Conservatives

I Was Right And You Were Wrong – a Deacon Blue classic

By BigBrother in All posts No Comments Tags: , , , ,

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.

Handbags And Gladrags

By BigBrother in All posts 4 Comments Tags: , , , ,

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…

Whatever you once had, you’re about to let go

By julesallen in All posts No Comments Tags: , , , , ,

The French presidential campaign is over. A complete media lockdown has been imposed and no further publication or broadcast of campaign material, propaganda or poll information (as well as any public pronouncement by either candidate or any member of their respective parties) is allowed until the vote closes at 8pm on Sunday evening. The most ferocious example of curtailing free speech for the benefit of Democracy.


This gives the French time to think…and I can’t help feeling that as they consider what they’ve been through, and the last 2 weeks in particular, they won’t be feeling too comfortable with their situation.

Sarkozy is an impressive, commanding, driven leader. But he is pure politics. There is nothing in what he says to the French people that isn’t sugar-coated, embellished, devious or basically dishonest. He knows how to win and he will win. He will garner as many votes for his style as his substance, on the basis that, like Blair, people feel that style is half of what you need anyway.

A vast amount of people see through Sarkozy and don’t like what they see. So they turn to the other candidate, whose only apparent weakness before the campaign started was that people weren’t going to take her seriously…that she wasn’t a big hitter. The French people believe in their own social model, which Royal wants broadly to preserve, and they fear Sarkozy’s radical US-republican style revolution and they are right to fear it because it doesn’t fit. So all Royal had to do was to prove herself to be in command of the facts, the policies, her own strategy. Sadly I feel she has failed. In the televised debate shown on Wednesday night, she took Sarkozy on at his own game, she played politics, she enthralled the pundits with her hard-hitting style (check out from 3.21), her turn of phrase, her suit, her haircut, her presentation. She laid into Sarkozy, she played the game. But people didn’t want that, they wanted to hear that she was in command of her facts policies and strategy and sadly, she wasn’t.

No one knows what’s best for France. But plenty of people feel they know what isn’t and that’s Sarkozy’s Thatcherite revolution. So they’re left with a least worst option and many could abstain. The socialists have a good woman as a candidate, but sadly for her and for France, she will still go down as having been a weak candidate. I fear the consequences.

Correction and clarification

By admin in All posts No Comments Tags: , ,

In yesterday’s Guardian, Peter Jenkins described Margaret Thatcher as “always a compromiser“. I think he was being serious. As such, I should like to retract any comment I may have made previously that may have implied that Mr. Jenkins could sometimes be a sane and rational political commentator.

As for Mr. Tony Blair’s tenth anniversary in office, let’s just say it’s probably a good job I’m on holiday without proper internet access…

Pinkie Brown

By BigBrother in All posts 1 Comment Tags: , , , , ,

First, a warning: this post concerns A Julie Birchill Column.

The Minister is no fan of Julie Birchill. Although she still produces the occasional paragraph infused with panache, she has barely spoken a sensible word in the past 20 years. She must now be nudging 50 but her writing often still resembles that of a teenager – too many exclamation marks and wink, nudge references to how very clever she is for taking drugs. And the whole ‘sleeping with Brother and Sister Raven’ thing is just deeply weird – even for a Bristolian.

That said, I forced myself on a train journey at the start of this week to read an extract from her most recent book that appeared in last week’s Guardian Weekend magazine. The book, I believe, chronicles her decade as a resident of Brighton. As premises for books go, that’s pretty flimsy. Nonetheless I persevered.

