Global warning

Thus 'Ed' Miliband in the Observer (my emphasis) :

"It's worth saying that no doubt when the next (IPCC) report comes out it will suggest there have been areas where things have been happening more dramatically than the 2007 report implied," he said.

Well, of course it will.

Never mind the facts. It's what the IPCC will say that matters. And that has already been decided.

The worldwide public is ever more vocal in its scepticism. The sceptic murmuring is swelling into a low roar, and is now joined by sceptical scientists coming out of the closet - not before time - because finally, finally, the MSM are catching up and getting stuck into Climategate. Naturally, so to speak, the Warmists will ramp up their attack before too many more of their cards fall flat. It's so predictable. One does not need a computer model.

These people will not give in. We'll be fighting them for decades. Now that water vapour is getting a look in, the Next Ploy Big Thing will be 'acidification of the oceans'. Trust me.

But back to 'Ed'. When he was asked on TWTW whether he had faith in IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri, Miliband Two said. 'Look, he is a Nobel Laureate! Of course!'

Er, no, Ed. Railwayman Pachauri is not a Nobel Laureate. Just a quangocrat who chairs (for now) an organisation which was honoured.

Of course, that was before the IPCC was revealed as just one more corrupt UN quango which patronises lucrative boondoggles for its friends and - oh, look! - has destroyed the integrity and credibility of the world's entire scientific enterprise.

The Nobel award was before we knew about all the shoddy paperwork, unchecked source material, amateur input labelled 'from leading scientists', mutual back-scratching, grant-fiddling, lies, fraud, conspiracy to defraud, conspiracy to commit a daily-growing list of criminal offences and official cover-ups.

That was before Climategate, Himalayagate and Amazongate were revealed as unscientific arse-dribble from which this Nobel Laureate organisation forged a moonbat consensus of taxsuckers desperate to find something new to feed on because they have already taxed every other thing to fucking death and there's nowhere else to go.

In decades to come, though, when warble gloaming is no more than a morality tale of human gullibility in the face of determined and corrupt pressure, humanity will suffer actual damage - from Climategate in which

corrupt scientists, to prevent criticism of their work which might jeopardise their access to public funds, have cold-bloodedly corrupted the peer review process upon which science depends

and

they have been defended therein by the shambolic, corrupt and unimpeachable (sic) IPCC which even now is encouraging them to persist in their manifold malfeasance.

The legacy of the IPCC and of Climategate is the possibility that nobody will believe anything any group of scientists says, ever again. The cost to the common weal of the fall from grace of the scientific process is incalculable. MMR vaccine, anyone?

The blatant bias of each of (the IPCC's) four reports has been pointed out by scientists – notably the rewriting of key passages in its 1995 report after the contributing scientists had approved the final text. This provoked a magisterial blast from Professor Frederick Seitz, a former president of the US National Academy of Sciences, who wrote that in all his 60 years as a scientist he had never seen "a more disturbing corruption" of the scientific process, and that if the IPCC was "incapable of following its most basic procedures", it was best it should be "abandoned". Source.

There was a time when the Royal Society would have put the guilty in the stocks and exerted its authority to flush out these Augean stables but there is clearly no hope of salvation from that quarter. The pontifications of some of leading FRSs show them to be as deep in the trough as the University of East Anglia crew.

Well done, IPCC, and well done all you fellow travellers like the ubiquitous 'Dave' King - incidentally just one of too many trouble-making 'government' scientists whose advice in so many areas has proved to be nothing more than grand-standing.

Not to worry, though - eh, Minister Miliband? Let's all look forward to the next IPCC report which, as you so rightly say, will say that we're more doomed than we were before. They you will say that the only way to save the dear little chiiiiiiiiiiiiildren (and their puppies) from drowning in a boiling sea is for us all to pay higher taxes and hand control of our lives to liars who treat us with contempt.

No. Fuck off. No.

Bright's right

Not something I ever expected to say.

More than

To date, the government of the United Kingdom has given (not pledged - given) more aid to Haiti than the EU Commission (whose foreign 'minister' can't be arsed to go to Haiti) and the governments of France, Germany and China put together.

We are the second largest nation-donor after the USA. The second largest overall is the group of anonymous private individuals.

So there, you cheese-eating, sanctimonious, hypocritical Francophone-like-Haiti critics of Anglo-Saxon imperialism.

Hat tip to Mr E.

Left-Right and right again

If I knew anything about football I might have half a chance of understanding the fine detail of this (my emphasis):

The main argument now, increasingly, is between those who view the state as an enabler and those who view it as, at best, a sometimes necessary irritant. To employ a massively oversimplified analogy, statists seem to think that the state should act as captain, coach, physio, kitman, ballboy, PR department, groundsman, ticketing department, FIFA representative, the guy with the half time oranges, agent, translator, WAG, turnstile operator, matchday police, the guy selling the big flags outside the ground and the guy confiscating the big flags on the way into the ground. Libertarians just want a guy with a fucking whistle.

I was at a loss until the last bit when the meaning became clear in an instant.

He's right of course. Again. What an irritating bastard he is. Your humble correspondent is only right most of the time.

And he owes me for three keyboards ruined in the last fortnight. If you should run into him, tell him I am saving all the receipts which will arrive on his desk on Ochi Day.

More wit and wisdom

... from PB.com, the most indispensable political blog apart from all the others.

This time, from commenter Patrick:

The army says: ‘If at first you don’t succeeed, maybe bomb disposal is not for you’.

Gordon Brown’s efforts at running the economy have blown up in all our faces. He has been like an incompetent ATO who has touched the wrong wires together with destructive results.

Tsk. Very cynical

Seth O Logue at PB.com:

General Election approaches.

A gathering of pollsters is arranged.

Each one is asked to predict the outcome.

“It’ll be close. By god, it’ll be close. Expect narrowing gaps.”

I just can’t explain it.

Completely baffling.

Which of these two would you rather have a drink with?

