Who Will Fire David Laws?

Shaping up as a half-decent, expensively-educated, millionaire Chief Treasury Secretary though he might have been, I'm awfully sorry, but David Laws' political arse is grass. He can't argue the case for public spending cuts when he, apparently, has been pretty happy to sponge off the state on behalf of his partner for the longest time.

So the only question to me is: who will fire him? His party leader, Clegg, or his boss, the Prime Minister?

My view? Cameron must pull the trigger immediately because what Laws did particularly is just the sort of troughing, fiddling, pocket-lining, venal rule-bending Cameron has been condemning in principle and often for over a year. He fought the election on that platform, for heaven's sake!

Frankly, Laws fired himself the moment he chose not to reveal any of this as being a potential problem to his boss before he was appointed (I do not for one moment believe he didn't realise or didn't understand the rules - in fact it's surely hard to believe that of a double first Cambridge economist - and it won't wash regardless, even if he sticks to that lame line).

But who to replace him? Well, how about John Redwood? I think it's high time Cameron picked someone like him for the cabinet anyway. Besides, he's much smarter and more experienced even than Laws in many ways, and genuinely believes and can explain the Friedmanite solution to Labour's debt crisis that we now so desperately need. He'd also be a handy bulwark against the economic mixed brew that is Saint Vince and his presence would vastly help to shore up the Tory back benches. A win-win scenario potentially, then, both for the party and, in my humble, for the country.

Oh, and sucks to the bloody Lib Dums. They can either suck it up and stay in government, or they can destroy this blessed coalition in a fit of indefensible pique.

I just can't wait to see how Deputy Nick decides to handle this one.

UK For Sale: Labour's Betrayal of Britain's Industry

This comprehensive, enormous post from excellent libertarian US economist (my favourite kind), J. Ricardo Valenzuala, on the subject of the vulnaribility of vast swathes of UK corporate assets to foreign takeover, is fascinating and an absolute must-read. In my view, however, and partially in contrast to Valenzuala's, the massive shift over the past decade to the foreign control of British manufacturers - large, medium and small - while certainly providing some temporary benefits in terms of stability and new investment (or, in Rover's case, a stay of execution), overall amounts to no more and no less than a deeply damning indictment of Labour's 13 disastrous years in charge of policy for the UK's manufacturing base, humiliation for the nation, and relegation to economic dependency.

The huge decline in UK manufacturing over the past decade or so simply cannot be hidden, no matter how much Labour's many liars and spinners lie and spin. Even before Brown's bust, his useless policies ensured that the manufacturing sector was either actually shrinking, or that corporations became too weak to defend themselves and stay in British hands, Cadbury being the latest case in point.

History shows that when foreign companies feel the pinch, they do not cut at home, and, if they must, then only as a last resort. They begin abroad. That, to them, means us. Remember Tata Steel and Redcar Corus? No one else seems to. The point is that if and when there is another downturn (though there must remain some uncertainty as to whether we're out of this one yet), Britain will be shockingly exposed because it will be the first country in the firing line for investment cuts by foreign companies. For instance, if Kraft begins to feel the pinch at some point in the fiture, it won't be American factories it will be closing first, it will be British ones. Cadbury, a healthy, profitable, productive and well-managed company, is now vulnerable.

For this reason, we simply must follow the examples of Germany, France and Italy and protect what remains of our homegrown, home-owned manufacturing base from easy foreign takeover. This can be achieved through German-style takeover legislation (remember Vodafone and Mannesman? Vodafone won in the end, but not without one hell of a fight with the German government, who secured enormous, locked-in investment commitments as a consequence, something the current British government has never even bothered to do) wherever such a takeover is deemed to be not in the national interest, the latter measure being transformed into a far sterner test of commitment. This country's highly productive manufacturing workforce deserves nothing less.

Sure, there will be extreme cases where loss-makers can be given a second chance with foreign money, but it's a long-term view for the country as a whole that should shape economic policy in this area from now on, not more of Labour's short-termism, which has always been about the cheap politics of making corporate headaches go away in an election year (ala Rover, 2005) that has doomed far more British industry either to ruin or to second class status than it has ever saved in the long term.

What's therefore crystal clear is that such a paradigm shift, from inept political pragmatism, sold to the British electorate under a false banner of 'globalisation', to an aggressive British enterprise culture which actually creates secure British manufacturing jobs, can't happen under Gordon Brown, but might happen under David Cameron. And that's the chance we can't afford not to take.

We have to take a chance on the Tories, because more of the same under Labour means game over for British industry, and that means game over for Britain.

Boneheaded

So Alan Johnson's loony-toons Postman Protection (Beware of the Yorkie) Bill 2010, has been unceremoniously dumped barely a week after he announced it all over the national media, or so I've just heard on Radio 4. As humiliating U-turns go, that one has got to be one of the fastest and biggest on record.

Well, while I'm obviously pretty happy this piece of ultra-boneheaded legislative garbage has gone, I can't help thinking that when John Reid talked about the Home Office being 'not fit for purpose', what he really meant was just about all Labourists of the ministerial class, especially Home Secretaries (including himself). I suspect he was thinking of your average, bog-standard, troughing Labour MP, too.

Cameron reborn, taking the fight out onto the hustings, finally getting the key policy areas into focus - and relishing the challenge of an energetic, vibrant general election campaign; Brown squabbling with his own party over dog laws, furiously chasing his own tale (as in story, rather than notional rear appendage) over Unite strikes and their funding of the PLP (and over a hundred Labour MPs), and losing all credibility over the debt crisis and the record structural deficit (if he ever had any) here, in Europe and everywhere else.

It all adds up to me as powerful signs of Labour's final decline.

And that denouement, people might one day say, all started with one overrated former postman's deep-seated fear, if not hatred, of poodles.

"I've Never Voted Tory" Campaign Rattles Labour

If the truly limp and, naturally, totally dishonest anti-Tory attack video below is anything to go by, then the - and pretty slick - "I've Never Voted Tory" campaign is causing some mental anguish to feeble Labourist campaigners.



