Or as Neil put it, “the selection will only increase the sense that Labour regards the role of MP as some glorified graduate trainee programme, and sees constituencies as regional call centres, expected to dilligently enact the faxed dictats from central office…Perhaps the defeat of Ms Berger would send a symbolic – but important – message from Liverpool to London that the days of carpetbagging must end if Labour is to re-establish itself with what was once its heartlands.”

Now the specific example is poorly chosen – Liverpool Wavertree is a marginal constituency, the number one target of the Lib Dems in the area. But the wider point deserves a fact check – is it actually true that Labour’s traditional heartlands are suffering from the “rise of the carpetbaggers”?

To find out, I looked at the excellent UK Polling Report website of all the Labour seats where the current MP is standing down, they’ve selected a candidate, and the majority is more than 20% (i.e. which Labour are still very likely to win even if the Tories win the election overall). Guess how many were London-based New Labour loyalists with no connection to the area?

Of these twenty four seats, ten picked someone who was a current or former local councillor in the area, i.e. not a carpetbagger by definition.

Of the other thirteen, six grew up and went to school in the constituency where they are standing (not carpetbaggers); one was born in Hexham and is standing in Newcastle (not a carpetbagger); one works as a trade union official in Sunderland (not a carpetbagger). And one is a councillor in Warrington whose husband works for the outgoing MP (not a carpetbagger).

So that leaves five people who did not have local connections to their seat before they were selected. Stephen Twigg has revitalised the Liverpool West Derby Labour Party since the local party deselected Bob Wareing; Rachel Reeves is always mentioned as one of Labour’s rising stars; Lisa Nandy is an expert in issues which affect refugee and migrant children; Yasmin Qureshi is an anti-war leftie who will be the UK’s first female Muslim MP. None of them got selected as a result of a stitch-up by the party centrally.

And possibly the star of an extremely talented group is Kate Green, the former Director of the Child Poverty Action Group and now parliamentary candidate for Stretford and Urmston. Kate has spent her life campaigning for social justice, and Britain would be a better place if the government had listened more to her over the past few years and less to businessmen like Lord Freud, who is now the Tory “expert” on welfare.

When you actually look at who is getting selected in Labour’s safe seats, it becomes clear that it is just silly to argue that “Labour regards the role of MP as some glorified graduate trainee programme, and sees constituencies as regional call centres, expected to dilligently enact the faxed dictats from central office”.

I’m sure that the evidence won’t kill off this myth, just as people go on about “sheep-like” MPs when in fact they are the most rebellious ever. But the fact is that the overwhelming majority of people who the Labour Party selects in its safe seats were either born and grew up there, and/or had already served in the area as local councillors. Those that weren’t are as likely to be leftie critics of key government policies as loyalists, and all achieved success on their own merits, rather than as a result of London stitch-ups.

According to the Daily Mail she resigned after clashing with party chairman Eric Pickles.

Insiders say she quit following a showdown with Mr Pickles over the promotion of Amanda Sayers – chairman of Westminster North Conservatives – to the role of President last night.

Sources say the women apparently had an ongoing dispute and Joanne Cash objected strongly to her becoming president of the constituency she is fighting.

But there is also speculation that she was forced out by the Tory Taliban for becoming pregnant.

Last night the former political editor of the Observer Gaby Hinsliff remarked:

whaaat? @joanne_cash quit as PPC for westminster n (via @nextleft). really hope this is not because she’s pregnant.

Political Scrapbook notes:

This blow to David Cameron’s efforts to select more female candidates comes after Liz Truss, the Tories’ candidate in South West Norfolk, survived a concerted deselection attempt after she failed to inform the local party that she (shock! horror!) had an affair a mere four years previously

The Jack of Kent blog lamented that Joanne Cash was one of the few genuinely liberal Tories who ‘got’ libel reform.

ConservativeHome’s coverage of the resignation was extremely and unusually short.

Joanne Cash herself tweeted two hours ago:

Lots of rumours flying around distracting from … electing new govt! Go go go people!

