Just found a Tory circular in my email putatively from Baroness Warsi. Here's the important bit (my italics):
On behalf of all of us in the Conservative Party, I congratulate Ed Miliband on his election as Leader of the Labour Party.
He will have many challenges ahead in these next few days, but if he wants to be taken seriously, the first thing he's got to do is own up to his role in creating the mess that Britain is in and tell us what he'd do to fix it.
From advising Gordon Brown in the Treasury in the 90s, to serving in his Cabinet in the 2000s, he must recognise his central role in creating the financial mess we're all paying for.
For the past five months, all we've heard from Labour is knee jerk opposition to our plans to tackle the deficit. Now is the time for Mr Miliband to tell us what he'd do instead. He promised us a Labour spending plan before the spending review, now we'd all like to see it.
The new Labour leader now has a clear choice. He can either serve the national interest by joining with us and the Liberal Democrats and set out how he would cut the deficit, or he can stand on the sidelines and refuse to engage with the biggest challenge facing Britain in decades.
The fact that Ed Miliband owes his position to the votes of the unions does not bode well. At the moment this looks like a great leap backwards for the Labour Party.
Spot on. Miliband Minor, the one who sounds like he's underwater when he talks, can't be permitted to wriggle his party out of its responsibility for the massive economic, social and foreign policy calamities its previous leadership and cabinet wrought on this country. Miliband Minor must also be brought to book the instant he caves in to his militant socialist union backers.
Personally, I expect the Coalition to treat this latest Labour clown with the contempt he so richly deserves. I know I will.
Jeff Randall typically has come up with the best opinion piece so far about the total dearth of quality, both in terms of its tainted, lightweight candidates and its inability to interest the country, in the current Labour leadership election sham.
So far, observing the battle for Labour's captaincy has been like watching a 0-0 draw between reserve sides in a Sunday pub league. Lots of huffing and puffing, but no goals, little excitement, and a gloomy acceptance among supporters that it really doesn't matter who wins, because the players are simply not good enough, and no amount of post-match lagers can change that.
Of course, Randall soon homes in like a well-targeted cruise missile on the real weakness underpinning the current incarnation of the parliamentary Labour party foundations and leadership: rank, institutional, barefaced, epic hypocrisy. Only, it's not just Dianne Abbott's hypocrisy he rightly lambasts (as I did here a while back) but the hypocrisy of that entire rotten political organisation. But what he does to the Milibands is priceless. Of Mili Major (Dave), before writing him off: "Offer him a platitude and he will contrive a soundbite."
For Mili Minor (Ed): he manages to muster only a cursory put down for the ugly one with a voice like a defective waste pipe, as if he just isn't worth it (he isn't):
This week, he said that he wanted Labour to become "the party of small business". Too late – Mr Brown already tried that. He began with lots of big businesses and turned many into small ones.
Boom! Two targets with one bomb.
The bottom line, of course, is that everyone has just had a complete bellyful of the whole package: the lying, the spin, the waste, the arrogance, the pocket-lining, the risible incompetence at every level and, it almost goes without saying, the huge levels of hypocrisy that have outraged so many for so long but who have only recently had the chance to show their displeasure. That gulf, between the Labour leadership's public pronouncements and private behaviour, grew so fast under Blair that the leader of the people's party was somehow able to leave office a millionaire many times over. But even all that is trumped by people's contempt for Labour's diabolical economic record in government (again):
Labour's problem is that none of the candidates can accept the real reason for the party's abysmal performance at the ballot box. As research by Demos, the think tank, revealed this week, the public is sick of borrow, tax and waste. The days of bribing voters with their own devalued money are over.
Let's hope "the public" really is that sick of it and has seen through the oldest Labour ruse of all (bribing voters with their own money). And let's hope public memories are a bit longer this time. My view is that this leadership campaign signals the death knell for Labour, for the reason implied in Randall's opening: it is now a party of alley cats, fat cats and pussy cats led by a bunch of common or garden careerist donkeys.
I rather like Dan Hannan's latest post about how shockingly bad the treatment of Turkey has been - and still is - by the EU (in reality, when it comes to Turkey, the semi-racist France and the fully racist Germany). This probably telegraphs my ignorance, but he also taught me a new word: "Turcophile". I like this word and I'm going to use it in polite conversation from now on. I also like the concept it denotes: admiration for Turkey and Turkish people. And, it seems, I'm not the only one. David Cameron is a Turcophile too. But that was always to be expected, says Hannan, for he is a hard line traditionalist Tory at heart and always has been. Yet there is a lot more to his Turcophilia (?) than mere nostalgia and tradition, and a lot more at stake should the EU (Germany) be permitted to ostracise Turkey any longer. As Hannan says:
I have argued before that David Cameron is a remarkably traditional Tory, and his attitude to Turkey is as traditional as they come. His – my – party has been Turcophile since Derby’s leadership a century and a half ago. (So, come to that, has The Daily Telegraph, which broke with Gladstone over his anti-Ottoman policy in 1877, and has been Tory ever since.) Cameron’s reasons for backing Ankara’s EU membership bid are solidly Conservative: Turkey guarded Europe’s flank against the Bolshevists for three generations, and may one day be called on to do the same against the jihadis. In the circumstances, the PM believes, Turks are being treated ungratefully by their allies.
To me, the "guardians of the flank against the jihadis" argument for halting Turkey's shabby treatment by German politicians in particular is bullet proof. But what about EU membership? Well, it seems to me that the EU is slightly worse at foreign policy than the last Labour government - utterly appalling in other words. Who'd want to be associated with an organisation that appears to be quite adept at upsetting all of the people all of the time while simultaneously being completely unable actually to do anything, anywhere, ever. Furthermore, if you accept the real motives behind the EU's passive-aggressive bureaucratic obstructionism over Turkish membership are ones of national self-interest on the parts of the usual suspects, then you realise that this translates as outright hostility in terms of international relations, whether it comes via Brussels or not. Why on earth would Turkey want to be a part of any of that? (Why on earth do we, for heaven's sake!).
