As many of those folk who have known me for a long time, and especially in close-up, will already know, I am a very strong believer in a healthy democracy. This needs at least two (but hopefully not too many) political parties with credible policies and a reasonable hope of being elected to government.
We have increasingly lacked that proper structure here in Britain, which is why I have (as many readers will be aware) been playing a small part in trying to fix the issue. For the past nearly seven years this has meant trying to find a replacement main opposition party to the Conservatives – whose ongoing tenure in government seemed to me assured for many years to come – in the knowledge that Labour were going to more or less destroy themselves in about half a dozen years.
As I told people in the second half of 2010 and later, I knew that Labour had set themselves upon an irreversible path to their own demise once they had installed Ed[ward] Miliband as their party leader – though I doubt any of them believed me back then. The party was turning to the left, and then some. Now, of course, those people perhaps understand at least something of why I made that bold claim, and with such conviction.
Fast-forward to today and what do we find?
Labour continued to turn leftward, eventually and inevitably installing the real party-killer (Ed-M was just the catalyst that made it not only possible, but just about unavoidable) Jeremy Corbyn. It had to happen. Equally predictably, this move allowed the ever-lurking out-and-out Communists to infiltrate and dominate the party, using the movement they created called Momentum. Their long-awaited day had come!
Thus today's Labour party has become the wolf in sheep's clothing, and is busy transforming the party from within. The parliamentary party has, as they'd have expected, become a serious problem, because of all those pesky 'moderate', 'Blairite' or 'blue Labour' MPs as the current leadership (and especially Momentum) brands them.
Thus we are seeing a number of more 'suitable' candidates for the upcoming General Election being parachuted in to safe Labour seats, while the less safe seats are becoming more marginal in the present political climate so will probably be voted out of office anyway – not a significant issue, then.
The Labour party manifesto for this election reads like something that wouldn't have gone amiss in former Communist East Germany – and its supposedly draft version was leaked to two news outlets so that it became in effect de facto policy. As I posted on social media less than a day ago, the idea was to make it effectively impossible for the party to materially change anything – and indeed at the meeting to discuss any such changes that was held later in the day, it was reported as just 'tinkering' and making no substantive alterations.
Thus the Corbynite faction have what they have sought all along: the leader they wanted, the now-official policies they wanted, and their own/preferred people forming a majority of their parliamentary party a month from now.
This was the real reason they embraced the 'snap' election so readily: not to win it (they knew that wasn't possible) but to transform Labour into a genuine Communist Party disguised as something else, even if the camouflage isn't exactly fooling most people. Still, they have enough supporters for their needs, considerable evidence of which I continually find in various places.
Such a wolf can never again be a suitable alternative party to the Conservatives. As I said seven years ago, Labour had set itself upon a one-way street to destruction: there can be no way back. Perhaps, as some have surmised, they will split as they once did when the SDP was formed by 'the Gang of Four' more than a generation ago. If so, though, it will be for the same actual reason (i.e. not the public face) which will be currently-elected members seeking to avoid losing their seats – self-interest, in other words, so this would not make a breakaway party trustworthy.
With UKIP now losing support hugely, the party falling apart internally (which has been going on for some time now) and rapidly becoming a 'dead end', as I labelled them a few years back; the Greens continuing to fool nobody so with barely three percent support; and a slowly resurgent Liberal Democrat party as the only other even vaguely realistic alternatives; it is the last of these that – for all its faults – looks like being the only conceivable future opposition party out of those currently in existence.
What about possible new parties, though?
The wealthy UKIP financial supporter Arron Banks has been rumoured to be creating a new party, a kind of UKIP Mk 2 that is provisionally being called "The Patriotic Alliance" – but all has gone very quiet on that front for the past two months; i.e. from well before the snap election was called, so the current hiatus wasn't caused by that.
So, in conclusion, what we expect to happen in the next few months? Theresa May's Conservatives look set for a landslide win in next month's General Election. After that, Labour might or might not split, Arron Banks' new party might or might not be launched, and the Lib Dems might or might not continue to climb up the pecking order. It looks like interesting times ahead!
Showing posts with label ed miliband. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ed miliband. Show all posts
Friday, 12 May 2017
Sunday, 8 March 2015
Debating the Debates
How idiotic is this? When there are real issues to be debated and discussed, what's the biggest, hottest topic in the public arena this week? The economy? Employment? Living standards? Terrorism?
No, it's the much-hyped television debates ahead of this coming May's General Election. The broadcasters have again been devising their preferred choices, formats and participants for these, and the political parties who will be involved have been having their own say.
Now, the complex story of who has said what, agreed to what or vetoed whatever is not sensible to go over here, but now narcissistic is all this in reality? Although I am in favour of these debates, and have been consistently from when they were mooted five years ago, it has to be said that they are in constant danger of becoming a sideshow if not handled intelligently and what I'd call 'cleanly'.
Sadly, Labour are trying to make a political football out of the debates issue (sad or what?) and there are some others who are doing the same (sadder still!) Now, I have to say that David Cameron hasn't handled this the best way he could – though I do realise that we was, at heart, trying to be helpful and constructive, but has in the end left himself open to easy criticism from the other parties and, perhaps, from broadcasters themselves.
Incidentally, the Cameron/Miliband 'head to head' would almost certainly be challenged legally by parties who consider themselves to be 'the third party', and at least a few legal experts seem to think this would be taken seriously within the legal system and would no doubt take months to resolve, thus scuppering such an event completely. This isn't the time to be proposing such a contentious idea!
In the end, whatever is decided, David Cameron really must attend whatever of these debates in which he is ultimately invited to participate, regardless of any earlier stance. Any other approach will be used against him and his party.
After all, it isn't (as some opponents are claiming) that he is 'afraid' of debating issues with anyone. He has shown consistently over the years that he is far and away the best at the job in British politics – once one sees through the bluster of Farage and past the nastiness of Galloway, both of whom are significantly inferior debaters despite their superficial ability to apparently dominate whenever they are given free rein (which Cameron usually isn't given, by the way).
It is interesting to see that, although people are generally in favour of the televised debates – and, as I indicated above, I am one of those – they don't seem to have any measurable impact on actual voting intention, as this article shows. After all, we never needed them before the previous election, Tony Blair refused to participate before that, and it's all much of a muchness as far as the country at large is concerned, as polls have shown no strong leanings n favour of them.
Perhaps we all ought to get back to concentrating on real issues!
No, it's the much-hyped television debates ahead of this coming May's General Election. The broadcasters have again been devising their preferred choices, formats and participants for these, and the political parties who will be involved have been having their own say.
Now, the complex story of who has said what, agreed to what or vetoed whatever is not sensible to go over here, but now narcissistic is all this in reality? Although I am in favour of these debates, and have been consistently from when they were mooted five years ago, it has to be said that they are in constant danger of becoming a sideshow if not handled intelligently and what I'd call 'cleanly'.
Sadly, Labour are trying to make a political football out of the debates issue (sad or what?) and there are some others who are doing the same (sadder still!) Now, I have to say that David Cameron hasn't handled this the best way he could – though I do realise that we was, at heart, trying to be helpful and constructive, but has in the end left himself open to easy criticism from the other parties and, perhaps, from broadcasters themselves.
Incidentally, the Cameron/Miliband 'head to head' would almost certainly be challenged legally by parties who consider themselves to be 'the third party', and at least a few legal experts seem to think this would be taken seriously within the legal system and would no doubt take months to resolve, thus scuppering such an event completely. This isn't the time to be proposing such a contentious idea!
In the end, whatever is decided, David Cameron really must attend whatever of these debates in which he is ultimately invited to participate, regardless of any earlier stance. Any other approach will be used against him and his party.
After all, it isn't (as some opponents are claiming) that he is 'afraid' of debating issues with anyone. He has shown consistently over the years that he is far and away the best at the job in British politics – once one sees through the bluster of Farage and past the nastiness of Galloway, both of whom are significantly inferior debaters despite their superficial ability to apparently dominate whenever they are given free rein (which Cameron usually isn't given, by the way).
It is interesting to see that, although people are generally in favour of the televised debates – and, as I indicated above, I am one of those – they don't seem to have any measurable impact on actual voting intention, as this article shows. After all, we never needed them before the previous election, Tony Blair refused to participate before that, and it's all much of a muchness as far as the country at large is concerned, as polls have shown no strong leanings n favour of them.
Perhaps we all ought to get back to concentrating on real issues!
Tuesday, 11 March 2014
Climbing the Greasy Polls
Labour's year-long decline in polling ratings appears to have bottomed-out recently – at least for the time being. The party's polling lead regarding general election voting intention seems, if anything, to have recovered a little, and now looks to be around five or six percent. It had dropped to around four-and-a-half percentage points when aggregated over the previous short time period.
So, what has changed? Has there been anything in the news that might have afforded Labour an opportunity to gain public/voter support? Not that I have noticed. Things have been happening, but not conducive to material changes in voting intention.
What remains, then? The only change I have been able to determine is an almost complete absence of the Labour leader from the public eyte in recent weeks. He still pops up occasionally, though usually only when he has no real choice, such as at Prime Minister's Questions and when a major international issue arises.
Apart from that, he has been absent from the public gaze, or at best unnoticed, and it has allowed his party's polling malaise to begin to hel. I can't help wondering whether this has been a deliberate exercise conducted precisely to discover whether this would indeed happen under such circumstances.
Now, what does that suggest to you is perhaps coming next...?
So, what has changed? Has there been anything in the news that might have afforded Labour an opportunity to gain public/voter support? Not that I have noticed. Things have been happening, but not conducive to material changes in voting intention.
What remains, then? The only change I have been able to determine is an almost complete absence of the Labour leader from the public eyte in recent weeks. He still pops up occasionally, though usually only when he has no real choice, such as at Prime Minister's Questions and when a major international issue arises.
Apart from that, he has been absent from the public gaze, or at best unnoticed, and it has allowed his party's polling malaise to begin to hel. I can't help wondering whether this has been a deliberate exercise conducted precisely to discover whether this would indeed happen under such circumstances.
Now, what does that suggest to you is perhaps coming next...?
Thursday, 19 December 2013
One Nation Labour, One Idea Balls
Continuing his tradition of re-using old ideas (and hoping that no-one will notice), such as allocating the funds Labour would supposedly raise from a one-off 'bankers tax' ten times over, Ed Balls is now trying a variation on broadly the same lines.
This time, he is launching the same idea he has put about previously – in fact, twice before, as Guido reveals (as have others).
It is interesting to note that the first time he repeated this 'launch' of his so-called zero-base cost review of all public spending a good year after his original announcement of precisely the same thing (although we can now expect Labourites to 'explain' how this is actually something different, somehow). The first was in September last year, repeated this past September.
Now, just three months later, here it is being 'launched' yet again. It seems that he has no other ideas, and has to repeat the same old same old instead of any original thinking, going forward. The reason appears to be an increasingly desperate attempt to hold onto the Shadow Chancellor position which, you might recall, he didn't get originally anyway: the somewhat hapless Alan Johnson held the position previously.
Now it looks as though it could pass to old hand Alistair Darling, or perhaps another, as Balls becomes ever more of an embarrassment to ed[ward] Miliband both for putting out messages that disagree with the party leader's stance (hardly a 'one nation' approach!) and for his weak and childish pranks before the television cameras, not least as the 'turkey' at Prime Minister's Questions.
As I have mentioned on a number of previous occasions when writing my political entries for this 'blog: the clues are all there, and their actions so often betray their motives. While it is always possible to read more into a situation that actually exists, often there are just so many indications, both current and from individuals' and parties' established patterns of behaviour, that it becomes a safe enough conclusion to deduce such as what I have outlined here.
This continues to leave Ed-M with the dilemma of what to do about (and with) Ed-B. Probably his only way out is to do something similar to what was done by Tony Blair to move John Prescott out of harm's way (at least in theory), which was to create a new position specially for him. Thus Prescott became Deputy Prime Minister, with his own ministry.