Blimey, that Mandy is one tough, self-centred bitch. Doesn't like letting anyone steal her limelight, does she?

In case you missed C4 News, here's the best bit:

KC: "You've blown it, Peter. You'e going down and you know you are. Get over it."

PM: "Yatter yatter yatter... fill up the air-time... don't you think you are going to get a whole sentence out, Ken baby, you Tory chump... whoops! Losing this pointless fucking argument! Damn. OK, when in doubt, patronise-patronise-patronise. And now for the big finish... shoot cuffs and... one, two, three, FLOUNCE!"

Director: "Nice big smile for the camera, Peter sweetie."

Back to basics

Brown gets his jollies from the power his present office gives him to make the Tories watch while he enjoys himself. Whenever he calls the election, that will be his last groaning, grunting surge of power. That’s reason enough for him (of all people) to put it off. His Balls will be aching for a few more, erm, surges before the, ah, chop. Brown may call a March election for which one can see good reason but I don’t think he gets off on ‘reason’ so frankly it would surprise me. More of my musings from PB.

Wassup, Dave?

Why the reserve at PMQs? Why no flame-throwers in the campaign to date?

Maybe Cameron has decided to show up Team Brown for the horrible bastards they are with a contrasting image of Clean Politics. 'More in sorrow than in anger' sorta thing... a gentle, sorrowful 'We Can't Go On Like This' instead of 'Hang These Fucking Evil Control-Freak Fuckers for Fucking Up Every Fucking Thing They Touch In The Name Of Their Fucking Horrible Fabianista Ideology'.

Well, all right, that's a little too street-thug, a little too Balls-y for Cameron, I grant you. He's too much of a toff gentleman to go all out with a negative campaign in the style of a Campbell, a Maguire or a McBride.

Brown presents a vast barn-door of a target for any enemy but maybe playing the man is just not in Cameron's blood.

Or maybe he thinks it's not in the electorate's blood. And maybe he thinks the Nasty Party label is with the Conservative Party for ever and that recalling it is to be avoided at all costs.

That would be sound, for which thank you and fuck off Teresa May.

That ghastly woman has done more substantive damage to the Conservative Party with her mal mot than almost any other single speech including 'unemployment is a price worth paying' and 'back to basics'. The dread connotation has shaped Cameron's personal and party campaigning from the word go. It colours every - EVERY - Conservative Party policy idea even before it's mooted, hamstringing the party philosophically, politically and practically whenever the Tories should be rallying the country with an appeal to sanity and a call to realism and the prospect of responsible capitalist prosperity for all.

Yes, all, you lefty bastard. Fuck off and carry on working to keep everyone imprisoned in your dream landscape of noble poverty, every crossroad with its gibbet for the plutocrat with mortgage or ISA.

Teresa May removed the lead put into in the Tory pencil by Margaret Thatcher. She is the living incarnation of anti-Thatcher Conservatism and I loathe her for it.

Why is the toffy-nosed, infuriating, couldn't-hit-a-fucking-barn-door woman still in the balloon? Hmph. Knows where the bodies are, I suppose. What? Oh. I mentioned Mrs May before?

Where were we? Ah, yes.

Actually, given the choice I prefer my politicians clean as opposed to dripping with gore. I am happy to get covered in the blood of the enemy myself, as is only proper to the foot-soldier, but I want those in government to at least look as though they have had a wash unlike the Labour front bench, pace the fragrant Bradshaw and Bryant.

And yet...

Team Clean Cameron, as Oborne has pointed out, looks a lot more like a government than Brown's shambolic, shagged-out shower. The Conservatives are increasingly treated as the government in exile by those who actually move and shake things out of the spotlight.

So Cameron must be wary. He has a lot to lose. Brown has already lost everything, pretty much - hence the gallows-gurning at PMQs.

Cameron must walk a fine line around Smug and Presumptuous - and Nasty.

For now. Once the election trumpet sounds, I trust the Cameron-Coulson-Hilton grid includes a snarling and biting break for the dogs.

Surely they know that Nice is knifed by Nasty on a daily basis in Brown's Britain? FFS, Gordon Brown is living proof that Nasty can gain power and will do anything to keep it. Don''t be too nice too long, Dave, or you may not outlive a kamikaze enemy.

I'll wait. For now.

But the electorate is angry, Mr Cameron. Fucking furious, since you ask.

We want revenge on Labour. We want some blood, even if it makes you wince a bit. OK, not the all out slaughter of which we have been dreaming. The odd gnash will suffice. Then you can go back to playing nice.

And if Teresa May should fall down one of the many stairways in the Palace of Westminster on the morning after the election, no-one will weep. No-one. Believe me.

Gordon Brown: 'I have a dream!'

'Give me five more years.'

Hm, let's think about that.

Here is Prodicus's vision of Britain under a permanent Labour government.

Vote Labour? Nope.

Image nicked from here.

A brave decision, Prime Minist... oh. Where did he go?

It's almost over.

At PMQs Brown has adopted a weird, gurning version of Maggie‘s Gallows Grin: 'I'm enjoying this!' but at night in the corridors of Downing Street the darkly frowning, sweating man with bitten nails is pacing, pacing, pacing, trying to find within himself sufficient courage to call a snap election in March.

Even the Great Delusionist knows a monumental fact when he sees one. March will be bad, but less so than May when the auguries will be far worse. March would also get him off the Chilcot hook.

May, on the other hand, would give Cameron more time to lose his shine which Brown is absolutely certain Balls and Campbell can arrange. Brown wants to give them more time and Cameron more rope.

However, Brown’s bodyguards are against March. They will lose their vast Brown-linked patronage, privileges and power immediately their man sounds the call. The Cabinet Big Beasts in marginal seats are against it because, for some of zose chentlemen, ze var will be oh-fer the moment the trumpet sounds.

