The dumbest guys in the room want a word with you

In case you've missed the obscure rustlings in the Tory undergrowth, there's a new and only fitfully literate manifesto out from the Forty Group. These are the forty Tories in the most marginal seats - the mediocrities not expected to win last time and destined for a watery grave in 2015 barring the government giving us all everlasting-life pills and flying cars between now and then.

It's a fascinating read. It's the product of people who appear to have been imprisoned in the basement of a think-tank since the Suez Crisis. Everything has passed them by: racial equality, the EU, the crashes of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, sexual liberation and equality, the end of Empire: the lot. It's like the company directors of Barnes' satirical England, England, or the near-future Tory government of McEwan's A Child In Time: fuelled by paranoia and sexual damage. All you need to heal the country is to hand it over to Big Business and sterilise the poor and the young. You think I'm joking? Read on…

Needless to say, my egregious, poisonous, dishonest and vacuous MP Mr Paul Uppal is one of the conspirators, never having met a short-sighted, reactionary and revanchist idea he hasn't liked. Not that he contributed any of the ideas, of course: his grey matter is too busy inventing evidence for Parliamentary speeches. One of life's sidekicks, our Uppal. He's the Richard Hammond to the government's Clarkson: he enjoys the cruelty but doesn't have the imagination or wit to do anything more than cheer it on.

So let's have a look at these intellectual adventurers' solutions to the country's ills:

1. “Excessive regulation is the biggest brake on our business
expansion."

This sets the tone for the entire document. The innocuous tone of this assertion belies a total absence of fact (who says? one-third of Chambers of Commerce survey respondents: not exactly clinching), and in particular ignores the biggest credit crunch and recession since the Weimar Republic, which I would consider a greater drag on business than 'excessive regulation'. This is simply imported American small-state ideology unconvincingly dressed up as fact. Surely nobody could object to 'excessive' regulation? But what do they mean by 'excessive' and 'regulation'? Easy: they're free-market ideologues (in theory: Uppal wants tax breaks for commercial landlords like, er, him). To them, all 'regulation' is excessive. And what they mean by 'regulation' is things like pollution restrictions, the minimum wage, unfair dismissal protection, the right to organise, to be protected from sexual or racial harassment, to a working life that takes into account family needs. It also – explicitly in this manifesto – means exempting small companies from contributing to employees' pensions. The result? Either they starve or the costs are passed on to the state.

What these people want is the capitalist dystopia of Back to the Future II before Marty goes back and saves the day from Biff Tannen. The problem with the Forty Group is that given a choice between Democracy and the Triumph of the Market, they plump for the market every time – because they've benefited from both markets and (though they'd deny it) democracy and the state. The experiences of those they're meant to represent are far less important than the Hayek and Pinochet they cream over in private. The Market is what needs appeasing: not the humans for whom (they forget) politics serves.

Big idea No 2 is 'more female entrepreneurs'. And celebrating the ones we have. Not exactly a policy, and again, it leaves unquestioned the notion of entrepreneurship, which is far less economically important than the discourse around it suggests. All 60 million of us can't be entrepreneurs, nor can all 30 million women. The glaring absence of any actual ideas suggests that 'women' as a concept are fairly alien to the authors and not at all a priority.

Moving on to number 3, we discover that discredited, dystopian, Ballardian notion of handing over Town Centres to private businesses, neatly ensuring that Consumers (we're no longer citizens) aren't impeded by unproductive drones: people taking the air, holding protests, chatting or otherwise subverting the Business of Business. The dreaded Portas is invoked in the course of a plea to turn over our towns to cars and shopkeepers: physically and legally. It's a bleak vision but a profitable one for someone who'd directly profit from this policy.

The next bit wounds me deeply:

“Universities offer a perfect environment for fledging businesses.”

Actually, universities offer a perfect environment for critiquing and comprehending the status quo, including capitalism. The problem is that these guys are spiritually poor: like Gradgrind, they can't see further than the balance sheet (and certainly don't want to address capitalism's manifest failures: another advantage of ignoring recent history).

The plot here is to make universities become profit centres, mini-industrial estates, the butlers of businesses, entirely subservient to the (often short-sighted) demands of businesses, which would – surprise – get another tax break. In case you've forgotten, universities are about new ideas and not simply reinforcing the prejudices of the hegemony (which is why Mr Gove hates us so much).

No. 5 proposes encouraging more people to start their own business. Hard to object, though it's marginal at best: most people work in, and want to work in, stable established businesses. The meat of the idea, if we're being kind, is to suffuse schooling and higher education with capitalist propaganda: this isn't policy, it's a naked attempt to turn Britons into a nation of alienated privateers, a programme already advanced by the wholesale abandonment of secondary education to the tender mercies of the very shady businessmen currently 'sponsoring' academies. The result will be a country of obedient conformists in a nation safe for exploiters, polluters and rent-seekers.  

The same is true of the next section: elevating 'workplace skills' rather than merely 'intellectual skills'. Presumably this will include Advanced Loyalty, Total Submission and Shutting Up. Then we're back to free-market capitalists' demands for more taxpayers' money. The State is evil, unless it's bankrolling these Tories' friends:

A state-backed Enterprise Bank could be a permanent solution to the lending gap and would lend to any company

The next section continues the theme: it namechecks Germany's industrial success without mentioning the employee-union-owner structure. Instead, industrial success depends (brace yourself) on handing over the State to business:

More must be done to address politicians’ knowledge gap of industry through better cooperation and collaboration with industry itself. This means having those who have served in the sector taking more prominent roles in the relevant departments of BIS and the Treasury and more policies that actively promote manufacturing. 

