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For some reason Tory pencil-neck Michael Gove is the man chosen for the assault on New Labour’s ties with the Unite union. Apparently Unite has given 11 million quid to Gordon Brown in the last three years. Brown then, if I understand Gove correctly, used the money to usher in the communist dystopia under which we now toil and slave. After the next election, if Unite get their way, Britain will look like the worst bits of Doctor Zhivago.

I was particularly taken with this from Gove:

“Labour’s re-unionisation has put them in bed with the past at a time when it is crucial that this country wakes up to the future.”

The Shadow Secretary for Schools is dishing up metaphor stew. Can you sleep with the past? Does it hog the duvet, I wonder. Also: Wake up! Wake up! The future is nearly here! You don’t want to kip through it, do you Britain? You know, I think Michael Gove might be calling us a bunch of lazy bastards, lolling abed just as something modern and… stuff is about to happen.

And when a Conservative shadow minister uses ‘forces of conservatism’ as a pejorative term, you can pretty much conclude British politics is busted beyond hope. I mean, did it not cross Gove’s mind, even for a second, the nine kinds of prick he might sound like saying that? You’re a Conservative, Michael. You are the forces of conservatism. The clue’s in the first three syllables.

‘In the three years since Gordon Brown became Prime Minister, Unite has spent more than £11 million of its members’ money on buying influence within the Labour Party’. To which the only answer is: it didn’t do them much bloody good did it? Not exactly 11 million quid well spent, was it? Gordon Brown is so grateful for his Kremlin gold that he called the Unite members striking over their working conditions at British Airways ‘deplorable‘.

Still, now we know. All you people who lost your jobs, investments and homes in the last couple of years, hear Gove’s cry: that’s who ruined this country in the last few years, the bastard unions. Them and their sub-prime mortgages, their soft-touch regulation and their multi-billion dollar bail-outs. The red scum.

So here we go again, back where people use words like ‘Gordon Brown’, ‘Labour’ and ’socialist’ in the same breath – in the face of 13 ugly years of New Labour neo-liberal history, no less – and expect to be treated as if they were great observers of the age. Ahistorical doesn’t begin to describe it. Gove’s claims that under Brown ‘class warfare has not only been resurrected; it has been elevated to holy principle’ would read as weapons-grade satire coming from anybody else.

Anybody who thinks the New Labour high command are hard-bitten class warriors huddled around their braziers (have you seen the Milibands?) should be immediately barred from participating in politics for life and for their own safety be permitted to use only a fork with a cork on it at meal times.

Allow me to pay you the compliment of being blunt. If you are the sort of person who approves of, or allows their voting preference to be swayed even a little by, the interventions in our electoral process by the wives of the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, you are a moron who should be interned until after the general election.

Insulting the country’s intelligence by wheeling out the wife seems to be a political tactic for all scenarios. Gordon Brown is seen as too serious by voters so the solution is to push out his wife to say nice things about him. David Cameron is seen as not serious enough by voters so the solution is to push out his wife to say nice things about him. The meagre amounts of dignity and self-respect on display are such you wouldn’t be surprised to see the two leaders being dropped off at the televised election debates by their mums.

What about Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg? Well, his wife is yet to mouth platitudes in a documentary or to be filmed in close-up wiping away a tear on a chatshow so it’s as yet impossible to come to a reasoned opinion about the leader of the Liberal Democrat’s character. Hopefully she’ll be shoved out to entertain the nation soon enough.

The media of course lap all this up like dogs going at a pavement pizza. Two women who appear to be reasonably intelligent and successful women in their own rights are reduced to clothes horses entered into a semi-naughty catfight. When the inevitable backlash kicks off after the election and one of these women’s life is made a misery by press intrusion and vilification their husbands won’t have a leg to stand on, them having signed of on the strategy in the first place.

Still, all this gives the rest of us a pointer towards what we should do when we’re facing life’s little challenges. Things not going well at work? When called into the bosses office all you need say is, ‘Yes, what I’m doing is shit and you don’t like me but have you heard what my Mrs has to say about me? I think you may very well change your mind.’

