new Cameron piss take

Top work, made me laugh

Nick Robinson's Newslog: Tory economic plans: Cutting spending?‏

In essence, would faster and deeper cuts, or slower and shallower cuts lead to better growth?
It seems from this that both sides agree that growth is the best way to reduce the current deficit. I'd agree with that. better that than trying to do it all at once.
I think that growth through investment and phased reductions as needed is the best way forward.

And I can't help thinking that the picture should be captioned Dumb and Dumber.

Expelled Tory MEP may sue party in Brussels row‏

I think he's probably got a point.
It just goes to show that even Tories have their moments of good sense

Politics

According to G.K. Galbraith, "politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable".
Personally, I think we (Labour) are unpalatable for various reasons. The Tories are/would be disastrous.
End of

Media reforms

Shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt has attacked the way the media operates.
"regulations designed in the pre-internet era should be replaced with a new "light-touch" approach. "
Light-tough, like what they called for in the financial sector. Worked well there.
Like the one that lets Fox get away with lies in America, rather than being impartial.
There may be a connection there.
Hunt is also calling for rules restricting ownership to be relaxed. Interesting, as one James Murdoch called for the same thing. So that he can grab more power and influence.
Local news is important, maybe there could be some government subsidy

SPIN The Sun, council tax and their support for the Tories

Huge council tax rises, apparently. Labour's fault, apparently.
"COUNCIL tax raised a staggering £21.3billion last year - and has DOUBLED under Labour in the past decade."
But 7 of the councils listed are Tory controlled.
Spin and politics - never pretty.
But they work. Remember what happened to the recent spin-friendly Prime Ministers? Thatcher and Blair.
Party leader who refused to have anything to do with spin - Michael Foot.
Prime Ministers not media-friendly - Gordon Brown, John Major.

Cameron's poverty rhetoric

To some extent, Labour has failed since 97.
My party has not made this country more equal by all measures. That should be Labour's bread and butter, even if it suffered the howling moans of the right-wing press and their hatred for the poor.
But this little piece picks apart Cameron's criticisms, and his solutions.
Criticisms - over the top, based more on words than facts.
Solutions - no big government i.e. none.
What cures poverty and makes people more equal? Redistribution.
When Cameron comes out as a proper Robing Hood, maybe i'll believe him. In the mean time, he's as shallow and empty as usual.

Cameron's poverty nonsense

"Yesterday Kate Green, chair of of the Campaign to End Child Poverty, said:

“We welcome the fact that Conservatives are taking seriously the scandal of four million children in poverty in the fourth richest country in the world. But their proposals miss the point that without real income redistribution to close the inequality gap we will never reach that goal.”"

income redistribution, sounds like a job for BIG GOVERNMENT!

Cameron setting out welfare plans

This is laugh a minute stuff.
DC "claims the Tories are now "best-placed to fight poverty in our country"."
"says the welfare system tells young girls that having children before finding work and a loving relationship is a way to getting a home and money."

""Our alternative to big government is the big society, but we understand that the big society is not just going to spring to life on its own: we need strong and concerted government action to make it happen. We need to use the state to remake society.""
Big government has failed, we need bigger government to sort it out. What else is "strong and concerted government action"?
Unless he meant "strong and concerted government INaction". THAT'S small government for you.
Personally, I fead he's still tripping after those wild days at uni.

Wasn't he praising the NHS and minimum wage not long ago?
Those are both big government things, and have done as much as anything in the history of this country to help the poorest

19th Century Liberals and poverty

Apparently, 19th century liberals did more to reduce poverty than Labour ever did. Really?
Well, no. But makes a good right-wing attack on Labour, if you're abit shabby about the detail, which they obviously are.
Lloyd George had a huge role in reducing poverty in his time through things like National Insurance, and he was a liberal.
But liberalism is not so easy to box, 19th C liberalism also lead to the workhouse, back in those days some Tories were at least paternalistic one-nationers, while the liberals were the 'leave them be' lot.

