…he’s gone off on his fifth holiday in as many months.First there was Cornwall back in spring.Then there was a mini-break to Granada.Then there was Ibiza.Then there was Tuscany, where the millionaire eventually remembered to tip the waitress.And this week he’s gone back to Cornwall.From whence he has returned to London, briefly, to discuss the end-game in Libya before going back to his beach.I’d love to say all this gallivanting is doing the nation a disservice, but I’ve racked my brains and can’t think of anything much that would be improved by this man giving it his close attention.I can’t say I’m completely relaxed about having a Prime Minister paid £142,500 a year to do very little of any worth. I can’t help thinking he’s an Earth version of Zaphod Beeblebrox, the Douglas Adams character who was made President of the Universe purely to distract attention from the people who were really in charge.But I suppose him being utterly disengaged – from the electorate, the nation’s wants and needs, the nuclear button – can only be better than having someone so dim he can’t open a bottle of wine without an embolism actually making decisions on our behalf.
Conservatives
Now, watch this drive…
“Fair play is one traditional British value we have always admired. And one we fear is increasingly at risk.”
A slowly growing sense of hopelessness and impending doom
Story #1: London’s burning. Again.
Story #2: The markets are in freefall and various economies are failing. Again.
Story #3: There’s been a massive increase in crime in rural areas since the recession started.
I don’t know what story #4 was on the BBC’s early evening news yesterday because I switched off at that point.
Each of the stories was presented in isolation, with fuck all by way of analysis or thought apart from a flash of Stephanie Flanders’ revolting green skirt.
It’s all linked, of course, and none of it is remotely surprising for those with half-an-inch of long-term memory. It happened in the 80s during a recession. It happened during the 90s in a recession. Just because we didn’t have a recession for 15 years doesn’t mean we should raise an eyebrow that the slash and burn approach to economics adopted by PBD and Gideon have resulted in exactly the same social upheaval that occurred when That Bloody Woman did the same thing three decades ago.
There are only two differences now.
First, rolling news channels have been invented. They’ve got to fill all that airtime somehow. The riots of the 80s just got ten minutes at the start of the evening news bulletin. Now it’s all riots, all the time. Breaking news is the new light entertainment.
Second, our leaders – the people in whom apparently sane and rational individuals were inexplicably prepared to place their trust just over a year ago – were absent. Whatever other flaws she had (and I think she had a couple), you can’t imagine a complete vacuum in Downing Street when That Bloody Woman was in charge. Even Bliar and Arrivederci Gordon realised some bugger had to hold the fort.
Everybody deserves a holiday. Even PBD and Gideon. (Or, more accurately, their families.) But, in real life, everybody in my department is not allowed to go on holiday at the same time. It is shameful beyond comprehension that the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Home Secretary and the Mayor of London were all on holiday at the same time.
And I notice Chauncey Gardiner was on his hols, too, only deigning to come back from Devon’s Adenoid Extraction Recovery Unit AFTER PBD had announced he was getting on a plane to fly back from Tuscany. That tells you everything you need to know about our Leader (sic) of the Opposition.
What was our Coalition administration’s stunning Plan B while everyone topped up their tans? William Hague and Vince Cable. The former, a man whose leadership credentials have already been roundly rejected by the British electorate in a plebiscite; the latter, a man whose sole achievement over the past 15 months has been to demonstrate his lack of temperamental suitability for ministerial office. It shows how well the Don’t Panic Double Act went that first Nick Clegg, then Theresa May and then finally PBD dragged their sorry arses back to work like a half-hearted zombie invasion.
Gideon remains absent, soaking up the Californian sun. Rome burns but it’s nothing to do with him, guv.
Of course, the real salt is yet to be rubbed into the wound. Wait for it – it’s coming: the emergency police powers. We’re inches away from a police state. But then maybe that’s what our politicians have wanted all along.