Something similar might be the only feasible way to deal with Ed Balls, though in opposition it is not quite the same thing. It would therefore be tricky and need a lot of very clever strategic thinking. I can think of a few approaches, or components of an overall approach, that might work...
In any case, all we need to do for now is sit back and watch what develops over the next few weeks and months, but with knowledge of 'the story so far' to inform our reading of that future. I expect lots of light bulbs to come on over people's heads, when that unfolds, because of this foreknowledge.
This time, he is launching the same idea he has put about previously – in fact, twice before, as Guido reveals (as have others).
It is interesting to note that the first time he repeated this 'launch' of his so-called zero-base cost review of all public spending a good year after his original announcement of precisely the same thing (although we can now expect Labourites to 'explain' how this is actually something different, somehow). The first was in September last year, repeated this past September.
Now, just three months later, here it is being 'launched' yet again. It seems that he has no other ideas, and has to repeat the same old same old instead of any original thinking, going forward. The reason appears to be an increasingly desperate attempt to hold onto the Shadow Chancellor position which, you might recall, he didn't get originally anyway: the somewhat hapless Alan Johnson held the position previously.
Now it looks as though it could pass to old hand Alistair Darling, or perhaps another, as Balls becomes ever more of an embarrassment to ed[ward] Miliband both for putting out messages that disagree with the party leader's stance (hardly a 'one nation' approach!) and for his weak and childish pranks before the television cameras, not least as the 'turkey' at Prime Minister's Questions.
As I have mentioned on a number of previous occasions when writing my political entries for this 'blog: the clues are all there, and their actions so often betray their motives. While it is always possible to read more into a situation that actually exists, often there are just so many indications, both current and from individuals' and parties' established patterns of behaviour, that it becomes a safe enough conclusion to deduce such as what I have outlined here.
This continues to leave Ed-M with the dilemma of what to do about (and with) Ed-B. Probably his only way out is to do something similar to what was done by Tony Blair to move John Prescott out of harm's way (at least in theory), which was to create a new position specially for him. Thus Prescott became Deputy Prime Minister, with his own ministry.
Something similar might be the only feasible way to deal with Ed Balls, though in opposition it is not quite the same thing. It would therefore be tricky and need a lot of very clever strategic thinking. I can think of a few approaches, or components of an overall approach, that might work...
In any case, all we need to do for now is sit back and watch what develops over the next few weeks and months, but with knowledge of 'the story so far' to inform our reading of that future. I expect lots of light bulbs to come on over people's heads, when that unfolds, because of this foreknowledge.
Saturday, 16 November 2013
Weekly Political Digest – 15 November 2013
This is being delayed a little, owing to some tragic news that has come in this week, but will be dated Saturday instead of Friday. I might also delay its release beyond that, while I am checking a couple of points. As is often the case, there is a fair amount to cover this week too. As usual, I shall start with national matters and end with local (Medway) topics...
Boom Today
Misquoting Susan Ivanova from Babylon 5, I admit, but the mini-boom (as I prefer to think of it, being perhaps more cautious than some other commentators) is not only confirmed in various ways and from numerous sources, it is also continuing to be awkward for Labour.
First, here's the Treasury's statement regarding (mainly) inflation, the deficit, and jobs.
As James Forsyth writes here, it is now very difficult to argue against this 'boom' assertion. It is no surprise that Labour has recently been trying divert attention onto other topics, realising that they have been rumbled and their messages on the economy have (yet again) been shown to be false and misleading. Not that the two Eds are in agreement over how their party should present itself regarding the economy, as leaked emails have demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt (and most of us knew anyway)..
Awkwardly for Labour, their tacking-away efforts are also coming back to bite the, as they have been clearly and unambiguously shown to be the architects of what they are now calling the 'living standards crisis'. I recently alluded to some of that on this 'blog. This graphic taken from their own manifesto for the last General lection (i.e. 2010) even shows that their policies are exactly the ones they are now attacking the coalition for implementing. I cannot see any wriggle-room with this either: it's an open-and-shut case.
Who Is Right On Immigration?
This perennial question is perhaps better answered from Douglas Carswell MP's angle, as he seeks to shed some light on an issue that, inevitably, suffers from a lot of misinformation, some deliberate, some from ignorance of what is a perhaps surprisingly complex subject. Take it from someone who has worked in this area: me!
The week before, Douglas had already looked at the topic from the point of view of our apparent reliance upon – and reverence of – so-called 'experts' in the field. I find all this a refreshing take on a difficult and (frankly) little-understood topic. It's only part of the learning one needs in order to be able to formulate a sensible and coherent view, but an essential part, I venture to suggest.
Incidentally, the only time I met Douglas was at a fund-raising social event here in Chatham, when he asked me to give him clues on local issues for his speech to the dinner gathering, later in the evening. It went down very well...
Falkirk Falsehoods lead Faltering Labour to a Fall
There is now too much evidence to let off any of the Labour party players in the Falkirk selection scandal and ongoing fiasco, right from the top of the party, for them to be able to protest innocence. Dan Hodges has looked first at Ed[ward] Miliband's own involvement, and the next day at the party leader's perceived lack of trustworthiness from inside the party; while Guido focuses on Labour's General Secretary and the part he played in all of this. It makes for very interesting reading; and the cat is now well and truly out of the bag!
As for Unite aspect of all this: although, as is said, they have some reason to be miffed at Mili-E's new-found negative stance, their own attempts to take over the Labour party during the past two years hardly afford them the moral high ground.
Spare Room Subsidy
This is another all-but-dead horse that Labour are still trying to flog, despite voter opinion remaining strongly in favour of the Coalition Government's stance on the issues. It's a full two-to-one ratio! Especially bearing in mind that the wording of the question tends to point toward responders feeling mean in doing so, they are – as in previous surveys – majorly behind the Government on this.
Labour are having an increasingly difficult time gaining traction on any of a wide range of topics they are pushing, which has led to near-desperation that has produced the seemingly scatter-gun approach they have been taking increasingly in recent months.
They are all over the place – and the clues are all there for anyone who cares to analyse what they have been doing, especially when compared to previous periods. It has happened before when they have been in a similar position, and not at other times, showing empirically that their approach is driven dolely by their own party political-driven agenda.
Social Housing
I am pleased that FullFact have looked at the question of who built more social housing (to use the in vogue generic term), Mrs Thatcher or New Labour? Although they try to slant it more toward Labour than they should, they are with validity bringing the Housing Association sector into the equation.
While there is still no doubt, in the final analysis, that there was much more of this type of housing created during the Thatcher years, despite a slow tailing-off over the years, it is overall a more balanced appraisal of the whole subject than some of the headline writers have been suggesting, on both sides of the political divide, for quite some time now.
Overall, it is a valuable source of data, provided one is just a little cautious regarding the (admittedly less than overt) attempted slant, which isn't difficult.
Behind this is the reason why this perhaps unexpected turnout has come to light. For those who truly know, rather than merely soak up the lines they are fed, Conservatives – for all their faults – have long been the best party to support and provide for the poorer end of society, while simultaneously encouraging self-reliance, dignity and wealth creation. They are now so one-dimensional as the political Left tend to be, whose aim is to dominate the poor and keep them that way: both poor and dominated by the Lefty 'élite' via the vast State machine
Kipper Rippers
Long-term readers of this 'blog will be well aware that I have been saying for some time that UKIP aren't a properly structured party (or words to similar effect) and their popularity would not endure. Both aspects of that are now being proven, not only with their opinion poll ratings having already slipped back part of the way toward where they were before all the protest votes without another home defaulted to their support, but also with the party's own structural deficiencies creating big problems.
Alex Wickham, better known to many as WikiGuido, and thus hardly a friend of the Conservatives, of all people has felt compelled to disclose the degree of rot inside UKIP, and how any dissent with its leader's views can have severe repercussions on one's prospects within the party.
Now, all parties have some level of discipline requirement, but the mainstream parties tend to be more of the so-called 'broad church' outlook. While this can encourage division into factions, it is not only much healthier on general principles but more accountable and less dictatorial than the alternative. Within UKIP, it's essentially a dictatorship – as, to be fair, several members and former members have been warning was on the cards for a few years now – in fact, ever since Nigel Farage again became the party's leader.
The party is now essentially a one-man cult, and is also one-dimensional, certainly as far as the public perception of them is concerned (there's plenty of evidence for that, for anyone who wishes to pursue this aspect), as always happens when a party is dominated by an individual. George Galloway and Robert Kilroy-Silk are two obvious other examples (and there and have been are others) that spring to mind in just this nation's own recent political history.
They are slowly dying as a party; and only if they get rid of Farage and 're-imagine' themselves (to borrow an expression from Hollywood) will the party be able to survive as a truly viable operation for much longer, preferably under a new name – and they have changed their name before (they were once the Referendum Party), so it could be done. UPDATE: Mark Pack has the graph that shows a consistent trend of decline in support of Nigel Farage's leadership, which just goes to add to my assertion that he needs to go if UKIP are to thrive again.
Naturally, I have modelled future scenarios for each way this could go, as I always do with my forecasting and public predictions (most of my findings are never made public, by the way), so I have no axe to grind on this. Either way will work out, one way or another...
A and E Pressures
As this is in the news again, especially locally, I thought it worth referring back to the hard data (using The Telegraph's own term) from a few months ago that shows A&E visits increased quite suddenly and dramatically, during Labour's second and third terms in government, beginning around 2004. The number rose by almost fifty percent (14 million when they came into office in 1997, to 20 million when they left), but has since flattened out under the Coalition.
Note that although from a year before that the columns in the graph were made up of two separate figures for the different types of A&E units, the total is still as accurate as when they were simply counted together. I know that's obvious, but Labour are trying to claim the graph 'misrepresents' the true picture, which obviously it does not..
The body of the linked article gives some explanation of what was happening, and deserves to be read fully to comprehend the full context and the multiple causes; but there is not the slightest doubt that the Labour government of the time caused much of it and triggered part of the rest through their policies, such as the 2004 contract that resulted in many GPs dropping their out-of-hours care provision.
No Khan Do
As I predicted last week, local Labour's newly-selected candidate for Rochester and Strood, Naushabah Khan, has changed her Twitter account to be publicly readable. The interest there is not so much in what has been posted there recently, but what went on while the account was 'protected'; and it is worth those who are sufficiently interested (and I can think of a few!) spending time going back through that period.
While most of it is of little interest, there are a few gems that no doubt some of us will have saved out on our own local hard drives, long before they might be deleted by their author....
As for offering a serious challenge to Conservative Mark Reckless: the section subtitle I have given this says it all: 'no Khan do'. It needs much more than a lightweight with no real substance to take on Mark – and I have the strongest feeling that even if that were to happen, he still will not be toppled, nor should he. It would be bad for the constituency, and ultimately bad for Britain if he went. Fortunately, I cannot see even the remotest chance of that happening: it remains broadly a Conservative-supporting constituency.
And that's it for another week!
Boom Today
Misquoting Susan Ivanova from Babylon 5, I admit, but the mini-boom (as I prefer to think of it, being perhaps more cautious than some other commentators) is not only confirmed in various ways and from numerous sources, it is also continuing to be awkward for Labour.
First, here's the Treasury's statement regarding (mainly) inflation, the deficit, and jobs.
As James Forsyth writes here, it is now very difficult to argue against this 'boom' assertion. It is no surprise that Labour has recently been trying divert attention onto other topics, realising that they have been rumbled and their messages on the economy have (yet again) been shown to be false and misleading. Not that the two Eds are in agreement over how their party should present itself regarding the economy, as leaked emails have demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt (and most of us knew anyway)..
Awkwardly for Labour, their tacking-away efforts are also coming back to bite the, as they have been clearly and unambiguously shown to be the architects of what they are now calling the 'living standards crisis'. I recently alluded to some of that on this 'blog. This graphic taken from their own manifesto for the last General lection (i.e. 2010) even shows that their policies are exactly the ones they are now attacking the coalition for implementing. I cannot see any wriggle-room with this either: it's an open-and-shut case.