…which has left a few scratching their heads.

EDM 524 states:

RECOGNISING CLIMATE CHANGE
That this House agrees that climate change is happening and is man-made; calls for hon. Members on all sides of the House to recognise this fact, which has the support of the overwhelming majority of the scientific community; and calls for cross-party support in tackling this problem that affects all of our constituents.

It was tabled in December.

But so far, Peter Bottomley and Tony Baldry remain the only Conservative MPs who seem to want to put their name to the EDM.

Back when cuts mania was all the rage during the conference season of 2009, only the TUC, others on the left and serious commentators like Martin Wolf argued that cuts came with major economic consequences.

The TUC argued particularly strongly that to start measures to address the deficit when the economy was still fragile threatened a double dip recession.

These views were of course rejected by the small state right in the form of the Institute of Directors, the Taxpayers Alliance and the Conservative Party itself.

Now it seems a new consensus has emerged in line with the view that cutting while the economy is weak is a recipe for disaster. All three main parties now agree on this since the Conservatives announced over the weekend they would not take any significant deficit measures until 2011.

The big fight now is to convince the parties that after 2011 the sensible approach is to address the deficit through economic growth and innovative taxation policies rather than by destroying the quality of public services and chucking thousands of public servants on to the dole.

This will again be rejected as insufficiently tough etc. etc. but the same was said back in September 2009.

We can make a good start by pointing to the current cuts in Higher Education. This is a disaster for the long-term future of the UK economy which will have to rely heavily on the strength of its knowledge led sectors to compete in the global marketplace.

We are playing off short-term fiscal policy against long-term economic policy – a massive error which will do nothing to benefit the public finances, let alone the economy, in coming years and decades.

“Not many women are really involved in blogging, because the blogosphere is quite pugnacious.”

In other words, this brave new world of ideas is much too rough for girls. In other words, keep to your corner of the playground before the nasty boys push you around any more.

When men are telling women why women don’t write about politics, they have a tendency to think of feminist politics as a niche subject, a fad, a schema somehow separated from the rest of political thought and action by a magical door of selective oversight. Coincidentally, whilst the New Media panellists were debating the apparent lack of female involvement in this new age of online activism, Matty Mitford was describing the progress of the Boris Keep Your Promise campaign in a much less well-attended Capital Woman session next door.

Boris Keep Your Promise is a multi-platform feminist, liberal coalition designed to embarrass the Mayor into keeping his election pledge to save London’s rape crisis centres. The internet has been essential in this campaign: activists blogged, tweeted and made a massive hypertextual fuss, pointing out that the amount of money required to save London’s one remaining rape crisis centre was exactly the same as Boris Johnson’s £250,000 yearly salary from The Telegraph, a sum he described as ‘chickenfeed’.

Mayor Johnson’s 2008 manifesto, in which he had pledged the rape crisis funding that City Hall officials were later forced to admit had not been prioritised, was quickly removed from the internet – but to no avail. On the 21st of October 2009, The London Assembly voted by a large majority to demand that the Mayor of London deliver the £744,000 a year he promised in his election campaign. Boris Keep Your Promise has been a coup for the left in London, it has been a flashpoint for internet activism in Britain, and it has been a victory for practical feminism. By challenging the right on small matters like whether they believe funding rape crisis centres is less important than keeping £750,000 in the City Hall PR budget, the Left can win victories. This is valuable campaining territory that is being lost in the wash of misogyny that pollutes the liberal blogosphere.

The offhand way in which Newman’s comment was made was what truly shocked me. Even if it were true that women don’t blog, even if it weren’t the case that thousands of brave, brilliant women from across the country and the world are right this minute raising their voices and debating online despite a great deal of targeted misogyny, Mr Newman and others on the panel made it seem that the presumed non-presence of over 50% of the population in the biggest conversation on earth was somehow a side issue.