Why not take your significant other along with you the next time you have a job interview? They can tell your prospective employer about how, even though you’re a bit untidy, you like to cook and are good with kids. When the interviewer asks about your ideas for increasing the company’s productivity, your partner can interject with a swift ‘I can honestly say that I don’t think he’s ever let me down’. The job will be yours.

With the polls narrowing towards election day, and with further desperation bound to creep in, who’s to say where we’ll end up next? We’ve already had the excuciating private details of the last days and hours of the children they both lost but there must be some mileage left there.

We’ve had the awkward and wooden marriage proposal story from Brown but how about the marriage consummation stories from both men? They could borrow from the Blairs and boast about how many times a night they stick it to the missus or give intimate details of how their children were conceived. As ever, with the continuing degeneration of British politics, the Blairs with their manifest lack of class and their no-depth-too-low will to win have so much to answer for.

So the news that Tory peer and millionaire sugar daddy Lord Ashcroft has announced he is ‘non-domiciled’ in the UK for tax is playing out in all the squalid fashion you would expect. It basically boils down to: ‘BREAKING NEWS: We’re both as disgusting and craven as each other when it comes to sheltering tax dodgers say New Labour and Tories.’ They might as well have made a joint statement.

In seeking to obscure their complete lack of honesty over the tax affairs of the man trying to buy the general election for them, the Tories are looking to spread the blame. Look at two of New Labour’s biggest donors, they squealed, Lord Paul and Sir Ronald Cohen are both long-term residents of the UK and also ‘non-doms‘. New Labour reply that the Tories ‘aren’t being straight with people’ (it obviously takes a bunch of wriggling liars to know a bunch of wriggling liars).

Both sides have ended up using a pisspoor and insulting ‘Look! They’re doing it as well!’ excuse for their tax-dodgers as if it’s a defence any normal person could employ in daily life and expect to get away with it. Morality and accountability both got a pasting in the ensuing shit-slinging. All they’ve actually managed to do is further entrench the deeply and widely held belief that the main parties are as bad as each other. That should do wonders for turnout come polling day.

You end up thinking, what are they, like six or something? If I want to watch a bunch of insufferably spoilt shits petulantly screaming at each other about whose fault something is I’ll spend more time with my kids, thank you very much. New Labour and Tory heavyweights John Prescott and Eric Pickles even took it upon themselves handbag the other about their parties’ tax dodgers on Twitter. Salad dodgers defending tax dodgers. It’s even less dignified than it sounds. This election campaign has descended into cheap so fast I can’t believe it’s costing millions to fund.

Meanwhile…

And then there… Toby Helm:

When Sir George Young recently blurted out that Ashcroft was a non-dom on Newsnight he was “corrected” by a spokesman for the party who said Sir George had “miss-spoken”.

No – it now turns out – he hadn’t.

The correction of Young was a lie perpetrated not by the spokesman, who would merely have been taking orders, but by the people at the top.

Looking at the Tories’ declining fortune in the pre-election polls, Jamie says: ‘[I]magine going down in history as the man who failed to defeat Gordon Brown – as the man to whom people thought that Brown was, on the whole, preferable.’ It’s a thought to cherish, imagining the shame on a beaten Cameron’s doughy face, but neither is it enough to thaw the chill in the heart the prospect of another five year of Brown gives.

No doubt Cameron would be gutted to have thrown away what was looking like a dead cert until very recently (and he may or may not resign as Tory leader) but in the longer term I reckon the party could view it as dodging a bullet. It’s tempting to think that the Tories might have the sense to quietly back away from winning this time around. Imagine what New Labour will do to itself as Brown limps on and they have to fix the mess he’s made of everything with a much smaller majority (or even no majority at all).

There must be at least a small part of Cameron that’s dreading what he’s got coming up in the next few years as Prime Minister if he wins. Surely he must occasionaly think to himself, ‘Christ, I’m about the squander the prime of my life clearing up some other bastard’s crap’? It’s politics as cleaning up nightclub chunder – all the work with none of the fun. Not that I’m sympathetic, you understand me.

