Still, the cringeworthy moment in this case has at least resulted in some incidental publicity for the campaign against 42 days’ detention without charge. Shami Chakrabarti’s threat to sue culture minister Andy Burnham unless he apologises for his allegedly defamatory remarks about her recent interactions with David Davis is thetop story on the Guardian politics page.

Can’t argue with that. For those who have been living under a rock for the last twelve hours, this is what Burnham said to Progress magazine:

To people who get seduced by Tory talk of how liberal they are, I find something very curious in the man who was, and still is I believe, an exponent of capital punishment having late-night, hand-wringing, heart-melting phone calls with Shami Chakrabarti.

Shami’s responding letter, gleefully described by the Mail’s Benedict Brogan as a “belter” says:

I am writing in relation to your recent article in the ironically titled “Progress” magazine. In that article you set out to smear my dealings with the former Shadow Home Secretary. I must say that I find this behaviour curious, coming as it does from a Cabinet Minister; let alone someone with a partner and family of his own.

By your comments you debase not only a great office of State but the vital debate about fundamental rights and freedoms in this country. Indeed you seem reluctant to engage in that debate except in this tawdry fashion.

I look forward to your written apology as I’m sure does Mrs Davis. If on the other hand you choose to continue down the path of innuendo and attempted character assassination, you will find that the privileged legal protection of the parliament chamber does not extend to slurs made in the wider public domain. The fruits of any legal action will of course go to Liberty (the National Council for Civil Liberties).

It’s both good politics and good ideology, what she’s done. On the one hand, this increasingly depressing government deserves to be challenged on every bit of blithe excrescent arrogance that leaks out of its collective flabby backside. This comment had an inappropriately personal tilt and something of the spiteful stench of pure office politics gone very sour. Put simply, it was unprofessional in a politician, and in any other line of work Burnham would have got a rap for it.

So, as Anne Perkins points out over at CiF, the fact that he felt the need to make such a comment hardly reflects well on the quality of the other pro-42 days arguments at his disposal. You’d have to be a fool not to drive home that point if handed the opportunity on a platter, and this lady ain’t no fool. Why, she’s even managed to split the grassroots Tories on the comment thread at the Tory diary into dinosaurs and fluffy bunnies yet again.

But she’s also absolutely right. Not necessarily because of the feminist angle. No, to be honest, I don’t believe Burnham’s comments had that much to do with conscious chauvinism, though I see Lynne Featherstone is among those who do favour that interpretation. I think it’s more complex and more serious than that. The comments sprang from a subconscious, short-sighted, self-aggrandising boorishness – which often involves chauvinism, but is in fact a different beast. It’s the arrogance of the territory-jealous middle-manager run power-mad (not a bad description of the Labour experience as a whole, in fact).

We’ve all been half-bullied by these half-people at some time (or maybe I just think we all have and it’s actually just me…) and the drip-drip narrative goes something like this: You disagree with me, ergo everything you do is worthy of ridicule, all your motives are untrustworthy and you are to be treated with contempt.

It’s a narrative that twists facts to fit its own picture of how the world should be – Davis obviously must be a lying snake in the grass, therefore any impassioned discussions he may have with senior civil liberties figures can only be a “joke” that reflects badly on both of them.

In fact, I can hardly put it better than one of the (female) commenters on that Tory Diary thread:

I am surprised at the naivety of some of the comments above, its the oldest trick in the book, as they must know – make a ‘funny’ comment, which is quite snide as well, and then say ‘It was only a joke’, or ‘can’t you take a joke!’

It’s an attitude of mind whose permanent destruction would make the world an immeasurably better place, but since that is probably impossible, all energies should at least be focussed on driving it out of politics. Knockabout across the despatch boxes is one thing (not that it’s any more attractive there, but at least it is ritual and contained) but this was not Westminster theatre, it was a reflective interview in sympathetic company.

Which, of course, brings me to the most sinister part, as outlined by Spyblog: how does Andy Burnham know what time of day David Davis and Shami Chakrabarti have been on the phone and what the emo-political tone of the conversation was? Is the government tapping the phone lines of known 42 days’ opponents?

