What has the EU ever done for us?
Oh wow, have we got an exclusive for you today.
Recently our mole in Brussels managed to sneak a hidden camera into a policy meeting of the European Conservatives and Reformists group, where members from the British Conservative Party, Poland’s Law and Justice Party and the Czech Civic Democratic Party were attempting to thrash out a common position on the future of the European Union following the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty by all EU states.
To say that the meeting became a little heated at times would be a bit of understatement, as you’ll see in a moment if you head down below the fold…
Britons want: to reform, regulate and redistribute
Thanks to tim f for drawing our attention to this recent BBC / GlobeScan poll. The top findings…
1. Most British people (57%) think that the problems associated with free market capitalism can be addressed through regulation and reform; however, 19 per cent think that capitalism is fatally flawed, and only 13% think that it works well as it is.
2. Four in ten (40%) believe that the government should play more of an active role in owning or controlling major industries, 31 per cent believe that the government should play a less active role, and 23 per cent believe that it should continue to play the same role it does now.
3. Two-thirds (67%) of respondents say the government should do more to distribute wealth more evenly, while 20% say it should maintain its current level of involvement and only 10% say that it should do less.
4. A majority (56%) favour increased government regulation of businesses, compared to 23% who favour the status quo and 16% who favour less regulation.
More information, including comparisons with 26 other countries, can be found here.
Cameron’s speech fails the poverty fact-check
Stuart White, Next Left blogger and director of the Public Policy Unit at Oxford University, had previously offered readers a fair and factual critique of the successes and failures of Labour’s record of poverty and inequality, scrutinising David Cameron’s claims that the Conservatives should be considered the party of the poor.
Now Channel 4 news have also done their own detailed fact-check on David Cameron’s claim about Labour’s record on poverty and inequality that
Poverty and inequality have got worse, despite Labour’s massive expansion of the state.”
On a scale of 0-5, where 5 means “absolutely no basis in fact”, Cameron’s speech scores a 4 on poverty, at the top end of the scale which suggests “misrepresentation, exaggeration, a massaging of statistics and/or language”.
That is because he claims that poverty has risen under Labour when any reasonable account would report that poverty has fallen.
Fact check find that his inequality claim stands up better – scoring him at 2 out of 5.
That may seem fair given that the Gini coefficient measure of inequality has risen slightly, as Labour’s efforts to ‘run up the down escalator’ slowed down sharp rises in inequality but did not reverse them.
However, the rise in the Gini is caused by runaway inequality in the top 1% and particularly the top 0.2% – while the 90:10 gap between those 10% from the top and 10% from the bottom has narrowed under Labour.
And David Cameron’s speech offered a (somewhat Blairite) critique in arguing that this is not the inequality that matters.
That doesn’t mean we should be fixated only on a mechanistic objective like reducing the Gini co-efficient, the traditional financial measure of inequality or on closing the gap between the top and the bottom. Instead, we should focus on the causes of poverty as well as the symptoms because that is the best way to reduce it in the long term.
And we should focus on closing the gap between the bottom and the middle, not because that is the easy thing to do, but because focusing on those who do not have the chance of a good life is the most important thing to do.
Labour can stake a reasonable claim to have reduced inequality between the bottom and the middle, which is the inequality which Cameron thinks matters.
In challenging that, David Cameron does also rely on some statistics about severe poverty which Channel 4 note “are not thought to be reliable another to get the quality stamp of being published as official statistics”.
A more detailed rebuttal also by James Graham: David Cameron’s vision of a McSociety
Dorries issues ‘apology’ to Labour MP Devine
Nadine Dorries has issued a grovelling apology to the Scottish Labour MP she branded a sex pest on Twitter.
According to a report in the Daily Record, Dorries emailed Jim Devine to say sorry for any “embarrassment” she caused with her comments, which were made in response to tweets by Kerry McCarthy which alleged that soon-to-retire Tory Grandee, Nicholas Winterton, had slapped another female Labour on the arse.
Despite her apology, Dorries is not off the hook with Devine, who said last night: “My lawyer will still be pursuing this.”
The DNA Database fudge continues
One of the motifs of the past few months has been that politicians of all colours “just don’t get it”. Ironically, when it comes to the continuing debacle over the DNA database, you rather imagine that they did get it and now they’re utterly bewildered at how things have turned out.
Here, after all, is what ought to be a standard tabloid outrage scandal: because of the “unaccountable” European Court of Human Rights, the government is having to change its policy on keeping all the DNA profiles of those arrested but not charged indefinitely, potentially raising the spectre of the guilty getting away with their crimes. The Sun, that flag-bearer of social authoritarianism, did originally raise its voice, but has since barely made a peep about the S and Marper case and its implications.
