Presumably because it shifts newspapers, truth or accuracy do not currently appear to be key motivational factors in making your newspaper shift large numbers of copies.

They’ve seen the writing on the wall and they’re getting their denunciations in early. The slash-and-burn approach looks like it’s not going to work out very well, and since we all know that the right can never fail (it can only be failed) the problem must be that the current government is left-wing. Exactly the same happened to GWB when the economy tanked on his watch – his most rabid supporters suddenly started denouncing him as some kind of communist. It’s really a very simple heuristic – when things are going well, it’s because the government is right-wing, and when they’re going badly, it’s because they’re crypto-marxists. Actual policy analysis is irrelevant. These fuckers would tell you that sunny weather is caused by tax cuts and rain is caused by public spending if they thought they could get away with it.

I love these columnist. They make me feel like some kind of left wing agitator for just smoking a bit of dope and listening to hip-hop. Also I to be accused of being part love of the liberal intelligentsia just for disagreeing with them, it gives me a break from the reality of my actual low paying job. Long may Old man Heffer, Mad Mel, littlecock and, to a lesser extent, Clarkson continue.

BTW Heffer was my first. By which I mean The first person I actually got generally annoyed by when I read his crappy little page in the Daily Mail. He was my first Troll.

whoops…My bad…that should read ‘I love to be accused of being part’ as opposed to ‘I to be accused of being part love’

There are a group of right-wing commentators who hate Cameron with a degree of apoplexy that is difficult to appreciate without actually reading their stuff. Amongst the most prominent are: Heffer, Hitchens and Phillips – but there are others. You have only to look at some of the comments on Coffee House or ConservativeHome to realise that these writers touch a nerve with some of the rank and file. Heffer genuinely seems to think that Cameron is a closet socialist. This dislike goes back to his election when he displaced Davies to win, and has been exacerbated by his refusal to hold the Lisbon referendum, his failure to win the election, his subsequent coalition with the LibDems rather go into a minority government, their belief that the public sector cuts are not deep enough and that tax cuts should be immediate and large, their hatred of all things EU, their hatred of foreign aid, a dislike of the Libyan adventure, a refusal to go back to grammar schools, the strategic defence review – I could go on. The editor of the Daily Mail dislikes Cameron, and the Telegraph is ambivalent about him. If he makes it to 2015, he will have worked a miracle of party management.

I’m unreasonably proud of the fact that if you google “Simon Heffer wrong”, my blog is the first result. Just above an article to the same effect by some bloke called David Cameron.

They’ve seen the writing on the wall and they’re getting their denunciations in early.

In Heffer’s case, as early as November 2005, before Cameron had even been elected leader.

It’s copy written to suit the paper’s agenda, whoever writes it.

The Daily Mail publishes little that does not meet with the approval of the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre. Hence Fat Dick, Mad Mel and the rest. The Maily Telegraph has effectively become a broadsheet Daily Mail, and the idea that its journalism was trustworthy and reliable, whatever its politics, is long gone.

The Hefferlump is also wont to spray his credibility up the nearest wall, as with his rant against decimal currency, where he demonstrated his mastery of Pounds, Shillings and Pence by getting his pre-decimal sums wrong:

http://zelo.tv/g6wrum

And if you think that Heffer is bad, look at the bearpit of “bloggers” the Telegraph entertains. Ed West, Nile Gardiner, Toby Young and of course Del Boy for starters – makes Norman Tebbit look almost innocuous.

Mad Mel and The Hitch ‘The Hitch’ Hitchens (Don’t read enough of the Telegraph to get back with the Heffinator) actually make me feel really sorry for Cameron and Clegg…are these a Tory false flag tatic. I think we should really know if they are?

Anyone who is despised by most of the vermin cannot be all bad, can he? If it weren’t for the fact that he joined these bastards in the first place, I could feel sorry for Cameron.

