Cheeky bastard

David Cameron is threatening to block Gordon Brown's appointment to the IMF because

 it was important that the role went to someone who "gets" the dangers of excessive debt and deficit. 

Er… that's true. Gordon Brown's utterly guilty of encouraging the banks and other speculators to go mad. The idea was that taxes from the City would fill in the gap where proper industries that employed lots of people used to be. More generous benefits and better schools, hospitals and so on would go some way to ameliorating the fact that we had an economy but fewer and fewer jobs other than hairdressers and Starbucks waiters.

In a swipe at Brown, Cameron raised doubts about his suitability for the post, saying he was someone "who didn't think we had a debt problem in the UK when we self evidently do".

But I'm not taking this from Cameron. (It's not true, for a start: lots of countries have far worse deficits and higher debts and get along fine: he's just using the recession as an excuse to cut public services for ideological reasons).

Cameron's the multimillionaire son of a stockbroker who spent his entire time in opposition calling for less regulation of the banks. He actually thought that the minimal rules in place under Labour should be weakened even further because he has this idea that 'creative chaos' will produce an innovative society. Bashing Brown is a deeply cynical attempt to rewrite history, and I'm shocked he's been this blatant. The pair of them thought that a global economy could and should be run on massive multiples of debt - but Cameron was by far the worst of the two.

What we need at the IMF is someone who isn't white and western, who isn't a man, and who isn't a capitalist. The IMF shouldn't be the first-aid kit for a system that's failed: it should be a toolbox for a more sensible and redistributive economy. It was pointed out recently that the entire crash was the result of too much money sloshing around, not too little: the IMF is guilty of punishing those countries who resisted these overbalancing attacks (particularly the South Americans, who've ridden the storm very well) and rewarding those who've got into the worse messes through their own greed.

Boo to Brown and Cameron can just feck off.

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.

Everybody's a comedian

My old friend Adam seems simultaneously to have discovered political satire and Photoshop. I don't necessarily endorse his views - I'm a bit more left wing, though no fan of Brown. He's right about Blair, and Stalin did remove friends from photographs as he had them executed. Adam: do you think that Cameron is any less evil?

Toodle-pip, old beans

Right, that's it. I'm off to do some more ironing because that's the kind of glamorous life I lead when not teaching. Tomorrow I'm off to Oxford to look intellectual, though I've drawn the line at goatee, teddy bear, bowtie and tweeds. I like tweed though.

Iran is still in ferment. I can't help thinking that overt support from other governments for Moussavi is a terrible idea. If Ahmedinejad retains power, he'll be angry as well as nuked-up. If Moussavi wins, he'll have to prove he's not pro-American if he's to have any chance of governing successfully (this is the Kennedy/Clinton/Blair/Brown strategy: be more rightwing than rightwing parties so that they can't accuse you of being weak on communism/defence/paedos or whatever.

See you on Friday.