Recent Articles

Legislation, legislation, legislation

Quaequam Blog! – The justice department wants us to all close our eyes and tap our ruby red shoes together chanting “There’s no legislation like child abuse legislation.” Eventually we may actually see some evidence to back it up too…maybe.
Obsolete – Scepticisle delves in to the impact Mary Whitehouse has had on our governance in lieu of the BBC show “Filth.” It also turns out Melanie Phillips is a hypocritical idiot, so no shocks there.
The blog of Dave Cole – Dave revisits one of the more interesting debates on LC and talks in depth about abortion and the “viability” argument.
Between the Hammer and the Anvil – Smoking being the new paedophilia is perhaps a little over-dramatic (as Devil’s Kitchen laments), but the liberties being ignored in the quest for perfect health are too many in number
Neil Stockley – Neil takes a superb look at the politics of ridicule, and also compares the Lib Dems to Barack Obama. I wonder who should be more flattered?
Peter Black AM – This story is already getting all over the blogosphere, so it deserves a mention…Labour to be broke by Christmas?
Moments of Clarity – In a rare instance of a debate on LC being taken outside of this site, Darrell attacks the “no platform policy” idea
Casting Back: The Guardian (2001) – John Crace’s article, in hindsight, showing naivety over the integrity of electoral systems

Exposed: Boris’s key adviser’s links with extreme group!

Just joking!

I’m out of town at the moment, visiting my mum, hence the recent paucity of posts. My time in the tiny internet shop I presently share with three Warcraft junkies and their loud crunchy sweets is mercifully short.

But I’ve had a quick read of this Evening Standard piece pointing out the misalignment between Mayor Johnson’s Tube booze ban and those of the Manifesto Club, which his culture director Munira Mirza was a found member of.

Imagine if she had been Ken Livingstone’s adviser.

Far from being a mere news story this information would have been seized on by a member of the Standard’s Get-Ken squad – especially the “lefties” among them – and inflated into a massive, oversold expose of a “key associate” having “links” with a “front organisation” for a “secretive libertarian cult” with roots in the far-Left Revolutionary Communist Party which supported Serb extremists during the Balkan wars and whose, erm, “shadowy leaders” have a 40 year history of assuming false identities and engaging in subversive political activities in an attempt to undermine the British state.

In fact, it would all be true, but not really terribly important – which is, ironically, what the Manifesto Club clique is so terrifically anxious to be.

Netcast update

Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that I have recruited additional writers to help me with the daily web review.

I have personally compiled the daily web review since Liberal Conspiracy was launched last year. I’ve very much enjoyed it, but I’m also keen to bring a fresh perspective to the review, and I’m sure that the bloggers I have assembled will do just that. You’ll probably know them from their contributions to the comments, but I’d like to introduce them nevertheless ::
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It’s the turbofolk, stupid

Welcome to our daily web review. Feel free to share your recommendations in the comments.

Splintered Sunrise – Voting in Eurovision isn’t just political. When was the last time Croatia and Serbia cooperated on anything but turbofolk?
Stumbling and Mumbling – Single parent children miss fathers’ money, not fathers themselves. It’s the (household) economy, stupid?
Daily Kos – Do you know what? Bush isn’t running for President. Really. Ask the White House…
Johann Hari – Mary Whitehouse was a paranoid fundamentalist. Surely the BBC at least would accept that, given how much trouble she caused them…
Lynne Featherstone – Is it time for name-blind employment?
Heleen Mees and Femke van Zeijl – The recent discovery of child abuse by UN Peacekeepers in the Ivory Coast comes as little surprise. Women and children always suffer in war.
Socialist Unity – Both the road lobby and the government have the wrong approach to road taxes. We need a more innovative approach.

Cruddas: Our language is bad

“In my view, those who are calling for a snap change of leader are as wrong as those who insist we can carry on with more of the same policy agenda,” says Jon Cruddas in the Independent.

MPs won’t give way on 42 days

Gordon Brown faces yet more pressure as rebel Labour MPs warned they will not give ground in their battle to prevent an extension of anti-terror laws. Next month’s Commons debates on the Counter Terrorism Bill will be a severe test of the Prime Minister’s embattled leadership, says the Independent.