This is exactly what I hate about the Tories. To be fair to them, they do this with our consent, so it is our problem, not theirs. What we have to remember is that David Cameron is the acceptable face of the Conservative Party. The Simon Heffers of this World find any part of humanity unacceptably repugnant. They find his outward sign of ‘concern’ for the poor and the sick and his alleged ‘love’ of the NHS to be a total betrayal of ‘Tory’ values.

If you want to see the true face of the Tory Party, look at the bloggs, the columnists and perhaps most importantly, the comments left by their rather odd acolytes.

This is why the Tory plans on anything from climate change to the NHS reforms should be looked with suspicion. The ‘decent’ Tories (yes, there are some) are forced to sell decent concepts to some of the vilest scum in the Country. If you are ‘not sure’ about the direction of the NHS reforms are taking, try and think about this.

Andrew Lansley may, or may not, have the best interests of the NHS at heart, however, the people he has had to sell these reforms to, definitely do not. The NHS is about as far idealistically as you can get from the modern Tory Party’s ideology. Your average Tory would happily see the whole thing crash and burn tomorrow, irrespective of the fallout. They are happy with the reforms because even if they ‘fail’ the Tory gets the bonus that the whole edifice will nosedive a la the mothership in Independence Day. So even if you believe Cameron’s assertion that the NHS is ‘close to his heart’ remember that most of his supporters have no intellectual investment in its survival. In fact, the NHS is the equivalent of the ‘Left’s’ nuclear deterrent, public schooling or even the Royal family!

I am fully aware that for many on the Left (though not me) would love to destroy one of those institutions, even if they lack the guts to admit it; the right are the political cavemen skirting the edge of a mammoth herd dreaming of taking the Alpha male down.

I have heard it said, including here, that we (the Left and Right) want the same things, albeit via different routes. Nothing could be further from the truth. Your average Tory wants to destroy everything that we achieved in the post War settlement and many here have openly denied that the great social investment since 1945 has been even partway responsible for the huge advances in living standards we have seen since then.

[2]

These fuckers would tell you that sunny weather is caused by tax cuts and rain is caused by public spending if they thought they could get away with it.

They do so on Mike Smithson’s site on a daily basis.

Could be he’s priming readers for the melt-down when, as predicted, leftist policies just don’t work.

Come on! These people are deliberatley trying to scare people by labelling which has an effect on the unlearned public. For example the basic health reforms proposed by Obama are decried as socialistic or communist. Sadly many people will be taken in by this. If you tell a lie big enough?

I offer a more frightening scenario – that these columnists actually believe, or at least half-believe, the hilarious nonsense that they write.

@10 Jim

“The NHS is about as far idealistically as you can get from the modern Tory Party’s ideology. Your average Tory would happily see the whole thing crash and burn tomorrow, irrespective of the fallout. They are happy with the reforms because even if they ‘fail’ the Tory gets the bonus that the whole edifice will nosedive a la the mothership in Independence Day.”

“Your average Tory wants to destroy everything that we achieved in the post War settlement”

The Tories’ real aim (with cuts in general as well as the reorganisation of the NHS etc.) is the destruction of what is left of the public sector till we’re left with the Nightwatchman State. Failure is also success, in other words. Cameron’s crew are the quasi-educated face of Sarah Palin.

They weren’t like that in Harold Macmillan’s day. That Woman has a lot to answer for…

Can’t stand Heffer although I have time for Hitchens outside of his column (his books and long articles are genuinely interesting and engaging even if you disagree with them, but the column is a bit too, well, tabloid).

“Cameron’s crew are the quasi-educated face of Sarah Palin.”

But there is a recognisable link between Cameron and Leninist ideology.

As Lenin used to put it: You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.

And when you want to make a really big omelette, which will taste absolutely delicious to Conservative palettes, it is often necessary to break an awful lot of eggs.

With that and the Roman prescription for keeping the proles compliant, we’ve about summed up contemporary Conservative motivation: When the bread gets scarce, increase the circuses.