The Party drums are against it. The old time-servers on the backbenches want to spin everything out for a few weeks' extra troughing - and Brown retains his tribal sympathy for them. He also recognises that he owes them and is looking to his place in the Labour Party after the election. There is no life for Gordon Brown outside the womb of his Labour Party. He craves lasting Party esteem in the form of office (heheh) or historical reputation (heheheheh).

March would be a better result for Labour than May but yet again it all comes down to the courage of one man - James Gordon Brown – and his ability to make a brave decision.

So, May then. June, maybe.

As posted at PB.com earlier

There are insults, and then there are Insults

It is a very great honour for me to be able to hurl a couple of coconuts in the direction of the Right Honourable The Lord Tebbit of Chingford in the County of... well, it used to be Essex but I expect it's London now.

For this:

I am not, and never have been a “Monday Club politican”, although I see nothing shameful in being one. After all, it is not like being a Fabian.

Delicious.

Can't wait...

.. for the release of Four Lions.

Nor for the frantic, furious, finger-breaking typing of that popular 'liberal' trio, Hundal, Hari and Sen.

Nor for the hilarity of the predictable preaching to which we'll be subjected by Jack Straw, backed by a troupe of high-kicking, burka-clad chorus boys from the MCB screaming in unison: 'Islamophobia! Death to the infidels who perpetrated this insult to our prophet PBUH and to all Muslims! Give us more money now!"

I watched this trailer half an hour ago and I'm still in stitches.

Hat tip Speccie.

Here's one I made earlier

Make your own here.

Dismal Prospect

If the Spectator is champagne for the brain, quaffable on a weekly basis, then Standpoint is Grande Champagne Cognac, a rarer treat which repays the investment of sufficient time to relax and savour it fully.

I have a subscription to both of these excellent journals, and also one which I shall not renew to the leftie Prospect which I suppose the rightie Standpoint was launched to balance. Standpoint and Prospect both publish articles by some of the best writers on current politics and culture. Design-wise they could be twins. The painful difference between them – and I make no claim to academic objectivity in myself, here – is that while Standpoint’s writers examine things as they actually are, Prospect’s writers examine them with that unconvincing and uniquely leftie combination of Olympian faux-detachment and whining because their world-view, albeit correct, irrefutable and historically inevitable, is not shared by and cannot be enforced on the unenlightened who are regrettably still too numerous, recidivist and noisy. The grim mixture of de haut en bas and just-you-wait-you-bastards is quite simply indigestible, like the Guardian, distilled. Now you may say that this is just the old ‘irregular verb’ fallacy, as in ’I am objective, you are a teeny bit biased, he is an appalling bigot’. You may well be right. Sue me. Bugrit, I am getting too old to waste my time trying to be balanced. A lifetime’s experience has made me a right-wing fogey and I intend to spend the rest of my allotted span luxuriating in my prejudices. They took decades to hone and now they are just about bloody perfect. I may relent and buy the odd issue of Prospect if it carries an above-average interesting article by an above-average interesting writer. Possibly not. There is too much good writing around and too little time. But what made me finally decide on the cull? This, from the deified prophet of the respectable Left, John Lloyd:

Expecting a Ford Cosworth for review and instead receiving an inferior model, he [Clarkson] writes that “the pain of not getting a Cosworth hurt: it hurt in the same way as a Sherman tank would hurt if it ran over your legs.”

[…] a car reviewer’s disappointment cannot be in the same league as one whose legs are crushed by a 30-tonne tank…

Yes, dear reader, it was that last phrase. I mean, life is just too short to waste one’s declining years on the humourless warblings of the sort of ponce who could write ‘a 30-tonne tank’.

Gordon Brown's definition of 'middle class'

Gordon Brown yesterday, quoted by SubRosa:

'And I believe that a fair society is one where everyone who works hard and plays by the rules has a chance to fulfill their dreams, whether that’s owning a bigger house, taking a holiday abroad, buying a new car or starting a small business.'

I commented on SubRosa's blog as follows:

That little list precisely circumscribes Brown's purblind definition of 'the middle classes'. No wonder he despises what he thinks they are like. If such people existed and if this was the sum of their world view they would indeed be the soulless, selfish, worthless people he imagines they are. Brown really has no idea - but why would he? He has lived his whole life in a tiny bubble of Marxist theory whose small windows on the world around him are the writings of Lenin and his biographer Maxton. Brown and his henchmen know nothing of the longings and dreams of ordinary people for financial security and independence of their own making in a stable and familiar society, the safeguarding of their hard-won liberties, the teaching to their children of the glories of their culture and their proper pride in all these things. Having cut his teeth on words like ‘struggle’ and ‘class war’, Brown can think and speak only in terms of 'fighting'. He has no other language with which to appeal to anyone. This is typically Marxist and also typically Fabian (‘Causes to fight for in 2010’). Brown and his Labour Party are now fighting most of the British people. Having destabilised the nation socially and wrecked it economically, Brown has made them weary of him and his bloody fighting.

Here's to Blessed Pauline and her ilk, a dying breed.

CoffeeHouse is taking a look at the British Council whose denizens, Daniel Korski suspects, are quaking at the prospect of a new boss in the mould of Dame Pauline Neville-Jones.

Seriously? Well, let's break out the Widow. It's about bloody time.

Korski fears the Tories may abandon the current 'liberal democratic values' in culture and education which, he says, the British Council exists to promote. Well, he's partly right. They are estimable 'values' and it does exist to promote them. The problem is, it doesn't. It has lost its way under the likes of Kinnock who, like all Labour aristos, is neither liberal nor democratic but anti-culture. For the peasants, that is. The masses are trained to accept a grotesquely false definition of what culture is while the nomenklatura enjoy pleb-free concert halls, art galleries, opera houses and literary festivals. But I digress.

Britain is - or was - synonymous with liberal and democratic 'values' but they are no longer taught. They are unacceptable. The Gramscians have excised them from our state school curricula and replaced them with their own canon of moral and cultural relativism, a thought-system of which only a nihilist like Pol Pot (a Socialist) could approve.

