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ConHome continues policy of ‘exposing’ lefties

ConservativeHome editor Tim Montgomerie’s post today on the blog’s redleft-watch shows how little modern Tories are willing to tolerate public figures that display even slightly opinions they disapprove of.

Yesterday Mr Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, criticised Chris Grayling’s suggestion that householders may need more rights to protect themselves from intruders.

Montgomerie was not happy. He says:

It is not the first time Mr Starmer has distanced himself from Tory policy. He has also defended the Human Rights Act against Tory plans to replace it.

The cheek of the man! How dare he defend the HRA!?

Mr Starmer has a history of left-wing activism. As a student he edited a publication called Socialist Alternatives.

Uh oh, who’s been a naughty boy then?

Judicial activism worries conservatives and Starmer was seen to have taken an activist stance last year when he adopted new guidelines that appeared to accommodate assisted suicide.

Oh no! Lawyers interpreting the law in a different way to how politicians want them to. Whatever next?

New Labour was always against ‘judicial activism’ too. To no no surprise modern Conservatives are trying to follow that vein of constantly trying to undermine the judiciary too.

When The Guardian profiled him after his appointment in August 2008 he was reported as a “Labour supporter”. Mr Starmer is another example of Labour’s dominance of “appointment-land”; a dominance that will continue even if the Labour party loses its Commons majority next year.

In other words: there’s going to be a whole host of people out there who won’t fall for Tory policy once in power. We must expose them instantly! And possibly find ways to drive them out?

As SohoPolitico says on Twitter:

Is it just me, or is @TimMontgomerie ‘s new ‘Reds Under the Bed’ project ‘LeftWatch’ getting increasingly sinister?

Blaming China for our failures in Copenhagen

contribution by Madam Miaow

This letter was written in response to Mark Lynas in the Guardian blaming China for Copenhagen

Dear Mark,

So the cold war is alive and well.

Western spin is really pulling out all the stops, perhaps because we are onto you as the various blogs and forums show.

If anything, China got strong-armed into signing a weak deal at Copenhagen when it should have held out as Bolivia, Venezuela, Cuba and others have said.

The US and the rich nations use up almost all the carbon allowance in the atmosphere over the past 160 years, the US dithers over ten years of Bush, they refuse to ratify Kyoto, the Danish summit chair has to resign when she’s caught fast-tracking the rich nations’ deal, the West fail in their Kyoto pledges, Canada rips up its Kyoto deal and proceeds with exploiting its huge reserves of dirty oil, the US will only reduce emissions by 4% against the 1990 base year and not the 17% you describe as “serious cuts”, while China makes real strides in green technology, and so on.

But it is all China’s fault.
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Daily Mail writer hails Brit execution in China

Leo McKinstry in the Daily Mail gnashes his teeth at liberals:

His case has prompted outrage in this country from politicians and from the trendy metropolitan elite, for whom drug use is a fashionable habit rather than serious criminal offence. Yet for all this orchestrated wailing, is it not possible that China is right to put Shaikh to death?

Indeed, I would argue that Britain’s enfeebled, self-destructive approach to narcotics has been graphically highlighted by China’s ruthlessness in tackling drug pushers. In contrast to New Labour’s policy of appeasement and surrender, the Chinese Government acts vigorously to defend its people from the misery caused by the drugs trade.
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In China, the death penalty can be invoked against anyone carrying more than 50g of drugs – and that is one obvious reason why China, proportionally, has nothing like the drugs problem that we have in Britain.

Actually, the evidence points to nothing of the sort: China Says Drug War is Failing / Chinese Junk.

There is currently a campaign on Twitter to ‘polljack’ the Daily Mail poll on that page. Over 60% of readers said they though the execution of Akmal Shaikh was wrong.

After Abdulmutallab: the media outcry

Odds are that the 278 passengers on board the Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day represented a reasonably random demographic.

I’m guessing entirely, of course, but it also seems reasonable to assume that there will also have been quite a few Muslims on the plane. Statistically speaking, the numbers involved even make it quite likely that those travelling on the Airbus A330 included one or two of the kind of people who habitually resort to such formulas as ‘refusal to condemn’ when discussing terrorism that they would classify as anti-imperialist.

There is an old joke that runs ‘just because you are paranoid, it doesn’t mean the bastards aren’t out to get you’. Unfortunately, the same consideration now applies to sane, rational, left of centre civil libertarians.

However morally outraged us lot get when the US blitzes an Afghan wedding party to Kingdom Come, it’s a fair bet that Osama bin Laden and his mates do not reciprocate our sincere Guardianista indignation when their team clocks up a home run.
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Polls suggest Lucas will become first Green MP

Greens take a 10 point lead over Labour and an 8 point lead over the Conservatives in their target constituency of Brighton Pavilion according to the latest ICM Research telephone opinion poll.

