Hazel Blears must be stopped
ePolitix.com - Blears: Parties have got to be paid for
In an interview with ePolitix.com, the Labour Party chairman said the public could be persuaded to give more of its taxes towards policy and candidate development.
No. This needs to stop. About the only thing Hazel Blears could persuade me to do right now is chase her across a field with one of these filled with wasp pheromone.
The reason New Labour want our money is because they’re lazy, contemptuous and want to avoid actually having to listen to people. They hollowed out their membership with neo-Thatcherite policies and overseas carnage. Remember Blair’s now-faded hopes for a million member party? Well, he’s only got 800,000 to go. He did only have 600,000 to go in 1997 but 200,000 floated away. Blears, making it up as she goes, says this is because many members saw it as ‘job done‘ after defeating the Tories. Many left however because they were pretty sure the Tories (or at least Toryism) hadn’t been defeated at all and to do so they reckoned Labour probably wasn’t the vehicle to do it any more.
So, trying to win these people back being too much of a fag, New Labour (and the rest) went on their knees, caps in their hands and dicks in their mouths, to millionaire businessmen. Now that’s all been exposed as little more than the financial equivalent of a back-alley bunk-up, it’s time for the public to grab its ankles. By taking the money rather than asking for it, the parties don’t have to bother with member and activist-attracting stuff like engagement, involvement, instilling passion, and showing that politics can be vital, exciting and life-changing.
It’s a complete circumvention of the relationship between voter and party. New Labour, in finally shedding those once-vital limbs of party membership, can finally become what it’s wanted to be all these years - an entity of pure intangibility and self-deluding, flailing improvisation. Blair must be rubbing himself with glee. No more having to go the Sedgefield meetings and pretending to like drinking bitter. No more tiresome meetings with sycophants.
So, cut out the middle(wo)men and soak Jo(e) Bloggs. It’s the same with the Labour Support Network. Sod the worker ants who stuff the envelopes and knock on the doors, says Labour, let’s cultivate those people who’ve gone to the herculean lengths of letting us have their email addresses (most of who, I might add, seem to be bloggers queuing up to dissect every worthless, witless electronic turd from Labour High Command that arrives in their inboxes).
If there were an election tomorrow you’d need to put a gun to my head to get me to vote for any of them. They want my vote and my support? Then they should come to me and earn it, not make me pay for it. Make Alan Milburn stump up some of the cash he made from shilling private sector MRI scanners to the NHS. Make Michael Howard splash out some of the money he’s making from war profiteering.
Imagine being legally obliged to pay footballers’ wages whether you wanted to or not. Christ, it’s demeaning enough paying for a flatulent national disgrace like Chris Moyles (and we have the gall to want to export our ‘values’ to other countries). Where’s the ‘choice’ New Labour fart on about all the time? Is your self-esteem really so low that you’d let them take money from you to pay for astroturfing and dogwhistle billboards? For the self-congratulatory party political broadcasts you never watch? I’d rather be the editor of the Sun before I gave a penny to these bastards - that my children regarded me as the lowest, most degraded form of life imaginable. There, I said it.
Posted on August 2nd, 2006 at 9:36 pm
What a loathsome creature she is. Just what the hell is an “enhanced democracy” anyway? If we were allowed to chose which political parties our money went to then maybe the idea might warrant further investigation. But she doesn’t seem to be suggesting that for some reason.
Just what the hell is an “enhanced democracy†anyway?
It’s the garnish. It’s what this Government is reduced to. It’s Custody Plus. It’s Jobcentre Plus. It’s orange boilersuits for those on community service and new uniforms for customs officials. Disappearances instead of free trials.
Instead of giving us a big plate of steak and chips or a big steaming bowl of moules mariniere, we’re presented with plate after plate of the parsley dust and limp lettuce that should be sitting on the side ignored.
The Whiskey Bar
Anyone who has even a smidgeon of knowledge about, or experience in, the Middle East, and who says he is absolutely, 100% certain he has the right answers, is either a liar, a fanatic, or Tom Friedman — which is to say, a world-class educated fool.
Blair, unfortunately, is all three.
So here’s my confession: At this point I really don’t give a flying fuck whether the Democrats take the House or the Senate back. No, wait, that’s not true. The truth is I hope they don’t. It wouldn’t save us from what’s coming down the road, in the Middle East and elsewhere. It wouldn’t force President Psychopath to change course or seek therapy. But it would make sure that the “left” (ha ha ha) gets more than its fair share of blame for the approaching debacle.
