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Liberté, fraternité, obésité!

A little something by me over at Comment is Free.

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With the tide of public support that once buoyed the good ship New Labour now slipping away to leave it high and dry, a new book is on the way cataloguing the cargo of woes sitting in the hold.

Iain Dale, former aide de camp to David Davis, and Guido Fawkes, Westminster gossip-monger and pseudonymous professional pain in the political posterior, are putting together The Little Red Book of New Labour Sleaze and are looking for bloggers to do the heavy lifting and write the thing.

No doubt there’ll be no shortage of willing volunteers although Guido did alienate a section of the political blogging community earlier this year by assuming for himself a role in the downfall of Mark Oaten. “A slaphead who most mothers would feel uneasy seeing near a playground,” was Guido’s enlightened contribution.

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What about the current wrestling over civil liberties then? Sexy or what? First Tony Blair and Henry Porter getting all Women In Love in the Observer yesterday and then Charles Clarke going threes-up with Simon Carr and Jenni Russell today.

I say “wrestling”. I’m being terribly cynical here but I’d bet my left plum that phalanxes of researchers and nuancers were conscripted to carefully craft Blair’s and Clarke’s responses. Charles Clarke’s fondness for what are known in the trade as “screamers“(!!!), however, does suggest an almost endearingly childlike regard to written communication on behalf of someone in the Home Office. I do hope it’s Charles. Picture him slipping notes to Gordon Brown in Cabinet meetings: “Do you like me!!? Yes [ ] No [ ]“. Or sending a memo to his Private Secretary, “I want these men drinking urine in an Algerian gulag before the month’s out!!!”

While gratifying to see two of the country’s most powerful taking the time to correct a perceived misinterpretation of their motives by such a small group (count them: Carr, Porter and Russell) of liberal journalists, it does make you wonder how and why they couldn’t find five minutes disabuse the media of another bigger, and ultimately disastrous, misconception and tell them, “hang on, lads, this 45 Minutes from Doom thing is complete bollocks”. Think of the lives that could have been saved with an exchange of emails with the editors of the Sun and the Evening Standard or a sneering lecture delivered after a large lunch.

Or have Tony and Charles only now decided to take on the media and the timing of their first go at it just happened to coincide with the civil liberties debate? They could do a spot of moonlighting for Medialens whose strapline reads, “correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media”.

We should await, with keen anticipation, their rebuttal of any black propaganda against Iran that might surface in our newspapers in the coming months. “Frankly it’s difficult to know where to start, given the mishmash of misunderstanding, gross exaggeration and things that are just plain wrong,” the Prime Minister will spit as he demolishes stories of Iran building nuclear weapons. “But I believe that a pernicious and even dangerous poison is now slipping into at least some parts of this media view of the world,” the Home Secretary will belch as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s proclamations are lampooned in the press as the rantings of a swarthy Hitler with little man syndrome.

Or would those stories be nothing-to-offer Zimbabwe compared to the civil liberty debate’s resource rich Iraq and therefore not worth trespassing on? Still, just because you can’t debunk all the myths doesn’t mean you shouldn’t debunk some of the myths.

See also: Tim, Longrider, Murky, qwghlm.

(And Blairwatch, Chris Lightfoot, Charlie, the Curious Hamster and Bookdrunk.)

Obviously, panics like that over Bird Flu sells papers and boost viewing figures which is why the media are currently in such a froth about it.

Personally, I think there is only one way to be if/when the pandemic finally arrives: a stoic, a realist, a fatalist. We can deduce, through the bitter experience of the many examples of incompetence and the cavalier attitude to human life displayed by our current masters, that, should Bird Flu mutate into a human-to-human strain, many people will die needlessly.

The early precedents aren’t good. It’s reported that the swan killed by HN51 in Scotland lay unattended for 16 hours after its presence was reported to DEFRA. So you can imagine the worst: inadequate plans will fall short, water and gas will be cut off (except to Government bunkers) as key workers fail to show up for work, the officious will stop food and supplies crossing quaratine checkpoints and so on.