Of course, the political blogosphere is pugnacious. It’s ugly, and it’s relentless, and it’s full of spiteful misogynists, rampant rape-apologists, slut-shamers, and bitter men in lonely bedrooms across the world whose idea of a great night in is to shame, decry and otherwise tear apart the very personhood of remote, virtual women who they’re never likely to meet. Nearly every female blogger I know has at some point spoken to me, half-amused, about her ’stalkers’, and the strange and cruel things they’ve emailed to say they want to do to them. There is a reason that women bloggers moderate their comments, a reason why the majority of female World of Warcraft players choose male avatars, a a reason why we often feel unsafe in spaces where, as liberals or as conservatives or music fans or uploaders of inane vlogs about our cats, we should not have to expect hostility.

But when that hostility occurs, as it has for women since the internet began, most of us are big enough and tough enough to handle it, and handle it we do, quietly, exhaustively, relentlessly, fending off the misogynist attacks that any woman with ambitions to raise her voice above a whisper learns to handle. I have been called a cunt, a cow, a whore, a stupid little girl, I’ve been told that I deserve to be raped and beaten, I’ve been told I need to be taken in hand by a man who will fill me up with the babies that are the only thing my body and brain are good for, and I’m still here, I’m still writing, arguing and debating, and they haven’t managed to shut me up yet.

The sort of repulsive, everyday abuse I’m talking about is perfectly anodine, and it’s entirely expected, and it has all occurred within the liberal blogosphere. This isn’t the nasty, evil Tories. This is the Left. The left urgently needs to clean its own house when it comes to misogyny and sexism online. The liberal blogosphere needs to stop marginalising women and condoning sexist attacks if we want our thousand flowers to bloom rather than strangling each other, weedlike, before we get off the ground.

Tonight, What Difference Does Political Blogging Make?, a debate hosted by the Westminster Skeptics, took place in central London. The panellists – Guido Fawkes, Iain Dale, Nick Cohen, Sunny Hundal and Mick Fealty – were all men. And it’s not like they didn’t have women bloggers to invite. What about Cath Elliot, or Harpy Marx, or Sadie Smith? What about Jess McCabe of that phenomenal political campaigning platform, The F Word? If there’s going to be any sort of future for the left, female bloggers need to be acknowledged as a central and vital part of the conversation.

Despite global consensus that industrial biofuel production uses valuable food crops and increases carbon emissions, the Department for Transport is currently developing policy that will increase the amount of biofuel in our petrol and diesel.

This means that by 2020 UK consumers with no choice when they fill up but to increase carbon emissions and push 600 million extra people into hunger.

To highlight this ludicrous policy they’re bringing together influential scientists, academics, journalists and bloggers from both sides of the argument.

Panelists include:
• The Times’ Environment Editor, Ben Webster
• Director of the Low Carbon Vehicle Partnership, Greg Archer
• Founder of the Bolivia Solidarity Campaign, Amancay Colque.

The debate is being held at the London Transport Museum from 6.30pm – 8.30pm on Tuesday 16th February and there’s a reception afterwards to give you the chance to meet and chat with speakers.

To attend, email: Jadis Tillery

More on Biofuels from ActionAid on this page

From a press release

These claims include more £20,000 for services provided by a PR company, set-up by a former Tory spin doctor in 2004, relating to Dorries’ controversial anti-abortion campaign, which failed to secure a change in the law cutting the upper-time limit for abortions from 24 to 20 weeks.

Dorries has also claimed more than £30,000 for services provided by two other ‘research’ companies with close ties to the Conservative party since becoming an MP in 2005.

Dorries’ official MPs website has also been found to have cost the taxpayer almost £9,000 since 2005 despite it not having been updated at all in the last twelve months.

Responding to reports that his company, Media Intelligence Partners, had received more than £66,000 in payments claimed against MPs expenses, ex Tory spin doctor Nick Wood told the Telegraph that MPs would typically pay for research, and then received PR advice from his company free of charge.

There should be, at least, a full investigation into the use of these companies, on expenses, by Conservative MPs.