That may well be the natural role of the Democratic Party in our one-and-a-half party system, but I don’t want any part of it any more.
“If there were an election tomorrow you’d need to put a gun to my head to get me to vote for any of them.”
Noooo! Please refrain from giving them any more policy ideas
Amazing though, isn’t it, how they manage to be simultaneously scum and dregs?
Well you got the tone dead right. Everyone outside the cosy Westminster village consensus ought to be apoplectic about it - but I’m not holding my breath. Guido Fawkes got it right too: The impicit threat is “unless the taxpayer gives us money we will have to revert to our traditional corrupt criminal means of obtaining it”. Forget any notion of earning/inspiring respect and support. It’s all so bloody transparent too. They must have concluded (probably correctly) that the electorate really is stupid.
It’s not in the iterests of ‘The Establishment’ to rock the boat on the issue either, so we are hardly likely to see ANY editorial anger from the MSM who will no doubt become complicit in soothing and smoothing any ripples of dissent among the sheeple.
I tend to go along with ‘Friendly Fire’ though. With what’s coming down the road over the Middle-East and the gathering pace of the Western Alliance hegemony/oil/resources wars, the whole issue is likely to become an irrelevance.
BTW Hayden Phillips, the man i/c the party funding review, is going through the motions of wanting to hear your views on the matter. The web site is Here
“Job done”? The arrogant cow! I was one of those 200,000 and I didn’t leave because I thought it was “job done” I left because the authoritarian bastards betrayed everything they were supposed to stand for. I objected to their dismantling of the due process of law, the loss of habeas corpus, the dreadful ID card scheme, ASBOs and “summary justice” Job done will be when this execrable shower are kicked out on their sorry arses. Bastards!
So, no, I don’t want to part with one single penny of my taxes paying for them. They lost my membership fees for a damn good reason, I certainly don’t want them stolen from my back pocket.
Longrider, here you go:
She admitted Iraq had been “hugely divisive”, but said the vast majority of the 200,000 people lost to the party since 1997 quit after they felt they had done the job of defeating the Tories.
What do you think of one of the POWER inquiry’s proposals on party funding:
State funding to support local activity by political parties should be introduced based on the allocation of individual voter vouchers. This would mean that at a general election a voter will be able to tick a box allocating a £3 donation per year from public funds to a party of his or her choice to be used by that party for local activity. It would be open to the voter to make the donation to a party other than the one they have just voted for.
My comments on this are that it should be an annual choice by a voter that replaces all other forms of funding and it shouldn’t necessarily be restricted to parties as that would disadvantage independent candidates (otherwise it would entrench the party system, which I feel is part of the problem with democracy in this country).
I don’t like it, sorry. It’s still state funding. I know there’s an opt out for those who don’t vote or don’t want money to go to parties but it’s still public money going to fund parties.
At the last election, if every voter (27,148,500 in the UK) had allocated their cash it would have come to £81,445,500 from the public purse. You could pay the deficits on two or three NHS trusts with that.
Quite right (you, not her)
It’s like being mugged, then having the mugger turn up at one’s home demanding a direct debit on your bank a/c, because they never got enough in the first place!
No the pigs should be made to get their stinking snouts out of the troughs and beg for our hard earned cash.
In addition -
Proportional representation.
Sliding scale of salaries starting with the minimum wage for ordinary MPs, with pension tied to the state one.
Forced to send their children to state schools.
Fixed term parliament / Prime Ministership.
Any other ideas out there?
Note also that the overall constitutional fuckup of the UK will end up being made even worse by whatever gerrymandering trick they come up with to make sure the BNP don’t get any of the money.
Political parties should only be allowed to raise money through busking…
with ukuleles… and those one-man band bass drum and cymbal sets.
Oh, and the leader of the party should have to dance to it, dressed up like one of those monkeys from the barrel organ days.
Well worth 50p of anybody’s money, I think.
[...] To other things… I notice over at Justin’s place an issue has arisen which finds me, unusually, in complete disagreement with the boy. No, not that Hazel Blears must be stopped. As a general rule, who could argue with that? It’s just that - in one of those monkeys and typewriters moments - Blears is actually backing a sound principle in this case. [...]
I was going to mention that my comment on this post evolved into a blog entry of its own. But your pingback appears to have beaten me to it.