Who Is Right On Immigration?
This perennial question is perhaps better answered from Douglas Carswell MP's angle, as he seeks to shed some light on an issue that, inevitably, suffers from a lot of misinformation, some deliberate, some from ignorance of what is a perhaps surprisingly complex subject. Take it from someone who has worked in this area: me!
The week before, Douglas had already looked at the topic from the point of view of our apparent reliance upon – and reverence of – so-called 'experts' in the field. I find all this a refreshing take on a difficult and (frankly) little-understood topic. It's only part of the learning one needs in order to be able to formulate a sensible and coherent view, but an essential part, I venture to suggest.
Incidentally, the only time I met Douglas was at a fund-raising social event here in Chatham, when he asked me to give him clues on local issues for his speech to the dinner gathering, later in the evening. It went down very well...
Falkirk Falsehoods lead Faltering Labour to a Fall
There is now too much evidence to let off any of the Labour party players in the Falkirk selection scandal and ongoing fiasco, right from the top of the party, for them to be able to protest innocence. Dan Hodges has looked first at Ed[ward] Miliband's own involvement, and the next day at the party leader's perceived lack of trustworthiness from inside the party; while Guido focuses on Labour's General Secretary and the part he played in all of this. It makes for very interesting reading; and the cat is now well and truly out of the bag!
As for Unite aspect of all this: although, as is said, they have some reason to be miffed at Mili-E's new-found negative stance, their own attempts to take over the Labour party during the past two years hardly afford them the moral high ground.
Spare Room Subsidy
This is another all-but-dead horse that Labour are still trying to flog, despite voter opinion remaining strongly in favour of the Coalition Government's stance on the issues. It's a full two-to-one ratio! Especially bearing in mind that the wording of the question tends to point toward responders feeling mean in doing so, they are – as in previous surveys – majorly behind the Government on this.
Labour are having an increasingly difficult time gaining traction on any of a wide range of topics they are pushing, which has led to near-desperation that has produced the seemingly scatter-gun approach they have been taking increasingly in recent months.
They are all over the place – and the clues are all there for anyone who cares to analyse what they have been doing, especially when compared to previous periods. It has happened before when they have been in a similar position, and not at other times, showing empirically that their approach is driven dolely by their own party political-driven agenda.
Social Housing
I am pleased that FullFact have looked at the question of who built more social housing (to use the in vogue generic term), Mrs Thatcher or New Labour? Although they try to slant it more toward Labour than they should, they are with validity bringing the Housing Association sector into the equation.
While there is still no doubt, in the final analysis, that there was much more of this type of housing created during the Thatcher years, despite a slow tailing-off over the years, it is overall a more balanced appraisal of the whole subject than some of the headline writers have been suggesting, on both sides of the political divide, for quite some time now.
Overall, it is a valuable source of data, provided one is just a little cautious regarding the (admittedly less than overt) attempted slant, which isn't difficult.
Behind this is the reason why this perhaps unexpected turnout has come to light. For those who truly know, rather than merely soak up the lines they are fed, Conservatives – for all their faults – have long been the best party to support and provide for the poorer end of society, while simultaneously encouraging self-reliance, dignity and wealth creation. They are now so one-dimensional as the political Left tend to be, whose aim is to dominate the poor and keep them that way: both poor and dominated by the Lefty 'élite' via the vast State machine
Kipper Rippers
Long-term readers of this 'blog will be well aware that I have been saying for some time that UKIP aren't a properly structured party (or words to similar effect) and their popularity would not endure. Both aspects of that are now being proven, not only with their opinion poll ratings having already slipped back part of the way toward where they were before all the protest votes without another home defaulted to their support, but also with the party's own structural deficiencies creating big problems.
Alex Wickham, better known to many as WikiGuido, and thus hardly a friend of the Conservatives, of all people has felt compelled to disclose the degree of rot inside UKIP, and how any dissent with its leader's views can have severe repercussions on one's prospects within the party.
Now, all parties have some level of discipline requirement, but the mainstream parties tend to be more of the so-called 'broad church' outlook. While this can encourage division into factions, it is not only much healthier on general principles but more accountable and less dictatorial than the alternative. Within UKIP, it's essentially a dictatorship – as, to be fair, several members and former members have been warning was on the cards for a few years now – in fact, ever since Nigel Farage again became the party's leader.
The party is now essentially a one-man cult, and is also one-dimensional, certainly as far as the public perception of them is concerned (there's plenty of evidence for that, for anyone who wishes to pursue this aspect), as always happens when a party is dominated by an individual. George Galloway and Robert Kilroy-Silk are two obvious other examples (and there and have been are others) that spring to mind in just this nation's own recent political history.
They are slowly dying as a party; and only if they get rid of Farage and 're-imagine' themselves (to borrow an expression from Hollywood) will the party be able to survive as a truly viable operation for much longer, preferably under a new name – and they have changed their name before (they were once the Referendum Party), so it could be done. UPDATE: Mark Pack has the graph that shows a consistent trend of decline in support of Nigel Farage's leadership, which just goes to add to my assertion that he needs to go if UKIP are to thrive again.
Naturally, I have modelled future scenarios for each way this could go, as I always do with my forecasting and public predictions (most of my findings are never made public, by the way), so I have no axe to grind on this. Either way will work out, one way or another...
A and E Pressures
As this is in the news again, especially locally, I thought it worth referring back to the hard data (using The Telegraph's own term) from a few months ago that shows A&E visits increased quite suddenly and dramatically, during Labour's second and third terms in government, beginning around 2004. The number rose by almost fifty percent (14 million when they came into office in 1997, to 20 million when they left), but has since flattened out under the Coalition.
Note that although from a year before that the columns in the graph were made up of two separate figures for the different types of A&E units, the total is still as accurate as when they were simply counted together. I know that's obvious, but Labour are trying to claim the graph 'misrepresents' the true picture, which obviously it does not..
The body of the linked article gives some explanation of what was happening, and deserves to be read fully to comprehend the full context and the multiple causes; but there is not the slightest doubt that the Labour government of the time caused much of it and triggered part of the rest through their policies, such as the 2004 contract that resulted in many GPs dropping their out-of-hours care provision.
No Khan Do
As I predicted last week, local Labour's newly-selected candidate for Rochester and Strood, Naushabah Khan, has changed her Twitter account to be publicly readable. The interest there is not so much in what has been posted there recently, but what went on while the account was 'protected'; and it is worth those who are sufficiently interested (and I can think of a few!) spending time going back through that period.
While most of it is of little interest, there are a few gems that no doubt some of us will have saved out on our own local hard drives, long before they might be deleted by their author....
As for offering a serious challenge to Conservative Mark Reckless: the section subtitle I have given this says it all: 'no Khan do'. It needs much more than a lightweight with no real substance to take on Mark – and I have the strongest feeling that even if that were to happen, he still will not be toppled, nor should he. It would be bad for the constituency, and ultimately bad for Britain if he went. Fortunately, I cannot see even the remotest chance of that happening: it remains broadly a Conservative-supporting constituency.
And that's it for another week!
Friday, 1 November 2013
Weekly Political Digest – 1 November 2013
It has been another of those busy weeks, so I'll have to be selective or this will end up too long for comfortable reading – not that the content necessarily makes for comfortable reading, of course, but I try to temper it with my own thoughts and experiences...
A Knock for Nick
Actually, several over the past two weeks; but this from Guido shows the Lib Dem leader's apparent dual standards when it comes to his own education as against his public stance against Michael Gove's education reforms. It's that question of 'unqualified' teachers – in reality, those not indoctrinated into the politically-driven 'training' style of the (as is now widely known) Lefty 'profession'.
That's what this whole debate is really about: it has nothing to do with standards and quality, only about control by political interests, as generations of unqualified teachers have shown. Nick Clegg himself is an example of the outcome of that freedom. There are times when qualifications are of value, but this turns out not only to be one of the exceptions, but also to be long-established.
While we're looking at hapless Nick, just a few days earlier Fraser Nelson was looking at this and other aspects of the Lib Dems and the behaviour of that party and its leader. It's Fraser in his telling-it-as-he-finds-it mode, and well worth reading throughout.
On a Lib Dem related matter, also in the Speccie on the same day, James Forsyth considered what David Cameron needs to offer Nick Clegg in order to keep the minor partner in the Coalition on board.
Now, if they had done what I outlined a while ago, this wouldn't be an issue for much longer, and the remaining programme of joint work should be well established. Remember: I (and a few others) thought that the two parties could start to separate into more distinct entities in their own right, starting from the recent conference season. Indeed, we have already seen fairly strong signs of that happening.
The idea is to reach a point whereby all the pre-election initiatives and legislation are either now complete or are currently going through the necessary stages, from now on, and nothing brand new (except for emergencies) should suddenly appear at this relatively late stage in the parliamentary five-year term. I'm reasonably confident that this is exactly how it has all been set up, behind the scenes, by the two party leaders.
Expect the separation to be made decisive and unambiguous by next year's autumn conference season, by when only tidying-up and minor (uncontroversial) legislative matters should be all that's left to be done before the May 2015 election. Meanwhile, as James says, the Conservatives in particular need to construct their manifesto – and it looks like it's already well in progress...
Leverage
In the ongoing saga of the UNITE Union, news of the intimidation techniques used by their so-called Leverage Team has reached the public awareness. It is noteworthy that they feel fully justified in applying such techniques, and have all the excuses ready. Of course, as the civilised world realises, only the lowest of the low would even contemplate such tactics, and only absolute trash would put them into practice.
The term 'Commie filth' didn't come about as a nasty insult devised especially for that purpose: it came into being from experience of what such types do in pursuance of their own agenda, here and anywhere else in the world. Put yourself in the position of someone on the receiving end – or, even more pertinently, one of their children.
There is no excuse in the Universe for that behaviour; and I think it might need to be treated as a much more serious offence than it is at present. Society should not be in effect encouraging this through a light-touch penal code.
I don't know how many members have now left the Union as a result of this (and all the other nasties that have been going on for years), but here's the story of one. Clearly noone with a shred of decency can now be a member of such an outfit – which tells us something about those who still are members and who have no plans to even consider leaving. Although I have no wish to turn the tables on them, it would be interesting to know how they'd respond if that did happen. Boot on the other foot, and all that...
The ongoing Falkirk candidate selection row continues this week with another delightful inside-track piece from former Labour member Dan Hodges. A batch of leaked emails has told much of the real story anyway, and it fell to the likes of Dan to write-up their significance, along with all the rest that has been going on during this unhappy (and hugely embarrassing, mostly for Labour) saga.
He correctly deduces, from the evidence now before us, that it is Ed[ward] Miliband whose personal reputation stands to take the greatest hit, rather than his party or even the Union that seemingly tried to rig the selection. As someone who has personally encountered selection rigging, I am very much alert to and cognisant of those methods described and other tactics used (only!) by the corrupt with their own agendas.
During all of the above, the ever-wily Jack Straw MP tried distancing himself from that Union, as this short video clip shows. Not that he was telling us anything we didn't already know, of course(!) Whether anyone believes his new-found stance is a matter for conjecture; but it's useful to have this on the record from a long-standing Labour MP, no matter how dubious his true motives!
Newman is the same old (Labour/Commie) man
Red Ed (Miliband) will continue to be unable to shake off that description while he is still subservient to the likes of UNITE's Len McCluskey, and also while he is ineffective at dealing with the numerous hard left (indeed, Communist) types firmly embedded within the Labour party and including both current elected members and those selected to stand in 2015. This is the story of one of the hopefuls.
To be blunt I have to say that it differs in no practical measure from those I have seen non-stop appearing within the Labour ranks and being picked as candidates, often getting elected (typically in safe Labour seats, but not only in those). Labour has, throughout most of its existence, been a Communist-style party with a very cleverly-manufactured public face to make it less obvious, and that certainly hasn't changed in the nearly forty months since Ed-M took on the party leadership.
