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John Rentoul, in case you don’t know him, is a columnist for the Independent on Sunday and unpaid New Labour suppository. In print, he comes across as a singularly unpleasant person. Not evil as such but having a lack of self-awareness that makes you want to hate him.

Take this from his latest column about how health secretary Alan Johnson should take over from Gordon Brown…

…he has a biography to die for, up against the Bullingdon boys: the orphan brought up by his sister in a council house…

You hear that? To die for. Many will be the days I’m sure, should Johnson ascend to the throne and pull off the miracle of saving Labour, that he will thank his lucky stars his parents were considerate enough to die when he was a kid.

I first came to the conclusion that Guido Fawkes was no better than dogshit on my shoes after he and New Labour darling Alex Hilton tried to claim some credit in the outing of Lib Dem MP Mark Oaten.

It was a disgusting affair and set the tone for the sniggering schoolboy prurience and fixation with what people do with their genitals that became the meat and potatoes of the Guido Fawkes blog.

So, those of us who remembered all that allowed ourselves a short, hollow laugh when we heard Paul Staines, the ‘mastermind’ behind the Guido Fawkes blog condemning the smear emails coming of Downing Street.

Enjoy.

More revelations on this blog tomorrow (if I’m not too drunk)…

Tags: Soggy Biscuit

Just ignore him, you’re saying. Don’t read his stuff. Leave him, he’s not worth it. And I’d like to take your kind advice, I really would, but as a follower of mainstream UK politics I simply can’t get away from the blighter.

He’s on Channel 4 News with his doughy soundbites. He’s reviewing the papers on News 24 or Sky News. John Pienaar’s podcast. He’s on the Today programme. More4 News. He’s on Five Live ruining a perfectly serviceable Sunday morning. For a million lazy journalists with seemingly just two blogs on their lists, he’s the go-to guy and they quote him endlessly. There is no escape, on radio, on telly, online.

Everywhere you turn there he is doling out another gob of cliche with all the care of a prison kitchen cook slapping down a ladleful of mashed potato on a lag’s tray. I was in the pub with a non-blogging mate the other week and he said that he was sick to the back teeth with the sight and sound of Dale.

(more…)

Welcome back to your cubicles, drones. And don’t forget…

It’s 2009 and Oliver Kamm’s latest two posts on his blog are about some bloke called George Galloway. Topical or what?

What do we call this then? Double standards? Affirmative action for the rich? Class warfare? Prejudice against the poor?

The black economy is normally associated with dodgy builders or painters and decorators. But white collar professionals are increasingly fiddling taxes, according to an MPs’ report today that discloses that 36 barristers have been forced to return £605,000 to tax authorities. Hundreds of thousands of pounds have been recovered from lawyers, surgeons, medical consultants, and landlords under private deals with the tax authorities.

But this has not become public because none of the white collar tax evaders have been prosecuted, says the report by the Commons public accounts committee.

How many benefit scroungers would it take to defraud the Treasury of £605,000? A damn sight more than 36, I bet. All equal in the sight of the law, eh?

Where are the adverts warning tax dodgers the government are closing in on them? Where are the tabloid editorials screaming that these people are scum? Where are the government ministers? Why aren’t they sitting in TV studios across the country demonising tax fraudsters? Where are the chilling threats of invading their private lives or threatening their children’s wellbeing?

The poor scumbags that are caught committing benefit fraud are paraded through the media like modern day circus freaks. Nobody ever asks why they do it. (Well some do but they’re largely ignored.)

Those caught dodging tax? They’re allowed to make secret deals with the Treasury and swan on down the road. Is anybody asking why they do it? I rather doubt it’s to feed the kids or get out of a damp flat.

Tax evasion, avoidance, dodging or whatever you want to call it costs the country vastly more than benefit fraud. The government lumps the benefit fraud with payment errors to make the number sound bigger. And it’s an exact figure. So clued in are they to the losses through non-payment of tax that the Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs puts the estimate at between £10 billion and £40 billion. A £30 billion margin of error. I mean, Jesus.

It would take every dole fraudster and benefit payment incompetent in the country four years to match the bottom figure. Or somewhere around 16 years if they’re going to be ambitious and go for the £40 billion jackpot.

And guess what? They’re closing 90 tax offices. How’s that for prioritising? It almost makes you wonder if the government’s fuss about the money lost through benefit fraud is really the issue.

That they’re prepared to tolerate theft on a far, far grander scale by the Greater Good, the implication is that all these threats and demonisation is rather about teaching the lower orders to watch their backs and know their place. You can, in other words, stick your class-free society.

Now, where’s the outrage?

