Posts Tagged ‘government’
Tuesday, May 11th, 2010
An outbreak of reality seems to have broken out during today among Lib Dem MPs although, according to Laura Kuenssberg’s tweets and the Sky ticker, it took Ed Balls to treat their negotiators with contempt for them to realise that Labour were more interested in wrecking a coalition rather than creating the impossible ‘rainbow’ or ‘progressive’ coalition that an inherently unstable combination of naive Lib Dem MPs and ennobled fixers like Adonis and Mandelson ever thought might be feasible.
So in the end Clegg miscalculated and gave an impression of weakness and vacillation in his leadership that will probably undermine his power in any coalition. As this blog said this morning ‘they fail[ed] to appreciate the startling concessions on PR that they have already extracted from both main parties’ — although, in reality, Labour was cynical enough to string the Lib Dems along on their pet policy of PR while blocking on the economy and other issues, which must have been a position designed to inflict most pain on their negotiating team.
I still maintained this morning that ‘it’s potentially as likely as not that Clegg will form a coalition with the Tories as Labour but the point is still valid that he is a weak leader who has failed to take his party with him — there would certainly be dissent from both Lib Dems and far-right Tories to such a coalition.’ Ironically, such dissent is probably going to be less now after such a farcical day than might have happened previously.
The Liberals must feel like fools, having paraded proponents of the ludicrous coalition with Labour on the news channels all morning — and there were plenty of them. Only when treated with contempt by Labour did they stare reality in the face and realise, in retrospect, that initially their negotiators had rattled the Tories into giving up more than they probably actually needed to.
While Gordon Brown’s exit was choreographed to be dignified, it would have had far more integrity had he announced his intention to stand down on Friday. In the end this is probably the least worst option — some of the Tories more recklessly capitalistic ideas being moderated by the Lib Dems — and Cameron came out of the whole shambles as more statesmanlike than one might have anticipated and genuinely prepared to put national matters before party interest, which is something today’s spurious negotiations by the Labour Party showed their senior figures could not be trusted to do.
I don’t have any illusions that this will be a government that’s going to be popular — and friends have pointed out already that their austerity will hurt everyone personally. However, Labour were going to have to do that anyway and would probably have allocated the cuts in a more partisan way — at least a coalition will be less able to indulge in the poison spin of the likes of Mandelson and Campbell, who everyone should be glad to see put back in their boxes.
Tags: David Cameron, election, Gordon Brown, government, Nick Clegg, politicians
Posted in Life's Frustrations | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, May 11th, 2010
What doesn’t seem to be mentioned in most analysis of this disastrous election aftermath is that the current mess is related to Nick Clegg not being in control of his party. You don’t have to read very carefully between the lines to realise that Clegg and his negotiating team put together a deal and it was rejected by the Lib Dem parliamentary party.
It’s obvious that for all Clegg’s high-blown talk of putting the country’s interests first, his MPs are a bunch of self-serving, deluded opportunists who are such a disgrace to democracy that they fail to appreciate the startling concessions on PR that they have already extracted from both main parties. Their dogmatism makes even Gordon Brown look a model of enlightened flexibility. They should have made it clear before the election that, in the case of a hung parliament, the likes of Paddy Ashdown would go round spreading poison designed to sabotage any deal with the Tories. Had they been honest about being so willing to enter a coalition with Labour even in the face of such dubious parliamentary arithmetic then they would surely never have won seats in places like Burnley — or Redcar where disgust at Labour’s lack of action in preserving local steel manufacturing jobs saw a massive swing to the Lib Dems.
It can now be seen that Clegg positioning himself as the new, honest face of politics was a cynical joke. In retrospect it seems obvious that he can’t deliver the support of his own party for one of the options he refused to rule out and, as the extract from my blog post two days before the election shows, he was absolutely disingenuous by implying he could deliver an agreement either way (or, as he implied, to the party with most seats and a larger share of the vote) . What Charlie said two days before the election:
Charlie Mackle just had two tweets featured on the listener reaction page to Jeremy Vine’s interview this lunchtime with Nick Clegg: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/shows/jeremy-vine/election-debates-2010/liberal-democrats/ (one is at 1203, the other at 1242).
Both are about Clegg’s failure to spell out what he would do in the event of a hung parliament…I think he’s making a huge rod for his back by effectively deceiving some people into voting for him…One thing that the Liberal Democrats trade on is that they tend to be all things to all people — and even more so this election…campaigning in some seats as the anti-Tory party and in others as the anti-Labour party depending on the incumbents…If Clegg does not explicitly say which party he’d support in a hung parliament then his only plausible course of action would be to support the party with the largest number of seats — that’s the only real democratic outcome…Virtually any scenario is such a complete mess that it makes the case for electoral reform where the parties would have to be far more explicit about working with opposing parties once elected.
