David Cameron’s placebo politics
contribution by Andrew R
With the emergency budget safely pencilled in for after the election, there’s clearly no need for the Tories to discuss economic policy any more. Moving down the list of key priorities, the next giant to slay is, naturally enough, Health and Safety legislation. Cameron’s speech comes as a timely reminder of how tired we all are of a government that’s obsessed with cheap, populist initiatives rather than addressing the big issues facing Britain today.
And they don’t come much bigger than this: bureaucracy is killing the village fete. I’m going to repeat that so the full horror can sink in: bureaucracy is killing the village fete.
Or in other words, the people in charge of organising village fetes are such gullible, lazy, pigshit-thick inbreds that not only do they believe they’ll have to fill in reams of forms to get a tombola permit, but they are so scared by the prospect of reading, understanding and completing said mythical forms that, like the selfish bastards they are, they’d rather see the whole village go without the much-anticipated, long-remembered once-a-year thrill of winning a bottle of Tizer at a coconut shy than crease their illiterate brows in thought, or sweat over a row of tick-boxes.
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The most difficult job in the world
Imagine you land a job where you get paid £161-50 a day for each day you turn up (even if you stay for, like, 20 minutes) plus £86.50 a day for food, drink and taxis, and an additional £75 for office costs, without producing a single receipt.
And you can’t resign even if you wanted to. What sort of workplace would let you do that?
Some people would tell you that your boss is either a saint or an idiot of the highest degree. Everyone at work takes the piss and the whole shop functions like a joke, with average attendance rates standing at just over 50%.
Until one day, under pressure from auditors, the board, or sheer financial hardship, your gaffer decides to see sense and announces he’s going to tighten the belt.
‘Course you’d expect the “reforms” to bring in more scrutiny on costs and expenses (i.e. producing receipts) as well as a wage freeze or even a pay cut.
But no. You turn up to work (it’s not even compulsory, there’s no attendance levels, you see) and, much to your delight, you find out that the dreaded toughened up rules are so tough that you wage is actually higher – from £161-50 a day to £200!
More, you also get £140 a night for accomodation expenses and you’ll still be spared from submitting receipts, as long as you declare you’ve performed “appropriate duties”, whatever that means. Sure, now you’ll be required to clock in, but a couple of hours will do, so no worries if you get bored or your colleague’s annoying voice is getting on your nerves.
Dream job, right?
Well, welcome to the world of Unelected Peers in the House of Lords. And you know what the Senior Salaries Review Board people said (those who drafted the reforms)? “We are sending a strong signal: if you’re swinging the lead, don’t do it.”
Policy Exchange: You win some, you lose some…
Sunny’s busy elsewhere at the moment, so I guess I’d better take on the news that the North London Central Mosque’s libel action against Tory think-tank, Policy Exchange, has been struck out by Justice Eady, leaving the trustees of the mosque facing a £75,000 legal bill just to cover PX’s legal bills.
The case related to allegations made in a 2007 report by Denis McEoin, ‘The Hijacking of British Islam’, which was withdrawn earlier this year, at the same time as it issued this apology to one of the organisations named in the report as allegedly selling extremist literature.
The Hijacking of British Islam:
Al-Manaar Muslim Cultural Heritage CentreIn this report we state that Al-Manaar Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre is one of the Centres where extremist literature was found. Policy Exchange accepts the Centre’s assurances that none of the literature cited in the Report has ever been sold or distributed at the Centre with the knowledge or consent of the Centre’s trustees or staff, who condemn the extremist and intolerant views set out in such literature. We are happy to set the record straight.
The key phrase in this piece of news seems to be ’struck out’, which gives no clues whatsoever as to the reason that the mosque’s libel action failed. As yet, there’s nothing on BAILI relating to this case, so whether it failed on a technicality, or because the mosque was unable to put forward a viable case, or even because Justice Eady decided that the mosque has no reputation to defend is anyone’s guess.
I must admit to being a little disappointed that this case failed to all the way to a full hearing, not because I really give a toss about either side winning or losing but because it might have shed just a little bit more light on the circumstances that resulted in McEoin incorporating fabricated evidence in his report. continue reading… »
ResPublica? You’re having a laugh
I have no idea why various policy people get so excited by Philip Blond. Everything he says sends my inner bullshit detector into sirens blaring overload. Even the title of his new thinktank make’s me think of Johnson from Peepshow. ResPublico/ResPublicus, anyone?