This is a tacit admittance that these politicians are anti-politics. They don't negotiate the competing requirements of the people: they just want to hand the state over to their mates. They also don't want to address economic matters. To them, manufacturing is held back by whinging lefties, not macro-economic factors. Once we 'free' children to stitch footballs, we'll all get rich. And once we unblock those outflow pipes:

Policies that are aimed at tackling climate change have their heart in the right place but are stifling industry.

They also want us to fly everywhere too.

The global trade section is particularly backward looking, to the League of Empire Loyalists. Instead of trading with those perfidious Europeans, the UK should demand that those disloyal Commonwealth johnnies should show some gratitude and shovel their dinero Britain's way. You know Godwin's Law? That the first person to mention the Nazis in pursuit of an argument, has lost. Voila:

World War Two demonstrated the extent to which we need countries like Australia and New Zealand to overcome obstacles and challenges, and in present times the Commonwealth could provide the key to our part in the global economic recovery… Traditional links should be at the forefront of any anti-trade barrier argument and there is nothing wrong with playing on old sympathies

And then we get to another nasty little surprise: the 'logistics friendly' government, i.e. one which encourages more and bigger lorries onto the road while ignoring mass transit such as rail. Less a policy, more a present for their mates. But this is just a warmup for the real nastiness: energy policy. Dig, drill, burn and rape with no regard for environmentalism – particularly fracking. The Big Idea is in fact Deny and Defer.

This gas should be used to replace coal and oil in our power stations, producing a reduction in our carbon emissions on an order of magnitude greater than anything achieved to date by wind or solar.

This is offensively dishonest: shale gas is a fossil fuel. It's better than coal, but there's no way on earth it'll be used as a temporary stopgap on the way to a carbon-free future. It's just a greedy, selfish fuck-you to our descendants. The only think climate change is good for is making money: the unspoken assumption is that it's all a big hoax:

let the market take its course. The plethora of artificial incentives, such as feed in tariffs and renewables obligations, should be phased out…

Though they are deeply interested in geothermal energy, which I had no idea was or could be a major player in UK generation. Presumably one of their donors has some hot water going cold without subsidy.

But we need to give projects like this greater government support.

To help geothermal companies attract private investment we need to create the right financial incentives using the Strike Price and the Renewable Heat Incentive. At the moment less technologically proven and cost effective renewable energy technologies receive larger incentives. 

But now we're getting close to these guys' hearts. Having spent an awful lot of our imaginary money subsidising their mates' businesses, they address tax. And guess what? They're not keen. The magic word here is 'simplification', by which they mean 'less tax for corporations and the rich'. But they don't say so. Embarrassingly, the policy doesn't have a single word to say about income tax, corporation tax, artificial vehicles, off-shoring, evasion or avoidance. Instead, they propose that public servants' tax returns be made public. And that's it.

But when we turn to property, we're reminded strongly that this is the manifesto of the 1%. The pressing issue is apparently too much taxation on property sales. Not the massive gap between salaries and property prices. Instead, they want to reinstate the Property Madness which condemned most of to mouldy flats and the extortion practiced by landlords like Uppal.

The housing market is in need of a tax neutral nudge in the right direction to make it more buoyant and fair. 

Ah yes, the 'nudge theory'. Who needs to bother the populus's pretty little heads with ideas? And what to we onlookers get as a reward for tolerating gimcrack developments thrown up willy-nilly?

Maybe a playground for local children, maybe the renovation of the Parish Hall. The sums will be minor

Even the most naked attacks on our collective decisions are dressed spuriously in the language of liberation. Everything our local authorities do, it's assumed, is repressive and incompetent. We busy people are to be freed… but only to choose a different corporate interest:

the localism act introduced a ‘community right to challenge’ clause which gives community and voluntary groups a ‘right’ to challenge a local authority for the services they provide.
The clause is limited in that it merely provides for a local authority to trigger a procurement process which may mean that the challenging group is not successful in being commissioned to provide the service.
There is a need to create much more diversity of provision at the local level which harnesses the expertise, skill and knowledge of a the community and voluntary sector. 

Yes, it's illiterate, but you have to look at the discourse as well as the typing. Elected local government = Stalinist Monster. 'Diversity of provision' sounds lovely.

Local groups should also be encouraged and similarly incentivised to challenge as consortia which would enable a consortia of local groups the ability to challenge for a range of services. For example a consortia of local groups currently providing youth services outside of that which is provided by the local authority could come together to put in a joint bid for the whole of a local authorities youth provision. Local authorities should actively encourage and facilitate these local consortia.

It took me a while to get the hang of this illiterate garbage, but I think what they're really saying is this:

We all like diversity. But really it means public services sold off to offshore, tax-evading, profit-increasing, service-reducing, unaccountable, wage-lowering exploiters.

Only they think these are positive terms.

You can have a small prize if you can explain this sentence:

we need to write the independence of local government into our unwritten constitutional arrangements.

Er…how?

