Is a Labour election win a poisoned chalice?
Given the Tories’ continuous slide in the polls, there was an almost tangible feeling of opportunity at last night’s “Osbornomics” event.
Hosted by the New Political Economy network and Compass, debate was mainly focused on what can be expected from a Tory chancellor.
The audience and panel focused enthusiastically on how Labour can stop the Conservatives, and even what it can do differently if it wins. There was talk of a hung parliament with Vince Cable as Chancellor, even of a small Labour majority.
As members of the audience and panel became enthusiastic about a Labour resurgence, the understated but excellent Andrew Gamble had a small and important point to make: be careful what you wish for.
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The Tory mistake: listening too much to Tory blogs
The big news today, that the Tory lead is down to 2%, is obviously a joy to the ears of lefties. Who can actually want a massive Conservative landslide? That said, I still think this is still an election for the Tories to lose – their strength in marginal seats and the willingness of Tory voters to turn out on election day remains.
But why the continued fall? Lack of clarity, narratives that have no real resonance (’Broken Britain’, ‘We can’t go on like this!!?!‘) and a complete lack of coherent policy are obvious points to make.
And to that I’d add another point: the Conservative party has been influenced far too much by the attack-dog politics of right-wing blogs, who are intent on winning the news cycle and simply trashing their opponents. Don’t get me wrong – that’s the job of right-wing blogs. But as I said earlier, their influence on the actual voting public is minuscule.
And so every time Cameron stands up and says: We can’t go on like this, a whole group of people seem to think – that’s true, I can’t go on hearing your crap. Every time Cameron says, We can’t have 4 more years of Gordon Brown, a group of voters seem to say – oh yes we can!.
Every time Guido Fawkes puts up another picture of the PM in the hope that he attracts more ridicule – the Labour Party’s poll ratings go up.
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The Tories want more class war
What sort of newspaper runs with headlines such as ‘We must arm ourselves for a class war’?
I mean, not even publications of the kind that get flogged outside Dalston Kingsland shopping centre of a Saturday routinely urge the comrades to break out the Kalashnikovs. That sort of juvenile ultraleftism is just embarrassing.
If you were just about to say Socialist Worker in response to my opening question, you may be surprised to learn that the correct answer is the Daily Telegraph this morning. No kid.
In fairness to economics editor Edmund Conway, I suspect the subs were getting a little carried away.
The piece at no point actively incites the bourgeoisie to stockpile automatic weaponry in anticipation of the need to gun down hordes of Jobseekers’ Allowance claimants on the rampage through the leafier parts of Richmond upon Thames.
But the article does offer an insight into what sections of the right are thinking right now.
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Right wingers launch “British Tea Party”
The Tory right is getting a British Tea Party movement off the ground this Saturday, aiming to build an anti-tax movement.
Its being organised by the Freedom Association, starring right wing Tory MEP Daniel Hannan.
As we will no doubt hear again and again, its a good moment for an anti-tax revolt.
After all, the 2010 British Social Attitudes survey shows public support for tax cuts and spending cuts has doubled since 1997, from 4% to 8%.
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Do Tories know why their poll lead has dived?
An amusing activity to do while watching the Tory lead dive over the past few months is to read the comments over at ConHome. The sight of activists panicking and subjecting Cameron to angry tirades is a joy to behold.
But there seems to be very little discussion on why they’ve dropped like lead balloons. It’s not like New Labour has announced any major new policies, found a coherent narrative, got the press on side or even escaped bad news. Cameron just ain’t getting a luck break. What gives? Here’s some thoughts.
1) Bad policies.
The rollout hasn’t gone too well has it? The education policy meant that Carol Voderman was excluded from their own ideas, the crime policy lead to Chris Grayling being publicly humiliated and the ‘broken society’ narrative got punctured by a few misplaced decimal points. All in all, Cameron was doing much better when he was vague. The public either don’t like their big ideas or don’t like the incompetent way they’ve been presented.
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Taking from the poor and giving to the rich
Here are three stories which are more closely related than they seem. First:
Workers judged to be lonely and to have a chaotic home life could be barred from working with vulnerable people, even though there is no evidence that they pose a risk, according to guidelines from the Government's new vetting agency…
If a teaching assistant was believed to be "unable to sustain emotionally intimate relationships" and also had a "chaotic, unstable lifestyle" they could be barred from ever working with children.
