A Giant Leap For Personkind ?

Trim ,pouting Ms. Harperson denied that she crushed a paper cup and whispered ,“ This is my moment “, the second Brown grabbed his bucket and spade , but it will have a place in the apocrypha . With a woman, even vaguely, in charge ,Labour are discovering new territory in the way the Eskimos did when, in the 17th century, they discovered the Outer Hebrides , (to the bemusement of local crofters) . Been there ,got the tee shirt . I refer of course , to “The Lady” Mrs T ,who appears to be granted honorary man status by her leftist detractors, except when they were engaged in misogynist bating .
This sort of double standard recently re-emerged directed at that other fly ,bashing against the glass ceiling ,Hilary Clinton .Ten of thousands joined a face book group called ,‘Hilary Clinton stop running for President and make me a sandwich’. If we are honest some of the sneers directed at the Harridan are not much better.( Not that that will stop me ).

So women then , what do we make of them , what about this feminist thing ? I suggest that there are two divergent forces acting in society and what I have not yet seen is any one making the reasoned speculation that they are connected . I intend to discuss just that in sinewy masculine prose

.First let us capture the spirit of pre-post-feminism.To do so we must adjourn to the court of Queen Toynbee who quotes smouldering sensuous Erica Jong with approval ,…“ 68-75..it seemed that everything would change for women …Then came the backlash. We were declared dead before we were even half born. The backlash has lasted longer than the brief flaring of feminism itself “.
Well preserved and coyly seductive Poly Toynbee locates the attack on women as starting in infancy with the “Pink disease”,….. ”It is impossible to buy toys now that are putridly pink branded or aggressively superhero male ..everything Barbie Bratz, Princess Tiaras fairy and ballerina dressing up pink pink everywhere and it damages girl’s brains …”. she continues on pornificaton….” How can it be that lap dancing is proliferating as a socially acceptable entertainment “. You will imagine that the solitary marble to which I cling has finally eluded me ,when I say I think Polly is onto something here.
I can also go along with gorgeous leggy brunette Kira Cochran ,the Guardian woman’s editor ,when she says that ironic sexism is usually not ironic . The “Retro-sexual guide to how to be a real man” is , ,in my humble opinion, on the right side of the line .“ Still mincing along to book clubs thinking you are going to pull the quiet one whose a screamer in the sack?” it says . On the other hand ‘I can’t believe I `m still single’, an example of “Frartire” says ( humorously), men are “ wired to smash a woman on the head with a bone drag her unconscious body by the hair to our apartments by the hair and fuck her”. To me this tone has become aggressive and unpleasant. It is a symptom moreover of a sly war on women operating beneath the public radar
There are exceptions to the Loaded /FHM zeitgeist .Male make up is about to sold at Super Drug , including “Guy-liner” ,the infamous Heido Fleiis is trying to open a brothel for women, and a survey by Brillcream reported that men were now far happier ironing than mending the car. These are shallow snippets of a metro sexual culture largely invented by the media .More typically ,Jordan’s little sister has got her mum to save up to buy her tooth veneers and a boob job, so she can be a glamour model like her heroine . She is fifteen and I do not like it .
So why are men treating woman so badly and women adopting sexualised roles . Well men are under sustained legal attack and women are now explicitly favoured . We know the perverse results of Maternity leave , and Harman is quiet clearly heading for a quota system by introducing the right to discriminate against men for jobs . In court women can now get away with murdering a man in his sleep by claiming “ fear of serious violence” , but a man cannot claim any diminished responsibility from jealous rage, or sudden provocation . The divorce courts continue to transfer to women the entirety of whatever they couple have built and whatever a weeping Batman says about it . The prize for divorce is the children ,a home and an income the woman no longer has to work for . This inserts a damaging power imbalance to the private sphere.
Meanwhile women remain highly resistant to marrying beneath themselves, and 75% of the dears who co-habit still want to get married . The female sole bread winner household appears to be simply unwanted by anyone ,being no more common now than 30 years ago. This of course puts great pressure on men to be a 1930s style provider when women want noughties style special treatment, in their efforts to out compete men in the workplace . True, women occupy many low paid part time jobs, but they are also pouring into the professions , outperforming men academically, and soon , no doubt , financially .
I am looking at a cutting and it is of a piece by Yvonne Roberts defending the quotas of women and speculating on how Joe Bloggs and his family might feel about his unemployment due to women quotas needing to be met. She sees the future as men becoming more like women ,and being prepared to accept a more female work/nurturing role . Well it is far from clear that women want us to do that but her final sentence is chilling.
“ Government has to restore the meaning of the word “ choice “ for fathers and mother. For some men that may mean a period of adjustment , which might hurt- but it will hurt less if they can see the reason for it “
I appear to have scribbled underneath this “ Cow !!“.Not my finest moment , and I am sorry . I mention it as a demonstration that even a reasonable and modern chap like me feel , at times , pushed , controlled and emasculated by the legislative assault on our gender. We are told to be mother , father provider , stander aside , that we are guilty from birth destructive and redundant . Beneath the public post feminist concensus men are rebelling sometimes in ugly ways .

Millipede Leads High Tax Labour Left In Attack On Brown

Milliband gives sour verdict on Brown`s Leadership ...

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at la Toynbees tearful and confused article on the Warwick wash out ,yesterday (A law to label real fur - that should bring the voters back) . My eyebrows went Gothic arch shaped , at her positioning of one significant name on the left of the Labour battlefield ( note also the fight for ownership of the word ‘progressive’ continues ) ..
....“But the other half of his cabinet equally passionately believes they are all doomed unless they adapt to changed times. The Millibands ,Ed Balls, Harriet Harman, Douglas Alexander, John Denham and Yvette Cooper think the post-Blair era of recession needs new policies. These progressives would tax the top 1% ....would windfall tax profiteering energy companies. ...turn more radically green ....pursue tax havens and tax avoiders ... bonus-heavy bankers ....The progressives warn..., Labour will be obliterated.”
So slimy David Millipede is a tax raising Old Labour man and friend of Polly Toynbee .I`m not sure this is the answer to Labour’s woes myself but they know best.
Today he has entered the lists with a front page article in the Guardian ( Labour Needs To Change and Change Now ). He offers no explicit support for Brown , and after a good showing at Foreign Seccy he , by all accounts, has acquired the cojones to stab the dour Scot in the front .It looks increasingly as if that may happen after the Labour Conference where the slime ball has a “Wide ranging “speech “ prepared and an agreement with Purnell who will not stand against him . I have always detested Millipede and suggest you join me in despising him now to avoid the late rush.

PS- I know its old news but in today`s Guardian Geoffrey Wheatcroft rehearses the extent to which the current electoral dispensation is stacked against the Conservative Party. The figures are always eye-popping .-
“In May 2005, Labour won 286 out of 529 English seats with 8.05m votes, or 35.5% of the popular vote; Tories 194 seats with 8.10m votes or 35.7%, Liberal Democrats 47 seats, with 5.201m or 22.9%. “

Toynbee Article
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/29/labour.gordonbrown

We Are Truly Doomed

The Concerned Adolescent

...Everywhere there is blood and
The stench of death
Human beings make war and
Hate one another
They do not understand their
Youth,they reject their ideals
They make them come home
early from the disco
They are doomed .....

Mathew Parris claimed to have solved the conundrum of the Labour obsession with silly and irritating tinkering . The Labour Party, for much of the 20th century ,basked in the presumption that they had the “intellectual” upper-hand . Marxist Dons swapped social analysis and in general though they were sweeping a Compass over the globe.The advent of Thatcher,Hayek, and the implosion of the planned economies ,was a horrible shock . It turned out that they had been wrong (and no-one likes that much . )
The emphasis from this time has switched from competing ideas , there being no competition, to various snippets which together prove , to someone , that Conservatives are “Not Nice” .
The absurd amount of time wasted on the fate of wily Monsieur Renard shows , amongst other things , how a once confident philosophy had become degraded to the point of the child –like . Mr. Parris, in a moment of epiphany ,grasped that this was all they had left, they have to believe it matters .
It is in this context we can understand the latest nonsense emerging for the Warwick Jamboree ( A forum for labour to sell policies for cash to Unions ) “Labour's next election manifesto will back extending the franchise to 16- and 17-year-olds,"
Partly this is driven by the desperate gerrymandering that a shrinking natural support produces . The assumption is that young people are likely to be state dependent, and having not yet acquired income or property, may be easily persuaded to exercise their consciences at other people’s expense. In fact young people are keener on low taxes than anyone else ,as a single issue ,having expectations of earning , and ( soon to be dashed) optimism. Nonetheless the Labour collation of bleeding heart gunk might be expected to appeal to the wish of youth to strut and posture there being little personal consequence.
I assume that no-one in the Labour Party has recently met a teenager. Wendy Cope in a technically masterful pastiche called “ The Concerned Adolescent “ captured the mix of solemnity and self obsession( see above)
This would be a vast improvement on most teenagers who are unconcerned about anything except ...well we’ve all been there . So the idiotic idea that we should be consulting these hormone addled ignorant and confused cubs about the Government of the country is about a dumb as I can imagine .

