Heseltine: Cameron has to ditch new EU mates
David Cameron would be forced into a swift and humiliating retreat on Europe if he wins power, according to one of the elder statesmen from the last Conservative Government.
Lord Heseltine, the former Deputy Prime Minister, predicts that Mr Cameron will have to rejoin the European People’s Party (EPP) soon after the election. He is understood to have warned the party leadership at a private meeting last week that its currently Eurosceptic stance would be deeply damaging to Britain’s foreign policy interests. He suggested that the Conservative leader would inevitably have to “reach an accommodation” with the EPP — even though that would be extremely difficult to achieve without losing face and enraging party activists.
Earlier this year the party fulfilled a pledge made during Mr Cameron’s campaign for the leadership by severing ties with the mainstream, but federalist, EPP in the European Parliament. Instead, he has formed a new alliance with mainly east European rightwingers, who have been repeatedly accused of anti-Semitism and extremism. They include Michal Kaminski, of Poland’s Law and Justice party, and Robert Zile, of the Latvian party For Fatherland and Freedom.
This has alienated important allies in Europe, such as Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, and President Sarkozy of France. Berlin and Paris have been dismayed further by Conservative opposition to the Lisbon treaty, as well as signals from Mr Cameron that he would still seek to repatriate powers from existing agreements even if the treaty were ratified before the election.
So how did Nadine Dorries MP get selected?
You’ve got to feel a little sorry for Tory MP Nadine Dorries at times.
Not only does she seem rather confused by this whole business of the Tories mucking around with all-women shortlists, but the stress of it all seems to have brought on some differing views of the past.
Writing for ConservativeHome she said:
Three weeks before the 2005 general election I, a council estate Scouser, was selected as the Conservative candidate to represent a southern rural constituency. Because the vacancy occurred so quickly and so close to D-day, the party provided my association with a shortlist of seventeen candidates, of which, about five were women. Following a long day of interviews in hot sunny rooms, the list was whittled down to a shortlist of three.
The by-election procedure David Cameron spoke of yesterday existed then, however it was a little more generous to the association in terms of choice. At 9.10pm that evening, Sir Graham Bright invited me to walk back into a packed school hall where I had just delivered my final speech of the day. Met by a wall of applause and a standing ovation, with tears in my eyes, I was informed that I had been selected outright on the first ballot.
I have never, other than when looking into the eyes of my new born babies, felt as proud as I did on that night. That pride, that sense of achievement, the knowledge that I was selected on the basis of my performance and merit above all other candidates on that day is what enables me to hold my head up high in this place. It’s what humbles me every morning when I walk into Members’ Lobby. It gives me confidence to take on my male colleagues with not just a little bottle, because I got here by exactly the same process that they did. They are no better than me and I no lesser than they.
That is also not quite the account that you come across when you consult independent sources.
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Poll: BNP support down, windfall tax support up
A new Comres poll out today for the Independent shows that the weighted percentage of people who plan to vote for the BNP is down to their usual 2% average.
Following BBC Question Time there was some speculation their vote had jumped by a massive 50% from 2% to 3%. But that was also entirely within the margin of error.
Of respondents likely to vote, support for UKIP also remained low at 3%. Greens were slightly higher at 4%.
The poll also rubbished the myth that most BNP supporters stayed at home or had left other parties. When asked who respondents would vote for if they were legally required to, BNP support only rose to 3%. UKIP remained at 3% while the Greens rose to 7%.
Only 2% of all respondents saw themselves as natural BNP voters.
Windfall tax and others
66% of all voters, including 68% of Conservatives and 76% of Labour supporters agreed that a Windfall Tax should be imposed on banks. Only 25% disagreed.
53% of voters also thought Labour had a good chance of winning the next election.
45% of voters agreed with the statement: “David Cameron seems likeable but I am not sure I am ready to see a Conservative Government.”
Full data can be downloaded from here.
Full, astonishing results from BNP/QT poll
The full results of the Telegraph / YouGov poll following Nick Griffin’s appearance on BBC Question Time are now out.
An astonishing result too: more people in the country have positive feelings towards the Green Party than UKIP, despite the latter’s claims of representing the “silent majority” on the subject of immigration.
