The ultimate right-wing guide to Outrageous Government Waste!
Yesterday Communities Secretary Eric Pickles trumpeted his department’s publication of all supply contracts above £500 as proof of the government’s new transparency. Rightly so.
Given the absence of any clarity though, the press settled for reporting the blatantly flagged expenditure of £1,600 on massages for staff and £539 on an away day at Blackpool pleasure beach.
Any serious analysis of the data is difficult as very little detail is provided on what each contract was actually for. But that didn’t stop the swivel-eyed brigadiers coming out in all their spEak You’re bRanes pomp.
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Why we chose to criticise Caroline Lucas over Homeopathy
A couple of weeks ago we published a blog post by Adam Grace titled: Why Caroline Lucas should drop her support for Homeopathy. It generated huge interest and got us some criticism from lefty greenies.
Tamsin Omond was one of them:
This is not an apology for Lucas, nor a demand that she be beyond criticism. It is only a request that we control our harping voice, especially when our voices are the only ones raised in outrage. Moral outrage should be confined, as much as possible, to the Daily Mail rather than seeping into our criticisms of the Left.
It’s not a position I disagree with, actually.
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Cam thinks you can get “tins” of Stella for 25p
The Manchester Evening News today quoted David Cameron as saying:
I think if what you’re trying to do is stop supermarkets from selling 20 tins of Stella for a fiver that’s what we’ve got to go after.
Where I want to try and help is ending the deep discounting on alcohol
The newspaper reported he was “very supportive” of plans to create a by-law that would make it illegal for pubs and shops to sell alcohol for less than 50p per unit within their boundaries.
20 tins of Stella for a fiver?? In the UK?
Channel 4′s Factcheck does some digging:
According to price comparison website mySupermaket, Tesco and Ocado offer the cheapest price right now on 20 cans of Stella. A pack of the 5.2 per cent strength lager would set you back £15 – three times what Cameron suggested.
But what about all those cut-price promotions? We asked the five biggest UK supermarket chains just how cheaply they’ve sold Stella Artois. So far, no one we spoke to could remember flogging cans for 25p each – the bargain Cameron claimed to have spotted.
Using bad statistics to promote their policies? Where have we seen that before?
In fact, with Home secretary Theresa May massaging alcohol-related crime figures to call for an end to “24 hour cafe drinking culture”.
Is Cameron’s team under the influence?
Update: Political Scrapbook has mocked this up
Oona rejects call she’s dismissive of unions
Oona King’s London Mayoral team strongly pushed back at accusations today that her campaign is dismissive of trade unions and their role.
The controversy arose when blogger Jess Freeman wrote a short piece about Oona King’s event yesterday.
She quotes someone from Oona’s team:
“The problem with the trade-union system is that it is rather outdated,” replied one person on Oona’s team. He continued: “Unions don’t really do anything except give money… I shouldn’t say that.”
The remarks were quickly pounced on by Ken supporters and have been circulating Twitter since.
When I asked Oona’s team for clarification, a spokesperson said they were “astonished” this had become an issue.
The campaign has put out a statement today saying:
As a former Trade Union officer, Oona King knows better than most the positive impact that trades unions make on the lives of ordinary working people in Britain.
…
Oona is proud to be supported by Usdaw and Community, not to mention thousands of ordinary trade unionists across London.
The spokesperson added: “We are prepared to accept those things have been said, but it’s not an official campaign view.”
He said it was a “sloppy, ill-thought out piece, many of who’s assertions we’re challenging”.
Jess Freeman lashed out at critics by posting another blog earlier today:
To just confirm my journalistic integrity and that of Total Politics, I will confront any criticisms right now. I have not misquoted a team member, I did not mishear and nor am I blatantly lying. And, to clarify, to assume that I can forget two brief lines about trade unions is a little bit rich. In fact, I held sustained conversations about unions all night.
But Oona’s campaign spokesperson rejected Jess Freeman’s assertion earlier that the event yesterday “could only muster around 30 supporters”, and that Oona King had “only just found an office”.
“[The event] was meant to be a low key affair… we were happy with the turnout” (which they put at 50 people).
He also said the campaign had an office since June in Heron Quays and had just moved into a bigger office a couple of weeks ago.
Ed Balls: not a supporter of apartheid
The idea that opposition to academy schools is tantamount to fascism is a suggestion so evidently preposterous to the point of derangement that one is forced to ask how it can credibly surface in a widely-read newspaper.
Yet such is the contention in an article on the Wall Street Journal website.
But this being August 12 and not April 1, the assumption has to be that Jamie Whyte – an author of philosophy books, it seems – is in earnest.
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We can’t just wait for the Coalition to fall
Simon Jenkins (no lefty) began an article in the Guardian yesterday with: “The British left is a disgrace.”