And does anyone better versed in Freedom of Information and suchlike matters have any idea as to how we can demand to be told?

Consider the wider implications of this peculiar marriage. Labour are committed to airport expansion and road-widening schemes. The Greens are opposed to both in much the same sense that the Pope is Catholic. Labour brought in public private partnership on the tube in the first place. The Greens are opposed to privatisation in all its forms, and are now having a bash at the Liberal Democrats for daring to even speak its name. Labour have just used green taxes to concrete over the massive hole in their own spending deficit. The Greens’ response: Darling bottles it in a budget that is Brown, not Green. Labour are in favour of nuclear power. The Greens are against it. Labour are on course to miss the 2010 emissions targets. The Greens rightly and continuously slate them for it.

Am I missing something here? Okay, Ken gets all the Green second preference votes, I can see why he wants those because they’ll be counted if he ends up in the top two. And Siân gets, well, all the Labour second preference votes, which will only be counted if she ends up in the top two… Hm, given that she is currently polling at 2% to Ken’s 40-odd, did anyone think this through?

And indeed it seems I am missing something, because this morning an open letter was presented to Nick Clegg by Green Assembly Member Darren Johnson, in which the Green party told Lib Dem voters they ought to be voting for Berry, had a go at Brian Paddick, a thirty-year career policeman, for being a “celebrity candidate” and claimed that he was less green than was to their taste! I trust that one went in the bin as fast as Clegg turned down Ken’s offer of a similar alliance a few weeks ago (the Greens being very definitely Labour’s second choice of junior partner).

So I now see what the Greens got out of their alliance with Labour. They got consultancy time from Ken’s publicity people. Some of whom were presumably in a bit of a vengeful mood following the Lib Dem rejection.

Labour have laid out their spending plans for 2009-10 and tax cuts ain’t part of the deal. And the Tories, while protesting that of course the world is about to fall apart and if they aren’t allowed back to the economic helm we’re all going to end up living on rubbish tips and eating roadkill, have nonetheless quietly accepted them. No tax cuts for at least the “first term” of Tory government, we learn from the laughably hubristic Mr Philip Hammond in the Sunday Telegraph.

Let me put in a disclaimer before I go about dissecting the lying lies of the liars; it is not the level of the tax take and the spending of it that I am discussing here. There will be tax-and-spend fans and minimal tax libertarians roaming these pages, and while veering to the latter myself I have no beef with either. My point is that this smugly perpetuated notion that in order to cut taxes for those well-known “hardworking families” you have to “find” some extra money from somewhere is a great big shocking freaking lying bloody lie. And I’m fed up with seeing it reported as fact, with lots of grave head-nodding from its Tory proponents as they assure us that this is a “sensible” policy and of course “sensible” trumps all, up to and including “monstrously unfair”. Anyone who dares question “sensible” economic policies must be an unhinged Trot. Still the same old paternalistic Tories.

This paternalism is a moot point; the Tories have hung on to it in the economic sphere in a way that long ago became unrealistic in other areas of policy. There’s a mystique surrounding the economy and its management that discourages frank enquiry, and prompts your humble layperson, perceiving just how complex the whole business is, to trust politicians on the subject of tax who in every other respect are quite clearly incapable of coming up with a policy to get out of bed. Eerily mystical utterings such as “the cupboard is bare”, “the chickens have come home to roost” are thoughtfully and seriously digested as pearls of financial wisdom, and spin is still, uniquely across governance, accepted in lieu of substance. Because these people must have looked at the figures, right? They must have done all the sums and proved to their own satisfaction that tax cuts are impossible, right? They know we can’t possibly follow the nitty-gritty, and so they wouldn’t deceive us that cruelly, right?

It’s really time this mystique was blown away from the specific area of tax. Because while the management of the economy and its relationship to taxation policy is indeed fiendishly complicated, the actual proportions of who contributes what to the revenue pot can be played about with by anyone who has a big enough abacus. In other words, you can alter the fairness of the taxation system without in the least affecting the number of beads you end up with. Tax “cuts” in the global sense of an overall reduction may well be impossible, effective tax cuts for the majority is not at all beyond reach, and never was.