As Hannan says:
For what it’s worth, if I were Turkish, I would be against EU membership. Turkey is a dynamic country with – in marked contrast to the EU – a young population. The last thing it needs is the 48-hour week, the Common Agricultural Policy, the euro and the rest of the apparatus of Brussels corporatism. Why tie yourself to a shrinking part of the world economy; when you have teeming new markets to your east? Why submit to rule by people who barely trouble to disguise their contempt for you?
Good question. He answers it, too.
There is a difference, though, between choosing not to join and being told that you’re not good enough to join. Turks are as entitled to their pride as any other people. The way they have been messed around can hardly fail to make them despise the EU. Which, in the broader sweep of history, is likely to hurt the EU more than it does Turkey.
Now, you know as well as I do that Hannan is a smart dude. He's not just talking about Turkey, is he? (Or was that obvious?) He's talking about us, too. The reason why up to 70% of the UK's adult population if not despises then mistrusts the EU is because they feel the cold blast of its contempt for their beliefs, traditions, sense of independence, history, national identity and sovereignty every day. That's why I'm pretty certain Hannan is on to something here, and so is Cameron. By championing Turkey, and wearing his Turcophile tendencies on his sleeve, he can appeal to people's in-built Euroscepticism at home, temper the coaltion's Europhiliac tendencies and highlight Brussel's in-built Angloscepticism. All at a single stroke.
If this is true then it's a foreign policy stroke of genius. Or maybe it just seems that way after years of Labour verbal incontinence on just about any international relations topic you care to think of, and total incompetence in actually doing anything, or total dishonesty and betrayal in the case of the EU.
Maybe, for a change, this new Turcophilia is just the right policy. How refreshing.
My utter and entirely justified contempt for Gordon Brown is well-documented on this blog. But even he's managed to surpass himself in terms of delusion and sanctimonious bullshit flammery in his post-prime ministerial speech to a bunch of corrupt socialist African 'leaders' (dictators) in Kampala yesterday.
But hey, that's just my view of the utter Brown catastrophe. Here's a bit of what he said. I think the entire speech, taken as watertight evidence of a diseased mind, conclusively demonsrates that he is, at heart, a quasi-totalitarian egoist with messianic tendencies. But, naturally, you must make-up your own mind:
All of our lives are connected: we can all impact for good or ill on the lives of people we have never met. And yet we don’t currently share a common society or effective global institutions that allow us to treat strangers as neighbours or give life to our feelings of fellowship, solidarity, compassion and care.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. I believe that it is possible for people, acting together, to build a global society, and design the institutions that would best serve its values
OK, Gord, you get on with 'building a global society'. But while you're busy designing the brave new world, the rest of us normal people will be searching for ways to harness individual compassion as a social force, lowering taxes to reward hard work and freeing the education system so that our brightest no longer have to feel disadvantageded because they aren't part of the anti-excellence Labour average.
I digress. The simple point is that Brown is a well-known, now-talkative lunatic, and Balls should just resign,
Quite aside from all his other disastrous decisions, mainly on foreign policy, it seems perfectly fair to me that Blair be blamed for not seeing while he was Prime Minister that Britain wasn't saddled with a successor he himself thought was unfit to govern. This is, according to Andrew Rawnsley in his extraordinarily excoriating assault on virtually the entire Labour administration, the thing for which Blair, ultimately, is most guilty. It's a heck of a read and should be disastrous for all Labour's leadership candidates, tainted as they are with the charge of cowardice, arch and chronic dishonesty and, simply put, self-interested misgovernance. Anyway, here's a taste of something which, if you haven't already read it, is well worth a look:
If Blair thought that Brown was unfit to be prime minister – and there's now lots of evidence that this is precisely what Blair thought – he had an obligation to his party and his country to do something about it. At the very least, he should have, as he could have, ensured that there was a contest for the succession in 2007 rather than allow Brown to be crowned without proper scrutiny. It was one of Blair's most selfish acts and a gross dereliction of duty to swan off to make his millions while leaving his party and country to cope with the consequences of a Brown premiership.
The implication from this is that by the time he had finally given in to the forces of hell unleashed by Brown in the form of Balls, Wheelan et al in 2006, Blair simply didn't give a toss about what happened next. A more damning indictment of the man as Prime Minister is simply inconceivable, even one involving his misleading the House of Commons, the country and the world over WMDs in Iraq. It's actually quite difficult accurately to describe a person like that, whose self-interest and vanity is only trumped by his greed and dishonesty. In some ways if one views it in the light of this unforgivable dereliction of duty, as Rawnsley rightly calls it, Blair ends up as an even worse national leader than Brown, difficult though that might be for some (like me) to swallow.
If you do accept Rawnsley's characterisation of Blair, it is, however, perfectly possible to argue that he was worse than Brown as a man and as a leader. The only difference between the two frauds being, therefore, that Blair was a far better con man than Brown ever could be, which meant that Blair was able to trick the country into believing him and then voting for him. By contrast, Brown was just Brown: paranoid, delusional, vicious, incompetent even in disguising his many falsehoods and, ultimately, a total electoral liability and a catastrophe for the nation.
The impact of these realisations on the Labour leadership campaign as I said should be massive. All the candidates are as discredited as each other for failing to make the decision Blair couldn't be ar*ed to make and stopping Brown once it was crystal clear he was utterly hopeless. As Rawnsley says, quite fairly and quite mildly in truth:
Andy Burnham was one of the nodding dogs who would declare to TV cameras that the cabinet had every confidence in Gordon Brown when the reverse was the case. Ed Balls ran the thuggish Brownite machine and the decade-long insurgency against Tony Blair to put his master in Number 10. Ed Miliband makes pious noises denouncing "factionalism" as if he is a saintly figure who never had anything to do with it. "The emissary from Planet Fuck" – as he was known among Blair's aides during the civil war – was at the heart of the Brown faction.It is a bit tricky for David Miliband. He was one of the senior members of the cabinet who knew Brown was taking them to defeat and failed to act before it was too late.
So they all should be screwed - and rightly so. For all his hypocrisy, Mandelson doesn't really matter because he's not a leadership candidate. So, assuming (and this is a big assumption) the MSM ends its own version of Labourist dishonesty and begins to treat the rest with the contempt they should have coming to them for their pathetic behaviour in propping up Brown, the only untainted candidate in the Labour leadership race is, hilariously, Diane Abbott!