Silly silly Labour

Progress At Last

Something you may not know about me , and are probably not gagging to find out ,is that I am quite knowledgeable about the development and structure of the English language . This odd state of affairs came about because when I arrived at “Uni” to do Eng Lit , I was deeply committed to hedonistic nihilism, aka 'wine women and song, plus sex and drugs and rock’n’roll ,(but not rum bum and concertina .) As a “subsid” , ‘English lang.’ struck me as a no brainer, and therefore fitted my skill set perfectly . Little did I guess at the Chomsky-ish horrors that awaited but , as sometimes happens I began to be fascinated. I have retained a curiosity ever since .
It was therefore with the trained nose of a 2.1 ( that’s two up from Carol Vorderman….) that I sniffed a sea change in a Janet Daley article . In it she slyly continue her long whine about David Cameron’s sensible balance by hypothesising a Labour Party attacking successfully from the right, under say a Purnell. All phoned in copy, but her final words set my spider sense tingling . …
“ I believe it would be best for the country if the entire policy debate was conducted in progressive terms “
What was that word ? “Progressive”? Now last I heard this described a dog eared set of baby boomer bourgeois Liberal errors , does “Progressive" now mean something good ?.
Then at lunchtime in was pestering Labour parrot and amusing writer Hopi Sen. He is busy counselling against ditching Brown and this exchange occurred with one of his commenters about the meaning of ‘progressive’ .
““the progressive agenda is strongly represented in the Brown government.”( said Hopi)
"If my decoding is any good, you mean ‘Blairite’ (non -social/permanently pro-’more market’). Progressive never used to mean that…” (said Miller 2 )

Well this is fascinating . My suspicion that the New Speak-ers of New Labour are at the heart of this as their eroded Party threatens to shrink to its Old Labour core ,but the meaning of ‘progressive’ is also organic . When Labour follow Conservatives on Welfare reform , when Irwin Seltzer says the state is too large and tax cuts should be offered , when the forces of Labour are visibly obstructing progress then it can only be that Conservatives are the new “Progressives “. Should you require further proof Conservatives are now the most popular second choice of Liberal voters who , as we know , are vacuous Weathervanes who would cut off their arms to fit into the latest trendy cat suit .As you may gather I am ambivalent about how much I like to be a “Progressive”.
Language facts :
1 Penguin is the only Welsh word imported into English
2 Commuter stems from a ‘commutable’ ticket once issued in the US from the root ‘commutare’ or change /metamorphosise
3 Key Points and the endless use of Key from “men” to issues stems not from a metaphorical transference from ‘Key’ to a door but from an early transference to arch building now the dead metaphor “Key stone”. properly used it carries the weight of the final stone placed which holds up the arch.
3 Jacob Grimm, the elder of the Brothers Grimm, in his book Deutsche Grammatik was a seminal linguists establishing the first non-trivial systematic sound change to be discovered linguistics
Grimm`s law describes Consonantal shifts between Indo European languages as they become Germanic . The one I know is P becomes F.

English: foot, German: Fuß, -Latin: pēs, pedis, Sanskrit: pāda, Russian: под (pod),
4 Noam Chomsky`s genius was the description of “descriptive” Grammar. He started by asking why it was that when I change the order of a sentence “ I am John.” to “ Am I John” a statement becomes a question. What law was being followed ? He looked at more complex sentences and discovered the underlying structure of English. On the back of this he bored the world with half baked political rubbish but at his job he was a genius .
5 One of many structures of change is continued pejoration of words. For example stink was once neutral as was smell.
6Many pronunciations are incorrect if you judge by historical precendent . Forehead for example is correctly pronounced “ Forrid’. Our chaotic orthography drawn from non existent Norman sounds created the misleading spelling “Forehead”. At the end of the 19th century the new mass literate classes determined to be correct followed the spelling ..incorrectly . Similarly Garij has become replaced by Gararj following an irrelevant French model .
7 There are far more linguistic marker differences between English dialects than between English and US English which is virtually uniform by comparison
8 None of this helps me to spell or punctuate any better as you will have noticed

Newmania Avoids Complacency

You find me naked dear reader , liberally basted in honey , gurgling through another cheeky Pinot and conducting Ode To Joy ,at thunderous volume, with a Conservative Rosette . Thus I contemplate ,‘avoiding complacency‘.
Her Majesty’s Daily Telegraph , which I now have delivered on Sunday ,is a fitted carpet of post Glasgow East gloating and Brown crucifying .Notes of doubt injected by stern Conservatives carry an almost audible giggle.' Tra la ' ,I said as we attended a golden afternoon’s sybaritic barbecue , and 'tum tum ti tum ',as we returned .
There is little I can add to the gallows crowd twitter ,” Cor dun e look eeevil”…” You shoulnu’ oughta dun it “ they shriek ,mouths greasy with pig and ale so , content in the knowledge that my often made point about the marginals (polling even worse) is endorsed by top pollsters, I shall indulge in little time travel. This , says my therapist , will assist in the all important “avoiding complacency” process.
Remember when the look of slack jawed confusion was on the other mouth? A month after the Brown coronation he had a 9% poll lead comparable to Labour`s performance in the 2001 General election, and worth a 134 seat majority, double his since depleted 67 . David Cameron was suffering the same slo mo close ups on every bench exercise wobble his Pictish rival now enjoys . The photo op trip to Rwanda , about which lord Dale of Blog was so hysterically swoony, the missed floods ,…oh and other stuff.
Gordon by contrast ,gasped at the bouquets and air kisses he got for standing “Calmly” in welly boots .Labour were on 41% ,( U Gov ) , the Conservatives 32%, a position mirroring that immediately after Saddam Hussein was ousted . Mr . Brown had an 18% lead over his rival on the question ,‘who would make the best PM’, and David Cameron was down to a 27% approval rating, from 43% ,six months earlier. Cameron was wounded and the Conservative party ,less vegetarian than the left , were already browsing suitable accompaniments to roasted ex leader.
To the intuitive Political commentator, ahem…, there were still signs if hope. Brown has started to undermine the talismanic Blairite city academies policy as well as signalling an end to the privatisation of NHS services . Hazel Blear the only Deputy candidate to say things like “England , aspiration and the South “ was told “Gordon doesn’t like that stuff”. All of this suggests Labour were talking only to themselves .A Senior back bencher told Anne Mc Elvoy ( Evening Stanit’ editor )” Gordon will need voices to the left to balance his ticket , he`s now seen as the right wing candidate “…yup in Labour world maybe .
Consider the coagulating conceit of Indy hack Steve Richards ,arguing ,earlier , that Labour had no need for a leadership election, far less a general election , pourquoi ? “. A new leader must immediately be an authoritative and (wait for it ) agile ,star at Prime ministers question times……perform badly and the leader is finished …” The little business of a specific promise we would not get Brown is forgotten by Mr. Richards and encouragingly it appeared by Labour .
There were other reasons Brown to go for it . The impending boundary commission was likely to give the Conservatives 20 seats , Frances Maude’s ineffectual influence was at its height and the Conservative Party were utterly unprepared . In Sir Menzies , Brown had perhaps the weakest political leader of any Party yet seen, and his tenure was already fragile . Any replacement had to be far better a crucial factor in some swing seats. Above all he was quite clearly enjoying a bounce accorded to any new Leader and the sheer relief to get rid of Blair . It had to subside , so why did Brown dither ?
Simon Heffer reported this Conservative back bencher’s hope …” Brown’s a coward. He always has been …”. So it proved, and then the arrogance .We must assume he genuinely believed that two years of Blair filtered and undiluted Brown was a better shot than the many good reasons for going to the electorate early .Undiluted Brown has, in the event, made the Nation vomit .

