Hearken unto me, saith the Lord

Lord Kinnock has offered his judgement that “Peter Mandelson is sadly out of date”. The Mandelson doctrine of attracting voters across class and party lines is an appeal to those who want to “hark back” to a “previous age” Source

An age of, erm... wait, it'll come to me. What? No, that can't be right.

Anyway, comrades, let us draw a line and move to, er... let us move. How does it go, again, Gladys? I mean Glenys? Oh yes, I remember. Yes, in the time-honoured Labour Party Conference phrase: 'I move.'

We're all right! We're all right! Comrades - back to the future!

Submission

Bought an iPad. Knew I would, one day. Just for travelling, of course. Helluva toy, though. And with this post, I declare it open.

Sent from my iPad (heh)

'Brownian economics'?

There's no such thing.

Brown is an historian (of Scottish Socialism) and not an economist. As economists go, he was an egotistical, over-promoted, Labour Party machine appointee, schooled in 'economics' by the even more vain and electorally-unappetising Ed Balls and by those who had taught him his economics. You know, Gordon's American East Coast 'expert' friends who, when they were running the Fed, brought down the almighty US dollar and are now repenting of their errors. Well, except Goldman Sachs, obviously. The skills necessary to sound economic governance and those needed for straightforward money-making ought not to be confused, Mr President.

Whatever Brown said on the subject of economics was all the sort of Balls by which the two of them have impoverished the nation, enforcing their will by systematic amoral political thuggery born of their mutual devotion and shared, Marxoid thirst for control. The aim of their joint political project was not to build the economy. It was to control the economy.

Talking of wrecking this country's economy on just about every front (credit, debt, pensions, banking, taxation, PSBR, gold, competitiveness, population numbers, de-skilled workforce...), Balls is far more guilty than Brown. Balls knew exactly what he was doing. Brown only thought he did.

Balls wants to carry on doing it to us, too, so he is doggedly repeating to the culpably and invincibly ignorant Labour Party electoral 'colleges' and their media lackeys, the Righteous-sounding economic Balls which got him/Brown/Labour/the country into trouble in the first place and finally lost Labour the election. Wouldn't you think...? But, no, you wouldn't.

Well, you go for it, Ed. The whole Tory party is rooting for you. 'Labour Leader Balls' just sounds so... appropriate, somehow.

Do it, Gordon. Please, oh, please.

Gordon Brown thinking of standing for election? My, my, whatever next!

Well you just go right ahead, my son. You'll lose, but don't let that stop you. Do it.

There's nothing like repeated humiliation to convince a bloke that everyone thinks he's a loser - as well as an utter bastard, of course.

It wasn't easy being Green

Greens outspent skeptics, they had the ear of the political class, effectively demonized and even silenced opponents and still it was not enough to convince the world that anything was wrong with the weather. It’s hard to think of any movement in history that enjoyed the funding, support and momentum that the greens once had and yet achieved so little. [...] It’s not much of an end for 'the greatest scam in history', but it is the end.

h/t Theo Spark

Close, but no cigar...

... said everyone scratching a living on the stand-up circuit.

... four-letter “c” word that blighted (Thatcher's) successors’ prospects: cuts.

Linky.

Perish the thort

I ran into Chief Whip* Nick Brown. 'Between you and me,' I said, 'given that we are going to lose the Election, we ought to be planting a few booby traps.'

I had in mind a few modest measures such as the election of select committee chairmen. 'I think we've done that with the PSBR [ Public Sector Borrowing Requirement],' replied Nick, smiling wickedly. - Chris Mullin

So, um, is it even remotely possible that Gordon Brown ran up his massive PSBR (budget deficit) for party political reasons?

I merely ask.

_____________

* Brown's hard-as-nails capo di tutti capi.

Bastards. Every one of them.

Ah, Labour politicians. Horrible ruiners, every one.

There wasn't a single member of the Cabinet who didn't at one time say Gordon wasn't up to being Prime Minister. - Chris Mullin

Nice of them to tell us, eh?

Cowardly, self-serving shits, the bloody lot of them. They knew the Evil Ruiner was useless yet they cynically and knowingly inflicted him on the nation rather than do the right thing and risk their political necks.