A bit more ‘Pauline realist' thinking from the British government about culture and education would be welcome, never mind from the British Council whose overseas staff lurve hanging around the British embassy but spend most of their time snuggling up to the local bigwigs and writing group-think reports for the Righteous back at head office in terms likely to win them a posting to a more congenial country in the next round.

The British Council is this country’s cultural ambassador from whom the majority of the British people would welcome a bit of trumpet-blowing on the world stage about Britain’s painfully-won political and cultural achievements (the two are inseparable) and the values which the British were once allowed to cherish as their patrimony. Incidentally, some of that at home wouldn’t hurt.

The BC should cut the warble-gloaming brainwashing projectsand the marxoid world-values mongering which occupy it at present. It should concentrate on promoting awareness and understanding of Britain's national, idiosyncratic, un-Napoleonic political and philosophical culture. (And what goes for the BC goes for the BBC, too.)

The chief priority of the British Council should be to advertise Britain’s settled belief in the inherent liberty of the individual, our tradition of stable representative democracy and apolitical civil service, our common law with independent judges and jury courts, our high culture and the history, philosophy and language which underpin all the above.

Sustained representation of this precious inheritance would increase our national self-confidence. It would boost the confidence of those representing us abroad in both diplomacy and business. It would re-establish, validate and emphasise Britain’s moral weight in an increasingly chaotic world. It would be helpful in trade, in political negotiation, peace-making and peace-keeping.

Oh - wait. I forgot. Labour has dismantled much of our political and constitutional settlement and worked assiduously to ensure that almost no-one emerging from Britain’s state 'education system' knows anything about British history or culture, so who on earth would staff a reformed British Council with a brief along the lines I suggest? God knows. No, actually, I know.

The public schools. It is no wonder that those occupying the highest echelons of British life are increasingly either privately educated or from families with origins in Asia where education is striven-for at great cost and where one’s own culture is esteemed, cherished and taught to one’s children.

By contrast, ignorance and ‘street’ patois are acceptable in state schools in the name of those evil deities, Diversity and Equality. The average school-leaver and graduate is incapable of speaking or writing in his or her own language about their own culture and history or indeed anything much.

For the most part, one can distinguish in an instant whether a young man or woman is state educated or privately educated. The difference in articulacy and knowledge is vast and increasing annually. What an indictment of Labour’s and the left establishment’s failure.

But the Righteous know they are right so they respond by sticking their fingers in their ears, averting their eyes from the evidence screaming at them from all sides and shooting the many heralds of the bleeding obvious. They complain and excoriate and make hate-filled speeches and redouble their efforts to force those schools which they do not control to be inadequate as those which they do, and brainwashing children into becoming climate change obsessives with an unwarranted self-belief which, when (inevitably) they fall below the standards of the real world, all too soon becomes in-yer-face aggression.

As for the British Council, a short reflection reminds one that it is indeed representing us as we have become. International Socialists like Kinnock are appropriate for its governance.

The fact remains that the British Council, like the nation itself, is overdue for life-saving surgery. It will not happen, of course, because it would be the opposite of relativist and we are no longer capable of asserting our positive belief in anything. Pride is illegal. It is 'imperialist'.

Britain's national stance has become the cringe. We hide it with apparently assertive shouting when there are cameras about, but we have in fact accepted that we have no right to national pride. What on earth does Britain have to promote to people in other cultures?

Britain's national stance has become the cringe. Either put some lead in the pencil of the nation it represents or cut the crap and abolish the British Council altogether.

Poll

Hands up those who think the economic and social car crash under whoever succeeded Brown would be pure accident and absolutely not of Brown's contriving.

The accidental dictatorship

"The decisions have been made for us. There is nothing left to discuss."

Douglas Murray was a guest of the British Council at a recent meeting in the EU Parliament. He records his impressions in the current issue of Standpoint.

Several people with impossible titles explained what the ensuing session would show. A very important man talked of the very important article in a very important treaty that would ensure everything needed to be done could be done. He was the Vice-President of the Commission or the Vice-Commissioner of the President. In Brussels, people can be called whatever they like to be called. I am confident that nobody outside the building had ever heard of him.

The treaty he was discussing had a clause on which he was particularly keen. Everyone talked about it. Yet I couldn't name it, and no one outside the parliament will have heard of it.

The vast building, replete with such people, put me in mind of T. S. Eliot's description of those who spend their days "dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good". If enough laws and treaties are passed then everything will be OK. Everyone agreed with that and only the details remained to be sorted out. Here was the concoction of a society in which you won't have to waste your time "pursuing" happiness. Here you will simply have to demand it.

And it wasn't just the future but the past that they hated. Everything about it was wrong. The important man explained how terrible and base we Europeans had been, how low our civilisation was while the others all rode high. Everyone clapped. We Europeans had been born into sin while everyone else had been born into innocence.

Realising with a start that I was sitting in a chamber full of well-remunerated masochists, I wiled away the time wondering when they would suffer the fate that all masochists finally meet: which is what happens when they finally encounter a sadist. As I ran over the enjoyably apocalyptic possibilities in my head, one thing was clear: the overwhelming sensation that an institution of government so monstrously unaccountable and unnatural which so hates and distrusts the people it aspires to govern is an institution that cannot last.

The day I was there, a new European President and Foreign Minister were chosen in a nearby room. Neither the people who did the choosing nor the people whom they chose could claim to have any approval from the people they claimed to speak for. Yet everyone in power, including all our major political parties in Britain, are in agreement that this is the way things should be done. As Heidegger once said, the decisions have been made for us. There is nothing left to discuss.

My emphasis.

If indeed the EU cannot last; if it collapses under the weight of its own contradictions; if the peoples of Europe tear it apart in defence of the liberties and identities they are being denied by an increasingly monolithic political class; if the current settlement come to an end, what sort of forces will replace it?

What always replaces repression?

Chaos. Anarchy. Dictatorship. The very things the EU was founded to abolish.