Plus he’s going to put some serious money where his mouth is. As Philip Collins says in the Times about Cameron’s speech to the Tory spring conference…

The trouble with “broken Britain” rhetorically is that it gives real fire to speeches now and ruins every speech three years into government. This list of awful things will be replayed time and again if none of them gets better.

And the ‘broken Britain’ hyperbole is just one of many misbegotten children he’s going to have to deny later on. Cameron might have stolen what he considers to be the best parts of the New Labour schtick in order to get elected but that also has distinct disadvantages. After thirteen years of all the deception, destruction and death from New Labour, huge swathes of the voting public have bullshit detectors finely tuned like never before. With seemingly no real and wider enthusiasm to see a Cameron government he’s not going to get any benefit of any doubts. He shouldn’t book a honeymoon.

Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport and UberTwat (copyright Armando Iannucci) Ben Bradshaw is whining about media bias on his Twitter account…

Another poll cuts Tory lead to 5 percent – ignored of course by the broadcasters

I think he’ll probably find that the media is too busy giving time to New Labour hysterics and the character of the Prime Minister, a smash of the party’s own making. Continuing the theme of watching online announcements from the parties, New Labour’s own website hasn’t announced a single policy all week, relying instead on attacking the Tories (and even they are days old). If the likes of Bradshaw would like to see the back of so-called media bias maybe him and his crew could put a little effort into getting the positive message out themselves.

Not that the Tories are much better. At the time of writing, the top three stories on their website’s news page are attacks on New Labour’s record on immigration, New Labour’s record on the NHS, and New Labour and the EU supposedly undermining The War Against Terror. Yay, positive campaigning!

You probably couldn’t give a finch’s fart about this – what with politicians screaming at each other and Our Cheryl splitting up with Ashley – but I thought it would be instructive to see what policies are announced on any given day by the main political parties in the run up to the election. You know, to see if those who want our votes are interested in anything other than screaming at each other.

To find out what’s been announced I’m going straight to the source – the news pages on the respective parties’ websites. It might not be too scientific but they should be pleased: this way I’m not taking anything that’s being filtered through the filthy, biased media. So what have we got for Monday February 23?

Conservative policies: 1

Announcement’s were…

- ‘A New Age of Agriculture – Our Agenda for British Farming’

…also…

- Tories show how ideologically similar to the government they are by parading a minor New Labour defector
- Tories sort of agree with New Labour’s pre-election hard-man crime and punishment window dressing

Lib Dem policies: 2

Announcement’s were…

- Tim Farron set out plans to reform the farm payments system and use the savings to support farm apprenticeships
- Vince Cable sets out the Liberal Democrat plan for the banking sector

…also…

- Labour and Tories are wrong on the economy and I’m right, says Vince Cable

New Labour policies: 0

Announcement’s were…

- The Tories are nasty says Foreign Secretary, David Miliband
- Tories are nasty says John Healey, Housing and Planning Minister

(Actually, ‘Healey announced a boost to housebuilding in England, by confirming nearly £500m funding to build around 8,000 affordable homes across the country’ but I can’t find that positive announcement on the New Labour website. Who told me? The filthy, biased media did.)

Douglas Alexander is the Secretary of State for International Development. He’s currently running New Labour’s re-election campaign (or Labour General Election Coordinator as he’s less than grandly titled – have these lot never heard the words Supremo, Caudillo or Kaiser?) because obviously there’s bugger all for a Secretary of State for International Development to do right now.

Anyway. Douglas has been bragging on Twitter that New Labour canvassers ‘made 102,079 contacts on the doorstep in the last week alone’. Contacts on the doorstep. What he means is 102,079 people answered the door when a New Labour activist knocked on it. But that just doesn’t sound as whizzy, technocratic and wanky enough, so he has to jazz it up.