Apparently Local Government is going to be freed from the Tyranny of Central Government through establishing a Decentralisation Committee. Excellent. Where's it going to be located? 10 Downing Street! Who's going to head it? The Prime Minister. Glad that's clear.

Another example of the group's faux niceness is the section on Community Hospitals. They're for them, and opposed to the centralisation of specialities in mega-hospitals. Medical madness, of course: you want your child's heart surgery done by a doctor who does these ops every day, not one who gets one every few years. But there are no votes in closing down St. Teacosy's down the road. Perhaps, though, they have in mind the Cuban polyclinic initiatives, which are hugely successful.

Er, no. They just want to close the NHS:

Community hospitals also need to be freed from the central control of the NHS. They should be free to own their own buildings and service users and employees should be encouraged to develop new ownership models based on mutual, cooperative or social enterprise models where that would maintain or enhance existing community services. 

But more positively, their plan for transforming Britain – in the depths of a serious recession, mass unemployment, failing services, overworked hospitals, environmental apocalypse etc – come in Idea Number 30: Cleaner Beaches. You want detail? They've got detail! They're going to test the water a few times a year rather than just in the summer. Seriously, these Tory kids are blowing my mind with their wacky, zany ideas!

Is all this affecting your mental health? Don't fret: they've a policy idea to treat your aching brainpan! You'll never guess what it is…

GPs should to be encouraged to look beyond traditional approaches whether through drugs or short term psychological therapies so that patients do have a viable range of choices appropriate to their condition. Commissioning should be opened up to allow therapists operating in private practice, in longer term therapies, to be able to bid for services within the NHS. 

So that's a) homeopathy on the state and b) more privatisation. 

I feel better already.

And in case you're thinking 'at least they care about my children's mental health even if they're deluded about the solution, let's see why they want you to get better:

Increased levels of achievement, education and productivity on an individual level that will translate to an increased ability to contribute to the state. 

They don't care why you're ill. Causes are irrelevant. They just want you back up that chimney and paying your taxes (not you, Mr Vodafone, you're excused) because someone's got to subsidise those corporate taxes and let's face it: you'd have to be mad to go along with this stuff.

But some citizens are Just Not Playing The Game, and Spoiling It For The Rest Of Us. The bankers? Guess again. Corrupt MPs? Nope. News International? Keep trying. Google, Starbucks, Lord Rothermere, the Daily Mail? No, no no and no. It should be obvious.

Teenage mothers. 

If it wasn't for those greedy bastards, we'd all be living in Easy Street right now. The banks would be solvent, the job centres empty, the Volvos full and the kiddies dancing round maypoles spontaneously erected from Walthamstow to Moss Side.

Take access to housing benefit, for example. 16-17 year olds are currently entitled to claim housing benefit if they “have a good reason for not living at home.” Some teenagers may view this, quite incorrectly, as an automatic right to free housing, encouraging them to have a child. 

Evidence? Oh really, what planet's political discourse have you been engaged with recently? We all know teenage mums have caused a) the credit crunch b) SARS c) 9/11 d) Charles Saatchi's violent behaviour d) Jimmy Savile and e) the decline of Channel 4's credibility, to name just a few of their crimes against humanity. So what if there's no evidence? Mr Duncan Smith made it very clear in his radio interview yesterday: evidence schmevidence, it's what he believes that matters.

All benefits to teenage mothers should be made on the condition of them living with their parents or in supervised hostel accommodation

So what if some of this very tiny number of people are fleeing abusive and neglectful homes? They need punishment. They might be old enough to join the army, kill people, be killed and pay taxes, but the female youngsters are still the property of their parents. If they're not forced back into the home with their little one, or locked up in a Home For Shamefully Disgusting Incontinent Little Slappers Who Are No Better Than They Ought To Be and taught to Know Their Places, how are they ever going to learn that female abstinence unless within the boundaries of a middle-class heterosexual official marriage is the cornerstone of Western Civilisation. Or more simply, ladies of a teenage persuasion: keep your legs crossed or the terrorists win. And the fathers? No mention. Presumably they're just 'sowing their wild oats'. Boys will be boys!

Note the sheer, despicable cowardice here:

The public perception of these policies adds to the general view that many teenagers are having children to attain benefits and subsidised housing, creating a great deal of resentment and unease. 

There's no attempt to ascertain any facts. Instead, they're nakedly endorsing 'the general view', 'resentment and unease' generated by… well, by them and their friends at the Mail.

Teenagers will be left in no doubt that teenage motherhood will not lead to an automatic right to subsidised housing and other benefits, while the general public can be assured that a teenager’s motivations for having a child are not related to housing access. 

They've found a victim, the lynch mob's waiting and these Tory scumbags are knotting the nooses for a very profitable hanging. And people wonder why they make me angry.

And then it gets really sinister. Under the guise of 'contraception efficiency', these Tories have decided that abortions have got to go. Especially for women who've had more than one. Yes, they're extended CCTV and GCHQ's activities to the final frontier: the uterus.

The Government should, for example, consider the merits of allowing agencies to check in with women post abortion, ensuring that they are continuing to use contraception provided to them.

Can you imagine the conditions and content of these 'checks'? Present yourself at the DSS for a Paupers' Duff-Upping Prevention Swab? Perhaps an RFID tab on your pill box. Or simply a two-way TV screen through which the Leader (in this case, Jeremy Hunt) conducts a uterine inspection before work on Monday morning. Free membership of the Primrose League for any C2DE who volunteers for sterilisation!