One suspects that there is already a figure of acceptable losses, not – idiotically – recorded on a piece of paper that can later be leaked, but firmly lodged in the minds of those who will be first in the queue for Tamiflu. “Just think of them as a slice of the cake you dropped on the floor, old boy,” you can imagine some Sir Humphrey figure whispering to his minister. You’re an infantryman at the Somme and Tony Blair is Sir Douglas Haig.

With that in mind, why worry about it? Relax. There’s nothing you can do about Bird Flu and even less you can do to mitigate against the attitudes of contempt and fecklessness of Government ministers. Maybe put a few cases of bottled water in the attic along with the odd tin of beans. Maybe print off from the internet a way of making it quick and painless if it gets too much for your kids.

Talk of a Bird Flu bodycount is like the talk about a New Labour meltdown at the local elections. You suspect that it’s New Labour activists talking up the party getting a right hammering on May 4 so that it if turns out to be not that bad they can say it was a good result because everybody was expecting a meltdown.

So it’s the same with these stories of a “worst case scenario” of up to 320,000 people dying in the UK in a Bird Flu pandemic. If the final body count comes in under that number, New Labour can rebuff accusations of an incompetence that cost lives by saying: “Look, everybody was talking about 320,000 deaths. In the event only 200,000 died. It could have been much, much worse.”

Of course, the deaths of so many people will no doubt be put down to “more cock-up than conspiracy” in any subsequent soft-pedalled Today programme interview (forget about a public inquiry), which is the platitude of choice these days for Government ministers trying to explain away their serial stupidity – which surely must be the excuse if our leaders deny being calculating and mendacious. Try it the next time you make a mistake at work. If you still lose your job, try telling the employment tribunal. Failing that, appeal to your favourite cabinet minister. I’m sure they’ll empathise.

Thinking of voting for New Labour on May 4th? Here’s one or two reasons why you maybe shouldn’t.

• “Putting King Herod in charge of a maternity ward”
• Astroturfing
• Tax credits
• Basra: “a mini-Iran-come-Sicily”
• “Several hundred” terrorists was actually only 11
• John Reid: Firebombs are better than napalm
• Margaret Hodge to Rover workers: Get a job at Tesco
• Stifling protest
• UK arms sales to Africa reach £1 billion mark
• Pisspoor computer system #1
• Verah Kachepa
• Walter Wolfgang
• Memorandum of Understanding #1
• Charles Clarke: “I welcome the decision” on allowing information extracted under torture.
• Memorandum of Understanding #2
• Sent back to Iraq by mistake
• Pisspoor computer system #2
• Innocence is no defence
• The Respect Action Plan
• Pisspoor computer system #3
• The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill
• Olive Mukaraguwiza
• Pisspoor computer system #4
• ID cards
• The treatment of the July 7 bombings survivors
• “A decent and honourable man”
• Cash for peerages
• “Here we are not tortured physically but mentally we are tortured.”
• “Get away from me, I will not be insulted by you, this is an insult“
• “Hoon plans curb on MPs’ questions”
• “If this was anything to do with trying to appeal to the electorate, he wouldn’t be so excruciatingly honest”
• Pisspoor computer system #5
• Pisspoor computer system #6
• A slight miscalculation
• Maya Evans
• Extraordinary rendition: ignorance is bliss
• Pisspoor computer system #7
• Pisspoor computer system #8
• Sally Cameron
• Pisspoor computer system #9
• Immigration cells ‘like kennels’
• John Reid: Be slow to condemn
• The politicisation of the police…
• …or maybe not
• 28 days
• The Politics of Fear
• No inquiry into 7 July bombings

In the lead up to the General Election last year while a cheerleader for the Backing Blair tactical voting campaign, I kept a list, updated throughout, of the reasons as to why I thought New Labour didn’t deserve being returned to power. As it turned out, only 22% of the electorate disagreed.

