Labour
The Cabinet Reshuffle
Stand well back, I fear the Minister’s likely to blow…
You cheat and you lie – it makes me wanna cry
This is one of the most profoundly depressing political stories I’ve read in a long time.
Not because it’s a bad idea – it’s not; it’s precisely the sort of thing for which the country has been crying out for years – but because Arrivederci Gordon’s useless Labour government is allowing the Tories – THE MOTHERFUCKING TORIES! – to claim the moral high ground on environmentalism and public transport.
These are the same people who spent 18 years running the rail network into the ground by refusing to invest in it, and then flogging it off in a recklessly dangerous manner to chancer-carpetbaggers that somehow means taxpayers now pay more to subsidise the railway network than ever before.
These are the same people who, frankly, my dear, gave so little a damn about the environment that they put Nicholas Ridley in charge of it for three years.
And now here’s Posh Boy Dave and The Eton Rifles saying, “Actually, you know, there might be some votes in this after all. Might make sense to stop people flying 150 miles because the train service is so pisspoor it’s usually quicker and cheaper to do so. Might make sense to upgrade the railways if the oil price is about to shoot off the charts for good. Sod the ideology, feel the election night count.”
And where’s our Transport Secretary? (That’ll be The Rt. Hon. Ruth Kelly, New Labour MP for Opus Dei.) She’s packing her fucking boxes instead of battering down the doors to the Channel 4 News and Newsnight studios to decry the hypocrisy of it all.
The Ad Man is going to win. And it’s time to re-investigate those emigration options.
When you’re down and out, when you’re on the street…
The Minister is no fan of The Disgraced Former Europe Minister Keith Vaz. And it seems that the same old Vaz-related shit is in the process of hitting the fan once again.
Keith Vaz was under intense pressure last night after a fellow MP said he had been misled over Vaz’s links to a controversial lawyer.
Vaz, a government minister under Tony Blair and chairman of the Commons home affairs committee, persuaded Virendra Sharma, the Labour MP for Ealing Southall, to intervene with him in a court case involving Shahrokh Mireskandari, an Iranian-born lawyer.
In a letter to the court, Vaz asked that a High Court judge review the case in which Mireskandari, senior partner with Dean and Dean solicitors, was on the brink of losing a long-running legal battle that could cost him £250,000.
Sharma said yesterday that when Vaz had asked him to sign the letter jointly, he had failed to tell him of previous personal dealings with Mireskandari. “Keith’s office drafted the letter. I looked at it and signed it. I did not know this company [Dean and Dean] and I had no knowledge that Keith Vaz knew this company,” Sharma said.
“If Keith Vaz knew the people involved he should have told me. If I had known all that, my approach would have been different. I probably wouldn’t have written the letter, or written it in that way.”
[...]The MPs’ letter to the High Court earlier this year concerned a dispute between Dean and Dean and a Romanian company called Angel Airlines. It is said to have highlighted complaints that Mireskandari had made about the conduct of a previous judge in the case.
The judge in the appeal, Mr Justice Coulson, is said to have become aware of it shortly before he was to decide Mireskandari’s appeal against an order seeking £250,000 costs from him. A source close to the judge was quoted yesterday as saying: “He was very surprised to get a letter asking for an adjournment from someone [Vaz] who was not party to the case. The judge had never come across something like this before in his long career.”
[...]Fellow MPs on the home affairs committee said they had been trying to contact Vaz yesterday about separate allegations over his relationship with Mireskandari. They have raised concerns about the presence of Mireskandari during a fact-finding trip by the committee to Moscow last May.
It was reported yesterday that Mireskandari had entertained Vaz and his wife, the immigration lawyer Maria Fernandes, at various events including in private boxes at concerts at the O2 arena, the London Coliseum and Wembley stadium.
[...]Vaz was unavailable for comment.
