Not dead

Just busy.

And serenely unfazed by the growing weirdness of YouGov. And Sky.

What Sky think they have to gain by uniform support of Mad Jock McMad beats me utterly but WTF. I'm no TV executive but if they followed Fox's line they'd be puling a lot more than 3% of the audience. Still, that's their business. Maybe the answer is to give Boulton Toenails's job on when he moves on, clearing the Sky for someone not married (sic) to the Labour Party.

But relax and stop fluttering, my little chickadees. Leave aside the socialist paradise north of The Wall. It's the overwhelming number of English constituencies (80 per cent of the total) which matter.

Focus on the METHHS and the marginals.

AR and Andy Cooke have it right. Tory majority. No contest. Well, all right, a contest...

Election night is going to be fantabuloso for Conservatives and for the country. Ladies and gentlemen, I suggest you bulk-buy your popcorn before the market rockets.

March would do nicely, Gordon, if you can find the bottle. Oh, and close the door behind you if you'd be so kind. Thank you.

"See this hand?"

What Peter knows

"I think Peter will read it and say, 'Yes – you don't know the half of it, Andrew.'"

Those were not the forces of Hell. THESE are the forces of Hell.

"Number Ten Downing Street.

This is Alastair Darling.

This is Alastair Darling calling Number Ten Downing Street.

Please listen carefully.

You are surrounded.

Look out of the window. There are cameras and microphones everywhere.

We have conclusive evidence against every member of the Balls Whelan Gang.

If you make one false move now, you will be eliminated from the political process.

This is your final warning.

This is not a negotiation.

THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING.

You cannot escape.

You cannot hide.

Now, BACK AWAY FROM THE LAPTOPS.

Lay down the Nokias.

Now, listen very, very, carefully.

STEP. AWAY. FROM. THE. BUDGET.

THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING.

STEP. AWAY. FROM. THE. BUDGET."

Got to. It's one's duty.

Seriously

The indispensable Daily Mash has abandoned comedy and become a serious newspaper, reporting breaking political news absolutely straight with just a light-hearted 'and finally,' at the end of an article, as a nod to its comic roots.

BROWN'S INSANITY 'DISTRACTING VOTERS FROM HOW BAD HE IS AT HIS JOB'

Brown's twilight zone

The allegations are 'clouded with uncertainty'

... said Mr Miliband. 'No, I haven't witnessed any of that kind of bullying.'

Clear?

Nothing to see here. All a Tory plot.

In case you missed it, this was six weeks ago.

Ah, nostalgia!

No-Brainer

Your name? Miss Smith.

What is your No-Brainer subject? Not claiming constructive dismissal by the Cabinet Office on the grounds of intimidation.

Miss Smith, your No-Brainer questions start now.

1 - Were you subjected to intimidation by a very senior minister who roared and threw things and broke things and manhandled people out of their chairs, in your office within Number Ten Downing Street? Yes.

2 - Did you complain to your line manager about this? Yes.

3 - Did your line manager tell the senior minister that under current legislation his behaviour could be defined as bullying at work which is illegal and must stop? He told me he had spoken to him.

4 - Did the minister change his behaviour? No.

5 - Were other ministers of comparable or almost-comparable seniority to the minister aware of the situation? Everybody was.

6 - Did these other senior ministers intervene to try to put a stop to it? Not to my knowledge.

7 - Did you tell your line manager that you would have to request a transfer or resign if the minister’s behaviour did not improve? Yes.

8 - Was it explained to you that a certain robustness and, more importantly, loyalty and discretion are indispensable for employment in the civil service and were you warned that advancement is impossible for a civil servant who gains notoriety as a trouble-maker? Yes.

9 - Did you hope to continue as a civil servant and to advance your civil service career in the longer term? Yes.

10 - Did your trade union support you during this difficult time? They were... kind.

11 - Did you at any time ask the advice of your trade union about bringing a case against your employer for constructive dismissal on grounds of grossly unacceptable behaviour by the minister? Yes.

12 - Did your trade union at any time mention the possibility that even to whisper such allegations publicly would result in your causing great distress to your family who would be hounded by the paparazzi day and night, week in and week out, and that you, personally, would be responsible for the disgrace of a brilliant minister, that you would cause the fall of the Labour government and a general election which the Conservative Party would win? But that of course the decisions were yours? Yes, they... mentioned all those things.

13 - Did your discussions with your trade union help you to make your decision whether or not to bring a case for constructive dismissal on grounds of the minister's persistently unacceptable behaviour? I... I... yes, they did help me to make my decision.

14 - Did you in fact bring a case against the Cabinet Office for constructive dismissal on grounds of the minister’s behaviour? No.

15 - Did you leave your job? Yes.

FX: gong

Miss Smith, the No-Brainer Laser Display Score-Board shows us that you have scored Zero points.

You are a loser, Miss Smith, and you know you are. Please stop crying and kindly leave the studio. An unmarked car is waiting to take you to some woods in Oxfordshire where the driver will hand you a small package containing everything you need to ease the government’s your distress.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, a bit of anti-climax there! But we look forward to a more exciting edition of No-Brainer next week so, until then, goodbye and take very great care of yourselves.

Music, credits...

_____________________________________

Continuity announcer:

If you have been affected by any of the issues raised in this programme, the Spencer Livermore Helpline can offer you small comfort.

If you would like to bring down the Labour government and help ensure that the people in Bunker Ten get what is coming to them, you may like to call the Maxwell Clifford Helpline. Their number is also on our website.

After the news, The Moral Maze.

Brown rebuts 'bully' accusations

What an odd feeling it is...

... looking at the world... politics, the arts, overseas news... everything... through the eyes of the Guardianistas. Weird, unpleasant, but salutary.