OK so the ‘not getting complacent' went quite well really . I’ll pick this up tomorrow … but thus far a pretty good level of humility achieved considering .(Tra la la )

Sources of Authority Ancient and Modern

After Glasgow East ,the membranously thin façade of loyalty to Brown has melted away and the suggestion that no constitutional problem would be created by changing leaders again , stalks the chatter-sphere with insidious intent . True enough, no written law would be flouted , it being unwritten an`all , but our political currency of would be as debased as a Zimbabwean dollar

The position of the leader has become pivotal .To purposefully digress ,I often remark to Liberals that voting formulas do not make a democracy in isolation. Take a mental trip around the democracies of Africa and it is clear that the dance requires partner with an ear for the music as well .We, the lay voters , are that intuitive partner.We interpret signs ,often unconsciously, which is why those without their noses pressed to the political window pane can often call results with occult accuracy. Our understanding of the leaders role is crucial whether or not it has been articulated .
During the Thatcher /Blair period, the Party leader has come to occupy a place we recognise in our ancient bones . The God King .( Bathos alert ...)In early societies a King was a negotiator between the un- knowable divine and the lives of the population. he took his authority, not from force ,or inheritance ,but from a belief that he was a conduit between the knowable world and mysterious forces beyond . For the Aztecs his person was explicitly incidental to the extent that they ritually butchered his body after a short term
The Party leader is latterly in a comparable position .Voters instinctively know that he chiefly wants to win their vote . They also know that to do so he must negotiate with the Party`s wish list . Thatcher was able to appeal directly to the electorate over the head of her Party in a primitive way.'One who came after her' , T. Blair ,brought the ‘conduit’ Leader system proper ,to its apotheosis
The electorate wanted change but required reassurance that they would not sign off on a dictatorship of Callaghan era socialists . Unable to negotiate with the Party the people extracted promises like, “No tax rises” and “No Gordon Brown” . Only the god/king can make these promises liveing as he does, uniquely , both in the political world and our own .Undertakings were duly given by “New Labour “ via the leader while he , Janus like, extracted agreements from the Party initially

The accession of Gordon Brown ,under somewhat les democratic circumstances than the enthronement of William the Conqueror , broke this covenant. It was already stretched by the inability of Blair to control "Brownite" rebels and a further re-capitation will tear the remaining tendrils between the form of government and its legitimacy.For a Party leader to have authority now ,he must represented the Political world to the people and visa versa .Furthermore,the confidence of his peers is the least important part of the equation.It remains a superficial possibility only under the fossil rules of a 19th century settlement .
In all English life drama and symbolism is vital. Some obviously shabby little clerk like Purnell may well call upon the authority of Parliament . This is like the Wizard of Oz booming ,“ignore the man behind the curtain. …”We will not and should Labour attempt to deny us our 'negotiation' they will find themselves the subject of a loathing they show little sign of understanding .

Housing 2 ( Sub Letting )

It was the Queens speech in which the eye catching 13 year plan to build 3,000,000 tractors …,sorry I mean homes, was announced .With the building industry on life support , the houses they hoped ‘other people’ would build are destined to remain a glint in a PM`s eye .Ok , I hear you purr malevolently , but they are doing all they can aren’t they ? Perhaps not … and certainly not for the poorest

“ Now for the science bit “ -There are 4.9 million households living in social housing , 2.7 million in Council housing and 2.2 million in housing association properties . One question you will not hear the Labour Party asking is just how many of those are lawfully occupied, and how many are sub let .

Subletting a property can be a lovely source of income . Rents can be charged weekly up to £400 when the out going is as little as £60-£70 per week. It is entirely possible that the same person or family has other tenancies in neighbouring boroughs as such information is never exchanged . Some years ago one smart operator was discovered to have as many as 28. Councils never do anything about it as ,so long as they collect the rent ,meet their targets and avoid penalties .

Anecdotally the practice is at least endemic , oh yeah , prove it you say , you fiends, and I would love to, but solid evidence is suspiciously scarce.

In the 1990s two surveys ,conducted in Lambeth, were abruptly halted when it became clear that a can of worms had been opened .So why the conspiracy of silence ,well the reason is a familar one , needs testing encouirages neediness.

Let me explain;back In Islington , my political almer mater , the piteous needs of a waiting list of 13000 was endlessly reiterated by earnest bespectacled socialists trying not be too loony. So why were’t the caring souls rushing about with pitch forks turfing out unlawful tenants then.? Pssst building , or freeing , more housing does not reduce the waiting list and everyone knows it , you simply attract more applicants to the area.Indeed , Coucils like a large socia l housing role which makes them important, and hate taking on this constituency . Sure enough, in Islington, they were due for a further 13000 units in what was already a basket case Borough and the most crowded in Britain. This is vastly more satisfactory than starting a bureaucratic nigthmare a political war , and using the stock properly .

Official estimates on sublets vary from 3% to 10% but no proper counting has been done and my instinct says that as a family becomes wealthier they are not likely to hand their house back .I would guess 30% on the basis of those I met and knew . Even the governments estimates would give you 490,000 units and the grand total of 69 have been recovered.

Perhaps the Government don`t know . Events surrounding Caroline Flint`s suggestion that Coucil House dwellers might like to get a job suggests to me that they know perfectly well but dare not delve. She said .."she was suprised that more than half of those of working age in social acccomodation were without paid work"
Thats twice the national average and nearly 3/4 of that group under 25 are unemployed . She was not really suprised of course , and in any case was howled down by the left. . Any reform of the Coucil house citadels brings New Labour into direct conflict with Old where they have been dug in for generations. Picking fights its a delicate business and this poisonous turf war allows scandalous waste to go on unreformed.

Back To the 70s

Over on the nest of lefty treachery Compass Gavin Hayes ( General Secretary of Compass )is claiming that Unions telling the Government what to do is not a return to the 70s

“Talk of going back to the 70s does not bode well for an informed and intelligent debate “.....

The Unions now supply 90 % of Labour cash although the tax payer ends up with the bill in the form of a“Modernisation grant” . Most people are not unionised ( only 18% are ) and with unemployment rocketing in the wealth creating part of the economy( not unionised Public sector layabouts ), cannot afford a parasite Labour client state .
Many will be staggered that after all the fuss about Spelman`s nanny ten years ago or poor Wendy Alexander’s minuscule crime, we are invited to view to one interest group openly bartering for Policies with equanimity Oldies but goldies like secondary picketing are getting a digitally enhanced re release it is far past time the collective union thumb was removed from the nations jugular .

I submit that asnyone who votes for Brown after the deal he has , no doubt, had to do needs his head examined for bat infestation.

Stagflation , Union muscle and an old tired Labour PM who missed his chance . Oil crisis, Billy Idol Touring ..( on fine form actually ) Abba at the Cinema why fight it ? Just get in a Ford Cortina looking like Dave Hill out of Slade, eat arctic roll, crinkly chips and fondue then wash it down with a bottle of Blue Nun. We are back in the 70s man

Housing Part 1

In his Two Treatises of Government John Locke wrote .” The great and chief end of men uniting into Commonwealths..is the preservation of property “. Conservatives tend to regard this as Cosmic verity, but en realité , the desire is neither a static or a national a phenomenon . Reference to the credit crunch fall like unbidden rain but lets remind ourselves that this supposedly impenetrable shift of gaseous markets, actually revolves around the eminently comprehensible desire to own property.

All over the English speaking world ownership is now the rule . Before the 30s no more than 2/5 of Americans were owner occupiers. Today that is 68%. In Britain the proportion rose from under a third in 1953 to a peak of 75% in 1981. 70% currently own their abode ,and this decline set against the increased desire for that heavenly state, is what has provoked serial hand wringing form the great and good , especially on behalf of first time buyers . I `ll return to that, briefly pausing now , to note that the various ideas Gordo has had for sticking our taxes into bricks and mortar demonstrate the innate timing we recall from the Brown Gold sell off debacle.

Back in the US the word is sub prime. Sub Prime is a market for loan sharking directed through a web of euphemism at vulnerable blacks who aspire to Cosby show lifestyles and have no way of judging the risk . Sub prime means ‘poor’ ,which in its chief target zones , Detroit and the like , means African American which means black.
Typically it was on a fixed to floating basis with a two year ‘teaser’ shifting to the full rate . Fixed rates rising by a quarter, from 5.34 to 6.66 % for a 30 year loan was enough to detach the sky hooks upon which the whole US edifice hung. We are recapping I know , the really deadly end of all this were the so called NINJA loans which you get with no income no job and no assets . The security is the value of the property which depends on the buoyancy of the market which ...well we know the rest. Given that the FSA carried out a survey here which found that one person in five had no idea what an either an inflation or interest rate meant and one in ten did not understand a percentage at all ,we can hardly blame the poor sap 'emptors 'who did not sufficiently 'caveat.'