Either way, and this is essentially Rawnsley's conclusion, Labour is truly, deservedly and royally buggered. And in the end, of course, they themselves are the ones who are to blame for it. After all, Blair only gave us Brown because he'd given up, and that's how history will judge him. But the Milibands, Burnham and Balls (and Mandelson) are the ones who propped the disastrous loser up. That was unforgivable - and the country isn't going to forgive them, ever.
Now, thankfully, their past seems finally to be catching up with them. Soon there'll be nowhere left for them to hide any more and no amount of continued lying will save their collective political bacon. If the PLP is stupid enough to elect one of them, (and it's almost certain that it is that stupid) then they should prepare to be out of power for decades, if not forever. Mind you, exactly the same thing will happen if they choose bonkers Abbott.
Catch 22 for the Labourist wreckers - and music to my ears!
Iain Martin has provided, presumably from his sources inside the civil service, a fascinating and chilling insight into Brown's autocratic, paranoid and hopeless (mis)management of day-to-day Prime Ministerial business. If you haven't already read it, click through here.
It will take a lot of effort to work out just how much damage three years (or 13 years if you include his time as a diabolical, serially disloyal Chancellor) of Brown's weirdness and chaos in Downing Street has done to this nation. The litany of disasters that can be traced directly back to Brown's bunker door are emerging daily, of course, so the process could take less time than we think.
Quite frankly, I think how such a man was elevated to the level of the highest office in the land in the first place, without even the pretence of any form of democratic election, should also be a source of deep and urgent study. Why? Because it must never, ever be permitted to happen again and if that means radical alterations to the rules governing the way Prime Ministers are chosen, then so be it.
In the meantime we can be happy about a couple of things, and Martin alludes to these in his excellent piece: stable, reasonable, elected people are back in charge, cabinet government appears to have returned and the principles of ministerial and collective responsibility look like being rigorously reinstated.
We shall see, but after the cocksure, cowboy, sofa government years of Blair and the mentally disturbed, incoherent, mafiosi years of Brown, it certainly feels like accountability, professionalism and, crucially, normality have returned to Downing Street, Whitehall and, perhaps (just perhaps), even Westminster.
Well, you might disagree. But God help us all if I'm wrong!
Just remember, Brown's chief hit man, Balls, is still around, waiting in the wings, shamelessly spewing his poisonous politics of propaganda, division, dishonesty and fear. He's on This Week right now lying through his teeth about, in this case, his many crimes against Tony Blair on behalf of his boss, Brown, to whom he remains fanatically loyal. The chances of the evil Balls becoming leader even of his own party are pretty slim, I admit, (oh I do hope he wins!) but there's still that chance, however slight, and the frailties of our system, exposed by the Brown 2007 coup d'état, mean that at that point, he would be a hell of a lot closer to Number 10 than is sanely conceivable.
If Iain Martin's revelations reveal just how very, very, incredibly bad Brown was, just imagine what life would be like under Prime Minister Balls.
That would be a nightmare from which we might never wake up.
New Labour Spin Twins: currently out-lying each other
Hardly surprising, I know, but since they have not been entirely well-received by his own party it was necessary for Mandelson to spin his memoirs for all he was worth upon their publication today in the face of what I predict will be pretty poor sales - and some reasonably tough questioning from Evan Davies this morning.
Even so, to hear Mandelson actually trying to spin his own, printed words from his own, conceited book - to hear him attempt the epistemologically impossible and wriggle and squirm as he did so - was a source of some pleasure for me as I battled my way into work through sheets and sheets of West Wales rain.
Doesn't he realise we stopped believing anything he says long ago? Davies made the point quite well: something like, don't you think the public will find it quite annoying that only three months ago you were telling them to vote for what you now call a 'dysfunctional' prime minister and party. Mandelson had no convincing answer to that, at least, not convincing enough for any potential readership, I would say.
But is this a case of one spin operation too far for the Prince of Spain (sic)? I suppose it's inevitable, actually, that spinners end up spectacularly but stubbornly contradicting themselves. After all, 'spin' is merely a euphemism for 'lie'. And Mandelson, after Alistair Campbell, is the biggest spinner of them all.
The only important thing about this book of Mandy's is that it represents the first shot in Labour's latest civil war, a war which, with enough luck, should keep them away from office - and us - for a generation.
I must say, I'm afraid I found Liam Fox's explanations and justifications for the combat drawdown timetable in Afghanistan on Radio 4 this morning rather unconvincing. At one point he started to remind me of various Labour defence ministers (you can pick one) in his attempts to service the argument that the Afghan National Army will somehow be ready to take over from American and British troops in five years' time, despite mounting evidence to the contrary (not least yesterday's tragic rocket attack on British soldiers by an insurgent who had infiltrated the Afghan army) and continuing military reversals (I define losing territory you have just gained from the enemy because you don't have enough men to hold it a 'reversal', don't you?).
It's not that I don't buy what he says - in most ways, he is far more believable than his Labour predecessors, who spent most of their time lying through their teeth about helicopter numbers, among many other things - it's that things just don't add up given the time frame proposed and troop levels involved.
It's been said by a lot of commentators and experts alike that the mission, the war aims, the 'liberation not occupation' philosophy, the 'protecting us at home by fighting terror abroad' ideology, even the timetable that's been announced, are all theoretically sound apart from one, vitally important factor: for all these goals to be accomplished, our troop levels in the short term need to rise substantially; our level of engagement intensify dramatically.
Under-manning has and, it seems, always will be the British problem in Afghanistan. In order to fulfil the mission we set for ourselves, two or even three divisions of soldiers (around 30,000+ combat troops plus support) should have been committed, and now should be committed, to augment the USA's 10. "But that would cost the country a fortune!" I hear you gasp. Well, war does cost a fortune and if you are not prepared to pay it, then you should pull the hell out immediately because there is no point in staying.
