased, the employee would not disclose any information about his work without the consent of the Crown. George Blake had been a spy for MI6, but he was also a double agent for the Soviets. When his treachery was uncovered in 1960, he was convicted and imprisoned, but he subsequently escaped from prison and fled to the Soviet Union. Perhaps he wasn’t being kept in the fashion to which he was accustomed after the fall of the Iron Curtain, because in 1990 he published an unauthorised autobiography entitled No Other Choice. The British government was outraged to hear that Blake was being paid £150,000 for the book by his British publishers, and successfully sought an account of profits over all profits remaining in the jurisdiction (some £60,000 had already been paid to Blake in Russia, but about £90,000 remained in Britain).

You can see the parallels and differences between this case and The Stig’s case. In both cases, there was a term of an employment contract which provided that information was to be kept confidential. However, The Stig’s breach is not quite of the same quality as Blake’s: he’s not a double-agent seeking to cash in on his treachery; he’s just a racing car driver on a popular television show.

Certainly, after Blake, there have been cases where some form of gain-based award has been awarded for breaches of contract providing that the promisor was to keep certain information confidential and that the promisor was only to use the information for certain purposes. There have been cases where ‘reasonable fee’ damages have been awarded for a concurrent breach of confidence and breach of contract: see eg, Pell Frischmann Engineering v Bow Valley Iran Limited [2009] UKPC 45; Vercoe v Rutland Fund Management Limited [2010] EWHC 424 (Ch). (In a somewhat unorthodox fashion, I see ‘reasonable fee’ awards as effecting a partial disgorgement of profit. )

If the BBC were able to force The Stig to disgorge at least part of his profits, what would the implications be for freedom of speech? (This is a question which my fellow law blogger Eoin O’Dell thinks should be asked more frequently in these cases). In the UK freedom of speech is protected under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Perhaps the Beeb would argue that it was not preventing The Stig from saying his piece (although it did try to prevent him with its application for an injunction!), it was merely seeking a remedy for breach of contract which would protect its legitimate interest, and remove the incentive for any future Stigs to publish memoirs. (Apparently there was a Black Stig before there was a White Stig, but the Black Stig got “killed off” after he let his identity be known…surely incentive enough to keep the secret?)

It’s probably pretty sad that I’m spending the first day sans thesis writing a post which deals precisely with the subject matter of my thesis, but I’m afraid that it was the first thing that popped into my head when I saw that article about The Stig. I will say that this area of law consistently throws up interesting cases, however: my PhD features Jimi Hendrix, the World Wide Fund for Nature and the World Wrestling Foundation, numerous spies and breaches of confidence, and my all time favourite, Elvis’ gold-plated piano!

I put a special part in my acknowledgements for my two co-bloggers and for the regular commenters on this blog who have broadened my mind. Blogging has made a very important contribution to my thought processes. And a very special thank you to SL and DEM who encouraged me from afar when I despaired at times.

Aboriginal Liberal candidate Ken Wyatt has got [sic] hate mail from people who say they wouldn’t have voted for him if they had known he was indigenous.

Mr Wyatt, 58, will become the first Aborigine to be elected to the federal House of Representatives if, as expected, he is officially declared the winner in the West Australian seat of Hasluck.

The upset Liberal candidate said his office had received at least 50 emails and telephone calls from angry voters who accused him of only being interested in indigenous issues, the Perth Now website reports.

Personally I think it’s a damn fine thing that it’s looking like an indigenous person has a place in the House of Reps, and I salute Mr Wyatt. I feel like writing him a letter to balance out the horrible ones. In fact, I think I’ll do that right now.

Julia Gillard is a childless 48-year-old unmarried atheist redhead who lives in sin with her hairdresser. She is also the first woman to become prime minister of Australia. Just in case you thought that might mean a new era had dawned, be assured that it is probably just about over. Not that Gillard had radical intentions, or radical policies, or any policies. Her slogan was “moving forward” – to nowhere in particular. The election, which took place this weekend, was hers to lose and she has all but lost it.