The vision of a life incomplete without ownership, is in sense ,behind all our problems at the moment. As we know this earthquake created a Tsunami which is currently spending its destructive force on our own housing market amongst other things and the headlines make grim reading “ House prices may not recover for a generation “, “ House prices drop 30% “... and so on( This is a bad thing remember ). Set against this is the keen desire of the government to carpet the Southern Green belt with new homes and thereby if there is to be any point to it at all , reduce the cost of housing . Not only that but shared equity, Council loans, key worker grants and all manner of ad hoc “initiatives “, are designed ...to make everyone’s negative equity worse and thereby create more homeless people. Or something ...

We can immediately see can ‘we’ cannot solve the property slump and the housing crisis at the same time, and the pretence that we want to is a transparent appeal to the general amnesia . I may be unique but it fascinates me that we all blithely skip along adopting nonsensical attitudes alternately . To cure this odd addiction I am going to have look at some aspects of UK housing in the hope that I will get a grip on it myself . If anyone else is interested you welcome to come along .Meanwhile I smoke an evening fag outside my modest semi and participate in the game as blindly as everyone else . Mine mine mine ....well half of it , if I can stay employed .

We Dwell Among Our Own

Again and again I hear the bawling yahoos of the semi educated left saying .. “Churchill was keen on the EU he loved it .. This is a short post but I just want that canard nailed good and sodding proper . This is what our greatest man had to say
"We are with Europe, but not of it. We are linked but not comprised. We are associated but not absorbed. And should European statesmen address us and say, 'Shall we speak for thee?', we should reply, 'Nay Sir, for we dwell among our own people'."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7511281.stm
Today the now ratified Constitution slunk an inch further into being and we will soon lose yet more of the independence that others fought for Mr . Hague put it well saying ..” the prime minister had "no democratic or moral authority to sign Britain up to the renamed EU constitution". It was "a total breach of trust with the British people and a flagrant breach of his solemn election promise to the British people".
So The Blunder Brown`s version of Churchill’s slightly Dumbledorish summary would be… “should European statesmen address us and say, 'Shall we speak for thee?', we should reply, 'Nay Sir, not until I have made false promises in my manifesto and concocted some rubbish about it being not the Constitution …then you go right ahead..”

The British people betrayed today are not just those still with us .

Would you Like To Try A New Position ?

Yawn yawn stretch yawn… so where were we .. Oh yes Cleggy the political impressionist has popped behind d the Curtain and come out as a Conservative …
“"We will get wasteful government spending under control and give the economy a boost by cutting taxes from the bottom for those who need the most help. If there is money to spare, we won't simply spend it. We are looking for ways to cut the overall tax burden."( Independent )

He is not just promising an adjustment at existing tax levels but a real reduction overall ,just as Cameron, with great good sense, is warning (in the Guardian ) ,that we had better face the prospect of tax rises over the next few years, not withstanding any waste that may be found in the system .

Clegg is being braver than it looks, if you believe it . Revenues plummet and claims multiply during a slow down, so much so, that it is possible to claim that Thatcher`s state was larger as a proportion of GDP than Brown`s. With intergalatic debt there is no room for manoeuvre and David Cameron was right to sound a note of sanity .Clegg. ,by contrast ,wants to put all his chips on Orange hoping low tax driven economic recovery will replenish the coffers . It did not for Bush did it , and given the suffering likely to assail this country it is a very bold manoeuvre indeed . Bold , resolute ,and Liberal …eh ? Bit odd for the Party that likes to say “Yes…now what’s the question?”

So could a swing right be the key to a Liberal breakthough ? Well repetition fatigue argues against it .The new dawn has been a perpetual imminence from Jeremy Thorpe’s supposed pact with Heath to Diddy David’s infamous “ Go back to your constituencies and prepare for tea..” . But now Clegg is summoning the spirits of John Stuart Mill Gladstone Cobden Bright , freedom , free trade and laissez faire halleluiah !Lets examine the “provenance “ of Clog’s piping-up shall we.

Wasn`t there some old chap recently …who was he ? …the one who was less popular sober than Charles Kennedy drunk . He promised to clobber households earning more than £70,000 …like a Policeman and a teacher for example . ….“ Hammer the rich and penalise the people who ah done too well under Labour” he said ? The mechanism was an end to the taper system for Private Equity . Brown U turned on it,finding he was destroying thousands of legitimate businesses set up, in the not unreasonable expectation, that the government would wait for them to be committed, and then chop their legs off. We will not be hearing much about that . I doubt we will be hearing much about the proposed Lib Dem Brown pact reported in the Independent on the 21st of Jan 2008 either . But oh dear my memory is long . I recall the 1p increase on income tax to pay for …kids with three legs or something, during the very long period when the Liberal Party were attacking Labour from the left.

During the magnificently snippy leadership contest Clegg was forced to swallow his nascent attachment to ,health vouchers and health insurance and reaffirm his commitment to the great Liberal pie in the sky Proportional Representation. In fact after the election ( which Huhne may actually have won ), weak in the Party, he went awfully quiet on the Orange book .Only now he has personally polled better than his felllows ,does he creep into the open.Electoral reality is the spur

We think of the Libs as a dull permanence ,a faintly irritating ache . Sometimes it plays up, buts always there. This is an illusion.In the progressive sixties the Liberal vote collapsed to 2,000,000 and the Party was almost wiped out .The SDP “event “ saved the beards and that reached its zenith in the lection of 1983. They scored 25.4 %( Labour only got 27.6%) up from13.8%. So if we are going back to real Liberal Party lets remember how small it was . The birth of the modern party , its “new” moment ,was all about yoking together irreconcilable positions and mushing them into porridge . Socialists ,and preening antiquarians have rubbed along with a motley crew of animal rights campaigners wimmin and assorted whingers. Their rag tag crusade has no steady course ,but like any asymmetrical army they use whatever anyone leaves behind . Luckily there has been plenty of carrion for the scavengers since …
When the Labour Party became infected with Marxist dominated activism, and Trade Union power, in the 70s ,it made itself unelectable . This gave the Liberals some meat and eventually they consumed the SDP , or visa versa. The Conservative Party then took over by refusing to believe no-one liked them after Major, and being sent to cultural Coventry . The Liberals darted to the left vacated apparently by New Labour and began doing business as real Labour . So at each stage since the 60s the Liberals have fed on some structural weakness with the big two.

We are now in what is , in my life , a unique period .New Labour are unpopular because of the economy a drift left and general arrogance born of power. There are however ample intellectual resources in the Party to reinvent itself and are suffering nothing like the disconnect of the Militant days .The Conservative Party has roared into life , alive with ideas and lean from ,long years of famine and both crowd the middle .Notwithstanding the current polls it is quite possible the next General Election will be close. In those circumstances the current flat line of 18 % would look like living high on the hog and the Liberals risk returning to a tiny Party of assorted protests , a status 2/3 of the electorate granted them in a recent survey . It could be the end for' three , (not two) Party politics'

Clegg`s implausible side step is born of fear not hope . As he told Martin Bright , (discussing a Lib Lab pact) 85% of Liberal seats are ex Conservative seats and with their being no good reason not to vote Conservative his MP`s are sweating profusely . All thoughts of “leading the attack against Labour “ in its heartland , are gone .
As a desperate Political strategy this makes sense but Politics is not just a game , the idea is that you wish to achieve something other than a spot on Question Time . People judge your sincerity by consistency and willingness to be unpopular . The Liberals Party will find rebranding is a game of diminuishing returns .They did not do their time out in the cold as we Conservatives did . They have not demonstrated any depth of attachment to new thinking . Partly they are following the zeitgeist like a lost dog, but mostly they are scared of losing any significant presence in Parliament . So ferocious is the antidote to the Labour -lite problem it will leave much of their own Party behind .They should not panic , it is not real .

When you are not going to be in power you can say whatever you like . You do not have policies you have ‘adverts ‘. I aint buying .It is a cynical posture on which he could never deliver his Party is they once suspected there was the slightest chance of it becoming policy.