If a nurse was judged to suffer from "severe emotional loneliness" and believed to have "poor coping skills" their career could also be ended.
Second:
People who inform on benefit cheats could be given a share of the resulting savings to the state under proposals being examined by Labour’s manifesto team.
Third:
Shares in state-owned banks would be offered to voters at a discount as part of a Tory effort to encourage young people and those on modest incomes to invest, George Osborne has announced.
The shadow chancellor said his "people's bank bonus" would reward taxpayers for the £850 billion ploughed by the Government into propping up crisis-hit financial institutions.
The common theme here is that these stories show that the state is not a rational force for justice, but rather a means of bullying the vulnerable whilst handing cash over to its favourites.
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Get your Eton hands off my school
contribution by Sam Bumby
An article in yesterday’s Independent highlighted the failings in the Conservative school policy. Personally I think it was a rubbish idea to start with. Allowing parents, charities and trusts to run schools?
It sounds to me just like an idea to privatise the school system, an idea which allows any idiot with a ton of money to influence and indoctrinate youngsters with their own opinions.
Obviously that is still the case today, but in small isolated specialist schools which provide top quality education for the highest fee payers. Imagine if that was the only choice for your kids (minus the massive bill of course)?
The wonders of a central education system mean that every child has access to the same basic education and whilst it may vary regionally, what is taught is practically the same.
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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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Tories and gay rights: championing equality?
‘Conservatives champion gay equality,’ according to the title of a speech Tory frontbencher Nick Herbert will deliver in Washington today. If he was being entirely honest, he would add the words ‘but only after Labour actually delivered it and didn’t leave us any choice in the matter’.
Of course nobody can credibly argue that David Cameron and his Notting Hill Set coterie personally harbour the type of crude homophobia that was dominant during the hey-day of Thatcherism.
But it remains a fact that the Tories are the party of Section 28 and Labour are the party of equalised age of consent, civil partnership, gay adoption rights and a prohibition on anti-gay discrimination in the provision of goods and services. And don’t forget that it was Labour that decriminalised homosexual acts between consenting adults in private in the first place.
In short, every single advance for gay rights in this country has occurred under a Labour government. Labour has set the agenda for decade after decade, often in the face of concerted opposition from the Tory right.
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!
Tory ads: taking negative campaigning to new places
There’s been something wrong with all the Tory campaign posters so far, even before their myriad and amusing spoofings.
Take the “We Can’t Go On Like This” line, first seen accompanying David Cameron’s shiny airbrushed forehead. Rather than a reason to vote Conservative, it reads like the first stage of a relationship break-up. Almost as bad as “It’s not you, it’s me”, but somewhere above “If you liked it, then you shudda putta ring on it”.
Last week there were the tasteful “R.I.P OFF” gravestones, taking a mooted proposal, dishonestly elevating it into Labour policy, and turning the morally complex issue of end-of-life care into a macabre political football. But again, the message was hardly, ‘here’s a reason to vote Conservative’. It was more “OOOOHHHH be SCARED, evil Gordon is coming to steal YOUR MONEY when you’re DEAD!”
The most incredible thing about these and the latest campaign is that the Conservatives are practically admitting that they are a rubbish party, hence why people don’t normally vote for them.
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The younger Cameron was less of a control-freak
Want to see David Cameron looking really miserable on General Election night?
Here he is, looking quite incredibly glum on losing the Tory-held seat of Stafford to make him one of the less well remembered victims of 1997’s Labour landslide. It was an image turned up by Peter Hitchens’s investigation into the enigma who would be PM.
Which I mention in order to wonder what young Dave would make of the latest command and control edicts from his older self, the self-styled great decentraliser of British politics.
The Mail on Sunday reports Tory MPs fury at Cameron’s “control freak” approach whereby which all candidate communications with the voters must be signed off as on message b CCHQ.
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Cameron’s centralisation of power laid bare
“It’s official: DC has changed the party!!!!!!!!”
So tweets Tory prospective parliamentary candidate Joanne Cash, who resigned on a Monday and un-resigned on Tuesday from the Westminster North candidacy, explaining that:
I did resign. Assoc did not accept. CCHQ has resolved specific issue so I am not leaving. It’s official DC has changed the party!!!!!!!!