Media Intelligence Partners

Between November 2006 and September 2008, Dorries submitted nine expenses claims totalling £21,927.50 in relation to services provided by a PR company called Media Intelligence Partners. The company was set up in 2004 by Nick Wood, a former media advisor to both William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith during the periods in which they served as Leader of the Conservative Party.

When challenged to explain these payments by the Daily Telegraph, last May, Wood told the newspaper that the company that it has sought “advice” on abortion from an “expert in America” on Dorries’ behalf.

Dorries told the same newspaper that her claims were for her campaign to reduce the upper legal limit for abortions from 24 weeks to 20 weeks before adding that, “It is impossible as a backbencher to run a campaign of that size out of your office unless you have additional help.”

A controversial Channel 4 documentary, ‘In the Name of God’, which aired in May 2008, shows Dorries receiving extensive advice and support for her campaign from British-based lawyer and evangelical Christian campaigner, Andrea Minichiello Williams, raises some questions however .

(see video footage below)

Williams is the director of the Christian Legal Centre, which has been behind a significant number of high profile cases of religiously-inspired litigation, a practice that Carl Gardner, who blogs as ‘Head of Legal’ has dubbed “religitigation”.

She is also the founder of the Christian pressure group ‘Christian Concern for Our Nation”, which was found to have provided Dorries with her anti-abortion campaign website, a fact that Dorries failed to disclose when launching ‘her’ campaign.

Although this campaign attracted a significant amount of uncritical and supportive media coverage, including 65 articles in Daily Mail, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008, her campaign website seems to have attracted a mere 7,000 pledge of support.

Although parliamentary rules prohibit MPs from claiming on expenses for advice on self-promotion or PR for individuals or political parties, Dorries’ anti-abortion campaign relied heavily on personal attacks on political opponents, including Liberal Democrat MP Dr Evan Harris and a number of female Labour MPs who has received very modest sum of financial support from Emily’s List before becoming MPs.

While serving as member of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, during its 2007 review of scientific developments relating to abortion law, Dorries attempted to use a so-called ‘minority report’, published as an addendum to the committee’s main report, to smear the science journalist and blogger, Dr Ben Goldacre, by claiming that he’d been covertly passed evidence relating to a submission by anti-abortion doctor, John Wyatt, by another, unnamed, member of the committee.

The allegation collapsed into high farce within hours of its publication after Dr Goldacre responded by pointing out that he’d obtained the information, which he used as the basis for an article for his ‘Bad Science’ column in the Guardian, from the SciTech committee section of Parliament’s official website.

Marketing Management Midlands Ltd

Last week, we revealed that Dorries had submitted expense claims totalling £24,065 between September 2008 and June 2009 for services provided by a Gloucestershire-based PR firm, Marketing Management Midlands Ltd. Payments for these claims were met from Dorries’ staffing allowance, which is typically used by MPs to fund salaries for office staff, researchers and/or constituency case worker.

On Friday, the Daily Telegraph identified one of the company’s two directors as Lynn Elson, who is described by the newspaper as a ‘close friend’ of Mrs Dorries. Elson’s company is based in small village near Moreton-in-Marsh in the Cotswolds, close to the location of the rented property at the centre of an ongoing investigation, by the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, into Dorries’ £18,000 a year claims for rent on a second home in Woburn, in her Mid-Bedfordshire constituency.

Dorries has already publicly apologised to her constituents for providing them with misleading information about her living arrangements after it was found that she had registered a property in Cotswolds with the Parliamentary Fees Office as her main home, despite announcing on her website, in 2005, that she and her family would ‘settle in Woburn’.

Our own detailed examination of Dorries’s expenses claims has now uncovered a further £12,000 worth of expenses claims submitted in relation to services provided by Marketing Management Midlands Ltd between July 2007 and June 2009, bringing Dorries’ total amount of claims submitted for services provided by her ‘close friend’ to £47,497.25 in just two years.

Claims totalling £37,509,75 were submitted during the period from September 2008 to June 2009, after Dorries discontinued her relationship with Media Intelligence Partners. During this period two issues, the so-called ‘smeargate’ emails exchanged by Derek Draper and Damian McBride and Dorries’ expenses claims, have accounted for the majority of the press coverage in which Dorries has featured.