Tax and Spend Tories

I told you so !For some considerable period, well actually dating back to my summit meeting with Oliver Letwin, (I waved as he sped off for a train) , I have seen tax rises coming under Cameron. Today I am proved right; I am in short fantastic!
I should explain that, although our intimate tete a tete was curtailed by my unimportance , I did listen with great admiration to a half hour speech covering arrange of issues notably Pensions / mean tested benefits and the iniquity of Brown squander.

Throughout this speech he returned again and again to the “yes but ..” moment . We would like to do things “but” the state of the exchequer is so parlous that in the short term you will have to be patient ..... rarely was there a 30 second period without some recourse to the “yes but....” .

Let me take you back to the days when Nick Boles ( now confidant of Boris in charge of poor vetting procedures), was defending the early Cameron refusal to offer “up front tax rises ". This was on the basis that we were too much in debt ,and you may recall the likes of John Redwood spitting nails at the illiteracy of claiming to value stability over tax cuts . Tax cuts are the only chance of stability ,says Mr. Redwood and co.,because without them the economy will atrophy. I `m not sure about that in the short term myself ....I like the clear equation of balanced books ,although tax cuts are obviously a spur to growth eventually. But I do not think Cameron has any intention of balancing the booksin a first term.

Moving on, you may remember the howls of rage at an undertaking to match Browns prodigious levels of spending, all the worse as it has required equally prodigious ,and often off balance sheet ,borrowing, to achieve . That ineffectual copse Andrew (lefty)Lansley has been talking about actually raising the amounts thrown at the NHS ...eek! Hopi sen (lefty apologists of note) also made a very good point about the so called’ Wisconsin’ style Welfare approach .

This is indeed a most promising strategy , combining the tough love of an end to hand outs with injections of real assistance in job finding channelled through the voluntary sector . What Hopi said was that in the US, whilst such initiatives have been effective, they have been expensive. So that’s another promise .Looking at the third world that is Glasgow East we may feel it is a price worth paying if we get long term change and not perpetuated poverty. Or not ....

The use of “Voluntary” is revealing here . To Conservatives it says ...small government while the reds snarl that they cannot see the WI solving unemployment and social breakdown . In fact, it is just efficient outsourcing of government work and indistinguishable from many similar Labour outsourcing . You will note that it is the Conservative Party which is being misled here not the lefty loons.

So add all this up and the plan is emerging. Cameron knows he has to do the difficult things first, as New York`s Mayor Michael Bloomberg advised Boris . After Eleven years of socialism ,notwithstanding the bounce provided by the economic down turn , he knows this country is not naturally Conservative any more . To make it Conservative in good economic weather he has to change it ,and that is going to cost.

He is going to raise taxes blame Brown and spend the waste dividend on solving problems in education health and the community in the short term . I doubt there will be much scope for righting the bank balance during this period . By this means he hopes to cut costs in the long term and break into the welfare citadels spreading opportunity and property .The natural Tory support screaming for tax cuts will have to wait . They will have to be happy with policies on education and symbolic fiscal adjustments aimed at helping “The Family “ .

After the war the Conservative administrations were notably quicker at supplying Public housing than Labour , this was because they stacked them high and want cheap and cheerful envisaging a stop gap not a permanent worker’s Palaces. Conservatives always had the end goal of a free independent property owning people though despite the apparently statist actions. That will be what Cameron is thinking , a ten year project , not a single term to change the country . To many in the Party the diffrehce will be difficult to spot only today ginga fatty Heffer was calling it, another term of Labour under Cameron. Troubling ...

Quite how I feel about a tax raising government I am not yet decided, but that , sure as eggs iz eggs is what we are going to get under Cameron. We will need to hear a lot more, and the patrician instincts of the toffs may need a dose of reality from the Party. His great advantage is that with the Unuons now running the Labour Party and inflation taking off a term of Brown looks like a padddle -free trip down the proverbial creek .

You've Got Soup !

The Politics of Envy...

............................. are back with us , belts are being tightened and lips pursed .All over the country women spit out the name “Posh Spice” with new venom and men , even Conservatives, find themselves wondering if they would not enjoy gently placing a pillow over Jonathan Ross` mouth and applying downward pressure.
As the New Labour project fragments faster than a globally warmed glacier (does not ), just when they should be soothing ,the lefties are starting to mutter the old dreams again. The Unions are squeezing , and even men of the cloth ,more properly engaged in being mystifyingly nasty to the gays ,are getting in a lather.
The Archbishop of Canterbury recently said of the rich list ” ..disproportion ( of reward) results in a degree of envy and cynicism that leads to people feeling alienated from the rest of society…” .Yes the Bish is obviously unhappy with his grace and favour palace and who can blame him , imagine finding your car keys
Many , like the dotty Bish, believe that under New Labour the rich have got richer and the poor poorer. Not so . According to the institute for fiscal studies since 1997 the people ranked in the top 10 % have seen their income grow by 17% in real terms. The bottom 5% have improved their lot by 13.5%. So the poor have not been getting poorer.
True the gap has grown a bit , perhaps then some question of morality arises. Nope , the activities of this class have assisted in the enrichment of the lowest 5 % but if Robin Hood should appear amongst us he would do no good anyway .There here are not enough rich people to go round , sorry. The IFS ,about three weeks ago ,calculated that the government would maximise revenues from those earning over £100,000 by imposing a marginal rate of 55.6% . This is perilously close to the current marginal rate of 53%including Income tax NI and indirect tax. It concluded that there was “No powerful case for increasing income tax on the very highest earners even on redistribute grounds” . the closeness of the result is not a coincidence .Gordon has taken all he can….well of course he has .

In fact the system is already redistributive . The government's own survey of personal incomes , the top 1% of earners pay 11.6% of pre tax income and 22% of tax.. The bottom 25% recive 8.2% of the national pre tax income and pay 2% of income tax.

This means that if there is to be any further redistribution of income it would have to come not from Madonna and Ashcroft but from the entire top half .That means ordinary families whose bread winner is temporarily hitting the heights at the time ‘he’ is supporting a family . ‘He’ will be below both before and after this period and is already strapped and exhausted . He will feel the money he strives to earn is his; any would be merry outlaw demurring will soon acquire a misshapen nose .
This class are already hugely envious of those below who appear to get a free ride and those above who have energetically supported their increased taxation under Blair /Brown.It might be kinda fun to drag down the economy achieving nothing sufficient schaudenfreude to sweeten our Cocoa . The middling are not tempted .Partly this is because they accept that market spikes are part of a broadly meritocratic process of which they are the beneficiaries . They know that the rich being richer does not make them poorer .Most importantly they intuitively grasp that they have the revenue because they have the numbers . Any higher taxaation in reality asmd however sold , must therefore , come for their boring cars and reasonable holidays .This will be tax on work a tax on families a tax on self reliance and a recipe for disaster
Conservatives must of course ,reject the new politics’ of envy .It is wrong headed and harms those it pretends to care for .There have been too may personal attacks in Brownand I going to admit something here .I really don’t seriously object to him as a man whereas I hated Blair . ( There I `ve said it ).Sadly he is ‘wrong’, just wrong , and I am afraid the sincere buffoon does a lot more harm than a self serving charlatan who has a better grasp of reality. I mean Blair not Cameron of course……
Honest

Norman Baker On The Politics Show

I have just been watching the MP`s on the spot for the South East which featured ,Norman Baker MP (Liberal Democrat) Lewes ( pictured posing worthlessly ), as well as Michael Fallon and some Labour apologist. They said you could join in the debate but rushing enraged to my "Pooter" I found that you could not . This is my e-mail….


Norman Baker makes no sense :
Constitutionally - He loudly proclaims his belief in local empowerment but assisted in passing the iniquitous and undemocratic Lisbon Treaty where Liberal Lords showed the true colour of the Party by supporting Gordon Brown outright . Additionally, he is in favour of proportional representation, whereby MPs such as himself will be safe from the dislike of their constituents, having only Party bosses and Westminster courtiers to please.
The silly Liberal imposrure of a referendum on whether we are in or out implies that if we are in we have no say whatsoever in what sort of EU/ Common Market it is . Suppose we simply want trade-access and no more ..like Norway.
Why does he hate proper accountable democracy?
Why does he care so little about the this country’s right to govern itself ?

On Tax and Spend He is equally noisy in his condemnation of waste but he is himself a socialist being a member of the Beveridge group whose credo is state intervention ie high tax and spend . Such extensions of the state will inevitably lead to more waste by the simple process of putting more people in charge of spending money that is not theirs ,on people they do not especially care about .
Does he want waste or not or does he think the public sector can only be saved by an endless line of Norman Bakers ?