The opposition had fallen in a heap after the Liberal Party “spilt” its ablest and most charismatic politician, Malcolm Turnbull, for insisting that the party recognise climate change. Into the breach to lead the Liberal-National coalition stepped the Mad Monk, Tony Abbott, ears akimbo, wide mouth agape, who refuses to believe that anything needs to be done about climate change. He set about building an image as one of the boys, a strategy that misfired when photographed during a triathlon wearing bathing trunks that Australians call “budgie-smugglers’. (His budgie was actually more like a “wren”, as unkind observers pointed out.)

We have yet to see Gillard in a thong. The election wasn’t fought on policies or issues or ideologies, but on sound-bites and gossip – and sex. Not the kind you do, but the kind you are. If there was something new about it, it was that women voted for a woman just because she was a woman. The tabloids did their best to represent Gillard as a treacherous Jezebel, who stabbed her predecessor, Kevin Rudd, otherwise known as the Milky Bar Kid, in the back. Mr Rudd was, of course, not stabbed, but dumped in June by the Labour Party which is run, not by Mr Rudd or Ms Gillard, but by a junta of faceless male powerbrokers who prefer to remain anonymous…

Anyone who thought Australia had a woman PM because of some fundamental change in the nation’s psyche was immediately reassured. Gillard was pilloried for her “deliberate” childnessness, her clothes, her morals, her looks, her undeniably unimpressive boyfriend, and her betrayal of Rudd. In any grown-up country her opponent, Tony Abbott would have been unelectable. He looks and sounds like a clown. There is not an issue that Abbott will fail to reduce to a fatuous mantra…

To hold a clear majority a political party must hold 76 seats. The coalition won 70, Labour 72, and at last count four were undecided. Of the others one (Melbourne) had been won by a Green (Adam Bandt) and there were three Independents, all of them erstwhile members of the National Party, previously known as the Country Party. The Green will probably support Labour; the three Independents are – well – independent…

Australia’s future looks grim enough with Gillard but with Abbott it would look terrifying.

- Germaine Greer, The Telegraph

Should he ever travel Down Under, be sure to check him out.

Here are two samples:

His website is here.

Go visit, the man is a talent.

I suspect the bloodletting in the Labor camp will begin shortly, with recriminations flying. I was fascinated to watch KRudd last night. He looked like the cat who’d gotten the cream, although his speech concentrated on matters personal to his electorate. Of course I don’t know, but I do wonder if he was delighted that Gillard didn’t romp it in. Maxine McKew lost the seat of Bennelong to Liberal Candidate John Alexander, a seat which she had wrested from John Howard in 2007. She delivered a pithy critique of the Labor party’s campaign and actions over the last 6 months.

If you’d told me a year ago that we’d be facing this prospect, I would have laughed at you. It just shows that a year is a very long time in politics. A year ago, the opinion polls had not yet started to slide against KRudd and none of the various projects of the government had started to founder. Labor looked like it was going to be in for another term without any worries.

The big question on Labor minds will be: would the result have been the same if they had kept KRudd as prime minister? I suspect that it would have been worse in some areas, better in others, but that the net result would have been a Labor loss, and that Tony Abbott would be in the Lodge today. I know that I probably would have voted in anger against KRudd and his spin, as I was very angry and disappointed with the way in which our country was going. It was like a lunatic had the wheel of the car, and just wouldn’t listen to anyone who asked him to give up the direction in which he was driving. Still, after the sudden leadership putsch, KRudd was transformed from villain to victim in many people’s minds. I didn’t like KRudd as PM at all, but I still felt desperately sorry for him as he stood crying outside Parliament.

However, part of Labor’s problem was surely that it took a leaf out of the LNP’s book in various respects (asylum seekers, gay marriage, etc) in an unsuccessful attempt to woo back the “battlers”, but alienated a big chunk of the middle-class left wing as it did so. I can’t count the number of Facebook friends who adopted a profile picture of a green square which stated, “This time, I’m voting Green.” The predominance of these logos signalled to me that Labor had a real problem. I was totally disappointed and turned off by Labor’s approach myself. It’s unsurprising that the Greens won their first House of Reps seat in a General Election and that they will have unprecedented numbers in the Senate.

