From Dave, via Jamie, we get this charming vignette from Tory Fortunate Son, George Osborne:

The development has left the opposition party on the backfoot, as City regulation becomes a new political dividing line. “No one takes pleasure from people making money out of the misery of others but that is a function of capitalist markets,” Mr Osborne said.

I suppose you’ve got to admire his honesty*. From Thatcher through Blair to Brown none of them were actually going to admit it all this verbally and up front - actions speak louder after all. Still, good to be reminded what you’re up against now and again.

No mention of how to remove the misery from the equation you’ll notice from George. These lofty matters stand above conventional morality and the common herd quite clearly. Get used to it peasants - as if we haven’t been used it since Adam (Smith) were a lad.

As Jamie says, you have to imagine that the ‘people making money out of the misery of others’ take some pleasure in it. Or are the Porsches, cocaine, champagne, and thousand quid dinners a device to drown the guilt and the miserable cries of the ‘others’?

*Even though he’s not completely right. Here’s Tory trojan horse, Business Secretary John Hutton, taking immense pleasure from people making money out of the misery of others.

Right-wing chigger, Ed Balls: ‘His passion, his pragmatism and his creation of the NHS are what make me a Bevanite’.

If Bevan were alive today, the likes of Balls would be anonymously slagging him off to gutter journalists.

So how did he do? Even with Jon Stewart’s reputation it was never going to be the exercise in humiliation that those of us who think Blair should be in the Hague wanted to see. Watching him squirm a little just isn’t enough justice.

What did we learn? With Blair at his most guarded, not a lot. Mainly that he has continued to be one of the most insincere men ever given breath. Insincerity is under his skin like a tick. Blair’s fake I-don’t-find-you-amusing-but-must-play-along laugh is still one of the most unconvincing I’ve ever heard.

Here’s a breathless, erotic press release from the Ministry of Defence. I bet the guy who wrote this had a sock handy:

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles scanned the horizon for enemy action. Jackal vehicles with their awesome firepower raced ahead using the latest surveillance and targeting systems. Infantry stood ready to strike with deadly sniper rifles, mortars and grenade machine guns - this wasn’t a major operation in Afghanistan but the UK’s largest demonstration of military equipment purchased urgently for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Oh my God, I think… I’m going to… ohhh… deploy.

Can I just ask one thing though. If all these throbbing, thrusting engines of hot death have been ‘purchased urgently for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan’ then WHY THE BLOODY HELL are they being flaunted on Salisbury Plain for drooling death fetishists? Shouldn’t they be on transports heading to where they’re needed?

(Those are rhetorical questions by the way. There’s no brownie points in just sending this stuff to the army, is there? Where’s the PR value in that? If New Labour hadn’t made such a cock-up of supplying troops up until now, there wouldn’t be any need for this dick-waving. ‘Look at us! Look at us! We’re finally getting it right! And it only took 14 years and four wars to do it!‘)

Work and Pensions Secretary, alleged New Labour wunderkind, right-wing trojan horse and future leadership disappointment, James Purnell, says the current econogeddon has meant ‘people slightly turned away‘ from New Labour. It’s that slightly, I like. It’s a self-deluding, fooling-nobody slightly. Who’s he trying to fool? People who don’t read newspapers and those don’t own radios and televisions?

People have only slightly turned away, have they? And only this year, did they? Take a look at the share of the vote New Labour received at the last three general elections…

Between 1997 and 2005, New Labour managed to misplace nearly four million ‘people’. They turned away. Did they do it in anticipation of a 2007 economic cocking up? Did they turn away massively or did they all individually turn away slightly which collectively meant a collapse in New Labour’s support?

Today the Tories are only slightly ahead in the polls at 52% with New Labour slightly behind on 24%. Following Purnell’s thinking, it will only take people turning slightly back towards New Labour to turn around that 28 point deficit.

Going on this definition of slightly, Purnell sounds only slightly ridiculous. Rome is only slightly burning. New Labour will be only slightly out of power at the next election.

I was with Matthew Norman’s excellent if (self-admitted) fantastical column today right up until the final paragraph:

This is not, as even his more relentless critics generally agree, a shallow, selfish, bad or foolish man. This is a decent man of undeniable gifts atrophying daily in a role to which he is luminescently unsuited, and it is not a pleasant thing to watch.

You hear this, this stuff about Gordon-not-a-bastard, a lot but I’ve yet to see evidence proving it. I’m not sure why it’s done unless a lot of journalists think they’ll be seen as rhetorically kicking a puppy. It’s like all this talk about Brown being a warm character in private - I’ll believe it when I see it. There’s no public evidence to substantiate the assertions.