But with Boris now in office and cuts to the budget threatening to wipe out the affordable housing programmes, this bleak story looks set to get even worse.

In my recent report, Coming home to roost, I showed how the policies of two Mayors of London have failed to deliver secure, safe, comfortable housing.

In London, social housing waiting lists have grown by 82% as the stock of homes actually decreased. Right to Buy continued unabated until very recently, with 85,000 homes off the stocks. In the same decade, we only managed to build around 55,000 new homes.

There are now over 330,000 households waiting to be allocated a place that suits their needs – that’s roughly 10% of all the households in the city.

For those looking to buy a home in the noughties, the housing bubble – cheered on by enthusiastic journalists – saw the cost rising twice as quickly as average incomes. The Mayor’s proposed new threshold for people looking to buy an “affordable” (shared ownership) home is a household income of £74,000. I’m not sure that’s a sign of a very affordable market!

The usual response to all of this has always been: “build more houses”. Apparently, all would be well if only we could increase the supply quickly enough to meet demand.

Unfortunately the very pro-building Mayor Ken Livingstone fell well short of his targets over his term of office, and even if he had met his targets that wouldn’t have contained the inflation-busting rises in house prices. You’d need to build roughly double the number we’ve managed to achieve that.

If you really wanted to increase house building that much in London – including building more council houses instead of subsidising developers to build unaffordable “shared ownership” schemes – you’d need to pump lots more money into the HCA budget, which comes out of the capital expenditure budget.

Which brings us to the latest Pre-Budget Report, which suggested this would be slashed by 50% over 2011-14. The National Housing Federation has warned that a 17.98% cut – the average across the whole government budget – would result in 500,000 fewer affordable homes nationally.

The other sources of funding for affordable homes are developer contributions, which fell by a third over the past two years from £30.6m in 2006/7 to £21.3m in 2008/9, and discounted or free public land, which both dried up last year.

There are fairer alternatives that don’t depend on housing bubbles. The Mayor and the Government could get radical, adopting models such as Community Land Trusts and Mutual Home Ownership.

These create community safety nets that own the land, keep homes permanently affordable, and enable you to buy up a growing stake in your home without having to take on all the responsibility for the debt. We could invest – as communities – in building these homes instead of relying on government handouts and big business. Remember building societies?

It wouldn’t be as quick, it wouldn’t be as flashy, but it would build the foundations for a housing market more focused on genuinely affordable homes than risky speculative investments.

Why could that be? Here are five six reasons why.

“I’ve been reading up on the impact of previous economic downturns on our health. Interestingly, on many counts, recession can be good for us. People tend to smoke less, drink less alcohol, eat less rich food and spend more time at home with their families.”
Andrew Lansley, The Blue Blog

“This is going to be the most unpopular blog I’ve ever written, but here goes. MPs should set their own salaries. They should be free – encouraged, even – to take on additional jobs. And the fuss about how much they can spend on their kitchens is silly and demeaning.”
Daniel Hannan MEP, Daily Telegraph blog

“People and governments have spent too much and borrowed to do so. Now the world’s markets are saying enough is enough. Living standards in both the public and private sector have to be brought down. The private sector has to sell more abroad and consume less at home. The government sector has to get closer to just spending what it can collect in taxes.”
John Redwood MP

“Why is it that some groups in society, notably homosexuals, seem to regard almost any reference to themselves as automatically pejorative? It suggests a terminal lack of self-respect and self-confidence, an over-developed sense of victim-hood, a mighty chip on the shoulder.”
Roger Helmer MEP

“Global warming is a politicians’ scam designed to centralise power and increase taxes”
Roger Helmer MEP

“I personally favour a system of social insurance with levels of care defined by government as used in whole or in part by many of our European neighbours.”
George Hollingbery (PPC for Meon Valley)

A leader in the weekly magazine says:

It would be idiotic to claim that Britain is perfect. The vomitous binge-drinking mainly by the young, the drug abuse and teenage pregnancy that are still higher than in most west European countries and the large proportion of single-parent families all tell a tale. But the story of broad decline is simply untrue.

