Sarkozy humiliated in French elections
Sarkozyism is dead. French voters made it very clear this Sunday that any affinity they may once have had with their President is over. He has not made them richer, and he has not made them feel better about their country. With his abrasive personality and divisive insistence on a ‘National Identity Debate’, French voters were seeking someone they could feel less bullied by.
Furthermore, Sarkozy’s arch rival within his own party, Dominique de Villepin, has announced that he is breaking away from the UMP and will lead his own ‘movement’ from June onwards. All the supermodel wives in the world can’t make Sarko look good right now.
As a result of the elections, the Socialists now control 21 out of 22 of France’s departments, having taken Corsica away from Sarkozy’s UMP. However, they didn’t win this campaign through any solid policies or clear-sighted ideological progression. They won because no one can stand the short man in the Elysée Palace. This is clear from the rate of abstention, which stood at 53.6% in the first round and almost 50% in the second. Although stay-at-home voters hit the right harder, the overall disgust with politicians of all stripes in France is all too apparent in this figure. continue reading… »
Citizen’s arrest attempted on Blair
Our friends at The Samosa have the details of an attempt by journalist David Cronin to arrest Tony Blair:
A short while ago, I got up close and personal with Tony Blair.
As the former prime minister made his way into a packed committee room in the European Parliament, I stepped up to him and laid my hand on his arm. “Mr Blair, this is a citizen’s arrest,” I said.
For a split second, he looked directly at me, treating me to an expression that seemed both blank and quizzical. Then I was pushed away firmly, though not too aggressively, by one of the phalanx of body guards surrounding him. “You are guilty of war crimes,” I shouted after him, adrenaline giving me the kind of high I haven’t experienced in years.
I had prepared a more lengthy speech about how I believed Blair should be prosecuted for authorising the war against Iraq as this involved crimes against peace and the crime of aggression. I had also intended to invite him to accompany me to the nearest police station so that I could file a criminal charge against him.
Read the whole thing here
Cameron Aide’s girlfriend made ‘legal threat’ to web developer over #cashgordon debacle
One of the more curious episodes in yesterday’s #cashgordon debacle came by way of a tweet by “Jimmy Sparkle”, one of the techies who’s playing with the Tory’s new webtoy helped to break it.
Jimmy is a web developer and cheekily took advantage of the non-existent security on the Cash Gordon website’s twitter feed to tweet a segment of Javascript that, for a very brief period of time, redirected visitors to the Tory’s site to his own personal site. Sparkle Interactive.
Compared to some of the other redirection scripts posted to the site before the Tories took it down, which included a rickroll and the infamous Goatse (and if you don’t know what Goatse is, don’t search for it at work – you’ll get fired) Jimmy’s piece of scripting was one of the least contentious and inflammatory things tweeted to the site all day. Nevertheless, within a couple of hours of the site being taken down, Jimmy put up this tweet.
conservative party phoned my workplace claiming they may sue me for supposedly hacking their website… tweeting != hacking. lol #cashgordon
Pretty shabby, huh? continue reading… »
Should the voting age be reduced to 16?
I am not sure where I stand on this issue, but our youthful cabinet minister with the responsible for drafting the Labour manifesto, Ed Milliband, says that one of the policies in the next Labour manifesto will be a “reduction in the voting age to 16”.
It is clear that we have a mish-mash of laws identifying the age of when a young person becomes an adult and some rationalisation must be carried out, but is the place to start the voting age?
As always, the best place to start is sex. continue reading… »
Byers. Hoon and Hewitt suspended by Labour Party
We’ve just received word that former cabinet ministers Stephen Byers, Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt have been suspended by the Labour Party on the instructions of the Chief Whip, Nick Brown, and General Secretary, Ray Collins, pending an investigation into allegations that they were willing to try and influence policy in return for cash.
The decision follows what we understand was a heated meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party, this evening, at which a number of MPs demanded that strong action should be taken against the three former ministers.
In defence of the Union Modernisation Fund
On the surface, the Telegraph reports of £18 million in state funds going to Unite, and its predecessors Amicus and TGWU, from the Labour government seem pretty damning. I was outraged; unions are not there to be funded by the State, and taking such funding compromises unions. Their bureaucracies could thence rely on State aid as insulation from having to fight for and fight to keep members’ dues.