Anyway, whenever someone perfectly sensible tries to get their head arounds this stuff, they end up writing a thousand words on the complex inner contradictions and fuzzyness on specifics inherent in the “Red Tory” project, which is a polite Thinktank way of saying it’s a load of old toss.
I have a simpler version. It’s toss, with the sole interesting feature being that it is fashionable toss. Why it is fashionable is a far more interesting a question than what Philip Blond is actually saying.*
I mean read this stuff:
“A new power of association could be delivered to all citizens so that if they are indeed in an area that receives public services in a form that can be identified both by sector and by type and if area specific budgetary transparency is delivered such that each place knows what is being spent on it, then if those services are less than they should be in terms of quality, design or applicability, then there should be a new civil power of pre-emptory budgetary challenge that is given to any associative group that claims to represent those in its area”
Why is it such waffle? Because if it wasn’t, if it was clear and you knew anything about housing, you’d probably say something like, “ah, like a Tenant management organisation you mean? But hold on, arent’ they part of the state that’s destroying society a paragraph ago…” and then you’d go, “ah, this is all toss”.
Which it is. So don’t bother yourselves with it.
(BTW, If the transcript of the launch is to be believed, the one thing that can be said about red Toryism is that it is resolutely, indefatigably opposed to commas. This is not good.)
As someone once said to me – Many things that are provocative are not worth arguing with. Red Toryism is one such.
God’s work: Goldman Sachs vs Church of England
When it comes to deciding the will of God, who you gonna call: Goldman Sachs chief exec Lloyd Blankfein, or archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams?
I only ask because both of these men have recently offered their verdicts on the forces of Mammon, with the £41m a year Big Swinging Dick getting his retaliation in first, in the shape of a recent interview with the Sunday Times.
Blankfein knows full well that ‘people are pissed off, mad, and bent out of shape’ at the profession which brought the world close to economic collapse, and disarmingly adds: ‘I know I could slit my wrists and people would cheer.’
So how does he justify not doing the business with the razor blade? He comes up with a wisecrack, of course, arguing that investment bankers deserve unlimited bonuses because they are ‘doing God’s work’. Heck, I must have missed that week at Sunday school, although I remember vague injunctions about camels, eyes of needles, money changers in the temple, and such like.
continue reading… »
They’ve banned Christmas! Sort of!
contribution by 5 chinese crackers
They didn’t actually. Last year, the Observer reported on 2 November that Oxford City Council had banned all reference to Christmas in its WinterLight Festival (which was nonsense).
This year, it wasn’t until the 13th that the Times managed ‘Christmas lights switch-on ceremony renamed ‘Winter White Night’‘. Guess what? It’s nonsense!
Okay, Dundee Council really have named the night the Christmas lights get switched on ‘Winter Light Night’ (not ‘white’, see), but according to the Times:
Christmas will not be Christmas in Dundee this year. All references to the religious holiday have been dropped from the switching-on ceremony for the city’s festive lights
Sounds familiar. In fact, it sounds almost exactly the same as last year’s nonsense about Oxford.
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Lamenting 40 years of The Sun
“We’re celebrating our 40th birthday in style”, announced the Sun yesterday.
With a series of self-congratulatory quotes (i.e. from people like Simon Cowell), Britain’s own bible belters have kickstarted a series of “sparkling birthday features”.
It’s undisputed that the Sun managed to push its way to the forefront of Britain’s contemporary culture. From shifting the nation’s attention towards mammary glands, through their contribution to harmony and cohesion, and all the way to reasoned and fact-based news reporting, the Sun has indeed become the epitome of British phlegm, “a national institution” (according to the Sun itself).
But to spare the Sun the risk of sliding into self-important back-slapping mode, which would be soooo unlike them, we’ve decided to help them celebrate the rag’s history with a short roll of honour of some of its most memorable moments.
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Poles Apart: coming near you
contribution by Daniel Hoffman-Gill
Last year, sick and tired of the endless dirge of bigotry, lies and anti-Polish sentiment coming from the right-wing press, me and my mate Mark decided to go to Poland. We wanted to get a job; to put our money where our mouth is and garner a small taste of what it means to be an immigrant. We wanted to single-handedly reverse the Eastern European immigration trend.