They are the permanently angry pandering to the prejudices of the permanently angry. Everytime I read one of them I get a mental image of Heffer or Warner with a bright scarlet face, veins bulging out of their necks, saliva dribbling down their chin and ready to explode with rage. They are utterly convinced that they are victims. White, prosperous middle class, 50+ victims of society. The commenters below the story will also be convinced that they are victims. Their victimhood is beyond parody.

Hatred towards all manifestations of contemporary society is the recurring theme. In comparison to the US, most elected UK politicians on the right are at least sane. However, beneath the surface in the base bubbles a lot of craziness and rage just like the US. Heffer strikes a chord because the demographic that he is pandering to thinks just like him. Despite Obama being further to the right than Nixon, they accuse him of being a Marxist. There does seem to be something of a transatlantic crossover amongst the permanently angry.

Actually it’s pretty easy for a Leninist to move further to the left, Lenin was on the right of the party on a lot of issues (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Economic_Policy).

Most of us know that he is a NWO conspirator and since it is the aim of the NWO to create a one world government run by massive corporations, he is obviously going to push that agenda. The idea is to massacre the middle classes economically, this is already happening and set up a credits system of exchange where people receive a fixed number of credits weekly according to their work status and they type of job that they do. A very small elite will control the whole world economy and they will want for nothing. Read 1984, that’s what it’s all about.

When you remember that Heffer has called for Scottish independence and the abolition of the union as a way to get back at Labour, then you realise he is at best an eccentric British Tory. I believe many Conservatives activists think he’s a joke, at least going by conservativehome.
Another puzzle is that in everyday life, I meet moderate, pragmatic people who have voted Tory for a number of reasons, yet the media choses to promote those with such a severe and self-hating position. Theirs is a ressentiment of the right wing, driven by a rage at everything that seems to be coping outside their control. Is this gap a worrying sign of things to come or is it a major weakness? It might just be a coincidence of individual newspaper editors promoting their colleagues, or could it be that cultural conservatives really are overwhelmed and powerless right now, as the neo-liberal society, quite apart from the coalition, isn’t delivering in the way they expected it to? Unable to compromise with actual majorities they retreat into the purity of opposition. A crisis of contemporary conservatism perhaps?

@21

A crisis of contemporary conservatism perhaps?

I think this has to be viewed in context. We should recall that despite appearances, the right, which has confidently dominated the political agenda for three decades, has in recent years suffered a major shock and setback.

Another thing which has barely been touched upon. Is the spectacular implosion of the credibillity of neo-liberal ideology since the crash of 2008. Much of the economic agenda bequeathed by Thatcher and Reagan now lies in ruins.

I don’t think that the right has even begun to face up to this either here or in America and are in a state of rage and denial. See how desperate the Tories are to bin the blame for the economic crisis, which clearly lies with the actions of deregulated banks on the patent nonsense Labour’s ‘overspending’. They do appear, it seems to be incapable of absorbing the idea that the ideology of deregulation etc they have been peddaling for the last 30 years has failed. And in the US the presidency of the most rightwing president in living memory ended in disaster.

Couple this with the advancement of social liberalism over the past few decades, and It’s probably no surprise that the right has gone a little bit crazy!

The Telegraph often puts leaders up to enrage or more accurately , titillate . The court jester in chief is Mary Ridell whose slavish Labour loyalist pieces are at just the right level of intelligent idiocy as to provoke satisfying carnage in the letters page.
Simon Heffer attacks the Conservative Party from the right and, this being the Telegraph, he has to go a very long way right to make that work. Right wing people, find agreeing rather dull and do not require homogeneity of tone.
Here he is articulating a frustration felt by many on the right that the £40 billion of tax rises we suffered remain in place whilst the middle-class welfare state is slashed brutally ( child benefit notably ). The language of conciliation to the left in the media is irritating and there is the suspicion that the people he needs least are those who need the Conservative Party to protect them from the tax and spend statists most. The Southern lower middle-class.
The symbol , of token black boys chucked into Oxford by a toff whilst ordinary aspiration is squashed is a potent one .
Anyway New Labour increased spending by an adjusted 55% and were considered by many on the left as Neo-cons in disguise , the BBC has decided that Blair was really a Conservative and btw when will we have eight years of Simon Heffer as Beeb editor of social affairs. We had Polly Toynbe in that post which was not seen as remarkable by the Pinkun’( BBC)