I still think it’s potentially as likely as not that Clegg will form a coalition with the Tories as Labour but the point is still valid that he is a weak leader who has failed to take his party with him — there would certainly be dissent from both Lib Dems and far-right Tories to such a coalition. However, the reasonably comfortable majority they would achieve would mean this was tolerable. Clegg is having to balance splitting his party against acting in the national interest. Cynical, tribal politicians like Brown would have no trouble deciding which way they would move but Clegg put himself on a moral pedestal which would make him look a supreme hypocrite if he put party over the needs of a stable government.
If the Tories were acting out of pure self-interest in the long-term they ought not to regret their actions if the Liberal Democrats and Labour put together this desperate coalition. After all, whoever is in government is going to have to impose some monumentally unpopular decisions or risk the country being trashed by the markets Greek style. It would be more justified if Labour carried the consequences for its own ineptitude and the Lid Dems suffered for their contempt of the electorate’s decision. When the ramshackle coalition collapsed then the Tories would likely obliterate both of these unprincipled parties — and rightly so. The problem is that we’d all suffer economically in the fall out.
I don’t particularly welcome the prospect of a Tory minority government or Tory-Lib Dem coalition either BUT any other outcome is so violently contrary to a sense of democracy and natural justice.
And it wouldn’t help the Labour party in the long term as the likes of David Blunkett have argued (Lib Dems ‘acting like every harlot in history’). I really don’t understand what motivates them apart from the naked desire for power for its own sake and the privilege and patronage that filters down to the activist and crony levels. That may explain the deeply depressing, anti-democratic attitude of Labour and Liberal activists whose tweets and comments on phone-ins seem to revel in glee that they think this gives them an opportunity to show the electorate they were wrong. I heard one on Radio Five last night. To the question, ‘didn’t Labour lose the largest number of seats since 1931 and get the lowest share of the vote since 1983) the activist said ‘Yes. But look at the NHS and how much money they’ve spent on that — and made it better as well.’
The point about a progressive coalition that consists of anti-Tory votes is risible and contemptible — fair enough if all those parties had stood at the election on a ‘progressive coalition ticket’ BUT THEY DIDN’T.
I’m encouraged that Caroline Lucas has indicated she wouldn’t sign up to a coalition and would support other parties’ policies on a case-by-case basis. I would have voted Green in my constituency had they fielded a candidate but would be exceptionally disappointed if she ended up being the one MP who perpetuated this financially and morally bankrupt regime.
Tags: anti-democratic, election, Gordon Brown, government, hypocrisy, idiocy, immorality, New Labour, Nick Clegg, politicians, progressive coalition, stupidity
Posted in Life's Frustrations | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, May 4th, 2010
Charlie Mackle just had two tweets featured on the listener reaction page to Jeremy Vine’s interview this lunchtime with Nick Clegg: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/shows/jeremy-vine/election-debates-2010/liberal-democrats/ (one is at 1203, the other at 1242).
Both are about Clegg’s failure to spell out what he would do in the event of a hung parliament. In some ways I can understand why he doesn’t want to properly answer the question — he can’t presume he’ll be in that position and he doesn’t know yet exactly how much power he’ll be able to wield or which of the two main parties will be the largest. However, I think he’s making a huge rod for his back by effectively deceiving some people into voting for him.
The potential dilemma he finds himself in makes quite a good case for the electoral reform that he’s arguing for, although, paradoxically this might weaken his potential power after Thursday.
One thing that the Liberal Democrats trade on is that they tend to be all things to all people — and even more so this election. They like to position themselves as the centre party and, in some respects, such as economic policy under Vince Cable, this is probably true. However, many of their other policies are well to the left of Brown’s labour party (e.g. immigration, Trident, Iraq). The fact that the Guardian has transferred its support to Clegg bears out that they are now the party that reflects the views best of the metropolitan, intellectual liberal left. Quite where this leaves Brown, whose policies seem to ignore the interests of his core working-class urban voters (like Gillian Duffy) is an interesting question — whose interests does he represent? The bankers, perhaps?
Yet the Liberal Democrats are campaigning in some seats as the anti-Tory party and in others as the anti-Labour party depending on the incumbents. This might be plausible if they really were a party with views equidistant from the other two but they’re not. Standing as the anti-Tories is, perhaps, less problematic although many centre-leaning voters might feel that their policies on Trident might be too far to the left. Presenting themselves as anti-Labour is, however, very disingenuous.
Many on the left, including it seems desperate ministers like Ed Balls and Tessa Jowell, plus Peter Hain, seem to believe that their best outcome is a scenario where a second-placed (in seats) Labour Party is propped up by Nick Clegg but I fail to see how this can ever be a justifiable scenario for the following reasons:
- Under this scenario the Labour party will have won a very small percentage of the popular vote: the overwhelming majority of voters will have voted against Brown continuing.