Telegraph gives the fascists a platform

via Jim Jay, it looks like the Telegraph website is hosting a blog by BNP London councillor Richard Barnbrook.

So far Barnbrook has written three posts, including Lily Allen and the BNP, and Blame the Immigrants. Fits right in with Telegraph editorial policy then.

Jim Jay points out:

Among other exciting proposals ubergrupen fuhrer Barnbrook has for us in his “Blame the immigrants piece” include;

- The police should disobey the government and pursue their own sort-of-legal agenda. He adds “A free society is one where the police can do their job the way they want to do it.” Although most of us would call that a police state rather than “free societies”, but the haircut knows best.

- You know there never was any violent crime until we started letting in darkies and their communist friends. “Most of it [knife and gun crime] is being done by immigrants or by the sons of immigrants who have been protected by a despicable government desperate for the Ethnic Block-Vote.”

- But what is to be done with our streets over run with all these “ethnics”? In order to clean up the streets send in the army. Yes. The army. I’m not joking, that’s what our man in the Eagle’s Nest is proposing. To get rid of guns on the streets we’ll fill the streets with… oh hold on.

- If the commies oppose this sensible measure? Well the “human rights lawyers can scream all they want.” Presumably in a basement somewhere, whilst Brownshirts tear out their fingernails.

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Bag carriers against Gordon Brown

All journalists hate slow news days, and bank holiday Mondays are often the slowest news days of the lot. Let’s be charitable and assume that this is why the Guardian led its politics coverage this morning with a potboiler of the worst order from Nicholas Watt.

It seems that an obscure New Labour speechwriter – hyped up as ‘a key ally of Tony Blair’, in a failed attempt to sex up the copy – has attacked Gordon Brown in a most unoriginal manner in a small circulation pointy-head magazine.
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Mayor of Simpleton: the family breakdown myth

A quick visit to the UK’s premium source of spittle-flecked ranting wingnuttery, other than that offered by Mad Nad that is, Melanie Phillips’ blog at the Spectator’s Coffeehouse site, yields this fine example of the Fifth Horsewoman of the Leftist Apocalypse in full flow:

Absolutely untrue. All these problems, experienced disproportionately by those at the bottom of the heap, were foisted upon them by the overclass of which India Knight is a member. It was the champagne socialist intelligentsia which destroyed the traditional family, demonised men, incentivised mass fatherlessness and declared never-married motherhood an inalienable human right, emptied education of content and cut off the escape routes out of disadvantage by withering the grammar schools, declared morality to be a dirty word, paralysed the police through political correctness, enslaved the poor through dependency on the state and then finally destroyed their brains by telling them to eat cannabis cake while themselves showing the way by snorting cocaine on the Square Mile or in recording studios, or getting legless on Crackdaddy cocktails at Boujis nightclub.

Culture is transmitted top-down, not bottom up. It is the supercilious overclass, with its self-obsessed nihilism and the money to get itself out of trouble, which is responsible for our social degradation and collapse — and it is odious in the extreme to blame those whose lives and prospects it has so irresponsibly and irrevocably destroyed.

Phew! Do you think she managed to come up for breath while she was kicking that out?
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Zimbabwe, abortion, and the Olympics

Welcome to our daily web review. Feel free to share your recommendations in the comments. Today’s review was compiled and written by Douglas Johnson, who blogs over at Scribo Ergo Sum.

This is Zimbabwe – It’s not just Zimbabweans who are watching the elections anxiously. Ethiopians too…
Tory Troll – The BNP exploits discontent with falsity and outright lies to push a racist agenda. Again. Why am I not surprised?
Obsolete – Tory proposals for unemployed youth show they’re still the Nast(ier) Party. Howard would be proud.
Huffington Post – McCain holds typical Republican attitudes towards abortion, contrary to his moderate image. Pro-choicers will have to (gosh!) vote Democrat, it seems…
Shashi Tharoor In an emerging pattern, McCain’s “League of Democracies,” proposals would undermine the United Nations. Just like the rest of his foreign policy, then…
The Economist – hosts a debate on whether Beijing should ever have been given the Olympics. Loathsome as the publication is, it could be quite interesting.
Pickled Politics – Blogging will change politics. The abortion debate was a turning point for the left.