Marriage, of course, is key. What's stopping people having a proper (i.e. religious) marriage? The 1753 Act for the Better Preventing of Clandestine Marriage, which bans religious marriages in any random location. Spot on, Tories! That's why marriages have been declining. And not a widespread perception that it's not appropriate for the range of sexual and romantic dispositions now available. Thank heavens you've got to the root of the matter.

But what if some feckless oiks slip through the net, have some kids, and can't make them go to school for their daily class in (Significant Dates in Conservative Party) History? Can't pay the fine?

fines should be taken directly from child benefit payments… It might just give the most dysfunctional family the incentive to get their child to school.

Starve them into submission. That's the ticket! It's not as if truancy and other social problems are at all complicated. It's the poor kids who are to blame:

Pupils on free school meals are around three times more likely to play truant than their counterparts. 

I'm too depressed even to bother presenting you with Idea 37: male role models in schools. Apparently all engineers, fire-fighters and soldiers are men. And we should be getting trained killers into school to give the boys something to which to aspire. 

Still, at least they're tackling the Timebomb of Obesity. Which could be very messy if we don't defuse it. But don't worry, it's easy to fix. Just abolish the 'risk-averse culture' and it'll all be fine. Anybody who mentions the pervasiveness of fat-laden food and the massive sell-offs of school playing fields will be sent to the Coca-Cola-sponsored naughty step.

And now we're back to education. One of the Forty, Paul Uppal, has a large university in his constituency. A university which finds itself repeatedly victimised by a government determined to restrict funding, research and high-achieving students to a small band of élite universities. A university which is doing its best to make ends meet by providing a decent education to overseas students. 

What does Paul want to do about this state of affairs? 

The permanent cap on non-EU workers has been a success and should now be extended to include some of our universities. We must be unashamed in our policy of only wanting to attract the very brightest and best students to come to the UK and so our top universities would be allowed to continue to enrol all students on an unlimited basis as they do now. 

That's right! He wants to deport all our non-EU students. They didn't get in to Oxford or Cambridge, so they must be thick (because obviously all universities offer the same courses) and they're just scrounging, even if they do pay massive fees which subsidise the EU students. For Christ's sake. 

And there we have it. Forty fag-packet ideas to keep the UKIP wolf from the Tory door. A rag-bag of cruelty, prejudice, hysteria, pandering, reaction, hypocrisy, bare-faced lies, omissions, distortions and fantasies. Many of them are dignified by the name 'idea': they're mere wisps, dispersed on the lightest intellectual breeze. All concerned should be ashamed and embarrassed. 

If I was Labour, I'd buy a million copies and send them to every household in these MPs' marginal constituencies. IF you thought Hunt et al. are vapid, this lot need the attentions of a mortician. Certainly there's no detectable cerebral activity. They're dead men (and 8 women) walking. If this is the best the Conservative Party can do, they're history. Let's make sure. 

Tough on crime… unless it pays.

I was very heartened by the Conservative Party's various policing and justice ministers yesterday. They're promising a new era of zero tolerance and swingeing sentences for criminals. 

Grayling… explicitly promised to be a "tough justice secretary"

The home secretary, Theresa May, reinforced the theme with her announcement of a new "pick a punishment" power for victims of anti-social behaviour and her promise that Conservative candidates in the first elections for police and crime commissioners to be held on 15 November will have a "laser-like focus on cutting crime". 

"Theresa used to say she locked 'em up and Ken let them out. Now Theresa locks 'em up, and Chris throws away the key."  

"I've made no bones about my intention to be a tough justice secretary. That means I want our justice system to be firm, fair and transparent," Grayling said. 

I'm delighted, frankly. Why? Because I know a group of people who are benefitting from the proceeds of crime, which is a crime in itself. They've received stolen money. The thief was a man named Asil Nadir, who ran a major corporation (Polly Peck) in the 1980s. He looted it of £29, 000, 000 and fled to Northern Cyprus. He returned last year to face justice and was convicted and sentenced to a minimum of ten years in prison. 

So which bunch of crooks took some of his stolen money? Why, it's the Conservative Party! They accepted a £400, 000 donation from Polly Peck, channelled through subsidiaries without the consent of directors or shareholders. 

Touche Ross, the administrators of Polly Peck, wrote a letter – widely reported four years ago – to the party's central office claiming that £365,000 came from money defrauded from the Polly Peck empire.
"It is the contention of the administrator that Mr Nadir is liable to repay the sums concerned as a result of his fraud and/or breach of fiduciary duty and/or malfeasance as a director," the letter concluded. "I would urge you to return the donations to Polly Peck so that the creditors can at least obtain some small measure of compensation from this unfortunate affair."

At the time, Conservative leaders promised to pay it back if it was found to be stolen. Now they're refusing to return it to compensate the shareholders and employees of the looted company. 

Clearly crime is something other people commit. 

Time for a letter to my local MP Paul Uppal and to the chairman of the Tory Party… one Grant Shapps! Just sent this:

Dear Mr Uppal and Mr Shapps, 

I am heartened by the Conservative Party's crackdown on crime. In that spirit, can I ask you to confirm that the Conservative Party will return the money donated by Asil Nadir via several subsidiaries in the 1980s, as promised by Sir John Major?  