- If the Labour Party was to do what Clegg has hinted he’d demand and nominate a new leader, perhaps as Johnson or Harman hope, then the country would end up with a Prime Minister who hadn’t fought a general election for the second time in succession and only days after an election: completely ludicrous.
- Clegg might want to lead a Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition. This might please those who like his shiny Blairisms but would he insist on electoral reform, non-replacement of Trident and so on — major policy changes that would have been endorsed by a small percentage of the electorate. It would also be ridiculous to have a Prime Minister from a much smaller party justified on the basis that he looked good on TV (but perhaps quite appropriate for our X-Factor politics).
The only way that Clegg could go into a coalition with Labour is to support Brown — none of the other options are remotely feasible. That would be a nightmare even for those on the left as it would perpetuate their biggest electoral liability and keeping in Brown would damage the Liberal Democrats who supposedly campaigned for a ‘new politics’.
Many on the left seem to think a Lib Dem-Labour coalition might be justified by arguing that over 50% of the electorate would have voted for the two parties and not the Tories. This is an incredibly flimsy stance as it could equally be argued that more voters had voted against Labour — probably over 60%.
If Clegg does not explicitly say which party he’d support in a hung parliament then his only plausible course of action would be to support the party with the largest number of seats — that’s the only real democratic outcome. This may be a problem if Labour had the largest number of seats but not the largest aggregate vote but this looks unlikely. It also risks alienating anyone who votes Lib Dem from a left perspective.
Virtually any scenario is such a complete mess that it makes the case for electoral reform where the parties would have to be far more explicit about working with opposing parties once elected.
Tags: election, electoral reform, Gordon Brown, government, Jeremy Vine, Liberal Democrats, New Labour, Nick Clegg, politicians
Posted in Life's Frustrations | 5 Comments »
Thursday, April 22nd, 2010
My initial reaction to the party leaders’ debate last week was that Brown was slightly better than expected, Cameron poorer and Clegg seemed to be rather unjustifiably pleased with himself. Seems I was more critical of Clegg than the media reports most of the public have been.
The Clegg bandwagon is clearly ludicrous: he’s in a position, unlike the other two, of never really being held accountable for what he says. He’s blandness personified, which if often an appealing attribute as it lets other people project their thoughts and values on to him.
However, as mentioned in a previous post, Cameron deserves something more severe than the sentence for treason if he fails to dislodge the unelected Gordon Brown. What does it need to unsettle this government — yesterday had inflation looking as if it might get out of control and today with the announcement of an approximately 2.5m unemployed figure. This government provides so many open goals it’s untrue — the airspace fiasco is just the latest in a string of incompetencies.
What seems to be clear is that the Tory campaign is in trouble — all down to the debate. I can say what I like about Gordon Brown but I’ll have to admit he has tenacity and a weird determination to cling on. The problem with Cameron is that he needs to look like he has some passion to do the job but instead he’s been acting as if he’s waiting to be carried into 10 Downing Street on a donkey. I’m hoping, just for the sake of the election, that he shows a bit of spark in the next debate.
There’s something quite disengenuous about the popular presentation of Cameron, not really helped by his demeanour and his amazingly stupid decision to stuff his cabinet with so many other old Etonians, like George Liability Osborne. In many ways Cameron is just an honest manifestation of what we already have — that the country is dominated by a wealthy elite educated at the top public schools. At least he’s not a fraud trying to cover up his priveleged past. Look at how Clegg and Harman (both Westminster), Blair (Fettes), Balls (Nottingham), Darling (somewhere in Scotland) and so on try not to draw attention to their expensive educations. In fact the contempt that the media tries to generate for Cameron is probably a result of some inter-public school inverse snobbery.
Yet Cameron has the air of someone who seems to think he’s been born to lord it over the non-Etonians and that if he happens to fail in removing Brown then it’s not much of a big deal — he’s not going to be struggling to pay the mortgage. That’s not something that could be said of the last two Conservative prime ministers.
Tags: David Cameron, election, Eton, government, middle classes, public schools, stupidity
Posted in Life's Frustrations | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 14th, 2010
The new Radio Times has a cover saying ‘Vote Dalek’. In my constituency I would quite welcome the choice. As boundary changes have illogically lumped us into John Bercow’s Buckingham seat then we really have a choice of lunatic candidates as it is (none of the three main parties stands by convention). Even though Farage has decided to visit all the pubs in the constituency, his crazy party has no chance of my vote.
Radio Times -- Vote Dalek
I was hoping I’d get the opportunity to vote Green — which would be a definite choice given the absence of other candidates and I could well want to vote for them anyway.