But the urge towards liberty and the assertion of identity are not to be denied. They cannot be. They are the essence of the human person and nature will have its way.

Those who deny these things because they can are sowing the wind. They will probably be dead when the whirlwind hits their victims.

The European State is in no way analogous to the United States of America.

Europe is enormous. Half a billion people some of whose cultures differ so widely from one another that the gulfs between them are almost unbridgeable. The member states do not share a single juridical culture, and the very process of imposing one militates against justice, creating victims and causing anger, as Geoffrey Robertson QC points out.

The USA came into being by the common will of a small population who shared a history and a culture, the majority of whom subscribed to a single programme of philosophical ideals and juridical principles. It had a unified economy and a single currency almost from the beginning.

These things made the young USA strong. The EU has none of the inherent strengths which the USA enjoyed from its beginnings.

The EU is inherently weak and built on sand. Therefore, to preserve itself as a polity, it has to bully its constituent peoples into common beliefs and practices which the political class believe, very wrongly, will unify the peoples. This is done by a coterie of administrators who are nameless and hidden but defended by the member states' governments who lie, in concert, to the peoples, telling them that this is not so. 'It is is a risible notion. The national, elected governments are in control.' They take the people for fools but they cannot hide from the people the self-evident truth that the emperor has no clothes.

This is extremely dangerous and cannot last. The only factor persuading the peoples of Europe against tearing the EU apart is fear. Fear of chaos and war. The big stick cowing the people. Hardly democracy in its flowering.

A person, or some persons, clear of mind and of benevolent intent, must assert the authority to persuade the European Union to reform itself, to limit is vaunting ambitions, and to liberate the peoples of Europe from itself before dark forces engage with the problem.

A peaceful community of free nations, of the homelands of very different but free peoples, is a great ideal. That is not what the EU has become.

The political elite must admit its collective philosophical and political error and change course, or the EU will end in tears.

A load of Balls from Clegg

The mask slips and Nick Clegg is revealed as just another school bully in the Ed Balls mould. You will teach your children what HE says you will teach them and fuck your own principles, traditions, religious beliefs and family ethos.

After all, what is more important to a LibDem - votes at the election from the Left, or the defence of your liberties? Ah. You guessed.

The old Liberal Party is dead, people. Dead and buried. Get over it

Do not mistake the 'Liberal Democrat' offering for anything resembling liberality or democracy.

Ollie Cromwell at The Red Rag says it better than I could.

Liberal my arse.

Dear Prime Minister,

Your party will shortly take over the responsibilities of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition. The British people will ask you, on their behalf, as (let us assume) the Opposition party leader, thoughtfully to examine and candidly to question Her Majesty's Government on all aspects of its policy.

To this end, as Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition you will have priority over all other elected representatives of the people in holding the Prime Minister to account.

This is a serious and onerous task. The British people will expect you to elicit thoughtful answers from the Prime Minister. They will expect the Prime Minister to treat you with the respect due to the importance of your position.

How will you approach your new responsibilities? How do you expect the Prime Minister to (a) answer your questions and (b) treat you, personally, on the floor of the House?

Will you accept dissembling from the Prime Minister? Will you be content with Stakhanovite lists of carefully selected and even false data? Will you accept it if the Prime Minister dismisses your questions with contempt and treats you personally with open derision?

I ask because I would really like to know how you see the proper relationship between a serving Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition and how you expect the next Prime Minister to respond to you.

Sincerely,

Prodicus of Ceos

Call me Norm

Lord Tebbit blogs again. The old boy's enjoying himself hugely, it seems. Worth a bookmark, obviously.

Our masters these days are willing to use a carrot and stick approach, but they almost always use the stick on the poor old donkey’s nose and inflict a terrible indignity on the beast with the carrot at its other end.

Scotch mist

Scotland's official policy to reduce the price of alcohol was in disarray last night after it was revealed that a so-called 'independent' report on Scottish drinking habits had in fact been sponsored by the trade body, Drinkup.

The report, its credibility now in ruins, was prepared for Drinkup by scientists at the University of Neasden. It presented data on the average cost of booze per annum for every man, woman, child, stag, grouse, weasel and stoat in Scotland.

The most shocking ‘findings’ of the Drinkup Report are:-

1. The average Caledonian spends almost £0.00 per annum on alcohol.
2. The average Glaswegian much prefers a 'nice cup o’ tea' or a ‘wee skoosh’ to a ‘hauf ‘n hauf’.
3. Scots do not like whisky.
4. 100 per cent of Scotland’s whisky production is drunk outside Scotland.
5. Scots are all teetotal. Any contrary imputation is part of the ancient racial slander concocted by the English which, over the centuries, has caused so many wars between Glaswegians and anyone who impedes their progress on a Saturday night as they dance the traditional ‘Buchanan Street’ waltz, merrily greeting anyone who takes their arm with the famous ‘Glesca kiss’.
6. The national drink for Hogmanay is the ‘the cream o’ the watter’, the first water drawn from the spring on New Year’s Day. After taking the ritual swally of sweet, peat-tinted Highland spring water, the entire population – men, women, children, stags, weasels and stoats – goes kilted to the kirk to renew the National Vow of Temperance.

Presenting the Neasden Report last year, a now-dismissed spokesman for Drinkup claimed that his members were extremely worried.

‘This is nothing short of a crisis. Unless we find a way to educate Scots into drinking alcohol, I fear for the survival of our hospitals and social services. Nobody ever gets ill up here and there are no social problems whatsoever.

'The Neasden Report is a serious attempt to raise concern about Scotland's abstemiousness before we face a brain drain from which Scotland may never recover. It will be worse than the Clearances. Oh, and when I say brain, I mean the doctors. Most o' them, anyway. Not the social workers, obviously.’

Last night, however, the chairman of Drinkup was forced to admit that the figures in the report are all pure guesswork.