So we got our CVs and covering letters translated (badly as it turned out) into Polish, put on our best interview clobber and made our way to Poland in a Vauxhall Astra.
We spent over two weeks as immigrants in Warsaw, ate a lot of lard and pigs feet and attempted to get any job we could, whether it be as a lift operator, a porn film star or a guttering and flues salesperson.
It was an amazing adventure that taught us much on the realities of life as an immigrant.
continue reading… »
What has the EU ever done for us?
Oh wow, have we got an exclusive for you today.
Recently our mole in Brussels managed to sneak a hidden camera into a policy meeting of the European Conservatives and Reformists group, where members from the British Conservative Party, Poland’s Law and Justice Party and the Czech Civic Democratic Party were attempting to thrash out a common position on the future of the European Union following the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty by all EU states.
To say that the meeting became a little heated at times would be a bit of understatement, as you’ll see in a moment if you head down below the fold…
Offensive Language?
Its been yet another one of those in weeks in which the use of ‘offensive’ language has been making headlines in both the press and with at least one prominent blogger.
The story that captured the media’s attention was, of course, Pierre Lellouche’s description of the Conservative Party’s attitude towards the European Union:
“They have one line and they just repeat one line. It is a very bizarre sense of autism,”
Curiously that comment failed to generate any real sense of outrage in the one place you might have expected it to – the Daily Mail seems to have been far too preoccupied with laying into Cameron for backing away from a referendum on Europe to indulge in the usual round of sneering at the ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ leaving the field open, for once, to someone with a genuine reason for taking offence, Charlotte Moore, to frame the debate in terms of whether its acceptable to use the term ‘autism’ as a casual insult.
Elsewhere, the Press Complaints Commission decided that its okay to refer Iain Dale as an ‘overtly gay Tory blogger’ in a ruling that leaves me wondering whether Iain’s mistake might have been to complain under clause 12 of the PCC’ Code (discrimination) rather than under clause 1 (accuracy). While Iain makes no secret of his sexual orientation I wouldn’t have said that he was ‘overtly gay’, not in the commonly understood sense of the term, which implies that someone is camping it up to the point that their sexual orientation is blatantly obvious. ‘Honestly’ is, strictly speaking, a synonym of ‘overtly’ but colloquially the two words carry very different connotations in the same way that acknowledging that homosexuality is part of the normal spectrum of human sexual behaviour is a very different thing to promoting homosexuality, despite some people having a marked propensity for conflating the two.
Iain also points the way to another interesting article on language, offence and disability, by Ian Birrell, in which the bone of contention is the use of ‘retard’ and ‘retarded’ as casual insults. That article is, again, written from the perspective of the parent of a child/children with a disability and carries all the more weight for it. continue reading… »
Why EU President Blair isn’t a bad idea
The Tories have finally found an issue to unite them with the mainstream European right: their shared loathing of Tony Blair.
Angela Merkel was never keen on the idea of President Blair; now Nicolas Sarkozy, who first mooted it, has decided that he, too, would rather have someone whose guts his voters don’t already hate.
Back in blighty, David Cameron is thundering that the British people would find whole notion of Blair 2: Attack of the Clones “completely unacceptable.”
On that, I suspect, he’s probably right. People were sick of Blair three years ago; they’re sick of unelected EU technocrats; and they’re sick of politicians living it large on their money. Bring those things together and you get a perfect storm of mutual contempt between the political classes and everybody else.
Except, I actually think that – from a pro-European perspective – President Blair is a rather neat idea.
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Loony Trots on Mars
My mis-reading of the headline of Dave’s piece yesterday brought back some wonderful memories of the maddest moments of the ultra-left. These days, of course, they just write silly manifestos about reforming international law, call for random invasions of foreign countries, attack human rights organisations or give support to reactionary, homophobic, misogynist, antisemites.
But back in the old days Trots had a far grander perspective.
J. Posadas (1912–1981) (occasionally referred to as Juan Posadas), was the pseudonym of Homero Rómulo Cristalli Frasnelli, an Argentine Trotskyist whose personal vision is usually described as Posadism. Posadas became the leader of the Latin America Bureau of the Fourth International and, under his guidance, the movement gained some influence in the region, particularly among Cuban railway workers, Bolivian tin miners and agricultural workers in Brazil.
