Hey, I said that there was a need for balance, didn’t I? Which means that there must and shall be some negative to counteract yesterdays positives.

And negatives don’t come much more negative than Jacqui Smith.

“We will look carefully at the ruling but what I want is to safeguard the world-leading position that we have in the use of DNA,” she told BBC News.

Ah yes, safeguarding the world-leading position of the UK on DNA. World leading in that Zimbabwe, China, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba and all those other lovely countries would love to be able to get as many people onto a database of criminal suspects as the UK has. World leading in that it’s easier to kill someone and get off on appeal than it is to get off the database after being stopped for being a passenger in a car that was being driven by someone who looked like a known criminal.

If that’s the kind of example that we’re setting to the world, then the world is in a bad way. But we’re in a worse way…