But if people were dissatisfied with Labor, and didn’t want to turn to the Greens, but were otherwise ‘liberal’ (with a small ‘l’) – I suspect there was nowhere to go but the LNP. With the perceived similarity between Liberal and Labor, such voters could content themselves that there really wasn’t much of a difference anyway. Some who were disappointed with Labor and unwilling to go with the Greens said that they abhorred Labor’s apparent waste and the way it brushed off evidence about rorting of various schemes. The media are saying that Labor didn’t emphasise its success in riding out the GFC; I wonder if these voters considered the price of riding out the GFC too high. Or perhaps they think the stimulus payments could have been better spent elsewhere? I welcome comments.

There is also the regional effect. There is no doubt that the Labor Party suffered in New South Wales and Queensland because of the failure of the Labor State governments in those States. Voters simply didn’t trust the Labor brand any more. Furthermore, in Queensland there was a feeling of anger that “their man” (KRudd) had been deposed by a knife in the back.

I’ve heard a number of people say that people were attracted to the LNP by “racism”. I have no doubt that some people were attracted by racism. However, I think that it’s more complex that that, as I’ve said in my previous post. I suspect there are also fears which stem from basic economics, and they should not just be pooh-poohed as racism. People who are not particularly well off may fear that asylum seekers arriving in boats use up our precious resources, and perhaps take their jobs. It’s pretty certain that my job isn’t going to be threatened by a new arrival, but if I were an unskilled labourer going for the small pool of unskilled labour jobs in this country, the probability is that I’d be much more worried. I read once that some of the worst violence against indigenous people when Australia was settled was by the Irish, who were at the bottom of the British social scale (and were already savages in English eyes). Thus the Irish sought to differentiate themselves from indigenous people. Sometimes, when there are scarce resources, being poor and disadvantaged doesn’t make you kinder to your fellow humans, it makes you more desperate to crawl out of the pit and step over the less advantaged as you do (the ‘crabs in a basket’ effect). I don’t think it sits well in the mouth of someone like me (who has lived a life of middle class privilege) to turn up my nose at such behaviour, but to attempt to understand it, and to think of ways of allaying such fears rather than increasing them.

Now, as it happens, I don’t think “stopping the boats” by ramping up patrolling and detaining people in nearby islands is the answer. The long term solution is far more difficult, and involves (a) greater parity between the treatment of overseas applicants for asylum and people who set foot in the country and (b) greater international consensus about how refugees should be treated. It also involves ensuring that refugees and the communities into which they integrated are treated fairly and sensitively. Unfortunately, neither of the major parties took that approach and just went on with nonsense about stopping boats.

I think another thing which made people distrust Labor and doubt its credibility was the ETS debacle. I am a centrist-left climate sceptic (a rare and exotic beast indeed). Nonetheless, I was disgusted with Labor’s attitude on this. You just can’t say that something is the great moral challenge of our times, and then back down from it. If you really think something is vital for our country, you organise a double dissolution and get everyone to vote on it. What was going to happen when the next moral challenge occurs? Another backdown? It showed a distressing lack of principle. Coupled with the various stimulus disasters, I suspect it is what started the Labor downfall. Whether a voter believes that climate change is the greatest moral challenge of our time is neither here nor there – the important thing is that someone who says it is ought to follow through on action on it.

It will be interesting to see where we go from here. Perhaps it’s like one place where I worked when there was a vacancy in the top office. Everyone was actually pretty relieved – there was no one there to bug us any more – although after a while we wanted proper leadership back. The nice part about a hung Parliament is that it’s going to be really hard for anyone to pass crazy legislation without negotiating hard and fast with a variety of people (independents and Senators) who have a variety of different view points.

Update: an interesting overseas take: a computer animation complete with Julia Gillard cackling as she stabs Rudd in the back, and Tony Abbott kissing his shining crucifix as he shoots at boat people…Not to mention the wrestling and the crocodile pit as drunken yobbos throw beer cans in… (hat tip, Jason Soon)

I was having an interesting discussion/debate with a friend. We were talking about how family history informs the way in which one votes in such an important way. Now, when you come down to it, I’d say that her views and my views are pretty similar. We’re both soft liberals (liberals with a small ‘l’).