When the Fourth International split in 1953, Posadas and his followers sided with Michel Pablo and the International Secretariat of the Fourth International. By 1959, however, he and his followers were quarrelling with the leadership of the ISFI accusing them of lacking confidence in the possibility of revolution. They also differed over the issue of nuclear war with Posadas taking the view that “War–Revolution” would “settle the hash of Stalinism and Capitalism” and that nuclear war was inevitable and desirable as a socialist society would rise from the ashes. Posadas and his international followers, who were concentrated in Latin America, split from the ISFI in 1962 prior to its rectification of the 1953 split with the International Committee of the Fourth International.
Posadas wrote that “Nuclear war [equals] revolutionary war. It will damage humanity but it will not – it cannot – destroy the level of consciousness reached by it… Humanity will pass quickly through a nuclear war into a new human society – Socialism.” J. Posadas’ enthusiasm for nuclear war and “worker’s bombs” escalated in the 1970s with the Posadist movement issuing demands that the Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China begin a “preventative war” against the United States in order to finish off capitalism.
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ConHome threatens civil war with Cameron over EU
In anticipation of David Cameron’s u-turn on Lisbon, Tim Montgomerie has mounted what could charitably be described as a face-saving operation at ConHome, while trying to extract his own pound of flesh for the support.
He says:
Unless Vaclav Klaus u-turns again, the Lisbon Treaty is about to be ratified. The Conservative leadership will say that, if elected, there’ll be no attempt to ‘unratify’ it via a referendum. Lisbon is not the only problem in our relationship with the EU, goes the argument, and it would be a referendum that cannot undo Lisbon. I’m 99% certain of this position having worked the phones over the last 24 hours.
So far so unexpected. In fact Peter Oborne earlier predicted this with an article in the Observer: ‘Cameron has only himself to blame for this mess on Europe‘.
Tim Montgomerie then proceeds to counter expected criticisms with headers such as:
‘DAVID CAMERON PROMISED A REFERENDUM ON AN ‘UNRATIFIED’ LISBON TREATY, NOTHING ELSE’
and
‘DAVID CAMERON DESERVES THE CONTINUING SUPPORT OF EUROSCEPTICS’
and
‘THE NEXT CONSERVATIVE GOVERNMENT WILL SEEK A ‘MANIFESTO MANDATE’ FOR RENEGOTIATION’.
Again, so far so unexpected.
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What will Fraser Nelson go for next?
It was the question that The Spectator’s recent foray in HIV-AIDS denialism was bound to spawn: “What next by the Spectator? ‘Questioning the evolution consensus‘ perhaps?”
Next? Not exactly….try ‘Been there, done that’
Creating an insult to intelligence
Listening to the Today programme this morning, I was irritated once again by yet another misrepresentation of Intelligent Design as a form of Creationism. In an item on the growing popularity of Intelligent Design, John Humphrys interviewed Professor Ken Miller of Brown University in the US who spoke on the subject last evening at the Faraday Institute, Cambridge. Humphrys suggested that Intelligent Design might be considered a kind of middle ground between Darwinism and Creationism. Miller agreed but went further, saying that Intelligent Design was nothing more than an attempt to repackage good old-fashioned Creationism and make it more palatable.
But this is totally untrue.
Melanie Phillips – Coffeehouse, 29th April 2009
Few could be said to have Mel’s expertise in the field of insulting people’s intelligence, she does it so regularly and with so little effort. But it’s worth putting a bit of context to her remarks if only to drive home a couple of important points.
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Spectator tries to airbrush out AIDS denialism screening
Yesterday I revealed that Spectator magazine had hastily cancelled its screening of the film House of Numbers.
In the spirit of openness and transparency that they constantly demand of others, the Spectator abruptly deleted the event page off their website (see the Google cache) and remained very quiet about it on their blog.
No mention of the cancelled debate and no explanation. Complete silence. Although you can still watch the video on the ‘AIDS debate’ on their website.
Last night I emailed its editor Fraser Nelson with the following questions:
Do you regret hosting the screening of the film?
Should the Spectator really be giving space to films that have been contradicted with so much evidence? Isn’t this reminiscent of the MMR stuff? I’m just curious as to what prompted you guys to screen the film.
No response at all.