I wouldn’t give the left-wing press such an easy ride. The Guardian these days is just a propaganda rag for increased state spending amidst lifestyle issues for the well off. Johann Hari, meanwhile, blusters away writing nonsense, and meanwhile Naomi Klein is widely republished even though she is almost literally full of cr*p.

@22

You’re joking, aren’t you? We’ve got the party of Daniel Hannan (he who says the NHS should be abolished) in charge here, and a Republican Congress in charge across the pond who are demanding the shredding of the very last of the post-war safety net along with further corporate tax breaks!

To say there’s a crisis of conservatism and we’re on the rise is to make one’s self sound like Comical Ali…

You’re joking, aren’t you? We’ve got the party of Daniel Hannan (he who says the NHS should be abolished) in charge here, and a Republican Congress in charge across the pond who are demanding the shredding of the very last of the post-war safety net along with further corporate tax breaks!

To say there’s a crisis of conservatism and we’re on the rise is to make one’s self sound like Comical Ali…

Actually the Conservaives did not win the last election and have no popular mandate for their policies. There is a Democratic president in the US. And given that a large chunk of the Republican Party is clearly no longer sane, all opinion polls suggest he will be re-elected.

Secondly, I think the crisis of Conservatism is only beginning to play out. The right on both sides of the Atlantic, seems to have reacted to the failiure of neo-liberalism, by becoming even more stridently neo-liberal. Albert Einstein once said that insanity was trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. This suggests to me a deep strain of denial.

Of course the left, having bought hook line and sinker into neo-liberalism over the last 25 years is implicated in it’s failiure, and has also lost credibillity.

The left has yet to extract itself from the poisonous legacy of Clinton and Blair, and put forward a coherent alternative. But that is another story.

@22: “Is the spectacular implosion of the credibillity of neo-liberal ideology since the crash of 2008. Much of the economic agenda bequeathed by Thatcher and Reagan now lies in ruins.”

I doubt that the time is ripe just yet for burning almost all standard, mainstream uni economics textbooks – especially if the proposed alternative is a return to the central planning models of the erstwhile command economies – or even a return to the commitments of Labour Party’s manifesto for the 1983 general election when Blair was first elected to Parliament.

The main causes of the recent financial crisis have been extensively analysed and identified by now in a huge and growing literature in which this is a good place to start:

Robert Skidelsky: Keynes – The Return of the Master (Allen Lane, 2009)

- see the review by Paul Krugman here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/aug/30/keynes-return-master-robert-skidelsky

Remember that Keynes wanted to retain capitalist market economies but ensure that they would function more efficiently without periods of stagnation with persisting high unemployment. Better constructed and applied regulation of the financial system is a necessary (but probably not sufficient) condition for a repeat of the crisis which, btw, we were warned about. Try this about Hyman Minsky:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_Minsky

And this from Warren Buffett in 2003:

“The rapidly growing trade in derivatives poses a ‘mega-catastrophic risk’ for the economy and most shares are still ‘too expensive’, legendary investor Warren Buffett has warned.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2817995.stm

Financial crisies have been part of human social history for many centuries:

Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff: This Time Is Different – 8oo years of financial crises
http://www.economics.harvard.edu/files/faculty/51_This_Time_Is_Different.pdf

@26

Look at the policies being enacted – seriously. We’re in trouble.

