Tory class warriors: shameless and clueless
As mentioned earlier by Paul, the class warriors over at Conservative Home have got a new website called mylabourposter, which has pictures of people such as immigrants, burglars, foreigners, the BBC etc., and the caption ‘I’ve not voted Labour before, but‘ and then reasons why these people like Labour.
One of the posters is Frank Gallagher from Shameless, saying “I’ve never voted Labour before, but I can see the benefits”.
One nice thing about these posters is that some of them have an explanation beneath them to explain the joke to anyone who finds the humour a bit too subtle.
For the benefits one, their “fact” is “Labour’s over-complex welfare system means there has been more benefit fraud and less incentive to work”.
Really?
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The Spectator’s Brown Shirt Poster Gaffe
It’s not just Conservative Central Office who’re having a few graphic design problems at the moment.
This is the actual poster that The Spectator are using to promote an upcoming education conference called ‘The Schools Revolution’ at which the Tories Education spokesman, Michael Gove, is the headline act:
Does it remind you of anything? Like, say, this…?
Or perhaps this…?
Maybe this makes things a bit more explicit…?
Memo to the Spectator’s design department… not the best choice of colour scheme there guys, D’oh!
The tale of Robin Hood, re-visited
This is the first in an occasional series, in which traditional English tales are retold by Tories. Today, the tale of Robin Hood:
“Back in the Middle Ages, there were a heroic group of sturdy Englishmen called the Barons. The Barons were responsible for making sure that the lazy peasants were kept in order and did their work.
This was tremendously hard work as even though there was no welfare state to create a dependency culture amongst the poor.
the Barons always needed to make sure that the common folk grew enough crops and produced enough wealth to allow the Royal Family to hold banquets, go on crusades and perform other such duties.
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I’m not making this up, honest
“Steve Hilton, though, remains the third most important man in the party behind Cameron and Osborne…Those who are close to him are phenomenally loyal, praising him as invigorating and inspirational.
“But his ideas are often so concentrated that they need to be diluted.
“For a while, Hilton argued that Cameron’s first Queen’s Speech should contain no bills, to show that the Tories did not think legislation was the answer to the country’s problems.”
I’m not making this up.
What exactly is Conservative economic policy?
I’m simply not clear on Conservative economic policy in relation to government debt.
Why is Cameron saying to business leaders one day that there is no need for big cuts in the first year of a Conservative government, while on the very same day one of his top MPs is going on about the ‘need to get to grips with public finances now’?
Why is there a commitment to an emergency budget if there are aren’t going to be any significant cuts?
Would such a budget simply be about reducing corporation tax and therefore increasing the deficit?
Well, there is a track record for such economic stupidity by the Tories.
Under Thatcher, cyclical borrowing costs caused by the Tory response to recession – itself largely driven by fear of how the markets might respond – continued to ensure that the structural budget deficit continued at more or less the same level for a further four years beyond the actual recession (graphs at page 7 of this IFS report).
And the Tories are trying to instill economic confidence with international investors? Gawd help us.
How not to kill a good story
contribution by David Hencke
An extraordinary attempt was made just before Christmas to kill off a story of mine to spare the blushes of a rather hapless Liberal Democrat Parliamentary candidate caught out for living a dual life in cyberspace.
Greg Stone is now toast and has had to stand down as Liberal Democrat candidate for Newcastle-upon Tyne East and Wallsend as a result but the shennaghins surrounding the attempt to make sure this did not get into print is worth recalling.
Guido Fawkes tried to come to the rescue of Greg Stone aka Inamicus by using one of the oldest tricks of ye olde print media -a spoiler before the tale could be published by a rival.
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Campaign to stop Rod Liddle; we need your help
Comrades, the campaign to stop Rod Liddle from taking over as editor of the Indy is in full swing. There’s a group of us working on a few ideas but here are two to start with.
First, we’re planning to print a dummy copy of the Indy with articles written and headlined as if they were edited / written by Rod Liddle himself.
These will then be distributed outside the Independent’s offices. To help, simply email me with a short or longer article parodying Liddle by the middle of next week please!
Secondly, an email campaign directed at Alexander Lebdev himself is also planned. From my sources he is persuadable on this and if he sees enough of a backlash from readers he would seriously consider rejecting the Rod Liddle as editor. For Liddle’s greatest hits see this post.
The Facebook group against Liddle is now nearing 4,000.