Until last year, Brown signed the cheques for every New Labour disaster. He backed several wars to the hilt, chased a neo-Thatcherite economic agenda that’s going to plague us for decades, and ran his own inner circle of thugs who monstered anyone who so much as spoke out of line. And continues to do so.

Where’s Matthew Norman been for the last 14 years? Writing journalism tearing strips off the various depredations, incompetences and crimes of New Labour, that’s where. They weren’t all Tony Blair’s fault.

Christ alive, are these the best character references New Labour could muster to vouchsafe their suitability for re-election?

- A morbidly obese and adulterous carpet-bagging class traitor whose only achievement while in office was [FORENSIC POLITICAL RESEARCH ONGOING]

- A scowling bully whose deceits helped bury hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men, women and children, whose own pathological drive for self-vindication led to the death of David Kelly, and who’s single-handedly done more to drag the reputation of politics through the shit than a trillion whining bloggers ever could.

- The wife of the never-was (he didn’t achieve enough to be a has-been) who paved the way (and gave political cover) for New Labour and its attendant war, deceit, death, lies, neo-Thatcherism, death, spin, lies, death and war.

- Some bloke who used to be Sports Minister.

Gordon, it’s worse than we all thought. Give it up, man, you haven’t got a hope. This new movement is called ‘Go Fourth’. At this rate and on this show of ’support’, you’ll be lucky to finish in that position.

And another thing:: This from the Four Horsemen of New Labour’s apocalypse:

If most of us were to stop people at random in the street, and ask them to name three things that David Cameron would do as prime minister, it is not an insult to the public to suggest most would struggle to answer.

Likewise, most people would struggle to name more than two or three current members of the shadow cabinet. The people who would run our schools, hospitals, roads, armed forces are virtual unknowns outside the Westminster village.

In those paragraphs, replace ‘David Cameron would do’ with ‘Gordon Brown does’, remove ’shadow’ altogether, and replace ‘would run’ with ‘do run’. Read it back to me.

It’s not all down, down, down in the news right now: some things are up, up, up…

The number of those sleeping rough: UP!

The number of Afghan civilians killed by the Taleban and Nato: UP!

The number of people killed by Clostridium difficile: UP!

…some explode spectacularly, like New South Wales Police Minister Matt Brown’s:

A witness told The Australian Mr Brown stripped down to his “very brief” underpants and danced to loud “Oxford Street-style” techno music on a green leather Chesterfield couch he had recently ordered for his office.

The witness said Mr Brown “mounted the chest” of Wollongong MP Noreen Hay.

The witness said Mr Brown called out to Ms Hay’s adult daughter during the performance: “Look at this, I’m tittie-f..king your mother!”

More politicians should do it. Surely to God Gordon Brown knows his number’s up. Instead of pathetically limping on for another few months, like a wounded animal, before slowly and painfully expiring in a mewling, sobbing heap, Gordon should dry hump the Home Secretary live at Prime Minister’s Questions.

Gordon would salvage some dignity and the rest of us would talk about nothing else for the rest of our lives.

(Via Warren Ellis)

When was the last time the Brown government announced a policy that wasn’t immediately shredded like a small, stupid child lost in the woods and surrounded by wolves? Less than 24 hours after Gordon Brown declared his ’sea change in energy efficiency’ (by which I mean I think it’s going to make us all feel queasy), it’s already hanging in tatters.

The government has admitted that it is powerless to stop energy firms passing on the cost on its fuel assistance package onto customers.

Business Secretary John Hutton said he could not stop firms increasing bills in response but said there would be “no justification” for them doing so.

In other words, there is absolutely nothing New Labour can do to stop it happening and when it does they’ll try their best to feign being jolly disappointed while still grabbing its ankles for the men with the fat cigars.

I like the offer that we can all get 50 per cent off insulating our homes as well. It’s a clever move - a lot of people, struggling financially as they are, will find it difficult to find that 50 per cent outlay and so will not take up the offer. ‘No one will be able to say they do not know how to reduce their energy bill,’ the government says. How? I’m not so sure. I’d like to bet there’ll be a lot of people asking ‘how the hell do I find 50 per cent of this insulation bill?’

Still, when the figures come in and show a poor uptake the government can blame the swinish masses. Well, we offered a solution but some people just won’t help themselves, you can hear them saying. Genius. To heap insult upon insult, around nine million houses in the UK aren’t suitable for cavity wall insulation either. Cheers.

