Guido Fawkes and MP Dorries – very chummy
Well this is very cosy isn’t it? Today blogger Guido Fawkes lets us know that he kindly delivered a letter to Damian McBride on behalf of Tory MP Nadine Dorries.
With a bemused look on his face he accepted the official Court papers, served by yours truly, on behalf of Nadine Dorries
Clearly Ms Dorries couldn’t do it herself, and needed two bloggers – the other being Tory Bear – do it on her behalf.
And here I was under the impression that Guido Fawkes detested parliamentarians. Seems the Tory ones are worth doing a favour for though.
Only last week he was telling us how he and Chris Grayling shared a laugh over the Mayor of Baltimore spoof. All very chummy.
Any implication that Guido is partial to Tory MPs is, of course, rubbish.
Curious that Guido doesn’t mention his mate Iain Dale’s libel against Tom Watson MP. Must have been an oversight…
On Twitter:
@BorisWatch: When Dorries comes to power, all legal work will be handled by people with drink driving convictions.
Update: The video posted by Tory Bear is an instant classic.
A comment underneath:
Is the cameraman pleasuring himself at the thought of Kate Garraway in close proximity? How else can we explain Tory boy’s shaky handiwork? It does rather look like the video a stalker might take.
Tsk. Some people have no appreciation of such art.
Edlington: sympathy for the Devil Brothers
IN ALL likelihood, the workmates and neighbours of two twentysomethings formerly known as Robert Thompson and Jon Venables do not realise with whom they are associating.
But as ten year old boys in 1993, these two young men, playing truant from primary school, abducted two year old James Bulger from a shopping precinct in Bootle in which they had been on a shoplifting spree.
They took him to a railway embankment two miles away. Once there, they tortured and killed the toddler in the most brutal manner imaginable, and then placed his body over the railway tracks before leaving the scene. The corpse was subsequently sliced in two by a train.
The parallels with what happened in the Yorkshire village of Edlington last April – which saw two young brothers aged ten and 11 subject two other little boys aged nine and 11 to a sadistic sexualised attack that left one of them fighting for his life – should be obvious.
Watch: BBC News blooper by presenter
(posted yesterday, via Mark Pack)
‘Big Brother Watch’ and Alex Deane
The Sunday Times yesterday carried news of a civil liberties campaign being launched by the TaxPayers’ Alliance in October.
TPA chief executive Matthew Elliott wants the campaign, called Big Brother Watch, “to become the central hub for the latest on personal freedom and civil liberty – a forum for information and discussion on something that directly affects British citizens in their everyday lives.”
In response, Spy Blog challenges many of the claims in Elliott’s article and asks:
Why exactly should Spy Blog, or anybody else who cares about these issues, support Yet Another Campaign Organisation rather than existing ones like:
• the NO2ID Campaign,
• Privacy International,
• GeneWatch UK,
• Open Rights Group
• the Foundation for Information Policy Research
• Liberty Human Rights.
Study: NHS improves hugely under Labour
A new study by the British Medical Journal shows that the NHS has improved massively since 1997.
It indicates that reforms have decreased waiting times and increased equality of services.
The report aimed to determine, “whether observable changes in waiting times occurred for certain key elective procedures” since 1997,
and analysed the “distribution of those changes between socioeconomic groups as an indicator of equity”.
The results, from surveying over 400,000 patients indicated that:
Mean and median waiting times rose initially and then fell steadily over time. By 2007 variation in waiting times across the population tended to be lower. In 1997 waiting times and deprivation tended to be positively related.
By 2007 the relation between deprivation and waiting time was less pronounced, and, in some cases, patients from the most deprived fifth were waiting less time than patients from the most advantaged fifth.
The study concluded that:
Between 1997 and 2007 waiting times for patients having elective hip replacement, knee replacement, and cataract repair in England went down and the variation in waiting times for those procedures across socioeconomic groups was reduced.
Many people feared that the government’s NHS reforms would lead to inequity, but inequity with respect to waiting times did not increase; if anything, it decreased. Although proving that the later stages of those reforms, which included patient choice, provider competition, and expanded capacity, was a catalyst for improvements in equity is impossible, the data show that these reforms, at a minimum, did not harm equity.
More information on this BMJ page.
Green Party conf.: Caroline Lucas speech
Caroline Lucas, Green Party leader, speaks to their autumn conference in Hove. 1.2 million people voted for the Greens in the 2009 European elections. Caroline is running for Parliament in Brighton Pavilion.
