Weekly Political Digest – 27 September 2013

In the week of the Labour party conference, there has been a lot to look at and report on, and some unrelated material too...

Labour Conference – Before and After

Ahead of the Labour conference, The Spectator's James Forsyth gave three reasons why Ed[ward] Miliband should not be written off. Now, it has to be said that these are primarily external factors (boundaries favouring Labour, and the UKIP effect) and not suddenly coming into being because of anything the Dear Leader has done.

The third reason, the Left coming together again, is mainly down to the big unions' 'barons', so still isn't anything like a direct result of Ed-M's activity or even presence. As I quoted last week, he remained at that time more of an absence than a presence.

Wind the clock forward to the end of the conference and his speech shows just how much presence he now has. Admittedly, this is the union chiefs' (and other Communists') agenda, and Mili-E was just the mouthpiece for what they have been dictating – and the Labour leader will, by his nature, be fully compliant with – but it certainly re-established his standing among the fawning Socialist classes. Predictable, yes, and of no value whatsoever to society (not even his faux 'energy price fixing' policy announcement) but it all focussed attention on the man.

He had already come back into the public eye (after having been invisible for so long) when he stated he was bringing back Socialism a.k.a. Communism – they are near-enough the same, as Stalin admitted and Lenin partly acknowledged, quite apart from the egg-pelting incident.

Of course, this conference was the proper occasion for actual firm policies to be announced, and they were announced in plenty. With little over 18 months to go until the General Election, and barely 18 months to the start of the official election campaign, this was the only time, realistically, when it would be sensible and appropriate to launch these policies into the public awareness.

Naturally, the commentariat dissected it all, and reaced the unsurprising (and correct) conclusion that, not only was this a severe lurch to the left for Labour, it was also a harking back to the 1970s. A lot of what was proposed in that speech fits in so very well with the failed policies of the Wilson and Callaghan governments of more than a third of a century ago.

What was revealed on this occasion was, if anything, even worse, including land grabs from private owners by government at one level or another – theft, in reality, just as the very worst of Communism and its ilk ever practiced. It's just an inevitable part of the route toward create a totalitarian State, which all Lefty outfits either desire or have already achieved. The Mail takes a suitably cynical view of it all, and is worth reading, although it involves a fair amount of scrolling owing to the quantity of large images embedded within the article..

The best way to deal with the potentially popular (though almost certainly disastrous) energy price-fixing policy is for the Conservatives to come up with a much better policy that will work and won't result in power blackouts. Some of us are old enough to recall the last batch of those, getting on for forty years ago, and it is not something that anyone should relish. Once again, Dan Hodges is on top of this and sees it for what it is: just Leftism, nothing more.

These just-announced policies will ultimately fail, if they are ever put into practice, and we are then likely to see a Thatcher-like long-term exclusion of Labour from national government for probably at least as long. It might almost be worth a single term of Miliband-ism just to get the British voters to wake up to the reality of the totally corrupt ideology that is the political Left, so that they do not repeat the mistake for at least a generation.

With any luck, there might this time be a widespread call for a prohibition of all Left-wing political movements, parties or otherwise, in Britain. Now that would be an interesting backlash (and backfiring!) in the wake of a Miliband-led one-term – perhaps even just part-term – national government!

Incidentally, the stage at the Labour conference was distinctly odd. Not only was there a long walk from the desk area to the lectern, the latter had even been placed off-centre to make it even further away than it needed to be. Let's hope the extra bit of exercise did them some good...


Labour Candidates

While we're with Labour, it's worth noting in passing that eleven failed MPs (i.e. who lost their elections in 2010) have been re-selected to fight the same seats next time. As Mark Wallace puts it at ConHome, this is directly contradictory to Ed Miliband's claim that his is a 'new kind of Labour.' and not a throwback to the past.

The list provided in that post includes Paul Clark, who was booted out of the Gillingham and Rainham seat (by Rehman Chishti), just along the road from where I live, in the adjacent constituency...