'Now look, you must not impugn the reputation of the Neasden scientists. That would be outrageous. I mean, they work for the government – could they be more independent? But nobody's infallible, as Wee Wendy told the Pope. And we always expect a certain scepticism from the public, stirred up by, er, vested interests.

‘Frankly, though, as arse-wipes go this report is right up there with this government-sponsored report. Complete bollox. Haggis-feathers. But what would you expect from an ‘independent’ report sponsored by Drinkup? Would you expect it to say that booze costs every Scot, oh, what?... £900 a year? People are not daft, you know.'

Hat tip Alex Massie

Boris will never be Prime Minister

He's too bloody good for us. This country will never have the good sense to elect him.

The damned disunited - #2

Look at the eye-lines. Mandelson is not even pretending to look at whatever Brown and Balls are looking at. 
Who on earth let these images out? Are they mad?
FAIL.

The damned disunited

Today's Labour photoshoot FAIL. Look at Mandelson's face.

Preparations

You may say I'm a bit previous but it is election year, finally, thank God, and I am starting to make my election night plans.

There's going to be a lot to celebrate on a long night (and morning, possibly) so I'm thinking lamb chops for a 10.30 supper with a few bottles of Barolo and some bite-yer-legs vintage Cheddar, a bottle of Grouse, cold chicken and salad to see us through the night and of course a jeroboam of Twiglets.

Breakfast will be Glos Old Spot bacon and eggs (properly fried) with toast, Marmite and Wilkins's orange+tangerine marmalade, all sluiced down with the Widow.

On the box, apart from the obvious (tsk,Tory landslide - do try to keep up), I am especially looking forward to:

1. Michael White in a live OB from Mount Olympus, explaining to us that (i) in a strange kind of way which you may find surprising because you lack my sophistication, this is going to prove a good thing for the Labour Party in the longer term (ii) it's all Brown's fault and I always said it would happen if they didn't get rid of the bastard (iii) Labour will be back, make no mistake (iv) The Cameroons are celebrating tonight but cold reality will hit them tomorrow (haha yes of course I mean today David) and the voters are not going to like the bastards one bit once their true colours start to show (v) yes, David, mine's a large one thanks.
2. Mayhem in all TV studios as Balls Falls and everyone demands comments from everyone else.
3. The noble expression on Clegg's face as, a couple of dozen of his MPs having been thrown out by the electorate, he admonishes the nation: 'This election is not a victory for anyone and certainly not for the British people'.
4. Fraser Nelson trying to stay sober. Or appear sober.
5. Jeremy Paxman having a ball, getting thoroughly pissed relaxed and not caring who sees it.
6. Polly Toynbee trying not to look as though she is at a funeral. Which it will be, kind of.
7. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown trying to look at though she matters to anyone. Anyone at all.
8. Kirsty Wark biting the heads off chickens 'in our Edinburgh studio'.
9. Anthony King looking like he's swallowed a wasp.
10. Iain Dale, looking unkempt for the first time in his entire life as he loosens his tie live on Sky News.
11. Assorted Dimbleboids, Snows, Cricks and Boultons adding to the gaiety of the nation as they compete and fail to get a concession-on-camera out of Brown. The Harman grimace will have to suffice. And will be almost as good. But not quite.

Oh, it's going to be a great night.

What are you looking forward to?

Oh, go on, let's be enemies, eh?

Man in a Shed announces the re-birth of the Clockwork Clegg blog.

I'm all for political discussion and scrutiny of Them by Us so I'd welcome it but for the fact that your man Shed is too jolly decent for my taste. He says Clockwork Clegg is 'not necessarily hostile' to developments on Planet LibDem.

Why not? Hostility is the only proper response to the bunch of shysters that is the Liberal Democratic Party.

I am still waiting for the 'Liberal' mouse to come out from underneath the soft-left ex-Labour SDP elephant. Most LibDem grass roots are way to the left of New Labour - Socialists in a yellow jacket.

To keep the roots happy, the front benchers snarl at Brown - if they can think up a good sound-bite (St Vincent's job) - though they are as keen as Old Labour on marxist social engineering and redistribution, at whatever cost. They can say whatever they think will make them popular on any and every subject because it matters not a tuppenny toss. The only price they have to pay for this luxury is the occasional pang of resentment at never being picked for the Big Boys' team.

Think about it. Have you ever - ever - heard a LibDem offer an unpopular opinion or make an un-populist proposal? Or one which is absolutely never going to but gets them face time on the box?

They are an thoroughly incredible and mendacious shambles of very illiberal soft-Lefties led by 'You want it? We have it. Er, whatever it is' power-seekers and indentured Eurocrats like Brussels-insider Clegg.

Nationally, they are doomed to scorn and a permanent place out in the cold. They make no pretence of defending the nation of Britain, its culture, traditions and history or its interests in Europe. They are avowedly more internationalist than the technically internationalist-socialist Labour Party..

Their only real success is confined to local politics where, being principle-free, they can adapt like to attain and retain power - until they are rumbled and/or turn out to be a bunch of grossly incompetent big spenders.

The LibDems are going to get savaged at the general election. A reason to get the very old malt out. to follow the Grouse down the hatch.

The studio window as prism

Andrew Marr (his emphasis):

'... Simon Schama, one of our great historians...'

I think you are mistaking celebrity for importance, Mr Marr.

Being on the box all the time neither indicates nor improves the scholarly standing of a telegenic journeyman academic. It merely increases his ubiquity and recognition level among the TV-watching laity.

Do try get out of your cosy BBC studio a bit more, Mr Marr.

Norm's a Right old blogger!

And off to a flying start is the old flyer himself, the 'Graph's latest blogger:

When I was at school in a less than fashionable working-class suburb of London before the Second World War, I knew plenty of kids whose fathers had been unemployed during the great slump, but I did not know any whose fathers had never worked in their lives. I did not know anyone who had been mugged, or even anyone who knew anyone who had been mugged. I soon learned that not every one was growing up in an ideal family, but I did not know anyone who had several half brothers and sisters, all by different fathers.