According to Touche Ross, the liquidators, at least £365,000 was illegally donated: "It is the contention of the administrator that Mr Nadir is liable to repay the sums concerned as a result of his fraud and/or breach of fiduciary duty and/or malfeasance as a director," the letter concluded. "I would urge you to return the donations to Polly Peck so that the creditors can at least obtain some small measure of compensation from this unfortunate affair." 

If this money is not returned, I'm afraid the only conclusion one can draw is that the Party's attitude to crime is contingent on its own financial health. 
Yours,

Spot the difference

Here's Baroness O'Cathain, chair of the Conservative Friends of Azerbaijan:

Azerbaijan, the United Kingdom and the Conservative Party have much in common.

The importance of heritage and history, tolerance of all faiths, a respect for the rule of law, strong support for the family, and a readiness to trade with the world are all hallmarks of Azerbaijan, the UK – and the Conservative Party. We share many beliefs, and as CFAZ we aim to strengthen ties and develop relationships.

And here's an extract from Amnesty's human rights assessment of that country. 

Journalists and civil society activists continued to face intimidation. The authorities continued to ban demonstrations in the centre of Baku. NGOs and religious organizations faced restrictions in obtaining registration.

The parliamentary elections on 7 November were described by the OSCE as “peaceful” but “not sufficient to constitute meaningful progress in the democratic development of the country.”

Some 600,000 people internally displaced by the conflict continued to suffer discriminatory registration requirements and inadequate housing. 

Threats, harassment, and acts of violence against journalists and civil society activists continued with impunity, leading to an increase in self-censorship. 

Criminal and civil defamation laws were used to silence criticism, resulting in prison sentences and heavy fines against journalists. On 12 February, the parliament (Milli Mejlis), approved a ban on the use of video, photo, or voice recordings without the subject’s prior knowledge or consent. Only law enforcement officials were exempt. Journalists and civil society activists were frequently subjected to violence and prevented from carrying out their work, sometimes through excessive use of force by police officers. 

Demonstrations continued to be banned in Baku’s city centre.

Mmm, what charming friends and paymasters. the Conservatives have.

And a big hello to Conservative Central Office

I imagine they're on the phone to Paul Uppal this morning, asking for a little clarification, given that they're reading all my blog posts on the weaselly construction industry shill and his untrue statements to Parliament. Enjoy your reading, boys!

chugai-pharm.co.uk ? (U.K.)
IP Address		194.203.158.# (Conservative Central Office)

Visit Entry Page		http://plashingvole....l-you-are-awful.html
Visit Exit Page		http://plashingvole....l-you-are-awful.html

Greetings, Tory Scum

I've just had a visit from Conservative Central Office.

chugai-pharm.co.uk ? (U.K.)
IP Address		194.203.158.# (Conservative Central Office)
ISP		UUNET

Hello boys and girls.

In case you come back, let's make my feelings perfectly clear.

I don't like you, mostly because you don't like any of us. You don't like the poor, the brown, the foreign, the regional, the working-class, the intellectual and the public-sector. You don't act in the interests of the population as a whole, and you appear to valorise greed and selfishness.

Your MP for my constituency is apparently lazy and uncommunicative.

Your policies on education will thicken us.
Your policies on health will sicken us.
Your policies on the economy will ruin us.

But your friends will get rich.

Here's some Alan B'Stard, featuring an early mention of oil shale, and of the phrase 'Tory Scum', around the 9.30 mark.



That's basically why I don't like Tory Scum.

Genius

The banks have collapsed, the financial sector is in crisis and the seas are full of oil, thanks to deregulation, lack of oversight, contempt for the environment, the population and for democracy. Private security firms have murdered hundreds in Iraq and conducted torture on behalf of the CIA and MI5. I would say, broadly speaking, that capitalism has done a brilliant job of enriching the few and an even better one of destroying the planet and impoverishing billions.

So what's our Prime Minister going to do?

Lord Browne is being lined up to be a "super director" with the job of inserting private sector business practices into the heart of government.

Clearly, what government really, really needs is more 'private sector practice'. And who is Lord Browne?

You'll love this.

he left BP early in 2007 after lying in the high court and presiding over a string of high-profile accidents in America, including the Texas City refinery fire in which 15 people died. Browne, who was dubbed the Sun King in business circles after building BP into Britain's biggest company, continues to hold an array of senior positions in the world of business, culture and academia.

Clearly being a perjuring polluter responsible for killing people while he was CEO of BP is no bar to respect from the City. What a delightful few years we're in for.

Quelle surprise

Under the Conservatives in the 1980s and 1990s, much was made of the 'ratchet effect'. This was the theory that if the Tories headed off far to the right of politics, Labour would have to follow them to avoid accusations of being Communist extremists: formerly moderate left policies would be seen as far-left. 


It worked beautifully: Labour acquired a leadership which abolished all socialist policies and spent more time publicly attacking its own members than it did opposing Conservatism. 


I hoped that this was merely an electoral tactic, and that since the Tories received a massive beating in 1997, the ratchet would move leftwards: that to appear sane, the Conservatives would have to move left. Until Cameron appeared, they remained on the lunatic right fringe: under him, they've acquired the discourses of liberalism, but underneath they're just as rightwing as previously. 


Worse than that: Labour (and the electorate) have continually moved to the right, under pressure from… well… nowhere. Blair, Brown and New Labour appeared simply to be, underneath it all, very rightwing. 

