Top Tory: I would only select fit women
The number of Tories who keep airing their views and embarassing leader David Cameron seems to be never-ending.
Alan Scard is in charge of selecting a Tory candidate for Gosport, where the sitting MP Sir Peter Viggers quit after trying to claim for a floating duck house on expenses.
In an interview with Channel 4 News today, when asked if he supported David Cameron’s attempts to introduce more women into parliament, he said:
If they are attractive yeah I would go for it.
He then added:
I suppose a woman…if they are attractive…I know it’s a sexist thing to say but you could get the blokes saying ‘Oh you know I would vote for her because she’s really attractive’ but then the other women say ‘Oh I don’t like her she’s too attractive.’
The chairman of Gosport Conservative Association is in the process of selecting a would-be MP from a list of candidates approved by Tory headquarters.
But Channel 4 News has learnt that activists in the Hampshire seat have clashed with the Conservative leadership over the type of MP they want.
More at Channel 4 News website.
Semenya and paranoia about being a woman
This is painful for me. I was scribbling notes in ‘The Female Eunuch’ and ‘The Whole Woman’ before I lost all my milkteeth; I worship her irreverent, punchy prose; but there’s no escaping it. These days, Germaine Greer is a prejudiced, ignorant dickwad.
In her rather confused verdict on the Caster Semenya controversy, Greer comes up with the following gem today:
Nowadays we are all likely to meet people who think they are women, have women’s names, and feminine clothes and lots of eyeshadow, who seem to us to be some kind of ghastly parody, though it isn’t polite to say so. We pretend that all the people passing for female really are. Other delusions may be challenged, but not a man’s delusion that he is female.
Greer hardly does any better in the grand game of unthinking prejudice bingo than the disgusting commentators who have decided that just because Semenya, a phenomenally high-achieving athlete, is big, butch and brilliant at sports, she can’t be a girl.
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Quote of the day
A bit of light entertainment on a Friday afternoon from Freeborn John:
LPUK [Libertarian Party UK] showed some early promise, I thought, but seems to have turned into the saloon bar at a home counties golf club; its members have, for some reason, elected as their leader a cross between Captain Mainwaring and David Icke.
All very odd.
The police and their tasers
The latest figures released on the use of tasers by police forces across the country are starting to look concerning. While the jump from 187 uses between October to December 2008 to 250 during January to March this year can be explained by how the Home Office allowed Chief Officers to decide when “specially-trained” units can be deployed with the weapons, it doesn’t explain why different forces are using them far more readily than others.
The most startling are the number of uses by Northumbria police, which since April 2004 has used tasers in one way or another on 704 occasions, 4 more than even the Met has. This is an astounding number, especially when compared to another force of similar size and with a similar urban environment, Merseyside, who also took part in the same trial as Northumbria and which has used them just 76 times in total.
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Tom Harris: Sucking up to the rich
Tom Harris MP has re-posted his article to Guardian CIF and responds to my criticisms of his opposition to the idea of a High Pay Commission:
Sunny Hundal at Liberal Conspiracy, in particular, accuses me of seeking rightwing adulation by seeking to protect the rich. He’s not entirely wrong. I want the Labour party to continue to win the support, not just of our core vote, but of those Thatcher and Major supporters who switched to us in 1997 and who stuck with us for another one-and-a-half elections.
But if supporters of a high pay commission are concerned about inequality, why are they focusing so much on those who are furthest away from poverty? Where are the measures for taking the lowest paid workers out of tax altogether? And how do they expect the poorest in the land to react when told that, although their own circumstances are to be entirely unaffected by the advent of the commission, at least a few people they’ve never met or heard of are worse off as a result? Gosh, I can feel the gratitude already …
Put aside whether you like the idea of a HPC or not, it’s more amazing to consider this is coming from a Labour MP.
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thelondonpaper: will you miss it?
New International today announced it was closing thelondonpaper.
Media Guardian story:
The paper will continue publishing for about a month while News International consults with 60 staff members. It is understood that the London Paper’s final day of publication is likely to be Friday 18 September.
Today’s announcement signals an end to the London freesheet wars, which began almost exactly three years ago in August 2006, when News International decided to launch an afternoon freesheet and Associated Newspapers retaliated to protect the London Evening Standard and its morning freesheet Metro by launching London Lite.
Perhaps the impending paywalls made the freesheet a difficult fit within the Murdoch empire. Or perhaps Rupert Murdoch has just given up on throwing money away.
Either way, it marks another recent media failure, especially after the bad investment that myspace turned out to be.
On twitter, most people were fairly ambivalent.
all you below par journalists beware – londonpaper staffers are gonna eat ya’ll for dinner.