Did not even one of them think he or she would do better than crazy Cyclops? Apparently not. Which means we can take it that none of them, by their own estimation, would be a less bad Prime Minister than God-awful Gordon.

But hold! Something seems to have changed.

Some members of that same shameful Brown Cabinet are now offering themselves as potential Labour leaders and therefore putative Prime Ministers. How can that be?

What has happened to make them think more of themselves now than they thought then? Why do they believe themselves more qualified to be PM now than when they conspired to keep Gordon Brown in the most powerful office in the land, to the great sorrow of the country, when they knew full well that he was not up to it?

Wait... what's the phrase... ah, yes. FUCK OFF.

Gordon Brown in 'Cleaning House'. Horror? Comedy? Farce?

Back then, the witless, neurotic bastard was cacking himself under pressure and decided (I use the term loosely) that Action This Day was more politically profitable than a Pause For Thought.

So his first move was this:

And now, from the political grave, he gives us this.

Metro

Bastard. Vain, stupid, incompetent, deluded, malign, mad bastard.

What on earth was the point of him? Everything he touched... everything... the economy, Parliament, the Constitution, our national identity, even *his own party... all ruined. Restoration will not be accomplished in my lifetime.

Fawkes was right all along - Jonah Brown is a veritable walking curse. And an utter, utter bastard.

Yes, I am still fucking angry.

________________

* OK - he did one good thing.

We are all liberals now. Aren't we?

Socialists, especially in the USA and especially in academe, like to describe themselves as 'liberal'. It's one of those nice, caring words which they colonise in order to deny use of them to their enemies. Like 'progressive', 'liberal' has a smack of God-free sanctity about it, a benevolent glow, connoting warm bread for the poor, that sort of thing. Peace and love, man.

On the other hand, the older English-politics definition puts 'liberal' nearer to 'libertarian-Tory', as soi-disant 'liberal' Ed Milibrother discerns, distinguishing the (good, Labour-at-heart) Kennedy/Hughes faction of the Liberal Democrats from the (wicked Tory-ish) Orange Book Coalition-Cleggers whom he condemns as 'small state/civil liberties/deficit nutters'.

Ah, words. What troubles they cause.

The 'Liberal Democrats' have an existential problem intrinsically connected to the colonisation of the word 'liberal' by Socialists. The seeds of the Party's death were sown by the now sainted but actually pompous and shamelessly unscrupulous David Steel.

Steel allowed the ex-Labour Gang of Four and their followers to merge into the Liberal Party for pragmatic rather than principled reasons. And what a characteristically Liberal/LibDem manoeuvre it was, prioritising electoral-arithmetic over honest politics. Plus ca change in the Love The One You're With party. But Nemesis lurked, wearing an improbable Shirley Williams mask.

The LibDems' problem today is that their 'party' comprises two philosophically incompatible movements, one classically liberal and the other closet-socialist. The two are locked in an incoherent embrace made deadly by mutually exclusive definitions of the word 'liberal'.

The public is no less confused, insofar as it considers Clegg's party at all, which on the whole it doesn't, as Clegg himself knows only too well, hence his being on his best behaviour around the increasingly popular Conservative senior partner in coalition.

If we weren’t in a coalition now I don’t think people would take any notice of the Liberal Democrats…

You think?

The fatuous electoral apotheosis of the Liberal Democrats was the Cleggmania moment when people who know nothing whatsoever about politics, incited by a bored and mischievous media, massed in the streets to chant, "I agree With Nick!" Nothing in the dishonourable, dishevelled history of the Liberal Democrat Party epitomises it as perfectly as this, when almost everybody, according to the papers, agreed with... oh, whatever... they're just not the others, innit?

Now we have some excellent spectator sport as the Liberal Democrat Party enters its death throes. And all because successive leaders, in archetypal Liberal strategy, put vote-grabbing (and now, courtesy of some warped constituency boundaries, a temporary taste of power) ahead of conscience and (Heaven forfend) coherence.

It won't last. Not the sport, not the Party. It's probably safe for the Social Democrats to go back home to Labour now, the Stalinists having been more or less purged. Then the Orange Bookers and the Cleggist opportunists, although obviously not led by fatuous, vacuous I-Agree-With Nick, will be able to get on with resurrecting the Liberal Party of Gladstone and Lloyd George. Well, maybe not Lloyd George. We are all puritans now.