"Tony Blair's great legacy has been to achieve Margaret Thatcher's ambition," said Curtice. "One of the consequences of the New Labour shift to the centre is it has moved the electorate to the right." Curtice argued that the shift, towards more conservative views, were likely to boost David Cameron's campaign – particularly as messages about cutting spending had become more popular.

Their consumerist, free-market economics and obsession with surveillance and biffing Muslims has set the moral and political tone for the entire country, leading to a population of selfish Tory racists - hence the upcoming election defeat. Why vote for soft right when you can vote for the party which doesn't just authorise greedy bigotry, but sees these qualities as wholly admirable… Intelliwench, are there any jobs going at Appalachian State?

With friends like these

Banished for their unspeakable crimes against the universe, the Lords escape with the intention of destroying it for their own ends, aided by selfish humans and renegade time lords, but are thwarted by a plucky Scot whose only concern is for humanity. But that's enough laboured metaphors drawing on the last David Tennant Doctor Who episode.



I've a proud record of never supporting Labour's leaders. I didn't want Brown to become Prime Minister (a McDonnell/Skinner ticket would be my dream team). I hated Blair before he was even party leader. I thought John Smith and Kinnock were rightwing sellouts.

But. For all their incompetent and right-leaning faults, the current Labour leadership is better by far than the Tory government which I think is going to win the election in May or June. Come the Conservapocalypse, you'll realise that Cameron and his well-fed, privileged Friedmanites (the origin of 'greed is good') mean what they've been saying in recent months. They genuinely believe in 'small government', a term they picked up from the Reaganite (brilliantly cheesy site: needs sound) Republicans.

Like Reagan, they mean big government for bailing out their friends in the banking sector, and big government for the armed service and the weapons industry (proof on its own that socialist economics works), and small government for you: worse schools, worse hospitals, less social security, fewer universities with bigger class sizes and smaller subjects, lower or no minimum wage, lower taxes on the things they spend money on (i.e. big houses) and more taxes on the things the rest of us buy (food).

So you'd imagine, given the importance of this election, that the Labour Party would be united in desperation. Determined to pull together and put aside its differences in one last effort to save this country. You'd imagine wrongly. The only thing Labour any longer has in common with leftwing parties is its capacity to stab itself in the face. Today, failed Blairite non-entities Patricia Hewitt (great voting record, you koala-bothering git) and Geoff 'Buff' Hoon (aka Whoon, identical rightwing voting record) have stirred the pot by calling for a ballot of Labour MPs on the leadership.

I'm all for a new leader. A loud, dynamic, lefty. McDonnell, Skinner, Bob Marshall-Andrews, whoever. But not now. There are reasons to vote Labour (still). What undecided voter, however, will be attracted by yet more internecine warfare? The Tories don't do it like this. They're ruthless and decisive. They assassinate their leaders in the middle of the night. Labour prefers to act like an extended family opening up old feuds at a wedding reception - and for the last few years, it's been embittered Blairites like Charles Clarke, hooked on publicity and divorced from reality. The reality is that the Tories don't care about the working and lower-middle classes as anything other than voting fodder. Hewitt and Hoon have just done their bit to make the Rise of the Torymen inevitable.

Don't be evil. Don't vote Tory.

(Here's John McDonnell's reaction to a previous bit of New Labour spinning):

This is about the fourth or fifth, (I lost count some time ago), attempt by former New Labour apparatchiks to try and reinvent themselves. We have had former Blair/Brown insider advisers Neal Lawson and Jon Cruddas with Compass, Charles Clarke and Alan Milburn with 2020 Vision, and now James Purnell and Jon Cruddas with Demos's Open Left.

No matter how clever the project's title, how well its re-launch statements are drafted and how smart its website, none of them can escape from the objective history of the part they played in creating and supporting the reactionary, political deviation that was New Labour, a political project that has brought the Labour party to the edge of extinction.

Between them all they have either been the architects of, the advisers to, the parliamentary lobby fodder in support of or the ministerial implementers of policies which have left at least half a million innocent people dead in Iraq, doubled the number of homeless families in Britain, privatised more public sector jobs than Thatcher and Major put together, undermined long-cherished basic civil liberties and forced through so brutal an attack on the recipients of welfare benefits that even the Thatcher government refused to implement.

Quoting past Labour party theoreticians, intellectualising justifications for betrayal in the language of an A-level sociology paper, and speaking left while voting right will not wash off the blood of the murdered Iraqis or stem the tears of a single parent forced off benefits or help explain to the unemployed person how they can live on £65-a-week jobseeker's allowance.

Some among this crew realised sooner than others that the only hope for their future political careers was to jump ship from New Labour and to rebrand themselves on the left. They have been assisted by parts of the media that are implicated in delivering the Labour party and the country up to Blair, Brown and Mandelson, and who are also trying to distance themselves from the creature they helped create.

The Sun scuttles back to the Tories - good

As the other media outlets have trumpeted today, The Sun has, after 12 years, returned to the Conservative Party fold, with a front page declaration festooned with a Union Flag (are they suggesting that Labour isn't British?).