If specialist Labour YouTube loser, Sion Simon, wasn't involved with this latest lame leftie propaganda-manure, then I'll eat his baseball cap!

Hat tip: Telegraph blogs.

Hammond Trumps Byrne

Just been watching BBC Parliament (now there's a displacement activity if ever you've heard one).

The debate on the PBR has been no contest, with Philip Hammond, Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, delivering a devastating lesson in economics to the entire house, not just the idiots in government who, for instance, don't seem to be able to comprehend the difference between monetary and fiscal policy, (a pretty fundamental problem if you're trying to prove to unconvinced bond markets that you're in control of things).

He's damn good. His forensic unpicking of the Brownite, delusional, dangerous PBR is highly damaging to the last traces of Labour's credibility - or would be if anyone was watching it, of course. Even the usually thuggish Liam Byrne looked quietly impressed.

I hope Hammond is given the praise he deserves for this superb parliamentary performance.

I'll put up a link to it later, if I can find one.

==Update==
Well, perhaps predictably, you can watch the PBR debate on iplayer, but only as far as the end of Byrne's woeful and woefully partisan speech. The BBC clearly didn't feel that Hammond's excellent response, during which he not only provided a forensic demolition of Labour's fantasy economics, but also clearly set out some of a future Conservative government's plans for bringing Britain back from the brink of a credit downgrade (and why that is so desperately important), merited the little bit of extra space on their ample servers (that we own).

Bias at the BBC? Never!

==Update 2==
Jonn Ward has kindly provided a link to the transcript of Philip Hammond's PBR speech. You can find it on parliament's website, here.

The Nightmare Noughties

So the dust has just about settled on yet another Christmas Day, which means that we can take stock, count our presents, our blessings and our lucky stars and get back to the real world just so we can start the twelve month countdown to the next "season of goodwill." (I had a marvellous Christmas, by the way. I bought my parents the one thing they have never in their entire lives, for a whole host of excellent reasons, bought for themselves, namely, a brand new, top of the range TV. They were surprisingly and gratifyingly thrilled by it.)

But Christmas is Christmas. For me, cynical as I am and, after the communal warmth of a dutiful morning mass had (quickly) worn off, and the postprandial hangover of Boxing Day political reflection kicks in, thoughts turn to the next decade. Fortunately, at least for me, Simon Heffer, who ordinarily these days comes across as a rather reactionary old duffer, has refound his radical voice and framed the "Noughties", from which we have all just emerged significantly scathed, in terms everyone must comprehend. As is my bad habit, I've copied it for you here:

It is customary to find a sobriquet for a decade as it comes to a close – the Naughty Nineties, the Roaring Twenties, the Swinging Sixties – but I can think of none to describe the Noughties that is fit for repetition in a respectable newspaper.

The commanding image of the decade remains, more than eight years after the event, that of the aircraft flying into the Twin Towers in Manhattan in September 2001. The battle of the civilised world against the lunacy of Islamic fundamentalism dominated and poisoned the rest of the decade.

However – and however callous it seems to say it – we should have been lucky if that had been all we had to worry about in the past 10 years.

Sadly, it was not. Both away from the "global war on terror" and, most controversially, inherent in it, was a display of incompetence by a political class which it sought more and more to cover up by obfuscation, a retreat from democracy, and downright lies. We are reminded almost every day that lies were told to take us to war in Iraq, and that is probably so. Yet we hear less about the lies told to conceal the activities and identities of those responsible for the economic collapse in the developed world, which have done their own severe damage.

What happened to global prosperity in the Noughties was just as atrocious, in its way, as the conduct of terrorism and of some aspects of the battle against it. I wish we could have a proper public inquiry into the causes of that, with the persons responsible punished in an appropriately bankrupting way.

We leave this decade poorer than when we entered it. That is the result of having lived spectacularly beyond our means. We have, quite simply, not earned enough to afford the lifestyle we have chosen for ourselves: and now we are paying the price. Yet whose fault was that? Foolishly, many blame the bankers, easy scapegoats in a society driven by envy because of their champagne-stoked lifestyles and their vast bonuses. They also took idiotic decisions that imperilled the savings of their customers and the value of their shares – decisions that depleted the pension funds of millions of Britons.

But how were they allowed to do this? The answer is painfully simple. The same Government that refused to regulate the bankers properly also allowed an insane amount of liquidity to go into the economy, which gave them cheap material with which to play casino economics.

Labour's biggest lie is that America brought us the recession. The truth is that there, like here, the recession was brought to us by politicians, and Mr Brown is the prime culprit. This decade of debt is about to usher in a new one of hardship.

These failures were partly the cause of the advance of mediocrity. Around the world, too many leaders won office because they were good on television, or plausible con men. Too few reached the top because they were able and sensible. We are now all paying the price for being duped.

We shall be foolish if we don't learn a lesson from the enormous mistakes of the past 10 years. They are both social and economic. In the former sense, we must stand up for our right to a way of life as we desire it in this country, and as no one else has a right to dictate to us. Majorities have rights, too. Nor is there anything wrong with fighting to protect them, provided the battle is joined honestly and with democratic sanction.

And as for our economy: we have to close down large sections of the state. We have to get it out of our lives. We have to get our people off its payroll. We have to get our poor out of dependency upon it. In Britain, the decade ahead needs to be the decade of the individual. For it is we, the people, who will revive us, and not the state.

Think about that one thing, apart from all the other disasters: "We leave this decade poorer than when we entered it." Heffer is at his best when he presents to us in clear terms the simple, unhappy truth. He's done that here.

Our job is to make sure the next decade is successful, prosperous and, above all, politically rejuvenating. That's going to be tough, but it can't begin without the total destruction of the current travesty of a (British) government. When Brown's gone, we can begin.

Hope you all had a great day off, btw. I did :)

Isaby On Grassroots Scrutiny

I wish Jonathan Isaby had written something like this a while ago. It's the first really sensible article on the subject of grassroots Conservative frustrations about the limits placed on their role in the selection of PPCs, which has been highlighted by the recent Liz Truss affair, that's been written. As I said before, I have absolutely nothing against Miss Truss and wish her well in her fight in Norfolk, so I agree with Isaby's first sentiment. But David Cameron, among others, should read what comes after that very carefully.