Then we will all have huge fun at Labour's expense. Is that a copy of the Limehouse Declaration in Rawnsley's top pocket?

Man with speech impediment needs YOU!

Aaaaaargh... Mind bleaaaaach!

Like wha' yer see? For full instructions on 'ow to 'elp 'im, click 'ere.

Hat tip (and worse) CoffeeHouse and ConHome

Best ever.

Except for all the others.

Spooky

The Love the One You're With party looks like whatever you want it to look like, while they're talking to you and wanting your support.

Funny how like Conservatives they seem at the moment, isn't it?

Give them time...

The Kampfner Dilemma

cf. this post:

The Left's perception problems are partly a consequence of their trying to hi-jack the English language.

In Left-Speak, 'Conservative' means 'wicked' because it is the opposite of 'Liberal' which means 'virtuous' and so may only be applied to Left Wing people, parties, principles and policies.

Once 'Conservative' people start doing things which are self-evidently virtuous, confusion reigns and some device must be found to facilitate lauding the action without lauding the Conservative actor.

The British Left's remedial device of choice is called 'the Liberal Democrat Party' which, being a glossy but empty vessel made of string and sealing wax, doesn't work.

'Lefty journalist in denial' shock

Were there no left-wing journalists at the 2009 Tory Party conference? None? At all?

Obviously John Kampfner wasn't there, as he makes clear:

(It) is essential for the Lib Dems to mark their ground. They have to show how they are making a difference. The scorecard on one area in particular – civil liberties – is better than most people realise: the scrapping of ID cards and the ContactPoint children's Database; the outlawing of finger-printing of kids at school without permission and of child detention in immigration cases.

[...]

Is Francis Maude right when he asserts that this Government will complete Margaret Thatcher's unfinished business? Or will Clegg prevail when he talks, as he did in a speech yesterday, about the seriousness of this administration in improving social mobility, Blair and Brown's unfinished business? There may be the odd overlap but fundamentally these two approaches cannot in the end be reconciled.

Every jot and tittle of the policies now lauded by Kampfner: civil liberties, social mobility... was presented in Manchester as official Conservative Party policy (as was the scrapping of speed cameras, to vast cheers) in speech after speech by leading Tories including Osborne, Cameron, Duncan Smith, Clarke, Maude... And (shock! horror!) every single top Tory banana praised Blair/Brown for having good motives, if disastrous policies. You really should have been there, John.

Hard for you to accept this, I know, but the Coalition policies that you like so much, and for which the always-unfuckingscrupulous, ever-menbloodydacious Liberal Democrats are keen to claim all the credit (LibDem-Good-Cop-to-Tory-Bad-Cop my fat arse) are and always have been Conservative policies with which the LibDems happen to agree. Well, everyone does, really. And you're in denial, John.

Lefties like Kampfner, a lifelong ABC (Anybody But the Conservatives) campaigner, just can't see - and will never admit - that the Conservative Party's very essence is liberal in the classical sense, demanding the liberation of the citizen along with effective help for those in need. The Left believes that the credit for liberal (sic) government action can only belong to the Liberal Democrats (the party of Hughes and Cable - hahahahaha) to whom, for a while and to further their ABC project, they lent their support once they

gave up on the thuggish practices of the Labour government.

... because the LibDems looked to them like Labour-lite which of course the Hughes-Cable-Huhne wing is.

And then, hilariously, the Lefti-chatterati got a horrible shock when Nick clambered up into Dave's bunk. Heh - couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of patronising tossers.

The Lefties are trying desperately to shore up the LibDems because, well, they must, for now. Prematurely flouncing back to Labour over Clegg's appalling treachery would smack of error and confusion, flip-flopping or, at best, indecent haste - always undignified in a patrician-journo. (Where is Dame Michael, by the way?) No, it's not on. But it's OK because Leaderless Labour is having a fit of the vapours and anyway it's summer and no-one's paying much attention.

Kampfner and co are working on Plan B for when serious politics starts up again after the hols. The LibDems' days on the sunny side of Fleet Street are numbered. Cleggers has heard the last of I agree with Nick outside Mock the Week and HIGNFY.