The Tories are confusing me somewhat with their society of volunteers. I think I know what they’re trying to aim at — the suspicion that the incompetent agencies of the state are uselessly interfering with aspects of community life, such as the ridiculous vetting of anyone who has cause to even look at a child in a voluntary work capacity. There are so many illogicalities to this sort of checking it’s amazing that anyone has the nerve to justify it (such as it only applies to criminals who’ve already been caught, that most abuse happens in families anyway, that such people are usually devious enough to disguise identities and so on). Yet the totalitarian tendency, epitomised by the likes of Harriet Harman, jump up to defend expensive and incompetently thought out schemes that destroy huge amounts of benefit for very little benefit. I also think the incompetence is inherent in his administration because he’s now surrounded by the cronies he used to undermine Blair for ten years and, to do that, they are not constructive people.
This sums up Brown’s big weakness — that he has the arrogance to think that he knows better than anyone else about how they and others should live their lives but he also fatally compounds that arrogance by not having the self-knowledge or humility to realise that he’s often (usually?) wrong and that his administration is far too incompetent to deliver what Brown thinks is good for us.
Tory Poster -- Rich and Poor
The Tories seem to hit the nail on the head with their election posters that mock Brown’s record on this (and also hit another weak spot — his total lack of humour). I’m not so keen on the picture that they’ve used, which seems to exaggerate his physical appearance, but the messages are absolutely right.
Tory Pensions Poster
His record is poor and he’s trying to campaign on it. Also ‘Vote For Me’ is ironic because no-one apart from his constituents has voted for him for anything. He’s an anointed Prime Minister whose bullying supporters prevented even a leadership contest in the Labour party.
One point the Tories have made that’s worth noting on this blog is that they have hit a lot of CAMRA’s hot buttons in their manifesto – bans on loss-leading supermarket alcohol sales and the intriguing right for communities to buy pubs.
I don’t see any promotion of this by CAMRA, though, which is odd seeing as the government’s proposals that came after 13 years of inaction and about two weeks before an election were given a lot of publicity.
Tags: CAMRA, Doctor Who, election, Gordon Brown, government, hypocrisy, John Bercow, politicians, pubs, Radio Times
Posted in Beer, Life's Frustrations | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, April 7th, 2010
Generally, I take a view about the impending election to be pretty consistent with that of the Economist– that Labour deserves to lose the election but the Tories haven’t done enough to win it.
On balance this really should be an argument for change but the perverted, risk-averse, ‘better the devil you know’ side of human nature may swing it unfairly in Labour’s favour.
Tags: Gordon Brown, government, idiocy, New Labour, politicians, stupidity
Posted in Life's Frustrations | No Comments »
Monday, March 15th, 2010
I’m starting to get worried. We’re not in the official election period yet and I’m already starting to get apoplectic about Brown’s behaviour. Perhaps if I get things off my chest earlier then I can have an election-free blog (little hope of that).
Here’s just a short taste of the way his world view seems to be twisted to serve his own vanity.
Firstly, the BA strike. Despite his party taking more funding from Unite than any other donor he’s cynically pocketed that and made a facile declaration of support for the aggressive tactics of BA management — clearly without taking the trouble to realise that their tactics are deliberately undermining the democratic and lawful ability of worker to engage in industrial reaction. What is so “unjustifiable” at a union scheduling industrial action when it has a mandate from the staff involved of about four to one in favour. It would be unjustifiable if it did not. Moreover, BA management made a calculated offer that it knew it would withdraw as the union had to call industrial action within a certain period of the ballot result. Basically Brown does not want a strike in an election period and he is prepared to compromise the principles on which the whole history of his party has been founded so he can limp on further like a wounded animal.
Secondly, his comments on continuing on as Labour leader if the party loses its overall majority are to use his own words ‘deplorable and unjustifiable’. According to the BBC website said: ‘I think I owe it to people to continue and complete the work that we’ve started of taking this country out of the most difficult global financial recession.’ This is completely deluded as which people does he owe anything to — that suggests that someone voted him into his current office. However, no-one has voted for Brown as Prime Minister — not even the spineless parliamentary Labour party voted him as leader. He has no mandate from anybody and it’s his own vain, ego-driven self-appointment as saviour of the world economic system that he’s deluded himself into thinking he’s a duty to continue.
His grip on reality seems to be as removed as his many enemies in the Labour party would have us believe.
Tags: BA, Gordon Brown, government, idiocy, stupidity, vanity
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Sunday, March 14th, 2010
According to the Sunday Telegraph, New Labour, in the hopefully unlikely eventuality that their pernicious blight be cast over the country again from May, is to abolish the House of Lords. One good thing about this is that they will presumably have to get rid from elected office their unelected legions of cronies, faceless bureaucrats and, of course, that barely human specimen of meretricious mendacity — Mandelson. (Maybe they will create a loophole by allowing the undead to continue to serve in unelected office?).