It is perfectly possible to keep the size of the revenue pot exactly the same and still offer tax cuts at the bottom end of the scale to absolutely EVERYONE who has income, whether from employment, savings or dividends, however rich or poor they are. Obviously the lower earners will benefit disproportionately because they are less far into the tax bands in the first place. You pay for this tax cut by increasing the burden on the wealth taxes instead, reducing the reliefs available on capital gains tax, removing the extra relief available to higher rate taxpayers making pension contributons, taxing non-doms properly rather than just badgering them for hush money and, if I had my way, by slashing the inheritance tax threshold. Much of this is costed Lib Dem policy. Working – and saving – would be well-rewarded, and sitting on accumulating wealth that immediately benefits no-one less so. This encourages a faster turnover of economic activity, and incidentally eases pressure most on the poorest sections of society because they are the people who will tend to have income rather than assets.

So much for the lying lie. As to the “Why?” part, well, the Labour lying liars are lying to us because they’ve been having a great big money-guzzling statist party for the last decade, and surplus there is none, so they have to find their pick-me-up-and-elect-me tax cut of the basic rate from 22% to 20% (effective in a fortnight) from somewhere else. From whence? The poor people, of course! Let’s get them to pay for it by removing the 10% band and ensuring that everyone earning below about £17,000 is actually WORSE OFF this tax year. Brilliant. The Labour party, as was, finally up and died that day. I mean, can you picture the scene? Seventy years into the past, a lugubrious gang of jowly men congregates round t’head of t’pit… “Wadda we want?” “Redistribution from the low paid to the slightly better paid!” “When do we want it?” “NOW!”. So no wonder they’re lying.

The Tory lying liars are lying to us because in order to follow something like the scheme laid out here they would have to fiddle with higher-rate pension contributions and potentially inheritance tax, thereby incurring the screeching wrath of the Daily Mail, and that would never do. Now Labour may have pulled off a pretty impressive piece of heinousness with the removal of the 10% band, but the Tories are compounding their lying lie by coming over all family-centric. I’m not sure I can take another earnest announcement by “Dave” that he’ll do everything he can to help hardworking families, short of, yes, actually giving them a tax cut. But that doesn’t matter because his intentions are really, really good!

To summarise, well, the lying papers are telling you lying lies being peddled by lying liars. Do not be taken in. It’s perfectly possible to offer costed tax cuts to groups in need of them in the current economic climate, but only under a liberal tax system. This stop-being-so-silly consensus between the two main parties that tax cuts are impossible is definitely of the cosy variety, and needs urgently to be questioned by all who are opposed to great big freaking lying lies.

First off, he has a go at the nurses who treated him in an NHS hospital in Bath for being “grubby“. If not exactly civil, this is at least a legitimate concern and the nursing profession, unsurprisingly, is up in arms at the slur. So his fartship has been on the Today programme on Saturday morning doing what presumably passes among Tory peers for retrenchment; no, he was not actually complaining about the treatment he received; yes, he fully acknowledges not all nurses are grubby, and made this clear elsewhere in his speech.

No, the true horror of all this grave frothing is yet to reveal itself. This is how he goes on to talk about these young working women whose life choices are absolutely none of his business.

But worst of all my Lords they were drunken and promiscuous. How do I know that? Because if you’re a patient and you’re lying in a bed, and you’re being nursed from either side, they talk across you as if you’re not there. So I know exactly what they got up to the night before, and how much they drank, and I know exactly what they were planning to do the next night, and I can tell you, it’s pretty horrifying.

I do not recommend you locate the audio clip, because the prurience in the shaking timbre of his voice as he says “pretty horrifying” will make you feel a bit queasy. And it only got worse on the radio when his fartship gave us the benefit of his full assessment of the problem. John Humphrys has just asked him whether, well, there is a widespread problem at all (I paraphrase):

Well, you read about this in the papers, don’t you. Young women vomiting in the street and so on. Some of those young women will be secretaries, some will be teachers and some will presumably be nurses.