Update @ 4.30pm: The vacuous Five Live Drive have just done a facile segment on this. Guess which group of tax dodgers they sent their reporter out to track down. You’ll be less than amazed to hear it wasn’t lawyers, surgeons or medical consultants. No, it was your legendary dodgy builder. The egregious Peter Allen even did his best stereotypical cockney wideboy impression as well.

“In Britain”, Gordon Brown said yesterday, there could never be “one rule for some and another rule for others”. Good, isn’t it?

But Brown wasn’t talking about the country’s feudal structures. He wasn’t on about Prince Charles and his untaxed £16 million income from the Duchy of Cornwall. Nor was the Prime Minister referring to Britain’s annual £25bn lost from tax avoidance (according to the Observer, the sum would be “enough money to increase old-age pensions by 20 per cent”). How about Britain hosting 35 tax havens out of a world total of 70? And would the Prime Minister do whatever it takes to stop billionaires like Mohammed al-Fayed “negotiating the amount of tax he paid with the Inland Revenue”?

No. Not a word about all that.

Read the rest

Gordon Brown marks World AIDS Day:

On this day, we remember those who have lost their lives to this terrible virus and those who have suffered from prejudice, misunderstanding or from lack of available treatment and support.

The Government marks World AIDS Day:

Two years ago, Sitiwe, who prefers not to give her full name, lived in the UK and was on regular medication for HIV. She was able to go about her normal life without worrying that her health might suddenly deteriorate. Last year she was deported to her native Zimbabwe.

To be fair to Gordon Brown, he was speaking in the past tense.

* Don’t forget the distinction.

What if support for the far right by ordinary people all over Europe owes less to tyrannical multiculturalism than it does to their cretinous desire to blame all of their personal problems on blacks, PC do-gooders, gays, Poles, criminal-loving lawyers, gypsies and Muslims, to name but a few?

I mean, the implications here are vast, almost beyond my comprehension. It would mean that, rather than being reasonable, decent people driven to desperate measures by forces beyond their control, voters for far right parties would actually be just, well, angry, racist retards.

Read the rest…

When you’re at the bottom of the pile, things are stripped away from you in a steady processions of confiscations. Dignity is one of the first things to go. Some manage to get by without it, some don’t. Arbitrary and incompetent systems introduce a degree of uncertainty so severe, so unsettling, you take nobody in authority’s word for anything – you can’t afford to. It’ll be different advice next week. A benefit letter could arrive at any moment telling you you’ve been overpaid.

When the Citizens Advice Bureau tells you that your creditors regard newspapers as a luxury you realise your very participation in society, your ability to stay informed about the world around you, can be taken away from you so very easily. Even a rudimentary quality of life can be forfeit.

And then, even at the end, your unloved, unmourned carcass will lie around for weeks…

Bodies are going unburied for up to two months because the Government is dragging its feet over paying benefits, it has been claimed.

It’s a lasting national shame that back, in the 70s when the country was in the so-called grip of the trade unions, the dead notoriously went unburied. It’s a stick that’s used to beat the Left and those in favour of workers’ rights to this day. People still talk of the national disgrace. And in the present day when it’s the lowly victims of the ideology that put paid to the unions that are suffering? Not so much. The outcry now is somewhat more muted. Not even compassion gets a decent funeral. Throw it in a ditch. Let it rot.

Anyway, a tune for a Sunday morning…

So, I see the undeserving poor are getting more hard-working taxpayers’ money . If that’s what you want to call them and it. I think we can take it that these people at the top with their hands out haven’t been and won’t be treated with the same level of high-handed contempt as those much further down the ladder also needing help.

Of course, the way the small time benefits scrounger is treated – the patronising, the vilification, the incompetence and the depressing – has the dual function of giving petty bureaucrats a frisson of sadistic power and, also, to teach said scrounger not to do anything as stupid and as careless as hit hard times through no fault of their own ever again.

So, here’s another idea for helping solve the global economic crisis. Let’s treat the leading banks just like unwashed dole scroungers. Don’t invite them to Downing Street for high-level talks. Make them walk a mile in the rain to a grubby office where they will be met by the distressingly surly indifference of a claims officer (if that claims officer isn’t off ’sick’). Make the bankers do this at the same time every two weeks. Don’t offer them any advice when they’re there or, if you do, make it ambiguous or just plain incorrect.

Hand the banks’ finances over to undertrained and demotivated staff in a government call centre. Make sure the system is as half-arsed as possible. Delay the payments to the banks for a day or two. When they phone up panicky and asking what’s happened to their much needed money treat them off-handedly. Make sure they know their place. If they can be reduced to tears so much the better. Stoke the crushing uncertainty of it all. Promise to phone back when you have more information but don’t. Send them a payment but make it smaller than promised. Make two payments just to unsettle them further. Insist they can keep the money and then write to them a week later demanding it back. Do it just before Christmas.