Actually the Conservaives did not win the last election…

They did you know. You can tell because they won the most seats, won the most votes, are the largest party in Parliament and David Cameron is Prime Minister. They were also the only significant party to improve their position at the election. By way of contrast you can tell that Labour lost the election because they got their second lowest share of the vote for, what, 80 years.

Well, this is going to be easy to debunk. The premise being the rightwing press is uniquely stupid or sinister?

Its only a few months ago that Polly Toynbee accused the government of launching a ‘holocaust’ against Britains poor.

Only a few days ago that Michael Meacher’s Left Future website published a photoshopped photo of Osbourne with his throat slashed.

Does Mr. Osler consider these things to be vile hyperbole?
Absolutely he does, but being a Western communist he has a blank cheque to lie and cry crocodile tears. One of the most amusing things about people like Osler is its almost as though the Central Committee has ordered them to be as hypocritical as possible.

‘not even any low circulation Trot rag, come to that – would make space available to the broadly equivalent contention that Ed Miliband is some form of fascist.’

Strange then it took me 15 seconds to find this from an edition of Socialist Worker.

‘Another falsehood is that Hitler was planning to invade Britain. The air battles of 1940 were used to huge effect to win sympathy for Britain in the US.’

Game over, comrade.

@30 yes agreed quite a distasteful picture wasn’t it. Just showing the man Osborne with that smug smirk of his is far more powerful …Had a read of the link that was taken from but nowhere in that trot rag article is Ed Milliband compared to a fascist though. I thought that was the point that Heffer isn’t too keen on Cameron cause he thinks he is too left wing which is quite a shrill hysterical over reaction from a right wing columnist.

Game back on Running-Dog Capitalist Pig?

on his face…that should be…dammit SAY YES TO EDIT!

Bob

Could you point towards any sign that the credit crisis had anything to do with financial derivatives?

thanks

So, Tory … who is calling Ed Miliband a fascist, exactly?

The NHS is about as far idealistically as you can get from the modern Tory Party’s ideology. Your average Tory would happily see the whole thing crash and burn tomorrow, irrespective of the fallout.

Is that really a plausible to think of the millions of Tory voters, most of whom aren’t especially rich and benefit from the NHS? They make up a good chunk of the country after all.

Can’t our opponents be honestly mistaken rather than evil? This attitude has the merits of forcing us to engage with their arguments.

@ 34 alright Dave…this is the link http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=22209 but at no point is Ed called a fascist. Which is why I don’t quite get why he is calling ‘game over’?

Heffer’s dad was a policeman. So Heffer junior was brought up on tax payers money.

Nothing like the self loathing of right wingers.

“They did you know. You can tell because they won the most seats”

So you will have no problem with AV then, if winning the most seats is your definition of winning?

Despite having the most money, the most media support, and against the most un popular Prime Minister since records began, yet they could not win an out right majority.

“I don’t think that the right has even begun to face up to this either here or in America and are in a state of rage and denial. ”

Except that plenty of free marketeers saw the crisis coming and had already developed a critique of the existing “neo-liberal” system. Yet the Left tends to conveniently ignore this.

@39

Yeah, their critique was that there was too much regulation – i.e if the government didn’t interfere and the banks were allowed to do as they wished it never would have happened. Personally, I don’t buy it.

“Yeah, their critique was that there was too much regulation – i.e if the government didn’t interfere and the banks were allowed to do as they wished it never would have happened. ”

Just a few years back, “free market capitalism” and “deregulation cut red tape” were the regular battle cries of the self-avowed “right-wing”.

For years and years, I’ve been posting that efficient markets depend on laws to define property rights and enforcement system to protect those rights. The sensible debate is about what kinds of laws and enforcement systems are most conducive to national prosperity. Plainly, financial services were under-regulated – the profits were privatised while the losses got socialised, that and a lack of transparency over the value of the assets under-pinning financial derivatives were a sure prescription for disaster. In retrospect, we should all be able to appreciate just how daft the battle cries were.