On Waste-He has done some good work on waste notably in uncovering the catastrophic wastefulness of the regional development bodies, notably SEEDA. But he himself has wasted god knows how much money asking endless questions about Kelly so as to conjure a science fiction conspiracy about Iraqi hit squads and sell the nonsense to the Daily mail for £50,000. That's some sweet action on top of your salary, but why are we paying for the research?

On Liberty-Why does he waste so much effort on Hunting as if Foxes were people in little furry coats . Foxes are subject to annual culls and hunters are hurting no-one . Is this not a matter of civil Liberties ? Similarly he did nothing to assist in stopping the smoking bann which has all but ended night life in Lewes, not that he would notice but some of us liked the pubs .
Why is his attitude to Liberty only the freedom to do what he likes doing ?

On England -Does he not find it increasingly odd that as a Scot representing a n English Constituency he is busily handing our powers away to the EU when his own country is closed to the English in politics and currently has a bizarre overrepresentation in English affairs having votes both in its own Parliament and ours ?

On The Slippery Liberal Party - Why was it reported recently in the Independent that Nick Clegg was in negotiations to do a power sharing deal with Brown and is not absolutely unreasonable that the Liberals will not say who they are going to do a deal with if anyone prior to the election.?We know he hates the Conservatives so what is the point of Labour-lite other than to support Gordon Brown?

On His Local Mafia -How does he feel about the propaganda that endlessly appears in the local Press the Gazette and Viva which is pro Baker.?Other views are ruthlessly excluded.

Go Straight To City Unslicker ( Do not pass Go)

http://cityunslicker.blogspot.com/

Enough of my wibbling anyone who looks in go straight to the abode of Mr. Unslicker. He is not one to dramatise and if he says Armageddon , Armageddon out of here . His best ever post and tells the story behind the story. Its scary stuff but we might as well know

Cast Out Of Heaven

Over on Compass the far left , in the person of David Baines are ,as usual , telling us we ought be Swedish , Danish or at any rate Scandinavian. ......

World Values Survey conducted by the University of Michigan ....Happiness relies on freedom from constraint and access to choice. Denmark comes out top in the survey in a grouping with the rest of Scandinavia. Social Democratic societies of Scandinavia enjoy ...‘increasing emphasis on subjective well-being, self-expression and quality of life' populations are not only simply surviving but living freer lives as active-participants in their countries (Inglehart 2006)..

I have been offering some helpful advice about importing alien species into an old country

In Kieron O'Hara’s excellent “After Blair” . the author teases out the sceptical roots of what might be termed c-onservatsim , often in creative tension with Libertarianism in the Conservative Party . One of the threads picked from the weave is the principle of limited knowledge . .The Conservative may follow an old winding path. The socialist or latterly New Labour managerialist cannot bear this insult to his Promethean ambition and immediately sets about the construction of a new shiny road .On each occasion such highways sink without trace in the forgotten swamp the Conservative sagely nods and pulls on his pipe. Muttering contentedly .. “Will they never learn” . This is why he is so deeply satisfied when the splendidly logical plans ( like tax credits) fall into comic chaos when they meet the real world .

The failure of galloping intervention under Brown has convinced many of the enduring wisdom of the sceptic. From public sector professionals to over regulated business to politicised police the cry is , “Just for gods sake , leave it alone for a second will you..”. So despite its antiquity such instincts have a currency today. Conceive then of the disdain with which silly essays by would be Guardian columnists picking aspects of country as if they could be poured undiluted into ours are regarded. They are ‘conceits’ both in the metaphysical and modern usage .Bourgeois entertainments with amore than wiff of the parochial.

The aforementioned tax credits show the good and bad of New Labour . It was conceived to vault what Keith Joseph called ‘The poverty trap’ , now the “underclass”. This is very much a live issue as 90% marginal disincentives and life expectancies of 54 in Glasgow East ,after ten years of redistribution ,attest. The Labour Party were well aware that means tested benefits would have distorting effects but instead of reducing tax at low-levels they increased “Targeted” hand outs at ever higher levels In principle , if you accept the Marxist derived preference for state intervention , this was a good idea . In practice however it has been calamitous

The overpayment fiasco (comprehensively predicted by the newly despised civil service ) ,sprung from the ignorance New Labour appeared to have about the American shrub from which their cutting was taken . There, deep individualist roots and the practice of personal tax returns had developed an acceptance and competence at handling personal finance at low levels of income. Here the crazed and hubristic notion that those involved would learn to fill in the sixty pages requited promptly and correctly inevitably lead to misunderstanding . ( This is not the only problem but the only one that concerns me here) The left’s charming infatuation with Scandinavia (now we have overtaken Germany as a tax and spend country) is founded on a fundamental error about the limits of knowledge. Its very form is an admission of defeat.

Polls are showing that Glasgow East may well fall to the SNP despite Harriet Harperon`s belated appeasement of Catholics over the embryology bill . If it does then Brown may well have to go. After Brown the challenge for the left is to start talking about what the state should ‘not’ do here .Each Compass essay advising this or that twiddle of the knobs tell me that a period in opposition if not a reformed Party political geography will be required .Be brave oh miserable lefties .The first instinct of we Tories having been cast from heaven was to cling to comforting fundamentalism. It will , I assure you , sink without trace carrying the Labour Party with it .

The Newmania surveillance satellite

OK so David Davies avoided humiliation but I remain ambivalent/mystified by the whole by-election. Fortunately now armed with my own intrusive surveiilance system I an in a position to spy on whoever I like .The first results are below:

Opinion
42 days is not a matter of principle, it is a matter of judgement and DD at another time might easily have taken the opposing view. At this point I have seen absolutely nothing that justifies the Police having such powers and the Parliamentary scrutiny is an insult to the intelligence . Inspector Knacker, we are assured , is too busy retiring at 50 defrauding the PA scheme bothering drivers and getting fat at his desk to put twice the bodies on this ,and must have six weeks .Well if they cannot make their case then it follows that Parliament is going to have to take their word for it . So much for scrutiny .

Evidence -The Newmania surveillance satellite picked this up from a Parliamentary scrutiny committee)

“This scrutiny committee accepts the man has a scowling demeanour and eyebrows that meet . The Police are right to continue their encrypting or de-encrypting or some long word such as appears at the end of a shampoo commercial ( Here’s the science bit ).”


Opinion
Still a couple of bombs and I will want anyone who looks funny banged up in perpetuity .Much more serious , in my view is the incremental encroachment both on the legal system and the casual spread of data /surveillance sharing and so on.
I am appalled at this perjurers charter ie anonymong witnesses for example. This truly strikes at the heart of open justice again handing power to the Police .So for me DD chose the wrong issue and the wrong time. We may have made some Liberal friends but they will soon be off. I would have far preferred to see him exclaim in anger that if witnesses to terrified for justice to be served , should we not start taking the streets back, before we return to the star chamber .
It was admittedly less than edifying to see Ian Paisley bought off , in fact the joke that Brown’s fixers persuaded him of the dangers of terrorism is so ridiculous its almost worth it .

Evidence .-The Newmania surveillance satellite picked this up from the 60 hour meeting with the DUP that saved Brown


”Bombs yew say ...thart sounds verry dangerous ...coo waaal I hard no Idea ...”


OPINION
Still this is part of Parliamentary democracy working imperfectly but as it always has done. It remains better than the alternatives including media stunt gestures and I cannot feel happy with the whole David Davies , toys –from –the pram-ite error.

Location Location Location

‘After sixteen months of often bitter disunity, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on Friday staged a “Unity Rally” in the town of Unity, …’
The symbolism of place is not exactly subtle over there is it . David Cameron`s choice of Glasgow east to make his most Conservative speech yet carries a far more powerful message :


Its has taken billions, literally billions to turn Glasgow East into Britain’s human tragedy and national disgrace . Here more than anywhere the progressive experiment is revealed as an evil. Horizontal ties are broken and replaced with the state tit from which 50 % of the working population suck ( Unemployment is 6.7% but incapacity benefit takes it up to 50%).Glasgow City as a whole has a male life expectancy of 71 years slightly lower than the Gaza strip at 72.Take the lush suburbs out and the true horror emerges , in this Constituency life is cheap and lived in no-go areas where gleaming regeneration projects are quickly covered in graffiti .Male life expectancy again tells the tale. Calmachie 64.5,(Uzbekistan 64.5 ), Parkhead 62 (Bangladesh 62 ),Dalmarnock 58 , (lower than Sudan) and Carlton is 54 .That’s fifty four in modern Britain on par with Gambia.