Paul Waugh has a very full account of “the farcical scenes at the plush Commander gastropub” in a little local difficulty in which party chairman Eric Pickles, the hereditary deputy leader of the Tory peers Lord Strathclyde, David Cameron himself, Michael Gove and several other party luminaries were heavily involved.
The upshot appears to be that Cash’s one-day resignation has succeeded in removing her enemy in the local party – who was constituency chair and, ever so fleetingly, elected constituency president by the members.
Which raises the question: does the episode show how “DC has changed the party!!!!!!!!”?
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LC Investigation: Dorries claimed £70K for PR company services in 2½ Years
A detailed examination of expenses claims submitted by Nadine Dorries, the Conservative MP for Mid-Bedfordshire, indicates that she submitted almost £70,000 in expenses claims for services provided by two public relations companies in the 2½ years from November 2006 to June 2009.
These claims include more £20,000 for services provided by a PR company, set-up by a former Tory spin doctor in 2004, relating to Dorries’ controversial anti-abortion campaign, which failed to secure a change in the law cutting the upper-time limit for abortions from 24 to 20 weeks.
Dorries has also claimed more than £30,000 for services provided by two other ‘research’ companies with close ties to the Conservative party since becoming an MP in 2005.
Dorries’ official MPs website has also been found to have cost the taxpayer almost £9,000 since 2005 despite it not having been updated at all in the last twelve months.
Responding to reports that his company, Media Intelligence Partners, had received more than £66,000 in payments claimed against MPs expenses, ex Tory spin doctor Nick Wood told the Telegraph that MPs would typically pay for research, and then received PR advice from his company free of charge.
There should be, at least, a full investigation into the use of these companies, on expenses, by Conservative MPs.
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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.
Nadine Dorries – Latest expenses raise more questions
Today’s publication of the Legg report has, naturally, pushed the whole expenses issue back to the top of the news agenda.
We have, of course, had a bit of look for ourselves. And given past history you won’t be surprised that our attention naturally gravitated towards the expenses claims made by our old ‘friend’, sparring partner and Conservative MP for Mid-Narnia, Nadine Dorries…
…and, also unsurprisingly, we’ve got a few questions for Nadine for which we’d really like some answers.
Dorries’ Website/Blog
You may, for example, recall that some time ago – May 2008, in fact – we raised a few issues with the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner about her personal website and blog.
At the time, the blog appeared to be funded from her parliamentary expenses and breached several of the rules governing the use of MPs websites when funded from the public purse.
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Where is that compassionate Conservatism now?
David Cameron is walking a tight rope between shedding the “nasty party” image while still holding on to the nasty bastards who only vote Tory for that reason.
So it shouldn’t be too surprising that lovely wuverly fluffy compassionate Conservative David Cameron said something so boneheaded on burglary in the wake of the jailing and subsequent release of Munir Hussein.
The moment a burglar steps over your threshold, and invades your property, with all the threat that gives to you, your family and your livelihood, I think they leave their human rights outside
At the time Sunny argued that he thought the law stood fine as it was but sympathised with Conservative attempts to strengthen it in favour of householders who have their house broken into. Ultimately he supported his friend’s mantra ‘If you don’t want your ass kicked then don’t break into my house.’
Luckily for Mr Hundal, his friend and all of us there is no human right which prevents your arse getting kicked if you break into someone’s house.
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#kerryout Tory PPC’s £325,000 CCJ
What’s the worst thing that could possibly happen to the idiotic #kerryout campaign?
How about this story from today’s Daily Mirror…
Tory star Adeela Shafi has £325,000 CCJ ‘debt’
A key member of David Cameron’s new generation of women MPs has had three county court judgments against her since 2007 – including one for almost £325,000.
And her husband Ijaz Shafi was declared bankrupt in 2000.
Muslim lecturer Adeela Shafi was hand-picked by Cameron to open for him at the 2008 Tory Conference.
He then endorsed her as a Parliamentary candidate and campaigned in her Bristol East constituency along with his shadow cabinet team.
CCJs of £400 and £1,048 have been settled but £324,272 is outstanding – despite her being ordered to repay it nearly three years ago in July 2007 – five months before she became a prospective Tory MP.