I don’t know whether or not I am (a) ill, (b) confused, or (c) becoming a Tory, but I have to admit I agreed with a large part of what she wrote. For instance:

All the people of this country want from the government, via their taxes, are decent public services: schools, hospitals and transport; this is the covenant that has served us well, in our modest way, since the end of the war. But even as taxes continue to rise, a lower proportion than ever goes on these essentials. Instead, it goes on bailing out the private companies that screw up our utilities and on lame “initiatives”…

Government By Gameshow, you could call it; the rubbish lies uncollected and the trains won’t work when the weather is “wrong”, but look on the bright side: you can always divert yourself with a council-lent camcorder for a few weeks…

What is it with New Labour and privatisation? Even Mrs Thatcher would not touch the post office and the railways, let alone start dicking around with the prison system. And at least in her case privatisation was about ideology, so understandable if misguided. With Labour, getting rid of public utilities or, in the case of local Labour councils, farming out contracts to private companies, seems like some sort of bizarre obsessive-compulsive disorder (“Eww, trains… dirty!”), like with those weird women who have one thing surgically altered then can’t stop until everything’s been renovated. If this country looked like a person right now, it would be Michael Jackson; a perfectly decent specimen to start with which for some reason convinced itself it would look a lot better with everything taken off and put back on inside out and upside down.

It works both ways: half the country couldn’t be bothered to vote because the election was like a really dull gameshow in which you know who’s going to win and don’t like any of them anyway. And that being so, gimmicky initiatives are the last thing that will win them over. It’s a bit of a joke that politicians are meant to be the serious-minded grown-ups and the electorate the frivolous thrill-seeking types; voters have never, to my knowledge, expressed an actual desire for prizes and makeovers among the political options offered to them. No, all we generally want is to have our loved ones educated decently when young, treated decently when sick and old, and to be able to get from London to Manchester in slightly less time and for marginally less money than it takes to get from Montreal to London…

OK, so she’s criticising New Labour from the right; I’m criticising it from the left. She’s saying (I think) that it’s OK to privatise everything if it’s done for ideological means; I’m saying that privatisation is, for the large part, a social experiment that borders on evil. Nevertheless, I have to agree with her. New Labour is a risible exercise in style over substance and its fetish for privatisation is inexplicable and inexcusable.

The Labour council that took power over [Brighton] in the mid-90s and still has power today is a very New Labour council, led by thwarted idealists, among others, who in the political wilderness of the Thatcher years mutated into strange, free-falling beings to whom power was not a means to an end, but an end in itself. In short, they became Pod Politicians: like their big brothers in government proper, they still went on about social justice and the brotherhood of man, but inside they’d gone all cold and creepy. Peter Mandelson is the greatest example, and in his irresistible rise from Lambeth councillor to Chief European Commissioner for Straight Bananas he serves as a lesson to all ambitious local bean-counters. They say politics is show business for ugly people, and in not one word or deed of Randy Mandy’s have I ever been able to discern exactly why he chose to be in politics, apart from the fact that he isn’t personable enough to make it in showbiz, which is obviously his first love. Every time I see Dale Winton I want to shout, “You’ve got Peter Mandelson’s life – give it back to him!”

More and more I’m starting to believe that politicians – contrary to common wisdom – are generally less mature than most of us. And that this is because they missed out on the giddiness of youth when they had it, and are seeking instead to have their silly, show-offy salad days now. Swanking wallflowers, the lot of them – those horrible brats who used to simper, “Go on, then, muck about! But I’m going to be rich and powerful one day, and then I’ll show you all!” Now, true to their collective word, on quangos and committees and local councils up and down the country, they’re making us pay, hitting us in the pocket, where it hurts, for their vile vanity projects galore. The dome, the city bids, the United States of Europe: we held their heads down the toilets a beat too long, and now it’s our turn to suffer…

The comparison of Peter Mandelson with Dale Winton genuinely made me laugh out loud: absolutely spot on.

Birchill criticises New Labour for chasing power for power’s sake rather than for ideological principle: I agree wholeheartedly. I, however, recognise that that’s precisely what the Conservative Party did under Winston Churchill in the late 1940s. By adopting wholesale the interventionist policies that proved so alluring to the electorate in 1945, the Tories regained power in 1951 and stayed there for 13 years. (There was no ideological battle within Britain during the height of the Cold War: both Tories and Labour alike agreed with the principles of state education, state ownership of utilities, state planning, state-provided healthcare and the welfare state – the political debate then surrounded who could best manage the services the state should provide. Ideology did not begin to play a major role in post-War British politics until the mid-1970s when the two parties began to diverge, that divergence reaching its widest point at the 1983 General Election.)

