Wey-hey: now THAT’S what I call broadband.
And THIS is what I call a victory for football.
Nice to see the Milton Keynes fans take the defeat in good spirit, too, attacking Shrewsbury players on the pitch at the final whistle.
Let’s hope they can fill their nice, new, shiny, 30,000-seat stadium in the Fourth Division, eh?
In the continuing absence of a functioning home internet connection (my hatred of Sky Broadband currently knows no bounds), I find myself at a computer in my local library.
I just want to leave you for the weekend with this thought. Tomorrow afternoon, I shall not be settling into my armchair to watch the first FA Cup Final at the new Wembley Stadium (only the fourth ever to feature the top two teams in the country).
Oh, no. Instead, I shall be standing in a suit and tie at a golf club in Surrey, eating nibbles to celebrate my wife’s godmother’s 70th birthday.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is what happens when you marry above your class.
What on earth is Great Britain coming to when a member of the Royal family – let alone the thickest of his generation – can no longer be handed a viable career in the Armed Services? Whither the British virtues of tolerance, fair play and rampant nepotism, to which we once held dear?
In some ways, this decision is not only sensible but is also admirably egalitarian: the Army (or whatever), having introduced a well-meaning plonker to the art of psychopathy and meaningless death, will now introduce him to a big old P45 and a life of limited opportunity. I think it’s important that Harry make a positive start by trying to grow some facial hair, getting obnoxiously drunk and selling his medals on eBay.
How’s a half-witted lug with A-levels in Art and Geography meant to spend the next sixty years? I think that the answer may lie in the field of charity work - possibly abroad in places that are often quite sunny. But what do I know?
If, as is currently speculated, Sarkozy makes Bernard Kouchner his foreign secretary, then he goes up in my estimation 150%. I always thought the pay off to the West Wing was a pipe dream, but apparently not.
I have very limited internet access at the moment as I transfer my broadband supply (why does it take so bloody long to flick a switch?). This means that (a) I’m in a bad mood as I can’t spend my time surfing for animal porn, and (b) I have too much time to think in between the short windows of opportunity when the wind drops enough for me to piggyback on The Bloke Over The Road’s unsecured wireless network if I half-hang my laptop out of the attic window.
British politicians have been wringing their hands for years about the seemingly inexorable decline in voter participation. While there are many reasons for this decline, I have been saying for a decade that a significant part – in recent years, at least – is a consequence of the homogenisation of the political options on offer. The rise within Britain of identikit professional politicians without any discernible personalities, coupled with the main parties vying ever more risibly to crowd out the others in the centre ground (which itself has been shifting ever right-wards) means, I believe, that the many millions of people in the UK who are (broadly speaking) Social Democrats have been effectively disenfranchised. The Liberal Democrats were, for a while, a refuge but now they have ditched the ‘democrat’ element in favour of more ‘liberalism’, many Liberal Democrat MPs could comfortably sit within “Dave” Cameron’s “new” Conservative Party.
The last time British electors had the opportunity to vote for a viable Socialist/Social Democratic Labour Party (1992), the turnout was almost 78% (close to the average for post-War General Elections). When faced with “New” Labour’s quasi-Thatcherism in 1997, 2001 and 2005, turnout was just 71%, 59% and 61%. “Voter apathy”, I contend, is actually voter antipathy towards the lack of choice: if it doesn’t actually make any difference which of the two parties wins, why bother to go out to vote on a Thursday evening when you could be doing something else instead – like eating a microwave ready meal while watching EastEnders, for instance? (The same argument can be made using General Election statistics from the United States, where it is often impossible to differentiate between Republicans and Democrats.)
As my (reasonably politicised) 80something-year-old Socialist grandmother says, “There’s nobody for me to vote for.”
While the result of last week’s French Presidential Election is deeply depressing for anybody with half-an-inch of brain, at least the French electorate had a real choice to make between two distinct programmes built around two distinct political philosophies. This result would matter France’s future. The consequence of this distinct ideological battle? An 85% turnout.
