It’s now 2010 and in the run up to the forthcoming election, constituents in Hove and Portslade are having this crap from New Labour shoved throught their letterboxes…

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Whoever produced this dross has a very short memory or, probably more likely, a galloping dose of denial. They’ve clearly forgotten or are studiously ignoring this little nugget from a certain Gordon Brown in September 2007…

I am a conviction politician like her, and I think many people will see Mrs Thatcher as not only a person who saw the need for change in our country and took big decisions to achieve that, but also is and remains a conviction politician, true to the beliefs that she holds.

A week later Brown had her round to tea at Downing Street and he paraded his guest in front of the waiting media. When do we get to see that in New Labour campaign leaflets?

EDIT: Sorry, not sure I made it clear that this is a New Labour leaflet I’m talking about here. Here’s the other side of it…

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I’ve edited the post slightly to make things clearer. In short, Thatcher is a source of embarrassment for Clegg, a cause of admiration for Brown.

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You heard right. Those around Robertson chanted ‘Sean Connery’ over and over presumably in an attempt to put him off. Sean Connery. Sean Connery. Sean Connery. Sean Connery. Sean Connery. Sean Connery. Sean Connery. Sean Connery. Sean Connery. Sean Connery. Er, ok.

You know, these witless, childish, unpleasant pricks will be begging for your vote in a few weeks. Are children shown PMQs at school as part of the curriculum to create ‘responsible citizens’? It could go some way to explaining why many of them are horrible little shits.

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Pay it back, you scrounging bastards

The government owes an “immense” £10.5bn in underpayments but benefit claimants are recovering less than £1.85bn a year, MPs say.

The public accounts committee is urging benefit claimants to improve “significantly” their efforts to recover the money.

Less than 30 people owe at least £10.5bn, the MPs’ report says.

The Tories called the situation “forgivable”, but the benefit claimants said debt reclaiming had “improved”.

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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.

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Get the full skinny here.

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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.

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That said, something bothers me about Foreign Secretary David Miliband’s plan for peace in the country:

This involves three things. First, the reintegration into Afghan society of low-level insurgents prepared to lay down their arms and accept the writ of the government. Second, political engagement with those disaffected by the current settlement, but prepared to renounce violence, split from Al Qaeda and accept the constitutional framework. Third, a wider regional political settlement that sees all Afghanistan’s neighbours and near neighbours supportive of an independent Afghan state.

It sounds like a plan although it does sort of fly in the face of the hardline ‘we don’t negotiate with terrorists’ thing we’re fed when some poor sod is kidnapped and is about to get his head sawn off by an al Qaeda affiliate somewhere. Define ‘low-level insurgents’. Is it those that only work weekends or don’t load their AK-47s?

What if Ken Bigley or Margaret Hassan’s murderers were ‘low-level insurgents prepared to lay down their arms and accept the writ of the government’ being merely ‘disaffected by the current settlement, but prepared to renounce violence, split from Al Qaeda and accept the constitutional framework’?

We need a moral philosopher of Miliband’s calibre to make the distinction between a beheader and a mere IED-layer or woman-stoner. Still, if we’ve learned anything in the last 14 years, it’s that there’s no moral, logical or rhetorical cul-de-sac out of which the likes of Miliband cannot handbrake-turn.

No, what bothers me is this. Hamid Karzai has been the elected leader of Afghanistan since 2004 and we’re only just coming up with this now? This plan’s six years and countless deaths late isn’t it? Mind you, only a cynic would suggest that the glorious liberators of Aghanistan are scrabbling around for this fix now because they’re saddled with a seriously bent partner in Karzai and a military campaign limping into its ninth year.

I for one cannot wait to see the fighters, extremists and women-haters that Miliband is hoping to coax onto our side (not to mention the ones already on our side) implement his much loved universal values.

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…you don’t tackle the fear of crime by cultivating it, by ramping up a public sense of panic, by abusing the figures and claiming our society is broken…

Way to go Gordon. His intervention is a fresh breeze through this debate. Creating fear of crime where none should exist is cynical, dangerous and not worthy of serious politicians. His illustrious predecessor Mr Tony rode to power by kicking off a crime and punishment arms race between New Labour and the Tories, and preying on people’s fears (when he was Shadow Home Secretary he called the murder of James Bulger ‘the ugly manifestations of a society that is becoming unworthy of that name’), so it’s great to see Brown condemning such transparent and tawdry charlatanism and blatant pandering to right-wing tabloidism.

But then, later on in the speech we got…

The next time you hear somebody question the value of retaining DNA profiles from those who have been arrested but not convicted, remember Jeremiah Sheridan. And most of all remember the innocent woman he attacked.

It was futile, one supposes, to expect any kind of consistency or cohesion between arguments when cheap political points need to be scored in an election year. So Brown thought he was well within his rights to use the rape of a disabled woman as a weapon with which to attack his opponents.

In summing up, Gordon says fear of crime is being stoked by the Tories and is a Very Bad Thing. But also, if you don’t back New Labour’s policy on the DNA database, it will mean horrible men will escape justice to continue their reigns of mayhem and terror. Don’t listen to Tory fear-mongering but pay close attention to Gordon’s in case you end up giving comfort to rapists and murderers. Think on.

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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.

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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.

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