Posts Tagged ‘politicians’

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The Least Worst Option?

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.

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Let Clegg the Weak Leader Destroy His Contemptible Party in the Losers’ Coalition

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.

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Anti-Democratic, Contemptuous, Opportunist, Self-Serving, Hypocritical, Myopic, Anal-Retentive, Self-Obsessed, Deluded Scum

Monday, May 10th, 2010

I thought about posting a blog about the machinations in Westminster by the defeated coalition of losers but I thought better of it as it might risk blowing my blood pressure if I said what I really thought.

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‘Be Careful What You Wish For…

Friday, May 7th, 2010

…or you just might get it’ could be applied to Nick Clegg and anyone who voted for him out of an anti- motive rather than any love of the Lib Dems.

At the time of writing (12.45pm) the Tories have 294 seats, Labour 252, Lib Dem 52 and The Others 27, including the admirable Caroline Lucas’s win for the Greens in Brighton. This means that a joint Labour-Lib Dem coalition is still 22 short of a majority and is only 10 ahead of the Tories as a whole (with 25 mostly large rural seats yet to declare).

This means Clegg can only deliver a majority to the Tories. It’s fairly likely that any Labour-Lib Dem deal would need to get the support of some of the smaller parties. They might be able to get some support from the Greens on an ad hoc basis but they’d still have to go to the self-interest of the nationalists.

Should Cameron and Clegg come to some agreement then this would be undoubtedly the most stable outcome — even allowing for some dissent within both parties. A joint Tory-Lib Dem cabinet might also have the happy result of perhaps sidelining a liability like George Osborne and replacing him with Vince Cable.

Yet Clegg and Cameron will probably engage in some brinksmanship. The Tories will be extremely reluctant to endorse proportional representation — but Clegg should probably treat his new putative best friends Milliband, Balls, Harman and Brown’s sudden conversion to the cause with the contempt and suspicion it deserves. He’d be a fool unworthy of holding the balance of power if he trusted politicians whose main motivation seems to be to stab their leader in the back in order to succeed him. The Tories will reject the more leftish policies that Clegg stood on — quite a lot of them, such as the immigration amnesty and Trident.

I guess Cameron will reject most of Clegg’s demands and he could justify this by the poor showing overall for the Lib Dems, which seeing as Clegg was apparently still popular must have been influenced by their policies. He will probably see if Clegg has the nerve to make the so-called ‘coalition of the defeated’ with Brown.

This might please many of Clegg’s casual and tactical supporters but would be an insult to his party activists and loyal voters — who must already be demoralised, having fought against Labour and, in most cases, have not succeeded in removing many Labour MPs themselves. Brown is also likely to have to make disproportionate concessions to the nationalists as the Lib Dem support seems unlikely to produce a majority in itself. It would also be political suicide if there was an election in the near future as those who voted tactically anti-Tory would probably return to Labour if they had been seen to be able to not lose this election.

If Cameron was quite cynical, he’d probably not be too disappointed to rebuff Clegg and see what kind of ramshackle coalition Brown (or those who seek to dispose of him in his own party) could put together. Remember this government is going to have to finally face up to dire economic reality and institute massive public spending cuts as well as raise taxes. The Tories might think it cuter to let Brown face his own music and bank on his Commons arithmetic falling to pieces (think of the rebels on the Labour benches if the hatchet is taken to public spending) and expect there to be another election within a year or two.

Of course, Clegg may also take the same view and realise that it would be electoral suicide for the Lib Dems to prop up an inevitably unpopular government — perhaps getting proportional representation would then be their only chance of avoiding obliteration.

Overall, Cameron’s best strategy is probably to offer Clegg very little and try and call his bluff into propping up Brown. If the Lib Dems either have to support him or be complicit in helping Brown try and dig himself out of his huge hole — either propping up someone who’s currently pulled in 29% of the popular vote or replacing him with someone too gutless to have tried to replace him before the election.

This is all in the context of Cameron’s undoubtedly disastrous campaign — sabotaged last year by Osborne’s ‘Age of Austerity’ and more recently by his baffling ‘Big Society’. Brown got away with outrageously negative campaigning — effectively ‘vote for us or you’re more likely to die of cancer’ — and he was the incumbent of thirteen years. Cameron was stiff, aloof and complacent and hardly tested the massive own goal presented by Brown’s and New Labour’s monumental incompetence.

If this posting is marginally less lucid and more discursive than normal it’s because I watched the 11.5 hour BBC coverage of the election night non-stop with Sky and ITV streamed on laptops and making frequent reference to the BBC website (which seemed to lack information in favour of clever animations) and, more frequently, to the Guardian’s web pages on each constituency.

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The Clegg Factor

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

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Vote Dalek

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.