Indeed, it has become the norm once again, and not even as well camouflaged as in earlier times – although that isn't helped by modern technology: it is much more difficult to conceal such truths nowadays, so it isn't necessarily down to poorer standards of deception. The example of Andy Newman will be just 'more of the same old Labour' to seasoned veterans like me; but might be more shocking to the younger generations who didn't live through the Foor/Scargill/Wilson (and the rest) years.
To anyone in that position, I can assure you that we've seen it all before, and it is and more-or-less always has been the true face of Labour, despite the veneer of seeming respectability and moderation they try to slap over the red rot to hide it from public view. They are just as totalitarian in nature as those running North Korea right now, and Labour-run governments have always headed in a similar direction, as is nowadays a lot better documented – and more easily publicly visible – than it was in my younger days..
Don't squander the advantage this generation has over mine: learn the lessons and learn them well! Today's world has not only better prospects of understanding the reality, but also has no real excuse for not doing so.
Completely Up The Poll
Jusr a brief mention of this very useful post from Dr Anthony Wells about misleading headlines to reports of and discussions of opinion polls. Long-term visitors to my 'blog will already be aware of how I always play it straight with everything I write, including polling news. The message here is not to be lulled into believing that all others act with such integrity when dealing with the same topic.
The good Dr Wells (whom I have met and talked to at some length) puts the record straight on a couple of recent examples of misleading headlines, and in the process reminds us to be sufficiently alert not to be taken in by such practices.
The Tommy-Knockers
It has been standard big media practice to 'knock' the English Defence League (EDL) and its founder Tommy Robinson. When said Mr Robinson decided to quit the EDL they media hacks and editors must have been in paroxysms of ecstasy: their boat had come in!
In reality, the EDL for all its many faults was never anything like the outfit it was portrayed to be, and some have cited considerable evidence – sometimes backed up with hard-to-challenge photographics records of what actually did happen at EDL meet-ups – that reminded one of the anti-Israel reporting that has been thoroughly documented in other 'blogs for years (I have studied much of that material myself).
Despite all of that, the EDL was known to attract the less idealistic and more thuggish elements of society – I'm sure not by design, and it was just an unfortunate side-effect – so there is some valid criticism of them 'out there'. Much, however, plainly isn't justified. I have been watching the scene for a couple of years now, so have become reasonably well clued-up on what is and what isn't accurate in the various reports I have encountered.
Daniel Hannan MEP has his own take on what he perceives to be a symbiotic style of relationship between the EDL, the Islamists (often a..k.a. Islamo-Fascists or, in the Hannan piece, Islamo-nutters) and even the ironically-named Unite Against Fascism (UAF) folk. By appreciating how all sides act at times, Dan paints what I think is not only a more comprehensive picture of this whole sorry business, but also a more helpful one than others tend to offer.
As for Tommy Robinson's departure from the EDL, this was recently covered in a BBC documentary. Ah, I can already hear alarm bells ringing in my readers' heads! Yes, you are right to be suspicious, though the BBC did a generally good job. However there were other aspects that need bringing to people's awareness – and Douglas Murray has done just that. As one might by now expect of Douglas, he covers not only all you need to know about the programme and its main Islamic participant in typical thoroughness, and then goes on to look at deeper questions.
It's fairly long; but I think you will find the time reading it through time well spent and 9as with Dan) helpful; and that is what we need most in regard to a topic that is somewhat sensitive and prone to misunderstanding and misrepresentation, including of its most media-visible players.
On The Record
Coming closer to home, I usually like to feature at least one item from my local area and (more often than not) its council. This week, it is the initiative by Eric Pickles to allow the public to record Council meetings in sound and/or video, perhaps including committees as well..
Of course, this will not become law for a little while, owing to parliamentary and legal procedures, and at this early stage no-one knows what will even be proposed, let alone finally passed into law or equivalent. Therefore it is hardly surprising that Medway Council did not permit recording by the public of a recent Overview and Scrutiny meeting.
This has infuriated local Labour, who (several weeks ago, a full three weeks before the policy proposal had even been announced) were planning to make and use such a recording for purely party political reasons (as everyone realised at the time, apart from any dullards if indeed any were present), and they are – predictably – having a go at the 'wicked Tories' for refusing such permission.
It also has to be said: if Labour now say "it’s wholly wrong for people not being able to record or film in public meetings", why did they do nothing whatsoever about this during their thirteen years in government? It has taken the Coalition Government just three years (barely a quarter of Labour's tenure) to come up with such a proposal: one that Labour clearly never actually wanted – at least until they could see a way of turning it to their own political advantage.
As always but always with Labour, what is dressed up as being in the 'public' interest is in reality pushed by them only when it is in their interest – nothing to do with the public at all...
A Knock for Nick
Actually, several over the past two weeks; but this from Guido shows the Lib Dem leader's apparent dual standards when it comes to his own education as against his public stance against Michael Gove's education reforms. It's that question of 'unqualified' teachers – in reality, those not indoctrinated into the politically-driven 'training' style of the (as is now widely known) Lefty 'profession'.
That's what this whole debate is really about: it has nothing to do with standards and quality, only about control by political interests, as generations of unqualified teachers have shown. Nick Clegg himself is an example of the outcome of that freedom. There are times when qualifications are of value, but this turns out not only to be one of the exceptions, but also to be long-established.
While we're looking at hapless Nick, just a few days earlier Fraser Nelson was looking at this and other aspects of the Lib Dems and the behaviour of that party and its leader. It's Fraser in his telling-it-as-he-finds-it mode, and well worth reading throughout.
On a Lib Dem related matter, also in the Speccie on the same day, James Forsyth considered what David Cameron needs to offer Nick Clegg in order to keep the minor partner in the Coalition on board.
Now, if they had done what I outlined a while ago, this wouldn't be an issue for much longer, and the remaining programme of joint work should be well established. Remember: I (and a few others) thought that the two parties could start to separate into more distinct entities in their own right, starting from the recent conference season. Indeed, we have already seen fairly strong signs of that happening.
The idea is to reach a point whereby all the pre-election initiatives and legislation are either now complete or are currently going through the necessary stages, from now on, and nothing brand new (except for emergencies) should suddenly appear at this relatively late stage in the parliamentary five-year term. I'm reasonably confident that this is exactly how it has all been set up, behind the scenes, by the two party leaders.
Expect the separation to be made decisive and unambiguous by next year's autumn conference season, by when only tidying-up and minor (uncontroversial) legislative matters should be all that's left to be done before the May 2015 election. Meanwhile, as James says, the Conservatives in particular need to construct their manifesto – and it looks like it's already well in progress...
Leverage
In the ongoing saga of the UNITE Union, news of the intimidation techniques used by their so-called Leverage Team has reached the public awareness. It is noteworthy that they feel fully justified in applying such techniques, and have all the excuses ready. Of course, as the civilised world realises, only the lowest of the low would even contemplate such tactics, and only absolute trash would put them into practice.
The term 'Commie filth' didn't come about as a nasty insult devised especially for that purpose: it came into being from experience of what such types do in pursuance of their own agenda, here and anywhere else in the world. Put yourself in the position of someone on the receiving end – or, even more pertinently, one of their children.
There is no excuse in the Universe for that behaviour; and I think it might need to be treated as a much more serious offence than it is at present. Society should not be in effect encouraging this through a light-touch penal code.
I don't know how many members have now left the Union as a result of this (and all the other nasties that have been going on for years), but here's the story of one. Clearly noone with a shred of decency can now be a member of such an outfit – which tells us something about those who still are members and who have no plans to even consider leaving. Although I have no wish to turn the tables on them, it would be interesting to know how they'd respond if that did happen. Boot on the other foot, and all that...
The ongoing Falkirk candidate selection row continues this week with another delightful inside-track piece from former Labour member Dan Hodges. A batch of leaked emails has told much of the real story anyway, and it fell to the likes of Dan to write-up their significance, along with all the rest that has been going on during this unhappy (and hugely embarrassing, mostly for Labour) saga.
He correctly deduces, from the evidence now before us, that it is Ed[ward] Miliband whose personal reputation stands to take the greatest hit, rather than his party or even the Union that seemingly tried to rig the selection. As someone who has personally encountered selection rigging, I am very much alert to and cognisant of those methods described and other tactics used (only!) by the corrupt with their own agendas.
During all of the above, the ever-wily Jack Straw MP tried distancing himself from that Union, as this short video clip shows. Not that he was telling us anything we didn't already know, of course(!) Whether anyone believes his new-found stance is a matter for conjecture; but it's useful to have this on the record from a long-standing Labour MP, no matter how dubious his true motives!
Newman is the same old (Labour/Commie) man
Red Ed (Miliband) will continue to be unable to shake off that description while he is still subservient to the likes of UNITE's Len McCluskey, and also while he is ineffective at dealing with the numerous hard left (indeed, Communist) types firmly embedded within the Labour party and including both current elected members and those selected to stand in 2015. This is the story of one of the hopefuls.
To be blunt I have to say that it differs in no practical measure from those I have seen non-stop appearing within the Labour ranks and being picked as candidates, often getting elected (typically in safe Labour seats, but not only in those). Labour has, throughout most of its existence, been a Communist-style party with a very cleverly-manufactured public face to make it less obvious, and that certainly hasn't changed in the nearly forty months since Ed-M took on the party leadership.
Indeed, it has become the norm once again, and not even as well camouflaged as in earlier times – although that isn't helped by modern technology: it is much more difficult to conceal such truths nowadays, so it isn't necessarily down to poorer standards of deception. The example of Andy Newman will be just 'more of the same old Labour' to seasoned veterans like me; but might be more shocking to the younger generations who didn't live through the Foor/Scargill/Wilson (and the rest) years.
To anyone in that position, I can assure you that we've seen it all before, and it is and more-or-less always has been the true face of Labour, despite the veneer of seeming respectability and moderation they try to slap over the red rot to hide it from public view. They are just as totalitarian in nature as those running North Korea right now, and Labour-run governments have always headed in a similar direction, as is nowadays a lot better documented – and more easily publicly visible – than it was in my younger days..
Don't squander the advantage this generation has over mine: learn the lessons and learn them well! Today's world has not only better prospects of understanding the reality, but also has no real excuse for not doing so.
Completely Up The Poll
Jusr a brief mention of this very useful post from Dr Anthony Wells about misleading headlines to reports of and discussions of opinion polls. Long-term visitors to my 'blog will already be aware of how I always play it straight with everything I write, including polling news. The message here is not to be lulled into believing that all others act with such integrity when dealing with the same topic.
The good Dr Wells (whom I have met and talked to at some length) puts the record straight on a couple of recent examples of misleading headlines, and in the process reminds us to be sufficiently alert not to be taken in by such practices.
The Tommy-Knockers
It has been standard big media practice to 'knock' the English Defence League (EDL) and its founder Tommy Robinson. When said Mr Robinson decided to quit the EDL they media hacks and editors must have been in paroxysms of ecstasy: their boat had come in!
In reality, the EDL for all its many faults was never anything like the outfit it was portrayed to be, and some have cited considerable evidence – sometimes backed up with hard-to-challenge photographics records of what actually did happen at EDL meet-ups – that reminded one of the anti-Israel reporting that has been thoroughly documented in other 'blogs for years (I have studied much of that material myself).
Despite all of that, the EDL was known to attract the less idealistic and more thuggish elements of society – I'm sure not by design, and it was just an unfortunate side-effect – so there is some valid criticism of them 'out there'. Much, however, plainly isn't justified. I have been watching the scene for a couple of years now, so have become reasonably well clued-up on what is and what isn't accurate in the various reports I have encountered.
Daniel Hannan MEP has his own take on what he perceives to be a symbiotic style of relationship between the EDL, the Islamists (often a..k.a. Islamo-Fascists or, in the Hannan piece, Islamo-nutters) and even the ironically-named Unite Against Fascism (UAF) folk. By appreciating how all sides act at times, Dan paints what I think is not only a more comprehensive picture of this whole sorry business, but also a more helpful one than others tend to offer.