After this week I will be extremely happy to see the back of Lord Adonis — the unelected Transport Secretary whose background from Oxford university onwards is even more privileged and cloistered than that of Cameron and Osborne — he followed teaching at Oxford with journalism on the FT and the Observer and, unsurprisingly according to Wikipedia, hides away from the hoi-polloi in the New Labour ghetto of Islington. This technocrat academic has maybe been handed the transport brief as no politician who wanted a hope in hell of getting themselves elected would want to be an apologist for this government’s lamentable lack of delivery in this area — belatedly getting Crossrail started and finishing the St.Pancras Channel Tunnel link that was started by the Tories and very little else except the ultimate cheapskate innovation of getting us to drive on motorway hard shoulders.
In the last few days he’s announced (or been reported to be about to announce) three things that would keep me blogging for a month.
1) The route of the High Speed 2 rail line — with its bizarre combination of tunnelling through London up to Amersham and then despoliation of the Chilterns and Aylesbury Vale from there on.
2) His ludicrous and partisan siding with the BA bully boy management in the cabin crew dispute. Someone should whisper to this sheltered egghead that he’s actually in a government that’s supposed to represent organised labour. Maybe the title of the party is a bit too obvious for his large brain to notice. Perhaps someone from Unison should remind him in a traditional working class way of the history of his party.
3) The proposal reported in the Sunday Times to reduce the drink-drive alcohol limit to effectively zero. This proposal sums up the cynicism and headline-grabbing ethos of this rotten administration as it anyone who understands human nature (by definition not most New Labour ministers) could predict that this is likely to lead to more, not less, drunk driving.
My anger about all three of these points goes beyond normal politics. Were this a genuine party of the left, rather than a bunch of self-serving parasites in thrall to global capital, then I might have more patience with them. Yet what really galls me about Brown’s Labour is that they offend something very basic and fundamental about human nature — they are complete hypocrites. They fail in almost every test of competence of their own administration yet they take every opportunity to preach to us plebs about the error of our own ways and are forever trying to interfere and assign blame in the minatae of social life. (It’s no co-incidence that Brown’s character determines that he does the same in government and his disastrously over-complex economic policies.) This wouldn’t be so bad if they had any integrity themselves but they are obsessed with appearance and perception to the detriment of reality — forever passing laws that they fail to implement. In some respects it’s the behaviour of an arrogant, totalitarian elite — even if it is fronted by meek and nerdy Adonis types.
More detail on each point above anon.
Tags: alcohol, BA, cynicism, government, idiocy, Lord Adonis, middle classes, New Labour, Peter Mandelson, stupidity, totalitarianism
Posted in Life's Frustrations | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010
The poll in the Sunday Times that gave the Tories a lead of only two points is a wake up call for everyone with an interest in politics. It is a very damning verdict on the competence of Cameron and also shows the lasting hostility to the Tories nearly 20 years after their removal of Thatcher’s divisive influence. I have a theory that Thatcher’s worst legacy was to leave an embittered and deeply politicised academic and cultural establishment which became receptive to the abhorrent and cynical use of political correctness (for want of a better description) as a neo-Stalinist tool of power and manipulation that has been the most insidious hallmark of New Labour — something that will wreak far more long-lasting damage to the country (IMHO) than anything Thatcher did.
This fairly superficial embitterdness towards the Tories seems to suggest that there isn’t the sort of popular acclaim for removing this clapped-out disgrace of an administration that there was with Major in 1997 — ironically a government now which seems to have been the most effective of the last 50 years (so much for the threat of hung parliaments). Even so, I think the whole country would want to see Cameron and company ritually disembowelled if they wake up the morning after a general election to see Brown’s psychotic grin as he walks back into Number Ten — no doubt with Alistair Darling, James Purnell, Caroline Flint and the rest on their way to the Gulag as he preaches about a listening government of all the talents.
Almost all Labour MPs seem to realise it’s in their best interests for Brown to lose by a small majority so they can cast him out to howl impotently with his forces of hell (Balls) and that they could look forward to a fairly new election with a leader who’s a member of the human race. Personally I’d consider voting for a Labour Party led by Darling — the only one with any guts shown in the last couple of years.
There are really two words that describe Cameron’s biggest mistake — George Osborne. Bad enough that Cameron is an Eton toff but at least he presents a semblance of humanity. Osborne both looks and acts irredeemably like a complete anachronism and irrelevance to the vast majority of the voting public — an image of the Tory party that goes back to Douglas Home and Eden. He reminds me of that awful upper-class ventriloquists dummy that Ray Alan (remember him) used to turn up with on dire 70s variety shows — mind you the dummy showed more independence of thought and character than most Labour MPs.