I hate to say, ‘I told you so,’ but…
Needless to say, Gordon Brown is laying the foundations for his administration to provide a few years of More Of The Same. Can’t wait to see the 2008/9 turnout figures.
An outbreak of bitchiness on Newsnight last night between Alastair Campbell and Michael Howard. The momentary look of panic on Paxman’s face was a joy to behold.
HOWARD: I’ve written about this in The Spectator so I may as well say it to his [Campbell's] face. Tony Blair shadowed me when I was Employment Secretary and when I was Home Secretary. In all my dealings with him in those years he was absolutely straight, he was absolutely straightforward. I have no complaints. I think that’s the man [Campbell] who’s responsible for what’s changed. I think the way in which Alastair has conducted his operations when he was in Downing Street, when he bullied and lied his way across our political life consistently, did more to lower the tone of our political life, our public life, more than anything else – and that was all, of course, done with Tony Blair’s connivance and authority so Tony Blair has to bear the ultimate responsibility for it.
CAMPBELL: I know it’s Michael’s view. I think it’s very sad he thinks like that. I think a lot of it is down to the fact that Tony [sic] is one of the handful of Tory leaders that Tony Blair saw off. I’m actually not going to respond to the point about lying, Michael.
HOWARD: I thought it long before I was ever leader of the [Conservative] party, as you know.
CAMPBELL: Indeed.
HOWARD: What Alastair’s done has been very well documented: Peter Oborne has written a book about it. As far as I’m aware Alastair hasn’t taken any action against it.
CAMPBELL: I haven’t even read it.
HOWARD: It’s been very well documented, time after time after time.
CAMPBELL: I think the Tory Party have got a real problem, though Cameron is a new leader and is trying to change it. They are in complete denial about why they lost. They think it was won by people like me: it was won because Tony Blair was an exceptional political leader.
HOWARD: Look, I’ve paid tribute to his political skills and he deserves great credit for the way in which he changed the Labour Party, for the way in which he won three General Elections. But I think it is indisputable that the tone and standards of public life in this country have deteriorated radically in those ten years and I think you bear a heavy share of the responsibility for that.
CAMPBELL: Well, I’m happy to take your criticisms, Michael, but I think a lot of it is sour grapes, the fact you lost.
Give ‘em a saucer of milk…
I suppose I can’t let the day pass without comment on the fact that Mr. Tony Blair has finally confirmed that we will actually see the back of him before the end of June, though I must concede I am struggling to know what to say except that the manner of his departure was befitting of his premiership – overhyped; stage managed to within an inch of its life; overflowing with hypocrisy and bad acting; and cynically timed to divert attention from bad news.
In an act of media absurdity Chris Morris would struggle to top, ITV1 interrupted its morning schedule to announce the “breaking news” (sic) that Blair had left Downing Street and was en route to an RAF airfield to fly to deliver his address to a grateful nation from his constituency.
Our brave news broadcasters hired helicopters to film Blair’s motorcade driving from an airfield in Teeside to the Sedgefield Labour Club – and took ordinary programming off the air in order to air that vital footage. Get your priorities right, Michael Grade: some of us were trying to watch The Jeremy Kyle Show and This Morning, dammit!
As Blair strode to the podium to begin overemoting, the Bank of England announced that it was increasing the base interest rate for the fourth time in six months to a six-year high. Pure coincidence, I’m sure.
And while every rentaquote MP and political commentator with a mortgage to pay was rushing from microphone to camera this afternoon (and oh, how we missed the late Robin Cook today), a Home Office announcement – delayed by a month – revealed that the cost of Blair’s vainglorious ID card scheme has risen by a further £400,000,000 in the past six months alone. The total scheme is now estimated to be costing taxpayers £5,310,000,000, or £88.50 for every man, woman and child in the nation. Oh, and then we all have to pay a further £93 actually to get a card. Bargain.
The speech itself was oddly nondescript. I’m just not sure how many more of these final farewells I can cope with. It’s like watching the hammiest actor in the world performing a death scene, falling to the boards in slow motion and twitching, jerking, moaning and groaning while rolling around the stage to delay for another second or two his last input to the production.
