Bring out the old words.

Blair seems to have decided that he needs to take some old-fashioned words out of the New labout spin locker to inject some stiffness into the upper. I didn't even imagine that Blair and co. had bothered to keep the word 'treason'- but here it is restored for new spinning duty, dutifully disseminated by our national boredcaster.

It's absolutely amazing, too, to think that we only abolished the death penalty in 1998- even though I used to remind people regularly who thought we didn't have it all, querulous pedant that I was. It was the inactivity of the penalty for over half a century that made it seem like a joke term; like describing a volcano as a volcano when it's been inactive for a thousand years. But now, Blair presents, in archetypal Blair fashion, the all-new, defanged, nuLabour charge of treason. I'd like to think that Galloway might be first up, though as with everything else Blair's government has managed to take all the fun out of it before deployment. Dumb Jon has some wise words on the Blair's other spinnouncements.

Update: I should have pointed out that the death penalty for treason had been inactive for over fifty years when it was abolished- the death penalty for murder had been enacted as recently as 1965. Timeline here.