I’ll be disenfranchised — voting in Bercow’s constituency so no Labour, Tories or Lib Dem candidates. Should UKIP stand I certainly wouldn’t vote for them but I’m hoping the Greens put someone up. While I disagree strongly with a lot of their practical policies, I have great sympathy with their basic premise — that global capital is a rapacious monster that’s defiling and destroying the world for the benefit of few but the very richest elites — which makes it bizarre that Brown and Blair so worshipped it.
I also like the practical application of green principles — protecting nature, growning your own and so on and I took delivery of a box full of seed potato and onion sets yesterday to prove it. Give a man a potato and you feed him a bag of crisps, give him a seed potato and some soil and (in my case) you get the magic of digging up a few knobbly organic specimens and you give the slugs a feast.
Tags: David Cameron, election, global capital, Gordon Brown, government, Green Party, New Labour, opinion polls, political correctness, politicians, stupidity, Thatcher
Posted in Life's Frustrations | 3 Comments »
Friday, January 29th, 2010
A reactionary friend and I had an e-mail conversation about how hypocritical it is for the media to bewail the calibre of politician we have. They are one of the main reasons why politicians have become discredited — it didn’t take too long for the spin doctors and interview coaches to teach politicians how to avoid the elephant traps the likes of Paxman and Humphreys set for them and how easy it is to manipulate lazy journalists into following a set agenda. In short we have politicians who evade and distort because we have a news media that is devious and generally lacking in ethics (see Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe).
There was a fantastic example of biased reporting which pushes a narrative set by politicians yesterday. The BBC website reported a fact that may astonish most people in this country –alcohol consumption per capita is going down – and going down quite rapidly. What the BBC report didn’t even mention was the figure for overall average consumption figure: down to 12.2 units per week in 2008 compared to 13.5 in 2006 (buried in a Reuters report). This is, according to my calculations, a 9.6% drop over two years. The BBC report described this as ‘slight’. In what other context would a 10% decrease be described as ‘slight’? I can guarantee that if the figures were the other way round and showed an increase of the same magnitude that there would be the lead story — ‘Alcohol consumption going up by 5% a year!!!!’
Instead the BBC deliberately broke down the figures by class to report that professionals were drinking more than the working class — 13.8 units — sensationalising the findings to suggest a growing crisis but not supporting this with evidence of any increase at all.
While this is a good news story that belies the general narrative that we are fast becoming a nation of drunks, the BBC was careful to conflate this with reports that drink related deaths are increasing. Alcohol related deaths rose from 8,724 in 2007 to 9,031 in 2008 — now that’s an increase of 3.5% in a year — which is obviously something to be concerned about but is smaller than the slightly less than 5% fall (allowing for compounding) in average consumption. Was that 3.5% increase also reported as ‘slight’? No. It was used as the headline for the web page.
Moreover, the number of total deaths in 2008 according to the ONS is 509,090 which makes alcohol related deaths 1.7% of the total. Again, because these are avoidable then this is obviously way too many but I doubt a headline that says nearly 2% of people in the UK are killed by booze would grab so much attention. (I would guess the man or woman in the street would think it at least double or even quadruple that). However, at a steady rate of growth of 3.5% (compounded) it would take another 18 years for the number of alcohol related deaths to rise by 50%, which would be around 4% of the total number (making the assumption that all other trends continue).
At least the page later conceded that consumption had been falling since 2002 and because the deaths are largely concentrated in older people who have, almost by definition, been drinking for many years that the positive trend of lower consumption will take a similarly lengthy period of time to show in the mortality figures.
Of course a rise in alcohol related deaths is very bad news and should be reported but so should the facts that show that overall this country is getting more sober and in general taking a more sensible attitude to drinking, albeit there may be more extremes in number of genuine problem drinkers and a large number of teetotallers.
Yet the way the Department of Health and other lobby groups put out a drip feed of press released that are regurgitated by lazy journalists shows that the media is complicit in completely misrepresenting a positive story into scaremongering. We might expect some of the tabloid press to do this but for the BBC to be so complicit is quite shocking.
Tags: alcohol, alcohol consumption, BBC, government, idiocy, journalists, lies, ONS, statistics
Posted in Beer | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, January 19th, 2010
The Quaker founders of Cadbury’s will be gyrating in their graves after the company — an original model of benevolent capitalism — has been sold out by its management to bland global capital processed cheese makers. It might be an appropriate epitaph for the era of New Labour — so much meaningless bluster and posturing (such as came from Mandelson’s reported hostility to the bid) ends up being utterly cynical and worthless.
Maybe it’s appropriate for the times. The Cadbury family cared enough about the people who worked in their Bourneville factory that they built houses (with gardens) for their Victorian workers and set up other countless benevolent institutions for their workforce.
New Labour have been mystifyingly craven towards global capital so it’s perhaps appropriate that they impotently preside over the destruction of one of the last companies that seemed to offer a compromise between the naked greed of capital and the humane welfare of the people who worked in that organisation.