Now, you might say I’m belittling New Labour activists but probably not as much as Douglas who described all their hard work, them being out in all weathers knocking on 102,079 doors, as making ‘contacts on the doorstep’. Plus, in the event of a New Labour victory, the party high command will go back to ignoring the grassroots campaigners until the next election.

What Douglas doesn’t say is how many of those 102,079 ‘contactees on the doorstep’ responded with ‘piss off’ or words to that effect. If we take the 2005 election results as a guide, there’s a rough chance 78 per cent of them did (a mere 22 per cent of the electorate turned out for Team Tony last time around, not that such a piss poor showing stops you from getting a decent majority under our wonderful electoral system).

Come on Douglas, you can have bragging rights to those figures as well if you like. We could call them ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ ‘contacts on the doorstep’. We can then measue how many of those are converted into ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ ‘ballot interface events’.

* I’ve realised that the upcoming general election isn’t a Hobson’s Choice (‘a free choice in which only one option is offered’), it’s a Morton’s Fork (‘a choice between two equally unpleasant alternatives’).

In an election year all parties have to make compromises. Before being thrown into the stewpot of a manifesto, issues and ideas must be chopped, seasoned, stirred, simmered and reduced.

Some would argue that there are ideas that shouldn’t be played with for the sake of politics. The health and well-being of our children for instance. New Labour would beg to differ…

Campaigners today accused the government of performing a U-turn over sex education in faith schools, after changes to a bill they said would allow the schools to discourage the use of contraception and teach that homosexuality is wrong.

Why would a self-styled and so-called ‘progressive’ political party do such a thing, undermining the issues of safe sex and tolerance?

Religion should play a role in British politics, Scottish Secretary Jim Murphy will say in a lecture later. The UK government minister will say connecting with religious voters could help Labour win the general election.

Ah, that’ll be why.

So, if the New Statesman is right, a number of prominent Tories have been running a dirty tricks campaign inside their own party. If Harriet Harman was doing this, Tory attack dogs would be going berzerk…

I’m amazed that the leaked Conservative document advising local officials on how to “trick” grassroots activists into selecting more female, gay and ethnic minority candidates hasn’t received more attention… The document, Action Plan for Candidate Selection in Safe Seats, encourages party officials to use “stealth” and to keep “quiet” over plans to diversify candidate selection. “Like a conjuror, we’ll get more applause if the audience cannot see exactly how the trick is performed,” it says.

I suppose those of us who quite like women, gays, brown people and political correctness should be glad that they’ve been doing it, even if by deception. That said, I doubt very much that after the election we’ll be seeing Cameron’s Queers or Cameron’s Khimars paraded like Blair’s Babes were in 1997. The Daily Mail won’t have its nose rubbed in it to that extent, for goodness sake.

It’s all apparently part of a move to change the ‘white, male and middle-class image’ of the Tory party. What it fails to address is the white, male upper-class millionaire’s club that currently controls the the party. Will any female, gay and ethnic minority candidates, should they get elected, get promoted from the back to the front benches or otherwise given positions of some power to challenge the traditional Tory powerbase? Or is this more Blairesque window dressing?

As we’ve seen in the last few days, the divide between our politics and melodramatic soap opera is a narrow one. Fact and fiction often blur in this great democracy of ours as harried and desperate politicians seek a cheap crowd-pleaser.

Who can possibly forget Tony Blair demanding the release of Coronation Street’s Dierdre Rashid (nee Barlow) when she was wrongly banged up in 1998? (He later misplaced that crusading zeal when real innocent people were in the slammers at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram Airbase but you can’t have everything.)

Indeed, the Street seems something of a battleground for New Labour and the Tories. Whether it’s Vera Duckworth for New Labour or Ken Barlow for the Tories, it seems Corrie endorsements are highly prized. Vera phones you up and hassles you at home while Ken appeals to your avarice.

Does it work, this kind of thing? The parties obviously think there are people out there soft-headed enough to be influenced to put their cross on a ballot because of what some soap star says – and enough of them to make it a worthwhile exercise. Which makes you clench more: the fact that political parties think like this about voters or the fact that there are voters who apparently lap it up?