It was a fortune of our treasure that Gordon Brown was not willing to spend on our behalf to protect our armed forces, so I place the blame squarely at his door for subsequent losses, both the ones caused by a lack of equipment - strength in the air - and the ones caused by insufficient strength on the ground.
I'm now wondering, though, will the Coalition government try to fight this war on the cheap as well? If they do, then we will lose.
Dr Fox had better wake up to that reality - fast. And so had David Cameron and the Coalition he purports to lead.
I know, I know - if you wanted to read about how bad the BBC is, you'd make your way to the first rate "Biased BBC" blog. But I just can't help it, mainly because every day with relentless regularity, the BBC - particularly its online news incarnation - confirms all my suspicions about it. The chief suspicion, of course - that the BBC is institutionally left wing, pro-Labour and viscerally Tory-hating - can hardly be called a 'suspicion' any more since so much evidence to prove this is right beyond any reasonable doubt has been forthcoming over the years. Lame BBC managerial and editorial statements to the contrary have become a joke.
You, as I often do, might be wondering to what lengths the BBC will go in pursuit of its propaganda goals. Well, today we have yet more data to show that "any" is the answer. Consider the farce of Ed Balls' entire education strategy for the past three years, given plummeting literacy and numeracy levels and ever-dumber standards in exams. Consider, for instance, the £10Bn+ that has been frittered away over and above the £30Bn school building and refurbishment programme, now being gallantly corrected by Michael Gove.
Consider also today's extraordinary news that a primary school head teacher has been raking in 200 large a year on the back of, we assume, some half-decent administration of a small school, the consequence of another Balls brainchild, "City Challenge". Jackpot! At least for Mark Elms, that is, who, it seems, is some kind of hyper-teacher, a true saviour capable of healing the educationally sick and giving the word-blind sight. At least I assume that's how good he is otherwise why is he troughing eight times more for running a primary school than a close relative of mine retired on after 35 years of highly distinguished teaching and administration in the secondary sector? No one, but no one, in the education industry is that good.
It seems the BBC's reporter, one Hannah Richardson, disagrees. I'll quote a bit of it, but you will need to read to whole thing to get a taste of just how extraordinarily one-sided it is - and I mean in favour, by implication, not of the teacher in question, but of the brains behind the ridiculously expensive but "prestigious" (according to Richardson - you betcha, girly! Anyone who can syphon off 200k from the government for running a primary school deserves some kind of admiration) "National Leader of Education" programme, Edward BALLS.
For this work, at his 400-pupil school, Mr Elms receives a basic salary of £82,417.This is well within the maximum head teacher pay rate of £109,000 for large inner London state schools.
The bulk of the £200,000 pay package he received last year was for the work he did on the London Challenge and City Challenge project over two years.
These schemes support schools in challenging circumstances and have been very successful in improving education in deprived areas of the country.
Well now, pardon me for complaining, but does this or any of the other half-baked comments she makes in her little piece remotely justify giving one man two hundred grand for running one school, no matter how bad it had become in a Labour-run inner city area. As I said, however, it's important to recognise that that's not the real purpose of this dizzyingly-spun article. The real purpose for this editorially on-message young BBC hackette is to speak out for a very expensive, and highly divisive, Labour schools policy, and therefore, by implication, up for Balls.
Gladly, if the rider at the top of the old Department for Children, Schools and Families, website dedicated to this policy from the incumbents is anything to go by, the "City Challenge" policy Ms Richardson seems to like so much, and Mark Elms obviously loves, is now as defunct and kaput as the failed government that spawned it. It goes:
A new UK Government took office on 11 May. As a result the content on this site may not reflect current Government policy. All statutory guidance and legislation published on this site continues to reflect the current legal position unless indicated otherwise. To view the new Department for Education website, please go to http://www.education.gov.uk
I like it! Seems Hannah Richardson was reporting on a dead policy walking, regardless of her motives for doing so.
Time she and the BBC woke up to the fact that Labour is out of office, and that their cosy world of protected political bias is no longer as safe as they might like to believe. Just as Mark Elms can expect no more ridiculous bonuses (or perhaps "bribes" would be a better word) for doing his job in a less than salubrious area of the Smoke, left wing BBC hacks, editors and managers can expect no more sanctuary in a public institution that urgently needs to be given back to the public, or go the way of the "Department for Children, Families, Schools, Pets and Wasting Money", Ed Balls and the entire, trainwreck New Labour Government.
Jackie Ashley, in her piece in the Graun this morning that's basically a 1500-word moan about why-oh-why the Labour party is imploding and so many people are 'abusing' the party's record in government, describes Mandelson's new memoirs as "bank-swelling". I'm not sure I agree with her about that. Beyond all the MSM political hacks who must buy it (assuming they're not given free copies), the professional bloggers (one of whom probably helped to publish it), MPs and former ministers, (who'll all be desperate to see if they get a mention from the oily old pocket-liner) I have a sneaking suspicion that very few people will be remotely interested enough to shell out their hard-earned on such an artefact of conceit.
You see, the thing Labour people like Ashley don't seem to grasp is that contempt for the Labour party and all its works has gone well beyond mere abuse now. Try as she and her BBC husband might to talk it up, the fact is that people have moved well on from the Labour narrative and are comfortable with the new, Tory/coalition one. So comments like this from her, let's face it, pretty desperate piece...
Somebody needs to fight back against the hysterical torrent of abuse being poured on Labour's economic record, which after all included a decade of good times, the rebuilding of public services, and successful action to stave off a full-scale collapse in the banking system. It may be too early: the self-righteousness of the Labour-haters now matches the self-righteousness of New Labour in its pomp. But the time will come.
...sort of pretty spectacularly miss the point. The "hysterical torrent of abuse" would not be the relevant thing even if it actually existed (it doesn't), the outcome of the general election is, with millions of people deciding, not as "self-righteous Labour-haters" (a rather feeble example of the sneering hyperbole I've often heard from self-righteous Tory-haters like her), but as ordinary voters, to reject Labour and its pisspoor record. You know, in their self-righteous Tory-hating, which shields them from all conceivable criticism, I think Labour-losers still really haven't understood the fact that they have lost the argument - comprehensively and conclusively - and that they are, consequently and with increasing shrillness, talking to themselves.