Hat Tip – Political Scrapbook
As Political Scrapbook correctly notes, an undischarged bankrupt cannot stand for election to Westminster, and an MP who goes bankrupt while at Westminster is out of a job, a fate that Jeffrey Archer narrowly avoided in 1974 by standing down at the October election before the shit really hit the fan.
Strangely enough, this seems to have been a minor detail that self-styled campaigner for political transparency Harry Cole/Tory Bear neglected to mention when setting up the #kerryout campaign to raise money for Shafi’s election campaign in Bristol East.
Still, we shouldn’t be too hard on young Harry.
Mistakes like this are bound to happen when you’re the unfortunate outcome of a failed cloning experiment involving Susan Boyle and Archie the Inventor, as demonstrated by his weekly appearances on ‘Guy TV News’.
FFS, Guido, can’t you do everyone a favour and put Harry in a burqa…
…every week.
UPDATE
A quick check has revealed that, to date, the #kerryout campaign has raised the princely sum of £1,681 for Shafi’s campaign.
Using the same fundraising system, Boris Johnson’s brother, Jo, has raised £11,956.
Labour cuts NHS Waiting List by 970,000
After falling flat on his face as a result of his last foray into the realm of statistics you might think that a certain Tory blogger would have learned a valuable lesson. But, no, he’s back again and making yet another raft of daft mistakes:
Burying Bad News on NHS Waiting Times
Whenever there’s a major political event, you always need to watch what government press office put out. And true to form, today the Department of Health is trying to bury bad news. At 10.06am an email dropped into my Inbox with the alluring headline
STATISTICAL PRESS NOTICE – NHS INPATIENT AND OUTPATIENT WAITING TIMES FIGURES – 31st December 2009
I nearly didn’t bother to look, but suspicion got the better of me. It turns out that patient waiting times have increased dramatically in 2009.The number of inpatients, for whom English commissioners are responsible, waiting over 13 weeks at the end of December 2009 was 57,600, an increase of 12,300 (27.3%) from November 2009, and a rise of 18,000 (45.3%) from December 2008.
The number of outpatients, for whom English commissioners are responsible, waiting over 8 weeks at the end of December 2009 was 74,100, an increase of 11,700 (18.8%) from November 2009, but a rise of 26,900 (57.0%) from December 2008.
Shouldn’t the press release have been headlined…
Labour Increases NHS Waiting Times by 50%?
UPDATE: The Dept of Health has been in touch to deny this is burying bad news. They say that these figures always come out on the last Friday of the month.
Credit where its due, Iain’s already sort of acknowledged his first mistake – had he checked the DoH’s website, he might have noticed that this is nothing more than a routine statistical release that the DoH does issue at the same time every month.
As for his suggestion for an alternative headline, Iain’s got that badly wrong as well because he’s forgotten – or more likely never learned – one of the cardinal rules of statistics.
One statistic does not make a trend. continue reading… »
Constituent harassed by Telegraph readers after sending email to Tory PPC
Let’s try a bit of word association… James Delingpole..?
I’m guessing that ‘climate change denier’ was probably the first thing that came to mind, although having read George Monbiot’s latest missive on CiF, ‘vicious douchebag’ seems rather more apt.
On Sunday, Delingpole posted this on his blog at the Telegraph:
The Warmists are looking increasingly foolish and wrong. But they aren’t going to go down without a fight. Consider, Exhibit A, this nauseating email currently being sent out to Conservative candidates. It seems that in the last week a couple of hundred Tory candidates have received variations on the theme below. Note that these emails do not come from a named organisation but from individual voters in each of the different prospective parliamentary candidates’ constituencies.
The text of the email in question, which he also posted, goes like this:
Dear Edwin Northover
I was concerned to note the results of a survey of 140 Conservative candidates for parliament that suggested that climate change came right at the bottom of their priorities for government action.
I hope you can reassure me that you recognise the importance and success of climate change action by the UK government at home and internationally.
Can you clarify that:
You accept that climate change is caused by human activity?
Do you support the target to achieve 15% renewable energy by 2020?
Do you support the EU imposing tougher regulation to combat climate change?
Kind Regards, *** ***”.
Not only does that look to be a perfectly polite and reasonable enquiry but it looks, to me at least, very much like the kind of simple fill-in-the-blanks form email that’s pretty much a staple tool of internet-based campaigning.
In other words, it about as far from ’stalking’ – the term Delingpole used in the title of his post – as its possible to get. continue reading… »
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