Open Primary

Also here in Kent, the retirement of the highly-regarded (and with good reason) Sir John Stanley has meant a new candidate for his Tonbridge and Malling seat needs to be selected. In a bold move, the local Conservative constituency association has gone for a form of 'open primary' style of selection, in which anyone from the area can vote to choose the new candidate, not just party members. It is a method that has operated successfully in a few parts of the world, most notably the USA.

Now, strictly speaking. it's not a full open primary, as the candidates themselves will still be only those approved by the party: a proper open primary allows anyone in the party to stand under the party banner, not just those on what is currently an 'approved list'. Whether one method is better than the other I do not know definitively, nor whether the circumstances here and there are sufficiently different to justify the varying approaches, but it seems to be a move in a good general direction.


Do Not Repay The Debt!

In a well-argued piece, Peter Franklin suggests that, once the deficit is eliminated so the situation becomes stable and known, we should not attempt to repay the resultant debt, even in part. The reason is that it will tempt some (future?) government to spend over the top again, seeing the ;spare capacity' (as it so often seems to be perceived).

I have considerably sympathy with this view, especially bearing in mind the way he has reasoned it out and its future cost, though it naturally goes against the grain of my natural inclination to clear any deby as soon as I am able. In my own case, I have the necessary discipline (though I haven't always!) but collectively a government and bureaucracy can never safely be assumed to be of the same nature.

Especially the Lefties, they love to spend other people's money if there is any scope to do so, mainly on their own pet projects – and that can apply to 'mandarins'at least as much as to ministers. Therefore, grudgingly, I have to accept the argument and support this idea of not repaying the debt – but it is a sad reflection on the nature of those holding the public purse strings that I have been compelled to come to this conclusion.


Muslim Brotherhood Expands London Operation

Something that is not widely known is that Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood has run its admin from London for a while. Now, with the proscribing of the outfit by an Egyptiam court, their media operation is also moving here.

Why London? Why not somewhere more favourable to their world-view? I cannot see the purpose in their being here of all places, unless it's part of a longer-term plan to use our country for some inappropriate purpose. Admittedly, that would be consistent with the easy ride and complicit handling of anything involving those of that broad faith, as so many have been reporting for years. I could list (and link to) a number of well-reputed websites that each have a long history of including such material in their mix of material.

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Propaganda or Improper Gander

In this important Trending Central article, the Nazi-like use of propaganda – and most notably falsified news – by the Palestinian movement, the real face of the hugely-slanted big media presentation of the ongoing conflict is revealed. It is also shown how some of those big media sources are (it is claimed) complicit in the propagation of the falsified 'evidence'.

Meanwhile, Cranmer reports on the case of the Nun who exposed some of the falsification, for example by the same children's bodies appearing in photographs taken at various locations. It is especially telling that the likelihood is that those few children (and perhaps others we haven't seen) were killed by the Palestinians' own militia, firing upon civilians and the youngsters were 'collateral damage' as the military put it. The photographs reproduced at the Cranmer post show the fakery very clearly.

Do not think for a moment that this is a new feature of media reporting: I have seen numerous other examples of photographic fakery, often by suggestion through careful staging and framing, quite apart from the BBC/Guardian-style slanting and omissions, terminology manipulation and the rest. Indeed, back in 1996, the Babylon5 episode 'The Illusion of Truth' covered the topic even more strongly than it had done in the two-season-earlier episode 'And Now For A Word'.

We must always be prepared to evaluate and, where we feel it is necessary, challenge what we find reported in the media. It is why I am so selective in what I include here, not only second-sourcing where I can but also building up a comprehensive picture of what is (as far as I can determine, and with a 'confidence factor' attached in every case) to ensure consistency and thus credibility.

Even then, one's world can occasionally be turned upside down by new discoveries that pan out after investigation. Overall, I cannot guarantee that everything I present here is a hundred percent accurate, but I do go to lengths that most others never would to make that as likely as I can.


And finally...

Crick In The Neck

Well, I expect Michael Crick might well have a painful head at least, if not necessarily his neck, after this little caper by the now-notorious UKIPper Godfrey Bloom (hat-tip to Guido for linking to this)...