Its founder yesterday sent this out:
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Daily Mail hypocrisy in slamming Swine Flu ’scare machine’
Six months ago Britain’s tabloids were tolling the bell of a looming Armageddon.
The Daily Mail headlines ranged from IS SWINE FLU ALREADY HERE?; and SWINE FLU: IT’S GETTING SERIOUS, to SWINE FLU NOW THE BATTLE TO CONTAIN IT, and KILLER FLU IS HERE.
And that’s without counting the paper’s first page warnings that “65,000 could die [and] one in three could get infected”, printed in the 7 July 2009 edition.
So you will excuse us if we laughed out loud this morning when the same paper published what is already on course as the most ridiculous article of 2010, a faux-outraged piece by Christopher Booker that states: After this awful fiasco over swine flu, we should never believe the State scare machine again!
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All the full lol-plot pics (32!), with new ‘Mandelkitteh’
Thanks to all of you who made these pics and sent them in (or tweeted them). I think this joke has run its course now, although ‘Mandelkitteh’ seems to have become a favourite for most of you.
Now doubt we’ll be seeing more of him in the future.
In the meantime here is the full collection. If you create any more please just link them from the comments section.
(made by Political Scrapbook)
LIVE! Pictures from the Labour plot! (updated)
Please send in your own pics as well! You can make them from here.
(Now with 18 pics!)
(made by @lukewaterfield)
The Tory confusion over NHS laid bare
Here’s some text from the Conservative NHS manifesto
British patients should be among the first in the world to use effective treatments, but under Labour they are among the last. The current system lets Ministers off the hook by blaming decisions on unaccountable bureaucrats in NICE, the agency which approves drugs for the NHS.
That’s right, damn those ‘unaccountable bureaucrats’ at NICE! The Tories will ensure that accountable ministers will instead make decisions so you can punish them if necessary.
Quite uncharitably, Alex Massie at the Spectator says to that: “The best one can say about this is that it’s total gibberish.” Doh!
But let’s assume we want these decisions to be more accountable. A good idea in theory right? But what’s this?
With less political interference in the NHS, we will turn the Department of Health into a Department of Public Health so that the prevention of illness gets the attention from government it needs.
Less political interference? But I thought that was more ‘accountable’ surely?
Can we file this under the Steve Hilton award for ‘Progressive Gobbledegook’?
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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The Daily Express guide to cutting taxes
It is, without doubt, the shock headline of the week.
BENEFITS COST FAMILIES £20 A WEEK
MINISTERS faced fury last night after it was revealed Labour’s welfare benefits bonanza costs the average working household almost £1,000 a year or £20 a week.
The soaring bill to fund Britain’s army of jobless has cost the country more than £28billion for every year under Labour.
This was in the Daily Express, so it must be true and £20 a week –
- fuck me, that’s the price of a meal for a hardworking family of four at the Pizza Hut lunchtime buffet.
So naturally we had to find out just exactly who these thieving bastards are and what’s makes them think they can get away with taking the pizza bread out of the mouths of Britain’s decent hardworking families.
Oh, if only Diana -peace be upon her… oh shit, that’s what the Muslims say, isn’t it? Fuck!!! – were still alive, these bastards wouldn’t stand a chance of getting away with it. continue reading… »
Understanding right-wing mentality
There’s an excellent article here by Julian Sanchez on the subject of right-wing ‘ressentiment’. He says:
The secret shame of the conservative base is that they’ve internalized the enemy’s secular cosmopolitan value set and status hierarchy—hence this obsession with the idea that somewhere, someone who went to Harvard might be snickering at them.
The pretext for converting this status grievance into a political one is the line that the real issue is the myopic policy bred by all this condescension and arrogance—but the policy problems often feel distinctly secondary.
This brings to mind several issues taken up so robustly by right-whingers, in particular climate change, because lefties champion them.
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Here’s how we regulate bankers
Know much about credit default swaps, do you? How about the Libor curve, how’s that playing out these days? I hear good things about those interest rate options. Maybe I should get me some of those.
Banking, frankly, is hard. We might like to think it’s just a bunch of suited monkeys pushing papers at each other. But a lot of it’s really, you know, complicated and stuff. These are bright guys. The rest of us (”taxpayers”, lets call us) can’t even begin to understand what they do. Hector Sants says as much. And he should know. He’s the chair of the Financial Services Authority.
Let’s be honest – the only people who have a hope of really understanding banking are the bankers. If we don’t want the events of the last two years to ever happen again, they’re the ones who are going to have to change things. After all, if we can’t do it, and the government can’t do it, the only answer is self-regulation.