This is the welfare ghetto at its worst , it was here that Iain Duncan Smith was inspired to try and understand and fight broken Britain. It is here that David Cameron at great political risk chose to make a stand for personal responsibility. He said …“We talk about people being ‘at risk of obesity' instead of talking about people who eat too much and take too little exercise. We talk about people being at risk of poverty, or social exclusion: it's as if these things - obesity, alcohol abuse, drug addiction - are purely external events like a plague or bad weather.”

Labour have turned ordinary people into battery chickens stuffed with Pills and unable to walk .It has taken a culture of lies to remove dignity and even adulthood from these victims and it has taken successive weasel politicians frightened to tell the truth to create a third word disaster in the worlds fifth richest economy.

Conservatives have a job to do here above all and the first step is to tell the good people of Glasgow East that they are not dots in some Marxist text book. They are souls who make choices everyday. They are adults that will live with those choices and no-one else can do it for them. That is step one and David Cameron has made it daring the ghost of Major’s back to basics to haunt him.

There has been much discussion of this speech but in my view the most significant thing about was ‘where’ the next Prime Minister chose to make it.

Different Class

I was loitering with intent to irritate in the far left Compass site and came across this quote
“Was it Tony Blair in 1998 or John Prescott the year before who declared "we're all middle class now"? Or both? I am not sure it matters much who it was, but in retrospect the statement seems pretty central to the New Labour “ Some thoughts about class and New Labour then...

Odd isn’t it that the Blair administration claimed to have moved beyond class. In fact this was a weak imposture ,of a piece with the entire New Labour advertising campaign designed to convey the impression that the Labour Party as was had left socialism behind . As we know, once in power the Party back benchers reasserted themselves behind Brown and over the next ten years government spending increased buy 30 % .

A large part of this went towards turning the post manufacturing regions into welfare wastelands where a new class , the underclass, was born. By bizarre logic infantilising hand outs were all the more necessary as many of the recipients were also paying more tax than ever directly and indirectly . These funded the pensions and sinecures of the “Public Sector Professional Class”.

The Working class structures that had sustained communities , already in trouble were shattered by the removal of fathers and floods of immigration . The calculation was that people once on the payroll could not escape and in any case would hardly vote for the Conservative Party. A little noticed fact was that 35% of Labour voters consistently put the BNP as their second choice. Since the Ealing result a succession of dog whistles have been blown at this ‘class’ but they have proved considerably less stupid than Labour had hoped and quite reasonable ignored the Damascene conversion of internationalist progressives to their communitarian culture .

So in one sense Blair was wrong , class is very much an issue and he has kept it that way. Class mobility as we know is now lower than in the seventies and has ground to all halt thanks to insane education welfare polices , marginal disincentives to work and the development of information industries.

In another sense the Blairites were right .The panic that created New Labour was that people were indeed becoming middleclass ,as the benefits of Capitalism freed by the Thatcher and Major years flowed into ever more pockets . As choice and independence spread people naturally had no further use for the Labour Party. This problem was papered over with witless jargon about social entrepreneur-ship .The real project was to expand the class of “Public Sector professionals “ , immigrants and the lower grade unionised public sector class , a vestigial remnant of the time when Labour had a purpose .This is the Labour Constituency. Without it they are extinct.

Thus class division remains essential to the left , it is recast and failing but class war is rarely far from the surface of their rhetoric . Conservatives must recognise that the way to beat labour is not by engaging in this war but by spreading opportunity .

The aim must be 'One Nation' at peace with itself .

Big Lies

I am not really blogging but the joy of the left in dragging Ray Lewis down included this remark from one Tim H , “So, it should come as no surprise that Lewis is a Tory. Of course he'd join the party for whom corruption is bread and lying is butter.”
Now the idea that New labour can lecture anyone about integrity struck me as so wilfully topsy turvy that both barrels were required and I duly obliged ...

Ooo look the pygmy tribe have found something their atomic sized intellects can grasp .“ He bad man he Conservative “ …and out they come to play. Yes Tim , that’s right ,that’s all Jasper did in long tenure as a slush fund distributor working in the employ of the Labour Party ,( and for what period has Lewis worked for the Conservative Party …oh yes not at all .). Similarly , Lord Levy did (not )sell peerages , then again the Brown Blair administration really thought there were WMDs and did (not )sex up the information . In the same sort of way, the government has (not) misrepresented crimes statistic ,inflation figures and the national debt by (not) ,creating fake PFI`s to keep it off the balance sheet and ( not) fighting a weekly battle to avoid proper accounting ,by which this , noticed -by-everyone , subterfuge will be rumbled .

I am certain that Balls is (not ) aware that his claims to have delivered top class education fly in the face of tumbling rankings as per OECD. No doubt they did (not) misrepresent immigration as recently revealed ( to anyone who did not know already) and did (not) continue to spout that myth about it being good for the economy ,in the knowledge it was fiction as revealed by Nigel Lawson`s crushing report . I daresay they did( not )tell us that 12,000 people would turn up from the EU , when in fact 600,000 did and did (not ) , defraud the electorate, to whom a referendum was promised on Lisbon …..

But hey we were also promised we were (not ) going to get Brown at all .We were going to get ..open clean government and that …wait for it …were (not) going to have tax rises.. Ha ha bitter ha. I expect Brown did not bribe the DUP to save himself , they probably did (not) understand terrorism all that well .

Consider this three volume novel worth of invention- “Stability through a stable and competitive tax regime and stability through light touch regulatory government “ What a joke , except in his Mansion house speech Brown was not joking , if he had been it would not have been so funny . The Chamber of Commerce said it was costing about 60 billion a year to comply with red tape which everyone in business knew already. Then what about the greatest lie “Prudence “.This ,when Darling will be borrowing about 50 billion ,which is why we are all ,as Boris would say, emerded.

This may be why Labour are (not ) on course to have a rump of 160 MPs left if there was an election tomorrow (Polly Toynbee ) and that’s counting about 50 in Wales and Scotland where devolution was (not ) a scam to count Labour votes twice . Oh and I Daresay the Unions are (not) doing a deal right now to be delivered after the election for their money .After all as Bernie Ecclestone will tell you they do (not) do deals . Brown of course ,as the man responsible for running Labour’s campaign, did (not )know anything about the fund raising.

If lies however have not be told by anyone it was Ray Lewis , if indeed they have been at all. New Labour ,on the other hand , is a lie from top to bottom ,a big lie and whilst you may know Goebell’s dictum “If you tell a lie enough…people will come to believe it “ you may not know the qualification
“ The lie can be maintained only for such time that the state can shield the people from the political economic or military consequences of the lie “

PS Quote nicked from Geoff Randall recently in the DT

Allegiance

For Gordon Brown “Authority forgets a dying king. “-Alfred Lord Tennyson ah poetry the one thing we are really good at ..(well its not football is it )
Reading Simon Heffers tirade at the lazy politics of the artist class ( In the Telegraph), I was wondering when it was exactly that “Good” in art came to be the same as “shocking” or "new” . It was never going to be easy to produce much of lasting quality in such an environment, and sure enough snotty hankies on beds and turds in vinegar have figured large .
I am ,by the way, unimpressed by the arty crowd’s plea for royalties for each resale of their work. Why should a kitchen appliance installer not earn royalties from each resale of a house …and then again for all eternity ?
Anyway much of our thinking about the place of art stems from Victorian Romanticism, and so I was thumbing through some bits, looking for a Conservative Romantic to cheer myself up. I doubt I can claim Wordsworth but he did at least write these thrilling lines … (on Burke …. )

I see him, - old, but vigorous in age,
Stand like an oak whose stag-horn branches start
Out of its leafy crown, the more to awe
The younger brethren of the grove . . .
While he forewarns, denounces, launches forth,
Against all systems built on abstract rights,
Keen ridicule; the majesty proclaims
Of Institutes and Laws, hallowed by time;
Declares the vital power of social ties
Endeared by Custom; and with high disdain,
Exploding upstart Theory, insists
Upon the allegiance to which men are born.
.
Makes you go all misty ..well it does me anyway . The above picture of the Proms used to summon a British allegiance but after the Cameron/Clarke fudge on English democratic rights and Brown`s infantile mendacity I am far from certian where my allegiance is nowadays . Still while I touch on the comstitutional dog`s breakfast Labour have made of the union , don`t you wish Tony Blair`s last act was to say to the Scots "I release you.... " Cherie baby would have sniggered and so would I

When Did The Great Awk Jump The Shark ?