I am glad that Liz Truss’s status as Conservative candidate for South West Norfolk has been confirmed and trust that this draws a line under the matter.

There is a lesson to be learnt from this whole sorry saga, however. What we have witnessed in the constituency is indicative of a wider malaise and frustration in many local parties about the way the candidate selection process has been changed to restrict the choice of local associations.

Conservative HQ allows just six candidates from a likely field of about 200 in a “safe” seat to be shortlisted for the nomination and would prefer if all six went through to a final selection meeting.

In days gone by, the process would have meant a field of 20 shortlisted candidates whittled down to three or four over a period of weeks, encompassing several interviews. This gave local parties ample opportunity to get to know the people aspiring to represent the constituency in Parliament as well as allowing would-be candidates to establish whether they had “clicked” with the association.

For constituencies selecting a candidate in a seat where an incumbent Conservative MP is standing down, a relationship is beginning that might well last for decades. It is essential that local parties do not feel short-changed when it comes to making that choice.

What is especially disturbing to many at the grass roots is the proposal that in any seat where a sitting Conservative MP announces their retirement after January 1, the association will be given a centrally-imposed shortlist of only three names from which to choose.

Such a step will only breed further dissatisfaction and frustration among the activist base and should be reconsidered.

Furthermore, every sitting Conservative MP should make their intentions clear before Christmas to avoid the scenario where the members who have loyally worked for them over the years have that restrictive shortlist foisted upon them.

There's that phrase "foisted upon them" again. It's slightly disappointing that Isaby does not mention open caucuses (though that is a separate issue, I suppose), but his main points and explanations about an ever-more centralised system of selection that runs a real risk of riding roughshod over the wishes of local associations and their membership and general supporters are powerful and, I submit, should be addressed.

Some kind of reassurance from the almighty Central Office at the very least would be nice.

The Best They Can Do

Shockingly pathetic though this laughable thing is, that's actually very positive, Tory wise.

Is it true that the best Labour can do is this lamest of the lame attack vids?

Watch it, be embarrassed and then realise that with this dead Labour government you are dealing with people who, because of an unhappy accident of democracy, don't care how much damage is done - in the "Labour" name.

Before the election, in their pathetic, tired, desperate search for re-election takes place, the people will have their way.

In Swansea, Labour is a busted flush.

But Labour doesn't really give shit one about anything apart from their own jobs. The local Labour boys care only about the prospect of losing the jobs they no longer deserve.

They had better watch out: the world is gunning for them.

The BNP Is Labour's Fault

Labour's anti-semitism: inspiration for the BNP

Iain Martin has blogged today that the "rise" of the BNP represents a failure of "all the mainstream parties". While I am a fan of Mr Martin, I'm afraid on this occasion I'm forced to disagree. It is not the fault of the Conservative party. Nothing could be further from the truth and, if you read his article, that is exactly what he demonstrates. His conclusion that the emergence of the BNP is somehow every party's fault just does not follow-on from his argument and cited examples.

In the process of answering his own question of just why the BNP managed to gain 6% of the Euro election vote in the first place (in core Labour regions), he simply reveals the craven hypocrisy and disastrous hate politics of the Labour party and its leader, Brown - and nothing else. And yet Martin seeks, illogically, to apportion blame for the emergence of extremism in Britain equally. See for yourself:

The answer is that Britain’s three major parties, the wider political class and the media have all, to varying degress, badly let down their fellow Britons. They have done this by setting narrow terms for the national debate which exclude the concerns of millions of voters and force them out on to the fringes. Some decide there’s no point voting but a portion of them have ended up in the arms of the racist BNP.

Take immigration. Britain has had a dramatic increase in its population in recent years. In 2007 alone more than 500,000 immigrants arrived. There are many good economic arguments in favour of being a magnet for those who want to be in Britain to get on in life. But there should be sensible limits because of the pressure it puts on public services, housing and the stretched social fabric.

But it is not just that these concerns were ignored, anybody trying to raise them was shouted down and quite often smeared. In the 2005 general election, Michael Howard advocated limits and was branded an extremist by Labour, which simply wanted to make the Tories look old-fashioned and weird. Much of the media happily played along with the game, questioning Howard’s motives. Thus mentioning the I word condemned the speaker as obviously not as sophisticated as the metropolitan types who live in London and run politics and the media.

But what message did this send to those struggling to cope with the fall-out of this experiment on the ground? It said quite clearly: Your views are unpleasant, you don’t matter, we’re not listening, shut up. Thus a great many people felt they had been abandoned for a simple reason. They had been.

So it's the Tories' fault for being smeared by Labour for trying to respond to people's concerns over high levels of immigration, aided and abetted by a tame mainstream media, during a general election campaign, is it? I don't think so. And now the chickens are coming home to roost. Nick Griffin, possibly the most ghastly man in Britain (Gordon Brown only manages a close second), like some overweight cuckoo has found his way into the Question Time nest in yet another example of media exploitation of a potentially explosive confrontation.

What makes it worse is that it's the BBC that's arranged the spectacle in what is in my mind an example of abject ratings-chasing. This, of course, being the same BBC that, as Martin puts it, "happily played along with the game" of Labour wickedly smearing Michael Howard in 2005 by branding him an "extremist" simply for seeking to manage immigration, something which Labour had, and still have had, notably - and in many ways spectacularly - failed to do.

Whatever the ins and outs of the debacle, to me it all boils down to one word: honesty. If Iain Martin and the rest of the mainstream media can't be honest about who has really caused the rise of extremism in Britain (England, actually) then there can be no way to begin to repair the social and political damage that's being done. It merely further compounds the ugly, dangerous dishonesty of Labour.