There is also the question as to whether or not the unions like Unite have been feeding this money back into the Labour Party. If that could be proved to be the case, then it’s all the more reason to get rid of the current morons at the top of the Labour Party; first the scandal of private donations from millionaires, and cash for peerages, now this.
Lest people forget, if any of this were true, the government was not just using State money to stay in government through a funded political machine. They were using it to retain control of the Labour Party, which is a much greater offence, so far as I and many other socialists would be concerned.
Reality is not so simple, however. continue reading… »
Stephen Byers: just how far a £5,000 cab fare gets you
Nine times out of ten I get the bus home like everybody else. But on those rare occasions when I pile out of Ronnie Scott’s or the 100 Club and it’s a bit too late or a bit too cold to be hanging around for the N73, I jump in a taxi to Stoke Newington. There’s change from twenty five quid, even after the tip.
So when Stephen Byers – who would have regulated the taxi trade during his stint as transport secretary – compares himself to ‘a cab for hire’ at £5,000 a day, the obvious question is just how far that fare would take a punter.
That kind of cash might even be enough to overcome any lingering traditional reluctance to go south of the river after midnight, guv’nor. Despite the extortionate rates charged by London cabbies, five grand must be sufficient to drop you off in Rome or Vienna, just in time for a bollocking from the missus for staying out late.
#cashgordon crashes and burns
In the last few minutes, the Conservative Party has taken down its Cash Gordon website after a major security failure which allowed twitter users to rick-roll the site using javascript embedded in a tweet.
To compound Tory embarrassment, one of the sites to which visitors were briefly redirected featured an image of three naked old men engaged in an explicit sex act, although the Tories can, perhaps, consider themselves lucky not have been Goatse-rolled at any point during today’s debacle.
So, that’s another expensive Tory new media project down the crapper in a matter of hours.
UPDATE
I’ve now been advised that both goatse and lemonparty did appear on Cash Gordon site for a while, all of which nicely sums up the Tory new media department’s day.
Getting off the Blue-Red Merry-go-round
This is a guest post by Prateek Buch.
As the nation prepares to go to the polls in just a few weeks’ time, this week’s Guardian Politics Weekly podcast, recorded live at Manchester University, took a snapshot of the political landscape as seen by our friends in the North. Whether it was from the three Guardian panellists, from the members of the audience or from interviews with the public, strong opinions emerged on the issues that look set to dominate the public discourse in the coming weeks – and listening to these contributions I saw a theme emerging.
John Harris began by documenting, rightly so given my experience of growing up in Manchester, that too much political rhetoric simply bypasses those in the great Northern cities who would rather hear politicians discuss the nitty gritty of housing or working conditions at the lower end of the jobs market. Michael White spoke of the pernicious effect of taking the concerns of those living in safe seats for granted – that the fixation with 800,000 or so voters in marginal seats leaves the needs of the majority behind. Polly Toynbee’s description of a ‘defunct electoral system that drives towards idiocy, with the crassest posters and stupidest slogans’ reiterated this. Indeed, Toynbee even wished for a hung Parliament, such that electoral reform could finally get under way. continue reading… »
Venables journo has manslaughter conviction
This one come firmly from the file marked ‘You couldn’t make this up even if you worked for a tabloid’ via the offices of Private Eye.
If you look at the bylines under much of The Sun’s recent coverage/speculation about the recall of Jon Venables to prisons for as yet unknown breach of his licence terms, you’ll frequently find the name of the Sun’s Chief Reporter, John Kay.
What you won’t find in The Sun is any reference whatsoever to Kay’s 1977 conviction for the manslaughter (by diminished responsibility) of his Japanese wife after an apparent murder-suicide bid.
The story was, however, recorded by the Miami News who, on 21 December 1977, published this brief account of Kay’s efforts to end his own life…
John Kay, 33, drowned his wife in the bath, said the prosecutor in court at St. Albans, England. Then he tried six times to kill himself. First he slashed his wrists – but the cuts were not serious. So he threw himself head first out of a window, but landed on a plastic garbage can. Next he turned on the gas in the kitchen, but the oven had a self-lighting mechanism he was unable to put out. He tried to hang himself but couldn’t get into an effective position. He then stood on a bridge overlooking a bypass, but decided, remembering the window episode, it was not high enough. His final attempt: driving his auto full speed into a stationary car. Kay (a reporter, it must be recorded) lived, slightly injured, to tell the tale – in court.
I dunno about anyone else, but I can’t help thinking ‘Wasp Factory’ when reading that…
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