If ever there was an award for meaningless, misleading and insincere prattle it should go to Mandelson’s words on Cadbury as reported in ‘The Times’: ‘Lord Mandelson, who was unable to intervene in the bid process, nonetheless warned Kraft last month: “If you think that you can come here and make a fast buck you will find that you face huge opposition from the local population . . . and from the British Government.”’
Let’s see what he does rather than says.
Tags: Cadbury, corporate strategy, global capital, Gordon Brown, government, idiocy, Mandelson, stupidity
Posted in Life's Frustrations | 2 Comments »
Thursday, January 14th, 2010
Fuller’s seem to be confident enough about the economic climate to push through the New Year increase in beer duty — at least in The Euston Flyer near St. Pancras station and on their London Porter. A good pint,and a nice pub with lots of pleasantly available tall blonde barmaids (I got served twice by the old bloke, of course) but I probably paid the most ever for a pint of real ale — a whopping £3.70.
Tags: Beer, duty, Fuller's, government, London Porter
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Saturday, December 26th, 2009
The working classes built the Labour Party through their struggle to seek representation through the union movement and to stand up to the amorality of global capital. Gordon Brown is in the ironic, and shameful, position of leading an incarnation of the party that has taken this working class vote disgracefully for granted. Intelligent MPs such as Frank Field and John Cruddas appreciate that much of the micro-engineering of the benefits system, so beloved of Brown, has wrecked the moral values of a strong working-class culture. The cabinet is now full of arrogant, condescending privileged, middle-class meddlers who have no inking of the self-reliance that used to be the foundation of working-class communities. To them, it is inconceivable that anyone would want to stay working class. The vanity of the New Labour elite is such that they believe everybody should aspire to be just like them. They erroneously conflate poverty with class and seem to believe that the country will thank them for destroying the working class. In its place everyone would either be middle-class or part of the underclass. Such is their unshakeable conceit that they don’t realise the political flaw of this strategy — the new middle-classes will tend to vote Tory and the underclasses will display the same apathy to the democratic process as they have to their own lives (preferring to become Brown’s clients as he dispenses skewed benefits) and not vote. The overall effect is that Labour has set on an unwittingly self-destructive mission to eliminate its own core vote.
However, Labour has always been able to rely on the vote of one significant part of the electorate — students. Even the spoon-fed, waited-upon offspring of the indulged middle-classes often realise its in their own self-interest to vote for a party of the left when living their pretend impoverished student existence for a year or two. That’s not counting all the crap spouted by politically correct university lecturer ideologues (again out of self-interest, conscious or subliminal) that probably sways a few impressionable student voters.
Yet following its success in destroying its working class core vote, Labour (if Mandelson still fits that description) sneakily chose the run up to Christmas, when they no doubt thought all students would be pissed, to declare war on this loyal part of their vote.
The scale of the cuts proposed is quite shocking and promises to demean higher education even further in this country. I had experience of the rubbish that undergraduates had to put up with in this country about 10 years ago — hundreds of students in a lecture theatre, negligible contact time with lecturers, widespread use of group work that allows skivers to be carried, large-scale plagiarism and so on. This was in a university that had a decent reputation for certain subjects (such as business). When I was an undergraduate I used to go for weekly tutorials with a lecturer and three or four other students. Even so, by international standards, universities in this country are relatively good — see how many international students are attracted to them (a good job as they have kept the sector solvent up to now).
Unfortunately the New Labour philistines have now made the cynical calculation that higher education funding is something that can be cut now but the resulting decline in quality won’t be immediately apparent.
Compensating for the lack of funding won’t be possible by bringing in gimmicks like two-year degrees and cutting holidays — an example of hypocritical scum Labour spin doctors going for the gutter vote by pretending students will need to work harder and not drink as much. Dave Prentis of Unison is right in suggesting this will have a long-term effect on the country’s competitiveness of destroying exactly the sort of knowledge based economy that we were meant to be relying on now Thatcher and New Labour have outsourced all manufacturing to China. No-one should really be surprised about this as this government has no conception of the long-term. Long-term thinking to them is the time it takes before the headlines appear in the next day’s papers.
It wouldn’t be so bad except this government encouraged a huge expansion in higher education in the first place — with a target of 50% of 18 year olds going into full-time education. I tend to think this was more motivated by removing a huge demographic group from the unemployment figures than by altruism. (Quite clever making them go into debt to do it as well.) Now, having massively expanded the university sector to cope with the huge influx of students, the government is actually penalising them for taking on too many students.