And one final thing. What the fuck has this got to do with the Olympics? How many people were murdered in Los Angeles in 1983? Or Beijing in 2007? Grow a fucking pair. If you want to try to shift attention away from the fact that you have wrought this on yourselves by pursuing exclusionary policies, fine. But some of us would have preferred all along if the £9.3 billion or more of public money being spent on the Olympics had been spent pursuing inclusionary policies.
Not for the first time, the Minister quotes with approval Tom McRae:
Rioters of London, remember to leave some real estate standing so mortgage companies have a product to deny you.
I wish the poor shopkeepers luck in claiming on their insurance or getting small business loans. The wrong buildings are on fire.
(Thanks to Radio Nixon for the post title.)
You decide if you think he has a point…
Dupe process
Yesterday Ofcom pleased its political masters by repealing laws passed by Parliament. It may have repealed a dodgy law, but that’s beside the point: it’s not how our system is supposed to work. No matter how dodgy a law may be, it is not a quango’s job to repeal it. It’s the job of legislators. And a powerful regulator should be independent, and not heel to its political masters – although anyone who followed the history of the regulator will permit themselves a hollow cackle at that principle.
Ofcom repealed Sections 17 and 18 of the Digital Economy Act by expressing no more than an opinion: the justification to support that opinion is absent from its report. Ofcom could have set out its case in terms of explaining the legal framework, for example, but it didn’t. It could have argued the costs and benefits of each approach to web-blocking – but it didn’t, it hadn’t even attempted to do that kind of empirical research.
Instead, on page 43, we learn that: “It is our current belief that the blocking of discrete URLs, or web addresses, is not practical or desirable as a primary approach.” What’s practical is not defined, what’s “desirable” is well beyond Ofcom’s remit.
Imagine the uproar if a quango had interposed itself to block significant primary legislation: Britain’s entry into the Common Market for example, or the minimum wage. All are quite complicated issues, after all. The blame isn’t entirely Ofcom’s; the regulator was permitted to do this because ministers wanted to find a way to bury the Sections without Parliament formally repealing them. Again, this is dishonest, and not the way laws are made or unmade. Ed Vaizey has been trying to get industry to agree to self-regulation which would allow him to announce their imminent repeal (most likely in the next Communications Act).
The Conservatives came to power vowing to abolish Ofcom, and declaring war on what they saw as Leftish academic poseurs, and business-hostile bureaucrats. They now seem to be at the mercy of all three. How on Earth did that happen?
How to call out Gideon without using the word ‘cunt’
I love this woman:
I’m no economist but a blind man can see that we’re in the shit. Everything – and I mean everything – Gideon has done, from more tax on North Sea oil to cancelling defence contracts which provide the only jobs available in some parts of the country, has been a disaster. He won’t cut VAT, which would get spending up, and the only job he’s created was for Coulson – a decision which has so far cost 500 jobs, closed a £160m newspaper and may even bring down the Government.
I had expected so much more of a 2:1 history graduate and career politician with the face of an 18th Century French aristocrat whose defining achievement in life, at the age of 40, is that he changed his name because it didn’t sound Prime Ministerial enough.
I had expected he’d screw things up over several years, rather than just the one. Now, can anyone explain why he’s still in a job?
…even if she is a journalist.
We’re all in this together
To the Commons, where David Lammy asks PBD if the informality of his relationship with Rebekah Wade-Mitchell-Brooks was appropriate.
“I’ve never held a slumber party or seen her in her pyjamas,” wisecracks PBD in response. (Because cheap gags is precisely what’s needed at the moment.)
Wonder if everyone else in the Commons today can say the same, though…?
What people want to know this week
Which politico might be feeling a bit nervy this week as old rumours which linked him VERY closely to the News International CEO are circulating around disgruntled hacks in Wapping?
Did the countenance divine shine forth upon our clouded hills?
So, a year on from the public school wank-a-thon in the Rose Garden, how’s that ConservativeCoalition government working out for y’all?
Still, at the least the clear, decisive alternative is so much better.