As for Tommy Robinson's departure from the EDL, this was recently covered in a BBC documentary. Ah, I can already hear alarm bells ringing in my readers' heads! Yes, you are right to be suspicious, though the BBC did a generally good job. However there were other aspects that need bringing to people's awareness – and Douglas Murray has done just that. As one might by now expect of Douglas, he covers not only all you need to know about the programme and its main Islamic participant in typical thoroughness, and then goes on to look at deeper questions.
It's fairly long; but I think you will find the time reading it through time well spent and 9as with Dan) helpful; and that is what we need most in regard to a topic that is somewhat sensitive and prone to misunderstanding and misrepresentation, including of its most media-visible players.
On The Record
Coming closer to home, I usually like to feature at least one item from my local area and (more often than not) its council. This week, it is the initiative by Eric Pickles to allow the public to record Council meetings in sound and/or video, perhaps including committees as well..
Of course, this will not become law for a little while, owing to parliamentary and legal procedures, and at this early stage no-one knows what will even be proposed, let alone finally passed into law or equivalent. Therefore it is hardly surprising that Medway Council did not permit recording by the public of a recent Overview and Scrutiny meeting.
This has infuriated local Labour, who (several weeks ago, a full three weeks before the policy proposal had even been announced) were planning to make and use such a recording for purely party political reasons (as everyone realised at the time, apart from any dullards if indeed any were present), and they are – predictably – having a go at the 'wicked Tories' for refusing such permission.
It also has to be said: if Labour now say "it’s wholly wrong for people not being able to record or film in public meetings", why did they do nothing whatsoever about this during their thirteen years in government? It has taken the Coalition Government just three years (barely a quarter of Labour's tenure) to come up with such a proposal: one that Labour clearly never actually wanted – at least until they could see a way of turning it to their own political advantage.
As always but always with Labour, what is dressed up as being in the 'public' interest is in reality pushed by them only when it is in their interest – nothing to do with the public at all...
Sunday, 27 October 2013
Mystic Ed and his Crystal Balls
Quite a clever little video (it's just a minute and a quarter in duration) showing how 'Red Ed' Miliband's predictions on the economy and related matters have all proven to be valueless.
Not that this is any surprise of course, especially with the other Ed (Balls) involved as well; but it is handy to have them brought together in this reminder of what was claimed versus what has transpired...
Not that this is any surprise of course, especially with the other Ed (Balls) involved as well; but it is handy to have them brought together in this reminder of what was claimed versus what has transpired...
Wednesday, 16 October 2013
PMQs – 16 October 2013
I don't usually feature the Prime Minister's Questions sessions these days, as they have become somewhat predictable (and generally boring) political knockabout with little actual value.
Today's exchange between the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Official Opposition was sufficiently interesting, and fact-laden (though needs proper attention paid to it, as both sides were perhaps too soundbite-conscious so missed out explanatory notes that would have nailed their claims) to warrant putting up, on the basis that an occasional airing helps us keep our thinking correctly calibrated. It seems to have been a day for wagging fingers, but one can put that aside.
Therefore, courtesy of the BBC (on one of those still all too infrequent occasions when they allow embedding of their videos, though even now it involves a huge block of code, necessitating a lot more effort than it should have done to switch off autoplay and make the player size more sensible!) is today's exchange – nearly nine minutes of much hot air, but some interesting facts and figures in the mix too...
Today's exchange between the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Official Opposition was sufficiently interesting, and fact-laden (though needs proper attention paid to it, as both sides were perhaps too soundbite-conscious so missed out explanatory notes that would have nailed their claims) to warrant putting up, on the basis that an occasional airing helps us keep our thinking correctly calibrated. It seems to have been a day for wagging fingers, but one can put that aside.
Therefore, courtesy of the BBC (on one of those still all too infrequent occasions when they allow embedding of their videos, though even now it involves a huge block of code, necessitating a lot more effort than it should have done to switch off autoplay and make the player size more sensible!) is today's exchange – nearly nine minutes of much hot air, but some interesting facts and figures in the mix too...
Friday, 4 October 2013
Weekly Political Digest – 4 October 2013
In this week of the Conservatives Autumn Conference, much else has also been happening. I shall try to steer a sensible course through the muddied waters...
UKIPper Knocking
Well, it is thought by some (and with a degree of justification) that UKIP are still knocking at voters' doors and continuing to receive a lot of favourables responses.
Alex Wickham (the rapidly-matured 'WikiGuido' member of the Guido team) has here written at the recently-created Trending Central site how UKIP's potential success could let Ed[ward] Miliband into Downing Street undeservedly. There is also a goodly amount of other interesting material in the piece; but the bottom line issue remains the strongest: 'no need to vote Red to let in Ed'.
It's an old, old story; and it crops up on all sides of the political arena fairly regularly. Although the point being made is certainly valid, and people will kick themselves afterward if they end up throwing away their only hope for the future and end up with a totalitarian dictatorship (which is clearly the aim, as last week's Miliband conference speech again revealed), I have long accepted it as a part of having a reasonably open democracy.
UKIP is in reality a political irrelevance, as they themselves sometimes let slip, most recently in party leader Nigel Farage's admission that only at this year's conference did the party finally 'grow up'. There are numerous other indications, some of which I have mentioned before so don't need to revisit them now.
There is actually very good reason to proscribe all Left-wing parties and other such political movements, but I do not advocate that. Yes, the British electorate make mistakes, often in thinking that their little protest vote won't make any difference to who wins the seat in their constituency, just 'sends a message'.
It is a harsh lesson to be learnt – but it has to be learnt, so the mistake might well have to be made – or, ideally, almost made. The best result in 2015 would be a slim overall Conservative majority and the necessity for a second election later the same year. That should drive the necessary points home, when the voting public realise just how close they had come to having a neo-Communist dictatorship running their country...
Unhinged on the Left
It has been fairly common knowledge for some time just how unhinged James (a.k.a. 'Gordon') Brown was and how violent his temper tantrums could so easily (and often) be. With the publication of diaries and other written works by the likes of Damian McBride and 'Bad Al' Campbell, however much one is disinclined to take what they say at face value, there is more than enough insider detail to show that others were, as Rod Liddle puts it, 'mad as hatters'.
The mutual hatred within the Labour upper echelons during the Blair/Brown years are now spilling out into the public arena. No doubt today's version will appear in years to come – and make no mistake, it is very likely to be at least as much, as serious, as mad and as bad now as it was back then. We have been hearing of so much turmoil and mixed messages that it is all very reminiscent of those earlier times, in those and in other ways as well.
Meanwhile, the controversy over Ed-M's late father, the (very Red indeed) Ralph Miliband, rumbles on. Firstly, was the Mail right to make the remarks that it did? It's not the sort of journalism I usually go for or appreciate all that much, personally, but on balance it probably was better to have done than not to have bothered.
The primary reason for this is that Ed himself has repeatedly used references to his father's lead, guidance or whatever in speeches and the like, as Dan Hodges reminds us, so he brought up the whole business in the first place. The Mail certainly isn't apologizing for their original article, as this follow-up piece makes abundantly clear, and it looks like they have a good point (or several).
The question of whether Ralph M loved, hated or was indifferent to Britain is bound to be nuanced and I suspect is, in reality, impossible for anyone (including either of his sons) to pin down with certainty, despite any claims they might make. My own suspicion is that Ralph was grateful to this country for taking him in as a refugee, but hated it nonetheless for not being run as a Marxist state. Nuances, you see...
Interestingly, The Telegraph wrote a perhaps surprisingly kind obituary to Prof. Ralph Miliband back in 1994, long before the Barclay Brothers shifted that newspaper's political leanings and emphasis. On the other hand, The Commentator takes a more robust and uncompromising stance on this and the wider matter of Marxism and the like.
This is a better approach, as Ed Miliband and his supporters within our big media have diverted attention from the real issue and made it a 'personal attack/affront', thus making it easier to sweep the original subject-matter under the carpet again. We should never forget, though, the points raised in that (shortish) editorial.
Not that personal attacks and the like have ever been anathema to the Left anyway, as Carol and Mark Thatcher (for example), similarly bereaved and only this year, surely realise only too well...
Fake Protest?
Predictably, the Left arranged a demonstration outside the Conservative Autumn Conference in Manchester on its opening day. It was a modest size, well-behaved event on the (equally predictable) 'Save our NHS' theme.
Labour MP Andrew Gwynne, though, realised it wasn't very impressive, so tweeted this, along with a photo of the same location, but rather obviously a different demonstration altogether. There were lots of clues, especially in the banners held aloft – and it didn't take long for several people to independently reach just one conclusion: that it was the anti-Labour government demonstration there, opposing Britain's involvement in the Iraq war..
Oops! Big embarrassment for Andrew Gwynne, who obviously treated the British public as 'too ignorant' to realise his deception. He has deleted the tweet, but Politwoops has caught it on his page there – though there is no direct link to the tweet itself, only to the page from which it has been deleted.
At Peace With Itself
That is how James Forsyth describes the Conservative Party this week, after a workmanlike conference that was, in practice, a kind of 'extra' in the election cycle, which is usually a four-year term but this time round is for five years. This is the one-in-between, especially for the party running or leading the national government of the day.
The party is, James reports, more united now than it had been for a while, largely down to the antics, positioning and threats of and from Nigel Farage (and his UKIP chums) and Ed Miliband (and his Labour comrades). This fits in very neatly with what I have been saying for the past couple of years – some of it here, some in private conversations. It is why I have maintained a calm assurance during these turbulent times, which some might have misinterpreted as complacency. It was never that!
It takes an understanding of how people and societies act and react, to be able to work all this kind of stuff out in advance, and a few commentators have that ability, which can be valuable. In this case, there are other elements that no-one could predict specifically, but it was (for example) always likely that one of the top campaign strategists would be brought in around now, and that was always most likely to be Lynton Crosby.
Thus today's in-party scenario is a culmination of all that has been pointing toward this time for a long while now. From here on, it hots up all around the country. The likes of election agent Andrew Kennedy have been reporting all manner of perhaps surprisingly positive party and campaigning news, and it's not guff: I've been involved with Kennedy-manamged election campaigns and am well aware of how it all works; and the way he puts it on his 'blog and social media today remains entirely consistent with that methodology.
This is the point at which not only Britain as a nation turned a corner: it's where the Conservative Party did much the same...
At the conference itself, the set-piece speeches in the main hall (the televised part of the event) were good but not at the peak that some recent Conservative autumn conferences have produced.
They didn't need to be: they just needed to be truthful (which they seem to have been, though I am sure the odd hair could be split by someone trying desperately hard to find fault), carry the somewhat overworked conference slogan 'hard-working people', and send out all the right messages, attacking where necessary and praising where appropriate, including patting themselves and each other on the back. That's standard fare, of course.
It did the job; and both commentators and the public (when polled) have been clear that it was the best of the three main party events, and David Cameron still far and away the best – or in polls thus worded, the least bad – of those parties' leaders. The somewhat unscientific measure of Twitter mentions parallels this. The Express's Macer Hall even thinks of Cameron as the Man of Steel – a worthy successor to the Iron Lady.
Reasonably good news on the economy pointed to the way forward and took the wind out of other parties' sails, especially Labour who no longer avoidably even talk about the economy.
Although Ed Miliband's speech last week painted him as suddenly a strong leader, it was obvious to anyone with even a modicum of insight that he hadn't miraculously changed overnight: his is essentially Union-dictated policy, not his own.
It is axiomatic that if he couldn't come up with any firm and substantive policy after more than three years as party leader, it wasn't all just going magically appear more or less overnight. We are also acutely aware of how the unions (UNITE via its own leader in particular) are controlling Labour policy anyway.
The public seem to be broadly aware of this too, this year, as the expected post-conference 'bounce' for Labour in the polls was not only more modest than tends to happen at such times, it also took several days to take any real effect. Their conference closed on Wednesday, but it was the following weekend before this (almost certainly short-lived) polling boost came about.
