The Chloe-ification of the Conservative party
David Cameron will win the next election, but the result will not be a Conservative government. That’s the proposition Simon Heffer advances in the Daily Telegraph this morning. And note how he says that like it’s a bad thing.
What he is actually trying to argue is that a Cameron administration would not be a Thatcherite administration. He’s probably right, but that’s a different matter altogether.
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The TPA: praising merit, talent and a juicy inheritance
The TaxPayers’ Alliance’s latest report, "Tax and entrepreneurship: How the tax system impedes the creation of new firms and decreases employment", contains four familiar ingredients:
1) A foreword by someone well-know (or at least not completely unknown)
2) A generous handful of footnotes (whether relevant or not)
3) Some elaborate formulae (to add a scientific veneer)
4) A hard-hitting press release (however flimsy the research).
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Irony still exists, despite Jeremy Clarkson
Trying to understand what we find funny by dissecting comedy routines is roughly as effective as trying to do so by dissecting the brains of Jim Davidson fans. And slightly less funny. Charlie Brooker wrote a good, but not very funny, column to this effect on Monday.
In the same Guardian comedy special, Brian Logan wrote a bad, and not very funny, column about the ‘new offenders’ of comedy. It’s made worse by the fact that his initial thesis that sexism and racism are back, wearing an Irony Cloak that makes their attackers manifest themselves as Humourless Sandal Wearers, isn’t a bad one at all.
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Why we should say no to Red Toryism
Sunny recently wrote of the danger posed by Red Toryism to the left, following a Compass debate on Left and Right Communitarianism.
He argued that the left was unable to produce an effective counter-argument to Phillip Blond’s Red Toryism. He’s not alone in thinking that the left is in a state of intellectual disarray. It’s a symptom of the collapse of the New Labour project and the vacuum it has left behind it.
This intellectual predicament is nothing new. The Labour Party originally emerged out of Liberalism and developed its own socially conservative brand of communitarian politics – Labourism. It was never distinct enough nor intellectually confident enough to break ideologically with Liberalism. At the heart of Labour remains an unresolved conflictual relationship between Liberalism and communitarianism. This dilemma has tended to dominate the left more widely and kept various forms of socialism on the periphery.
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What is the Tory vision for foreign policy?
On paper at least, William Hague seems like he could be a qualified & competent Foreign Secretary. Ideological differences aside, the former Tory leader is regarded as one of the smartest men in his party, is a keen debater and someone who apparently possesses a strong interest in, and grasp of, British history. These qualities (particularly the last) are all important in a top diplomat, and I think it’s safe to say they have not been present in every one of Labour’s foreign ministers.
Likewise, the vision Hague recently articulated for the future of British foreign policy is – again, on paper – a positive start, and one which does well to reflect both the global economic realities of the present and the breadth of challenges our government will face in the future.
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Is Attlee relevant to our economic troubles?
noticed a letter in the Guardian this weekend written by Michael Bath of Rochester, Kent, which read:
Instead of interviewing four monetarist ex-chancellors [on the subject of public spending cuts], why don’t you explain how Attlee funded his programme of nationalisation, and founded the NHS, when the country had been virtually bankrupted by the second world war?
Workplace occupations: good for the left
I am just about old enough to remember the last time the British working class had the self-confidence to occupy workplaces threatened with closure. The Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work-in of 1971 was a major news story at the time, and may have done as much as anything to reverse Ted Heath’s tentative stab at Selsdon Man premature Thatcherism.
It was only later – when I became a Trot – that I learned the history of a tactic that, by definition, challenges the rights of the employing class to ownership and control of the means of production.
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Uninformed criticism of Child Poverty bill
The government will be introducing a child poverty bill, which aims by 2020 to ensure that no children are growing up in relative poverty.
Grassroots Tories have attacked this plan, because they claim it is mathematically impossible to achieve this. They combine this with amusing jokes about how the government is full of maths clowns, before going a bit quiet when it turns out that it is, in fact, they who are the maths clowns.
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An attempt to smear Mehdi Hasan from New Statesman
Mehdi Hasan is a recently appointed senior editor covering politics at the New Statesman magazine. I mentioned a week go on Pickled Politics that a minor kerfuffle blew up last week when an article he wrote about biased coverage of terrorists in the media was questioned by Harry’s Place blog.
He gave a stinging response. Obviously not happy with the way he had come back at them – it looks like now HP is running a smear campaign against him. Over the weekend they ran a post titled: ‘Mehdi Hasan Exposed. Part I – Atheists and disbelievers are “cattle” and “of no intelligence‘.
It’s worth pointing out that I don’t know Mehdi Hasan and apparently I met him years ago but don’t recall the incident. But it’s worth while deconstructing the post itself for the absurd question it raises.
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Why does the right keep believing in grammar schools?
Why do so many people think grammar schools are a way of improving social mobility? It’s not because the social research says they are. I suspect instead that plain error is involved.
One such error is the availability heuristic, mixed with survivorship bias. The handful of working class people for whom grammar schools were a means of upward mobility have high profiles, make lots of noise and get lots of attention. It’s easy, therefore, to over-estimate their numbers.
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» The real agenda behind Telegraph’s abortion investigation
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