Blair simply repeated Churchill’s trick and adopted Maggie’s Mantras – our politicians are now back to the 1950s position of really only arguing about the style of management by which public services should be provided. Ironically, Thatcherism truly took hold AFTER Thatcher was ejected from Number 10, when the Labour Party turned its back on everything that could be termed loosely as ‘socialist’ in outlook. I contend that the reason why a lot of people are not voting in the 21st century is because a lot of people have simply been disenfranchised by Labour’s embrace of Thatcherite policies. (It’s getting even worse now that the Liberal Democrats are becoming more ‘liberal’ than ‘social democrat’ in their outlook.)

Towards the end of the extract, Birchill turns her attention to Brighton Council’s attempts to flog off its social housing. This is where the ground begins to erode beneath her feet.

Even when council housing stays in the hands of housing “trusts”, evictions of tenants rises by more than a third, rents are more than a quarter higher and management costs around 40% higher. As the chief executive of one such organisation helpfully put it, “We’re a business and our divisions are expected to make a surplus.”

Last spring, Defend Council Housing Brighton reported that, not content with spending millions of pounds of public money trying to con council house tenants, some among the pro-privatisation lobby were going round tearing down the anti-privatisation posters tenants put up in their own blocks. Oh, and to sweeten the pill, these charmers were planning to spend another £25,000 of public money on a video telling tenants to lie back and enjoy it – the latest incidence of government, both local and national, robbing Peter the Pauper to pay Paul the PR man.

So, having spent the first 80% of the article bigging up those who truly believe in supply side economics and free markets, she then criticises private housing trusts for, er, running themselves as profit centres. That’s the law, Julie; that’s what they have to do. The overarching obligation for a limited company is to seek to increase shareholder value to the exclusion of all other considerations bar the law. If the managers of a limited company fail to do that, they commit an offence. Birchill’s argument, if she has one, should not be against the behaviour of the private housing trusts but against those who believe that social services should be provided by the private sector.

Still she probably can’t waste her valuable time following her thoughts through to a conclusion; there are more episodes of Sugar Rush to write, I guess.  Bless…

Like a hurtling, fevered train

By BigBrother in All posts No Comments Tags: , , ,

Now here’s a man with whom I could do business. I don’t necessarily want my politicians to be crack addicts – just honest.

The man brought in by Ken Livingstone to transform London’s transport system admits today that he is an alcoholic. Bob Kiley, 72, says he starts drinking vodka in the afternoons, “and once I’ve lost control it’s hard to pull back”.

Mr Kiley also admits he does little to earn the £3,200-a-day fee he gets as a consultant for Transport for London.

“I’m an alcoholic,” he says. “But I’m not going to make excuses and say the reason is because I lost my family because, facts are, I always liked a drink. It is true, though, that things have got worse now that I’m not exactly overworked. I’ve always had high-pressure jobs that kept me extremely busy; now that I’ve got time on my hands, I start drinking.”

He added: “Most people who know me well know I’m alcoholic, so why should I worry about the rest of the world? I’m dealing with it.”

In a frank interview published in full in [yesterday's] Evening Standard, he admits that his consultancy fees, which translate to an annual salary of £737,000, are difficult to justify. He said: “If you ask me what I actually do to earn my consultancy, I’d have to tell you, in all honesty, ‘not much’. ” Mr Kiley earned £3.9 million during his time as transport commissioner and continues to live rent free in a grace and favour Belgravia townhouse. He got a £2million severance deal and he was retained as a 90 day a year consultant to the Mayor after he quit.

Mr Kiley spoke out to counter rumours that his alcoholism affected his job. He said: “My drink didn’t affect my work while I was full time employed, and anyone who says it did is talking bullshit.”

Contrast Mr Kiley’s candour with the knots in which David Cameron has tied himself simply trying to avoid even answering questions about his previous drugs use or abstention: such wriggling is as unedifying as Bill Clinton’s bollocks about ‘smoking but not inhaling’.