Funnily enough, I expect a not dissimilar pattern to occur for the Conservatives, though for different reasons. Theirs was what has been termed a 'holding' conference (similar to my own description a couple of days ago) so wasn't anywhere near as geared up to securing immediate/short-term support 'blips'. It was aiming much more strategically toward May 2015; and I for one could perceive this during the event.
This was not the case with the Miliband speech or, indeed, any of Labour's conference: the aim there was very different, (a) to plug the policy vacuum and (b) to save Ed Miliband from ending up where he would be called upon to resign as weak and ineffective.
Their conference need was immediate and drastic: the Blues, on the other hand, were playing the long game coolly and calmly, regardless of what some have been trying to suggest – although no doubt a journo' can always find a few nervous MPs of any party in marginal seats!
Bad Reports? Burn 'Em, said Burnham
We already knew about the mid-Staffs hospital scandal, had heard that there were scores of bad reports coming in from here and there, and yet Andy Burnham – the then Health Secretary – has on several occasions been reported as having had all that bad news suppressed, hidden from the public eye.
The latest to hit the news has been Basildon University Hospital, as The Telegraph tells us, and in particular the apparent subversion of the official health watchdog (and its complicity) in providing what appears to be a false appraisal of the health service. Note that the 'Mike O'Brien' mentioned in that article is not the same Mike O'Brien who is a member of Medway Council's cabinet. Wrong party, for a start(!)
With a shadow cabinet re-shuffle thought to be imminent, this now looks like a suitable time for Burnham to be moved from the health remit; and Ed-M will have both immediate and (no doubt) further revelatory troubles later on if he doesn't move him. The additional revelations, if there are any, will still appear, but be less damaging to Labour if a new shadow health secretary has taken over at least several months before, and certainly well before the next General Election.
Guardian Loves Lenin
It seems to me that The Telegraph is going through a phase in which it is positioning itself as a kind of mediator between warring factions within our big media, and attempting redress and the highlighting of hypocrisy, presumably to take the sting out of the situation and smooth things over.
This week we have them dealing with the digging up of an ancient Mail item seemingly in praise of the now-infamous Blackshirts. The Telegraph's contributor for their counter, one Sean Thomas, points out that The Guardian has in its own past been similarly disposed toward the likes of Lenin, and in recent years Milosevic. The last two paragraphs are particularly worth reading. Yes, The Guardian has always liked and admired, and still likes, those Left-wing mass murderers and suchlike...
Party Membership
It is an open secret that all long-standing political parties in Great Britain (i.e. not necessarily in Northern Ireland, about which I know little in detail) has seen an ongoing decline in their membership levels for decades. Every now and again, something will happen to give one or another a short-term boost, often at another party's expense, but the overall trend is unmistakable.
Some though not all of this ongoing decline seems to have come about as a result of reduction in the benefits in being a member, and the subscriptions becoming a little too high for many people to justify on that basis.
The blogger known as Churchmouse has looked at the impact of a change in party rules and benefits for members that was brought in by the Conservatives for their membership back in 1998 – some fifteen years ago now. The post raises valid points; and it would be to David Cameron's great credit if he were to personally propose and successfully work toward reversing the damage and even improving on the original.
Although it is bound to take several years before enough potential members (including returning former members) .realise that there are by that time good reasons to sign up, a lot of good will have been done for the long-term future strength of the nationwide party.
...and on that potentially positive note, this ends the current week's digest.
UKIPper Knocking
Well, it is thought by some (and with a degree of justification) that UKIP are still knocking at voters' doors and continuing to receive a lot of favourables responses.
Alex Wickham (the rapidly-matured 'WikiGuido' member of the Guido team) has here written at the recently-created Trending Central site how UKIP's potential success could let Ed[ward] Miliband into Downing Street undeservedly. There is also a goodly amount of other interesting material in the piece; but the bottom line issue remains the strongest: 'no need to vote Red to let in Ed'.
It's an old, old story; and it crops up on all sides of the political arena fairly regularly. Although the point being made is certainly valid, and people will kick themselves afterward if they end up throwing away their only hope for the future and end up with a totalitarian dictatorship (which is clearly the aim, as last week's Miliband conference speech again revealed), I have long accepted it as a part of having a reasonably open democracy.
UKIP is in reality a political irrelevance, as they themselves sometimes let slip, most recently in party leader Nigel Farage's admission that only at this year's conference did the party finally 'grow up'. There are numerous other indications, some of which I have mentioned before so don't need to revisit them now.
There is actually very good reason to proscribe all Left-wing parties and other such political movements, but I do not advocate that. Yes, the British electorate make mistakes, often in thinking that their little protest vote won't make any difference to who wins the seat in their constituency, just 'sends a message'.
It is a harsh lesson to be learnt – but it has to be learnt, so the mistake might well have to be made – or, ideally, almost made. The best result in 2015 would be a slim overall Conservative majority and the necessity for a second election later the same year. That should drive the necessary points home, when the voting public realise just how close they had come to having a neo-Communist dictatorship running their country...
Unhinged on the Left
It has been fairly common knowledge for some time just how unhinged James (a.k.a. 'Gordon') Brown was and how violent his temper tantrums could so easily (and often) be. With the publication of diaries and other written works by the likes of Damian McBride and 'Bad Al' Campbell, however much one is disinclined to take what they say at face value, there is more than enough insider detail to show that others were, as Rod Liddle puts it, 'mad as hatters'.
The mutual hatred within the Labour upper echelons during the Blair/Brown years are now spilling out into the public arena. No doubt today's version will appear in years to come – and make no mistake, it is very likely to be at least as much, as serious, as mad and as bad now as it was back then. We have been hearing of so much turmoil and mixed messages that it is all very reminiscent of those earlier times, in those and in other ways as well.
Meanwhile, the controversy over Ed-M's late father, the (very Red indeed) Ralph Miliband, rumbles on. Firstly, was the Mail right to make the remarks that it did? It's not the sort of journalism I usually go for or appreciate all that much, personally, but on balance it probably was better to have done than not to have bothered.
The primary reason for this is that Ed himself has repeatedly used references to his father's lead, guidance or whatever in speeches and the like, as Dan Hodges reminds us, so he brought up the whole business in the first place. The Mail certainly isn't apologizing for their original article, as this follow-up piece makes abundantly clear, and it looks like they have a good point (or several).
The question of whether Ralph M loved, hated or was indifferent to Britain is bound to be nuanced and I suspect is, in reality, impossible for anyone (including either of his sons) to pin down with certainty, despite any claims they might make. My own suspicion is that Ralph was grateful to this country for taking him in as a refugee, but hated it nonetheless for not being run as a Marxist state. Nuances, you see...
Interestingly, The Telegraph wrote a perhaps surprisingly kind obituary to Prof. Ralph Miliband back in 1994, long before the Barclay Brothers shifted that newspaper's political leanings and emphasis. On the other hand, The Commentator takes a more robust and uncompromising stance on this and the wider matter of Marxism and the like.
This is a better approach, as Ed Miliband and his supporters within our big media have diverted attention from the real issue and made it a 'personal attack/affront', thus making it easier to sweep the original subject-matter under the carpet again. We should never forget, though, the points raised in that (shortish) editorial.
Not that personal attacks and the like have ever been anathema to the Left anyway, as Carol and Mark Thatcher (for example), similarly bereaved and only this year, surely realise only too well...
Fake Protest?
Predictably, the Left arranged a demonstration outside the Conservative Autumn Conference in Manchester on its opening day. It was a modest size, well-behaved event on the (equally predictable) 'Save our NHS' theme.
Labour MP Andrew Gwynne, though, realised it wasn't very impressive, so tweeted this, along with a photo of the same location, but rather obviously a different demonstration altogether. There were lots of clues, especially in the banners held aloft – and it didn't take long for several people to independently reach just one conclusion: that it was the anti-Labour government demonstration there, opposing Britain's involvement in the Iraq war..
Oops! Big embarrassment for Andrew Gwynne, who obviously treated the British public as 'too ignorant' to realise his deception. He has deleted the tweet, but Politwoops has caught it on his page there – though there is no direct link to the tweet itself, only to the page from which it has been deleted.
At Peace With Itself
That is how James Forsyth describes the Conservative Party this week, after a workmanlike conference that was, in practice, a kind of 'extra' in the election cycle, which is usually a four-year term but this time round is for five years. This is the one-in-between, especially for the party running or leading the national government of the day.
The party is, James reports, more united now than it had been for a while, largely down to the antics, positioning and threats of and from Nigel Farage (and his UKIP chums) and Ed Miliband (and his Labour comrades). This fits in very neatly with what I have been saying for the past couple of years – some of it here, some in private conversations. It is why I have maintained a calm assurance during these turbulent times, which some might have misinterpreted as complacency. It was never that!
It takes an understanding of how people and societies act and react, to be able to work all this kind of stuff out in advance, and a few commentators have that ability, which can be valuable. In this case, there are other elements that no-one could predict specifically, but it was (for example) always likely that one of the top campaign strategists would be brought in around now, and that was always most likely to be Lynton Crosby.
Thus today's in-party scenario is a culmination of all that has been pointing toward this time for a long while now. From here on, it hots up all around the country. The likes of election agent Andrew Kennedy have been reporting all manner of perhaps surprisingly positive party and campaigning news, and it's not guff: I've been involved with Kennedy-manamged election campaigns and am well aware of how it all works; and the way he puts it on his 'blog and social media today remains entirely consistent with that methodology.
This is the point at which not only Britain as a nation turned a corner: it's where the Conservative Party did much the same...
At the conference itself, the set-piece speeches in the main hall (the televised part of the event) were good but not at the peak that some recent Conservative autumn conferences have produced.
They didn't need to be: they just needed to be truthful (which they seem to have been, though I am sure the odd hair could be split by someone trying desperately hard to find fault), carry the somewhat overworked conference slogan 'hard-working people', and send out all the right messages, attacking where necessary and praising where appropriate, including patting themselves and each other on the back. That's standard fare, of course.
It did the job; and both commentators and the public (when polled) have been clear that it was the best of the three main party events, and David Cameron still far and away the best – or in polls thus worded, the least bad – of those parties' leaders. The somewhat unscientific measure of Twitter mentions parallels this. The Express's Macer Hall even thinks of Cameron as the Man of Steel – a worthy successor to the Iron Lady.
Reasonably good news on the economy pointed to the way forward and took the wind out of other parties' sails, especially Labour who no longer avoidably even talk about the economy.
Although Ed Miliband's speech last week painted him as suddenly a strong leader, it was obvious to anyone with even a modicum of insight that he hadn't miraculously changed overnight: his is essentially Union-dictated policy, not his own.
It is axiomatic that if he couldn't come up with any firm and substantive policy after more than three years as party leader, it wasn't all just going magically appear more or less overnight. We are also acutely aware of how the unions (UNITE via its own leader in particular) are controlling Labour policy anyway.
The public seem to be broadly aware of this too, this year, as the expected post-conference 'bounce' for Labour in the polls was not only more modest than tends to happen at such times, it also took several days to take any real effect. Their conference closed on Wednesday, but it was the following weekend before this (almost certainly short-lived) polling boost came about.
Funnily enough, I expect a not dissimilar pattern to occur for the Conservatives, though for different reasons. Theirs was what has been termed a 'holding' conference (similar to my own description a couple of days ago) so wasn't anywhere near as geared up to securing immediate/short-term support 'blips'. It was aiming much more strategically toward May 2015; and I for one could perceive this during the event.
This was not the case with the Miliband speech or, indeed, any of Labour's conference: the aim there was very different, (a) to plug the policy vacuum and (b) to save Ed Miliband from ending up where he would be called upon to resign as weak and ineffective.
Their conference need was immediate and drastic: the Blues, on the other hand, were playing the long game coolly and calmly, regardless of what some have been trying to suggest – although no doubt a journo' can always find a few nervous MPs of any party in marginal seats!
Bad Reports? Burn 'Em, said Burnham
We already knew about the mid-Staffs hospital scandal, had heard that there were scores of bad reports coming in from here and there, and yet Andy Burnham – the then Health Secretary – has on several occasions been reported as having had all that bad news suppressed, hidden from the public eye.