There is no shortage of those wanting to agree with him in the comments that follow, although most point out that if he is describing the Labour leadership of the last 15 or more years as being of the Left then he is sadly misguided.
His argument is this:
For whatever motive – and reducing a budget deficit is hardly dishonourable – Cameron is seeking to redefine the individual’s relationship with the state, more radically than anyone since the 40s.
On health, benefits and housing Jenkins argues that Cameron is seeking to destroy the welfare state. And I suspect he is right – that is what Cameron is seeking to do. Of course, whether he succeeds or not is another matter.
As all papers noted yesterday, the Ministry of Justice is planning £2 billion of cuts out of its £9 billion budget. 15,000 of its 80,000 staff will be made redundant as a result. No one, quite clearly, knows the impact. The aim is to cut first and wonder what the impact will be afterwards. Or as a Guardian editorial put it:
It is that the coalition is putting the cart before the horse, by brokering totals before deciding what needs to be done. It is time to borrow from Sir Humphrey and plead with the government: "If you are going to do this damn silly thing, then don’t do it in this damn silly way."
Pragmatically this seems true. And pragmatically the left can, to some degree, afford to sit out this summer saying “it will all go wrong” sure in the knowledge that it will. I have no doubt that’s true. Nor has an old Blairite, Matthew Taylor, writing in the FT yesterday where he warns that the Coalition risks a massive error – promising more than it can deliver whilst simply supplying mayhem in reality.
But it’s not enough. To quote the Guardian editorial again:
Bevan said the language of priorities was the religion of socialism. It should in fact be the religion of good government, of every stripe. Brokering first and thinking later is the opposite of that.
I agree with that.
And that does require a vision of what the Left is trying to do. Jenkins has an easy target in the remnant of New Labour (which we can only pray is not revived after the Labour leadership election) because there’s not a shadow of a doubt that the disgrace of that leadership was that it was not of the Left at all – embracing in its totality the mantra of rational choice theory and the market based ideology that followed.
In that case the Left has to reorganise itself – and say what it is for. Regaining power would be good. Regaining power for a purpose would be so much better. And the definition of purpose is twofold. One is pragmatic – that is to deliver workable solutions in government.
But the other is to deliver a new narrative for life in the UK. This is something much more telling. It is to persuade the country of the need for a new understanding of living in this community that justifies change, a new direction, and a purpose for delivering difference within those pragmatic policies that underpin good government.
This is an issue to which I may turn. Because without it the Left is useless. Having conviction and goodwill is not enough. Being able to persuade others to share it is essential. That’s the job the Left has to do. And watching the ConDems fail won’t be enough to deliver that. Even pointing out that they have no interest in social justice will not deliver that. We have to say what success, social justice and a good life are. That’s the real challenge.
Is Labour really to blame for the deficit?
So common has it become for the White House to blame all bad news on the last administration that a Washington joke claims that Obama is planning to name a newly discovered trench deep under the US, “Bush’s Fault”.
Much more of this sort of stuff from the Coalition and maybe we’ll soon see Gordon’s Fault opening up somewhere under Whitehall.
One of the recurrent claims of the Government, repeated to much fanfare yesterday, is that Labour got us in to our fiscal mess by spending too much.
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The graph that has the Coalition worried
These are the latest approval ratings for the government, tracked by YouGov.
These latest figures were released by YouGov last night. The Coalition’s approval rating is now down to net +1 (approve 41%, disapprove 40%).
It took Labour around two years before they declined that much, after victory in 1997.
Is it any wonder the Coalition is afraid and trying to blame the coming economic downturn on Labour with these snazzy ads?
(but at least the BBC is on hand to help by showing it without checking its claims).
It’s worth nothing that much of the decline is down to wavering Labour and Libdem voters being turned off the Coalition. But what you won’t hear from the right is that Coalition’s extremist agenda is turning off independents very quickly. That line of argument only applies to Labour you see.
Falling polls force Govt into Labour attack ad
This is the attack ad that the Conservative party has just released.
Under broadcasting rules, it cannot be shown on TV. So it looks like the only aim here is to try and get it played on news channels through a discussion.
But why would the Coalition be releasing an ad attacking Labour now, given the election has finished? Unless someone is worrying about their rapidly declining approval ratings…
No, David Cameron is not middle class
John Prescott caused widespread merriment back in 1996, simply for declaring the obvious truth that he should be classified as middle class. The hilarity was even more general after his dad effectively denounced him for coming over all poncey and getting ideas above his ‘umble working class lad station.
But surely the entire point of the man recently created Baron Prescott of Kingston-upon-Hull – to the extent that he had one – was to serve as New Labour’s token prole in residence. Claiming to be anything else was effectively doing himself out of job.
Yet in so far as he was at that time no longer a seafarer but a senior opposition frontbencher with a wedge to match, the designation was entirely beyond dispute.
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