About the only true or sensible part of the article is:
"If either party were serious about reducing poverty they would reintroduce that very sensible Classical Liberal principle, one of the few Liberal principles that the Lib Dems still believe in – that the poor shouldn’t pay tax at all. They could raise the income tax and National Insurance threshold to £10,000 and abolish council tax, while taking benefits away from the well-off."

"compassionate conservatism"

Compassionate conservatism is the biggest idea in British politics, apparently.
I'd call it the biggest con anyone's tried to put forward, ever.
I'm biased, of course, but for me compassion is totally missing from conservatism, that's why i'm a lefty.
Nominated for Joke Of The Day

Councils and charges

The piece i'm refering to is written by a Labour councillor, so should be taken with the right amount of salt.
But the point is valid:
Shadow Secretary of State for Local Government Caroline Spelman has been attacking the Labour government for forcing councils to charge more for services. Isn't that the same Tory party who have been going on about how wonderful Barnet council is, that's the one where they charge for services. Not only that, it's not just a 2 tier approach, it's a sliding scale: want a service good and quick? Pay more and you get it.
That to me is wrong because quality and speed of service should not come down to ability to pay, it should be on the basis of need.

Tony Benn and the Tories

The other day I called him Tony Bandwagon Benn.
"Tony Benn doesn’t hate the Tories anymore".

Interesting:
"There are issues I find myself in agreement with some of the Tories on, particularly on civil liberties,” said Benn. “All this security state stuff is very, very worrying. Libertarians like David Davis, a right-wing Conservative, resigned over the government’s 42-day detention law and I went to speak for him.” He said he also agreed with the Conservatives over the Lisbon treaty.

Steady on, mate. Socialists shouldn’t find themselves in agreement with the Tories on anything. Ever. We might share the Tories’ opposition to given aspects of New Labour authoritarianism, but that is a different thing entirely from being in agreement with them. The difference is one of nuance, perhaps, but nevertheless vital to grasp."

"
You don’t jettison your underlying ideas, but you do have to sharpen up your arguments. So while I do still want to see the bourgeoisie swinging from the nearest lamppost, it has finally dawned on me that this is something of a long-term strategic perspective.

But at the same time, this means that I have a different ideology to that of the Tories. And that I want to be divided from them, as they will want to be divided from me.

That is why Benn is wrong to privilege issues over ideologies in seeking out alliances. I fear that his newfound tendency to elision brings him to the brink of final political collapse."


To me, Benn will never recover from opposing Foot. Now he's jumping into bed with Tories.
I applaud David Davies for being a libertarian who resigned over the 42 days detention. And what happens to him? Backbenches.
I may oppose authoritarianism, but I don't support the Tories

Tories attack FT

I've mentioned many times that the FT has been very critical of the Tories in the past. It seems i'm not the only one who noticed.

Dan Hannan, Iain Dale, Guido Fawkes, Iain Martin (paid by Murdoch, who'da thunk it?) and Tim Montgomery have all come out against the FT for daring to support Labour.
Guido (mr impartial, the one who doesn't support any political group, that's the one) says:
"As the FT’s circulation shrinks further perhaps it will decide not to support the Labour Party for a fifth general election in a row. Yes, the Pink ‘Un even backed Neil Kinnock to the huge annoyance of the readership."
And he's on about "Two refugees from the Labourgraph". The Labourgraph eh?

Now i've noticed the FT aren't keen on the Tories. Maybe there's a conspiracy going on. Maybe they just don't rate the Tories very highly?
Given what I think of the media (corrupt, back-stratchers, cronies) the last can't be right.
But what if it was....

The state is too big, voters say

BOOOOO
"Two-thirds of voters back David Cameron’s call for the size of the state to be slimmed down"

Boo: "Sixty-seven per cent said they agreed with the Tory leader that “the Government has grown too big and needs a major overhaul to make it smaller”. Just 28 per cent disagreed, with his call for a smaller state supported across the social spectrum.