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They hate our prosperity
The Legatum Prosperity Index is a free market think tank which ranks 104 countries according to nine different measures of prosperity.
There are some predictable results – four of the top five countries are in Scandinavia, and Zimbabwe is last, just behind Sudan. But it is interesting to see what they say about the UK.
The Daily Mail writes on a daily basis about a UK where business is stifled by regulation, the economy is burdened by a bloated public sector, we are run by a corrupt politicial elite, terrorists and violent criminals menace the law abiding public, the traditional family is under assault, ancient freedoms have been taken away, our universities teach ‘mickey mouse degrees’ and our health service is inefficient.
The research suggests that every single one of these are right-wing myths.
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easyCouncil: Tory cheap flight from Hell
Officially, the proposals are known as ‘Future Shape’. But the unofficial designation ‘easyCouncil’ better spells out just what Tory plans to re-run 1980s-style local government cuts under a pseudo-funky nickname will mean for users of local authority services.
Barnet leader Mike Freer – a Conservative parliamentary hopeful, natch – openly admits that the Ryanair business model is his inspiration for slicing town hall expenditure by £15m over the next 18 months. Other Tory councils, from Coventry to Hammersmith & Fulham, are watching closely.
Predictably, the rightwing press is bigging the whole thing up. ‘Book me a seat on low-cost easyCouncil’, enthuses Philip Johnston in the Daily Telegraph this morning. He even goes on to mull the prospect of easyGovernment.
But what if local authorities really were run like bmibaby, as the British Midland subsidiary preposterously styles itself? Please step inside the Liberal Conspiracy time machine on a trip to the May 2010 London local government contest, as we follow Mr Freer’s speaker car:
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Top 10 ways Cameron has made an arse of himself
Following my recently popular Top 10 Tory ‘out of touch’ gaffes, I thought I would follow it up with a focus on the golden boy David Cameron.
So here is an incomplete list:
10. Not knowing how many houses he’s got, only a while after John McCain made the same mistake.
9. Being photographed by Dave Osler.
8. Getting embroiled in a doctored photo fiasco in relation to some now embarrassing pictures of him being an arrogant-looking git at university.
7. Pretending he’s all green on his bike, when it’s total bollox.
continue reading… »
Conservative affirmative action
This is a lovely example of conservative principles, taken from a conversation with leading American conservative thinker Irving Kristol:
“The talk turned to Irving’s son, William Kristol, then Dan Quayle’s chief of staff, and how he got his start in politics. Irving recalled how he talked to his friend Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, who secured William a place there as both an undergrad and graduate student; how he talked to Pat Moynihan, then Nixon’s domestic policy adviser, and got William an internship at the White House; how he talked to friends at the RNC [Republican National Committee] and secured a job for William after he got his Harvard Ph.D.; and how he arranged with still more friends for William to teach at Penn and the Kennedy School of Government.”
“With that, Prof. Katznelson recalled, he then asked Irving what he thought of affirmative action.
‘I oppose it,’ Irving replied. ‘It subverts meritocracy.’ “
Boris Johnson will kill children
Boris Johnson is threatening to kill some children and worsen the educational outcomes of many more.
The reason for this is straightforward. He intends to remove the western extension zone of the congestion charge, and delay phase three of the low emission zone, which would charge polluting vans more for entering London.
The effects of these will be to increase congestion and emissions of carbon and nitrogen oxide. Such emissions, however, are quite strongly associated with pre-natal health, as a new paper by Janet Currie and Reed Walker demonstrate.
They studied the impact of the introduction of E-Z Pass in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. This system allows cars to travel onto toll roads without stopping to pay manually. They therefore greatly reduce congestion and emissions around the toll plazas.
continue reading… »
You can read articles through the front page, via Twitter or rss feeds.
» How bad is the feline obesity crisis?
» Why don’t MPs pay back tuition fees instead of increasing ours?
» Obama is right to slam BP – and why capitalists should too
» Why does Phillip Blond see civic cohesion as a security issue?
» So what if the Labour candidates went to Oxbridge?
» Last night’s Labour hustings: will it get interesting or turn to torture?
» It’s now down to Ken to win London for Labour
» The Labour people need
» Blog Nation: what would you like to see discussed?
» The Labour leadership’s token contender.. and it’s not Diane Abbott
» In defence of these fraternal nominations
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