The latest to hit the news has been Basildon University Hospital, as The Telegraph tells us, and in particular the apparent subversion of the official health watchdog (and its complicity) in providing what appears to be a false appraisal of the health service. Note that the 'Mike O'Brien' mentioned in that article is not the same Mike O'Brien who is a member of Medway Council's cabinet. Wrong party, for a start(!)
With a shadow cabinet re-shuffle thought to be imminent, this now looks like a suitable time for Burnham to be moved from the health remit; and Ed-M will have both immediate and (no doubt) further revelatory troubles later on if he doesn't move him. The additional revelations, if there are any, will still appear, but be less damaging to Labour if a new shadow health secretary has taken over at least several months before, and certainly well before the next General Election.
Guardian Loves Lenin
It seems to me that The Telegraph is going through a phase in which it is positioning itself as a kind of mediator between warring factions within our big media, and attempting redress and the highlighting of hypocrisy, presumably to take the sting out of the situation and smooth things over.
This week we have them dealing with the digging up of an ancient Mail item seemingly in praise of the now-infamous Blackshirts. The Telegraph's contributor for their counter, one Sean Thomas, points out that The Guardian has in its own past been similarly disposed toward the likes of Lenin, and in recent years Milosevic. The last two paragraphs are particularly worth reading. Yes, The Guardian has always liked and admired, and still likes, those Left-wing mass murderers and suchlike...
Party Membership
It is an open secret that all long-standing political parties in Great Britain (i.e. not necessarily in Northern Ireland, about which I know little in detail) has seen an ongoing decline in their membership levels for decades. Every now and again, something will happen to give one or another a short-term boost, often at another party's expense, but the overall trend is unmistakable.
Some though not all of this ongoing decline seems to have come about as a result of reduction in the benefits in being a member, and the subscriptions becoming a little too high for many people to justify on that basis.
The blogger known as Churchmouse has looked at the impact of a change in party rules and benefits for members that was brought in by the Conservatives for their membership back in 1998 – some fifteen years ago now. The post raises valid points; and it would be to David Cameron's great credit if he were to personally propose and successfully work toward reversing the damage and even improving on the original.
Although it is bound to take several years before enough potential members (including returning former members) .realise that there are by that time good reasons to sign up, a lot of good will have been done for the long-term future strength of the nationwide party.
...and on that potentially positive note, this ends the current week's digest.
Friday, 27 September 2013
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.
.
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)...
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.
.
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)...
Friday, 20 September 2013
Weekly Political Digest – 20 September 2013
We're now into the autumn conference season, with the Liberal Democrat event over, UKIP sandwiched in between that and Labour's conference beginning this coming weekend, and the Conservatives the following week. With just eighteen months to go before the official General Election campaign opening, this is a crucial moment for all serious political parties in Great Britain, and on a smaller scale the Northern Ireland parties as well...
Oborne Backs Miliband
Peter Oborne has come out strongly in support of Ed[ward] Miliband as a good Labour party leader. I can no longer find it, so wonder if it has been removed in the meantime, though I don't know why that might have been done.
His perhaps surprising stance, when all around – including within the upper echelons and elsewhere in the Labour party itself – are labelling their current leader as weak and even 'an absence rather than a presence' (to paraphrase something I quoted here recently, is quite well evidenced, at least if you take the claims at face value.
In a week when the YouGov daily opinion polls have the Labour lead at either one percentage point or nothing at all, the Oborne piece must be the only positive thing Ed-M can take to his party's autumn conference this weekend. Indeed, I imagine he is already on his way to Brighton, or might even have arrived by now.
Of course, this probably isn't Iain Martin's famous DUEMA (the 'Don't Understimate Ed Miliband Association') but may be nothing more than an attempt to swing the balance of opinion within Labour so that they won't ditch him in favour of a more competent individual.
I can understand such a ploy, if this is what it turns out to be: having Mili-E at the helm of Labour at the 2015 General Election offers probably the best hope of there being a Conservative overall majority in May 2015...
A Liberal Helping
As usual, the Yellows had the first of the major parties' conferences of the season, in Glasgow. I no longer regularly (one might have said avidly just a few years ago) follow the televised conference set pieces in the main venue, as they have tended to become less and less for members and ever more targeted at the only people who can afford the sheer cost – the professionals and other financed delegates, whether lobbyists or union officials.
There's little scope for ordinary members these days, largely because of hotel and travel costs. Therefore I now find it more useful to keep an eye out for overall summaries that appear in the big media, as those at least tend to be fairly accurate reflections of the general flavour of each event.
Thus it has been with the Lib Dem conference, which seems to have had two main thrusts to it: (1) how they now feel that they must always be in government (something of a change of tack!) and (2) how successful they have been while in government – but only in holding the Tories back by acting as an anchor. Put another way (as Isabel Hardman does in the first of those linked articles) party leader Nick Clegg 'loves blocking popular policies', and then goes on to list some of them.
When they do support something, it doesn't go down well with what is now very much a disunited party, as Mark Wallace could see at the conference as early as Monday. As a party, they still don't really fit very well into a real-world governance situation, and it shows...
Of course, a negative outlook like that is not only a drag on the nation's progress toward recovery and being able to better afford the kind of society we'd wish to put (back?) in place for our children. It also tends toward stagnation, especially when there are still other countries in the world, outside the Eurozone for example, who are continuing to leap ahead of us while we plod along as the Eeyore of the nations.
Thus the Lib Dems aren't actually 'helping' at all, despite early signs in this Coalition term that they could and would be. They will need to be jettisoned from government in 2015, otherwise we really aren't going to get anywhere near where we need to be during the years that follow.
Despite all this, the coalition itself is apparently operating 'very harmoniously', as James Forsyth writes – and he usually has a good handle of what's going on out of public view.
Economy With The Truth
Allister Heath (editor of City AM) has a very good and truthful piece in The Telegraph this week, showing once again that he 'gets it' better and more comprehensively than many others do. There is a lot of good material in there; but the single most significant point is, as its headline indicates, that success must be made available to all, and not focus attention on particular groups, whether it's support for some or additional taxation inflicted on others.
I shall say no more at this time, and urge everyone with any kind of interest in our nation's economic and societal recovery to read Allister's long (but not too much so) article.
Supporting Poorer Children
Also from Allister Heath, this time back in his 'home' of City AM, this piece, of a medium-length (just eight moderate paragraphs) looks at the new 'free school meals for all' initiative. He very carefully states that it is this government and not a specific party that is behind this (and, by implication, others) idea.
It is already public knowledge that this is a Liberal Democrat scheme, and no doubt there has been horse trading behind the scenes to get this one out, in exchange for Lib Dem voting in support of some Conservative initiative elsewhere in the legislative arena.
On this policy, it is the last sentence of Allister's opening paragraph that tells the whole story in a nutshell...
The bottom line is that the money for all this has to come from somewhere, and history clearly shows that we shall be subsidising this in higher-than-necessary tax, which will in all probability hit poorer families proportionally more than any other section of the population.
Beyond the Veil
The controversy over cultural dress within (typically) Muslim. communities – though, I am told, originating from the people's culture and not Islam – reached an odd point this month when a court decided to impose a half-and-half solution regarding a witness.
I can understand the thinking: any face covering must be removed while giving testimony (and, one might just as easily expect, at other times when authority figures, including law enforcement, have a valid reason to require it) in order to allow the judge, counsel and any jurors to be aware of that aspect of body language.
After all, they get that with all other witnesses, so not requiring it in such cases as this could be said to be a form of discrimination, and could even (in some cases) be prejudicial to a proper outcome of the case being prosecuted.
In other situations, such a requirement is not appropriate – and that too is correct. If we didn't like cover-up garments, then Nuns' habits and even – one could say especially – with regard to 'hoodies'. There was a controversy surrounding those in a shopping centre not so many years ago, so we've been here before, in a sense.
The Commentator has taken a somewhat dim view of the court ruling, but I think they haven't quite understood the predicament that I outlined above. As with so many things in life, it's more than one-dimensional, so no universal one-size-fits-all approach can work properly in all situations. It's awkward, especially for the tidy-minded like myself, but it's a fact of life. We have the intelligence to think it through and devise something sensible and workable.
The Adam Smith Institute has a good take on the topic, and usefully pictures a range of such cultural head coverings, from the Nun-like Chador to the full Niqab and Burka. As they rightly say, banning them would be illiberal and un-British, as they put it.
The writer also points the way to a better, more sensible way to proceed – and I anticipate that the Motion in Parliament will end up being modified considerably in that direction. He also usefully acknowledges that there are other places where at least face coverings might indeed need to be required to be removed, such as airports and banks.
It would make sense, and if handled that way would not become the thin end of the wedge that some are suggesting.
Even Sheffield Gets It
The recent diversionary tactic by Labour away from the economic recovery (now in much healthier shape than they'd like to admit) and toward their new wheeze 'levels of income' was not lost on the more perceptive members of the public. Even in Sheffield – hardly an anti-Labour part of England – a letter-writer to the Yorkshire Post hasn't been taken in.
It is perhaps an example of what I have been saying for a long time: that in time even the Labour heartlands begin to realise just how much they have been taken for fools – and once that lesson has been learned that generation is permanently lost to Labour.
It happened a decade ago, when many Labour voters turned the BNP, of all parties, as was fairly extensively documented at the time. These days, they are at least as likely to switch to UKIP, much of whose new support comes from disgruntled former Labour supporters.
This all ties in with the opinion poll mega-shifts, of course. After two years of coasting under their new leader, retaining moderate but unexciting poll leads of typically 12 to 14 percentage points over the Conservatives, that lead has more-or-less been completely wiped out in just one more year.
The public weren't prepared to wait any longer for Labour to get serious, and who can blame them? The party is now seen by a large proportion of the electorate as having significant internal issues – and with the present leadship having been involved with, or at least knowing of, last decades similarly nasty activities by Brown and Co to unseat Tony Blair, as are being revealed in Damian McBride's new book.
On top of that, the policy vacuum, reshuffles of the shadow cabinet, and the business with David Miliband, all add to the feeling that Labour is not a party fit for national government – and as those of us who have seen them from the other side are well aware, that is a correct deduction, and in fact has long been so.
No amount of diversion, wriggling, repeated spouting of 'the party line' or any other artifice can plug the leak in Labour's body of support. Not now; it's too late for that, and too much has happened on the present leadership's watch...
No Sweat!
Well, it should have been; but UKIP leader Nigel Farage was so obviously perspiring, and profusely, that several big media commentators felt compelled to tweet the news. Guido has helpfully rounded up some of those tweets, along with a photo of the melting Farage...
Drunk Tanks
This idea of 'tanks' where the well-inebriated causing problems in public places can be deposited in privately-provided holding places, and for which they will be required to pay., has received cautious acceptance-in-principle (for want of a better way to put it) from this county's Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC), so Kent might start to see these in key spots around the county in perhaps a year or two. No decision has yet been taken, either here or elsewhere in the country, as I understand.
One can see the idea: there aren't all that many prison cells in the typical police station, and filling up a large proportion of them with drunkards is hardly a good use of a vital but limited resource. It also won't be pleasant for others being held in adjoining cells, some of which might have done nothing wrong and will be released the next day for all one knows.
I am unsure about the idea, but await further information, particularly on how the concept has fared elsewhere in the world (I gather it is in use in at least one other country), but at least it shows that someone is trying to tackle a long-standing and seemingly worsening (nationally) issue.
On the subject of alcohol consumption, it should as always be noted that those who go to the more extreme lengths are, for the most part, doing so because they want to be bold and over-the-top – it's their warped idea of 'a good night out'. Thus the drink is only a means to that end, and is no more a 'culprit' than any other substance that produced the same kind of effect.
Only recently we have been reading about so-called 'legal highs' for example, and we have long had meths and others as alternatives, so blaming the drink (which is often taken in combination with other substances, producing a dangerous but heightened-effect concoction) is not helpful, and misses the target completely.