In their goal to demonise the Conservative party across swathes of Britain to ensure that large sections of the population share their blind, mindless hatred of all things Tory, they have used every propaganda tactic in the book, even to the point, if you recall, of turning Michael Howard into a Nazi-style anti-semitic caricature. By the end of the campaign, therefore, according to Labour propaganda, Howard was both a right wing extremist and a money-lending Jewish hate figure. As far as I am concerned, this was truly evil stuff and it had a terrible side-effect. Labour's lies, smears and Third Reich style approach to political propaganda gave permission to a section of society, mainly in its own heartlands, to hate. It made the rise of the BNP all-but inevitable.

So the origins of the rise of the BNP can be traced back to that general election campaign, the dirtiest and most dishonest on record. But all the dirt and dishonesty was coming from one direction: the Left. It's their core vote, whom they have subsequently thoroughly alienated by being so utterly useless in office, who are drifting into the arms of extremism and racial bigotry. Yet this is a key point that appears to escape all but the bloggers. The MSM seems to be happy to continue to peddle the Labour party's increasingly desperate message that the BNP, as a party of the 'far right' (it's not, it's a typically muddled, socialist/nationalist organisation), can somehow be associated with the Tory party. This is the ultimate smear and one where the deepest contradiction can be found. If this were the case, then why are the vast majority of misguided BNP supporters former Labour party voters? No adequate answer to this question has been forthcoming from the Left media as yet - it doesn't fit in with their dishonest narrative, you see.

The point, therefore, is that the blame for the rise of the BNP has nothing to do with the Tories, and Iain Martin and other independently minded, professional journalists should have the guts, or the sense, or the honesty - preferably all three - finally to acknowledge this.

What is certain, however, is that should they win the next general election, it will fall to a Conservative government to fix the problem, caused by Labour, of what is really the political dislocation and disaffection of fairly significant sections of Labour's core vote. How they go about that is beyond me, but they are going to have to try.

So there you have it, yet another dimension to the universal catastrophe that will be "Labour's legacy". And people still wonder why I am convinced that this is comfortably the worst government this country has ever had inflicted upon it.

A Peer Too Far

I've just got back from a nice trip to Tenby (lovely little town) only to be confronted by a vague rumour in the Spectator that Michael Heseltine might be about to make some sort of a comeback with a possible role offered to him in a Cameron cabinet. I've got two sets of opinions about this, one positive and one most definitely negative.

First, the positive. Tarzan is still a powerful, even commanding figure, untainted in the eyes of neutral and possibly left of centre voters by his years as a cabinet minister in Margaret Thatcher's government (his Westland tantrum cleansed him) and as Deputy to John Major (his side was never held responsible for the great Tory Euro split - that honour belonged, wrongly, to the "sceptics"). His experience and bullet proof, heavyweight 'elder statesman' image would cause severe problems for both Labour and the Liberal Democrats and could even attract a significant number of their voters, looking for an excuse to vote Conservative, to the party.

He's also a Welshman, but not a lot of people know that.

However, there are also negative points to make about the impact of his appointment on the balance of any future Conservative cabinet. The Spectator makes this point better than I ever could:

...if Heseltine returns to the Cabinet, there will be a problem of balance. As Tim Montgomerie notes, the presence of Clarke and Heseltine in the Cabinet will make a robust approach to Europe almost impossible. Plus, the right would be irritated if the left is over-represented in Cameron’s cabinet which it would be if Clarke, Heseltine, Andrew Lansley and Sir George Young were all in it. A Heseltine return would make it more likely that Peter Lilley, as a greybeard from the right of the party, would be offered a significant job by Cameron.

The only things I would add to this are that, in the first place, questions must be asked about the signals to referendum campaigners that this appointment would send. They are hardly encouraging. Also, by creating what would be a powerful clique of Europhile, big beast cabinet ministers around whom pro-federalists on the left of the party would rally, there is a risk that if they didn't get their own way, or felt that Cameron was being too sympathetic to the (reasonable) demands of the pro-sovereignty wing of the party - and 70% of the population - they might cause a lot of trouble. They've done it before.

For these reasons, and on balance, I feel quite strongly that the reactivation of this septuagenarian campaigner would be a bad idea. His best role would be as leader of the Lords or as an adviser of some description. His being offered a cabinet role would be a retrograde step.

What is more, given the number of unelected, appointed peer-ministers in the current government (including, of course, the most powerful politician in Britain, Lord Mandelson), we need more ministers from the Commons in a future Cameron cabinet, not fewer. Cameron must seek to rebalance British democracy in favour of the electorate.

Lord Heseltine would be a peer too far.

The Hollow Message?

"This is the way the world conference ends
Not with a bang but a whimper."
-T.S. Elliot, 1925



I'm not one to complain, and I'm not suggesting David Cameron or his team are "The Hollow Men", but...

I opened my ears to his curious end-of-conference speech in the car this afternoon (on my way to a two hour lecture on computational linguistics and discourse analysis - what fun), and found myself listening to what sounded like the threat of doomsday if we don't all vote Tory tomorrow. It was not his best. It was certainly not as good as his last one. Or the one before that.

Quite simply, if you are going to "tell it straight" as an Opposition party leader and prospective PM, then the usual approach is to hammer home the narrative of the government's massive failure everywhere and then accentuate your positive alternate reality relentlessly. Whoever wrote that speech for Cameron seemed to forget this simple equation. As soon as you start muddying the waters with a "we're all in this together" message, admirably JFK-ish though that might sound, you run the risk of people hearing "we all caused this together" - not something I'd recommend suggesting if you want those same people to vote for you. They should have remembered that Kennedy made his "ask not what your country can do for you..." inaugural epic after he'd been elected President, not before.

Cameron did well in his nuking of Brown and Labour's extraordinary failures and he was dead right when he said that the Tories had won the argument on the economy. That was convincing, so why go on about it? There's honest and straight and then there's downright masochistic. This speech ran the serious risk of running into the realms of the latter. It will take even a very average Grauniad hack very little time to make the connection between masochism and sadism. Pain is something you can talk about, even indulge in; it's also something you can inflict. The leftie hacks will be wrong, of course, and dishonest: Cameron's honesty is exactly what the country needs. But this is politics and people who only hear the second hand accounts of biased and/or shitstirring journalists in their rag of choice are going to hear that one word over and over again: Pain. They ain't gonna like it. Oops.

