The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

Police delete London tourists' photos 'to prevent terrorism' | UK news | guardian.co.uk.

For mercy's sake, New Labour and all your minions. Just go. You have humiliated us enough in the eyes of the world. Our economy lies in tatters after you  – as the honourable people still left in your party are now admitting – released great floods of our hard-earned money without securing remotely commensurate benefits. For years.

One tiny compensation for this shambles was that, thanks to you, our currency is so weak that tourists find our usually expensive and inhospitable capital city affordable. So what do you do? You have your uniformed buffoons harass them. You force them to delete their snaps. You send them home to tell their countrymen how a nation once famed for its stiff upper lip under fire has lost its nerve. How it has become an enfeebled, cowering rabble that its historical heroes would scorn to acknowledge as Englishmen.

How my shame burns, to see our people sacrifice their dignity, privacy and freedom – on the basis of lies, spin, smears and scare stories – to provincial losers with no higher ambition than to swan around in ministerial Jaguars and feel (as they could never otherwise have felt, having no productive skills) important.

With such lumpen creatures as this in charge of our internal defences, how can we hope not to be embarrassed? She throws tantrums and sends out our public servants, from Permanent Secretaries to humble police officers – to punish her opponents for exposing her incompetence. Then she lets them take the rap for the consequences of her steam-out-of-the-ears pique. How like her cowardly boss she is. Like him, her idea of taking "full responsibility" is to let those who served her exactly as she demanded take the consequences. Like him, she has the morals of a stoat.

All those involved in the New Labour "project" must always have known in their hearts that what they were doing was wrong. They must have known it from the dishonest, deceitful methods they had to use and the scum they had to employ, to secure the power to do it. The means in the end, always signal the squalor of the ends.

But perhaps, as readers more cynical even than me have suggested, they never cared for anything more than than their perks and their expense-fiddling. It certainly seems to have been all (until they got careless) they were good at.