The sales of Mandelson's new novel, the serialisation of which is safely hidden behind a Murdoch paywall, should provide a fair measurement of just how irrelevant Labour have quickly become, and just how far the country has moved on from them and their sorry tale of failure in government.
Me? I expect to see it in the bargain bins within weeks, along with Mandelson's memoirs.
Education is an area that interests me intensely so it might not be surprising that I'm spending the early evening watching the education funding statement on the parliament channel at this very moment (exciting, eh?).
Suffice to say, and in the spirit of his refreshing brevity and precision, Michael Gove is giving one of the more polished parliamentary performances I've seen in defending his policy of suspending Ed Balls' pie-in-the-sky, dishonest pre-election plans for building and refurbishing 700 schools. A number of facts are emerging thanks to Gove's extraordinary mastery of the detail, not least among them the bureaucratic waste, vast inefficiency and dreadful mismanagement of PFI contracts by Ed Balls and the department he apparently headed (even though he seemed far more busy most of the time trying in his role as Gordon Brown's barely house trained thug, propping up the auld fraud and protecting him almost 24/7 from his own cabinet, a full time job in itself).
Gove's handling of the various whining Labour opposition MPs, moaning about things that their own pathetic leadership brought down on them, is just breathtakingly good. The more insulting and detached from reality they become, the more witty and precise his answers become and, in a spiral that can only ever tarnish the grim image of the socialists further, causes the Labour MPs to become even more insulting and detached from reality.
The reason for this is simple: the principles underpinning Gove's policy initiatives, even ones that amount to large but necessary cuts in the education budget at a time, thanks to the disastrous failures of the previous government, of great insecurity in the public finances, are bullet proof. Better value for money, less bureaucracy and higher standards through greater choice are on offer. And you would bet your house that Gove is the sort of man who will deliver.
All poor old Balls, the biggest villain of this piece, can do meanwhile is moan about the list of affected schools not being available in the Commons library for a handful of minutes. That really is the best he can do - and it's not very good, is it? I think I can predict Gove's response: "Ball, E: must do better, but on the strength of past performances probably won't. D-".
Gove is a truly impressive figure - everyone knows that. But when he's up against the likes of feeble Balls and his ilk on the opposition benches, he looks like a world beater. Cameron beware!
Oh dear. And Balls is still moaning away - this time about his money fiddling of that dodgy Islamic faith school some aeons ago. Labourists - you've gotta love 'em (sort of). They are totally clueless. It's a wonder to me they remember to breathe.
For them to be whinging about pre-announced policies is just priceless!
This article, buried away in the Sunday Telegraph, had me chuckling quietly into my cornflakes this morning - at first. Apparently, mysterious and severe damage to an antique table in Downing Street was caused by Gordon Brown ferociously scribbling on documents containing stuff he didn't like and either scraping so hard he punctured the paper or missing it altogether and just scrawling illegibly on the wood. Years of this abuse have left the table so badly scratched that it will be too expensive to repair in this post-Crash Gordon age of austerity. Here's a bit of the entertaining piece.
The damage to the table is so severe that cleaning staff have been unable to remove the marks despite frantic polishing. "The marks to the table were noticed by people using the room on the very first day of the new Government. People were curious about what had caused the damage," says Mandrake's man in No 10. "We learnt it was the room that was regularly used by Gordon Brown. It became apparent that the marks were caused by his manic scratchings. He was clearly writing very angrily with his pen and the marks came through the paper on to the table. Some are two or three inches long and very deep."
Now I know this all smacks of a bit of Downing Street propaganda, but it just sounds so totally plausible that I think it must be true, and, if true, then it's not a smear. With that in mind, personally I think this, combined with Brown's many other acts of weirdness, falls comfortably into the category of "anti-social behaviour", complete with expensive damage to public property and a high nuisance value for the recently arrived, new tenants of the building. Since such "low level" criminal activity can't be punished any more in post-Labour Britain, realistically justice will have to be seen to be done with the only instrument of public retribution left: Ken Clarke must serve Brown with an ASBO.
Better still, let's just send the vandalising old fraud the bill, or take it out of the MP's salary he's still drawing but not earning these days. I'm serious about that last option. About £160 Billion should cover it. Well, some of it.
It's heartening to know that propective Labour leader, hard left loon Diane Abbott, believed as early as 1987, when she was the newly elected MP for Hackney, that the Tories were responsible for what she curiously branded the "gentrification" of London.
Now, we all know that what she really means by "gentrification" is the migration of wealth from traditionally affluent areas of the capital, like Chelsea and Westminster, to what were then traditional Labour slag heaps often resembing demilitarised zones, like Battersea and Docklands. It's no accident, for instance, that Kubrick, for his classic war movie Full Metal Jacket, deemed the latter wasteland as the perfect filming location for that movie's desolate battle scenes throughout 1986 - just before the evil Tories began to, er, "gentrify" it, I guess.
It's also no accident, at least to me, that Abbott's constituency, which she has now been protecting vigilantly from gentrification for 23 years, is still an absolute sh*thole where no one in their right mind would dare, never mind want, to live. And that's just the way she likes it. But why? It's pretty obvious really.
People like her, namely corrupt, hypocritical chardonnay socialists (and I do not care one jot what she pretends her background was, that's what she became a long, long time ago) always preach one thing and practise another. In her case, no matter what she might say to the contrary, she's perfectly comfortable with the misery and poverty her brand of political ideology not only fails to alleviate, (regardless of what they laughably say about wanting to do just that), it actually entrenches it and makes it worse. Look around you. Look at the vast, socialist-built housing estates and tower blocks in virtually every inner city in the land, most of which have been under Labour control for decades, and you will see deprivation unchallenged, crime unpunished, immigration uncontrolled, children uneducated and mothers unmarried. Everywhere.
So for Diane Abbott to talk, as she does in this early interview, about schools being "damaged" across London by the then Conservative government's attempts to break what was already back then a desperate cycle of despair and ignorance begun in the post-war world by socialists just like her, is simply an insult to reason and an affront to common decency. She sends her child to a private school for God's sake. However she might try to hide behind her gender, pathetically, as she did in a radio interview yesterday afternoon, that is a fact and it smacks of the rankest of a rank hypocrisy, something which is, sadly, indicative of her type.