I bought the Observer today, for obvious reasons. First time in about fifteen years. I will probably buy next week's too unless the Rawnsley book has arrived by then. I never, ever buy the Guardian. I skim it online for essentials, though. Not the comment columns - just the news coverage.

It's not so much the lefty slant that's off-putting (although it is, of course) as the total uniformity and conformity of the world-view of these people. All of them. Extremely odd. I mean, their shared working premise that the world is necessarily precisely as they tell each other it is. They all see it and theorise about it the same way. Well, except possibly Nick Cohen who is odd in his own way but at least goes about with his eyes and ears open and insists upon thinking for himself. As for the rest of them, well it really is all quite peculiar. Is it something the bosses put in their fair-trade coffee?

Of course, one glimpses the mindset through BBC radio and TV but even Radio Four's not as monolithic as the Observer. But it's through reading an entire Guardian group paper that one actually enters into their little world. It's like finding yourself shrunk, like Alice, and landing in a place just as strange as her Wonderland. I say - could Will Hutton actually be the Mad Hatter, do you think? Is Mary Beard the Caterpillar?

Yes, I now see very clearly what Wotsisname meant when he said they can't help it, it's just that they never meet anyone else. Yes, that's it. It's a closed world. But how gloriously comical that they think we all live in it! If only they knew!

The FT, Times and Telegraph all carry heavyweight opinions from left and right. There can be war between two op-eds on the same page. The right-liberal-libertarian, usually Conservative-supporting Spectator has the likes of Martin Bright and Hugo Rifkind. And Rod Liddle. Let us pass over the tragedy which is the Staggers, and I admit I know nothing about the Independent these days having long ago discarded it as worthless vanity-publishing. But, in reading the Observer, which I take to be very like the Guardian, one finds oneself simply staring at a monolith. Boring and the very opposite of intellectual stimulation.

Still, I suppose it provides some sort of comfort zone for people who work backstage in our subsidised theatres, and it preserves poor old Polly Toynbee's illusions. Which is nice.

CAMERON AIDE EFFS AND BLINDS, SCREAMS AND THROWS THINGS

We can reveal exclusively that a friend of David Cameron, tipped by some for junior ministerial office, habitually grabs aides by the lapels, calls staff 'c**ts' and physically shoulders office workers aside if they stand in his way. He once smashed a printer to bits because it was not working correctly. He regularly roars and throws phones at people. He manhandles secretaries out of their chairs if they do not type fast enough for his liking and takes over their keyboards himself.

David Cameron has refused to denounce the man’s behaviour, saying he is a warm and caring man who only gets angry with himself and then only under the most severe pressure caused by selfless worry about the country’s economy.

A spokesman for Prime Minister Gordon Brown called on David Cameron to fire this violent man adding that Gordon Brown is implacably opposed to this sort of intolerable gross misconduct in the workplace, before noting sadly that the Tories voted against Labour’s flagship Telling People To Fuck Off Right Now You Cunt Is Wrong Bill.

Harriet Harman is currently frowning on all TV channels and struggling valiantly not to laugh out loud at the political suicide of the Conservative party and its leader.

The political editor of the Daily Mirror, Kevin Maguire, has called for the immediate sacking of 'Cameron's disgusting crony', adding, ‘The whole country can now see what these Bullingdon Bullies are really like. They treat their co-workers the way their ancestors treated serfs. Oh, it’s all right for them but if a working class voter behaved this way he would be sacked. These violent, mediaeval-mindset Tory aristocrats are not fit to govern decent people. Five more years of Gordon Brown, please.’

Speaking on the Andrew Marr Programme, Lord Mandelson smirked, ‘The Conservative Party deserves everything that’s coming to it, Andrew, as I am sure you will agree. And I can tell you from my personal experience that they do not like it up them.’

The dark night of Labour's soul

Mail

LibDem campaigners told: 'Be guided by your inner cnut'

'We, the Liberals in Newport West, believe in campaigning on the issues, not the personalities. That is why we have not published the information given to us anonymously by the Conservative Party, that if published, would prove that the Labour candidate, Mr Flynn, is not fit to be an MP.'*

Flynn had forgotten to MOT his car and got fined. Fucking shocking.

Vote LibDem and let's have even more cnuts in politics, that's what I say.

Mail. H/T Iain Dale

Not for art's sake

Painted by Louis Sidoli and nicked from Iain Dale.

Labour Stealth Tax News

When VAT was temporarily reduced to 15%, Chancellor Darling added 2% duty to fuel to offset the reduction in tax collected from motorists.

Now that VAT has been increased to 17.5% again, this hidden tax has not been removed - hence recent rises in fuel costs at your local pump.

Sign the petition to have this Labour stealth tax removed.

Labour Party Political Broadcast (Template)

And the coconut goes to...

... Antifrank at PB.com for this gem:

Isn’t it a little dangerous for Labour to seek to associate itself with so many F-words?

Back to the future with Labour. No, really.

Read the story at ConHome.

Pass it on

This from a comment at Guido's via Tapestry at PB.com.

This is the record of Labour in office. You know, the stuff Gordon's minders say they would rather Labour campaigners did not mention when they knock on your door, only to have you set the dog on them. Good call, tossers.

- 22,500 of debt for every child born in Britain

- 111 tax rises from a government that promised no tax rises at all

- The longest national tax code in the world

- 100,000 million pounds drained from British pension funds

- Gun crime up 57%

- Violent crime up 70%

- The highest proportion of children living in workless households anywhere in Europe

- The number of pensioners living in poverty up by 100,000

- The lowest level of social mobility in the developed world

- The only G7 country with no growth this year

- One in six young people neither earning nor learning

- 5 million people on out-of-work benefits

- Missing the target of halving child poverty...