Vote Dalek

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.

I Increased The gap Between Rich and Poor

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.

Vote for Me -- I Took Billions from Pensions

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.

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Election

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.

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Dave on the Verge of Treason?

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.

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New Labour Destroys Yet More of Its Core Supporters

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.

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Apprentice Campbell-Mandelson-Tuckerite Scum

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.

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Is This A Labour Government?

Friday, December 4th, 2009

1,700 steel workers to be sacked in Teeside while the board of a 84% state owned bank tries to blackmail the government into paying its bankers £1.5 billion in bonuses! If this sad conjunction had happened at the height of Thatcherism then the Labour party would still be reminding everyone of it 25 years later.

Brown should realise how much contempt the electorate hold for the bankers. He must be about the only person left in the country who believes the New Labour fiction about the City being the new source of wealth for the country — and how we will be fine to offshore all the real work (manufacturing, IT, back office work, etc.) to India and China so our whole economy became a huge casino that just shuffles money around. And this is a LABOUR chancellor and prime minister!

Spare a Few Million in Loose Change for the People Who Work Here

Spare a Few Million in Loose Change for the People Who Work Here

If he has any hope of redeeming himself with the country then he should take his attention off the Eton Toffs on the front bench and train it on the pinstriped pigs in the trough — the Hooray Henrys who are threatening to go abroad if they don’t get their £1.5m bonus. Well, why not call their bluff and let the greedy parasites go abroad — although they won’t be quite as well received in Dubai as they may have been a few weeks ago. And if all the bankers leave then why doesn’t their protector and defender, Gordon Brown, follow them and not darken our shores any longer. I’m sure there are plenty up in Teesside who’d be glad to see the back of them all.

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Latent Myrmidons

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

I found this fascinating new word (guess which one) from Word of the Day on Dictionary.com. Strikes me as quite apt when applied to corporate life — management speak and the jargon of PR types — and also to the kind of bland double-speaking politicians we have to choose from at the moment.  The quotation applied to Milosevic begs the question about how many people in other parts of Europe would become myrmidons if they saw it would be to their advantage?

myrmidon

1.
(Capitalized) A member of a warlike Thessalian people who followed Achilles on the expedition against Troy.
2.
A loyal follower, especially one who executes orders without question.
 
Quotes:
He risked assassination, torture or . . . retaliation, the defining signatures of Mr. Milosevic and his ultranationalist myrmidons.
– Bruce Fein, “Follow U.S. war crimes advice?”, Washington Times, May 10, 2001
I felt quite sure that the myrmidon on duty in Gadsby Row would tell you all about my visit.
– Georgette Heyer, Behold, Here’s Poison
The best hotel, and all its culinary myrmidons, were set to work to prepare the feast.
– Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit

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Those Who Live By The Gutter…

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

As someone else with appalling handwriting, I have a very tiny amount of sympathy with Gordon Brown over ‘Lettergate’ (although I don’t use childish black marker pen). Even those who regard him as an arrogant control freak with a disastrous lack of self-knowledge realise that he’s going to be a busy one and to handwrite a letter is a substantial allocation of his time. (It’s unforgivable to get names wrong, however, and it probably shows that his minions daren’t send him work back to correct — which is very worrying if it comes to policy matters but probably explains a lot.)

There’s no doubt that The Sun is now doing its best to stick the knife into Brown but he makes it pretty easy for them. A read of the transcript with the soldier’s mother shows how he is completely unable to empathise with ordinary people and to communicate outside a narrow, political context — all things that Blair was an expert at. The transcript looks very like the famous confrontation with Thatcher on Nationwide over the Belgrano and perhaps the Sun have engineered it that way.

However, it is nauseating hypocrisy of the worst kind for the likes of Mandelson to come out and complain about Murdoch’s anti-Labour agenda. New Labour benefited from the support of the gutter for over ten years and didn’t complain about it then. Those that live by the gutter should be prepared to die by it.

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Nuttcase?

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

According to the Telegraph sacked drugs advisor Professor David Nutt has come out and said that his public statements on drugs were made to highlight the evils of alcohol.

It seems to me that he’s gone over the top in showing his contempt for alcohol and taken the tack of trying to score sensational debating points rather than advance a cogent argument — exactly the behaviour one would expect from a politician and not a scientist.

For one thing he bands about extreme and emotive language: ”There are hundreds of kids lying in hospital beds waiting for transplants that will never come.” Are there really hundreds of under 18s waiting for liver transplants caused by alcohol abuse? How can he be so sure they will never get these transplants and it’s a bit bizarre anyway for someone involved in medicine to complain that there aren’t enough transplant organs available. This must be a measure of success for others in the medical field.