Fonzy appears in photo op canoodle with The Balls in her majesties Torygraph today. He is actually more associated with the sudden loss of credibility than anything else now, having created the defining image of a show that has lost its way.( When he jumped the shark on water-skis)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_the_shark

Its hard to remember that Gordon Brown ever had a pre jumping-the-shark period, but the moment it all started to go South for me was Osborne’s announcement on Inheritance tax, …or maybe pussying out of the election…..or maybe the 10p tax fiasco ….or Northern Rock,……bribing the DUP……Actually he seems to have jumped the entire shark population of the Pacific. Anyway he is well into the period when Fonzy ‘making out’ , started to look like paedophilia . Perhaps they `ll give Milliband his own show , like the pointless Chachi ….he will never make his Mork IMHO.Woah !

PS Despite all its self awareness the Simpsons "Jumped the shark "a long time ago as well.

Brown Tragic ? He Wishes....

-"I was asked yesterday by Mark Lawson which Shakespearean character David Cameron most resembled. This was in the context of Jonathan Freedland's comments about Gordon Brown having the jealousy of Othello, the ambition of Macbeth and the indecision of Hamlet.” ( Jeremy Hunt )


This blog is not really open for biz due to the demands of new born twins and the commensurate loss of sanity that entails. However while we are twiddling our collective thumbs this is super new game which Shakespearian character is Brown and why. These were my thoughts :

I think I good make a good case for Iago. I was thinking of his off hand loathing of Cassio .Cassio ( Blair ) has a "daily beauty" in him that makes Iago ugly. The inchoate rage of Caliban is obvious just add mobile phones, but I am inclined not to grant the Great Awk tragic status, even of a diabolical kind.

So I choose Dogberry , Bottom or better still Malvolio of 12th Night , a character too ridiculous for evil who is hilariously deluded about his attractions .Do you remember how he wears his yellow garters and leers like a goon having been tricked into believing these to be irresistible to Olivia .Critics have said that Malvolio's treatment borders on cruel and I admit Brown is now so pathetic it is becoming hard to watch… Achilles, whose sulking in his tent and homosexual obsession with his servant, is played for laughs in Troilus and Cressida may have a claim but overall Malvolio still does it for me .

Cameron is tricky... He is like Hamlet in his intelligence and awareness of "show " Hamlet finds truth in a performance ( The Mouse Trap). Let us hope he can find the strength and means to act when the time is right


Thanks to Aunti Flo who found this quote on shadow culture and heritage minister Jeremy Hunt's excellent new blog

Labour Play The Race Card Again

In a plan which is bound to be applauded by the BNP's Nick Griffin, Labour intends to drop a plan to make families pay a cash bond for relatives who visit from India and Pakistan, instead there will be heavy fines or the threat of jail if family members overstay.Liam Byrne has just told the BBC's Asian Network radio station that "what we want to do is have a new system but punish people if things go wrong." He was referring to people coming over for family weddings and then disappearing. Byrne said the government now wanted to "make sure that we can just hit people and hit people hard if their family member breaks the rules".


There really are no depths they will not sink to. Racist hogwash about the Poles in Crewe , British jobs for British ( fiction) and Enver Hodge moaning about the darkies on the housing list in Barking ;all nonsensical from an administration which has allowed immigration to quadruple.
The BNP polled 5.35 % across London, it has 55 Councillors it is posing real threat . Look at Stoke on Trent here ten years ago Labour had all 60 seats . Now it has 4 wards in a loss to independent and others amounting to a working class revolt .Or Barnsley where the BNP polled 21%,.Have another look at he Ealing result , by the way, serious inroads were made by the BNP , unnoticed at the time in the crowing about the Brown bounce .Labour’s support among C2 DE demographics was at a lower level in 2005 than the crushing defeat of 1983.
Labour abandoned the working classes on the assumption they have nowhere else to go .The arrogance has been stupefying and now they are paying the price . On immigration it is far too late .Once again they did not fix the roof when it was sunny , only the Conservative Party offers a cap on numbers we can see.
On the Continent the split of the working class vote off to the far right is commonplace and it look as if we are going the same way. As if things were not bad enough for Brown he now has another front he cannot defend. The Liberals in his Parry will not countenance real action so he has to pose. By doing so he alienates Liberal England even more but will achieve nothing for the target ex Labour voter.
This clearly shows we are at the end game .

Labour have forgotten winning and they are about surviving. This in scorched earth stuff and on the other side the Ashcroft money is being switched to the new marginals in operation Landslide


If there was one day when it finally happened this is it

New Labour is dead

Target Practice

I have been chatting to nice Mr. Hopi Sen about targets … do look at his blog he is such a good writer . Sadly he is still convinced of the wisdom of Brownite targets .....

Against Targets :

It is not so much detail of Hopi`s piece as the direction such thinking would imply . It would, for example, imply an end to private provision, as this will respond to commercial pressure and elude top down manacles .It would imply an end to varied and independent schooling as this is specifically designed to avoid the dead clammy hand of state . It is in fact 'Brownism' and if you look at tomorrows ICM Poll you will seewhy , firstly ,I say right or wrong , you might as well forget it. …Brown is dead in the water ; time to move on. I do have more imprtnat objections than fashion though. Some examples ..

Mr Blair placed a target for LA s to collect a certain quantity of recyclable waste ( or rather the EU did but I digress..) , Many authorities insisted residents separated their waste and thus met their targets . There was , however, a shortage of depots so some LA s ended up putting the recyclables back in with the rest whist collecting their bonus for having achieved “collection”

The RAEs were intended to justify University funding by measuring research. Well all the universities soon became adept at playing that game and made costly changes for the sake of funding. As the level remained uniform ,however ,no information was acquired by the system, and the same pot was shared in ignorance of a now distorted system. Targets for deaths in operation lead to an unwillingness to take on dangerous operations .and on it goes…. How tempting to imagine a better target and it would al work …this is the Brown trap.

Theoretically it might be possible in the NHS , say by the provision of a gigantic and costly data base , to get enough information and be reactive enough to fine tune at all times .The expense is prohibitive though and the complexity itself soon reaches a point of negative return as no-one understands it . This is a common complaint as erosion responsibility and devalues decisions and the workers themselves . This why we have the odd phenomenon of the Public Sector turning on their paymasters .They are insulted daily from teacher to Doctor to Policeman


What about safety in the workplace . On construction sites certain levels of competence are require and in order to escape Prosecution it is handy to be able to demonstrate that the Company provided the training and the employee was indeed trained . Such is the legal “Terror “ that Companies are now able to buy software that automatically provides the training in accessible modules and requires the employee to sign off his having watched and learnt. The soft ware logs what is in effect a ‘hold harmless’ from employee to Company.

The perverse result is that the sum of knowledge held by real people reduces as does the level of safety over time , the legal responsibilities of the Company will soon shrink to 19th century proportions . Again this is quite real and accounts for the rise in Industrial accidents of late ( not cuts in H and S funding as bureaucrats pretend). The FSA has had much the same effect on Financial services eventually and it was their hopeless tick box approach that allowed Northern Rock to sail unnoticed into trouble although the market had noticed some time before. This was a directly attributable to Brown reforms
.
.Now any private company would use models as aids but in real competition these models are themselves subject to cumulative evolution. The Conservatives as I see it wish to reincorporate human knowledge into systems . This need not be a market but might equally be something developing over time like Common Law.
What I think , Hopi objects to is that on the ground politicians of all Parties will be averse to advocating a sort of Laissez faire for health or education. It is so much easier rhetorically to bang your fist and talk about funds , targets and plans . Nonetheless we must move from the IBM mega computer into the PC age of interacting units .It is my belief that the people feel in their water that Brownism has been tried and failed .

The Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries and food ( MAFF) in 2002 met 10 of its 13 targets . Sadly one of the three targets it missed was to prevent the outbreak of serious disease .

Never mind it did all the easy ones before it was dismantled

Fertile Newmania is Busy

Good news , the Newmania family has grown by the addition of two boys (twins) and I am far too busy for politics . I attribute this fecundity to our marital bed. I have no further need of it if you are interested in buying ....