With the New Labour campaign for the local elections being launched this week and a newly invigorated Backing Blair up and running, and while the old reasons not to vote New Labour still apply, I thought I’d compile another list of reasons, dating from the General Election, as to why New Labour don’t deserve your X on May 4. ID cards or the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill are enough on their own to damn this Government.

The central message of the Backing Blair campaign is “Don’t Vote Labour“:

Labour MPs, councillors, candidates and activists all need to understand that – as long as Blair remains in power – they can no longer count on our vote.

No doubt Polly Toynbee will be parading her nosepegs again and reminding us of all the cheap baubles New Labour has given us to make our lives marginally less shit than they were under the Tories. Maybe others will again choose to insult those who do not wish to vote New Labour or tell them endlessly that a protest vote risks allowing the Tories in by the back door.

Now, my council, Brighton and Hove, aren’t having elections this year. The next ones are 2007. So, this is going to sound a little Operation Clark County. But given my vote this year I’d go further than not voting New Labour. On May 4 I’d scrawl “NONE OF THE ABOVE” across my ballot paper.

Still-raw memories of the Thatcher years preclude many of us from giving the Tories our vote. Cameron has no policies to speak of and may yet reveal himself as the slavering neo-conservative many people suspect him to be. The Lib-Dems, let’s face it, are little more than a receptacle marked “protest vote” and on a local level they can’t be trusted – you never know what you’re going to get from council to council. I don’t fancy voting for a coalition of ex-Stalinists and muslim fundamentalists or a single issue party.

I’ve said it before but low turnouts at elections get spun by the victors for their own purposes. John Prescott once blamed low turnout on a “culture of contentment” among voters. Non-voters get branded lazy and apathetic when in actual fact low turnouts are largely caused by a dangerous and depressing dislocation from our so-called democratic process.

To turn out to spoil your ballot, however, sends a message. It’s a rejection of our political system and our grossly inadequate, unrepresentative and inequitable electoral system.

Jim Bliss made the point on his old blog, in possible the finest General Election blog post written during the 2005 campaign, that:

But my vote will have None of The Above written in large black letters across it. Thanks to this archaic system, that means my vote will be declared “spoilt” and lumped in with all the morons who thought they could vote for 3 candidates. But with a bit of luck one of the candidates will be walking past the table when my vote’s counted and will realise that at least one of the spoilt ballots was a protest vote against every single one of them standing in that room.

I’d argue that spoiling one’s ballot isn’t as potentially fruitless as Jim says. Spoilt ballots are counted. Imagine if councillors were elected at the forthcoming elections with fewer votes that the number of spoilt ballots. If more people got off their arses to say that our system isn’t working and they’ve had enough than voted for the winners, wouldn’t that be something?

Don’t vote Labour. Or anybody else. Tell them that until they listen to us, give us real democracy and reform their corrupt, evasive, unaccountable, money-grabbing, expense-exploiting, primus inter pares contempt for us, their paymasters and employers, we want none of them.

The hired help, the servants, are no good. They’ve forgotten their place – we are upstairs, it is they who are downstairs. This isn’t The Servant, it’s The Remains of the Day. When an employee is lazy, dishonest and mendacious you don’t reward him. In days gone by recalcitrant servants were thrashed.

Time to get out the None Of The Above vote.

Update: Chris over at Stumbling and Mumbling has a great post replying to this one and advocating a boycott of elections.

His is an attractive argument but needless to say, I prefer something a little more proactive. (Although there’s absolutely nothing preventing both points of view working independently and yet in concert with each other.)

However, a campaign using something like Suzon’s “none of the above” rubber stamps or even simple stickers all of the same design would be a striking visual protest that surely wouldn’t fail to plant a seed of doubt in politician’s minds. I’d argue a unified “visual style” of ballot spoiling would move the “none of the above” camp away from intimations of what Chris calls “inconsequential lunacies” towards the impression of an orchestrated movement. And yet, you wouldn’t be creating another political movement but a very loosely connected – practically gaseous – coalition.