Stepping back from the glare of the latest appalling tale, it is clear that by most measures things have been getting better for a good decade and a half. In suggesting that the rot runs right through society, the Tories fail to pinpoint the areas where genuine crises persist. The broken-Britain myth is worse than scaremongering—it glosses over those who need help most.
…
In attempting to convince voters that society has suffered a comprehensive breakdown (and pandering to his own party’s right wing), Mr Cameron has been guided towards social policies that are designed to heal the entire country, rather than help the relatively few who need it. His proposed tax break for married couples and gay civil-partners is an example. It does nothing for workless households. It would help only 11% of the 4m British children in poverty, while handing bonuses to plenty of well-off people. That would be a bad idea at any time; in a period when the state must tighten its belt it is an extraordinary proposal.

A longer evidence-based article rubbishes the scaremongering peddled by the Conservatives on various fronts.

It covers issues such as crime, teenage pregnancy, the health of children, drinking, smoking and other indicators, and concludes by saying:

The evidence supporting the existence of a “broken society” is thin indeed: all the more reason to focus on those who languish outside mainstream society altogether.

This week shadow home secretary Chris Grayling was comprehensively debunked by BBC reporting when he said that crime had risen massively under New Labout.

Even the UK Statistics Authority’s Sir Michael Scholar had to step in, and his own colleague Iain Duncan Smith said using the statistics in such a way was “profoundly misleading”.

You can see shades of this frustration in the backlash over Luciana Berger’s selection as Labour’s candidate for Liverpool Wavertree. Ms Berger is hardly at fault for being young, for harbouring a desire for public service or for possessing qualities which have made her appealing to London’s Labour hierarchy. She may, indeed, prove to be an excellent MP.

But what I read in the exasperated responses to her selection is a refrain I’ve heard many times in & around the Shankly Gates: was there not a single person, in a city of over 400,000 people, who could’ve done as good a job? The city expects an Emlyn Hughes or a Jamie Carragher – someone who, at some level, can understand & relate to the culture & traditions of the people they serve.

In my experience, scousers are no more insular than the inhabitants of any other large town or city. But they do possess a distinctive history and culture which they are deeply proud of and enjoy sharing with the rest of the world. They deserve – like every constituency in the country deserves – an MP who can recall this rich history, revel in its traditions and understand the hopes and fears of the people they wish to represent.

Really, this post isn’t even about Luciana Berger; a similar piece could’ve been written about David or Ed Miliband, Ed Balls or Yvette Cooper.

But her selection will only increase the sense that Labour regards the role of MP as some glorified graduate trainee programme, and sees constituencies as regional call centres, expected to dilligently enact the faxed dictats from central office.

One argument made by opponents of proportional representation is that it would remove the link between an MP and his/her constituents, yet they never stop to recognise that, thanks to the centralising of political parties, this link is already reaching the end of its tether.

Perhaps the defeat of Ms Berger would send a symbolic – but important – message from Liverpool to London that the days of carpetbagging must end if Labour is to re-establish itself with what was once its heartlands.

Last week we published a report through ippr suggesting that we really did need to catch up in our approach to identity and how we foster diversity and tackle inequality.

Our central point was to question the belief that our identities any longer fit neatly into ‘tick boxes’ or that equality issues fit neatly into ‘strands’. Doing this produces a simplistic and sometimes false picture of disadvantage.

It runs the risk of patronising those in the previously disadvantaged groups who do not feel that their aspirations and achievements are any longer foreshortened by the mere fact of being black or disabled or gay or whatever.

And, worse than that, an approach to equalities that is based solely on ‘minorities’ risks excluding further those in the broader population who already feel that they are not being listened to. It is not so difficult to join the dots from this kind of political approach to one of the reasons why people vote BNP.

What has been most encouraging is that the reaction to the report has been overwhelmingly positive.

