Tories: filling in forms will strengthen the family
Almost nobody outside the political classes has yet heard of Chris Grayling, the populist, telly-themed soundbite obsessed shadow Home Secretary.
But while his colleagues attempt a liberal love-bombing strategy by posing as progressive, Grayling is already gearing up for what could prove a very successful bid to achieve Michael Howard and Ann Widdecombe levels of notoreity.
Here’s his latest headline-grabbing wheeze.
Tories to demand: are you married? reports The Sunday Times.
Official forms will routinely demand to know whether a person is married under Conservative plans to promote stable families.
Chris Grayling, the shadow home secretary, claimed that, under Labour, marriage had become a “non official institution”. In an interview with The Sunday Times, he pledged that a future Tory government would make it a priority to raise the status of married life. “Marriage has almost disappeared from official forms, from official documents,” he said. “I think that needs to change.”
Doctors and nurses
If I hadn’t, a quarter of a century ago, in the heat of the moment, cast aside the class-based distinctions, built into the NHS rules, which said I must wait upon a doctor’s order in spite of what we both knew or didn’t know, that diabetic gentleman slipping into coma would have suffered brain damage. Perhaps he would have died. Class could have killed him.
I used to work as a nurse. One evening, I was just doing a last walk round the ward, checking on anyone I had particular concerns about, having a laugh with one or two of the regulars, making sure people were settled before the night shift nurses came on.
As I came to the bed of the gentleman who’d just been transferred over from A&E a few minutes before, it took me a second to work out something was wrong.
His pyjama top was soaked and for a second I looked to see if he’d dropped the water jug as he fell asleep.
But then it clicked. I grabbed a lancet and the blood test strip tube from my pocket and stabbed for blood, but even before the blood was on the strip I knew there was no sugar in there to change the colour; the sudden drenching of sweat could only mean he was in hypoglycemic shock and heading swiftly for coma. continue reading… »
The Left, the Right and Advertising
There are two adverts currently doing the rounds that really get on my nerves.
The first is for Clover, or Utterly Butterly, or one of those other butter-substitute spread things. You’ll have seen it, the posters are everywhere. They have a picture of some twit in a van holding a crumpet, and the words “Now With 70% Less Fat*” emblazoned in giant letters above him.
The things is, if you follow the asterisk and read the tiny print at the bottom of the poster, you will see that it says “When compared to ordinary butter”. I don’t think you’d be a fool for assuming that the claim of a 70% reduction related to the fat content of the same product but as formerly produced, not to ordinary butter generally. But then, you’d be wrong. Personally, I think this is misleading to the point of near-absurdity.
The other advert (or series of adverts) that irritates me is the T-Mobile “what would you do with free texts for life?” nonsense. Specifically, I’m annoyed by the bloke who is allegedly starting a “superband” now that he’s got free texts for life. Maybe I’m missing something, but I’m fairly sure that what was stopping him from forming a superband was never the cost of sending inane chatter to people he knew (he’d surely have heard of Twitter already).
The whole T-Mobile advertising campaign is simply daft. Right? Then again, T-Mobile must have done extensive market and advertising research before ploughing huge sums of money into this campaign. So they must think it will work. Which leads me to wonder: are people really so stupid that this sort of campaign, rather than causing them to scoff at the ridiculous premise, will instead encourage them to switch phone companies?
Perhaps many people are that dumb. Or perhaps advertising makes them that way. That and the cold, cynical manipulation of Simon Cowell et al.
continue reading… »
Only 25% Republicans think Obama election legit
A new opinion poll finds that a 52% majority of Republican voters nationally think that the community organising group ACORN stole the Presidential election for Barack Obama last year, with only 27% granting that he won it legitimately.
Overall 62% of Americans think Obama legitimately won the election to only 26% who think ACORN stole it for him, as few Democrats or independents buy into that line of thinking.
Belief in the ACORN conspiracy theory is even higher among Republicans than the “birther” theory – that Obama was not born in the USA – which only 42% of Republicans expressed agreement with in a national survey in September.
The end of the free internet in Britain?
contribution by by Charlotte Gore
If we can’t stop this, it’s beginning of the end for the net in Britain
That’s what Cory Doctorow suggests when reporting the news that Mandelson is seeking to use a back door to grant himself powers that grant him yet more powers to do just about anything in the interest of protecting Copyright.