Tom Ash @ 35

Sure most ‘Tory voters’ use the NHS and some of them even accept that they benefit from using it. However, from what I see is that many committed Tory members of the Party or those who often appear to speak on their behalf (via bloggs, comments pages and the like) seem to openly despise the very existence of it. I bet if you injected these people with some kind of ‘truth serum’ and pressed them against a wall they would admit that they wish they could prise the elderly Tories from the NHS and into private health care. I get the distinct impression that for most Right Wing commentators are really pissed of with the crass root’s need for the NHS. It is that ‘respect’ for the NHS that saved it being privatised thirty years ago and no doubt the released cabinet papers in the coming years will show that.

Can’t our opponents be honestly mistaken rather than evil?

Tom, I have to say that you are not the first person to suggest that and this is not the first time I have had to think about this. Here is my stock reply:

We on the Left are sometimes described as ‘bleeding hearts’. We are described (rightly or wrongly) as always giving the benefit of the doubt to people, even when their can be simply no doubt left to give. There is always ‘another last chance’ there is always an excuse or a reason why the last ten times should be ignored.

Well, I ask the question, when do we stop giving the Tories the benefit of the doubt? At what point do we look at their track record and think; ‘well no actually, you are not always mistaken, you actually spout crap because you are evil little scumbags’.

We either believe these people are wrong on every subject because they have the same intellectual capacity as Peter Griffin to the point they keep getting things wrong because they always misread or misinterpret the data. Or the alternative is they keep getting it wrong because they always ignore the evidence and just fit the data around their prejudices.

Ask yourself this: Why is it that EVERYTHING that is wrong with society is the fault of the poor, the sick, the unemployed, the employed in low wage jobs, the public sector. Why is it that EVERY solution is cut the money the poor get, cut the public sector, cut benefits, and destroy a public service? Why is it that everything they believe is just a rehash of their prejudices, no matter what the problem is, the solution is always make the poor worse of and make the rich better off? Why is it that everything the say is about keeping the poor poor or making them poorer? That is not ‘being mistaken’ that is nasty scum putting the boot in.

Why is it that the Tories en masse, have managed to get Global Warming so wrong? Surely, the law of averages and all things being equal, you would expect them to spilt fifty/fifty on this? If this was just about them getting things wrong, then surely on a simple yes or no we would expect around half to choose the right answer? No, the reason they all (with a few exceptions, admittedly) got it wrong is because they are too greedy to get the answer right. Given that the science all points one way and that happens to point the opposite way to their political ideology, then they would happily ignore the science.

What kind of person would ignore the science on such a pivotal issue? What kind of person would happily see millions of people suffer, just to ensure that their greed went unchecked? Would you say these people were ‘decent but misguided’? Would you ‘give them the benefit of the doubt? What doubt? Where is the wiggle room here?

Let us imagine that we on the Left of politics, believed in something and the laws of physics said something else. Let us further imagine that a scientific Conesus built up on the subject. Would we cling onto our ideology and ignore the science?

Come to think on it, could you even imagine an ideological position the Left would take that would even contradict the given science?

Demonstrably right-wing? Would you care to demonstrate precisely how they are ‘demonstrably right-wing’?

I wouldn’t call any Government that launches sustained attacks on our few remaining institutions of any meaning (see: Universities, notably Oxford) or launches unwinnable, ideologically muddled and dangerous left-wing wars, or increases public spending (which the Government is set to do) a ‘right-wing’ Government.

It is well known that Mr Cameron is anything but right-wing. In fact, the fellow has said all things to all men out of desperation to hold office at the expense of any obvious political allegiance to anything. Other than his desperately ridiculous ‘Big Society’ dogma.

To the left, paranoia is anything that disgrees with them just as to the femiist, anyone who disagrees must hate all women.