"Why did the Prime Mister forget about Egypt?" (photo courtesy of Jim White)

Pouting Baby is talking to us again.  –  JW

Remember when Hoser Mubarak sent his thugs out to kill protesters and shut down the internet in Egypt?  Mr. 0 and the Prime Mister didn’t like that at all:

“The Prime Minister and President Obama were united in their view that Egypt now needed a comprehensive process of political reform, with an orderly, Egyptian-led transition leading to a government that responded to the grievances of the Egyptian people and to their aspirations for a democratic future,” a spokesperson for Mr Cameron said.

/snip/

“The Prime Minister and the President agreed that the Egyptian Government must respond peacefully to the ongoing protests.

/snip/

Mr Cameron also criticised Egyptian efforts to block access to the internet and called for the bar to be lifted.

The Prime Mister said those things at the end of January of this year, but it looks like he’s forgotten about what happened in Egypt, because today he’s saying very different things about the protesters in England. It sounds like he wants to fight them:

Earlier, as he left a meeting of the government’s emergency committee Cobra, he said every contingency was being looked at and “nothing is off the table” in providing police with the resources needed to tackle the disturbance.

Police would get whatever resources they needed, and legal backing for whatever tactics they needed to employ. “We needed a fightback and a fightback is under way.”

That’s just so different from what he said about Egypt. Just a couple of days after he and Mr. 0 had their statement above, the Prime Mister said this by himself:

“We have been watching the events in Cairo with grave concern, and completely condemn the violence that is taking place. And if it turns out that the regime, in any way, has been sponsoring or tolerating this violence, that would be completely and utterly unacceptable. These are despicable scenes that we are seeing and they should not be repeated. They underline the need for political reform and, frankly, for that political reform to be accelerated and to happen quickly. We need to see a clear roadmap for that political reform, so that people in Egypt can have confidence that their aspirations for a more democratic, a future with greater rights, is met. And that change needs to start happening now, and the violence needs to stop.”

So it looks like the Prime Mister wants to act a little like Hoser Mubarak to “fightback”, even though he told Hoser Mubarak not to. And he is thinking about doing another thing he told Hoser not to do, and to take away parts of the internet:

Britain is considering ways to disrupt online social messaging and networks such as Blackberry Messenger and Twitter during civil unrest, a government source said on Thursday.

Why did the Prime Mister forget about Egypt and the things he said to Hoser Mubarak? It sounds like someone needs to tell him the same things he told Hoser. Instead of fighting and stopping Twitter and instant messages, maybe he needs to do something to make a “future with greater rights”, because right now he only seems to be protecting the rights of the rich, not the rights of everyone.

PS: To read more about these ideas, Mr. Kevin wrote some great things today and there is also a long article at the Washington Post.