I haven’t yet had time to read the second of Tony Blair’s three foreign policy speeches (Episode II: Attack of the Clones) to see if there’s any nutritional value in it. The way it’s being reported suggests not and anyway, the speech will now get zero coverage as the pundits ponder the Prime Minister’s unwise choice of words in a radio interview.

However, the speech was notable for the repetition of one of the Prime Minister’s favourite baseless smears. To wit: that criticism of the Bush Administration – implied, explicit or imagined – is anti-American:

But the strain of, frankly, anti-American feeling in parts of European politics is madness when set against the long-term interests of the world we believe in.

Most of us are, thankfully, capable of more sophisticated differentiation. George Bush, to pick an American at random, is a fool whereas Terry Gilliam is a genius. Dick Cheney (say) is the devil while Harper Lee is an angel. Of course, being an equal opportunities generaliser, Blair applies this same perceived failure to nuance to himself by prefacing the remark with:

I don’t always agree with the US. Sometimes they are difficult friends to have.

Not accustomed or inclined to hearing truth spoken to his own power, it’s not surprising that Blair is incapable of speaking it to others. We all know that “the US” means the Bush Administration but I suppose it was too much to expect the Prime Minister to say:

I don’t always agree with President Bush. Sometimes he is a difficult friend to have.

There’s always talk that Blair chooses to wield his so-called (and much vaunted) influence over Bush in private. To which the rest of us are entitled to demand: prove it. The softly, softly, catchy monkey approach hasn’t put many exhibits in the Blair zoo’s primate house.

The thing is, when talking about the Bush Whitehouse, Blair always sounds like a man at a party who’s brought a drunken rugger bugger with him. His friend is staggering around, insulting the other guests, breaking the furniture and throwing up in the corner but Tony says to everyone else: “Shhh! Look, don’t say anything horrible to George. He might get in a huff and leave.” Blair can’t admit that yet another rendition of “The hairs on her dicky dido” and the ostentatious farting accompanied by shouts “better out than in” from his companion offends those with better manners.

I have worked out that I gave my details out eleven times at least, possibly more, but by 24th October I was still, apparently, not on an official Department of Culture Media and Sport list of survivors, and nor were many other passengers. This is staggeringly incompetent: I and other people managed to climb out of a bombed train, find each other, look after each other, and now we have almost 100 survivors’ names and details.We have executed a successful media strategy, helped each other find counsellors, fill in compensation firms, find lawyers, medical help, dealt with hundreds of media enquiries, safeguarded ourselves from nutters and wierdoes trying to infiltrate the group, organised a 6 month memorial ceremony, set up a website, campaigned for a public enqury, liased with the police, all whilst holding down a day job and recovering from injuries and PTSD. And nobody has given us any funding: we haven’t asked for it we did it all by ourselves, for free. Meanwhile someone, somewhere has a salary or a grant and a job decription that is about looking after victims of July 7th. I’d like to know what they are bloody well doing, frankly.

However you look at it, Rachel North and the other survivors of the July 7 bombings have been badly, inexcusably let down. They’ve had to fight for every scrap of help and recognition. I’d like to hear a government minister try and justify this. No doubt it’d be hand-wringing laments of being “unable to go into details of individual cases” and “things are improving” and “INSERT NON-SPECIFIC PLATITUDE HERE”.

No wonder the Government don’t want a public inquiry into the bombings. Tales of the careless, aloof, unfeeling and incompetent treatment of these people are the last thing this grubby and limping administration needs right now.

Rachel says she’s tired. All this has made her unwell. She’s talking of taking a break from her blog. I hope when she’s rested and found some peace she’ll come back to us.

Where’s a journalist with balls when you need one?

New Labour corruption is a little like religion. As with belief in God, more people believe that Tony Blair is bent than don’t but they are unable to produce a scrap of evidence to back up their faith.