And in the August of that year, it came to pass that on MacBooks all over the valleys of Arno, Lot and Severn, guff like this was in draft:

Began in hope... disappointing... opportunism... regrettable... Liberals versus Social Democrats... toff Clegg... killed his party... closet Tory... if only Hughes/Huhne/Cable... Labour now Britain's only hope... line drawn under Blair/Brown era... Miliband... return to True Labour Values... party of the middle class... Whelan? Never heard of him... who is this Bob Crow of whom you speak?... Help for Heroes... peace and love, man... sunlit uplands... zzz...

Please?

Can we stop calling him 'Vince'? I mean it's not as though he's anyone's friend, is it?

In a nutshell

Here is why Gordon Brown is a dangerous bastard whose legacy leaves the country cursed for generations.

During 13 years in office, Gordon Brown quietly but skilfully enmeshed large sections of the middle class in a gladiator's net of state dependency. Paul Goodman.

And that the Labour Party considers this corruption of society a Good Thing is reason enough that it never, ever, be allowed to govern again.

What he said.

Here.

Oh, all right, then.

I make no secret of suffering acute arse-pain whenever Theresa May appears on the box. She's a lousy rotten debater with an irritating manner, a world-class record in on-camera own goals and a total inability to shoot down the enemy. Every time she's on QT she loses votes and deprives me of the will to live.

Fair play to the ghastly woman, though. She's making a decent fist of the Home Office.

Just keep her off the debating programmes, Dave.

He is the very model of a modern Liberal Democrat

Clegg has demonstrated a level of duplicity in his conduct of politics that richly merits the tortures that are about to be carried out upon him. In the last Parliament he ditched a Lib Dem commitment to a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty in favour of proposing a referendum on EU membership itself. Now that he is in a position of influence he has abandoned this policy too, showing it was only ever a flag of convenience to fool Eurosceptic voters into believing he took their concerns seriously. His contribution to BBC political editor Nick Robinson’s documentary Five Days That Changed Britain was also telling. First of all he appeared to admit gilding the lily about what Labour had offered him during coalition talks in order to bounce the Tories into offering more. Then, more damaging still, he claimed to have changed his mind about the need for immediate spending cuts well before the election, before being reminded by Robinson that he had spent most of the campaign promising voters that he would thwart Tory plans for swift expenditure reductions. For once he was lost for words. That episode showed him at his very worst – a man who would stand on his head if he thought it would increase his chances of personal advance. Source.

Clegg is the made-to-measure perfect leader for the Love The One You're With party whose HQ routinely orders its grass roots to campaign on diametrically opposing policies in adjoining constituencies if necessary, in order to win votes.

Anyone keeping count of the number of About Turn! orders issued by Cowley Street since the election? No wonder one poll has the LibDems down to 8 per cent. The electorate sees right through them. All Cleggover's hilarious posturing is bootless. With every day that passes, his party is more despised.

The electorate recognises that Clegg is DPM by reason of electoral arithmetic, nothing more. It's fine - it got Labour out and it's keeping them out, which is what the public wants. The public also wants the most popular Conservative Chancellor (up yours, Gordon) ever to have the time and space to do what the public wants him to do: cut the cost of the state, direct essential aid to those who need it and not those who merely want it. It's what we Tories call 'building a fairer society': prenting theft from honest workers by the feckless and the creation of wealth by, erm, wealth-creators, for the benefit of the greatest number and especially of those most in real need. A fairer, Conservative society will also get left-wing apparatchiks and their fellow-travellers off our children's backs and re-introduce what will be a novel concept to the malign socialist manipulators of the 'education' establishment: education.

As for 'I agree with Nick', well, come the next election campaign, we'll all be able to say that in ironic chorus because good old Nick will be saying whatever he thinks we want to hear. He'll have had a taste of what he thinks of as power and being a true LibDem he'll say anything to keep it. But it won't do him any good.

All credit for the achievements of the coalition will accrue to the Conservatives. All the Liberal Democrats will get, with one or two honourable exceptions who are not on Simon Hughes's Christmas card list, is abuse, for being transparently venal lying turncoats.

Yvette Cooper's Diary

Bloody Daily Mail.

Danny Alexander’s walking in the Cairngorms. He gets a special rate at the hostels because until recently he used to be the press officer for the Cairngorms. Now he’s Chief Secretary to the Treasury. How cool is that!