For a government that has so often treated with contempt the concerns of civil libertarians, with the full connivance of the vast majority of the tabloid press, the Daily Mail only recently deciding that it’s time to join the other side, it must be wondering where all those who believe if they’ve got nothing to hide they’ve got nothing to fear have disappeared to.
continue reading… »
Poll: most voters think Sun attack back-fired
A poll for PoliticsHome today found that 65% of voters think the Sun’s reporting on the letter sent to Jacqui Janes was over the top and crossed the line.
About half of all those who voted said they were more inclined to defend Gordon Brown, with only 17% saying they were less inclined.
PoliticsHome reported:
In addition, more than three times the percentage of voters (thirty one per cent) say that this episode has made them think more of the Prime Minister than think less of him (9%). A comparable proportion (twenty eight per cent) say that the episode has made them think less of the Sun.
Today the Daily Mirror hit back, quoting Jamie Janes’ uncle as: ‘My sister’s grief has been hijacked to make a political point..it’s wrong‘.
Army veteran Ian Cox said he was outraged sister Jacqui Janes’s attack on the PM’s condolence message spelling mistakes had been hijacked by opponents.
And Mrs Janes yesterday said she had been misrepresented in the row and only acted out of concern that her son did not have the proper military kit in Afghanistan.
The Mirror story and the poll will come as a huge embarrassment to the Sun newspaper and Rupert Murdoch, who has also had to back-pedal over comments that he thought US President Barack Obama was racist.
A survey for YouGov released today found that most people believed the influence of the Murdoch empire was waning in contrast to Google.
Yesterday Tory blogger Guido Fawkes defended the Sun as:
This morning’s reporting of Brown’s conversation with Mrs Janes was a good news story, news is after all what people don’t want you to hear, the rest is spin. The left is now in full on “Murdoch is evil” mode, Fox and the Sun will be characterised as liars. They will take presenters like Glenn Beck and columnists like the great Kelvin MacKenzie and make out that this is biased news – it isn’t, it is opinionated infotainment.
Seems the “news story” was not perceived as “good” by a vast majority of the public.
Mutiny at Spectator against wingnuttery?
Clive Davis was, until recently, a blogger at The Spectator magazine’s website. Last week he finally wrote about his reasons for leaving. He cited, among others, a general difficulty in talking about immigration and race at the website:
There’s no question, either, that the political establishment has been mealy-mouthed about the side-effects of mass immigration. (Half my family is white working-class, so I’m allowed to say that too.)
But as I discovered when I had my own blog at the Speccie, most of the noise comes from people who are, frankly, not worth talking to, a small but energetic brigade of green-inkers who would never normally be allowed house-room on a letters page. As well as repeating the same lines over and over, they express a degree of contempt for non-white faces in general, and Muslims in particular, that is downright scary. Shoot illegal immigrants? Why not?
That’s the main reason why I switched off my comments facility early on. To be blunt about it, if I were a BNP apparatchik I’d be pleased with the way Coffee House has become a sounding board for the party.
Ouch. But it’s true. Most of the people commenting at the Spectator website regularly espouse BNP policies. It’s a surprise the moderators (do they have any?) don’t delete more of the comments.
Clive Davis mentions Sarah Standing’s blog-post which contained this gem:
We never needed a day to remind us of our worth and I suspect, should British Day be enforced on us, it will mainly celebrated by illegal immigrants living in our great country thrilled to have yet another day off.
Apparently that’s how right-wingers talk about immigration. That’s how much class they have. And the Spectator’s editors are happy to publish such bigoted rubbish. Clive Davis also mentions Liddle Rod – who’s been obsessed with Mary Seacole for months now because of her mixed-race background – also mentioned here several times.
Clive concludes:
The problem, I think, is that some Speccie-ites seem to believe that generating “mischief” is all that matters.
This is certainly true when you take into account their new editor’s recent decision to promote AIDS Denialism. They do the same with Global Warming denialism all the time.
Alex Massie has indeed been one of the rare sensible right-wingers there, especially when writing about immigration. But in a growing sign that he too is getting annoyed with some of the wingnuttery by fellow bloggers, he takes issue with Melanie Phillips:
Who is John Limbert?
Well, he’s the new Deputy Assistant Secretary for Iran in the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs who is, according to Melanie Phillips, a “fifth columnist” who is “in hock to the Iranian regime”. Melanie suggests that Limbert’s appointment means Tehran “now has its own man running the United States’s policy towards Iran” and asks “Has there ever been a situation where the President of a country delivers his country in this fashion to its mortal enemy?”May I quietly suggest that this is not quite the case?