So, no, not for me the rhetoric of failure. Not for me the politics of gloom. Frankly, after that speech, I was left wondering what the hell this conference was all about. And I've reached a conclusion. It was about framing the debate, not starting it; setting the benchmarks, not the tone. At least I hope that's what it was all about, in which case it was pretty clever. Having hit rock bottom after 13 long years of Labour failure, from here on in with the Tories the only way is up! Yeah, baby.

I hope this is true because I'm not remotely convinced that people will stomach nine months of the "economy is destroyed and only the Tories can rebuild it, but there will be pain", even if it's true. The BBC might have been right for once: this would be a very risky strategy. Mind you, we can always rely on the regular Brown crises to distract everyone from the Conservatives' collective pessimism. Maybe that's what Cameron is banking on. I hope not.

So, just to recap. From now on, Dave: attack, attack, attack - but smile, smile, smile. It might not be very easy, but it works.

The frown doesn't suit you.

Conservative Recovery (The Sun Says)

(Click to expand)

The Sun is reporting an introduction to Britain's Conservative future. It's all almost totally aspirational, so I'm still not completely convinced. But at least these goals - and, consequently, these Tories - seem almost totally credible.

But hell, make up your own mind. That's what I always do.

And when you have, whoever you decide to vote for, just make sure you don't vote for Brown!

Jackie Ashley Comments

I just thought I'd take the opportunity to make a quick note of some of the more entertaining responses to Jackie Ashley's fresh assault on the Conservative government in yesterday's Grauniad. "The what?" The Conservative government. No, not the last one, for that one has gone and can be trashed no more. She speaks of the Conservative government that is to come (she's convinced it's coming then).

This left wing ("leftwing" as the Graun hacks prefer to use, pathetically copying the US media) seer seems to think the the next Tory government will be some sort of dystopic nightmare, a la Nineteen Eighty-Four or Darkness At Noon. You know, just like the last one wasn't and just like this Labour government has more-or-less been. Curious.

To be honest, I'm not especially interested in what this silly cow has to say for herself. She (and her husband) are the journalistic equivalent of soggy toilet tissue as far as I'm concerned. But some of the comments 'below the line' - some from people whom I know have absolutely no love for the Tories - are quite refreshing and, in fact, far more interesting than the original, basically dishonest bit of lefty propaganda penned by the other half of the Marrs show. If you really want to read it then you can find it on the Graun website. I wouldn't recommend it, unless you're very bored, so I haven't bothered to link to it.

A few of the comments...

1. "stevehill":

What are they supposed to do? They're history and they know it.

They can't uninvade the Middle East. They can't credibly repeal reams of legislation like 4,000 new criminal offences and manic control-freak surveillance without looking stupid. They've been well and truly rumbled on the fact that their "investment" in better public services has been at the price of mortgaging my childrens' futures, and probably their children too, while they've studiously ignored the hard questions like public sector pensions.

I'd like to say "the left" faces being out of office for a generation, possibly for ever. But let's be honest, "the left" has already been out of office since 1979. It is not only an ex-parrot, the species is extinct.

The Guardian kindly provides a forum for a few nostalgic old relics to muse and dream about what might have been.

2. "CybilWrights"

Cloud cuckoo land.

a big expansion in further education, F.E has been all but privatised under Labour and the workforce demoralised by new and onerous contracts.

public investment in transport Oh yeah? Where? Most weekends you can't get a train anywhere because they've all been cancelled.

success in containing terrorism The worst terrorist atrocity - the London bombings - took place because of and following Labour's wars of aggression - they caused this terrorism.

You need a reality check, Ms Ashley. I've never voted Tory and probably never will, but I'd rather have them than this bunch of authoritarian, spendthrift, high-taxing, freedom-hating, war-mongering, expense-fiddling liars.

3. "EvilTory"

More scaremongering about a possible Tory government, Jackie?

This country needs a bonfire of its quangos; indeed one could go so far as to say that every single one should be closed down, its senior management and directors banned for life from public office, and their responsibilities passed on to elected MPs and mayors and councillors. Who, let's face it, could hardly do a worse job than the tens of thousands of petty paperpushers we are stuck with now. And that's before the enormous duplication and the total lack of accountability that quangos embody.

That you support such organisations is not surprising; you are after all a 'big government' social democrat judging from your writings. Personally I think government is by and large the problem, not the solution, but I suppose we can disagree on that.

However I do have to ask you, do you honestly believe that an incoming Tory government can be worse than the current one? Could waste more of our money? Fail to replace more of our power stations? Send more of our troops into battle inadequately supplied and equipped?

Cameron has his faults, but he's not Hitler, and he'd pretty much have to be to outdo brown in the civil liberties destruction stakes. Or don't they count either?

Yes, a Tory government will do things people on the centre left and left will hate. Tough. We've had to put up with the current bastards for more than a decade. At least a Tory government will be moderately fair and reasonably competent.

Who knows, maybe a Tory government will do something really liberal, such as scrap ID cards and ASBOs. Or perhaps junk the entire government funding for multiculturalism that has fucked up race relations in this country for forty years and more. Seeing Trevor Phillips and his whole cretinous and racist organisation on the dole would certainly make me happier than seeing another battalion of soldiers come home to P45s.

Sorry jackie, but I can't agree with this article; Labour have done far more harm than the minimal good they have achieved. Why don't all you Labour supporters vote libdem instead? They can't be worse, and will likely be much better, than your current loyalty.

4. "1nn1t"

I'll start the list of what's not going so well:

Social Services - broken
Lots of new graduates - no jobs
Banks - broken
Housing - unaffordable
Army - inadequately equipped
Immigration Controls - broken
Unemployment - lots, and rising
Power cuts - due soon
Prisons - full, and getting fuller
Railways - trains only run on Sundays if someone feels like driving one
University Science Departments - fewer than ever
Pubs - illegal to sing in them
Smoking ban - closing pubs
Teenagers - drinking more heavily than ever
Illegal Drugs - universally available
Income Tax - collected from people on benefits

and someone else please continue the list..