If after 18 months this situation isn’t sorted the banks should be handed over to a private sector agency charged with getting the banks working again by all means necessary. They will be paid by results and will receive their money when the banks are working again – whether the agency had a direct hand in helping or not. Again, make sure the staff are undertrained, bored and lacking in any empathy whatsoever. Leave it hanging over the bankers that they could lose their money at any minute.

Start a widespread campaign to plant in the public consciousness that banks and bankers are scum. Find out if any of them are foreign. Shame, shame and shame again. Sodding bankers sitting around leeching off the tax-payer. Add to their already towering misery as much as possible. Apply pressure from which they can’t escape. Make things ten times harder, more long-winded and as frustrating than they need to be. Break these scroungers, in other words. Compensate them by allowing them to get their anti-depressants for free.

The bastards won’t do it again.

A land of ‘tolerance and inclusion’*:

The first Iraqi interpreters to be offered refuge in Britain are living in fear in squalid tower blocks in Glasgow, The Times has learnt.

They complained of living among drunks and drug addicts, being abused and spat at, and of feeling isolated and unable to work. One girl of 9 had had her hijab torn off by one of her new neighbours.

Abdul, 71, one of three Iraqis who risked their lives working for British troops in Basra and were resettled in April with 15 dependents, advised others in a similar position to stay in Iraq.

One can only hope that Abdul’s advice to others that they’re better off risking death squads in Basra rather than neds in Glasgow was hyperbole born of despair.

We wrecked your country, ruined your life and left you on a sink estate to rot. Don’t you find it all – what’s the word? – liberating?

* Copyright G. Brown.

What we of the liberal centre-left have done is join Brown, Miliband and all those who so absolutely fail to represent our beliefs in allowing ourselves to be brow-beaten into silent, sullen acquiescence by the unrelenting right-wing propaganda of recent decades. We glow in Sarkozy’s facetious praise when we should shriek in rage about what a nasty, brutal, mean-spirited country our spineless apathy has helped create, and this report on the systematic maltreatment of asylum-seekers shames and diminishes us all.

read the rest

I take it that this is a rhetorical question.

Our political establishment has been convulsed by a debate about whether suspected terrorists can be detained for 28 or 42 days without charge. How is it, then, that this young girl, who no one has suggested has ever committed any crime, gets more than 80 days with no outcry?

You could tell her how but then we’d be here all day and there’s horsey racing today apparently. Let’s not spoil it. I’m putting my money on ‘Sociopathic Inertia’. It wins every time.

But when all’s said on done, never let it be said that this government are unfeeling bureaucratic monsters. Take a look at this press release from the Commission for Rural Communities’ website, calling for pensioners to be helped to get their pension credit.

We’re encouraging organisations in rural communities to work with us to ensure that people in rural areas are aware of their entitlement. Increased take-up of benefits could reduce pensioner poverty dramatically.

A laudable enterprise. Look out though, there’s trouble in paradise. Here’s a comment on the bottom of the press release:

In the area where I live people have died waiting for a visit from the Pension Service because they are so far behind with their work. The Pension Service will not however allocate “their” work to other partner organisations with whom they work to help speed things up – yet it isn’t hard to do a Pension Credit claim. Is more joint working the answer?

Here’s the reply:

Thanks for your comment. The situation you’ve described is tragic – perhaps your suggestion is a good approach. We’ll pass your comments on to our policy teams.

Now that’s how you deal with pensioner poverty. Can’t you see the policy teams leaping in to action? Don’t you wonder if they have costumes and a theme tune. Pol-icy, pol-icy, reviewing pensioner pov-ert-y. If you were old, poor and living in a rural community, wouldn’t you be sleeping a little easier tonight?

The situation you’ve described is tragic.

Sky News’ Kay Burley to the former partner of serial killer Steve Wright:

Do you think if you’d had a better sex life, he wouldn’t have done this?

Mat has more.

Update: Mitch Benn:

Maybe soon we will be able to do our own Daily Show, if this is the sort of journalism we’re starting to embrace on British TV news. But that won’t be any sort of compensation.

BRITISH Gas has said its 500% increase in profits is the result of charging people much more money to buy gas.

Unveiling its annual results, the company insisted the £480 million profit jump vindicated its strategy of making it a lot more expensive to cook food and keep warm.

Read the rest

(See also Philip)

‘The number of people living in fuel poverty is at its highest for almost a decade. This no doubt accounts for the price increases announced by British Gas and its competitors, all of whom plan to raise their bills by between fifteen and twenty-seven per cent, thus continuing the combination of low prices and efficient service which is the hallmark of privatisation and competition in the free market.’

