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 ....

Got Carried Away

I have been reading Hopi Sen and gathered a few thoughts on marriage. His stuff is very good as entertainment if morally corruping and wrong


A good amble through of the standard apologist response to inconvenient facts Hopi .I am not quite sure what you have said here that is not said on daily basis in the Guardian new Statesman and the BBC, but you do say it endearingly
The Press , you imply , are perfectly beastly mention the lifestyle of Ms. Mathews . First box ticked then, the lie that the media is dominated by dreadful right wing tendencies …no mention of Murdoch ? Shame .Karen’s previous record of exploiting relationships for housing and benefits is relevant in that such a morally degraded creature would plausibly exploit her child .The social welfare and housing system are of course complicit in the process even if responsibility mainly rest with the doer of the deed. I will not excuse her , as you do , on the basis that ‘society is not fair’ .
Then you fight a valiant battle against the claim made by absolutely no-one that marriage universally ensures moral behaviour . You refute the claim , made by no-one , that in history there have been no examples of immorality predating the current malaise and that marriage was at all times the norm.
You , mystifyingly , blame unemployment ( solution ..get a job) and pronounce yourself overjoyed at the replacement of the family with Soviet style crèches .
Having eaten your cake you then swing into having it , with a call for Labour to value the family and the community. That would be lovely but it would not be Labour who detest ordinary families and express this dislike with hard cash .
The point of this tawdry story can only be symbolic it happens to combine elements like idleness , callous disregard for ordinary values and a benefit suckling single/endlessly coupling mother . The themes that lie behind the way people react to it are not misguided at all. If you want to see flabbily gaseous political campaigning resting on a random meaningless event look at Blair on the Bulger case. Here there is at least some connection to the political reaction.
Leaving aside your Tardis excursions into deep history ( Look what vandals the Vikings were?) . The debate is actually this . Is marriage and family stability valuable ,should the government stop destroying it and how much is it actually the Government’s fault ? Finally is anything new really happening at all
Well it is a new problem . Children now are three times more likely to live in a one parent household than in 1972 ,and Britain now has 1.9 million lone parent households, an increase of 200,000 since Labour came to Power. In London, rules that made it harder to use marriage as means to immigrate lead to a third cut in the number of ceremonies . Marriage has slumped to its lowest level for 150 year and married couples as proportion in the adult population being 53.3%. They were about 2/3 in the 70s.Married women are out numbered by single and divorced women for the fist time this year. One in three children will experience divorce or separation before the age of sixteen and UNICEF.. yes even that left wing collection of whiners, say that Britain’s position as having the least happy children in the developed world is due to the high level of family breakdown.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter though ? Not so. ONS showed that children of single parent families are about twice as likely to have mental health problems .Children from Lone Parent Families are 2,.4 times as likely to smoke ,1.6 times as likely to drink alcohol .In the US 63% of teenage suicides , 90 % of homeless and 85% of juvenile prisoners are form Fatherless homes ( 70 % of UK young offenders coke from fatherless homes and again in the UK about the same proportion of young drug abusers . You might also look at also Patricia Morgan Civitas , Jill Kirby of the Centre for Policy Studies if you are interested in the truth.). Don’t say marriage is just incidental to the single parent story either .Only one in twelve married couples par within five years of the child’s birth for unmarried couples that number is ONE IN TWO.
Marriages decline has been disguised by immigration . It has had a disproportionate effect on white working class boys educationally . This was one of the conclusion of Iain Duncan Smiths report and it has not been refuted. How could it be ? Two out of five children are born to unmarried parents that figure was one in eight in 1980 so it is all getting worse
Alright then but is it New Labour’s fault ?I think the blame can be shared between Labour directly direct fault and the progressive wider constituency . On the obvious side of the equation is the money .The Institute of fiscal studies shows that if a couple are earning £5000 and £15000 a year respectively they will lose £5400 in benefits if they continue to share a home .Care have shown that many couples are £50 per week worse of f they stay together rising to £100. A Couple on £18000 who live in the same house pay a penalty of £8588 per year or 40% of their pre-tax income .A couple on £50,000 per year would be £7000 worse off . Shortfalls then are throughout the population . No wonder 200,000 cohabiting couples are pretending to live apart
I appreciate that social and economic changes are at work and also that groups like war widows show that single motherhood alone is not a curse . Nonetheless Brown abolished the marriage allowance ,already eroded ,and will not allow tax allowances to be transferable. Priority in the housing queue is routinely given to single mothers ,encouragement of the use of abortion as a contraceptive technique , the absurd myth of the girl who does not know she is pregnant or how it happened . (For God’s sake what world do these people live in, some bourgeois island of fantasy ?) Sure Start , has failed to be used by those it was intended for . National colleges for parenting and assorted gimmicks are only that and the blameless middleclass divorcee blonde with grief , wheeled it by the BBC are beside the point.
So it is entirely obvious why Karen Mathews seems to sum up so much that has gone badly wrong . It looks like Labour’s Britain. Sad bored useless and so pathetic as to invent a fantasy scam while idling a feral life away on benefits in social housing with no respect for anything least of all herself . Meanwhile who pays ….Ordinary working families struggling to live decent lives with no help from the state whatsoever .
The left assault on marriage and Conservative Plans to remove the impediments were the precursor to the first swing from Gordon brown to Cameron. One of the groups to do so were women and amongst them were as many unmarried mothers as any other group.

Letter To The Express

I always read the Westminster update with some irritation. Lewes is not , as the Sussex Express sometimes appears to think, exclusively populated by adherents of whatever concoction of mutually contradictory causes the Liberals are espousing this week. Recently Norman Baker’s disgraceful betrayal of the countries sovereignty, by supporting Gordon Brown over the Lisbon sell -out, received a line or two. His opinions on China are of no more importance than mine, and yet we are treated to lengthy hand wringing .
In what is left of Parliament, there are two Parties who might form a Government , and the Liberal Democrats are not one of them. I don’t suppose it does any harm to emote, but by electing a luxury issue, small Party MP, Lewes has decided , for now , it does not want a real say . I for one dearly hope Lewesians will review this position when we are eventually given the opportunity to get rid of New Labour and their side-kick supporters the Liberals .
In the meantime, by all means let us ‘terrify’ the Chinese authorities with meetings in the Town Hall ,it can’t hurt .I would , however , remind participants of Skibbereen. When the Skibbereen Eagle announced that it was "keeping an eye on the Czar of Russia" over his expansionist designs on China’ it condemned the blameless people of this pretty little Irish fishing village, to immortal mockery as a byword for parochialism .
In Mr. Bakers busy desire to obscure his irrelevance I hope he does not make Lewes the Skibbereen of England .