It’s Game On, people. And may God help us. There was a knock at the door on Saturday morning which we answered eagerly. It had been my birthday the day before and I was hoping for a belated goodie or two from Mr Postman. So imagine my disappointment when it turned out to be a New Labour canvasser.

(more…)

God, it’s going to be a long few months before the general election and we get the privilege of rubber stamping the next elected dictatorship. Does the mind not reel at the prospect of having to listen to week upon week upon bloody week of this kind of horse’s doings from the likes of Harriet Harman?

“We have to understand that we now have a new cohort of well, active, healthy older people. The role that they play in their families, in the economy and in society must be recognised and responded to. We must recognise the emergence of the “wellderly”.”

You can just picture the warm little thrill she got when she said that, can’t you? I bet she did her best ‘aren’t I clever’ look. I sometimes think that some people are against all-women shortlists for parliamentary seats for no other reason other than the fear that such a system might turn up another Harman.

Anyway, her talking down to the electorate got me thinking. There must be loads of condescending does-he-take-sugar neologisms that New Labour could half bake in order to patronisingly pigeonhole thinking, breathing human beings. How about…

We now have a new cohort of well, active, incontinent older people. We must recognise the emergence of the “smellderly”.

…or…

We now have a new cohort of well, active, sexy older people. We must recognise the emergence of the “bombshellderly”.

…and…

We now have a new cohort of well, active, anti-social older people. We must recognise the emergence of the “neighbourfromhellderly”.

…then there’s…

We now have a new cohort of well, active, healthy older people aghast at the destruction of our civil liberties under New Labour. We must recognise the emergence of the “orwellderly”.

Then we’ve got the ‘farewellderly’ (never going to vote New Labour again).

Click to make big.

Make your own poster here (via Councillor Bob).

Day three and the temperature of the general election campaign has reached tepid-point. As time dilation kicks in between politicians and voters (ours are the clocks ticking at a slower rate, in case you were wondering), what have we learned?

Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg has said there’ll be no ‘backroom deals’ with either of the two major parties before the election. He’s saving them of course for after the election when they’ll have more pull and can’t scare voters off. He wants you to vote for his policies, obviously, but isn’t prepared to tell you which ones he’s willing to horse-trade away in exchange for a seat in the cabinet of a coalition government.

Meanwhile, what would you get if Kryten from Red Dwarf and Brains from Thunderbirds were to have a child together? I put their photos through the Make Me Babies! photo merging website to find out…

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Finally, what’s all this nonsense about New Labour being skint and on the verge of bankruptcy? This attack advert warning against the dangers of a Tory election victory must have cost a fortune…

So, apparently I’ve been doing this cack for five years this week. Go me.

All told, and without going into detail, 2009 was downright crappy for me and mine hence the large quiet periods on the blog. You quickly realise what a shallow and bathetic spectacle British politics is when reality decides to bite you on the bum.

The likes of Nick Robinson might as well be commenting on the goings-on inside the World of Warcraft for all the relevance the cloth-eared gobshite from Brown, Cameron, Clegg and the rest has when you’re up against it. No wonder millions of people don’t vote; if they’re not soldiers dying in vain in the desert, or not kids losing their minds in government detention centres, or not too close to the sharp end, they’re bumping along without politics and politicians. I imagine they’re quite happy. Or at least no more miserable.

So what’s next? Well, an interminable, unedifying and dirty-as-never-before general election campaign stretches out before us like a skidmark on the underpants of a morbidly obese incontinent. And nobody, as far as I can see, is offering to put a wash on. Mind you, the speeches we’ve heard so far have all the rhetorical heft of detergent commercials.

Judging by some of the bloggers the mainstream media have recruited so far to fill its hours of dead air and yards of fish and chip paper on the cheap, the general election is looking like one that will be won less by the Internet and more by the twin howitzers of glad, self-congratulatory anti-intellectualism and spitefully stubborn moral cowardice.

You think people are brassed off with mainstream politics now. What’s it going to be like in five months after all this?