- Child poverty rising in each of the last three years instead

- Cancer survival rates among the worst in Europe

- Hospital-acquired infections killing nearly three times as many people as are killed on the roads

- Falling from 4th to 13th in the world competitiveness league

- Falling from 8th to 24th in the world education rankings in maths

- Falling from 7th to 17th in the rankings in literacy

- The police spending more time on paperwork than on the beat

- Fatal stabbings at an all-time high

- Prisoners released without serving their sentences

- Foreign prisoners released and never deported

- 7 million people without an NHS dentist

- Small business taxes going up

- Business taxes raised from among the lowest to among the highest in Europe

- Tax rises for working people set for after the election

- The 10p tax rate abolished

- The ludicrous promise to have ended boom and bust

- Our gold reserves sold for a quarter of their worth

- Our armed forces overstretched and under-supplied

- Profitable post offices closed against their will

- One of the highest rates of family breakdown in Europe

- The ‘Golden Rule’ on borrowing abandoned because it didn’t fit

- Police inspectors in 10 Downing Street

- Dossiers that were dodgy

- Mandelson resigning the first time

- Mandelson resigning the second time

- Mandelson coming back for a third time

- Bad news buried

- Personal details lost

- An election bottled

- A referendum denied.

... for starters.

Fawlty election SOP

94. Don't mention the Labour record in government war

Dictionary Corner

Heff, v.i & t. Excoriate, lambast, propose as an object of public contempt, e.g., 'X gave Y a thorough heffing' and 'Z was utterly heffed'.

Heffer: n, one who heffs.

Example of heffing:

Today Mr Brown will unveil his party's election slogan. Its "themes" for the campaign include "Ensuring the recovery", "Protecting front line services", "Standing up for the many" and "Protecting future jobs and new industries". I fear that he will not embrace a much-needed spirit of truthfulness and go for "Finishing off Britain", "Lying for Labour", "Soaking the many" and "Protecting my job". Judging by the rubbish that he now routinely spouts – whether lies or delusion I do not know – he should be forced to produce a certificate proving his sound state of mental health before being allowed to stand for election: as should anyone who intends to vote for him.

Typos

New Labour slogans, #94

"Ker-ching. Simples."

Labour: for the many, not the few

Brown has forgotten nothing and learned nothing

Mr Brown, who has a PhD in the history of the Labour Party in Scotland in the 1920s, often refers to himself as a historian and prides himself on his extensive reading.

However, on this occasion, his attempt to demonstrate his historical knowledge may have been unsuccessful.

Tsk, tsk.

Har-har.

(My emphasis.)

Labour's new election slogan

And after the election, then what?

In a Spectator article (paywall for now, I think) Mark Wood, former editor-in-chief at Reuters and CEO of ITN, writes:

It is an open secret that nobody [in Europe] can stand Brown. Years of his arrogant lecturing of European governments on economics and his open disdain for other ministers at Euro gatherings have left an indelible impression – and a host of enemies.

This aggressive, patronising and behaviourally-challenged man’s notion of his own expertise and leadership skills is not shared by those whose support would be needed if he wanted a high profile European/international post. But maybe he does not want one.

He is bookish and lives a quiet private life. He has a young family with whom, given his eye problems, he probably wants to spend as much time as he can once he leaves office, instead of shuttling between airports and conference rooms. He would find a PM’s pension more than adequate to his needs.

And the driving force of his entire life has been war with the Conservative Party.

In the same issue of the Spectator, James Forsyth writes:

The Brownite political culture that now dominates [Labour’s] election machine has always been hard and aggressive. They do not enjoy government and they are not good at it. The Brown machine is fundamentally an attack machine. By contrast, the skills of the Cameroons are far more suited to government than electioneering.

Now, let’s imagine that the Tories win the election. The Labour Party will have until the conference season to decide what it’s going to do about the Leadership. Does it keep Gordon Brown or throw him overboard?

The man himself will have much to say and the right to be heard. He will pitch that he is the dream Leader of Labour in opposition. He will remind the NEC that

• he is universally acknowledged as temperamentally suited to attack (true)
• having been Prime Minister he could discomfit Prime Minister Cameron at PMQs more piquantly than anyone else (true)
• he is better-informed than anyone else in the Party about the minefield ahead of Cameron (true – he, personally, laid the mines)
• he is supported by blindly loyal, hand-picked, battle-hardened and viscerally Tory-hating Praetorians who out-class anyone else whom the Party could possibly propose for the front rank in the class war ahead (true).

Above all, Brown will argue that there is no-one in the entire Labour Party who is better motivated or who could possibly offer a stronger prospect than he of destroying the Conservative government within one Parliament and returning Labour to power in 2014/15.

Well, he would convince me. I’d hire him. For that job. Certainly not to lead the Party into the election in 2014/15, but to give Labour a fighting chance of victory? Oh, yes.

Gordon Brown may go down to electoral defeat but I strongly doubt that he is out. I suspect that given the experience of the past three years or so he would rather be Leader of the Opposition than Prime Minister. And I suspect he will fight every inch of the way for that post, just as he did for his current job.

Of course, there is one thought-provoking strategic argument against appointing Brown as Leader of the Labour Party, especially given that he will have delivered the Party up to its greatest defeat in modern electoral history and defeat by an Etonian, at that. This will twist his already Tory-hating viscera into a greater hatred than anyone can imagine, bringing to the fore the Corleone Caveat:

Never hate your enemies. It clouds your judgement.

Quite a decision for the Labour Party. Almost as difficult as whether or not to force Brown out while he was clearly bringing them down to defeat. Much will depend on their evaluation of the magnitude of that defeat. Was it just a battle lost, or the war?