There is absolute evidence that in certain situations certain groups experience persistent bias. But discrimination, while it may still be an every day event is no longer an all day event.

We have reached the position where the very categorisations that we have relied on to understand equalities challenges (for example ‘black’, ‘Asian’, ‘gay’ or ‘disabled’) tell us less than ever about who people are, what lives they lead, who they identify with or what services they need from government and society.

For example, ethnic categories such as ‘black African’ hide such huge differences that they become almost pointless.

Overall some 66 per cent of black African-born people in the UK were employed in 2005/06 but Ghanaian-born people had an employment rate of 80 per cent while Somalia-born people had a rate of around 20 per cent.

To be blunt poverty and class will always trump identity when it comes to real disadvantage.

We must design our public services to be accurate in tackling discrimination where that is the problem, but where it is not, to deliver services to individuals, without making assumptions about their need and lives. If we can personalise public services, then we can personalise our approach to equality.

There is a long way to go before we achieve anything like true equality in the UK but we have no chance of getting there until we drop our simplistic, tick-box approach to how disadvantage and discrimination work in society.

———–
‘You can’t put me in a box’ by Simon Fanshawe and Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah was published this week by the Institute for Public Policy Research.

The Tories were independent in their thought and actions, we were told, and that’s what made them a vibrant force online.

Oh wait:

David Cameron has ordered his party’s candidates to submit their online utterances for vetting.

The strict edict issued to every Tory candidate across the country covers updates on social networking sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as Internet blogs and websites.

The move aims to cut the number of gaffes in the run-up to the General Election when would-be MPs will face intense scrutiny.

A sudden rush to embrace “Stalinist control” and “regulation”? Surely Tories will not stand for this? Erm, the top Tory blogs seem to be rather silent on the matter.

The Daily Mail carries on to say:

In fact, relatively few Tory MPs use Twitter regularly.
One, Andrew Rosindell, has left his 314 Twitter followers just one message since signing up 12 months ago with the words: ‘Andrew is excited to have joined Twitter’.

Perhaps that was a step too far.

Coming after the attempt by CCHQ to herd Tory bloggers into a unified message, it seems their Stalinist tactics seem to be working quite well.

Update: And the repercussions have already begun:

@BevaniteEllie: Has this passed CCHQ fact check?? Is it really tea time? RT @LouiseBagshawe …am exhausted and it’s only tea time!

@gift_of_the_fab: @BevaniteEllie Officially Tory PPCs are not allowed to be tired or exhausted; they should always be bright, chirpy, chipper

So what happened at the convention?

Tom Tancredo, a former Republican congressman from Denver in Colorado who ran for president in 2008, devoted most of his opening speech on Thursday night to illegal immigration. He said the fabric of US society had been eroded by the “cult of multiculturalism”, “Islamification”, and large numbers of immigrants who did not want to be Americans.

In his most incendiary comment, he invoked the segregationist methods of the southern states, saying that Obama had been elected because “we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country”. Southern segregationist states used to prevent black people having the vote by setting them restrictively difficult qualification tests, a historical allusion lost on few of the delegates present.

Watch the video

Sunder Katwala at Next Left points out why Tancredo mentioned literacy tests:

Literacy tests were made illegal in the 1965 Voting Rights Act after being one of the key measures used to systematically disenfranchise black voters in the US South.

But remember:

Barack Obama won 67.4 million votes to 58.4 million for Republican John McCain.

Exit polls show he led among voters of every level of education.

We wonder if Conservatives in the UK, who previously played down racism amongst the Tea Party movement and generally amongst Republicans, will acknowledge or even distance themselves from the wingnuts.

The Times also reported in horror, though sister-station Fox News was a key promoter of the Tea Party convention:

One featured speaker, a “Patriot Pastor” named Rick Scarborough, told The Times that he was not against legal immigrants “but God has ordained that you are not a nation if you don’t have borders”. Standing next to a pile of books entitled Liberalism Kills Kids, he added: “If this country becomes 30 per cent Hispanic we will no longer be America. We don’t want to become like the UK where in places you have Sharia.