Read the whole thing. There are some right-wingers willing to challenge the wingnuttery dominating their side, but it’s only a matter of time before they get pushed or drowned out like they were in the US. The mutiny will be crushed.
Dan Hannan slams NHS in new video for Ron Paul
Anthony Painter highlights a new video by the American lobby group Campaign for Liberty attacking the NHS, again.
The video starts off with talking about the establishment of the NHS with images from the Second World War and that of Hitler.
Anthony says:
Did you enjoy the frames of Hitler when he was talking about the establishment of the NHS? Very stylish and clever. Remember, healthcare reform in the US is Nazi- lots of people say so like these people and these. Nicely done, Campaign for Liberty.
Hannan calls the NHS a remnant of a system from “war time planning”.
He asks:
Why do we still have [the NHS], 60 years on, when in every other field we have moved away from government control. … Why do we have this one remaining bureaucracy which is unresponsive to consumer demand? I think part of the reason is that it’s so large it’s difficult to reform.
He said it was “not a good system” if you “took the comparators of survival rates and waiting times”.
You know we’re not the worst in the developed world, but the United Kingdom does pretty badly.
But Anthony Painter fact-checks him again:
Well, let’s compare the UK and US using OECD data (UK and USA):
- The UK has 2.5 physicians per 1000 people, 10 nurses per 1000, 2.6 acute care beds per 1000, a life of expectancy of 79.1 years, and an infant mortality rate of 4.8 per 1000.
- The US has 2.4 physicians per 1000, 10.6 nurses per 1000, 2.7 acute beds per 1000,life expectancy was 78.1 years, and an infant mortality rate of 6.7 per 1000.Most people would say that the UK was marginally better than the US overall with the exception of infant mortality where it was considerably better. Why? Because infant mortality is heavily correlated with poverty and an unequal healthcare system- like the US has.
BUT the big difference? There was one stat that I left out. That is the cost of healthcare. For a healthcare system that is comparable but worse in significant ways, the US has to spend a whopping 16% of its GDP. We pay 8.4% of GDP.
Hannan later adds:
the one thing that is by definition going to be bigger and more unresponsive than an insurance company is the federal government.
Except that by actual fact the US healthcare system is bigger and insurance companies frequently deny people treatment on technical grounds (saying their plan doesn’t cover treatment).
Campaign for Liberty is a political organisation founded by the US Congressman Ron Paul.
Pinochet and Polanski: even old men should face their past
What happens when old men touch down in a foreign country and suddenly get hit with a writ for crimes committed decades ago? Consider, if you will, the contrasting cases of Augusto José Ramón Pinochet and Roman Raymond Polanski.
The Chilean general staged a coup in 1973 against a democratically elected government and instituted some strange hybrid regime, fusing military dictatorship with Hayek’s supposedly libertarian economics.
Four years later in California, the Franco-Polish film director had sex with a 13-year-old girl. Under US law, that constitutes statutory rape, although testimony indicates that a degree of coercion may also have been involved. It is also uncontested that he tanked up the young Samantha Geimar with champagne and a Quaalude before getting her into the hot tub.
Did the fall of the Berlin Wall kill ideology?
Most of the comment on the fall of the Berlin Wall has come from people who experienced life in the eras both before and after it came down, and for obvious reasons. So here’s something different: a reflection from somebody who doesn’t remember the wall, because they were 3 years old in 1989.
My generation lives, for all intense and purposes, without ideology. There’s plenty of ideology knocking about in the world, as we all know from the daily death count in Afghanistan. But there’s not much of it here in Britain amongst the under 25s. It’s a platitude that political parties have seen declining membership for years, and that apathy and disillusionment with politics has been steadily on the rise.
Yet it doesn’t follow that people of my generation are completely uninterested in politics per se. Most – I imagine – would tell you that Gordon Brown is a bad prime minister and needs to go. Most would say the recession is a bad thing that needs to be sorted out. Many – possibly most – will have other concerns: opposition to university tuition fees, the spectre of global warming, and so on.
Yet whilst there remain political beliefs and issues that the young are interested in, it’s rare to find a young person who holds all these issues and beliefs (should they be interested in more than a couple) to be unified by any under-lying and coherent worldview.
Rather, they are presented and held as broadly freestanding political preferences, which may connect with other preferences in some respects, but are essentially self-sufficient. In short: politics without ideology.
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