And so it goes on. And on and on and on. Ashley getting comprehensively trashed by her own readership. Not quite on the scale of the regular monstering Polly gets, but very entertaining nonetheless. At least we know what the Graun (and the Beeb) will be whingeing about in the coming years. "Tory cuts" will be the main theme, even though they absolutely know that what they will be attacking will be policies the Labour Party would have had to follow too, anyway - or finally destroy the economy for good. The Tories will have to cut spending to clear up Labour's monumental, catastrophic mismanagement of the economy, which has left us in the icy wastes of the deepest recession since WWII.

So what's new?

A Sane Voice In Swansea

Rene Kinzett: Clearly Sane

I was pleasantly surprised to receive a comment from René Kinzett, leader of the Conservative opposition on Swansea City council. His correction in his cheerful message of a predictable but nonetheless very shoddy inaccuracy in my previous post was most welcome, and not a little entertaining.

Here's what he had to say:

Just a quick point of correction - the "crew" running Swansea are a bunch of directionless LibDems supported by a group of "independents" who range from former communists, former Welsh Nationalists, disgruntled former Labour Party members and the extreme right (including one councillor who delivered BNP-designed leaflets in the 2004 elections). Labour ran the Council up until 2004.

René Kinzett
Conservative Opposition Leader
Swansea Council

His blog is pretty good too...

I am rather glad he's taken the trouble to point out my glaring error. If I'm going to take an interest in local(ish) politics, I suppose I ought to take the trouble to get my facts straight. Must try harder (a bit like the Lib Dims and the Labourists, in other words).

And on the subject of the lunatic fringe, Mr Kinzett pointed-out in an excellent post some days ago that the medical profession in Swansea took a very dim view of the forced sterilisation argument put forward by certain nutters on the council:

The two Independent Councillors who made bizarre comments in favour (to varying degrees) of compulsory sterilisation have been publicly horse-whipped by the City's medical profession in the pages of today's South Wales Evening Post.

The two Councillors, who make up part of the ruling LibDem-led coalition on Swansea Council, have continued to remain silent on the issue - but, of course, we do have an email from one of the alleged offenders, in which she attempts to explain that her preferred method of social engineering involves only the use of enforced contraception, so that's all right then!

As someone said to [me] the other day, "only in Swansea!".

Indeed. Or Berlin circa 1938, perhaps.

Young Conservative

Fun post from Dan Hannan a few days ago that I've only just clocked:

A heart-warming email arrives from a constituent:

"I recently asked my friend’s little girl what she wanted to be when she grows up. She said she wanted to be Prime Minister some day. Both of her parents, Labour supporters, were standing there, so I asked her, ‘If you were Prime Minister what would be the first thing you would do?’

She replied, ‘I’d give food and houses to all the homeless people.’

Her parents beamed.

‘Splendid: what a worthy goal.’ I told her ‘But you don’t have to wait until you’re Prime Minister to do that. You can come over to my house and mow the lawn, pull weeds, and sweep my yard, and I’ll pay you £50. Then I’ll take you over to the supermarket where that homeless fellow hangs out, and you can give him the £50 to use toward food and a new house.’

She thought that over for a few seconds, then she looked me straight in the eye and asked: ‘Why doesn’t the homeless man come over and do the work, and you can just pay him the £50.

I said, ‘Welcome to the Conservative Party.’

Her parents still aren’t speaking to me."

Ho ho.

I get the distinct impression from the syntax and vocabulary that it was originally an American story that's been lifted off the net and recast. So it might not strictly be true, if I'm right. But it's still pretty darned good either way.

Clean And Wholesome Wins Through

Chloe Smith, the new Tory MP for Norwich North

Useless Labour and its chums at the Beeb (and Channel 4 News, as I see just now) are spinning their catastrophic defeat in Norwich North like crazy in what is clearly a prepared line of attack on the Tories' massive victory. It began with Brown's one-eyed lunacy about this somehow being a bad result for all the parties. Huh? You then had Harperson spinning herself into giddy circles saying that the expenses scandal was somehow linked to Brown's superbust - er - the global downturn, which just got a lot worse in this country. Whatever.

It actually amuses me, all this desperately dishonest, nonsensical claptrap. Why? Simply because these people are now spouting such garbled rubbish so regularly, and they are so totally unable to recognise that nobody believes a word they say any more, that they aid the Tories whenever they open their disconnected gobs. Brilliant!

Case in point: Norwich North. Here, a typically smug, smearing Labour campaign was countered (brilliantly, in my humble) by Eric Pickles' home truths and fluffy kittens approach, complete with a lambswool-soft, 27 year-old candidate called Chloe. Ignore the oh-so stale and tedious Labour straw man and ad hominem attacks, coos Pickles. Smother the people in love and sincerity and the butter drips of crumpets. And it's working. Boy, it's working. Labour give you class hatred, McBride and Hoons by the bucketload. Pickles' Tories give you Edward and Chloe: nice, clean, wholesome - and safe. It seems to be exactly what an awful lot of people are craving. That's one impressive bit of 'triangulation', or whatever they call it, by the Tory campaign managers. I'm impressed.

So, the fact is now - and it is a fact - whatever the Beeb and the Grauniad and all the other ideologically and morally bankrupt agents of Brownite darkness might wish to be the truth, and write or broadcast accordingly, has now become irrelevant. It can be ignored in the round, and Pickles is ignoring it. The Tories have stolen the march and created a new kind of campaign: clean and wholesome is the only way!

My view (and many, many others', to be fair) has been, since the era-changing signal that was the Crewe landslide, that Labour simply have absolutely no idea how to cope with this style of campaigning. And that's why I will say it again - mainly because it really feels nice to say it, but also because it's true: Labour are heading for total annihilation whenever the next GE is, and whatever happens to the economy. There is no hope for them. Fabulous. It means there might actually now be hope for the country.

That's assuming Cameron knows what to do when he wins. The hope had better not be misplaced. This is one of the things that people like Purnell, who's getting an awfully big wooing from the right media just now, is secretly hoping, I suspect (that a Cameron government fails to deliver).