Well, I mean, of course one thought it but one didn't like to... one can't simply... look here, it's all a bit...

Oh, fuck it. What he said.

Frankly, if you can't applaud when a terrorist on a weapon-buying trip is whacked by Mossad agents in wigs and fake beards, you're dead inside. Or possibly an anti-Semite: I haven't decided yet.

Yep.

No fakery, please, Prime Minister.

I have been watching some episodes of The West Wing that I missed when they were aired.

There is one in which President Bartlett is agonising over the fate of a condemned man, a manifestly guilty multiple murderer. The locus of Bartlett's agony is the separation of powers. The President has the power to be merciful and grant a stay of execution despite the final rejection of an appeal by the Supreme Court, but should he? Bartlett decides not to intervene but living with his decision is excruciating. With the execution scheduled for one minute past midnight and the evening wearing on, he calls his his old priest to him, not to advise but to be alongside him in his anguish.

The priest arrives and greets him with a hug. He has known the President all his life, since childhood. Suddenly he says,' I don't know what to call you. Is it Jed - or Mr President?' After a pause, Bartlett replies. 'Frankly, I would prefer Mr President. Given the decisions I have to make in this room, it helps to remind me that, in here, I am not the man but the office.'

Good.

Let us have a British prime minister like that. Let him appoint dignified and conscientious cabinet ministers who inspire public respect, not for themselves but for their offices. Let us have ministers who treat their colleagues with the respect due to the offices they hold and to the constitutional arrangements under which they hold them.

Let us have the return of formal Cabinet government. Away with informal, un-minuted, ad hominem, sloppy, dangerously chaotic government-by-sofa. It is bad government which at its worst leads to war.

Enough of ministers referring to each other in public by their first names instead of their formal names or titles, in the mistaken hope that they will seem more electable next time they have to apply to us for their jobs.

The Minister would like you to think of him as your mate. To believe he's a pretty straight sort of guy, down the pub with the lads most nights. These are lies. They convince no-one. Faked first-name matiness does not inspire respect in the governed for those who govern. It diminishes it. Is the Prime Minister no more fit for his office, and does he take it no more seriously, than that big-mouthed daft bastard at the end of the bar? I mean, who wants his sort running the bloody country? If they're like him, sod 'em. Pint while yer up, bar steward.

The 'ordinary, just like your mates' illusion which too many politicians cultivate is both mendacious and dangerous. It encourages voters to overlook the enormous power to wreck lives and wreak legal violence upon the citizen which is inherent in government office. Its very falsity diminishes respect for both office and office-holder. It militates against both ministerial accountability and participation by the citizenry in the democratic process.

Beware the politician who tells you he's just like you, and who refers to other ministers by their first names as though they, too, are your personal friends - and his. He's lying -- and banking on your liking him enough not to demand answers to the hard questions he is dreading.

We neither want nor require a government of fakers who pretend to be each others' friends or even to like each other. Perchance it may be so but that is irrelevant to the business of government although incidentally it runs the risk of nepotism and so, better that they not be friends. Parliament is a serious place, not reality TV. Government not soap opera but deadly serious business with power of life or death in the hands of ministers.

The fictitious President Bartlett should be a lesson to Mr Cameron and the rest of his incoming government. I hope they have seen The West Wing.

What does Murdoch know?

The Sun has started running its pre-election poll-a-day series. The pollster is YouGov.

Doubtless Kellner and Co have given Rupert a special price but if the election is to be in May (or June?) it's still going to cost a packet.

Or maybe we don't have to wait for May. Or June.

What does Murdoch know that I want to know? Not to mention Mike Smithson.

Oh please, just shut up will you?

As soon as I heard his familiar whining voice, I placed a small wager with myself that the inveterate but inexpert self-publicist and serial failure Ray Gosling will be proved to have made it all up. Whether or not he realises that, if I'm right, is another question, as is why he might do so, so I will probably never be able to settle the bet.

I have always found Gosling deeply unimpressive and exceedingly annoying. His style is to dress up sneery arrogance in a coat of less than convincing son-of-the-soil pathos. The result is as nauseating as anything the BBC (who else?) ever produced.

Huge fun

So Labour will be the first UK governing political party to privatise the running of a major NHS hospital. (All public sector bidders have withdrawn leaving one private sector supplier.)

Can't wait for the abuse from our upcoming Opposition front bench when the Tories merely follow Labour's example.

More LibDem 'Love the one you're with' tactics

Now here's a surprise. Not.

The leadership of the We're Not Like Those Other Bastards Party is known for its standard lefty anti-Israel campaigning which informs the anti-Israel theme of Camden LibDems' leaflets for - who'da thort it? - a Muslim ward. But - ooh look - a different lead-story altogether on a leaflet delivered around the same constituency's Jewish ward. This one leaflet has a some-of-my-best-friends-are-Jews story (also in Hebrew already!) complete with photo of Cleggie at a party hosted by the local Jewish leadership. Why would they fall for it?

Same old Liberal Democrats, hypocritical to the Nth yet first to their feet to cry hypocrisy. Nasty bastards, led by nasty bastards.

Hat tip to ConHome for alerting hypocrite-hunters to nastylibdems.org

Cam's co-ops

Opposing this concept could prove tricky for the LibDems (local heroes) and Labour (founded by the co-operative movement among others).

It would combine the retained principle of state funding with localism (electorally popular) and devolution closer to the front line - a visibly practical improvement in delivery competence and accountability. All these are generally accepted as Good Things.

So where's the rub?

Ah, yes.

The big unions. Unite. The PCS. The NUT.

How would they like the idea of no more national pay and conditions structures. No more national negotiations. Maybe no more involvement at all in co-ops whose worker-owners don't want them.