Later he must have thought, damn, I left out the seamstresses…

Now, this would be nothing more than yet another diverting right-wing-shouty-plonker-mouths-off-looks-like-a-cretinous-dinosaur story, if it weren’t for the fact that the prejudices on display are not limited to the right.

Recently, Jacqui “wetter than a haddock’s wet bits” Smith announced a new crackdown on underage- and binge-drinkers. Among her sophisticated suggestions to Her Maj’s police force are to stop drinking in problem areas* and close down “dodgy premises”. That drinking in public is a Bad Thing, and a Suitable Subject for a Crackdown seems to be taken as read by Ms Smith:

[Confiscation of alcohol] does make a difference, because it makes it very clear that young people should not be drinking alcohol on the streets with the sort of concerns that brings to local communities and the potential for them to go on and get involved in crime and disorder.

I’m sorry, the potential for them to get involved in crime? This bit of special pleading is rooted in nothing more than good old-fashioned suburban housefrau disapproval. How has it gained such currency, this Victorian notion that public drunkenness is a terrible problem in and of itself? It’s so conventional an assumption that even some liberals slip into using the language of illiberalism, as the Chair of the London Liberal Democrat Youth and Students (oh the rich irony!) recently did in this piece for Lib Dem Voice:

Everyone but me seemed to be devoted to the single-minded pursuit of the cheapest available route to drunkenness in the shortest possible time.

The writer himself was engaged in buying bread – try substituting the word “bread” for the word “drunkenness” in the above sentence and see what you learn about yourself. Somewhere in all the handwringing about binge-drinking and that well-known social demographic the Young People we have lost sight of the most fundamental liberal principle of all – who does it harm?

The binge-drinkers? Well then, we must have a discussion on whether the state has the right to save them from themselves, which alone could take the comments thread comfortably through a six-pack of Carling. And even if the state does have the right to intervene, should it do so via the route of law enforcement?

Innocent passers-by? But if someone is stabbed, assaulted, raped, robbed, jeered, threatened or otherwise inconvenienced by a street binge-drinker, there are laws which deal with and punish it, and oddly enough the punishment is exactly the same as for those who perform any of the above acts without being a street binge-drinker.

The Fabric of the Nation? Please. The entire business world today is run on coffee. Two hundred years ago the entire diplomatic and trading world was run on snuff and, not infrequently, laudanum. Five hundred years ago the whole of society was run on – yes! – alcohol again. We’ve always been high on something. The drug du jour is entirely incidental.

What the Home Secretary and the other tutters on the left cannot admit even to themselves is that they are just as guilty as the likes of Lord Mancroft when it comes to implicit prejudice about “things that nice people simply don’t do”. What the hell is wrong with the physical act of standing in the street getting wasted? Will Jacqui be sending police into middle-class homes on Christmas Day to arrest mummy and daddy for giving little Daisy a sip of sherry? The binge-drinkers live here too, Ms Home Secretary, whether you like it or whether it causes you to purse your mouth into something resembling a dog’s bottom.

The way this Hyacinth Bouquettish attitude is become mainstream in public life, I shouldn’t be at all surprised ten years down the line if sentences do start being varied according to the alcohol levels in the blood of the perpetrator. From there it’s but a step to simply banning alcohol, and this position would at least have the merit of intellectual consistency and prevent thick middle-class ministers from being able to legislate against lower-class habits in the name of public health.

The social fabric of Britain is under threat, not from binge-drinking, but from a truly terrifying marriage of barking right-wing paternalism and dour left-wing mumsyness, and it is my firm belief that every true left-liberal should lead the rearguard action by gathering up all their friends and hanging around in a big slouchy group outside the library swigging from bottles of merlot and shouting environmentally-aware abuse at passing 4×4 drivers. Direct action is what’s needed here.

* Yes, I read it that way the first time. But I think she means the police should stop other people drinking in problem areas.