I do remember how she attempted to justify this on This Week some years ago, moaning when challenged that the local schools in her constituency, (with a Labour dominated LEA in a socialist-dominated sector, naturally), weren't "good enough" for her son. I also remember how Starkey, that annoying historian, memorably slapped her down by saying that if it wasn't good enough for her child, it wasn't good enough for anyone's. Hear hear.
But I digress. The simple point is that putting the hypocrite Abbott's strange complaint, born as it is of nugatory, familiar, fake class warrior mendacity, to one side for a moment, this Tory government needs to press on with urgent zeal and reboot this "gentrification" of not just London's remaining Labour fortresses of futility, but the whole of the United Kingdom's - everywhere (and I don't mean with a Brown-style catastrophic property boom and bust). It means fighting entrenched Labour corruption and double standards, which Abbott perfectly personifies, everywhere and ruthlessly. This time, the Tories should be playing for keeps.
That there's an outside chance Abbott will be leader of a dying Labour party when that process is well and truly underway fills me with glee. The elegant irony of the arrangement would be priceless.
Oh, and in case any socialists out there are still confused enough not to understand what I'm saying, I'll spell it out for you: for "gentrification" read success, growth, social regeneration, aspiration and, of course, liberty - something that everyone deserves to be part of, and which is at least possible under a Conservative government, but completely impossible under a socialist one, as the last thirteen years have just proved with such terrible, terrible consequences. Get it now?
Well, no. It wasn't really much of a shock that John - sorry - "Lord" Prescott felt he was so important that he could swear at fellow interviewee Zac Goldsmith on Radio 4 this morning, and then smear said new Tory MP with impunity.
Nor was it much of a shock that the interviewer did nothing to intervene - if nothing else than to get Prescott for once in his miserable political life to stick to the point, but merely apologised vaguely afterwards I assume for his own conduct by saying that sometimes it's best for these things to be allowed to run their natural course - without getting involved.
As to the issue being discussed - Labour's (Prescott's, in fact) appalling record on housing and the disastrous assault on our nation's green spaces under that regime, which, Prescott seemed quite happy to admit, was more or less a conscious brand of class war - others will disagree no doubt, but I thought Goldsmith wiped the floor with Lord Two Jags (or should that be Lord Two Shags?).
Goldsmith commanded his brief and, when permitted by the lame BBC interviewer, delivered a rational, compelling set of reasons for why, to meet the housing shortage, existing housing stock must be renovated, only appropriate spaces should be built on (ie: not greenfield sites), and local councils must be released from central government meddling so they can do what they were elected to do and make policy to suit the area for which they are responsible and which they (in theory) know best how to manage.
It was a polished performance and Prescott had no answer to it, his policies having buggered everything up (to borrow his expression) in the first place.
It was good to hear that Eric Pickles has officially scrapped Labour's preposterous bin tax. I'm all for recycling, but using tagged, chipped, electronically tracked bins as an excuse effectively to spy on and surcharge people on their already astronomical local taxes severely damaged the integrity of a what is, at least on the surface, a decent cause. An incentive scheme is a far more sensible idea if we really must go down this road.
Personally, I think recycling is a bit of a scam as it is has been permitted to develop as an the industry thanks largely to the previous administration's cavalier approach to all things concerning private companies earning public money, civic duty and civil liberties. Currently, huge private firms hoover up council contracts and then make a heck of a lot more money out of waste management via exploitation of what should be, as I said, a good cause, namely recycling. Consequence? Hardly anything is actually recycled in this country as a proportion of the total and yet we are already paying far more for the privilege of having our household waste taken away. Pickles' idea therefore seems to be the best of a bad set of options. If people are to be forced to pay more for refuse collection, and forced to sort out their own rubbish, then yes, some kind of payback incentive is a reasonable idea. Maybe it should go further and become a full rebate for getting your recycling 100% right. That would be a real incentive and prove the sincerity of any council's recycling motive.
Predictably on the Today programme this morning, John Humphreys seemed quite keen to attack even this popular and modest Tory government policy by trying to argue the toss with a pretty no-nonsense Norfolk councillor who had only briefly looked at the Windsor and Maidenhead pilot scheme on which the new government policy is apparently based and was having none of Humphrey's puffed-up, scornful nonsense. Humphreys eventually seemed to realise he was talking rubbish and marginally altered his inappropriately confrontational tone towards the end. In fact, I'd say he was pretty comprehensively 'owned' by whoever that interviewee was, actually, and it was a very pleasant experience for this listener. I've never really heard anyone who likes the sound of his own voice more than Humphreys, apart from, possibly, David Dimbleby. Oh, and Paxman. Not forgetting Marr who's shaping up as another fine lefty BBC windbag as well. But that's another story, I suppose.
Whatever anyone thinks about the abolition of the bin tax proposals, this to me is another example of the Tories trying to right Labour's wrongs. It's therefore worth praising just on those grounds, even if it is merely a shuffle in the right direction when it comes to this country's sorry record on recycling, value for money for local services and councils' continuing erosion of privacy and individual rights (including the rights guarding against trespass by council officials), and local government 'snooping'. In the end, that's perhaps what was at the heart of this issue, not recycling. In that sense, what Pickles has done is to begin the process of tackling the surveillance mentality of far too many local authorities and to reframe the authoritarian zeitgeist that prevailed under Labour in a small state philosophy that should help to bring about a shift towards a freer society. I have no doubt that this is his aim, and it's laudable in its libertarianism.
Whether he achieves any more than making sure our bins continue to be dumb trash cans rather than being permitted to evolve into spying robots working for the state remains to be seen. But it's a start.
Hey guys, unsurprising news: the BBC decide to defy with self-righteous Dimbledonian indignance the reasonable request of the government for a Labour front bencher to be on the QT panel and not, repeat not, the hideous denialist, contaminated, corrosive, bloodstained liar Alistair Campbell. So the BBC, with infantile predictability, nails its colours to the Labour mast once more, and drags the burnt out Campbell monster in anyway.