Only 11% of the public have a favourable impression of the BNP. Positive feeling towards the BNP has in fact fallen over the last 10 months.
And the poll also vindicates the BBC for the way it handled Question Time, with a significant increase in the number of people (over 11%) saying the BBC was right to invite him.
From here. Via Sarah Ditum on Twitter.
easyCouncil: Tory cheap flight from Hell
Officially, the proposals are known as ‘Future Shape’. But the unofficial designation ‘easyCouncil’ better spells out just what Tory plans to re-run 1980s-style local government cuts under a pseudo-funky nickname will mean for users of local authority services.
Barnet leader Mike Freer – a Conservative parliamentary hopeful, natch – openly admits that the Ryanair business model is his inspiration for slicing town hall expenditure by £15m over the next 18 months. Other Tory councils, from Coventry to Hammersmith & Fulham, are watching closely.
Predictably, the rightwing press is bigging the whole thing up. ‘Book me a seat on low-cost easyCouncil’, enthuses Philip Johnston in the Daily Telegraph this morning. He even goes on to mull the prospect of easyGovernment.
But what if local authorities really were run like bmibaby, as the British Midland subsidiary preposterously styles itself? Please step inside the Liberal Conspiracy time machine on a trip to the May 2010 London local government contest, as we follow Mr Freer’s speaker car:
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Over-compensating by turning pro-Israeli
My old psychology dictionary of terms informs me that overcompensation can be ‘a Freudian defence mechanism, whereby an individual attempts to offset weakness in an area of their lives by focusing on another aspect of it.
I thought back to those English Defence League marches, where 2 things are promised every time; that an Israeli flag will appear to show solidarity with Israelis over Muslims (like it was a simple choice between the two), and a couple of beered up scummies will produce the fascist salute (for examples see here and here).
It came up again when Nick Griffin stumbled over his words on Question Time tell the audience that his party was the only one to give full support to Israel and their right to exist during its clashes with Gaza, or more precisely:
[National Socialists in UK] loathe me because I have brought the British National Party from being, frankly, an anti-Semitic and racist organisation into being the only political party which, in the clashes between Israel and Gaza, stood full square behind Israel’s right to deal with Hamas terrorists.
Right-wing attempts to legitimise BNP policies
The BNP’s Question Time appearance has led to two predictable responses from the right.
First, they’ve been whinging that Nick Griffin was singled out by the audience. After declaring for years that ‘no platform’ was wrong and it was better to expose the BNP publicly, most now seem to think even exposing them on national TV is a step too far.
Apparently if the BBC invite a Holocaust denier and avowed racist on to TV we should just ignore their past and talk about his views on the Royal Mail strike. Pathetic. Nick Griffin repeatedly lied during QT. Why aren’t right-whingers talking about that?
The second predictable response is to play up a ‘surge’ in BNP support following the programme.
A Telegraph poll following BBC-QT said this:
The survey found that 22 per cent of voters would ‘seriously consider’ voting for the BNP in a future local, general or European election. This included four per cent who said they would ‘definitely’ consider voting for the party, three per cent who would ‘probably’ consider it, and 15 per cent who said they were ‘possible’ BNP voters.”
The 4-3% is not unexpected and is within the margin of error for the 2% that BNP voting intentions lie along.
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New: Spectator pulls AIDS denialism screening!
Update: Just got off the phone with someone in Spectator magazine’s events department.
The screening of the film House of Numbers has been cancelled as of today because several panel members pulled out at the last minute. They said that would have left the discussion “unbalanced”.
[hat/tip: Sunder on Twitter]
——–
Last week I blogged about a piece by Spectator magazine editor Fraser Nelson titled ‘Questioning the AIDS consensus‘.
It promoted the AIDS denialism film House of Numbers that has been eviscerated by the New York Times among several other places.
Spectator magazine’s promotion of the film was also picked up earlier by science blogs including by gimpy and Richard Wilson.
Now this week’s Spectator magazine has published an essay by Neville Hodgkinson titled: Does HIV mean certain death?
