Thursday, April 09, 2009

Quicky at Bed Time

..before I go thought I really must share this article I came across in the New Statesman .It deals with the rapid promotion of the well born in New Labour ranks For example Georgia Gould ,22-, Oxford graduate and daughter of Philip Gould, pollster to Tony Blair, is to be parachuted into a safe seat Her “career” to date stretches only so far as having campaigned for Barack Obama last year ( …pass the sick bag …). Tony Benn’s granddaughter Emily has been chosen as the party’s candidate for East Worthing and Shoreham at 19. Nineteen !
Greenslade Comments…
How can you empathise with your constituents’ job insecurity if you have never had a job to lose? Similarly, no elected representative can truly understand the significance of rising fuel and food prices and the importance of interest rates if he or she is still living at home and has never had a mortgage or the responsibility of running a household budget..( Good question for Sunny Hundal ....)
Such people have absolutely no grasp of the work and sacrifice people make to make themselves a life , take a holiday , buy a better car . To them these are laughable objectives and they assume the right to remove such trifles on grounds of taste , class and a sort of assumed elitism or displaced envy. Polly Toynbee like others says she would pay more tax..but would she sacrifice what really matters to her , her fame ? I doubt it .

Incidentally the most popular politician with the young is not young ,its Boris Johnson .

9 comments:

Mark Wadsworth said...

Are you mad?

"take a holiday"??

That sounds like 'non-essential flights' to me. Why not buy a goat for a village in Africa? If butchered properly, they'll serve a hundred people.

"buy a better car"??

People should cycle to their allotments in the local community. Don't forget the carbon footprint!

Auntie Flo' said...

Good points, Newms. What also comes out of your piece is the dynastic tendency which is pervading so much of politics and turning local and national government alike into a family business.

Am I correct in thinking this has become a more prevalent tendency under this government?

I know of one council which is virtually controlled by four families, two of them interlinked. This trend makes me very uneasy.

Newmania said...

Did I say holiday ...I meant goat naturally ...

Flo... actually Jeremy Paxman has gone throuhg the 20th centuiry and the Labour Party has always had a tendency to be dynastic ..Its to do with the class structure of its support.
Conservatives get a lot more outsiders but the Liberals are the best at this (hate to say it but they are )

Anonymous said...

Don't ruling classes always behave like this?

NuLab are just our ruling class, that's all there is to it, really.

Of course they employ their family members and form dynasties. So did the Medici, the Tudors, the Devonshires, and all the rest of them. So also do the Mafia, in their own way.

Before long you will hear of European parliament seats, or possibly European Commissionerships, being handed down from father to son.

There's nothing new under the sun.

Auntie Flo' said...

There's nothing new under the sun.
(Anon)

Oh, there is, Anon, it seems that every day a new form of abuse and degradation emerges under this government.

An innocent newspaper seller dies after being roughed up by a police officer, for the sheer hell of it as far as I can see.

Number 10 adviser is accused of trying to smear top Conservatives using number 10's email facility. Gordon knew nothing, as usual.

Then this:

"During her six-month detention at Cornton Vale women's prison in Stirling, 21-year-old Donna McLeish was chained to male and female security guards 24 hours a day.

..."In the beginning I thought it was normal to have a male in the room 24 hours a day. I thought it was normal to be chained up when I showered and used the toilet."

Donna - a first offender - was jailed for assaulting a young woman in a nightclub. She was sentenced while pregnant.

Once inside she suffered complications in the form of a blood clot on her placenta and had to be admitted to hospital.

"I was in a lot of pain and I was bleeding heavily. They refused to take the cuff off - even for a minute.

"Once, when I was in the shower there was a knot in the chain - making it even shorter. The shower wasn't working properly. I was bleeding heavily but couldn't reach the water."

She says the experience stripped her of dignity.

"I'd be talking to the doctors about the details of my condition in front of these strangers. It was really personal stuff and it made me feel so uncomfortable but I still had to be chained to one of the guards."

I ask Donna how she feels about the inevitable opinion among some, that she committed a crime and should never have expected prison should be easy.

"I never wanted to be treated differently to anyone else. But I felt they were too harsh. This was my first offence - I'm not a persistent offender and they treated me like my crime had been far, far worse."

Reliance Security issued a statement saying they had now stopped their procedure of cuffing pregnant women. They admit that she was chained to a male guard but refute the claim that they were present when she showered or used the toilet" (Sky News)

Auntie Flo' said...

Newms - once you're back.

I've been thinking more and more about this whiny child speak with elongated vowels and word endings that zanulabs increasingly use when they're lying and spinning for all they're worth. It goes hand in hand with a sort of wide eyed, innocent child look.

You know, Yvette Cooper speak.

"We are within the ru-u-u-wells for expen- ses, we've done nothing wro-o-o-ong"

Byrne is using it today in an attempt to spin Brown out of trouble over McPoison's emails.

Is there a name for this? I'm sure I've heard one somewhere.

Anonymous said...

I trust you were not murdered in Dorset? There is a lot of murdering these days....

Newmania said...

Only murdered in body Mut

I have been listening to that Flo , of course the idea this was done without the approval of Brown is preposterous

manwiddicombe said...

Emily Benn .. .. .. now there's a candidate for me not to vote for and as I actually have the option to do so I shall definitely be exercising that right.

I doubt very much that, even prior to the current round of scandalous revelations, that she would stand a chance against the incumbent MP (who increased his majority at the last general election) which begs the question "Why do it?". I'm guessing that it's for the experience to add to her CV for 5 years time?

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