It’s terrifying stuff that, if he’s successful, will cripple Britain’s technological progress. I use a programme called, “Drop Box” and it allows me to transfer files from my MacBook to my PC using the Internet. I don’t want such files to be publicly available because they’re my own personal private files.
But Mandelson wants these services to disable privacy modes so that Movie Studios can check I’m not stealing from them. Forcing us to make the contents of our online storage public is just one of the powers Mandelson wants to gift himself, unchallenged.
continue reading… »
Blair’s failure at EU illustrates its real nature
So, it’s looking like it’s lightweight, little-known Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy for the President of the European Council, and lightweight, little-known Baroness Ashton (current UK European Commissioner, Peter Mandelson’s almost invisible replacement) for the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.
Two no-marks, for two jobs that many have claimed are among the most powerful in the world.
Does anyone seriously believe that Van Rompuy has what it takes to impose his will over the likes of Sarkozy, Merkel and Berlusconi in Council meetings?
Does anyone seriously believe that *anyone* is going to take Baroness Ashton seriously, a woman who’s been at the Commission for only a year, and was unqualified even for that? (See also…)
A worker’s wage for MPs?
Labour candidate for Reading East, Anneliese Dodds, mentions an interesting idea for helping to restore public respect for MPs:
“I have always promised that, if elected, I would claim only the average Reading wage as a salary, and invest the rest in making sure that local constituents get the best possible service from their local MP.”
The average full time salary for a worker in Reading is about £36,000, which is more than most people earn and a decent salary, but a significant pay cut compared to what MPs currently earn.
I certainly don’t think that the Labour Party (or any other party) should require all their candidates to pledge to take the average wage of the people they represent, not least because it would mean Labour MPs getting very different salaries for doing the same job depending on where they were elected.
But there is something very admirable about anyone who chooses to make this commitment, and I think more leftie politicians should consider following Anneliese’s lead. Would welcome other people’s thoughts on this – would you be more likely to support someone who pledged to take the average worker’s wage of the people they want to represent?
Watch: Ed Balls makes Gove look like a fool
[via Septicisle]
Mandelson’s Copyright Death Star exposed
I’m not even going to comment on this story, having more or less promised myself from the outset that I wouldn’t go into full-on swearblogging mode at LC. Instead, I’ll the Guardian tell the story…
Lord Mandelson is seeking to amend the laws on copyright to give the government sweeping new powers against people accused of illegal downloading…
In a letter to Harriet Harman, the leader of the house and head of the committee responsible for determining changes to such legislation, Mandelson says he is “writing to seek your urgent agreement” to changes to the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act “for the purposes of facilitating prevention or reduction of online copyright infringement”…
Henry VIII clause alert!!!
The proposed alteration to the Copyright Act would create a new offence of downloading material that infringes copyright laws, as well as giving new powers or rights to “protect” rights holders such as record companies and movie studios – and, controversially, conferring powers on “any person as may be specified” to help cut down online infringement of copyright.
The changes proposed seem small – but are enormously wideranging, given both the breadth of even minor copyright infringement online, where photographs and text are copied with little regard to ownership, and the complexity of ownership.
And, in the process, leave the Copyright Act wide open to further amendments with minimal parliamentary scrutiny – cue Rupert Murdoch…
By giving the business secretary the power to amend the Copyright Act at will, Labour fears Mandelson could be creating a Trojan horse that under a Tory administration would allow Murdoch to be rewarded for his support for David Cameron over Gordon Brown, for example by making it illegal to use such extracts from a news site for profit.
I know I said wouldn’t swearblog, but isn’t Mandelson a complete and utter cunt.
The Truth about Immigration
When New Labour’s election strategists sat down to look over the results of the 2005 general election, in which the party lost more seats than they expected, they quickly came to two very clear conclusions.
One was that middle-class opposition to the war in Iraq had spawned a protest vote from which the Liberal Democrats had been the main beneficiaries and had cost them a number of marginal seat. The other was that working class antipathy towards immigration was costing the party votes in its traditional heartlands.
Six weeks later, the government joined the race to the bottom on immigration in earnest with the publication of a new Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill, which become law in 2006, restricting the right of appeal against refusal of entry that had previously been afforded to students, dependants and visitors to only human rights and discrimination grounds and imposing fines on employers who employ migrant workers who lack the necessary paperwork, i.e. entry clearance, leave to remain and/or a work permit.
The Conservatives may have spawned the mantra that ‘it’s not racist to talk about immigration’ but it was New Labour who gave it legitimacy.
continue reading… »
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