Read the rest

…if you work for Westminster Council, as Jamie points out, you’re denying the homeless a bowl of hot soup.

If you work for the Home Office you’re busy splitting up families on Christmas eve. Evil never sleeps.

I say evil but it’s really just a case of someone enjoying their job a little too much. When bureaucratic efficiency is indistinguishable from malice, why bother hunting for the distinction?

Most of the poor sods forced to work today will prat about in the morning, have a few pints at lunchtime and then slope off early. No such genial seasonal piss-taking by the boys at the Home Office, oh no. Maybe they make a concession to the time of year by wearing Santa hats when they’re kicking in asylum seekers’ doors at dawn.

And all under the auspices of a Labour government. The next person to say to me that New Labour is still the best vehicle for progressive change in this country is liable to get a punch up the bracket. The oil of human kindness has leaked out of its sump and the engine has seized.

One hopes someone has bought Gordon Brown a new moral compass for Christmas because the one he’s got that he likes to brag about is clearly knackered.

But wait, there’s more:

The home secretary, Jacqui Smith, was today ordered to return a 15-year-old Iraqi asylum seeker to his UK foster carer after a judge condemned the way he was forced out of the country.

Mr Justice Collins criticised the “total lack of humanitarianism” of the way the authorities had launched an early morning raid to seize the boy, who later ended up on the streets when he was flown back to Austria.

Now that’s talent. It takes a proper pedigree bastard to dream this kind of stuff up. I suppose we should be grateful that these people are working for the Home Office and not freelancing. Otherwise they’d be holding the world to ransom with laser-satellites made from diamonds or bombarding us from orbit with poisons created from rare orchids. Or making suits out of dead prostitutes.

(Via Philip)

In proposing that temporary and agency workers should benefit from the same pay and basic conditions as their fully accredited counterparts, [MP Paul] Farrelly’s [temporary and agency workers (prevention of less favourable treatment)] bill drills into an issue that barely intrudes on the political mainstream: the casualisation of thousands of workplaces, and the alleged slow death of the Real Job. Around 1.4 million people currently work in the temporary and agency sector, millions more feel its downward pull on their working lives – and at its current rate of growth, millions more soon will do. Unfortunately, the involvement of the trade unions serves to confirm that the issue lies as far from middle England as can be, and you thus arrive at yet another illustration of how contorted Westminster politics has become: the political class blithely yakking about “rising aspirations”, while millions of people’s hopes are plummeting at speed.

read the rest

If I was editing The Blog Digest this year (and I’m not), this by Alex Harrowell would be up front. I’m not going to quote it, just go and read it.

I suppose it struck a chord with me because over the years I’ve being trying to reach my own synthesis on the psychology of government ministers and other public ’servants’ seemingly indifferent to the suffering of their fellow man. I may be some time.

Let’s just say that Alex and I are on the quest for the hidden human in these people. We haven’t found it yet but there’s a nugget of hope at the heart of our hunt nevertheless.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Chris Dillow is ace. I’ve had a drink with him on a couple of occasions and he has a bullshit detector and an ability to distill ideas that I’d kill for.

But I have to say that this really is one of the most chilling and dispiriting blog posts I’ve ever read:

Economic success requires that talent not be unlocked, and remain unused

[...]

As Harry Braverman showed in one of the best books ever written, capitalism requires that workers be robbed of their skills.

And this is why Brown’s words are not only stupid, but perniciously stupid. In pretending that economic progress and human flourishing can always coexist – especially under capitalism – he’s ignoring one of the most important and profound trade-offs of all.

I feel like I did when I found out Father Christmas didn’t exist or when I read that Steve McQueen was a wife-beater with a penchant for coffee enemas. Talk about pissing on someone’s chips. ‘Can’t win, don’t try,’ as Bart Simpson once said.

Why, Chris, why? What next? Heroes isn’t really a documentary? I don’t think I could bear that.

I’m sure you were as scandalised as I was to discover that the media fabricated its output in order to deceive the public. What I want to know is how many people died as a result.

WHY AREN’T THEY COUNTING THE CASUALTIES?!?!

Isn’t some kind of petition or website in order?

Why all the fuss about Gordon Brown’s £50 million cut to the Government’s drug rehabilitation scheme? ‘Hypocrite!’ screamed the Tories when the news leaked out straight after Brown declared he wants a review into reclassifying cannabis from Class C to Class B.

But is he a hypocrite? It’s makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? If, say, you’re a Daily Mail-fellating authoritarian, that is. Reclassifying the eeeeevil weed would mean more people being banged up for possession, so what would you need all the drug rehabilitation places for? Hence Gordon’s budget cut.

QED*, innit?

*Quite Evil Demagogue.