But I for one choose to put my faith in Cameron. We could do a lot worse. And we have.

Whatever the future might hold, it is clear that with every fresh, deserved blow to this punch-drunk, journeyman government - and Norwich was if not an out-and-out knock-out then an eight-count at the very least - the Tories grow in confidence, which, in turn, energises their campaign and makes them appear to be a government-in-waiting. This becomes a dynamic shift as people sense the mood and follow it.

Suffice to say - and yes, this is speculation but it's rooted in empirical, historical fact - we're actually way past the comparison with the end of the Major years (he was never hated so completely, so bitterly, as Brown is, for instance. And he was elected). Labour are headed for humiliating, devastating defeat whatever happens and whatever their tame media might argue to the contrary. And the longer they wait, the deeper that humiliation will be.

I would urge readers not to bother to give anyone who might argue that any other outcome is a possibility the time of day. They are either mad or they are a Labour tribalist - which actually means they are both.

Mandelson's New Apprentice

Dark Master...

As Baron Sugar of Clapped-Out completes his journey to the Dark Side of the Force, arising as the new apprentice to vile Sith Lord, Mandelson of Death Star, the Imperial Broadcasting Corporation has apparently decided to continue the pretence that it isn't merely a servant of evil by stating it will not air the former's supershite reality TV programme during an election campaign. (Correction. The BBC has been banned from showing it, which suggests its clone army of mindless managers actually wanted to, which tells you all you need to know about them.):

The BBC was told today that it could not broadcast The Apprentice during an election after its governing body ruled that Sir Alan Sugar’s appointment as the Government’s enterprise czar risked damaging the corporation’s political impartiality.

The BBC Trust was responding to a complaint by Jeremy Hunt, the Conservative Shadow Culture Secretary, that Sir Alan, who became Baron Sugar of Clapton on Monday, should not be allowed to juggle the roles of government adviser and BBC presenter.

Although they rejected the complaint, the trustees said that allowing the Labour peer to present The Apprentice, or its spin-off programme, during an election period could lead viewers to think that the corporation was biased in favour of the Labour Party.

Yours truly firmly believes - and, one suspects, most of the rest of a country currently enslaved by unelected, incompetent Emperor Brown - that that particular starship blasted off into hyperspace long ago.

...and new apprentice

Go ahead and show Sugar's appalling series, lefty Beeb politico-droids. It will make no difference to the election outcome.

One suspects the real reason they've been ordered not to is because their marginally more technologically advanced Trustee droids have made a simple political calculation (how's that for 'impartial'): once the emperor has been destroyed - and Lord Mandelson of Death Star with him - there will be reprisals from the erstwhile victims of their relentless Labourist propaganda, perhaps even to the point of the break-up of the entire corporation. And not a moment too soon.

Well, if Alan-bloody-Sugar can become an unelected policymaker and a peer of the realm (for services to himself, I guess), literally anything can happen in these, the final months of this particular B-movie government. We're in the realms of political fantasy these days after all, folks, so we can but dream that our rebellion is a total success and the last vestiges of the Labour Empire, including its broadcasting arm, are gloriously swept away, heralding the Return of the Tories (in a sort of deja-vu prequel).

Now where did I put my light sabre...

Another One Bites The Dust

Fraser Nelson reports that another Tory grandee is to fall on his sword after making dodgy expense claims.

Only this morning, Andrew MacKay said that he would stand for election again - but after a conversation with David Cameron he has now decided to stand down at the next election. The open meeting he held had several calls for him to go, and there was talk of a petition. The grassroots momentum was significant. This, make no mistake, is a personal loss to David Cameron who relied on MacKay to be his eyes and ears in the backbenches.

It's become pretty obvious that Cameron intends to purge the Tories of all those who have abused a lax system, whether their claims fell within the rules or not. The party faces a torrid time over the next week or so, but one thing is now abundantly clear, whatever you might think about the main parliamentary parties' behaviour generally, the battle between Brown and Cameron on how to deal with the issue is being comprehensively won by Cameron.

As I said a few days ago, thanks to his indecisiveness, mixed messages and perennial favouritism Brown faces the impossible task that is reshuffling a tainted and split cabinet. Another minister broke ranks today providing a front page story for the Times and further evidence of a government in total disarray not just over the expenses fiasco but over the management of the economy and home affairs, too. Caroline Flint, the over-promoted minister of something-or-other in question and friend of chipmunks everywhere apparently

...risks angering Downing Street by saying that Ms Blears had technically done nothing wrong, despite Mr Brown’s branding her behaviour “completely unacceptable” after she failed to pay capital gains tax on the sale of a flat.

Ms Flint says that Ms Blears is “one of the last people who would ever come into politics to gain some kind of financial benefit”.

So, not only wrong but wrong-headed and a thinly-veiled assault on Geoff Hoon, the Lord High Chancellor of Troughers. Combine this backbiting with the brewing tempest over the economic mismanagement apparently exacerbating an already serious situation vis-a-vis the debt crisis, with the UK about to lose its AAA status according to CNBC and you quickly see the Times is way off-beam with its characterisation of the mood within the Parliamentary Labour Party...

In a further sign of the febrile atmosphere at the top of government, some ministers are now speculating that Mr Brown could be persuaded to call an autumn election. They say that, with Labour apparently heading for certain defeat next year, the only way Mr Brown could rescue his party would be to be bold and go to the country...

They shouldn't bother talking to 'some ministers'. There is not one snowball's chance in hell that this outcome is even remotely likely. On the strength of the evidence so far, Brown will either hang on until the last possible minute of this parliament (not a chance) or he will be metaphorically assassinated (probability rising with each passing day) soon after the June 4th wipeout by the growing mass of disaffected Labour MPs faced with unemployment.

Not to see this is not to appreciate the state of panic among Labour's rank and file, or the total lack of leadership or connection from the Prime Menacer. While they are ponderous and slow on the uptake, predictably, they will eventually come to the conclusion that they chose him and they can depose Brown. Whatever they might think of him personally, they will look at David Cameron and see tough, sure, decisive - even brutal - leadership from a fairly normal human being. They will then look at Brown and see a bully who cannot see past the end of his own nose, inconsistency, dithering and, above all, a willingness to burn anyone to save his own bacon.