My mother has been looking into our family genealogy. Our forebears were utterly working class on both sides of my family. There are five or six convicts in the mix. The first two people in my immediate family to be educated past the age of 14 or 15 were my father and my mother. Both of my parents finished high school, completed undergraduate degrees then completed postgraduate degrees. Their younger siblings followed suit. You can see that my grandparents are very intelligent people; it’s just that they never had any opportunity to continue on at school because their families were too poor, and in those days, you had to go out and work for a living. Can you guess where my family’s historical political tendencies lie?

My friend’s family is from Eastern Europe and some of her forebears were involved in the early communist movement. Some of her relatives were caught up in an early factional purge and were put on a black list, partly, I think, on the basis of their religious background. I understand some members of her family ended up in the gulag, and didn’t make it out again. Life was very hard for that side of her family. The other side of her family hid their ethnic and religious background in order to escape discrimination. When she was a toddler, her family escaped from the Iron Curtain and obtained refugee status. Suffice to say that her family doesn’t have a very good opinion of left-wing politics and factional battles because they’ve seen the unpleasant aspects of socialism in practice, where factional battles have fatal consequences.

Anyway, my friend and I were debating who we were going to vote for in this election. In challenging each other’s presuppositions, we agreed that family history has a lot to do with how many people vote. My friend and I had pretty similar views and desires really: we want sound economic management, not waste; we want refugees to be decently treated; we don’t like factional battles or the manner in which KRudd was deposed; we don’t like the net filter; we’re a bit wary of the Greens; we want the life of indigenous people in this country to be improved; we support women’s rights and same sex marriage; we can’t abide discrimination and we want a government who looks out for those who are most needy in our society. Neither of us really likes the two main political party leaders, and both of us wish there was someone who displayed more principle, less spin.

But, despite our agreement in principle, historically my friend and I have voted on opposite sides of the political fence. Perhaps we need to form our own party, the Purple Party (a nice mix of blue and red, naturally) although I don’t think either of us are tactful enough to be politicians. Interestingly, my husband has none of this family history baggage – neither of his parents were born in Australia, and neither of them have any particular allegiance to one party or another as far as I know. Consequently, my husband is the genuine article: a swinging voter.

Isn’t it weird how voting is almost like football team allegiance in some ways? Actually, I never had a family football team allegiance because my parents come from Sydney, but I imagine it’s something like that. My football team is the Richmond Tigers – I chose it when I came back from England, because it was my initial team in Grade 1 before Miss Candy persuaded me into Hawthorn in Grade 2. Anyway, anyone who follows AFL football will know that the Tigers have been been doing execrably. At the start of the season they lost 10 matches in a row. I did stop watching the matches (too depressing) but I didn’t stop supporting the Tiges, because that would be disloyal. Imagine how much harder it would be if I had a whole family history behind me too? I think people’s attitude to voting has to do with the idea of commitment and consistency. In Influence at page 57, Robert Cialdini says that we have:

…a nearly obsessive desire to be (and to appear) consistent with what we have already done. Once we have made a choice or taken a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment. Those pressures will cause us to respond in ways that justify our earlier decision.

Family baggage makes the choice easier if there’s no party which really represents the mix of things that you want, and if there seems to be little practical difference between the main parties (although see contra here).

It’s an annoying choice in the House of Reps today: no one represents the mix of things I want. It’s a choice of who I dislike the least, with all that family baggage knocking along behind me. I worked out my below-the-line Senate vote last night.

What I do like about Australian elections is the sausage sizzles. I like the carnival atmosphere. When I lived in the UK and I rocked up at British elections, I was most disappointed to see that there was no sausage sizzle and no stall selling shortbread and lemon butter.

Alas, today our local voting venue had none of these things. Robbed! An uninspiring election on all counts. I think we’ll have to go to a new venue next time.