Mm-hm. Nice.

Brown to raise Greenbacks at the UN. Greenbacks. Geddit?

Steve Green over at Daily Referendum has spotted this announcement from The Foe.

[…] United Nations High Level Advisory Group on Climate Change Financing, which British Prime Minister Gordon Brown will co-chair with Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, Asad Rehman […]

Gordon Brown has a chance for genuine leadership this year in pushing the international community to adopt a tax on financial transactions, which would provide billions of dollars of new money to governments to tackle climate change head on - now is the time for him to grasp it.

Lovely. Brown screwing money out of the entire world to benefit his mate Pachauri who will campaign for it to be handed over to his friends.

Still, look on the bright side. McNutter will no longer be scorching the earth of the United Kingdom.

But seriously... now that he has his feet under the table at the UN, maybe Broon will bring the GE forward to April 8th, ditching Darling's budget plans, ducking Chilcot and the 13th April announcement about the disastrous UK economic performance in Q1 2010 - and winning me a few bob courtesy of Ladbrokes (10/1 at the time of writing).

Well, stap me

The Winter Olympics just got really really interesting. Snork.

Clegg, his Fairy Godmother and his coalition dreams

I blogged earlier about the fatuity of coalition government. Not that it's going to happen, nor a hung parliament neither, no matter how the BBC agonises in its prayers to its weird gods.

Which is why, Cleggie, you are wasting your time advocating coalition governments and trying to abolish our adversarial electoral system which has proved to be the least bad at delivering democratic scrutiny and effective policy making. If you disagree, Cleggie, perhaps you can show me how well democratic scrutiny and effective policy-making are achieved in, for example, Italy, Greece - oh, and your former employer, the European Union. Call me suspicious, but since you are not a fool I suspect you agree with the Martin proposition but maintain your electoral policy as your only chance - vanishingly thin though it be - of gaining the power of government office. Eventually. In due course. When the time is ripe. Maybe. Or then again... Call me cynical, but I suspect that if your Fairy Godmother (I assume you believe in her, being a Liberal Democrat) offered you Number Ten on condition you laid aside the PR nonsense, you'd become an FPTP fan overnight. Call me bitter and twisted, but I suspect that if you ever gained power through your Fairy Godmother's good offices (you're not going to get it any other way so I'd stay on her good side if I were you) we would never hear another word from you about PR. You'd probably pass some Brown-type gerrymandering constitutional law outlawing PR for ever. You are a Libdem, after all, so nobody looks to you for coherence, consistency or integrity.

Love The One You're With is your official party anthem, isn't it?

Bye, then, Andrew

Writing on the Lansley/Burnham fight, Iain Martin is disparaging about consensus whether over elderly care or anything else. No wonder, he thinks, Cameron broke up the love-in, and a good job too.

"Consensus is the enemy of democratic scrutiny and effective national policy."

Yes.

Lansley is not destined for a Conservative Cabinet. Not because of what he does but because of how he thinks. Like St Joan Bakewell, she of the outraged luvvie spluttering (calm down dear, it's not a real job) Lansley is wrong and Cameron is right.

Enough with the cosy already. Enough with the droning about fairness and enough with the Brownian crocodile tears. We need coherent, principled decisions leading to decisive action. Time for the smack of firm gummint. Time for a big Tory majority. Which we are going to get. And how.

What's that noise? Hissing?

Well!

Wasn't it nice of Gordon and Sarah to invite Hello into their lovely home to talk about Gordon's sexual prowess and going blind and how losing a baby makes you cry and him wanting to work for charity and everything? Dear Diary: This changes everything! I am no longer a Tory! From now on I am a Labour voter!

I'm shocked. Shocked, I tell you.

This poster is the politics of the gutter.

Unlike this one.

Cut the fucking hypocrisy, Labour. You're a bunch of cnuts and you know you are. And you're going down.

More Reeves...

… and ‘the least moral form of wealth'.

Tsk.

From the consistency of his pseudo-philosophical blathering (and to take a more charitable view than I did earlier) it is possible that Richard Reeves believes his own nonsense and really thinks that inanimate entities like ‘wealth’ can have moral qualities. Typically irritating philosophical illiteracy from a Willy Hutton protégé.

Inanimate objects can have no moral qualities. Morality concerns acts and not persons or things.

An act may be moral, immoral or amoral.

Moral implies virtue in an act, such as helping another. Immoral implies vice in an act, such as gratuitously harming another. Amoral implies neither virtue nor vice in an act such as cleaning a window.

A person is neither moral nor immoral although his acts may be either or neither. A man may, in the space of an hour, feed his baby, steal his neighbour's bicycle and clean his windows. The baby food, bicycle and windows have no moral quality.

Relativism and post-modernism, relativism’s bastard child, reject ‘morality’ as a concept. Their advocates often use the term but only mendaciously when rhetorically convenient. And there I go being uncharitable to Socialists again.

Wrong about Right

Richard Reeves (R4, ‘Broadcasting House’) calls inherited money ‘the least moral form of wealth’.

Sigh. More tosh. Is there no end to it?

This sort of lazy, incoherent, sub-Marxist statement is held to be self-evident Truth by the half-educated Guardianistas who grant Reeves unchallenged pontificating rights in BBC think-slots. And by Gordon Brown, of course.

What does Reeves think is a ‘more moral’ form of wealth than inherited money? Non-inherited money, presumably. Whatever a person earns by their own labour. Or from trade, perhaps? Yes, how about trade, Mr Reeves? From your statement, money made from hard work in trade (profit) must be ‘more moral’ than inherited wealth. So, that’s all right then.