More! More! [ claps wildly ]

Course, Thirsty Lewis has only brought Norm on board to annoy Cameron. Meh. This should be a lot of fun.

Me? I'm ordinary, me. One of 'the many'.

As usual, Janet Daley is half right.

Her overall point (that the Conservatives should attack Labour head-on) is well made but in making it she is banging a drum she should puncture, for she can be read as accepting Labour's categorising of people into either 'privileged' or 'disadvantaged' as though there is no other category. That is exactly what Labour needs you to believe and it is a lie.

Of course there are privileged people and there are disadvantaged people. The many, though, are neither. They are simply ordinary. They go about their lives privately: decent and realistic and making their own happiness, pulling each other through painful experiences, until the commissars of the Labour Party come along and tell them they must be angry. The must fight.

Why must everybody fight? Why do they say this? It's psycho- and socio-pathological.

In a free society, privilege must be available. It is a sine qua non of liberty. Ordinary people - the many - know this. They do not consider themselves 'disadvantaged' because someone else is better off than they are.

Labour hate-mongers try to make ordinary people - the many - angry by comparing them with a few whose 'privileges' anger only themselves, the Brown-Balls-Harman and Gramsci-ist class warriors. One can understand their sensitivity to the possibility of public distaste, though, since many of them are highly privileged themselves and hag-ridden by guilt about it. To ease their troubled souls, they 'make a holy show of themselves' as my grandmother would have said, mumbling through the half-forgotten words of their hymn to a discarded political-economic theory which has been turned to ashes by history, even as they assure each other that their dream of total equality will come about through 'historical inevitability'. No wonder they are angry. The world has left them behind and History itself is laughing at them and their song.

Political rancour is not an everyday emotion outside the Labour Party - other than about the Labour Party. Ordinary people - the many - do not wish to waste their lives on it. They have work to do, families and friends to love, hobbies to pursue, soaps to watch, dogs to feed, sock-drawers to sort out. They wish to be left alone, free to aspire if they wish to a WAG-ish or pop-star or banker lifestyle.

Ordinary people are realists, well aware that Kate Moss and Lily Allen, David Beckham and Simon Cowell have to work like stink for their big money. They find the glitterati amusing and entertaining if they think about them at all, then they shrug and get on with their lives which are, in the main, reasonably satisfying in ways Labour’s class warriors do not understand. As for the landed aristocracy who are anyway a minuscule proportion of the population, and most of them rather more socially responsible than your average Labour politician, ordinary people - the many - either find them monumentally ignorable or they rather like them. Your normal toff is welcome down the pub any time although I doubt one can say the same of the very weird Ballses and Harmen.

It is no wonder Labour people do not understand ordinary people - the many - for they are not ordinary. Labour people need to be - and boringly drone non-stop about - ‘fighting’. This is embedded Marxist thinking which ordinary people - the many - find both alien and bonkers and for good reason. Ordinary people - the many - are emotionally adult and so do not need to spend their entire lives behaving like hormone-charged adolescent boys wrestling behind the bike shed to sublimate their newly discovered sex drive.

Framing your politics solely in terms of 'fighting', then constantly actually fighting and dreaming up ways to fight some more - which, revealingly, Brown says he does daily - very obviously drives one mad and renders one unfit for high office. Ordinary voters - the very many - will shortly make this point to the Labour Party, and to Mr Brown in particular.

Ordinary people - the many - are only disadvantaged by the Labour government which expropriates their money to a wholly unreasonable extent and burns it, instead of putting it to work. Ordinary people - the many - are happy to support the helpless but resent having to hand over their earnings to people made helpless by Labour in furtherance of its dogma. They especially resent handing over their money to a government run by an incompetent, malevolent Labour madman and his personal bodyguard.

Ordinary people - the many - are only 'disadvantaged' by a Labour government which supervises their every thought and action for its own political purposes, convinced because they have read Marx that they are both able and duty-bound to re-educate ordinary people - the many. Labour people refer to ordinary people as ‘the masses’, and send their officials into their homes - and minds - to force them to comply with Labour's minutest, tentacular, whole-life-encompassing regulations.

In drafting its insane, asphyxiating regulatory regime, Labour has demolished English Common Law, perhaps this country's greatest gift to civilised life. Under some of Labour's more creative new laws, an accused person is assumed to be guilty unless he can prove his innocence (not necessarily before a jury of his peers) and his property may be confiscated by the state as soon as he is accused. Soon, everything which is not forbidden will be compulsory.

This, and other damage to our eccentric, pragmatic and successful constitutional settlement is Labour's legacy and it is this, above all its other crimes, which makes Labour the enemy of ordinary people who wish to live quiet, private, peaceful lives. Justice is no longer available to all citizens. Our peaceful society is riven by dangerous divisions which Labour has deliberately created for its own dogmatic and party purposes, or through its cosmic incompetence and ignorance.

If you remove the Labour Party from the lives of ordinary people you remove at a stroke the driver of most of the systemic disadvantages which only a Labour government could impose, by which it drives as many of them as possible down to the gutter where they become semi-feral, aggressive-defensive and utterly dependent on the Labour aristocracy for their survival. If they vote at all, they can only vote to prolong the Labour aristocracy's life of privilege, for Labour has told than that the only alternative is starvation. Real starvation. This is wickedness of the highest order, only a few short steps from eugenics and mass extermination.

Refuse to accept the Labour Party's definitions of you. With one bound you are free. Your next step is to vote. Vote whichever way you need to, to destroy the patronising, interfering, oppressive Labour government of slave-owning hate-mongers.

Confused?

So let’s recap.

1. Brown assured Darling and Co. he is going to rein in Ed Balls.
2. Darling walks out grinning and tells the country he’s going to out-Osborne Osborne with massive cuts.
3. Mandelson makes a speech saying, in short, that Thatcher was right and Claws Four’s dead, get over it.
4. Tonight Balls runs an article saying fack yew to Darling.
5. Update: The Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary are not talking to each other.