In other ways, Facebook creates social difficulties. One example is when a Facebook friend dies. I keep seeing prompts to “reconnect” with a friend who died earlier this year, and every time I see it, I get a little jolt of shock and sadness. But I don’t want to “remove” that person as my friend, because that somehow seems disrespectful, and she’s still my friend, she’s just “late” (as Mma Ramotswe might say). Brigid Delany wrote an excellent article in the Sydney Morning Herald on this phenomenon, in which she notes how odd it is that the virtual self lingers on despite death:

Facebook is grappling with the question of what to do with the pages of deceased members. For a start, how does it know you have died? The problem is, it doesn’t. There is no mechanism to shut down a page if it has not been accessed by the user for a while, and attempts to track pages by keywords (such as shutting down pages where RIP appears a lot) have led to mistakes such as living members being locked out.

Until there is a way of finding out a user is dead, friends of the deceased must cope with ghosts in their machines.

They include the automatic messages from Facebook reminding you to ”reconnect” with your dead friend. Or reminders of your dead friend’s birthday. Having had friends who have died, getting these catch-up reminders from Facebook can be weird.

Sometimes people’s updates show that they are in a very different space. A few friends of mine have deeply religious updates, for example. As I’m not religious, I don’t have much to say. I don’t mind as long as the updates are not pious. At one point I had to “hide” a friend’s updates because they were starting to really irritate me. Once I also had a religious fight on Facebook with one of my cousin’s friends after the friend told me I was going to Hell. My poor cousin got home from dinner with his parents to find that some post on a survey about belief in God had 67 comments (a heated discussion between three of his friends and I). I was very foolish to do that, but I do have quite a temper, and sometimes I don’t always think. I deleted all my comments upon my cousin’s request.

I try not to post on politics and/or religion on Facebook any more, other than the automatic blog posts that come up on my feed. Usually I keep it to light updates: silly things the kids do, posts about food, progress updates on the PhD and funny stuff that happened at work.

I confess that I was one of those irritating people who played all those silly “-ville” games during the second half of last year, and I probably drove everyone batty, but I now think it was a side effect of being pretty stressed out with the PhD, lonely and unwell with pneumonia.

Another side effect of Facebook is that it’s hard to let a friendship gracefully drift if all the parties are Facebook users. I used to have two friends with whom I regularly caught up when I first had my daughter. I really valued those friendships at the time. Last year, I was very busy with the PhD thesis, so it took me a while to realise that I wasn’t seeing these friends any more. However, as far as I could see from Facebook, they were still catching up with one another. “Oh well,” I thought, suppressing a pang of hurt, “my schedule doesn’t match with theirs.”

Things deteriorated further when I wrote a blog post on a topic where my opinion strongly differed from that of my friends, and one woman took it as an attack on her personally (which it was not). We got into heated argument on Facebook which was very unpleasant. I didn’t mean to hurt them, and I don’t think that they meant to hurt me either, but I suspect all parties were pretty upset by the end of it. This is one of the reasons why I now strongly discourage comments on Facebook and ask that people post comments on the blog.

These women were still my “friends” on Facebook,  but did not have much interaction with me for the next six months. During that time, I expected them to “unfriend” me, because as far as I could tell, they no longer liked me very much. I became very sad and depressed after reading some of their status updates, particularly when it became evident from those updates that my child hadn’t been invited to their children’s birthday parties. I felt like I’d ruined my daughter’s friendships along with my own. I hid their status updates for about three months, but I couldn’t resist peeking at their profiles and getting sad. In the end, I “unfriended” them and their partners, a thing I thought I’d never do to anyone. It’s hard to get back from that. I wish one could simply make one’s brain perform an “unfriend” action too, but I don’t work like that, and of course I still care. It still stings.

I think some of the difficulty arises from the fact that social norms are less obvious than in yesteryear (although a simple Google search of “social networking etiquette tips” shows there’s a wealth of material out there). Often people don’t think over what they write. And sometimes, people read messages into stuff which were never intended. In the olden days, there was a gap between writing a letter and posting it which I’m sure was valuable. These days, it’s so easy to spew out one’s thoughts on the screen, especially with something like Twitter, which can be very dangerous if one has no filter (think, for example, of Catherine Deveny’s difficulties in that regard). There’s little gap between thought and expressing it in writing with social media, but there’s also no way of gauging audience reactions.