No, what Reeves means is that it is ‘less moral’ to give and ‘more moral’ to deny one’s children one’s lifetime’s earnings. This breathtaking judgement, which would have raised Solomon’s eyebrows, requires considerable justification. Not that I am expecting Reeves to offer such justification, for he thinks property ownership in itself is immoral. His oblique, nonsensical words are chosen to conceal this fact.

Reeves would splutter that of course he does not object to property ownership. He may even have a house on a mortgage for all I know. (But who expects Socialists to be consistent?) No, it is how the property may be disposed of upon which Reeves makes his moral ruling.

Aye, there’s the rub, for if Reeves ever reads a philosophy primer he will learn that without the freedom to dispose of one’s property as one wills by any means including bequeathing it, the term ‘ownership’ is meaningless. Ownership is replaced by a licence merely to hold and use the property, licence which may be withdrawn by whichever authority grants it.

Now who, in Reeves World, might that authority be? Quite. If Reeves could be pressed to be both coherent and truthful, he would have to admit that in Reeves World there is no such thing as property ownership.

Now where have we heard that before?

When Reeves talks of morals and wealth he is preaching Socialism. Reeves is one of the Righteous, the Enlightened, destined by historical inevitability to re-educate you and rule over you, granting or withholding ‘freedoms’ according to his beliefs which you will, in time, accept, because Might is Right and one day everyone will understand that what the Socialist State teaches must be true.

You will own nothing because the State will abolish ownership. What you have, including what you have earned, will be confiscated from you and from your family. It is the right thing to do. It is Written.

It's rude to laugh

Stop it at once.

Give us a clue

Funny, the Indy is the only 'heavy' whose front page lead was omitted from the Today programme's round-up of the papers (update: at 07:40) this morning. Anyone think of a reason for that? At all?

UPDATE: A little very-early-bird tells me that it was included in the paper reviews before 7 am. It was only excluded in the programme's peak-listening period between 07:30 and 08:30.

So, no bias there, then.

Quiz

Guess who?

His behaviour towards relatively junior members of staff can be "unforgivable" according to one person who has witnessed it. "It isn't a very nice place for people to work. However bad it sometimes looks from the outside, it's far, far worse from the inside. And the atmosphere is very much set by him." Those in the press office more used to dealing with the daily onslaught of unpredictable news put it down to Brown's 10 years in the Treasury, where events could be carefully planned and the phone never rang in the middle of the night with another crisis to be handled. It is Brown's misfortune that he is forever being assessed in the light of the observation that he is "psychologically flawed". Those who have witnessed his behaviour refer back to it constantly without being prompted. "It doesn't come close," said one. Another said Brown was always looking for somebody else to blame when things went wrong. "It's this self-pity thing. There's a pathetic side to him that is really unbecoming." A third said the problems have got no better with time, concluding: "He is psychologically and emotionally incapable of leadership of any kind."

Source.

Nature's on the turn. Nature? NATURE!

Now even the head warble gloaming honcho at UEA writes (in Nature hahahahahah) that the IPCC has run its course and is no longer fit for purpose. Five leading AGW chaps say a Wiki would be better than the IPCC. Hahahahahahah.

Someone tell Ed Miliband. Hahahahahah.

Excuse me. I am going into a soundproof room now, to laugh myself hoarse until I fall down in an exhausted heap. From laughing. At the thought of Miliband's role-model, railway engineer Pachauri, receiving the news that Nature thinks he ought to seek work elsewhere and he may be replaced by a Wiki. Hahahahahahah.

But hold on. Doesn't Nature know, doesn't the head honcho at UEA know, that there is a consensus? That the science is settled? Yadda yadda? Al Gore yadda yadda? Voodoo science yadda yadda?

Mwahahahahahahahahaha...

Alligators...

... up to my arse in.

Blogging may be staccato as I focus on swamp clearance for a bit.

I am still watching you, you Labour bastards.

If Clarkson were a cat...

Free to every taxpayer!

The Gordon Brown Pencil Sharpener

Every UK taxpayer will receive one with their 2010 Tax Return. Watch your post!

If...

... a publicly funded scientist says their area is a problem, they'll be a better-funded public scientist!

Just a thought, from Bishop Hill. Not a new thought but one that bears frequent repetition.

Worth 1,000 words

From page 2 of the Andrew Montford (Bishop Hill) interview at The Register.

Dispiriting dialogue of the deaf

I'm a glutton for punishment. I really should know better than to plough through this sort of thing.

A man proposes that humanity and the planet would benefit if the scientific community were to verify all its findings before reporting them openly and without exaggeration and without allowing politicians to hijack science which alienates public opinion.

Ignoring the proposition, a second man opens a different debate altogether by accusing his interlocutor of denying what he (the opposer) says is the indisputable truth of a given scientific thesis and thereby endangering humanity. He challenges the proposer to disprove the scientific theory which he supports.

The proposer explains that this is not to the point and returns to his own proposition which is that it is unhelpful for information which might lead to a different conclusion from that held by his opponent to be withheld. He invites his opponent to agree with him that it damages the scientific community and process, and alienates public opinion, so making international political agreement more difficult.

The opposer again declines to respond but again challenges the proposer to disprove his favoured scientific opinion because, he asserts, it is true. He also offers criticism of some third parties of whom he disapproves politically, for all the world as though they were the responsibility of the proposer, and as though their political opinions were part of the original proposition about the dissemination of scientific information. The opposer (who never actually opposed) closes his remarks by warning of impending planetary catastrophe.

At no point were these two men discussing the same thing.

Where did the people go?

Why do Guardianistas religiously use 'men and women' instead of 'people'?

'The men and women who...'

Even after 50 right-on years, they need to make their position absolutely clear, in every bloody thing they write, that Guardian man may not embrace Guardian woman.