All this is very self-important. The Sun likes to think and say that it wins elections for whichever party it supports - it's an equally convincing argument that The Sun supports whoever it thinks its readers support. Lots of data here

The Sun recommended that its readers vote Labour for the past three elections, but it never supported Labour. Its reasons were always hedged and reluctant, and often negative - based on the disarray in which the Conservative Party found itself. Essentially, The Sun supported Tony Blair and his clique, rather than Labour values. The Sun was and is racist, selfish, consumerist, nationalist, anti-green, homophobic, militaristic and misogynistic. For a few years, New Labour captured the Labour Party and catered, shamefully, for these positions. The Sun didn't change - Labour did, and deserves opprobrium for its shameful capitulation to the worst aspects of British culture.

Will readers of The Sun be better off under the Tories? I wouldn't think so. They're working class individualists - not natural supporters of the Etonian land-and-inherited-wealth toffs who really, really don't give a fuck about the poor. Sure, they'll toss some selfish, racist red meat to white van man, but they don't have the interests of the working class at heart. Sun readers like the NHS for instance - the Tories hate and fear it.

But that's irrelevant - The Sun and all the News International papers don't care about their readers either: their writers care about the opinions and commercial interests of Rupert Murdoch, who wants to run the world and wants to run it as a capitalist oligarchy free from competition by boring old state-funded, objective BBC - exactly what the Tories will give him. That's why the declaration was today, and not during the election campaign, as usually happens. It came out the day after Brown and Mandelson made good, fighting speeches. Rather than reporting news, The Sun decided to ruin the Labour conference and help the Tories by intervening in the political process. Mmm…ethical.

Fuck The Sun (sorry, I'm quite angry). It's too stupid to be as evil as the Daily Mail, but it's still a cancer on the public sphere.

News from Norway

Not the most thrilling story for most of you, I admit, but they had a general election in the Nordic Paradise on Monday. The ruling (in coalition) Labour Party gained a few seats, the Socialist Left party lost a few. The Communists and Greens have no seats, unfortunately, nor do the Republicans. The Conservatives gained a few and the rightwing Progress Party quite a lot, but the Labour/Socialist Left/Centre Party coalition will maintain power. Hooray!

How did Labour and their allies do it? By promising to spend MORE on the already wonderful Norwegian Welfare State! Meanwhile in Britain, we're going to respond to being bankrupted by naked capitalist bankers by electing the naked capitalist Conservative Party, on a ticket of slashing public services and punishing the blameless poor, to pay for bailing out the bankers. Well done, people of Britain.

Tories = scum (reprise)

Like a one-man demolition crew hellbent on knocking down Cameron's house of lovely cards, Daniel Hannan comes out with another gem. Not content with treating Europe like a leper colony (he's an MEP) and describing the NHS as a 60-year disaster, he's announced that his political hero is Enoch Powell, the Wolverhampton MP who prophesied 'rivers of blood' if immigration wasn't halted, before leaving the Tories to become an Ulster Unionist MP - presumably immigration's fine as long as it's British people invading others people's countries.

What a charmer. Don't fool yourself that he's a loose cannon or the last hurrah of the buffers: he's young and a rising star, a new generation of the mean-spirited, racist, Thatcherite men in sharp suits who caused the 1980s. Behind Cameron's devious, plummy niceness, there are sharp teeth and dangerous views.

I ain't no suit-wearin' businessman like you... you know I'm just a gangsta I suppose...

Quote of the day, from the passionate, leftwing author of The Wire, to which I'm quite attached:

"It is possible," he has observed, "that a few thinking viewers, after experiencing a season or two of The Wire, might be inclined, the next time they hear some politician declaring that with more prison cells, more cops, more lawyers, and more mandatory sentences that the war on drugs is winnable, to say, aloud: 'You are hopelessly full of shit'."

I do worry a little about watching the show - it's pretty voyeuristic to watch the travails of a mostly-black city. From top to bottom, it depicts a capitalist dystopia in which life is cheap, getting paid is all that matters, and from which all oversight is absent. The newspaper jettisons standards and journalists at an appalling rate. The politicians are obsessed with their careers and kickbacks, whether they started idealistically or not. The legal system is politically compromised, and the police - some of whom are broken, others corrupt - care little for their citizens, with a few exceptions. The unions are mob-controlled, the schools act as mini-prisons for kids who really want to be earning on the corners, and the black men are determined to kill or be killed for money and prestige. Add the racial tensions and you have a recipe for disaster.

Yes, it's fiction, but it's based on long experience. The Tories are currently claiming that the UK is like The Wire, which is astonishingly irresponsible, and proof that they haven't actually watched it: the show's implied solutions are leftwing, calling for altruism, a strong and caring state and a sense of community. The Wire's problems, meanwhile, are those of Thatcherite capitalism, in which unbridled capitalism, the free market, privatisation, contempt for public services and 'there is no such thing as society' (Thatcher) feature prominently. Think about it: drugs are a selfish bit of indulgence. There's demand, and businessmen have spotted a gap in the market and behaved like good little capitalists by filling it. Legality, guns and the like don't matter - we've all been taught that profit is more important than morality or community. The dealers shouldn't be alienated: they're just further along the continuum that is us.

Public relations victory of the week

After one Tory MEP told Americans that the NHS is shit (clue: it isn't), and another millionaire MP told someone on film that MPs were treated 'like shit' and lived on 'rations', here's another headache for millionaire man of the people David Cameron: his rich South Staffordshire MP, Patrick Cormack, has called for MPs to be paid £130,000.

