Top 10 Tory ‘out of touch’ gaffes
Because I love lists, here is my list of top 10 pieces of real documentary evidence that the Tory hierarchy by virtue of their privileged upbringing, are incapable of government which takes account of ‘real people’s’ experiences. The top 10 is limited to Tory parliamentarians or wanabee parliamentarians, as it would have to be a top 100 otherwise.
No. 10 Anthony Steen, soon to be ex-MP for Totnes, on his inordinate expense claims:
‘You know what it’s about? Jealousy. I have got a very, very large house. Some people say it looks like Balmoral. It’s the photographs that make it look like Balmoral, but it’s a merchant’s house from the 19th century.’
A fairly obvious one in for starters, only down at No.10 because he’s not going to be an MP.
Investors complain about insufficient corruption
The couple of times I’ve ventured on to LibCon turf to have a rant about international credit rating agencies, I’ve been told I had no idea what I was on about, what with not working in financial markets, and then that I am a nutjob conspiracy theorist who think the world’s controlled by white cat-stroking evil dudes.
To be fair to the second commenter (Giles), it was very funny and he has since softened his line commendably. He now suggests that, while I may not be a total nutjob, I’m wrong to see what the credit rating agencies have been up to as a systematic abuse of power, rather than occasional rank incompetence.
Since those little contretemps, the US House Committee on Oversight and Government reform has been investigating what the credit rating agencies have been getting up to for the last 70-odd years, and has discovered that for the last thirty five years of those they have been tailoring their credit ratings so as to maximize income from the very people whose financial products they are rating. (backstory here)
That is, they have been acting corruptly.
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Tory support down 5% in 11 minutes
Eleven minutes can be a long time in politics.
The BBC online, 12.54pm today:
The first opinion poll – the daily YouGov tracker for Sky News – since the measures were announced suggested that voters had not taken fright at the plans.
The poll suggests the Conservatives had increased their lead over Labour to 14 points. The survey of about 1,000 people was conducted on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Sky News, 1.05pm today:
The Tories’ lead over Labour has dropped from 13 points to nine on the day David Cameron addresses the party conference.
Yesterday’s ‘Osborne bounce’ appears to be wiped out in today’s Sky News/YouGov daily voting intentions poll which puts the Conservatives on 40%, down three points.
At this rate, Labour’s on for quite a landslide victory
Tories arguing for extra borrowing shock
On the evening of Thursday 24 September, click here and you’ll be able to watch Conservatives arguing hard for additional borrowing.
Sounds unlikely? Well, it’s true.
The venue for this bizarre reversal of Conservative orthodoxy will be the Council Chamber in Preston, where Lancashire’s new Conservative administration will argue for an additional £10million in immediate borrowing to cover additional revenue costs, £9 million of this for ‘highways works’, and a further £39 million over three years to cover a range of capital costs. See press coverage for a quick overview.
A Tory council spending massively beyond its means? A Tory council making future generations hostage to fortune? What’s going on?
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The logic of the ‘left-wing’ BBC
Here’s a BBC reporter on Radio 5 Live (around 47 mins and 30 secs in) quizzing Ian Gray, Scottish Labour Leader, on the political response to Diageo’s decision to a) slash 900 jobs in Kilmarnock and b) turn down flat alternative plans put forward. This is the same Diageo plc which posted £2bn profits on August 27th.
I just wonder, when we face public spending cuts two years from now, whoever wins the election, with what authority do politicians push through those spending cuts when you criticize companies for looking for efficiencies in their operations?
Get that? Remember it well, because it’s a new interviewing tactic thought up by those clever BBC journalists in the wake of Labour’s admission that it’s planning spending cuts as well as the Tories. I’m sure we’ll hear it lots more.
And just marvel at the logic that lies behind it:
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We should focus our anger on Standard & Poor’s
The slightly heady days of the initial financial crisis, when there was a naïve hope around that radical change might somehow come of its own accord, seem a long time ago now. We should still be angry at what’s happened, but what can we actually do? Where can we focus our anger in a way that actually changes things?
Well, here’s one suggestion for where we should focus our anger.
I and others recently picked upon the still startling notion that Standard & Poor’s (S&)P, the biggest international credit rating agency, should have been both instrumental in bringing about the financial crisis, but is now proceeding to throw its weight about, telling us all how we’re going to have slash spending in order to keep the country ‘creditworthy’.
Not content with playing a major part in bringing unemployment and financial pain S&P published, in March 2009, ‘Toward a Global Regulatory Framework for Credit Ratings‘. In what must be the understatement of the year, the report says:
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Is James Purnell using Sen?
Amartya Sen and his capabilities model is all the rage in cabinet, and ex-cabinet. Gordon Brown’s read all about it, Liam Byrne’s been quoting Sen in the Guardian, and now James Purnell’s been using him as the basis for his attempt to portray himself as a leading left thinker, ready to lead Labour and the left out of the electoral wilderness with his new best think-tank mate Jon Cruddas.
So what are we to make of the adoption of a piece of thinking which dates from the 1970s, and set out most famously in Sen’s seminal 1979 Tanner Lecture ‘Equality of What’? Like Stuart at Next Left, I’m not a little worried about how Sen’s being used and abused.
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Developing a new economic common sense
I’ve recently written quite a lot on my own blog about the need to develop a new economic policy narrative, and soon.
I’ve also written about how the now dominant narrative of neoliberalism and money supply control became so dominant; despite the fact that the fundamental assumption of a finite world money supply is flawed, the ‘good housekeeping’ / ‘you cannot spend what you have not got’ narrative has continued to hold sway over public opinion for a generation and more.
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We should boycott the Queen’s party
There’s a load of good initiatives starting life on the LibCon website at the moment, not least Paul Evans’ call for a link between reselection/deselections and the strengthening of local parties, and the Labour activists letter to the NEC. It’s clear the website is becoming quite a political force.
Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, therefore, I’m using LibCon to start a call for a boycott of the Queen’s garden party, if the BNP are invited.
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The left and ‘rural issues’
Rowenna Davis made a very decent stab of calling the Left to address rural issues more seriously, on Libcon recently. However, the example she chose to show how these ‘rural issues’ should be natural matter for Left concern and action is reflective of much of the Left’s basic misunderstanding of rurality and rural campaigning.
Yes, the campaign against pesticides is an important one, and Rowenna is correct to say that it should be a leftist struggle because it is about the abuse of power – the power of agri-business to keep health protective legislation at bay. But the biggest issues for people living in rural areas are not classic ‘rural’ issues, in the sense that they relate to farming and landuse policy.
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