It starts off with:
In the quarter century since the world was introduced to the idea that a new sexually transmitted virus was the cause of Aids, HIV has been generally regarded as one of the biggest killers of our time. HIV/Aids has not been the mass disease in Britain that people were led to believe in the 1980s, but the death toll from immune deficiency diseases ascribed to HIV in Africa has been staggering.The scale of death there is an ongoing tragedy that tests the moral resolve of the rich world. How much do we care? Enough to ask hard questions about it? Enough to challenge the orthodoxy about the treatment, diagnosis and even the causes of Aids?
Brave warriors challenging the ‘orthodoxy’ once again. The article goes on to praise the film House of Numbers.
Hodgkinson was named earlier by Ben Goldacre as the Sunday Times health correspondent who drove [AIDS] denialist reporting in the 1990s.
Goldacre had earlier written about Hodgkinson:
Maggiore’s views on HIV were driven by the work of Peter Duesberg, a well-known Aids denier. He was unable to persuade other scientists that his views on HIV were correct, but he did very well with journalists, most notably Neville Hodgkinson, former science correspondent of the Sunday Times.Over two years in the early 1990s the paper published a series of lengthy articles rejecting the role of HIV in causing Aids, calling the African Aids epidemic a myth. It was all a scam to make money and defend reputations, they said. Things got so bad that Nature, probably the world’s most important academic journal, published an editorial describing the Sunday Times coverage as “seriously mistaken, and probably disastrous”.
And what impact has this denialism had?
Sunder Katwala asks: Why has the Spectator become Mbeki’s unlikely ally on HIV-AIDS? and points out that:
A peer-reviewed Harvard study published last year suggested that, had South Africa followed similar policies to Botswana and Nambia, then around 365,000 premature deaths might have been prevented. (This estimate was described by other leading epidimologists to the New York Times as ‘reasonable’ and based on ‘truly conservative assumptions’).
Even some right-wingers are alarmed.
Writing on ConservativeHome, Graeme Archer says: “I was particularly disappointed to see the Spectator promoting the views of people whose agenda is to suggest that HIV doesn’t usually lead to AIDS”
What next by the Spectator? ‘Questioning the evolution consensus‘ perhaps?
More: AIDS Truth
Osborne calls for ban on big bonuses
Britain’s retail banks should be banned from paying out “significant” cash bonuses as part of a drive to plough profits back into new lending, the shadow chancellor, George Osborne, will declare tomorrow.
In the strongest attack by the Tories on banks, Osborne will say that bonuses should be paid in shares, which cannot be cashed in for at least three years, as he warns that billions of pounds in “subsidised profits” are threatening to worsen the credit crunch.
In a speech to Thomson Reuters in Canary Wharf, east London, Osborne will tell financiers: “We cannot wait for the promised land of a new responsible bonus culture which looks more remote than ever. We need to take emergency steps to support bank lending and move the economy forward.
“I am today calling on the Treasury and the Financial Services Authority to combine forces and stop retail banks paying out profits in significant cash bonuses. Full stop. Then the cash that would have been paid out should be put on to banks’ balance sheets explicitly to support new lending. This should be a condition of continuing to receive taxpayer guarantees and liquidity support.”
Left Foot Forward reports: Osborne’s banking proposals just “populist headline-grabbing” says analyst
We shouldn’t help starving people, apparently
Rarely can the standard neo-Malthusian rightwing orthodoxy on development have been expressed quite as bluntly – or quite as nastily, come to that – as it is in The Times last week: ‘Do starving Africans a favour,’ runs the headline over a piece by the paper’s former Africa bureau chief Sam Kiley. ‘Don’t feed them.’
Well, they do say the first rule of good journalism is to cut to the chase, and Kiley certainly does that:
The Horn of Africa is in the grip of the worst drought for 47 years! Some 23 million people are threatened with starvation! When you see children on TV with distended bellies keening over their dying parents, it would be inhuman not to be moved to tears. But do them a favour. Sit on your hands.
There follows a spot of quibbling over the statistics. The compassion industry routinely ramps up the disaster stats on its press releases, the better to gull the guilt trippable into emptying their wallets. That 23m figure is ‘humbug’, he argues. Nobody is in a position to count.
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