This is the man who, rumour has it, is so safe in bourgeois South Staffs that his canvassing consists of leading a cart horse festooned with posters along the high street. He is also a useless, smug, arrogant, bumptious Bufton Tufton.

His colleague Douglas Hogg, of moat-cleaning-at-taxpayers'-expense fame, wants MPs to earn £100,000 + expenses because

the current MPs' salary was "so low in absolute and relative terms" that members of the professional and business classes would be deterred from entering parliament.

MPs earn £64,000 plus expenses.

The average wage in the UK is £23,000.

A quick plug

For two events: Cruel Brother (named after an old ballad, or the mirror of Pentangle's 'Cruel Sister' album, or Rachel Unthank and the Winterset's album of the same name?) and the Deer Friend are performing this weekend, at the Chindit on Friday night, and supporting an ex-member of Fairport Convention at the Newhampton Inn on Saturday. Highly recommended folk/rock stuff, everybody. I'll hopefully be at the Chindit, depending on whether I have to go to Cardiff that day or early on Saturday.

Before that, however: please vote tomorrow. As long as you aren't planning to vote UKIP, Tory or BNP. If you are, the elections are on Friday. I always try to vote at 7 a.m. so that the Tories are losing straight away.

All my Christmases come at once

Today's greedy porker is Bill Cash MP. I punned about him last week and you all ignored me ('Did Bill Cash in?').

I particularly hate and despise him because he's my parents' MP, and was mine when I lived on the lovely Shropshire/Staffordshire border. He should have been turfed out in 97, but the Tories hurriedly removed the only urban area in the constituency, leaving only subsidy-sucking farmers and feudal barons. When the locals hang shot magpies on trees rather than Christmas lights (yes, they do), you know that they're going to vote Tory even if Fred West stood.

Anyway, Cash is one of the absolute, raving loons who made poor John Major's life a misery. I saw Black Beauty the other day. It's a terrible film, and in it, a bigoted old general shouts 'God, I'd love another crack at the wog'. Bill Cash would consider him a lily-livered liberal. Cash (who made millions from inheriting 'Cash's Name Tapes') wears those horrible, loudly striped blazers and thinks that foreigners think in English really, and pretend not to just to annoy. Though as a Catholic of a particularly rancid variety, I suspect he thinks in Latin. His delightful son William is a dubious 'journalist' famous for anti-semitic articles about 'culturally nihilist' Jews running Hollywood: he's married to one of the revolting rich currently trying to overthrow Chavez's government in Venezuela.

Anyway, the Daily Telegraph has caught him subsidising his delightful daughter.

Despite owning a posh London flat and claiming to live in his 'gentlemen's club', he charged the taxpayer £15,000 per year to rent her London flat - which she subsequently sold for a massive profit - which seems rather odd. Laetitia (I know, we should have some sympathy) is clearly a lovely human being too. Despite being a Conservative councillor for Bridgnorth (about as challenging as standing as a racist in 1980s South Africa), she seems to need a London base, and she's simultaneously standing against Hazel Blears in Salford (the setting for Coronation Street, only it's less pleasant in real life). She has a Facebook page, seemingly packed with Hooray Henrys and the idle rich.

Now, there's a race you wish both of them could lose. I actually didn't think there was anyone less working-class than Blears, especially in Salford - but I do have a mental image of lovely Laetitia turning up dressed in her hunting pinks, shouting 'Hallooo' and treating everybody much as Melchett treats Baldrick. What's her slogan? 'Hello Paupers! How would you like some Cash?' (Though according to Labour Mancunians, she spends a lot of time in posh London nightclubs and rather little in the northern city) and even the Daily Wail thinks she's a waster.

I'm loving this. Lots of rightwing Labour MPs are proving that they're corrupt and greedy - but far more Tories are proving that they haven't changed since the 18th Century: servants, stately homes, assuming that they'll be elected forever whatever they do (as this analysis proves), even hereditary politics. This is why PR or AV is needed: they abolish safe seats, thus making the candidates and sitting MPs work hard and keep their noses clean.

Coming in from the cold

Iceland held a general election yesterday. The previous goverment collapsed because its policy of encouraging reckless financial greed and speculation despite having a population the size of Wolverhampton and West Bromwich combined and a fish-based 'real' economy bankrupted them. So now, the population has elected a Social Democratic/Left-Green coalition.

How did the US react to economic meltdown? It booted out the party which encouraged, enriched and was enriched by Enron, Goldman Sachs etc. etc.

What's Britain going to do? It seems that the British population is going to elect the Conservatives, who invented all these dodges and wheezes, who openly proclaim that government is an evil imposition on the free market and on individual ambition, and who see the solution as 'cutting back' on 'wasteful government'. Now, I'm well up for scrapping ID cards and nuclear weapons, but what the Tories mean is sacking nurses, teachers, tax inspectors and all the other low-paid, unappreciated public sector workers. It won't save much at all, and will contribute to making a brutish and inefficient public sphere.

I'm not excusing Labour - they've been rightwing for 15 years now, the party hierarchy entranced by Thatcherism, never meeting a tycoon they didn't like, never meeting a lefty they did like. But still: while everybody else votes Left against the obvious depredations of capitalism, we're going to vote Right for the party which sowed the seeds of our destruction. Well done!