It will finally dawn on them that he is a liability and has to go.

Eye Of The Storm

Peace broke out on last night's Newsnight as the historic events of the day were digested, according to left wing cuckoo in the nest of the Spectator, Martin Bright. Not so sure myself. It was certainly chummy, calm and the discussion about possible directions of parliamentary reform was fairly substantive, especially from Douglas Carswell. But it was not a fair reflection of the febrile mood either in a vegitative parliament on life support or in a country crying out for it to be put out of its misery.

If there is a period of calm over the next few days - or hours - it will be a phony calm, caused by the shock of the new reality facing MPs, and particularly government MPs and ministers. It's clear now that Gordon Brown's disingenuous and sometimes wildly contradictory remarks in his car crash of a press conference yesterday have stunning implications for members of his own front bench, as well as for Labour backbenchers.

As usual he is playing a desperate catchup game. David Cameron has already dealt with these issues - and with the main offenders - up to the point where common sense dictates he can do no more without moving on to the next, essential stage in the reform process: an immediate general election, where all his MPs can and must face their accusers constituents personally and with their careers on the line. He knows this. He knows it's in touch with popular opinion and he also knows that it's right. So he's calling for it, and those calls will simply get louder and louder as government ministers fall one by one under Brown's putative promised purge and as his administration grows ever more enfeebled.

But if the purge fails to materialise; if Brown backs down on the pledge of a genuine clean-up of his own party by keeping-on tainted ministers and hiding behind the 'within the rules' mantra, he will end-up in an even worse position by looking like a ditherer: he will be totally compromised and condemned as a coward. He is boxed in and, as a consequence, is politically paralysed, whereas Cameron's instincts have never seemed keener and his party, I would hazard, has never been more energised in spite of its travails (viz: Carswell's performance).

So the equation has now resolved itself into a simple inequality: the one thing Brown dare not do is call the one thing that has always terrified him the most, a snap general election. But the only thing that an angry electorate will settle for is a general election on their terms, not his. This is an impasse: Brown will fight tooth and nail to avoid it, while Cameron's - indeed the country's - demands for it will grow stronger and stronger daily. The beautiful tempest sliding across the skies above Westminster fleetingly sits directly over Big Ben's clock tower: the eye of the storm is parked above Parliament.

As the eye passes, the second phase of the storm will be far more violent than the first. While it rages and their liability leader becomes even more indecisive and irrational deep within his Number 10 cave, at some stage it will finally dawn on the Labour party, as their polling plumbs record depths, that the only thing that can tame it is the general election, with or without Gordon Brown.

The next month is crunch time for Labour - and quite possibly the Prime Minister's last in office. It might, therefore, be worth their reminding Brown of his Shakespeare before it's too late:

"Cowards die many times before their deaths,
The valiant never taste of death but once."

Brown Ousting

Lefty Independent journo, Steve Richards appears to have had enough of Labour leader (and usurping PM) G. Brown. While everyone else is going after arch trougher and pisspoor speaker, Mick "I wannit all" Martin, Richards has his crosshairs fixed firmly on the thick head that co-ordinates the clunking fist. Writing in low-circulation leftish rag, The New Statesman yesterday, he said:

The Prime Minister is exhausted, abused and hapless. Labour MPs have one final opportunity to remove him this summer, or accept the consequences...

Some ministers watched Brown’s inept response to Joanna Lumley and the Gurkhas with particular alarm. As one said to me: “Gordon did everything the wrong way around. He failed to deal with the crisis in advance of the Commons vote. He lost the vote. Only then, when everything was too late, did he hold a meeting with Joanna Lumley. Why didn’t he meet her at the beginning of the sequence rather than at the end? It is a case study in how not to handle an issue.”

Brown's equally flat-footed handling of the expenses scandals, which have hammered Labour's already precarious standings in the polls, and his palpable inability to gauge the public mood or modify the tone of his hate attacks on the Tories, has led to deep disquiet in the ranks of a parliamentary Labour party now utterly demoralised by the prospect of imminent unemployment and the loss of the attendant perks. Ousting him before a general election which now could (and should) happen any time is now a priority. The calculation is that if he remains, inevitable defeat will become total wipeout.

Now he has lost the media and it is difficult to see how he can change the narrative, not least when morale is so low, both his own and the government’s. One minister tells me, not surprisingly, that the mood among ministers is joyless. No one, he suggests, feels part of a team.

If Brown were to go, the problems associated specifically with him – Damian McBride, elements of economic policymaking, his personi­fication of a tired, long-serving gov­ernment – would go, too...

says Richards. While this is probably true, it seems the electorate might have simply moved on from Labour completely, whoever is in charge, and mentally prepared themselves for a Cameron government. The latter has, after all, been fairly light on his feet about the expenses debacle - though how he expects publishing expenses on the Conservative website will limit the constitutional damage that's been done to parliament by these revelations remains to be seen.

One thing is certain, though, regardless of the threat of a 'fresh face' to the Tory resurgence, Brown must go - not merely for the sake of a Labour party wishing to remain a political force, but for the sake of a country in deperate need of decontaminated or, perhaps, uncontaminated leadership for however short a time. But the equation - or gamble - is much simpler for the average Labour MP currently defending a marginal seat (ie: any majority below 10,000 these days):

If the wretched sequence that began with the McBride emails continues into the summer, I would not altogether rule out a change. After all, what would you do, if there were one more throw of the dice that might just save your seat?

True enough, but all you gather from this, ultimately, is that Brown's dithering disease has spread to the left commentariat. They or the cabinet will not convene the firing squad, let alone pull the triggers, even when the final appeal has been refused and Brown is bang to rights as the traitor he is - to Labour and to Britain. Cameron, head of a bunch of criminal piggies though he might well be, is now in charge of the agenda. He should exercise this power and force an election after June 4th - thus bringing to an end the dark chapter in British history which has been Gordon Brown's stolen premiership.