WE KNOW. We get it. OK?

We know where you are coming from. We can spot one of your few remaining readers at 100 paces and a sodding Guardian writer about a mile and half off without field-glasses. The big red flag is a bit of a give-away.

Do move on, FFS. Besides being boring and wasting your paymasters' dwindling ink budget, laborious tautology is harmful to a journalist's reputation as you'll discover once the last Guardian reader finally grows up and you have to find work elsewhere.

Call yourself wordsmiths?

Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte. - Pascal

AFTERTHOUGHT

Wouldn't it be more right-on to write 'men and women and transsexuals'?

It is your duty to publish this as widely as you can

Worth a fiver?

General Election 25th March?

No Chilcot appearance, no need for a fake Budget, no terrible Q1 back-to-recession figures?

No-brainer, Gordon?

Be you never so high, the law is above you

Labour Party solicitors are arguing that criminally-accused Labour MPs are above the law and should not face court.

Fine with you, Labour Prime Minister Brown?

Everybody should expect the Green Inquisition

The Green Inquisitors, the pollutocracy of our compulsory new Green Religion - Pachauri, Gore, the Milibros - are acquiring ever greater power over world politics and, in the case of Gore and Pachauri, Croesoid riches from the international emissions trade which they have set up with your money.

The Milibros? Smaller fry than Pachauri and Gore, admittedly, but they wield disproportionate power in the palaces of the pollutocracy by hosing prodigious amounts of your money all over the Green priesthood.

These powerful left-wing* bastards intend to punish the capitalist west for rejecting Marxism. Because most people dare to deny that malign, anti-human creed, they intend nothing less than its forced imposition - but now with a deceptively gentle, Green face.

* Examine the far-Left policies of the Green Party.

Following the classic example of the communist cadres, Green Priests lie without hesitation or compunction and assiduously cover each others' lies.

• They lie about 'green economics' (no such thing)
• They lie about 'green energy' (depends on conventional power generation because it's pathetically inadequate).
• They lie about food production (crushing Africa's exporters) and strain against scientific advance therein. (The same people are against GM seeds solely because they come from capitalist enterprises who make money from the patents. If they came from state institutions they would be forced on the capitalist food industry who would be charged royalties by patent-holding governments.)
• They lie about scientific data and they lie about the lying.

With their unsupportable 'new Green economy' the Green Priests would consign billions of powerless people to poverty and pain. They know that the great unwashed are not qualified, economically or scientifically, to argue against them, so their Inquisitors take great care to exclude every opponent who is so qualified from both scientific fora (sceptics go unpublished and unfunded) and the mass media. Highly-qualified critics of the New Religion, that is, those outside the self-preserving priesthood of 'the consensus', are either accused of culpable ignorance of 'the settled facts' or called 'politically motivated right-wing deniers'.

Those we may call 'lay-sceptics' are labelled Deniers, scorned and shunned. British state schools are ordered - and resourced - by Green Inquisitors to reward children for identifying and pointing at Deniers, including their parents.

Familiar? At all? Think about that, next time you see the British government's still-not-banned propaganda film about the scared little girl and her drowning puppy and how it's all the fault of wicked parents.

The Inquisitors of the New Religion would wrest priceless goods like liberty - hard-won over millennia - from the people of the entire planet.

Some of the Inquisitors, like some Inquisitors of previous centuries, are of, um, less than Puritan bent. These will get rich at the expense of their congregations and spend the rest of their megalomaniac lives in gated, guarded, red-carpeted, taxpayer-funded comfort, shrugging philosophically at the suffering of those - if they think of them at all - for whom poverty is what they deserve for daring to deny the New True Religion.

All Inquisitors want their place in the history books. They get it, too, but the books are not written by their friends.

British government accused of money laundering

Individual MPs who think themselves above the law may only be taking their lead from Gordon Brown's Cabinet which, corporately, stands accused of flouting Britain's money-laundering laws.

Details from Booker.

There are "suspicious indications" which should attract attention to the possibility that many British government financial transactions under the general heading 'global warming' may need investigating. These range from donations and grants to mysterious bodies where "checking identity is proving difficult" and instances of "reluctance (on the part of government departments) to provide information requested" as well as "unnecessary routing of funds through third parties" and "transactions having no purpose" or "which seem to involve unnecessary complexity".

All the highlighted phrases are extracts from the the Money Laundering Regulations issued by Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs listing "suspicious indications" which "should attract attention to the possibility that a financial transaction might need investigation".

Booker's article, based on years of investigations by himself and Richard North, lists a breath-stopping catalogue of occasions when British taxpayers' money has been passed in large amounts to unnamed organisations some of which would seem to be mad (but left-wing) and others against whom there is mounting evidence of (left-wing sympathy and) malign intent. This is in addition to large donations to wealthy foreign governments and a disproportionate contribution to the IPCC itself in order, so Booker alleges, that Britain's EAU-Hadley CRU (as in Climategate) can exercise disproportionate influence in the IPCC.

These grants of British taxpayers' money, taken together, make almost-bankrupt Britain the world's largest funder of the global warming religion. This is by the government's own admission.

Now, why might Gordon Brown's Labour government consider this a good thing?

Cheap as chips

One of those wit-free, lefty-wank 'comedy' programmes yesterday (R4, didn't catch the name, was excavating some important ear-wax) got a cheer from its studentish* studio audience when the chief arse suggested that all supermarkets should be closed down. Wa-hay, that's a good'n, gee how they all larfed and cheered. Pavlov must be smiling.

Is there any hope? I mean, any? At all?