Who could possibly have predicted that the appointment of The Disgraced Former Europe Minister Keith Vaz to the chairmanship of a Commons Select Committee might not have been an entirely sensible move…?
The failure of people to learn from previous mistakes forms part of Simon Jenkins’ column today in The Sunday Times, in which he makes some good points:
It is by no means clear what really happened over the past two weeks or who was to blame.
[...]Were this a military catastrophe or an intelligence failure or even a train crash, there would be a public inquiry. There would be one even if everyone knew what had happened and whom to blame. Neither is the case today. The crash of 2008 has been, for most people, an utter confusion leaving a nasty sense that those in power knew what was going on and were too spineless to control it.
I hate public inquiries, so often media kangaroo courts that merely enrich lawyers. But there cannot have been a fiasco more in need of illumination than the past two weeks in the City of London. Its decisions cry out for analysis; its lessons cry out for learning, and those in charge should render a public account.
And finally… now for something completely different: vote Palin for President.
You could never run this country, buddy, I’ll tell you that much…
What a cunt.
Seriously – what a cunt.
Now I’ve swung back down again it’s worse than it was before
At the risk of sounding like Michael Winner, I went to dinner on Wednesday night with a number of American gentlemen. They are all nice enough blokes with level enough heads and decent enough brains. But the conversation was a bit distressing at times.
“What do you think of Palin?” one (an ex-pat marooned in Blighty for the time being) asked another (a Californian resident just visiting this planet).
“You remember David Lee Roth’s Hot For Teacher? She’s got that kind of sexy teacher/librarian thing going on. A real MILF. She’s got a great rack.”
“But as a candidate [you think] she’s crap, right?”
“Oh, yeah. But you can only vote McCain, right? I mean, Obama…?!”
“Sure, sure, but you know – it’s a bit worrying: I mean, McCain could die at any minute…”
“True. But she’s hot. I’m for McCain.”
Inside, I wept for two and a half hours.
In her acceptance speech to the Republican Party convention, Governor Palin quoted a writer called Westbrook Pegler:
We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity.
It seems Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is not particularly impressed with the sexy librarian’s choice of reading matter.
Fascist writer Westbrook Pegler, an avowed racist who Sarah Palin approvingly quoted in her acceptance speech for the moral superiority of small town values, expressed his fervent hope about my father, Robert F. Kennedy, as he contemplated his own run for the presidency in 1965, that “some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in pubic premises before the snow flies.”
It might be worth asking Governor Palin for a tally of the other favorites from her reading list.
Still, cracking tits, eh?
In other news…
[Arrivederci Gordon] sought… to show that he was committed to reform of the City and tackling the financial crisis. Keen to re-establish his authority ahead of Labour’s annual conference, Brown said: “We are cleaning up the financial system where there have been problems and we are going to continue taking whatever action is necessary so we have a stable financial system.”
Forgive my naivety but how can the man who was, er, in charge of “the financial system” from May 1997 to June 2007 re-establish anything by admitting that “there have been problems” in that system, that it is not “stable” and that there is a need for it to be “cleaned up”?
Meanwhile…
If I place a bet with Ladbrokes and Ladbrokes refuses to pay out when I win, I cannot enforce that gaming contract because it is a long-established principle of English law that permitting the enforceability of gambling deals would be A Bad Thing – floodgates, public policy, that sort of thing.
However, if I decide to sell shares THAT I DON’T OWN to someone, in the hope that I’ll be able to buy them back later at a lower price (ie place a bet), I can earn gazillions in bonuses in the City if my luck holds. This noble art is called short-selling and is what 21st Century GB plc is built upon.
So…
Hector Sants, chief executive of the FSA, said: “While we regard short-selling as a legitimate investment technique in normal market conditions, the current extreme circumstances have given rise to disorderly markets. As a result, we have taken this decisive action, after careful consideration, to protect the fundamental integrity and quality of markets.”