Blair gets some sympathy from me insofar as The Left (if such a thing exists anymore) is comprised of idealistic dreamers who tend to view anything short of Blake’s Jerusalem as failure. No Socialist or Social Democrat politician can ever deliver everything that their base demands. So there was SOME truth in Blair’s claim today that expectations in 1997 were too high. But there is MORE truth his earlier admission that he should have made bigger changes, earlier. HE missed the opportunity and, in so doing, HE disappointed and disenchanted a generation of electors.
Any Prime Minister of the past 40 years would have given their right arms to have delivered the sort of settlement in Northern Ireland that played out last Tuesday. While the likes of Major, Trimble, Hume, Mallon and even Thatcher have to take some of the credit for laying the foundations, Blair’s personal achievement of getting Paisley, Adams and McGuinness to work alongside each other is genuinely impressive and – we hope – a new start for the people of the island of Ireland.
There is much else of which Blair can be proud – the minimum wage, civil partnerships, the Human Rights Act, the Freedom of Information Act, genuinely massive investment in the National Health Service, devolution. Britain has had a remarkably stable economy for a full decade, even if there are now signs that the wheels are coming loose.
Of course, it would be nice if the minimum wage could buy more than a can of baked beans, if Blair hadn’t tried to rig so many devolution and Mayoralty votes, if his own government didn’t undermine and badmouth the Human Rights Act and try to wriggle out of its FoI obligations, and if one of his many Health Secretaries hadn’t dismantled internal markets in the NHS before another of his many Health Secretaries re-established internal markets in the NHS, throwing away so much of that investment. But, to a certain extent, many of these and other criticisms arise from ‘Jerusalem Syndrome’.
More seriously, Blair’s administrations have assaulted civil liberties every which way and played fast and loose too often with legality and their obligations to abide by the law. They spun and spun until it became a habit and lies blurred into the truth. Our jails are overflowing (tough on the causes of crime, eh?). The poor are poorer, in relative terms, than they were a decade ago. Public transport is a shambles. Our hospitals are filthy and our classrooms are crumbling – except for those shiny but malfunctioning buildings constructed under PFI deals for which we will pay more and pay longer than we would have under any public effort.I’ll give credit – begrudgingly – where it’s due: the society of the United Kingdom is, overall, a better place in which to live on 10 May 2007 than it was on 1 May 1997 for most of its citizens. It is not, however, the place it could have been if Tony Blair had made the most of the opportunity handed to him on a plate in 1997 and I contend that, if anything, the Kingdom is less United than it was when he entered 10 Downing Street.
Everything, of course, pales into insignificance when positioned against the colossal failure that is Iraq: whatever good Tony Blair did, the 100,000+ cadavers that litter the Middle East and the ghosts of Harrowdown Hill, Aldgate, Edgware Road, Russell Square and Tavistock Square represent his true legacy.
It’s about trust, Stupid, and this country hasn’t trusted its Prime Minister for three or four years. The last year in particular has been, frankly, embarrassing: he should have gone long ago.
Blair is not solely responsible for the lack of trust between the electorate and the executive, but he has a lot to do with it. While on holiday last week, I watched the DVD of the first series of The Thick Of It. If Yes, (Prime) Minister summed up the way government ‘worked’ in the late 70s and early 80s, then The Thick Of It sums up the way Blair’s government ‘worked’ – in a frenzy of panic over the presentation of fluff. What a shabby taste to leave in the electorate’s mouth.
I couldn’t vote in the 1997 General Election as I was living and working abroad, but I was in the UK on the day of the vote and I travelled a couple of hundred miles around the country during 2 May 1997 and saw for myself the real hope and genuine goodwill that the new government had. It DID feel as though a new day had dawned; people WERE smiling on the trains.
I have never thought Blair – from his very earliest Shadow Cabinet days – was anything other than all fur coat and no knickers, but I shared that hope and goodwill. I therefore say with genuine regret that I feel there won’t be too many people (apart from the sadly deluded Alan Milburns and Tessa Jowells of this world) who will go to sleep tonight feeling anything other than that – on balance – he outstayed his welcome and he really rather ballsed it up.