Flaccidity
I thought Iain Duncan-Smith would be the worst Leader of the Opposition I ever experienced. Wholly lacking in personality, gravitas, communication skills or the indefinable leadership ‘X factor’, his only redeeming feature was that he was a fully paid up member of the Toryscum and his maladroit tenure was therefore amusing to me.
Edward Samuel Miliband has, however, romped clear in the race to be the least competent and most clueless holder of the office. The distance Miliband – a man so inept I can’t even be bothered to think of a soubriquet for him – has put between himself and the likes of Duncan-Smith, Howard and Foot resembles nothing so much as the way Shergar drew clear of the field in the 1981 Derby.
Miliband’s campaign for the leadership was pathetic insofar as he sought to claim that the calamaties of the Bliar and Arrivederci Years were nothing to do with him. That untrue, self-serving claim ensured he did not get my vote.
Interestingly, of course, he didn’t win the vote of MPs and MEPs.
He didn’t win the vote of party members, either.
While I am in favour of both trades unions and proportional representation, you do have to wonder whether everything is entirely rosy in the garden when a candidate who lost two of the three electoral colleges on offer still wins the election.
I’ve given him as much time and cut him as much slack as I could. But while I largely decry the knee-jerk reactionism so beloved of rolling news channels, there is also a point at which you have to accept that things are not working out and that persevering with the status quo will do more damage in the longer-term than the short-term damage of changing leaders for a second time in twelve months.
The way politicians sound and look matters. It shouldn’t matter – and certainly not as much as what they say and do – but it does. And Miliband sounds and looks dreadful. For wont of a better description, he looks and sounds floppy. While having the charisma of a breeze block didn’t stop John Major, at least he was not handicapped by also being ill-at-ease with himself and others.
So, awkward and floppy. It’s not much of a selling point, is it?
And the electorate can’t help but draw an unfavourable conclusion in comparison with the presidential swagger and unrelenting smoooooothness offered by PBD. (LL Cool D, anyone?)
That Bloody Woman and Bliar were lucky Prime Ministers in that they faced (largely) awful Leaders of the Opposition at most of the elections they fought. If we hope to have a welfare state, a state education system and an NHS to leave to our children, we can’t repeat that mistake. We have to put up a vertebrate against them.
The final straw for me came with Miliband’s abysmal decision to call for Kenneth Clarke’s resignation last month. Clarke fucked up during one radio call-in, fair enough, but anybody who has actually paid any attention to British politics over the past 30 years knows that Clarke is one of the last Toryscum standing on whom social democrats should not automatically urinate.
Miliband’s judgement was abysmal on the day of Clarke’s problems, but I might have been able to overlook it had he not compounded the problem 48 hours later by publishing a pitiful attempt at self-justification in The Independent (effectively the only ‘quality’ newspaper left to the Minister until Harry Potter is finally sacked for bankrupting The Guardian).
He could have just moved on and hoped that everyone would forget. But he didn’t. In a lovely little microcosm encapsulating his entire time in office, his judgement was awful and his performance worse. He stood limply at the despatch box savaging Clarke like a dead squirrel and then awkwardly spewed anaemic, nonsensical drivel in the direction of news microphones and newspaper column typesetters. It was only marginally less infuriating than it was embarrassing.
(I’m not going to waste everyone’s time by repeating again the various arguments about why Clarke should have rightly been called for his poor use of language in espousing a perfectly sensible penal policy proposal and then left to get on with it. I will, however, observe that Miliband’s limp posturing almost certainly resulted in that policy being spiked. So well done, Ed. Fucking brilliant work.)
For the record, I voted for Ed Balls in the Labour leadership ballot. I don’t care whether or not he’s a nice guy: he is undoubtedly the best performing senior Labour politician against the Eton Trifles. He gets under their skin; he gets at them; he gets to the point; he gets that point across. The contrast with Edward Samuel Miliband could scarcely be starker.
Anyway, enough whining about nonentities. Typography For Lawyers has just landed on my desk. And I may have just wet myself a little bit.