Meanwhile, outside, the wind howled. Or was it wolves?

Matthew Norman on public servants serving the public:

[A] report by the ISC committee of peers and MPs into communication failures between West Yorkshire police and MI5 before the London bombings of 7 July 2005 has been abandoned “for legal reasons”, whatever they might be. The PM has read the document, which apparently implies that the bombings may have been avoidable, but prefers to keep it to himself, possibly for fear of distressing any poor police darlings already traumatised by a jury’s scepticism regarding the guilt of those charged with conspiring to blow up planes with bombs made from formula baby milk and contact lens cleaner.

I suppose a little while back there’d have been some outrage generated by all this. But these days who has the energy for anything more than a resigned shrug?

(more…)

Political bloggers are often accused of lowering the tone of political debate and most of the time it’s true. Most political blogs, particularly the top right-whinge ones, are staggeringly and offensively mediocre.

But then you read something like this crap from state-funded gossip Nick Robinson and you realise that the standards of professional political commentary really aren’t all that either:

Platform 5, Birmingham New Street: Delicious. The Panorama team has just seen David Cameron on to the train home to London. Thanks to an extraordinary coincidence, the Tory leader finds himself sitting in the next door carriage to the prime minister, also on his way back from Birmingham. If either needs to pop to the gents or for a cup of tea, they may well meet halfway.

Why is it ‘delicious’? What is this, a pitch for Heat magazine’s readership? Is Robinson hoping for fisticuffs? A stony silence in the queue for the bog? A spot of childish namecalling, perhaps? No doubt an anonymous ’source’ or ‘friend’ of Brown or Cameron will fill him in on the ‘delicious’ details later and Robinson can breathlessly pass the tittle tattle on to us.

Brown and Cameron work in the same building, within walking distance of each other. Is that ‘delicious’? If either needs to pop to the gents or for a cup of tea, they may well meet halfway. Maybe if it was Batman and the Joker it’d be ‘delicious’. Or if it was Robinson and a licence payer wanting to know just what the Hell Robinson thinks he’s doing with our money.

In a move to get the feckless and the dressing-gowned off their sofas and into the 21st century economy, which offers so very many golden opportunities to the under-trained and under-educated, New Labour are seeking to recruit motivational speaker, Jeremy Kyle.

A man who has made his career from humiliating the lower classes and inciting them to violence is seen as the ideal choice for easing the unemployed back into indentured servitude. Jeremy Kyle’s Underclass Deathmatch will see carefully selected layabouts facing off in a number of disciplines. Hair-pulling, head-locking, and broken bottle brawls will be just some of the events to feature.

Speaking about Kyle’s chequered history as a talk show host, a government source said: ‘Of course the government deplores violence when it affects the deserving poor and people who vote in marginal constituencies. But surveys conducted amongst tabloid newspaper readers tell us that, in a controlled environment, it could be extremely useful in getting the unemployed active again, reducing jobless figures, and fostering vote-winning class hatred.’

The show will be shown on weekday mornings when real people are either at work or having a cup of tea with the nanny.

Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling has so much ‘utmost respect‘ for ex-Scottish Labour leader Wendy Alexander that he told a national newspaper that she is ‘not likable at all‘.

Only in New Labour can contradictory ideas like these be mashed together, like a child with red and yellow plasticine. It’s what the party was built on and stands for.

I’m not sure what you get if you mix chicken salad with chicken shit but I sure as hell don’t want to eat it.

Right here. Prepare yourself.

Jamie asks the question:

Lady Thatcher’s symptoms, as described by her daughter, are just as consistent with neurological damage caused by tertiary syphilis as with dementia: personality changes, memory loss, minor strokes and so on. The megalomania and grandiloquence noted by many in the later stages of her rule are also consistent with the later stages of the disease.

There’s every bit as much justification for putting this about as there is in spreading rumours about Brown’s mental state.

Fair’s fair.

It is time to bring the question out into the open: is Guido Fawkes of sane mind?

Going right back to the White charge that he “looks a bit of a prat” this question has periodically arisen. Whereas in the past people made a joke of it, now the issue is becoming a genuine concern. Bloggers discuss it semi-openly and political journalists report evidence of hysterical rants, the rages, the odd behaviour, the drink-driving. The question comes up in private conversations all the time. Justin has heard it seriously suggested that Guido suffers from “functioning alcoholism”.