* I can't swear that they were all students but they certainly need to grow up before they attempt to argue the economics of mass food supply, especially that part where you compare the cost of basic noms from despicable capitalist Tesco and, er, Co-op supermarkets with the cost of right-on organic veg-box delivery services in Ladbroke Grove (arty bottles of extra virgin olive oil pressed by the gnarled but noble feet of peasants, on request).

The guilty men, and not a banker among them

The billions put into the banks to stave off catastrophe will eventually come back to the taxpayer. It will take some time, but the nationalised banks will one day be re-privatised, probably at a profit. Taxpayer subventions to the others will come back in by way of insurance premiums, taxes and other instruments. How much any final net loss from the bank bail-out will be, should there be any loss at all, is hard to calculate. It does not worry the money markets over-much. They know very well that the banking crisis, though acute and dangerous, is passing and that it will end eventually, with some sort of equilibrium restored.

So let us stop wasting time on Fred the Shred and his paltry millions. Fred is merely a distraction from a far more dangerous problem, a distraction peddled by the Labour Party and the usual leftie suspects for whom bashing the nearest capitalist is de rigeur. It's fun. Well, it gets a cheap laugh on Mock the Week and is a lot easier than actually thinking. No, let us keep our eye on the ball and go after the real bad guys, those who have robbed us of hundreds of billions, impoverished our children and their children, and deliberately sowed the seeds of pain and distress for the innocent and of historic social disaster in this country, for their own malign reasons. The structural deficit is really frightening. And never forget that it was created by this Labour government, and that it preceded the banking crisis. It has absolutely nothing to do with banks. It is the structural deficit which is panicking the international money markets whose withdrawal from the UK, if it should happen, would send our interest rates sky high, devastate our commerce and industry, put rockets under householders’ mortgages and credit card balances, and cause unemployment and real hardship on a scale we have not seen since the Jarrow Marches. If this should happen, where would the money come from to pay mass unemployment benefit and fund support for the poor, the old and the sick? There would be no money. We no longer earn money as a country – we borrow it. And the moneylenders would turn their back on us. There would be no money. Britain would have become Cuba. And then what? You may well ask. Ask, too, why we have had so many repressive laws installed since Labour came to power. That is the risk this country faces, thanks solely to Gordon Brown. Gordon Brown, who seriously expects the country to give him and his henchmen five more years in the offices from which he, with their support and that of his sycophantic friends in the press, not all of them with benign intent, has caused Britain such terrible damage that we face almost unthinkable troubles in the years ahead – regardless of which party is in government. The nation’s plight is entirely the result of Gordon Brown’s spending vastly more than the government earned, year after year after year after year, and borrowing on the international money markets to cover the shortfall, claiming that he had abolished the 'bust' part of boom-and-bust. This is the insane vanity of the major criminal through the ages – like the Godfather, a megalomaniac contemptuous of the rules governing everyone else’s behaviour.

The money markets whose largesse is the British economy’s life-support machine, for now, are staying their collective hand until the election, in the hope that Brown will be so destroyed that he and his party will not be able to get their hands on the levers of the British economy for at least a generation. (IMF jobs for Gordon and Ed? Erm, I don’t think so.) If Labour loses it will comfort the markets and they will give Britain a bit more leeway. But not much. If Labour should win the election, economic catastrophe will strike within days. The money markets know that the real problem for the British economy under the Greatest Chancellor in British History, Saviour of the World, etc., is, in fact, the Greatest Chancellor in British History, Saviour of the World etc. Gordon Brown has probably been the worst finance minister in the western world, ever. Ever. He has saddled Britain with a spiralling government deficit so vicious that it’s anyone’s guess whether it can ever be reduced. Ever. But the reduction must be attempted and the attempt will be extremely painful. If we are to avoid the sort of actual ruin of lives envisaged above, lots of things we are accustomed to have free of charge will no longer be free. Salaries, wages and pensions will be substantially cut. Taxes will rise. Unemployment will rise although not as much as if the medicine were not administered. Looking on the bright side, services will be threatened. Trains will not run. Bob Crowe will think it’s Christmas all year. The unions will riot on the streets. Billy Bragg will write anthems which will echo off the walls of Whitehall as Leninspart and the Comrades address mass meetings in Trafalgar Square. Rocks will be hurled through plate glass windows. People will get hurt. After the election, the money market’s best guess as to the viability of Britain as a candidate for its lending will change from time to time. They will watch closely as the poor bastards who succeed Brown-Darling at the Treasury try to stave off near-chaos as they set about cleaning up the unbelievable shite left behind by immoral Gordon Brown’s immoral government, which has not only beaten all Labour’s previous records for damaging, delusional economic incompetence, but has pursued a merciless scorched-earth policy in its dying months in order to saddle the next government with unprecedented and (Brown hopes) intractable problems.

In addition, Labour has carefully ‘invested’ billions of our money on quangoid braking mechanisms staffed by Labour-supporting obstructionists who, whatever the cost to us – the taxpayers, the electorate – will strain every sinew to thwart the Conservative government. And sod democracy. Fuck the great, unwashed electorate. This is not about economics. This is not about democracy. This is not even, in the last analysis, about the man Gordon Brown. It is about his dogma. It is about power. Labour in power. Gordon Brown plans to regain power at the next election but one. If not him, personally, then his creatures, Balls and Cooper. In the meantime, Brown will relish opposing David Cameron, his class enemy. He will love every minute at the Opposition Despatch Box as much as he has hated every minute at the Treasury Despatch Box, believing it impertinent for anyone, let alone an Etonian Tory, to challenge him, the Leader of the Labour Party. Brown is a zealot, a puritan. He is not human enough to relish the trappings of power. Only the power itself. If this country should ever re-elect that man or any of his evil, cold-blooded gang to office, it will have abandoned all reason and will deserve the sort of nightmare which can only end with a deep draught of Kool-Aid.