The London Paper is set to close – thank f*ck for that, just the pthers to go and the streets will be ours again http://tr.im/wLNt
Can’t believe The London paper is closing. How am I gonna find out where Lily Allen went to dinner last night now?
the london paper is no more? what what? Do I have to downgrade to the metro!?
@samranger omg. How will I ever feature in the london paper’s lovestruck section now? Devastated.com
why would they close The London Paper- everyone knows its so much better than the Lite!
Are you sad or elated London is going to be slightly more cleaner? Or perhaps you’re pissed that Associated Newspapers won the battle?
What we accept when we accept individual freedom
There is a natural tension between social conservatism and social liberalism, and not one that can be broken down on the usual left-right or Labour-Conservative axis.
Thus there are many socialists opposed to supercasinos, lap dancing clubs and 24 hour drinking, on the grounds that such activities are both detrimental to working class communities and carried on for private profit.
I happen think that attitude is wrong, and that the left should back the right of adults of all classes to engage in gambling, voyeurism and prodigious alcohol consumption if they elect so to do, irrespective of whether we approve personally.
At the same time, I acknowledge that the red puritan stance is a legitimate opinion with a traditional base in Britain’s ‘more Methodist than Marxist’ labour movement.
There is a similar cleavage on the political right. From the outside, it looks mostly an age thing. Thatcher’s children tend to be of the ‘let it rock’ school, extending the logic of the free market into the personal sphere. Yet at the same time, the Cameroons see no contradiction in harping on about ‘Broken Britain’.
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What difference a bit of research can make
One of the following articles was based on a couple of anecdotes, copying down some government spin and personal prejudice on the part of the author.
The other was written after doing some proper research and reporting the opinions of people who work day-to-day to help unemployed people. Can you guess which is which?
Jenni Russell, Nov 2008 – “We must dare to rethink the welfare that benefits no one:
The left has long been blind to the dependency culture that deters adults from flexible work and damages their chlidren”
Jenni Russell, August 2009 – “Some talk about welfare to work. The poor know it as welfare to destitution: The unemployed are being forced to take huge risks with their security when they move into the world of low-paid labour”
A better response to the financial crisis
contribution by Duncan Weldon
The current economic downturn is a crisis of finance. Over the last twenty years alone the world has witnessed a half dozen crises: the bursting of the Japanese ’bubble economy’ in 1989, the Nordic banking problems of the early ‘90s, the Mexican ‘Tequila Crisis’ of 1994, the 1997 Asian Crisis, the Russian Crisis of 1998 and the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000.
What all of these various episodes have in common is that a problem that began in the financial markets was allowed to spill out into the real economy, often with severe consequences.
So far the left, whilst rightly calling for further regulation is not really advancing a specific argument beyond vague talk of bonus caps and clawing back previous pay.
Neither of these are a bad idea, but any attempt to reform the financial system needs to be based on firmer grounds.
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Twitter wars: right-whingers not happy
You may have seen Charlie Brooker’s clip calling Dan Hannan a few names on TV yesterday.
Some right-wingers with no sense of humour clearly did not take lightly to their poster-boy getting denigrated so badly.
Writer James Delingpole, best known for writing climate change denial rubbish for the Spectator, shed some tears on his blog:
Normally the joy of Brooker is that whatever he says, you think: “That’s so true.” But in this case it just isn’t. Or funny. And I’m really not saying that because I’m a friend of Dan’s. (There’s probably even a schadenfreude part of me which quite enjoys seeing the overexposed baldie being given his comeuppance) (xxxxDan). I’m saying it because, judging Brooker by his own high standards, it’s lame, totally uninsightful, woefully unamusing. And because, worst of all, it evinces exactly the kind of intellectually lazy, identikit-left, student-bar, group-think which Brooker is normally so quick to condemn and mock.
Rather fittingly, Charlie Brooker let loose on twitter saying:
What a clueless, rat-faced, simpering, humourless, piss-writing, fuck-of-a-shit: http://tinyurl.com/delingcuntmorelike
And then again.
Delingpole defends himself:
@charltonbrooker. Oi. Less of the rudeness. I was coming at you from a position of love and admiration. Ungrateful warthog-faced cunt.
Will Heaven (who?), a fellow blogger of Delingpole, annoyed he was missing out on the action, defends his mate:
Just lost any remaining respect for @charltonbrooker after his utterly rude, boarish and spiteful attack on @jamesdelingpole
And then adds:
@charltonbrooker Go back to your windowless hovel to write funnier jokes!
But just as it was all getting quite amusing to watch, Charlie Brooker says:
@JamesDelingpole How dare you. I’m a walrus-faced c**t not a warthog-faced c**t. But let’s not fight: @WillHeaven seems to be getting upset
Oh well, at least you can watch the video clip again.
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