It is becoming harder to cover it up whatever it is - some blog posts border on totally loony - the repetitive mantras, the obsession with male homosexuality, the uncorrelated bizarre facts, the juvenile bragging about what he got up to last night, the complete inability to empathise.

It is low politics to hurl cheap abuse at opponents, but this is not borne of malice towards Guido, Justin feels like the boy who pointed at the fat bastard and said what everyone was too embarrassed to say. The head of British blogging is clearly at the very least drunk and unable to function under the pressure. The worst is frightening to contemplate, for his blog and the planet…

Our favourite merchants of hot death have fired a depleted uranium-tipped warning shot in the direction of the government:

The head of defence giant BAE Systems has said the company could consider leaving the UK if military spending ever fell below a “reasonable level”.

[...]

But he said he feared the government was “not giving the priority to defence that is needed” - something which could lead to Britain losing its “say in the world” and to BAE having to consider its future

Why he didn’t just give us a rendition of ‘Stay With Me‘ by the Faces is a mystery. The sentiment is identical. In the morning, don’t say you love me, ’cause I’ll only kick you out of the door. Who knew arms dealer could be so cold?

It’s the ’say in the world’ bit I like best. How nice that BAE are mindful of the way diplomacy is conducted in this day and age. The thing is, the way BAE like us to have our say in the world is too much like Robert De Niro in The Untouchables: ‘You can get further with a kind word and a gun than you can with just a kind word.’

It’s all rather ironic really. New Labour have traded virtually every scrap of its principles and dignity for BAE, turning all manner of depraved tricks like a tuppenny doxie in order to keep them sweet and safeguard British jobs (what with call centres not being for the likes of arms workers, unlike miners, dockers and steel workers).

And yet here’s the object of their affections saying all that might not be good enough and suggesting they might have to pull the plug on those jobs themselves. Sooner or later New Labour are going to realise the likes of BAE can’t be bought, only rented. As Gordon packs his bags, maybe he’ll realise that all those grunting bunk-ups his party had with all those fat businessmen in suits wasn’t love like they said.

They’re already leering at a nice new piece of arse - the chubby, posh one.

Gordon Brown vowed to bring back competitive elections in politics today, saying it had been wrong to discourage politicians from competing against each other.

The prime minister promised to extend the range of policies available to voters and revealed that a taskforce of the country’s female political champions would be set up to inspire more girls to participate.

“We want to encourage competitive elections in politics, not the ‘medals for Gordon’ culture we have seen in previous years,” he said. “It was wrong because it doesn’t work. In politics you get better by challenging yourself against other people. A lot of politics are team games where people have to work together but they play against other teams.”

Brown said the government had now begun to “correct the tragic mistake of reducing the competitive element in politics”.

(With apologies)

When MP John MacDougall died, Gordon Brown gave a eulogy at the funeral…

And we are here today because we have lost in John a tireless fighter for social justice, we have lost an endlessly loyal champion of decent values…

Could Brown say the same about himself? Bollocks could he:

John MacDougall, the former MP for Glenrothes, launched a court action against the Ministry of Defence (MoD) last November after the Government turned down his request for a £300,000 payout. Mr MacDougall believed his lung cancer was contracted as a result of working at the Royal Naval dockyards in Rosyth in the 1960s and 1970s when he was exposed to asbestos

Only in New Labour can you write a man’s eulogy with one hand while making his last, hard days even harder with the other. As it has been and always will be under this lot, misery is tribute just as bombs bring peace.

The hypocrisy on display on Brown’s eulogy is breathtaking even for his myriad mendacities. How about his on MacDougall’s heroics during the Miners’ Strike:

And John [MacDougall] and Bert [Gough] were true to their words; when faced with the provocation of social security relief withdrawn, with miners reliant on soup kitchens, they used the Social Work Scotland Act to give essential relief to miners’ families.

Social security relief withdrawn? Why those bastard Tories. What monsters. What’s that? Oh, hang on…

‘More long-term unemployed people could have their benefits cut - or stopped altogether - under new proposals‘ … ‘Benefits could be withdrawn almost immediately if people do not cooperate‘ … ‘These proposals will make those people worse off, and that’s of course how these savings are to be made‘

Life is indeed measured by deeds. Gordon Brown, the morally vacuous old joke, has been measured. Please be sodding off now.

Jacqui ‘chins’ Smith on the loss of yet more sensitive data:

This was data that was being held in a secure form, but was downloaded onto a memory stick by an external contractor

BZZZZT! Wrong answer.