Things Can Only Get Better? I rather hope A Change Is Gonna Come.
Is this for real?
Thursday 10 May
ITV1
11pm
SUGGS IN SOHO
The Madness frontman strolls around Soho with Stephen Fry.
It seems that approximately 100,000 ballot papers were discounted as invalid/spoilt in last week’s Scottish Parliament elections.
Amy Rodger, the Scotland director for the Electoral Reform Society, told the BBC it was too early to jump to conclusions over what had gone wrong… before – wouldn’t you know it? – concluding that:
“From what we have seen about the ballot papers that were filled in wrongly, it does seem to be something about the way it was designed or the instructions that were given.”
First of all, if it’s too early to draw any conclusions, stop drawing fucking conclusions.
Second, why must the ‘problem’ be to do with the design of the ballot paper and not to do with too many lazy and/or barely literate electors who can’t be arsed to read things properly? (For the avoidance of doubt, this is not an equally lazy (but almost certainly barely literate) diatribe against the Scots, but against all Britons.)
The Minister – along with his fellow electors in the “northern Home Counties” town in which he now lives – is one of the few English voters who can comment on this issue with any sort of legitimacy because the ballot papers we used last week were exactly the same as the Scottish ones.This town had two elections last Thursday – one for the borough council, one for the Mayoralty – and both used different voting systems. The borough council was elected according to the traditional ‘first past the post’, ‘stick one cross next to one name’ system. The Mayor was elected according the ‘single transferable vote’, ‘put numbers next to candidates’ names’ system.
The ballot papers here looked exactly the same as the example Scottish ones shown on the gogglebox and reprinted in the tabs over recent days. The ballot papers contained precisely the same instructions.
And, er, we successfully re-elected our (independent) Mayor and returned another hung council (for the 21st consecutive year) with no appreciable difficulties and without any significant increase in invalidated ballots. The word ‘chaos’ did not figure in any report about these elections on Look East or in the local rags.
I concede that the two electors in this household are more educated than the average (though not necessarily any brighter) but the instructions were perfectly adequate if you bothered to read them. If you didn’t do that, then you may very well have put crosses where you should have put numbers and/or vice versa but – frankly – it’s then your own fucking stupid fault if your vote is disqualified and the only sympathy I have is with those who CAN’T – as opposed to WON’T – read the ballot paper properly.
This isn’t an MFI flatpack, for fucksake. It’s your vote – your democratic duty for which (cliche, cliche) millions of people have died. Have some fucking (self-)respect.
This electoral ‘chaos’ is hardly the same thing as the gerrymandering perpetrated by ‘Dame’ Shirley Porter in the 1980s, or the flagrant breaches of electoral law that took place in Florida in November 2000. For that, people should have been strung up. For this, people should simply think twice about whining about the rancid egomaniacs who now find themselves on the fortunate end of a Holyrood expenses account.
I’ve been a vocal proponent of proportional representation for 20 years. On this showing, this idiotic electorate gets everything it deserves.
I’ve been back off holiday for only 48 hours and already I’m as depressed as before I went away.
First, Sarkozy won.
Surely this photo must be captioned:
Fascist Cunt asks, “Are you talkin’ to me?”
Second, I listened to the fourth Reith Lecture last night and concluded that we all might as well just give up the ghost now and have done.
Third, I have already been forced to visit Homebase, IKEA, Sainsbury’s and Tesco.
Still, on the up side, “Dr.” Death’s off.
As is yet another Newcastle United manager.
And the revelation that the Scots are apparently too stupid to vote means that Alex Salmond definitely gets my second and third preferences. (I’ll have a proper rant about this tomorrow.)
And this YouTube classic never fails to raise a laugh (until you realise his finger’s on the button).
On that very topic, a YouTube-related piece of Minitrue merchandise is the first item to be made publicly available from the Ministry’s Printfection shop. I am a whore: buy me.