Andrew Hawkins, the chief executive of ComRes, said: “The Conservatives are on to a winner with this campaign line.” "
Dah crap

Question Time

Got to really ain't ya?
I thought Straw and Warsi had a good debate about immigration, but overall none of them really tackled a big issue, which is that people buy the myth that English people have been made into second-class citizens.
The BNP thrive on the idea of a conspiracy, that X, Y and Z are conspiring against X, Y, and Z (the indigenous British in this case).
It's a shame that immigration is not tackled and then it takes the BNP getting 1 million votes before it enters mainstream debate, and then most of the show is about it.
Griffin showed himself as a far-right nasty-man who relies on the idea of this conspiracy, but the issues which force people into his grubby paws were not properly addressed. Straw tried, and I thought did pretty well all night, but didn't make the case forcefully enough. People need to know that it's ok to feel proud to be British without being labelled racist, which is something the Tories have traditionally done far better than Labour. Due, I think, to our more bleeding heart liberal wing (including me to some extent).
Griffin's a right winger, so I don't like him. But if enough people shun pride in their origins (e.g. being British), there is a vacuum created into which the likes of Griffin step.

TV debate

Apparently the TV debates might be off due to squabbling.
Gordy wants one thing,
Cameron wants another.
Whole thing might not happen.
"After only a few weeks of negotiations, David Cameron has rejected the idea of a series of debates between all three party leaders"
Cameron threw his toys out of the pram perhaps?

"Both Labour and the Liberal Democrats are accusing the Tory leader of "backing down" after months of calling for a television debate. "
Who's dithered and bottled it now eh?

"both Labour and the Lib Dems are pressing for a separate debate between the Chancellor Alistair Darling, the shadow chancellor George Osborne and the Lib Dem treasury spokesman Vince Cable, as well as a foreign policy debate between the Foreign Secretary and opposition foreign affairs spokesman. "
Seems like everyone wants to only do the one they think will highlight their strengths. Will it ever get off the ground? Maybe, maybe not.

Change

The Tories are really starting to remind me of beggars. Why? Going on about change.
This car sticker says 'honk for change' as if just change is going to solve everything. How about some real policies dipshit?

Alastair Campbell on Cameron's speech

His attack is his own, but I think he has a point.
I like this bit:
"devolution was a good thing. The minimum wage was a good thing. Civil partnerships legislation was a good thing. They all required a bit of big government and they were all opposed by the Tories.

His big theme was that we did not need government but responsibility. But Sure Start was also a good thing. That needed big government to get it going. And of course the NHS is perhaps the best thing of all, and its basic principles untouchable. There was a little bit of having Labour's cake and eating it going on. The best policies in the speech were the Labour ones he said a Tory government would keep."

and

"What he did was lay down a very old fashioned dividing line, but wheras sometimes GB stands accused of having too many ideas for government action, Cameron's definition of small government seems to be to have lots of admirable goals, and just hope somehow that they come about. It was frankly a bit weird.

Ps. on the buzzword count, am I right in saying banks and bankers rated a Big Zero? His attempt to make the financial crisis all GB's, and nothing to do with his friends and bankrollers, is a bit lame. Also, worth pointing out that Big Governments(s) round the world were essential to preventing recession from becoming depression."

David Blanchflower on the Tories economic plans

and I quote:
"“This is the most wildly dangerous thing I have seen in a hundred years of economic policy in Britain,” Blanchflower said in an interview today. He said the Conservative opposition is “showing no understanding of economics. To remove QE and cut public spending is like a return to 1937 — it could drive the economy into depression. This is the most bizzare set of economic policies I have ever heard.”"

Blanchy's star is pretty high after being the one who arguebly saw the financial fuck up coming, so that's pretty stinging