They’ve shown scant interest in changing anything so far, of course. Indeed, if the crisis has taught them anything it’s that they can wreck the economy, take our money, plunge us into the deepest recession in 70 years, and still pay themselves enormous bonuses at the end of it. So – how do we get them to exercise some self control?
Here’s my suggestion. We give them whatever they want.
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Dave still doesn’t know what he’s doing
Why isn’t Dave a banker? The Times reports his City in my blood pride at his banking heritage:
David Cameron attempted the balancing act yesterday of wooing the world’s most powerful bankers while assuring Middle England that he would not give that most hated profession too easy a time.Speaking to a gathering of top financiers, the Conservative leader told them: “My father was a stockbroker, my grandfather was a stockbroker, my great-grandfather was a stockbroker.” The City, he assured them, was in his blood. Those present, who included Bob Diamond, president of Barclays, and Richard Gnodde, the co-chief executive of Goldman Sachs in London, purred their approval.
The Times report suggests it was an exercise in characteristic Cameron ambiguity, and not one which did much to answer the same newspaper’s challenge yesterday – “David Cameron has yet to answer a basic question: what does he stand for?”
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Class war quiz
By Andrew R
Looks like the battlelines are being drawn. If you’re not sure which side of the barricades you belong on, a short fill-in-the-blanks quiz based on the latest Mel Philips piece should help you decide. Simply replace the blank with one of the following: A – Working; B – Upper; C – Middle:
It is the ________ class whose children are discriminated against by the rigging of university admissions against candidates from high-achieving schools.
It is _______-class aspirations for their children which have been attacked by the war of attrition waged against grammar and independent schools.
It is the _______ class whose ethic of professionalism – whether in medicine, education, the law or other disciplines – has been under sustained attack by government interference in order to snuff out the independence of mind and spirit which is one of the principal sources of ________-class robustness.
How you scored:
Mostly As – don’t take the piss.
Mostly Bs – well done, comrade. You gut the last banker, I’ll hang the last Master of Fox Hounds.
Mostly Cs – Bad luck. If you can’t already smoke a cigarette blindfold, I’d start getting some practice in.
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I am an unlikely class warrior
Here’s what I don’t get.
When I talk to serious people in badly cut suits, they are unanimous in their opinions. “Oooh, the deficit is troubling”. They say, grimacing in fiscal sympathy. “It’s all very serious” they add, stroking their chins in deficit based peturbation. “Sacrifices must be made” all concur, gazing steely eyed towards a future of budget balances and restraint.
You know what? I agree with them.
I sit alongside, in my own badly cut suit, grimacing and chin stroking and gazing sternly at the dissolute world with the best of them. I nod along solemnly when, to quote Benedict Brogan, we hear the regular call for a “politics, not of them and us, but of “we” “.
But I have to respond, “Who exactly is this “we”?”
Because when it comes to asking people who have done very well out of prosperity and asset growth to contribute towards last and this years current economic rescue operation, I’m all for it. Go right ahead, I say.
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Burns defeats Clinton in New York Mayor election
CNN reports that in the recent elections for the Mayor of New York, Charles Montgomery Burns, better known as Mr. Burns in the hit animated TV series “The Simpsons”, got the most votes of any write-in candidate during last month’s mayoral election in New York City. According to records released by the New York City Board of Elections, the cartoon billionaire received 27 write-in votes out of the 299 that were cast.
Although Burns finishes just under 586,000 votes behind eventual winner, fellow billionaire Michael Bloomberg, he managed to finish ahead of a whole range of well known opponents, including Fantastic Four arch-villain Victor Von Doom, Mickey Mouse, Sleeping Beauty, Bill and Hillary Clinton, former Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, and Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
Full story here
What to do about boggle-eyed Spectator bores?
Boggle-eyed Spectator bore Rod Liddle, who is one of many who seems to believe that both lies and bigoted boo-hoo are now legitimate weapons in the great battle against the awful liberal elitists, wrote that:
The overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community. Of course, in return, we have rap music, goat curry and a far more vibrant and diverse understanding of cultures which were once alien to us. For which, many thanks.
It looks like the bugle has been blown, and every cheap, nasty bullshitter in the land has acknowledged its message… With the Tories almost certain to triumph at the next election, anyone who’s spent the last decade masquerading as a basically decent human being should now rip off their masks and show the world their hideous deformities.
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