The media is partly to blame for the way in which it sensationalises everything and everyone in political life and boils everything down to soundbites. However, surely our politicians are at least equally culpable for their failure to treat the electorate as grown ups with half an inch of brain? State the truth, let the public decide. Don’t run scared of saying, “I’m 40 years old and – 20 years ago as a student, like a great deal of my contemporaries – I smoked the odd bit of draw. I don’t do so today, I don’t intend to do so in the future, and I don’t expect – if ever elected to the office of Prime Minister – to skin up in the Buckingham Palace loo. Can we talk about the dirty hospitals now, please?”

Christ alone knows what’s going to happen with the next generation of politicians if we don’t grow up and discuss drugs sensibly because, as a 36-year-old, I know an awful lot of 34 to 38-year-olds who were off their tits on E most Friday and/or Saturday nights throughout the early and mid 1990s and who have subsequently become responsible parents and upstanding members of polite society. Are we to preclude their participation in public life just because Fleet Street’s finest are a bunch of lazy hypocrites who prefer the easy hysteria of a headline to an in-depth discussion about drug use in 21st century Britain?

And still there never seems to be a single penny left for me…

By BigBrother in All posts No Comments Tags: , , ,

One of my two readers – bless you both – texts me to tell me that the last paragraph of Max Hastings’ piece in today’s Guardian deserves praise.

So…

[Mr. Tony Blair] has failed in almost all his declared objectives of 1997. He has displayed a genius for retaining power, and has presided over a nation obsessed with personal wealth, to the exclusion of almost everything else. It is entirely appropriate that Blair should depart Downing Street to become indecently rich, because the record suggests that respect for wealth is the only constant in his moral universe.

You know, I’m quoting so many Tories with approval that I fear I’m turning all Cameroon.

Anyway, Jules – texting your performances in?  That’s not how blogging’s supposed to work.

Is it?

Oh.

Does your mother know that you’re out?

By BigBrother in All posts No Comments Tags: , ,

To judge from his byline photograph, the Independent‘s Johann Hari has not yet started shaving and his balls haven’t yet dropped. Like police officers, it’s hard to take entirely seriously columnists who get younger with every passing month. But I like to persevere with him when he’s ripping the piss out of the Tories.

George Osborne has indicated he would like to “move” on inheritance tax, which he says – with compassionate fawn-eyes – is “putting pressure on the middle class”. In reality, only the richest 6 per cent pay inheritance tax. These are people such as Osborne himself, who inherited millions from his family, and virtually everybody else David Cameron knows. His “move” would be simply an Old Tory massive tax cut for the wealthy.

He’s wrong about “Old Tory”: he means “Thatcherite”. It’s a small but important distinction and an error that can be forgiven in one so callowly youthful.

Cameron has been given a ludicrously soft ride, with every piece of spin taken at face value by an awe-swept media… When one of Cameron’s policy researchers declared his opposition to relative poverty and his love for Polly Toynbee, it made front-page news. Hardly anybody bothered to read Cameron’s big poverty speech that followed, which explicitly stated that Cameron would do nothing about incomes soaring into the stratosphere at the top. By definition, then, he will not do anything about relative poverty. He directly contradicted himself, but nobody called him on it.

I’m not sure about that. Let’s be honest: anybody declaring love for Polly Toynbee has to be taken with a pinch of salt.

Where Cameron’s thinking is not filled with holes in this way, it amounts merely to a rebranding of old Tory nostrums. Small-state conservatives have always said cutting taxes will stimulate private charity. Without the Big Daddy of the state there to take charge, we will start to look out for each other, they argue, and poverty will fall. Cameron calls it “rolling forward the frontiers of society”.

Danny Kruger, one of Cameron’s advisers, calls this stress on fraternité (rather than égalité) “Cameron’s big idea”. But it is very old, and it has been tested a thousand times. In the years Margaret Thatcher was in power and sawing into state expenditure, the number of children living in poverty trebled, and – according to the definitive London School of Economics study – their chances of ever making themselves rich collapsed. Fraternité didn’t grow; it haemorrhaged away. Once again, the evidence shows that without explicit redistribution, the poorest become trapped.