Also Facebook forces you to be definitive. Fundamentally, according to Facebook, someone is either a friend or she is not. The technology is relatively black and white. It doesn’t always let things drift, or allow for graceful partings of the ways. It doesn’t allow for death. Sometimes people move in and out of your life, sometimes friendships end, sometimes people change. And that’s okay. Friendship is all about shades of grey.

David Cameron claimed on Tuesday that he and his wife Samantha are members of ‘the sharp-elbowed middle classes’. This statement was at the same time an attempt to proclaim his ordinariness and a dig at middle-class values. The Prime Minister was in effect saying that he is much like everyone else while deprecating those whom he regards as pushy.

He told a member of the audience at a PM Direct question and answer session that he wants to protect Sure Start children’s centres, which were set up by the Labour Government, from being colonised by ‘the sharp-elbowed middle classes’ — by which he appears to mean those who try to get the best out of the system.

Are Mr Cameron and his wife middle class? Only if that term is absurdly elastic. As the daughter of a landed baronet, Samantha Cameron is inescapably a member of the upper classes. Mr Cameron, the son of a stockbroker, less moneyed than his wife and with fewer aristocratic connections, is more of a borderline case. An argument could be made for his being a member of the upper classes or the upper-middle classes.

Who cares? The point is that he and his wife both come from extremely privileged backgrounds — as he has himself previously freely admitted. Their education and considerable wealth and other advantages put them securely in the top one per cent of Britons. And there is nothing remotely wrong with that. My point is only that describing the Camerons as middle class is pretty meaningless.

They do not share the experience of the great mass of middle-class people, the vast majority of whom are not privately educated and not at all rich. They have not had to struggle in the way most of the middle class have. So I have a problem with the second part of the phrase ‘the sharp-elbowed middle classes’ as it applies to the Camerons.

Are they ‘sharp-elbowed’? Yes, they probably are. For example, they have managed to send their daughter to an excellent church primary school some miles away from where their family home is. That must have involved some arm-twisting.

For several years Mr Cameron also claimed close to the maximum amount then allowable for an MP’s expenses for his mortgage on his second home, a very pleasant country house in Oxfordshire. Was this sharp-elbowed? Entirely within the rules, he was undoubtedly milking the system for all that it was worth. He could have chosen to live in a modest cottage, and drawn less public subsidy.

On the whole I would say that while David and Samantha Cameron are not at all typical representatives of the middle class, he, at least, has pretty sharp elbows. I don’t blame him for that either. We all have to make our way in the world, and the Camerons have no doubt pushed and shoved from time to time like the rest of us.

But I am not sure that this combination of a privileged background and pushiness qualifies him to pass judgment on those who are much less privileged. In fact, one could say that, with all the advantages that life has given him, Mr Cameron has had rather less cause than most to use his elbows.

- Stephen Glover, Mail Online

New laws in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates will require that every Blackberry user dress their phone a miniature burqa and face veil.

‘The Blackberry burqa means that people can still use their phones,’ said a Saudi government official, ‘but the tiny niqab that covers the screen will stop them from reading emails or accessing the Internet.’

Followed, thereafter, by this:

Some businessmen believe that making their phone wear a burqa can be very liberating. ‘It’s great,’ said one, ‘with the veil in place I am free to walk about with my Blackberry in public without the feeling that people are staring lustily at my multi-media application. It also covers my shame for not owning an iPhone.’

Some religious groups have welcomed the policy. ‘If Allah had meant us to freely access the Internet He would have given us web browsers in our heads,’ said a local imam, adding ‘There is absolutely no mention of instant messaging in the Koran and at no point did Muhammad, or any of his eleven wives, ever say LOL, ROFL or PMSL.’

It’s rather like spotting racism or sexism in a given document by substituting one ethnic group’s name for that of one not usually subject to abuse and reaslising that, ah, racism doesn’t just happen to black people.

But wait, there’s more:

If the Blackberry burqa is successful it may spread to other countries. However, experts say that dressing your phone in a burqa could result in poor reception, especially in France and Belgium.

The British government has yet to declare an official line on phone burqas although Immigration Minister Damian Green said that to ban them would be ‘very unBritish’. He went on to explain that, ‘the British thing to do, as always, is to grumble and tut.’

As they say, read the whole thing.

[A gentle tip of the hat to Michael Bonner].