Cool? Putting a sodding park-keeper in charge of state spending? Cool? It's a national fucking disaster.

I dunno. When the electorate fired me from the Ministry of Control it proved that they really had lost the plot. Maybe Gordon's insanity is catching.* Anyway, this bloody country is ConDemmed without a Labour government to control the commanding heights. Of the economy, not the Highlands.

Fucking Cairngorms. I ask you.

* To be honest, I've been a bit worried about Ed for a while, now.

Two. Just two.

There are two contenders for the Labour leadership. Two. Both are called Miliband. One of them will win. It is written. Indeed it was written some time ago.

That is all.

Not that anyone is interested. Anyone at all.

Psst, Iain Dale - HINT.

Intimate congress

Then she pounced, like a sea-eagle on a basking pilchard.

Oh, I say. Good grief. Just think of it. Are your eyes watering? Teeth and arse-cheeks clenched? Well, quite. I mean to say. Talons are involved here. Talons.

Thus does W J Webster, in persona Wooster, pay homage to the great Wodehouse in the Spectator's competition of 7th August. The task was to write a bedroom scene in the manner of 'a novelist who would not normally venture into such territory'.

The merciless Mr Webster came second to Chris O'Carroll whose depiction of Darcy and Elizabeth getting it, as they say, on, has coloured permanently my reading of the great lady's magnum opus.

Faute de mieux

There was a fine independent bookshop by our market square until the online booksellers and a rapacious landlord forced it out. Its former premises are now occupied by our largest non-supermarket bookseller, W H Smith.

“Sorry?”

“The Misogynist by Piers Paul Reid.’

“Has it been out a long time? Only we don’t carry many old books.”

“No, just a couple of weeks. It’s been reviewed everywhere.”

Silence.

“The author is very famous.”

Silence.

"It’ll be in hardback.”

“Oh, we don’t carry many of those.”

“It’s by one of our leading writers.”

“Like, you mean, a novel? Only we don’t carry many of those.”

With an encouraging smile, “Just out, you say? Well, if we’ve got it, it’ll be there,” pointing to shelves heavily polluted with loose stool water.

“I’ve looked. It’s not there.”

“Well we haven’t got it, then. Sorry.”

The old shop used to have a book-ordering service. You know, like a bookshop.

But that's the whole point, innit?

So there is a value to industrial action that is innate to the process, regardless of the outcome: it keeps the vocabulary, the mechanics and the muscle of conflict alive. These are things we’re going to have more and more use for.

*Sigh*.

Passing swiftly over this example of the stunted intellectual development which is Socialist realpolitik, we move on to discuss the fallacy of their "economics".

Jock-a-nory

"During [Gordon Brown's] premiership, it was permissable only to be Scots or Welsh, but not English."

Who knew?

Image by Raindance at B3ta.

He's right, for once

Hopi Sen suggests a name for the South Manhattan mosque.

Hat tip Alex Massie.

Meanwhile, on another planet

I checked the Mash and then, utterly mystified, googled the man in question.

I find I need to do that quite often these days, especially if I'm reading the Mail online and happen to glance at the unfamiliar but important faces in the Sleb News column.

And I came across this from someone who is clearly down with the vibe. Is that the phrase?

I adore André Benjamin. I don't think of him that often, since I'm too often mind-traveling to 1962, but he is pretty much the ONLY contemporary celebrity whose style I applaud and admire.

All the others who are usually -- and wrongly, IMO -- heralded as modern "style icons" are, more accurately, either boring-masquerading-as-good-taste (Anderson Cooper), complete shams (David Beckham), clueless label whores (Kanye West), or vastly overrated and only stylish by comparison (George Clooney).

Mr. Benjamin's style has wit, originality and audacity -- but he also has the keen color sense and just enough restraint to fall short of excess and self-parody. I can't claim to love everything he puts together, but I have to admit that it works for him.

I am no wiser although I recognise the names Beckham and Clooney. One's an actor and the other's a footballer, I think. Give me a minute while I work out which is which.

I am missing a lot, obviously, but I can't help it. Having a life takes up so much of my time.

A national tragedy

The short-term memory loss inflicted on so many people by socialism.

Thus Chris Addison on *Mock the Week:

Big Society? But we can't run things - we're hopeless. We just accidentally elected a Conservative government!