Headline results
1. The Greens have the greatest support with 35% of the constituency’s voters followed by the Conservatives on 27%, Labour on 25% and LibDems on 11%.1

2. Almost two thirds (63%) of Labour and Lib Dem voters in the sample said that they would be likely to switch their vote to the Greens if that party was best placed to stop a Conservative win.

37% said they were very likely and 26% said they were quite likely to switch their vote in that situation.

…more by Derek Wall at Another Green World

It is the first publicly released standard-size constituency opinion poll of local voters.

Also: See press release by Green Party

Labour’s need for a Class War strategy explained

Various people have waded into our discussion of electoral strategy in the upcoming election, namely that I think New Labour should fight a ‘class war’, without understanding what I’m getting at.

So I’ll restate some points, rebut criticisms and start by simply saying that if newspapers like the Telegraph are trying to kill it then the strategy must have some merit.

I also think it exposes some generational differences within the Labour party.

What is Class War?
Class War takes place in the papers of the right-wing media every time New Labour raises taxes on the rich even slightly or has the temerity to mention any vaguely economically left-wing policy. New Labour has bent over backwards to shake-off old skool connotations of being in thrall of trade unions, and so it runs away as soon as the spectre of ‘class war’ is raised in the media. Actual policies have been very thin on the ground.

In the current news cycle ‘class war’ nominally took off when Alastair Darling decided to marginally tax bankers’ bonuses. Since then the right-wing media have tried their best to play up supposed differences among ministers on the ‘class war strategy’. The Indy jumped on the bandwagon by bringing in the fox hunting angle.
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Revealed: Cameron meets NHS ‘advisors’ who want to completely undermine it

David Cameron spent some time in a House of Commons private office with Nurses for Reform earlier this month seeking inspiration to remodel the National Health Service.

We are told he wanted to discuss NFR’s ideas on the future of health policy and have them present a range of ideas.

We already know what Daniel Hannan thinks of the ’60 year mistake’ but what does Cameron think? He would have us believe he ‘loves the NHS’ and it is ‘safe in his hands’ and surely consulting nurses proves this? However it’s worth examing the people associated with Nurses for Reform, which is:

growing pan-European network of nurses dedicated to consumer-led reform of British, European and other healthcare systems around the world.

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Tory PPC fakes people, in leaflet about honesty!

A Tory parliamentary candidate has been caught using a member of staff to pose as a constituent – in an election leaflet calling for honesty.

The newsletter – titled ‘Honesty on the Economy’ – features prospective MP Jacob Rees-Mogg talking with a blonde woman on the streets of the Wansdyke constituency, in North-East Somerset. The caption, also used on the North East Somerset Conservatives’ website, simply refers to ‘Jacob talking to a lady in Midsomer Norton’.

However she is in fact Fiona Tyrrell, an employee from Rees-Mogg’s London-based investment firm, Somerset Capital Management LLP.
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In March he was forced to apologise after plagiarising an editorial from a national newspaper for an election leaflet. And in May he was caught using staff to write an attack on Gordon Brown which he claimed to be his own words.

… more at the Daily Mail

Dictatorship of the Brummies?

We are desensitised to the idea of being ruled by Eton and Oxbridge elites. But would it be the same if Britain was like this instead?

There’s been some debate recently over the fact that the Mayor of London, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Prime Minister all went to Bournville School, Birmingham and that almost the entire Cabinet did their university studies in Birmingham too.

When we turned the question to the public, we registered overwhelming resentment. The idea of being ruled by an unrepresentative lot, both geographically, socially and culturally doesn’t seem to be perceived as either popular or fair.

“It’s absurd that all our leading figures went to the same school and had exactly the same background. They’re all from the same Birmingham school. And how bad is it that we have an actual Mayor of London who grew up in a Birmingham council estate? It doesn’t make sense!”, told us Ariel Painin-Diaz from South Kensington.
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How will this terrorist attempt affect liberties?

The attempted terrorist attack by Nigerian national Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on Christmas Eve presents some major policy headaches for President Obama just when he was beginning to grapple with them.

It’s a given that airport security will tighten further to near-ridiculous levels, even though some number-crunching by blogger Nate Silver shows that a person could board 20 flights a year and still have less chance of being caught in a terrorist attack than being hit lightning.

The attempted airborne attack will instead impact other issues too. For a start it will raise complications again about trialling terrorists in civil courts rather than military courts. President Obama attracted a storm of criticism from the right when his Attorney General announced that one of the architects of the 9/11 attacks – Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – will face a civil jury in New York.

That issue is likely to come to the forefront as the trial begins. But Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s capture will also raise questions on whether he should be charged in a civil court or by a military commission as KSM initially was.
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