Tories lose quarter of members since Cameron
David Cameron’s charm offensive has failed to attract new members to the Tories – or keep hold of tens of thousands of people who were already in the party when he arrived.
Local Conservative parties have lost almost a quarter of their rank-and-file members since Mr Cameron took over in late 2005.
Although the Tories have enjoyed a huge opinion-poll lead for several months, they have not been able to translate the surge in popularity into an increase in membership on the scale experienced by Labour during Tony Blair’s early years in charge.
The total membership in more than 200 constituency associations – barely a third of the overall number – who provided relevant figures to the elections watchdog fell from 185,000 to 145,000 between December 2005 and December 2008. The constituencies experiencing falls include “safe” seats, the bases of shadow Cabinet members and target seats that must be taken if the Tories are to win the next general election.
BNP on Question Time: a farce made in heaven
The BBC has to let Nick Griffin appear on Question Time, for at least two reasons: legal and prudential. The legal reason is that the BBC is constitutionally sworn to treat all political parties equally. The BNP now has two MEPs; for the BBC not to allow it to speak would be a clear case of politicised partiality. It has to invite Griffin.
The prudential reason is that excluding the BNP will play into the party’s myth that it suffers from a conspiracy perpetrated by liberal elites stifling the opinions of “ordinary” people. If the BNP operated a no-platform policy vis-a-vis Griffin, this would substantiate the myth of persecuted outsider underdogs his party has crafted with effective electoral results.
Taking the prudential point, one could go further and argue that the best way to tackle the BNP is to debate them: putting them on a platform makes them easier to shoot at. On this point, I’m convinced of the classic liberal arguments espoused by Mill in On Liberty: the best way to destroy a pernicious opinion is to publicly expose it; the most counterproductive way of tackling such an opinion is to try and stifle it.
Except – and here’s the irony – QT is highly unlikely to achieve that, for the simple reason that QT is not a platform for debate. It’s an opportunity for political figures to sound-off their own prejudices without being subjected to scrutiny. And its format necessarily makes this so.
continue reading… »
More on why we must stay in Afghanistan
Last year when traveling around Nepal, a friend who worked out there said she saw India as basically an imperial nation telling the Nepalese government what to do. India controls all the main trade routes going into Nepal (the border with China is closed) and this allows them to dictate policy.
I highlight this point to illustrate that in South Asia, all the big powers are in a sense imperialists – trying to exert lots of influence outside their borders. Afghanistan has always been a target of proxy wars, with India, Pakistan, Iran, Russia, China and USA trying their hands in various degrees.
If we leave, the game begins again. I said this as much in an article for Guardian CIF on Friday: that staying in Afghanistan right now outweighs the potential dangers of leaving: the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, their attempts to take over Pakistan, and stir trouble in India. With over a billion and half people in the immediate region, the deaths caused by more instability, which is inevitable, would outweigh the death-rate right now.
I highlighted a comment on my own blog in response to my article, by a Pakistani, on the menace that the Taliban is. And I think to leave the Afghanis under their mercy is not a viable position to take: for humanitarian reasons and because it would mean we’d have to intervene again sooner or later (if war broke out between India and Pakistan over terrorist attacks).
continue reading… »
Welfare handouts, idle people and Michael Portillo
On August 30, former Tory MP Michael Portillo penned a Sunday Times article carrying the headline ‘Idle young should be entitled to nothing‘, a celebration of the ideology and beliefs of controversial American libertarian Charles Murray, a bloke who gained fame in the 1980s and 1990s for his statements about “the underclass” and the alleged link between ethnicity and intelligence (see here for an overview).
Particularly surprising is the fact that the champion of such ideas is Michael Portillo, the man who, a few years ahead of David Cameron, called for a Tory makeover that would disentangle the party from the deepest right-wing morass it was stuck in. Compare in fact Portillo’s mid-90s ‘SAS speech’ with the cuddly toy TV personality currently hopping from one settee to another on Andrew Neil’s This Week.
In any case, Portillo is guilty of superficially rehashing ideas that don’t have a leg to stand on now any more than they did back in the Eighties. Notions that go back and forth like a tennis ball between Daily Mail columnists and neo-Conservative politicians to the point that they’ve grown into their default ideological background.
One phrase in particular struck me for its staggering degree of superficiality.
continue reading… »
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