Sad, how a pretty (sic) witty young comedian should have forgotten so quickly the two biggest things to happen in politics since he attained the age of reason:

• the national damage on so many fronts wrought by Britain's most venal, vain, vicious, incompetent, ignorant and - in short - dangerous government ever
• the directly-consequent elimination of Labour as an electoral contender for the foreseeable future

And the subsequent election of a government of educated adults is an unfortunate 'accident'?

Only in a tiny Labour mind like yours, Chris, dear, and of course to some of the more noisome noisy, Left-indoctrinated habituated audience. Even your colleague Russell Howard (not a Tory, I would venture) noted that the audience thought for a mo before deciding 'That's the sort of thing we ought to applaud'- did you catch that?

You see what socialism does to a even a lively mind, dear reader? Avoid it at all costs, and move heaven and earth to protect your children from contamination.

*Why do I bother? In a word, Hewed Ennis. All right, two words. Tsk. Some people.

Right in the eye, Labour

This government, unlike previous governments, will govern for the long term. That’s why we are prepared to take the difficult decisions necessary to equip Britain for long-term success. This approach not only underpins our commitment to safeguarding our environment for future generations and to restoring transparency and accountability to our politics, it must also underpin everything we do in the spending review. That means welfare reform that will get people off benefits and into work; effective support for children in the crucial early years to provide them with a fair chance in life; tackling the blight of youth unemployment and long-term investment in our infrastructure to build a competitive and sustainable economy for the future. These should be our priorities, not the short term gimmicks, top down dictats and wasteful subsidies of the past.

So this is the purpose of our government, in one sentence: putting power in the hands of communities and individuals and equipping Britain for long-term success.

Thus Dave and Nick reveal their strategy: to fuck Labour in the long-term. Excellent.

So. Electoral pact it is, then.

Room at the top?

2010 is surely the estimable Mike Smithson's finest year in the blogosphere, what with the record-breaking tsunami of comments over the election period at his must-read blog, PoliticalBetting, the premier drug of choice for UK and expat political anoraks. And some expat/overseas cousins. Open all hours: political debate continues all day and all night. Simply amazing.

OGH ('Our Gracious Host'), as he is usually known, makes no secret of his LibDem activism although he scrupulously refrains from intruding his personal prejudices into discussions at PB.com where all are welcome including the truly enlightened (like me, obviously), the 'Tory Herd', some world-class-witty Libertarian controversialists, a handful of phenomenally dedicated, narcolepsy-inducing Labour bots and a few blind-to-the-bleedin'-obvious barking mad maniacs. The lethal and original lightning wit with which culpably ignorant posters are euthanased and the pathologically prejudiced outed and squished makes for better reading than most Booker winners and for frequent coffee-keyboard incidents. Bloodsport at its finest - and all conducted in the best possible taste. Some of the more self-important political blogs could do worse than to lighten up a bit and emulate the humour of the PB.com community.

But back to OGH. With his party's leadership having arrived in government against even his own fondest predictions, he is taking the opportunity, reasonably enough, to post regular articles about his home team. Today, in a rare McEnroe moment, he allows his wishes to father a ridiculous thought which no-one outside LibDemmery should - or could - take seriously, to wit., Fox despatched and Ashdown for Defence Secretary.

Look here, Mike, old chap, Cameron is running Cabinet government. Chaps meet around a big table, Prime Minister in the chair. One chap proposes X which all the other chaps ponder before agreeing which bits of X they like. All the chaps agree to accept responsibility for X-amended and then the first chap toddles off and does X before reporting back to the other chaps on results. The entire Cabinet meeting snacks on any prima donnas who get above themselves.

Now where could Paddy possibly fit into such a scenario? His custom is to bark an order and have the chaps reply "Sir!" before obeying with alacrity and without demur. Fact is, after a lifetime of that sort of thing, compounded by having lived for too long in a world carpeted wall to every wall in red Yugoslavian and Belgian Axminster, the Cabinet Room would not be big enough for Ashdown's huge ego. See, he actually believes himself, now, to be a monarch - without a country, so far, but he's working on that. His head alone would occupy the space normally allocated for half the chaps around the table.

No, Mike. No. Not Paddy, sorry. Decent enough bloke, old soldier and all that, but there is simply not enough room at the top.