Memo to Ms Smith: If you have a system that allows some herbert to download information from it to a memory stick and then go out and lose said memory stick, THAT INFORMATION IS NOT IN A ‘SECURE FORM’. This system is, like so many, many others, is bollocks.

Is Smith ignorant or is she relying on the ignorance of the public here? I think probably both - Smith gives every impression of being genuinely witless on this matter and that, by lucky chance, allows her bad news masseurs to befuddle the ‘ee, I don’t understand computers, me’ public.

In a not-at-all-patronising speech to troops in Afghanistan, the Prime Minister compared British soldiers to our Olympic heroes…

This week we are celebrating the Olympics, where we have had great success. People have been winning medals in areas where we have been breaking ground.

But this week also I believe that our Olympic athletes and everybody else in our country will remember that you have showed exactly the same courage, professionalism and dedication.

…said the Prime Minister likening ‘exactly‘ the courage, professionalism and dedication needed to ride a bicycle round in circles to the courage, professionalism and dedication needed to fight the Taleban. I think that’s what they call faint praise.

He is of course, however, exactly right. Our troops are just like our Olympians. They’re underfunded and spend most of their time abroad. They perform obscure activities that we only pay attention to once in a blue moon before turning over to watch the X-Factor. And politicians love their reflected glory unless they’re losing in which case they get barely a mention.

Clutching at straws, AC Grayling finds a lone reason recommending David Miliband as Prime Minister: he’s an atheist.

Grayling then proceeds to draw up a list of wishful thinking; a list of all the amazing things a non-believing prime minister will do. All very nice:

Atheist leaders are more likely to take a literally down-to-earth view of the needs, interests and circumstances of people in the here and now, and will not be influenced by the belief that present sufferings and inequalities will be compensated in some posthumous dispensation.

Wouldn’t that be lovely? Has Miliband gone on the public record anywhere giving even the merest hint that he might think along these lines? He was head of Tony Blair’s Policy Unity from 1997 to 2001, for crying our loud. He backed the Iraq war despite his belief that everyone fighting might squander their one existence without hope of the reward of an after-life.

The thing is, I have doubts whether religious (non) beliefs of any stripe colour the judgement of leaders to any large extent. For all his self-proclaimed Christian beneficence, Tony Blair displays very, very few of the qualities that mark someone as a Christian. Ditto ’son of the manse’ Gordon Brown. See also George Bush.

But here we go again, imprinting another potential Prime Minister with our tenuous hopes. Haven’t we learned our lesson in the last year? Miliband, like Gordon Brown, is a leading figure and architect of New Labour. He is the status quo; another bag carrier for the post-Thatcherite consensus.

He bought into all that when he was a kid. He’s been soaked in power-without-purpose politics for decades. Does he look like a boat-rocker to you? An ‘agent’ of ‘change’? The idea that, as he crosses the threshold of Number 10 as Prime Minister, his atheism gland will kick in and rewrite his New Labour DNA is, frankly, ludicrous.

The government flashes its knickers at BAE…

BAE Systems has signed a 15-year deal with the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to supply the UK armed forces with small arms and medium-calibre ammunition.

It also includes mortar bombs, tank, artillery and naval gun shells, but not weapons such as guided missiles.

No guided missiles? That’s a relief. Still, this should encourage us all. It shows that corruption is no barrier to success.

BAE, needless to say, are jumping about with joy. Here’s Charlie Blakemore, managing director of BAE Systems Land Systems Munitions…

You can imagine that the rate of production that we are now at, it’s been some achievement to keep that going in that period to make sure that we deliver on time.

You can imagine that the rate of production that we are now at. Oh do shut up, Charlie, you sound like a teenager talking about how much self-abuse he manages to fit into a day. Well done for keeping it up this long. You can almost hear the grin in the statement.

I know embellishing one’s CV is frowned up but think of the benefits. Worried you might not get that job? Just say you bought prostitutes - sorry, hostesses - and yachts for Saudi Princes and you’ll be quids in. There are those out there who’ll find it irresistible, like a spray of Lynx for your career.

It’s all over. You do have to feel for them a little bit…

ITEM: You have a prime minister who everyone says is dour and humourless. People feel free to impugn his mental state and say he’s out of touch.

ITEM: Number 10 attempt a light-hearted and humorous video involving Jeremy Clarkson. People feel free to impugn their mental state and say they’re out of touch.

(Coming soon: Complaints when Gordon Brown decides to give everyone a fifty pound note. ‘It’s a disgrace that people weren’t given the choice of two twenties and a ten,’ say critics.)