It’s predicted that whole universities will close or merge and the more expensive courses will disappear (ironically those which tend to teach skills that aren’t available elsewhere like advanced science and engineering). It’s also anticipated that the UK will end up with a two-tier system with a small, elite group of universities funded to carry out research and a large number of chav universities that ‘teach’ large numbers of students in a cheap and nasty way. Of course, access to the two parts of the sector will be entirely unequal — with those from privileged backgrounds playing the system and swanning into the good universities (with maybe a bit of token equal access thrown in for ‘the kids from the inner cities’) whereas the majority of students will be funnelled into the sausage factories. It will be just like the good old days to the large numbers of privately educated cabinet ministers from privileged backgrounds themselves, such as the privately educated Harman and Balls.
Tags: Gordon Brown, government, higher education, idiocy, middle classes, New Labour, politicians, stupidity, universities
Posted in Life's Frustrations | No Comments »
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009
The culture of spin or, as it usually turns out to be, downright lying in the face of obvious facts has worked its way down from the heights of New Labour policymaking to infliltrate the more prosaic echelons of the incompetent governmental edifice. Who actually believes a single word that council spokespersons are saying when they say that gritters are working flat out and that all possible is being done to clear the roads? Probably even less people than now believe in the fabled WMD. Yet these PR officers, schooled and practised by their national government role models, blithely issue statements or turn up on the radio and TV to spout forth works of fiction that, if not exactly untrue, are as deliberately contrived to misrepresent the actual facts as possible.
The local government association said a few days ago that it was rumour mongering to say that salt supplies were almost running out but I have heard from my sister, who works for a large local authority in the north, that their salt supplies have now run out. The gritters are still driving round but they’re not spreading anything — just acting as snow ploughs. The Bucks Herald website accuses Buckinghamshire County Council of trying to spin their way out of trouble – and then having to admit a large amount of economy with the truth (e.g. that they tried to generalise about the whole county by citing evidence of gritting in the south of the county and that they left a 12 hour gap during Monday in Aylesbury Vale during which the snow came down but no gritting took place.)
The fact they think they can get away with it shows the way this mendacious culture has infected all levels of government. People can see whether the roads have been cleared or treated – due to the consequent out-of-control and undriveable vehicles. In choosing to spin something that people can dispute with the evidence of their own eyes these idiots show they’re more Ollie Reeder than Malcolm Tucker.
The only other category of civil servant who are currently less contrite about the consequences of their incompetence are the Met Office weather forecasters. With their nauseating cosy chats to the newsreaders, perhaps they’re more interested in auditioning for the next series of ‘I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here’ than actually deliver an accurate piece of forecasting. Taking their forecast that there would be no more snow after Monday morning at face value (a forecast of which no doubt all evidence has been erased now) I went on a 450 mile round trip to Manchester and, after having had to dig the car out of nearly a foot of snow, had to drive back in a blizzard on the M60 with only two lanes usable (except if you were a mad Lithuanian lorry driver piling down the snowed up fast lane twice as fast as anyone else on the road) then ended up in the untreated Bucks roads at the other end. I think forcefeeding all of the falsifying forecaster some nasty Australian parasites would be appropriate (apart from sweet Laura Tobin, of course). Mind you, the Met Office website has been just as guilty a fabricator of fantasy.
Tags: Bucks County Council, Gordon Brown, government, Laura Tobin, Mad Lithuanian Lorry Drivers, Met Office, New Labour, politicians, stupidity, The Thick of It
Posted in Life's Frustrations | 1 Comment »
Thursday, December 17th, 2009
Gordon Brown will be jubilant that the High Court’s disgraceful decision to overturn a democratic ballot will convince global capital that this country is even more disposed than it was before to treat its citizens as serfs to globalisation. In the miners’ strike the police were politicised and used to enforce an energy strategy that was clearly, in retrospect, shockingly irresponsible. The behaviour of the police in kettling, and allegedly killing, demonstrators in the City of London shows that they are still partisan in the service of their political masters. Now the judiciary can be relied on to magnify technicalities that were irrelevant to the overall result and annul a democratic ballot. It will do absolutely nothing either in the medium and long term for BA except reduce morale further and increase the intense loathing for their digraceful, incompetent, muddled management that is held by the staff BA depends upon to deliver service to its customers. What it does is avoid unfavourable headlines over the Christmas holidays. Now all the BBC newsreaders and broadsheet opinion writers can jet off and pump carbon behind them on their Christmas holidays but a dangerous precedent has been set that sees further encroachment of the litigious into our society. What John Lennon said 40 years ago about our bondage to capital is even more true now it’s global: ‘Keep you doped with religion, and sex and TV, And you think you’re so clever and classless and free, But you’re still f*cking peasants as far as I can see.’
Wonder if any of the judges or their friends and family were planning to fly BA for their Christmas holidays?
Tags: BA, BBC, global capital, Gordon Brown, government, stupidity
Posted in Life's Frustrations, Travel | No Comments »