However…
[The] clampdown came as early signs suggested that fears that HBOS had been targeted in a frenzy of short selling earlier this week appeared to be misplaced.
We’re in safe hands.
OR
Doomed. Doomed. We’re all doomed.
You decide.
Tory! Tori! Toré!
Yesterday in Eastbourne the (at least notionally) sole mainstream political party vaguely committed to social democracy – the Liberal Democrats, for those who may have forgotten they existed – turned bright blue, deciding that the best platform on which to fight the next election is “£20 billion of spending cuts and a couple of pence off income tax”.
This is on top of the party’s existing plan to cut £20 billion from public expenditure and take four pence off the basic rate of income tax.
So that’s £40 billion in spending cuts. Can you imagine the reaction if the Tories threatened that? (Actually, what am I talking about? If the Tories threatened that, there would be complete apathy in the streets. Fuck me.)
Of course, nobody’s quite sure how any this is going to be funded, given that the party two years ago ditched its commitment to introduce a 50p tax rate for those earning £100,000 or more annually.
Vince Cable keeps going on about closing “immoral tax loopholes”, but it must be nice to be able to spout bollocks knowing you’ll never have to account for it. (Which is why I’m a bit surprised Arrivederci Gordon isn’t making the most of his final days in office by announcing some initiatives based on the rejected drafts of David Sutch’s speeches from the Seventies.)
If only Labour would elect as leader a pudgy-faced, pasty posh boy who used to wank over posters of That Bloody Woman (is Mr. Tony still available…?) then I could conscionably stay at home at the next election, secure in the knowledge that my vote really won’t make the slightest bit of difference to the outcome.
Isn’t it ironic, don’t you think?
I love the fact that our politicians have apparently decided that nationalisation and governmental intervention is actually the only sensible route to take in certain circumstances, but that none of them will actually say so.
Fannie May and Freddie Mac have this week followed Northern Rock into national ownership: there has been barely a whiff of political or economic dissent to the astonishing development.
Some stuffed shirt or another from Goldman Sachs told the Today programme yesterday that governments have a “duty to intervene” in circumstances such as those that have developed in America, where free markets have failed working people.
That, once again, from Goldman Sachs.
Goldman Sachs, the investment bank.
(I’m sure they said much the same circa 1978 a propos British Leyland and British Steel. The tape of that interview probably just got wiped.)
Most interestingly Dave Cameron’s barely locatable, let alone jumping up and down on the Six and Ten, yelling to Huw about the Trots in Number 10 and the White House and their evil machinations designed to thwart the unchecked progress of global capitalism.
Don’t tell me that the fucking Tories are going to be to the left of Labour at the next election: I’m on a diet and I don’t have the strength to take that…
Ten Things I Learned On My Holidays
1. Max Bygraves is still alive.
2. Mélissa Theuriau has got married and is pregnant (six months, a boy).
Initially on learning this news I resolved to kill either myself or her husband.
Then I discovered she’s married actor and comedian Jamel Debouzze, who was very good in Amélie, and I can therefore just about forgive them both.
Seriously, though, just one more time for the road……
3. No Country For Old Men is really very good indeed.
4. The Dark Knight is really not.
5. They’re making a sort-of-sequel to Streets Of Fire. Holy shit!
6. I am in love. Please allow me to introduce Pilar López de Ayala.
The Minister’s Wife’s biggest disappointment is the Minister’s predictability – cf. #1 on the Minister’s Laminated List for the past 17 years:
7. I hate being so predictable.
8. No matter how vapid, insane and unimaginably pathetic the Republican Party seems, it can always get vapider, insaner and patheticer.
9. No matter how vapid, insane and unimaginably pathetic the Labour Party seems, it can always get vapider, insaner and patheticer.
10. No matter how vapid, insane and unimaginably pathetic the Premier League seems, it can always get vapider, insaner and patheticer.
It’s good to be back.
But enough about me. How are you?
Day 4,058
…the day the music died.