Not sure I actually need to watch the programme now. The BBC's agenda is pretty clear, with Campbell and Piers Morgan (would you believe) pathetically shoehorned onto on the panel for cheap, student-activist political reasons. Both men are basically worthless in themselves, seeking to justify their failed public existences through some sort of loudmouth hyperidentification with causes about which they have, and never have had, any comprehension. Ignore their lies and ruthless, utterly corrupt, insatiable vanity.
My absolute, incandescent fury at the ongoing hypocrisy of Labour and its nabobs, even in opposition (after they've been brought to democratic book!) and of its corrupt, lightweight mouthpiece that is the BBC, is really the only thing that's keeping this blog going these days.
You know, I think I'm finally starting to get my mojo back, after the deep - and deeply felt - disappointment of no overall majority, a hung parliament and the coalition.
Well, I'm glad about that even if noone else is likely to be :)
Three years - or thirteen years. You pick. It amounts to the same thing: this is the end of the worst government this country has ever had inflicted upon it. It is the moment this blog was mainly started for: to bring that moment a little bit closer. If it did (which I doubt) then at least it has served some sort of a purpose aside from channeling my anger. I suppose I'll have to turn it into a 'defend' blog now - or something.
But, my god, the most poisonous advisors finally did for him didn't they? Mandelson, Adonis, Campbell, Balls - they were all there. A sad collection of Wormtongues who finally killed the corrupt old leader off. And never was such an ignominious end more richly deserved.
I never thought I'd say this because I haven't really 'got' Will Heaven so far in my relatively short blogging journey (maybe I'm jealous of his relative youthfulness and palpable cleverness - I certainly apologise if those are the reasons!), but he's just posted a piece answering that desperate Freedland thing that caused a bit of a stir in the leftwing media today of such dazzling brilliance that I'm afraid I've caved-in to the temptation to cut and paste it here so that you don't have to venture into its natural habitat to read it:
Emails from my Lefty friends have been pinging into my inbox this afternoon.Their subject lines have all been similar: “What do you think about Jonathan Freedland’s article in the Guardian on life under the Tories?” Hardly surprising, since it has been trending on Twitter all day. But I thought I’d take a closer look at what’s really worrying the brilliant Left-wing columnist.
Freedland writes, à la Kinnock: “I warn you that a chance some have waited for all their adult lives will slip away, perhaps taking another generation to come around again: the chance to reform our rotten, broken electoral system.”
But do the voters really want Labour sharing power after 13 years in government? Surely not, judging by recent polls which suggest a Labour collapse worse than one overseen by Michael Foot in 1983. They’ve had enough. And if you won’t listen to the electorate, at least read Boris Johnson on the problems with PR:
With PR, you end up with two types of MP and two types of democratic mandate; you promote the rise of extremist and fringe parties, such as the BNP, which has exploited PR to capture a seat on the London Assembly; and you end up with a system that is not remotely proportional. As Clegg knows full well, the effect of PR is greatly to magnify the influence of the third or fourth or fifth party – at the expense of the first or second. Look at Germany, where the FDP was able to hold the balance of power, and retain the foreign ministry for decades, in spite of winning only 5 per cent of the vote. Look at Israel, and the disproportionate influence of the minority religious parties.
All these are grave defects, but there is one final and overwhelming reason why Britain should not and will not adopt PR – that it always tends to erode the sovereign right of the people to kick the b––––––s out. Look at Belgium or Italy and see the disaster of coalition governments, endlessly forced to appease their constituent parts, chronically unable to take the decisions necessary for the country.
Freedland knows this first-hand. The only time I have met him was on a trip to Israel during the last Israeli election, when he explained to me and other students – in crystal clear terms – why Avigdor Lieberman, a Russian Right-wing nut (and former nightclub bouncer), was about to be made the Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs despite his extreme party, Yisrael Beiteinu, only receiving about 11 per cent of the popular vote. PR – and a weak coalition government – was to blame.
Freedland continues: “If Cameron wins, he will not only thwart any move to fairer voting, he will act fast to rig the system in his favour. Even neutrals agree that his plan to cut the number of MPs by 10% – presented as a mere cost-cutting measure – will be one of the grossest acts of gerrymandering in British political history.”
The above link – to an Independent story – was a curious one to include. The so-called “neutrals” are David Blunkett, some unnamed “Labour officials”, and – finally – there is some research from the University of Plymouth which concludes: “The geography of each party’s support base is much more important, so changes in the redistribution procedure are unlikely to have a substantial impact and remove the significant disadvantage currently suffered by the Conservative Party.” Right, so that supports Freedland’s argument, does it?
Thirdly, he calls for “reform of our absurd, unelected second chamber” which, he writes, “will be postponed indefinitely, enabling Cameron to pack the Lords with his mates and sugar daddies, including perhaps a few more of those businessmen who so obligingly sided with the Conservatives in condemning Labour’s plans for national insurance.”
Why not acknowledge the fact that the Conservatives have themselves pledged to reform the House of Lords? Here’s the key quote from their manifesto:
We will work to build a consensus for a mainly-elected second chamber to replace the current House of Lords, recognising that an efficient and effective second chamber should play an important role in our democracy and requires both legitimacy and public confidence.
Freedland laments the Tory plans for the economy, saying, “I warn you that the economy could slide back into despair… A sudden shut-off of the public spending tap could well send a frail recovery staggering back into recession: the dreaded double-dip. It’s happened elsewhere and could happen here.”
But, as I blogged earlier, the argument that swift debt reduction could endanger the British economy is wearing thin, as Greece’s debt crisis shows worrying signs of impacting Europe as a whole. As one influential financial journlist (who until 48 hours ago was planning to vote Lib Dem) put it to me: “There is only one way for the UK to avoid a Greek-style crisis, and that is to reduce the country’s deficit as quickly as possible. The Tories’ economic plans have been vindicated.” The Economist and the Financial Times – both of which have backed a Conservative government – seem to agree.