FullFact have done one of their better looks into the topic of alcohol-fuelled crime, which although it draws no firm conclusions does at least go some way toward bringing some common sense to the debate. For one thing, it shows just how old some of the 'evidence' some are putting about really is: see the update in particular (at the foot of the report) to show that some goes back over a third of a century. Hardly useful or valid!
Dartford Crossing Toll
Staying in Kent... Although the country is not in a healthy enough state to scrap the Dartford Crossing toll at this time (and other parts of the country would ask why they are being, in effect, required to subsidise it thereafter if it were to be scrapped), at least a move in the right direction has been announced by the Transport Secretary.
I think this is a way to slow wind-down the toll so that it can be quietly dropped altogether a few years hence; but I can see why it needs to be done in this way. Meanwhile, regular users benefit, and it is what I read as a statement of longer-term intent. It's what I might have thought up under the prevailing circumstances.
That's it for this week: I do like to be able to end on a positive, ideally local, note!
Oborne Backs Miliband
Peter Oborne has come out strongly in support of Ed[ward] Miliband as a good Labour party leader. I can no longer find it, so wonder if it has been removed in the meantime, though I don't know why that might have been done.
His perhaps surprising stance, when all around – including within the upper echelons and elsewhere in the Labour party itself – are labelling their current leader as weak and even 'an absence rather than a presence' (to paraphrase something I quoted here recently, is quite well evidenced, at least if you take the claims at face value.
In a week when the YouGov daily opinion polls have the Labour lead at either one percentage point or nothing at all, the Oborne piece must be the only positive thing Ed-M can take to his party's autumn conference this weekend. Indeed, I imagine he is already on his way to Brighton, or might even have arrived by now.
Of course, this probably isn't Iain Martin's famous DUEMA (the 'Don't Understimate Ed Miliband Association') but may be nothing more than an attempt to swing the balance of opinion within Labour so that they won't ditch him in favour of a more competent individual.
I can understand such a ploy, if this is what it turns out to be: having Mili-E at the helm of Labour at the 2015 General Election offers probably the best hope of there being a Conservative overall majority in May 2015...
A Liberal Helping
As usual, the Yellows had the first of the major parties' conferences of the season, in Glasgow. I no longer regularly (one might have said avidly just a few years ago) follow the televised conference set pieces in the main venue, as they have tended to become less and less for members and ever more targeted at the only people who can afford the sheer cost – the professionals and other financed delegates, whether lobbyists or union officials.
There's little scope for ordinary members these days, largely because of hotel and travel costs. Therefore I now find it more useful to keep an eye out for overall summaries that appear in the big media, as those at least tend to be fairly accurate reflections of the general flavour of each event.
Thus it has been with the Lib Dem conference, which seems to have had two main thrusts to it: (1) how they now feel that they must always be in government (something of a change of tack!) and (2) how successful they have been while in government – but only in holding the Tories back by acting as an anchor. Put another way (as Isabel Hardman does in the first of those linked articles) party leader Nick Clegg 'loves blocking popular policies', and then goes on to list some of them.
When they do support something, it doesn't go down well with what is now very much a disunited party, as Mark Wallace could see at the conference as early as Monday. As a party, they still don't really fit very well into a real-world governance situation, and it shows...
Of course, a negative outlook like that is not only a drag on the nation's progress toward recovery and being able to better afford the kind of society we'd wish to put (back?) in place for our children. It also tends toward stagnation, especially when there are still other countries in the world, outside the Eurozone for example, who are continuing to leap ahead of us while we plod along as the Eeyore of the nations.
Thus the Lib Dems aren't actually 'helping' at all, despite early signs in this Coalition term that they could and would be. They will need to be jettisoned from government in 2015, otherwise we really aren't going to get anywhere near where we need to be during the years that follow.
Despite all this, the coalition itself is apparently operating 'very harmoniously', as James Forsyth writes – and he usually has a good handle of what's going on out of public view.
Economy With The Truth
Allister Heath (editor of City AM) has a very good and truthful piece in The Telegraph this week, showing once again that he 'gets it' better and more comprehensively than many others do. There is a lot of good material in there; but the single most significant point is, as its headline indicates, that success must be made available to all, and not focus attention on particular groups, whether it's support for some or additional taxation inflicted on others.
I shall say no more at this time, and urge everyone with any kind of interest in our nation's economic and societal recovery to read Allister's long (but not too much so) article.
Supporting Poorer Children
Also from Allister Heath, this time back in his 'home' of City AM, this piece, of a medium-length (just eight moderate paragraphs) looks at the new 'free school meals for all' initiative. He very carefully states that it is this government and not a specific party that is behind this (and, by implication, others) idea.
It is already public knowledge that this is a Liberal Democrat scheme, and no doubt there has been horse trading behind the scenes to get this one out, in exchange for Lib Dem voting in support of some Conservative initiative elsewhere in the legislative arena.
On this policy, it is the last sentence of Allister's opening paragraph that tells the whole story in a nutshell...
"Poor children are already eligible for free school meals, which means that this policy will only help better off parents."
Poor
children are already eligible for free school meals, which means that
this policy will only help better off parents. - See more at:
http://www.cityam.com/article/1379469230/we-must-help-poor-kids-not-subsidise-middle-class-parents#sthash.8NqAylvY.dpufPoo"
Poor
children are already eligible for free school meals, which means that
this policy will only help better off parents. - See more at:
http://www.cityam.com/article/1379469230/we-must-help-poor-kids-not-subsidise-middle-class-parents#sthash.8NqAylvY.dpuf
Poor
children are already eligible for free school meals, which means that
this policy will only help better off parents. - See more at:
http://www.cityam.com/article/1379469230/we-must-help-poor-kids-not-subsidise-middle-class-parents#sthash.8NqAylvY.dpuf"
Surely they must have realised this within Westminster? The Whitehall mandarins who put it together certainly will have done, and should have advised the relevant Ministers accordingly. Perhaps they did, and were ignored...The bottom line is that the money for all this has to come from somewhere, and history clearly shows that we shall be subsidising this in higher-than-necessary tax, which will in all probability hit poorer families proportionally more than any other section of the population.
Beyond the Veil
The controversy over cultural dress within (typically) Muslim. communities – though, I am told, originating from the people's culture and not Islam – reached an odd point this month when a court decided to impose a half-and-half solution regarding a witness.
I can understand the thinking: any face covering must be removed while giving testimony (and, one might just as easily expect, at other times when authority figures, including law enforcement, have a valid reason to require it) in order to allow the judge, counsel and any jurors to be aware of that aspect of body language.
After all, they get that with all other witnesses, so not requiring it in such cases as this could be said to be a form of discrimination, and could even (in some cases) be prejudicial to a proper outcome of the case being prosecuted.
In other situations, such a requirement is not appropriate – and that too is correct. If we didn't like cover-up garments, then Nuns' habits and even – one could say especially – with regard to 'hoodies'. There was a controversy surrounding those in a shopping centre not so many years ago, so we've been here before, in a sense.
The Commentator has taken a somewhat dim view of the court ruling, but I think they haven't quite understood the predicament that I outlined above. As with so many things in life, it's more than one-dimensional, so no universal one-size-fits-all approach can work properly in all situations. It's awkward, especially for the tidy-minded like myself, but it's a fact of life. We have the intelligence to think it through and devise something sensible and workable.
The Adam Smith Institute has a good take on the topic, and usefully pictures a range of such cultural head coverings, from the Nun-like Chador to the full Niqab and Burka. As they rightly say, banning them would be illiberal and un-British, as they put it.
The writer also points the way to a better, more sensible way to proceed – and I anticipate that the Motion in Parliament will end up being modified considerably in that direction. He also usefully acknowledges that there are other places where at least face coverings might indeed need to be required to be removed, such as airports and banks.
It would make sense, and if handled that way would not become the thin end of the wedge that some are suggesting.
Even Sheffield Gets It
The recent diversionary tactic by Labour away from the economic recovery (now in much healthier shape than they'd like to admit) and toward their new wheeze 'levels of income' was not lost on the more perceptive members of the public. Even in Sheffield – hardly an anti-Labour part of England – a letter-writer to the Yorkshire Post hasn't been taken in.
It is perhaps an example of what I have been saying for a long time: that in time even the Labour heartlands begin to realise just how much they have been taken for fools – and once that lesson has been learned that generation is permanently lost to Labour.
It happened a decade ago, when many Labour voters turned the BNP, of all parties, as was fairly extensively documented at the time. These days, they are at least as likely to switch to UKIP, much of whose new support comes from disgruntled former Labour supporters.
This all ties in with the opinion poll mega-shifts, of course. After two years of coasting under their new leader, retaining moderate but unexciting poll leads of typically 12 to 14 percentage points over the Conservatives, that lead has more-or-less been completely wiped out in just one more year.
The public weren't prepared to wait any longer for Labour to get serious, and who can blame them? The party is now seen by a large proportion of the electorate as having significant internal issues – and with the present leadship having been involved with, or at least knowing of, last decades similarly nasty activities by Brown and Co to unseat Tony Blair, as are being revealed in Damian McBride's new book.
On top of that, the policy vacuum, reshuffles of the shadow cabinet, and the business with David Miliband, all add to the feeling that Labour is not a party fit for national government – and as those of us who have seen them from the other side are well aware, that is a correct deduction, and in fact has long been so.
No amount of diversion, wriggling, repeated spouting of 'the party line' or any other artifice can plug the leak in Labour's body of support. Not now; it's too late for that, and too much has happened on the present leadership's watch...
No Sweat!
Well, it should have been; but UKIP leader Nigel Farage was so obviously perspiring, and profusely, that several big media commentators felt compelled to tweet the news. Guido has helpfully rounded up some of those tweets, along with a photo of the melting Farage...
Drunk Tanks
This idea of 'tanks' where the well-inebriated causing problems in public places can be deposited in privately-provided holding places, and for which they will be required to pay., has received cautious acceptance-in-principle (for want of a better way to put it) from this county's Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC), so Kent might start to see these in key spots around the county in perhaps a year or two. No decision has yet been taken, either here or elsewhere in the country, as I understand.
One can see the idea: there aren't all that many prison cells in the typical police station, and filling up a large proportion of them with drunkards is hardly a good use of a vital but limited resource. It also won't be pleasant for others being held in adjoining cells, some of which might have done nothing wrong and will be released the next day for all one knows.
I am unsure about the idea, but await further information, particularly on how the concept has fared elsewhere in the world (I gather it is in use in at least one other country), but at least it shows that someone is trying to tackle a long-standing and seemingly worsening (nationally) issue.
On the subject of alcohol consumption, it should as always be noted that those who go to the more extreme lengths are, for the most part, doing so because they want to be bold and over-the-top – it's their warped idea of 'a good night out'. Thus the drink is only a means to that end, and is no more a 'culprit' than any other substance that produced the same kind of effect.
Only recently we have been reading about so-called 'legal highs' for example, and we have long had meths and others as alternatives, so blaming the drink (which is often taken in combination with other substances, producing a dangerous but heightened-effect concoction) is not helpful, and misses the target completely.
FullFact have done one of their better looks into the topic of alcohol-fuelled crime, which although it draws no firm conclusions does at least go some way toward bringing some common sense to the debate. For one thing, it shows just how old some of the 'evidence' some are putting about really is: see the update in particular (at the foot of the report) to show that some goes back over a third of a century. Hardly useful or valid!
Dartford Crossing Toll
Staying in Kent... Although the country is not in a healthy enough state to scrap the Dartford Crossing toll at this time (and other parts of the country would ask why they are being, in effect, required to subsidise it thereafter if it were to be scrapped), at least a move in the right direction has been announced by the Transport Secretary.
I think this is a way to slow wind-down the toll so that it can be quietly dropped altogether a few years hence; but I can see why it needs to be done in this way. Meanwhile, regular users benefit, and it is what I read as a statement of longer-term intent. It's what I might have thought up under the prevailing circumstances.
That's it for this week: I do like to be able to end on a positive, ideally local, note!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)