I am confused. Who’s minding the shop?

This comment is issued on behalf of the British electorate, the international bond markets, the global finance industry, the Bank of England, the European Commission, the ECB, the IMF, The One… and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all.

"Hello? Number Ten Downing Street? Hello? Hello?"

So Brown chopped the choppers after all

So as well as making all the domestic politics ministries answerable to the Chancellor as per the Granita Pact, Blair allowed Brown to dictate how the Ministry of Defence was to allocate its funds, and he vetoed the purchase of helicopters? The RAF has decided to leak the relevant government paperwork to the media. So in addition to half his Cabinet turning against him, Brown is now known to have betrayed the Air Force directly. And the Army indirectly. Or directly. We await further information.

Way to go, Brown.

And tomorrow we are to learn, rumour has it, of some of his other endearing little ways. I wonder whether any of those might include involving himself in Donorgate? Perish the thought.

How soon before his patience is exhausted?

‘I have no more sympathy with you feculent maggots and no more patience to pretend otherwise. Gentlemen, I wash my hands of this weirdness.’

Mandy challenges Spart for Labour's soul

Peter Mandelson, ever the pragmatist, last week:

"The 1980s saw the timely privatization of industries that were long overdue for return to the commercial sector. Industrial relations underwent a sea change. The quality of management in our best firms improved, and with it, corporate profitability."

Translation:

• Margaret Thatcher was right.
• Clause 4 Socialism failed. History has proved it to be a delusion.
• Get over it.

"First and foremost we need to foster a new climate for enterprise in Britain. There is no substitute for this – no substitute for the drive and ambition that it brings … it is the single most important engine of economic progress. The recovery cannot be driven by consumer debt or public spending. It will be driven by private sector investment and private enterprise."

Translation:

• Cut the public sector. I said CUT IT.
• The party's over. Stop shopping and get back to work.
• If you haven't got any work, either start a business or get on your bike.

"Enterprise and reward go hand in hand. Much as it shocked many of my friends when I said I was comfortable with people making themselves “filthy rich”, in the context I was speaking I was simply stating a simple truth: that enterprise and effort should be rewarded. It sets goals to spur people and brings gains to us all … there is never a case for punitive taxation. There is never a case for rates of tax that remove the incentive to self-improvement or to build a business."

Translation:

• CUT TAXES.
• Gordon Brown is catastrophically wrong about taxation, just like Healey.
• Inequality is an economic fact and an economic necessity.
• The Labour Party is and always has been economically illiterate.
• No more amateur chumps ('historians of Socialism') running the economy.

Executive Summary:

• The Tories have the right idea.
• The public recognise that and will elect them.
• Gordon Brown would rather die than admit that these are political facts
• After the election, Labour has a choice to make. The way of class war nostalgia as recommended by the Comrades, or my way.
• The first will lead the Labour Party to political oblivion, the second offers some glimmer of hope of survival and of being in government again one day.
• Your call, Spart.

Sub-text:

• I am more employable than any of you yet here I am, when I could be on Wall Street, in a Geneva chateau or on a humongous fuck-off yacht in the Aegean..
• I have proved my loyalty to this Party over and over again. I have nothing to prove and nothing to lose by yelling you the truth.
• If you wish to remain out of office and become a withering remnant of the Party you claim to love, be my guest. Hold on to your comfortable illusions and delusions. I wish I thought they will comfort you out there in the wilderness.
• If you choose to continue blindly ahead despite the reality around you, well, frankly my dears I really couldn't give a flying fuck.
• Your future. Your call.

Happy hour

Here’s a good game.

Walk into a pub of your choosing, which can be anywhere… Hampstead, Glasgow, Manchester, a Labour marginal… but it must be at peak drinking time, and shout, very loudly so they can all hear you, “Oi! Gordon Brown says he wants another five years!”

Just so you know...

Courtesy of Powys Health Board.

I thought you should know, because you paid for it.

Hat tip to Matt Davis.

How's your week been, Gordon?

"Britons have a better perception of Conservative leader David Cameron than of Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, a new Angus Reid Public Opinion poll has found.

The online survey of a representative national sample of 2,002 British adults asked people to choose six words and characteristics to describe each one of the three main party leaders.

Cameron scores higher than Brown and Clegg at being intelligent (42%, 27%, 28%), in touch (22%, 8%, 17%), efficient (21%, 10%, and 13%, respectively), compassionate (20%, 14%, 13%), and strong (20%, 12%, 7%).

However, the Tory leader is also called arrogant (31%) by more people than Brown (30%) or Clegg (9%).

Brown shows the highest scores in the categories of out of touch (48%), boring (46%), inefficient (39%), weak (38%), secretive (28%), dishonest (26%), foolish (25%), and uncaring (20%).

For his part, Clegg gets the highest proportion of people describing him as open (22%, tied with Cameron), down to earth (21%), and honest (19%).

Preferred Leader To…

As part of this survey, respondents were also asked about their preferred leader for specific activities, ranging from serious issues (such as commanding the armed forces) to more mundane endeavours (such as having a beer at the local pub).

Britons would prefer to sit down for a beer with Cameron (21%) over Clegg (20%) or Brown (13%). They would also pick Cameron over the other two political leaders as a trivia quiz teammate (31%); to babysit their kids or those of a relative (29%); to become their sports teammate (28%), and as a person who could recommend a good book to read (23%).

Prime Minister Brown comes last in all of the above scenarios, except for being in a trivia quiz team, where he comes second (18%, followed by Clegg at 15%).

Cameron is also the preferred politician for Britons for negotiating with United States President Barack Obama on trade and security issues (34%); representing the United Kingdom at the London 2012 Olympics (31%); heading the government in the event of a terrorist attack (30%); representing the country in the next round of climate change talks (27%), and acting as head of the Armed Forces (25%).

Prime Minister Brown comes second in all of these more serious categories, followed by Clegg."