Freedland is suspicious of Cameron’s wicked, wicked plan to ringfence NHS spending and of the Tories proposed inheritance tax cut, which is unlikely to happen soon. He is also anxious that single mothers and widows will receive £3 a week less than married women, because the Conservatives believe that the tax system should promote the family.
Finally, Freedland wishes he had time “to make a positive case for Labour, echoing its promises on a living wage and a cap on predatory chargecard interest rates or its plans for green jobs.”
But the truth is that – after 13 years in power – there really is no positive case for Labour. Tomorrow, the electorate will show they know it.
Been reading a few hand-wringing blogposts around and about reinforcing the idea that after that truly appalling rant at the weird, "Citizen UK" rally, Brown had somehow found his voice at the eleventh hour. Of course, it's in the nature of the media that these things become self-reinforcing narratives leading, usually at breakneck speed, to some sort of settled view or consensus, however totally detached from the truth - or reality - it might be. In fact, you could argue that the general election battle is a battle not just for a vote, but to influence that mercurial, flowing media narrative and try to alter, if you like, the course of the discourse - so to speak.
So in one sense - this sense - one could say that Brown sort of succeeded. He has shifted the narrative slightly - maybe - with the BBC on this morning's Today programme being willing accomplices, typically, or even the initiators of this latest little change of tack. But we know that the whole narrative, whichever way it is leaning, is generally nonsense anyway; that the reality is rather different, regardless of whether it influences people's minds or not.
The reality is that Brown, with his back against the wall and his campaign leaders pulling in three different directions, telling their own voters to vote for other parties (David Blackburn was pretty amusing on this in the morning), has decided unsurprisingly to get all atavistic on our butts; to go back to the old irrational, deceitful, Tory-hating, prehistoric Balls-Brown fake dividing line that Mandelson and Darling worked so hard to move away from and onto less toxic, less risky ground. They tried to decontaminate brand Brown. It seems they failed.
But they at least could see the bigger picture that concerns the whole future of Labour. I figure they calculated that if they allowed Brown to lie about phantom Tory cuts/ equally phantom Labour spending, won the election and then proceeded to cut everything in sight having been ordered to by the IMF, they would lose the next election (which would probably come soon afterwards anyway) by a country mile, be truly obliterated this time by a livid electorate, and secure 25 years of Tory government into the bargain without David Cameron even having to break sweat.
So, the upshot is that, despite the direction in which the media narrative is currently veering, apparently and irrelevantly, the fact is that Brown has got it disastrously wrong. He's not only reverted to type (who could have doubted that he wouldn't - that's all he is, after all), but he's actually going to lose the election on the back of it too, so we can skip the brief period of the total turmoil of a Labour government winning on a lie and collapsing within months as the economy tears itself apart and move straight onto the Tories.
All in all, the couple of more rational members of the former Labour cabinet must be tearing their collective hair out (that doesn't include Liam Byrne, naturally) gnashing their teeth and generally wailing a lot. Thanks to Gordon Brown, the whole, elegantly triangulated (and exquisitely dishonest rather than brutally deceitful) Mandelsonian election campaign strategy has now totally imploded and will suck the party down with it.
As I've said before, they only have themselves to blame. They could have removed Brown a long time ago. Hell, they never should have taken the piss out of the electorate by giving the auld wrecker a coronation in the first place. But that's all history now, and so is Labour. The one silver lining is that if there is any justice left in this world, or, indeed, sense left in this country, then even if Labour aren't kicked into third place and kicked into touch for a generation - even if they manage by some miracle to keep Cameron down to a minority government - Brown will be gone.
Even I, ever the optimist who still firmly believes in the clear Tory triumph - if by some horrible, perverted twist of fate I'm wrong, even I would happily settle just for the end of Brown if I can't have anything else. That outcome would be by no means satisfying, or even satisfactory, but it'd be one hell of a relief.
Seems to me that just about all the polls, dodgy or not, are showing that the Conservatives are pulling ahead. But the Angus Reid one (and they're the most trustworthy pollster, we are led to believe by some) today in the Express, should send shockwaves through the Labour party. It is Labour's worst poll since 1918 and, if repeated, would represent the eclipsing of Labour by the Liberals - who knows for how long. The marginals poll, as reported in the Spectator, confirms the trend too: the bells are beginning to toll for Labour.
Generally speaking, therefore, from now on, it is pretty clear that the best Labour can hope for is to limit the damage in this general election as far as possible, and try to come out of it with at least its core vote just about in tact. As for the blame game, I think that's already started with party loyalists not having to look too far for the main culprit. The only problem is that in blaming Brown for an atrocious campaign and for dividing the party, Labour MPs also condemn themselves. It was them that arrogantly installed him unchallenged as leader in the first place, and the electorate knows that.
A strong element in the causes of Labour's dwindling support must be the punishment factor. I can tell you pretty confidently that people I know, for instance, have never forgiven Labour for inflicting Brown on us without even a leadership election for them to have a look at him first. They simply do not believe Labour any more, with good reason, and if not exclusively, then partly, because of this. They feel they've been taken for granted, and made fools of by a party that's completely out of touch.
Hang on, there's someone at the front door and my dog's gone bananas...
Well, now. That was timely. Labour activists delivering yet more leaflets, this time in person. I've got a stack of them now. They must really think this ultra-safe seat's become marginal, and that is truly extraordinary.
My dog. Cairn terriers do not like activists
But, a brief glance at the campaign literature handed to me by the jolly, red rosette wearing man and the drop dead gorgeous Labour woman (maybe they've done some research on me!) tells me that they still just don't get it. Nothing in the pamphlet will change people's minds that they cannot be trusted to tell the truth. Quite the reverse, actually - it just confirms people's suspicions in that it contains, sadly, the same sort of now-familiar Brownite smears about, for instance, the Tories planning to eat pet cats or something (well, abolishing bus passes for OAPs, which is a lie). It's very depressing, desperate stuff and a strong indication to me that they are on the way out in Wales for the first time ever.
My money is therefore still on an earthquake election, with Labour being hammered into third place and, if not Liberal-style oblivion, then a truly shocking reverse. Good news, if you think they deserve it, as I and an awful lot of other people plainly do.
They only have themselves, and Gordon Brown, to blame.