Yet the few symbols of redistribution introduced by the present government are explicitly opposed by Cameron. He talks ominously of “moving beyond tax credits” and he is committed to abolishing SureStart, the programme that supports the poorest parents in Britain and helps make sure their kids keep up developmentally with their middle- class cousins. Cameron calls it “a model of state failure”; easy to say when you can afford two full-time nannies, I suppose.

And then the alarm clock went off and I woke up and it was a dream.

I may have made up that last sentence.

…but I can’t trace time

By BigBrother in All posts No Comments Tags: , , ,

Apparently it’s the first anniversary of Plastic Dave Cameron’s ascension to the Tory throne.

Apparently this means it’s time for State Of The Party pieces in the Sunday broadsheets.

Apparently the State Of The Party is confused.

In the Sunday Telegraph, a focus group thinks Plastic Dave is:

“[a] family man; posh; English; nice but dim; quasi cyclist; highly intelligent; cheerful; unknown quantity; slick; interesting; directionless; PR friendly”… Something stark is becoming apparent: Cameron is inspiring the most admiration among those who usually tend towards Labour, the Lib Dems or minority parties or who didn’t vote at the last election. He provokes the most critical comments from those who most frequently vote Tory.

Tory traditionalists are hostile towards Cameron for the same reason socialists (remember them?) were aghast at the rise of Mr. Tony Blair – because he’s full of shit as far as they’re concerned.

Consider that previous Conservative Secretaries of State for the Environment number the notorious greens Nicholas Ridley, Michael Heseltine and Peter Walker (who were, in fairness, complicit in the destruction of our coal industry, thereby significantly reducing the nation’s carbon emissions – if you don’t count the emissions involved in now shipping in all that cheap coal from Poland), Kenneth Baker and – oh, yes – Michael Fucking Howard: that line up shows you exactly how serious the last 30 years’ worth of Tory leaders took their responsibilities to the planet.

All of a sudden the annual conference finds itself addressed by a plastic man who rides a pedal cycle (as alien a concept to them as it was to Katharine Ross in Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid) standing in front of a picture of a tree scrawled by a five-year-old with ADHD. When conference ends, the delegates drive home in their Jags and 4x4s and go back to work in businesses raping the planet with gay abandon. They don’t “get” it any more than Scargill and Benn “got” the blue-pencilling of Clause IV and the fellating of business tycoons.

And it would, of course, be more convincing to the rest of us if that pedal bike wasn’t being shadowed by a car carrying Plastic Dave’s change of clothes.

Almost everyone thinks he is caring and compassionate… Jane adds: “It seems to come naturally to him.” Even Colin agrees: “There is sincerity in him. You can’t fake that.”

You can’t?

Can’t you?

CAN’T YOU REALLY?

The Observer worries that Plastic Dave’s approach to politics might lead voters to see that the emperor is naked:

The greatest risk David Cameron takes is that being fashionable will go out of political fashion.

The newspaper’s Andrew Rawnsley also points out that eventually someone is going to ask Plastic Dave actually to say something meaningful instead of mouthing sanctimonious platitudes.

But then, what’s this in The Sunday Times?

David Cameron, the Conservative party leader, is facing an official investigation for hosting a series of fundraising events in the House of Commons. He and other senior Tories have hosted 32 fundraising lunches or dinners in private parliamentary rooms in the past two months. They are thought to have raised more than £100,000.


Last week, two backbench Labour MPs filed a formal complaint with Sir Philip Mawer, the parliamentary commissioner for standards.

Parliamentary rules ban the use of Commons dining facilities for fundraising. They state: “The private dining rooms are not to be used for direct financial or material gain by a sponsor, political party or any other person or outside organisation.”

The sale of dinners in the Commons is the latest fundraising controversy to hit Cameron. Last week the Tories disclosed they had taken substantial loans running into millions of pounds from several offshore trusts and companies at rates below those offered by conventional banks.

Thank fuck for that: sleaze and money. After a year, at last I can identify with the Tory leader.

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