Tory MEP compares Sarkozy to fascist!
Daniel Hannan MEP, one of the Conservative party’s most popular right-wing politicians, risked a diplomatic crisis yesterday by comparing Nicholas Sarkozy to the far-right extremist Jean-Marie Le Pen.
He also published a picture of the French President designed to make him look like Hitler (screenshot below).
It’s unlikely that such a comparison would go down well on French circles and risked badly damaging relations between David Cameron and the French President.
In a blog-post he also called Sarkozy’s party “extreme”:
His party, the UMP, is in the EPP, and so cannot possibly be extreme, for all that it sits alongside a number of parties with anti-American, anti-gypsy, protectionist and homophobic tendencies (see here for a selection).
A caption underneath Sarkozy’s Hitler picture says: “Nicolas Sarkozy borrows Le Pen’s language, but backs Brussels”.
To be clear, I agree with Dan Hannan.
Sarkozy is indeed borrowing language from the far-right fascist in his vendetta against the Roma people in France. And his UMP party is indeed allied with extremists across Europe.
It’s refreshing to see a Tory politician admit that.
But if the French press were to report on a prominent British MEP publishing a picture of Sarkozy as Hitler – it wouldn’t bode well for Cameron’s diplomatic efforts in Europe.
Cameron to end lifetime council tenancies
An end to lifetime council tenancies was signalled today by David Cameron as he warned the coming public spending cuts will not be restored when the economy recovers.
Cameron said he wanted to see fixed terms for all new council and housing association tenancies lasting as little as five years to help increase social mobility.
The prime minister admitted that “not everyone will support this and there will be quite a big argument”.
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The homeless charity Shelter said tonight: “We do not believe the big question in housing policy is security of tenure for new tenants. The prime minister has sidestepped the fundamental cause of our housing crisis – the desperate lack of affordable housing supply.”
We’ve cloned food for centuries. Let’s have more of it
My nan was a dab hand at cloning.
No, I’m not bullshitting you. She may have died getting on for twenty years ago and I doubt very much that she ever saw the inside of a laboratory but nevertheless she had the art of cloning down to a tee. And its not my just nan.
There must easily be hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people living in Britain today who are equally well-versed in the art of cloning – they’re called gardeners.
Okay, so gardeners don’t actually call what they do cloning, the call it propagation.
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Tory cllr sorry for calling his ward ‘Chaffrica’
A Conservative councillor in Essex has apologised for any offence caused after he described the ward he represents as “Chaffrica” on Facebook.
Neil Rockliffe added: “Thinking that the scriptwriters of Eastenders must live on Chafford Hundred…has all the ingredients…murderers, rapists, concerned ethnic minorities, gay men etc, etc….”
Mr Rockliffe, who represents Chafford and North Stifford on Thurrock Council, said he had removed the posts.
The BBC has seen a screen grab of Mr Rockliffe’s Facebook page.
Speaking to BBC News, Mr Rockliffe insisted that the reference to “Chaffrica” was a comment about his garden, and how overgrown it is.
The comments were about his garden? Uh huh. I believe that.
Demos poll shows only 15% want to be party of Big Society
Here’s what the think tank Demos said about their latest piece of research:
“Labour’s next leader needs to support public sector cuts and embrace the ‘Big Society’ agenda if they are to be heard by the public.”
And here’s what their polling showed that people actually thought about the ‘Big Society’ agenda:
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How PC myths are becoming government talking points
Five Chinese Crackers spots a stinker from Baroness Warsi:
“Well I think there’s a difference between multiculturalism per se, and state multiculturalism, where the state intervenes and says, ‘You will do this, you will do that.’” For example, she offers, “When the state says ‘We’ll have winterfest instead of Christmas, so everyone feels included.’ That’s wrong.”
Eh? Did I miss something? When – and you don’t have to be exact now, a year will do – did the state say we’ll have Winterfest instead of Christmas? (Except for the time when Cromwell’s government banned Christmas, smartypants).
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Scientists: Govt ignoring advice on homeopathy
The coalition Government ignored scientific advice on the questionable nature of homeopathy by continuing to allow the NHS to fund homeopathic treatment despite there being next to no evidence that it works, leading scientists have told The Independent.
Last week, health ministers refused calls from the House of Commons science and technology committee to stop the NHS funding homeopathic treatment on the grounds that such a ban would limit patient choice and contradict the Government’s stated aim of devolving more power to the Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) of the NHS.
However, the Government’s own chief scientific adviser, Sir John Beddington, said that he had spoken informally to coalition ministers about his grave concerns about homeopathy and the Department of Health’s policy of allowing it to be prescribed under the NHS.
“I remain of the view that the evidence of efficacy and the scientific evidence base of homeopathy is highly questionable. It is vitally important that the public can make informed choices on their use of homeopathy, so the evidence base must be freely available in an easily-accessible format,” Sir John said.
In defence of Ed Balls (again)
There is a mistake that left-wingers frequently make: that is, to buy the narrative that right-wingers are spinning for them.
I fear this is the trap that Hopi Sen has fallen in when he makes the case against Ed Balls’ candidacy for Labour leadership:
As a result of this hurly-burly past, what Ed Balls doesn’t have is a positive public image. This is what is fatally crippling his candidacy. Ed Balls is seen, certainly by the media, as the champion of a group within the Labour party that has become more and more unpopular.
It’s certainly true that many right-wingers on teh interwebs make a big point about saying how Ed Balls would be their preferred candidate since he wouldn’t win the election. But these people also think Daniel Hannan should be in the cabinet.
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Ed Balls: Labour should avoid ‘three traps’
Ed Balls has written an excellent article in today’s Times (reproduced on his site) that says Labour needs to avoid three traps going forward.
First, we risk falling into Mr Cameron’s trap by focusing our fire too much on the Liberal Democrats. Yes, they have ditched their manifesto and sold their principles for power — and done so on the backs of the unemployed, public sector workers and the poorest in our communities. But while we must win back voters lost to the Lib Dems, we must not let the Tories off the hook. Even if Lib Dem ministers are wheeled out by Downing Street to defend the most unpopular decisions, we must not forget this is fundamentally a Conservative Government.
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Second, Labour must avoid the media trap, encouraged by the coalition, that the first and most fundamental question in British politics is cutting the deficit. This is what happened in the 1930s when the media and political elites, backed by the Governor of the Bank of England, insisted that the Government cut spending as quickly as possible. The economy spiralled into depression and we paid a heavy price.
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The third trap is the one we risk setting for ourselves. In the best of our 13 years in government, we dominated the radical centre ground of British politics, and we must not cede that territory now. … But there are risks in the other direction too: the idea that to be centrist and credible we must return to safety-first triangulation and hanker after the approval of the rightwing press and conservative business groups. We’ve ridden that tiger before and it didn’t get us very far. Neither should we fall for the myth that our biggest challenge is to “win back” middle-income voters. They largely stuck with us at the election while we lost the support of too many people on lower incomes who felt we were no longer on their side.
Spot on (as in, I agree with all three suggestions).
Ed Balls seems to have gone further than the other candidates in staking out a position on the deficit while avoiding the right-wing narrative that Labour must also cut the deficit strongly. Wonder if the other candidates will catch up.
Why aren’t we talking about Europe’s Roma shame?
contribution by Jon Lansman
Across Europe, eight million Romani citizens of the EU are subject to systematic segregation and persecution that is similar to the treatment of Jews in the first months of Nazi rule.
The interest they did show in the run up to the enlargement of the EU into east and central Europe seems to have been motivated only by the desire to prevent Romani migration to seek asylum in the West.
In recent months, the following events have taken place in western Europe:
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