His biggest mistake is confusing absolute numbers with proportionality. In absolute terms, he’s probably right. There are probably more people with health problems due to alcohol than from any other drug, although why he’s not as miltitantly against smoking as alcohol I can’t fathom. However, when he makes statements like the horse-riding is more dangerous than ecstasy,  he trivialises the debate. Does he really mean that because there are more horse-riding deaths than those from ecstasy in absolute terms that means horse-riding is really riskier — apart from the numbers of people participating there are also lots of other factors to consider. What he doesn’t know and can’t possibly argue with any credibility is that we would all be better off if 90% of the population were on heroin, cocaine or whatever other drug he chooses as he argues alcohol is the worst.

Nutt also tries to make his argument (in true NL fashion) by attacking and denigrating something else without realising that many of the anti-alcohol arguments can also be applied to the substances he is promoting. He would find more favour by arguing that banned drugs had similarities to alcohol (i.e. if he said just as most drinkers aren’t alcoholics then he could say most e or cannabis users aren’t addicts).  Typical short-sighted, point-scoring student debating tactics.

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Positioning v. Core Competencies, X-Factor and New Labour

Sunday, November 1st, 2009

Thinking about ‘The Restuarant’ again I was struck how the format reflected two polarising concepts of corporate strategy. In the programme the chef of the pair had to cook their signature dish for Raymond’s assessment. Then the front of house person had to pitch the concept of their restaurant to Raymond and his minders.

This reflects the debate between the positioning school of corporate strategy and that of core competencies. Michael Porter’s famous market positioning theories emphasise how organisations should have a clear idea of where their objectives in a market — do they go for mass market leadership or for niche differentiation. This has filtered down into companies’ much reviled mission statements and goals and, in the process, Porter’s original insight has been lost. So you have companies that come out with the absolute banal like ‘we want to serve all your leisure travel needs’ which really says nothing apart from the company is in the leisure travel market. A brilliant definition of strategy is that it’s the decision about what NOT to do — as that decision can’t be reached by meaningless platitudes. This distortion has seeped into popular culture in shows like The Apprentice, X-Factor and the Restaurant where contestants always say they just want to ‘be the best’ or ‘kick the competition’s ass’ . It’s completely stating the obvious and not what Porter’s original analysis meant — which was to emphasise the role of careful choices and decision making — such as serving a gap in the market. So the clever X-Factor contestant might rationalise that there isn’t a successful act in a particular niche. Of course, it would be pretty impossible for them to do that as they’re all picked to a stultifying unoriginal formula.

It’s all very well saying what you want to be but it’s worse than useless to believe in an ambition if you have no capability of achieving it. This is where Hamel and Prahalad’s Core Competencies come in. This theory states that  organisations have inherent capabilities that cannot be easily imitated by competitors. These could be cultural, organisational, intellectual, political, managerial or directly related to the quality of the staff. The theory argues that companies often fail to realise and capitalise on their core competencies, especially if they are being crisis managed or ‘turned round’ by firefighting managers or management consultants (how often have ailing companies been completely finished off by new managements — the Royal Mail comes to mind at the moment).  The same is completely true of people (and contestants in reality shows). Everyone has things they are good at and not so good at and it is absolutely futile to try and persue an ambition if you don’t have the skill to ac hive a level of competence at it (never mind to achieve exceptional talent). So if you can’t open a tin then it’s pretty unlikely you’ll end up a Michelin starred chef, however much it’s your dream and ambition.

Of course shows like the Apprentice and X-Factor have this tension between positioning (what the contestants want to be) and competencies (what they are actually able to do) at their heart. The Apprentice is also brilliant at showing the dramatic irony of when contestants don’t have the self-knowledge to realise that that they don’t have the competencies to achieve their desired positioning. Sometimes the two things co-incide well and what the value of these shows (even the X-Factor) is to show that often ‘ordinary people’ have the most extraordinary, unexploited competencies and that they have as much talent as ‘the stars’.Yet the programme makers like to concentrate on the deluded people who think their competencies match their desired positioning like the ridiculous twins from Ireland.

It’s surely no co-incidence that when our government likes to maintain the ludicrous pretence of complete equality in everything (and in the process ensure there is less real equality than ever before), particularly in the education system, that the highest viewing figures are for programmes where people are judged – almost to the point of humiliation. Like the leaderboards in these programmes, people have a deep-seated sense of status and want to gain status (by definition at the expense of others). The programmes make sop to New Labour’s pathetic ‘Every 1′s a Winner’ mentality by having audiences which jeer and boo any negative comment (not realising that positive comments need some critical comment to achieve credibility and balance). It’s the equivalent of the ambition of giving every 16 year old an A* grade in GCSEs and thinking that demonstrates the brilliance of their education system.

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