It’s all so circumstantial (although circumstantial enough for the police to have a sniff, not that they’ll do anything as vulgar as proscecute members of the Greater Good). And a bit like intelligent design – a lot of signs point towards the New Labour high command being a bunch of liars and wrigglers but as DSquared says in the comments over at Tim Worstall’s blog:

Of course it’s all a bit smelly, but I would not want to get my hopes up or stake material personal credibility on there being a paper trail linking the loans to the contracts in any way more substantial than just saying “phwoar, look at that, pretty dodgy”.

It’s the smoking gun that refused to bark and other such utterances. Until somebody produces a piece of paper saying “I, Tony Blair, offer you Mr X a peerage in return for a £1m loan” – much like God popping up and declaring, “it’s a fair cop” – you can bet what’s left of your pension that even if (and that’s an if as big as the Ritz) Blair does go over this it’ll be with “no stain of impropriety against him whatsoever“. It won’t be the Prime Minister’s fault if he’s put out into the street. Just you wait – it’ll be the fault of the media and the cynics and the Left. Blair, like God, moves in mysterious ways and he may yet salvage his reputation on a technicality.

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Would you like to take a seat? I’ve some rather upsetting news.

British politics is dead. I’m sorry.

Let me take you on a journey. Imagine a movie theatre …

The place is empty but for two figures sitting in the middle of the front row. One of the figures is the glassy-eyed, grinning corpse of Marlon Brando. Around his neck Marlon has a dog lead. Holding the other end of the lead is an equally glassy-eyed and grinning Ben Affleck. Flickering on the screen is an endless retrospective of Affleck’s films. Every time the screen-Affleck utters a line of the cod-profound platitudes that pass for dialogue these days or initiates a retina-scorching explosion, the watching-Affleck squeals with delight and pulls on Marlon’s lead. “Did you see that, Marlon?” Marlon nods. “Wow, I’m the greatest, aren’t I Marlon?” Marlon nods. At the back of the cinema the projectionist, his sobs unheard above the explosions and hackneyed wisecrackery on the screen, weeps over movie reel cans marked “The Godfather”, “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “On The Waterfront”.

Golden ages exist only in people’s heads and lazy writers’ columns but surely even the most grounded, glass-half-full, be-here-now optimist should admit that the life has left British politics. Where are the big ideas, the massive intellects, the fierce ideological battles? With more money seemingly in thinktanks and punditry, the science of how we are governed has withered and died, the last fluids of debate having long since escaped from its slack sphincter. Lesser creatures skitter among the corpses of the big beasts parading webchats and “eye-catching initiatives” as the pinnacle of politics in action.

Now, I’m not the first to say it, but the New Labour project was built as a vehicle purely for getting the party elected. It’s an election winning-machine. But, rather like the invasion of Iraq, there seems to have been very little planning for what was to come afterwards. Yes, yes, I know about tax credits, the minimum wage and the other trinkets that keep your middle class cockles warm at night. But if you don’t have to scrape by on them you should fall down on your knees every night and offer up thanks to Tony.

It’s here that I miserably suggest that Alan Milburn is right when he says:

“Since last year’s election victory New Labour has won an even more crucial battle – the ideological one.”

… and David Cameron is right when he says:

“The change we are making recognises that we have won the battle of ideas.”

They’re both right in the sense that there’s nothing to distinguish the Blairites’ monkey-see-monkey-do Thatcherism from the Cameroons’ walks-like-a-duck-quacks-like-a-duck Blairism. That and their identikit, nutrition-free, clichéd, stifling, insulting, passionless, can-I-go-home-yet?, unimaginative, identical, any-old-cobblers-will-do, and utterly, utterly depressing use of language. Won’t somebody buy them a copy of Politics and the English Language?

Surely, as when an old man dies alone and abandoned in his house, the neighbours are noticing the smell? But then, in whose interest is it to acknowledge the sad passing of politics? Not the politicians (obviously) or the beneficiaries of the subsidiary industries – newspaper owners, columnists, lobby correspondents and, yes, obscure bloggers given the keys to the Guardian’s shiny new uberblog. The whole shebang is starting to resemble a remake of A Weekend At Bernie’s with a script by Michael Dobbs.

And, it gets worse …

(Originally published at Comment is Free.)