Update: According to the Washington Independent, a Tom Tancredo staffer pleaded guilty last year to hitting a woman after calling her a ‘nigger’. He was allowed to keep his job.
(via @LDNCalling)

Sensible people may disagree, but they ought to agree on this

The appropriate role of government in the economy is a fundamental question, and one that should excite the interest of LC readers. In the interminable blog war between libertarians and statists, there are two polarized positions that all sensible people should disavow.

1. Government activity is generally undesirable (on one side)
2. Government programs with laudable goals should be supported (on the other)

These extreme views are paraphrased from this blog post, which was itself inspired by this blog post, in which a couple of libertarians try to persuade their fellow libertarians to embrace government.

I heartily recommend both articles.

They are not the final word on the subject (both operate at a reasonably simplistic and generalised level) but if the insights therein were more widely appreciated, well for one thing the standard of debate in the blog comments thread would improve no end.

One thing that might re-vitalise the liberal-left is some careful thinking about which problems are amenable to government solutions, and which aren’t. But the point here is not merely to shake up the left. These arguments also provide ammunition to demolish the witless anti-government instincts of the right.

To quote from the article linked above:

If your politics were about policy, and you were reasonable, then you’d support programs with high value impacts and easy coordination, and oppose programs with low value impacts and difficult coordination.

Ideologues who oppose all government programs no matter how valuable or easy, or who support all programs with laudable goals no matter now difficult their coordination task just don’t get it. That might signal their values …. but not their reason.

Be interested to hear your thoughts.

Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson nominated as ‘people’s peer’

Paralympic gold medalist Tanni Grey-Thompson is set to become a “people’s peer” after a recommendation from the House of Lords Appointments Commission.

We can skip the next couple of paragraphs, which are just the usual puff about Grey-Thompson’s personal achievments, and move straight on to the punchline:

She will be one of four new non-party-political peers recommended to the Prime Minister by the commission.

The others are Design Council chair and former Whitehall mandarin Sir Michael Bichard, Royal Opera House chief executive and former BBC journalist Tony Hall, and eminent surgeon Professor Ajay Kakkar.

So, our other three ‘people’s peers’ are:-

- A career civil servant and Companion of the Order of the Bath.

- The Chief Executive of the Royal Opera House who’s role and achievements at the BBC are being woefully underplayed to give him a bit of the common touch.

Hall was not just a BBC journalist. He’s a former editor of the Nine O’Clock News, Director of News and Current Affairs Television, Director of News and, in 1999, he was an unsuccessful candidate for the job of Director General. Not uncoincidentally, the achievements section of his CV includes both the launch of Radio 5 Live and, somewhat more relevantly, the launch of BBC Parliament.

As for Professor Ajay Kakkar, my first reaction was ‘who?’, but on looking him up, he’s:-

Professor and Chairman of the Centre for Surgical Sciences at Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry, Queen Mary College University of London. Surgeon St Bartholomews Hospital and The Royal London Hospital and Director-Designate Thrombosis Research Institute, London, UK.

Its an impressive looking CV and it appears to come (although its not mentioned) with the obligatory Harley Street practice.

In all, this sheds a bit of interesting light on the appointments process undertaken by the House of Lord Appointments Commission.

On this evidence that appears one of picking a name that people will have heard of, for the sake of a nice headline, and then shoving three other well-stuffed members of the establishment in the behind in the hope that no one will notice just how obvious a piece of utter bullshit this whole ‘people’s peers’ business has been from start to finish.

Culnane is the latest and most extreme member of the BNP to be employed at the Greater London Authority, since Barnbrook was elected in 2008.

His other appointments have included Simon Darby (now suspended) Emma Colgate, Rod Gordon, Chris Roberts and Tony Avery. All have been, or remain members of the BNP.

However, Culnane is also a close associate of the British People’s Party, a group so vile that even the BNP pretend to want nothing to do with them.

A white separatist party advocating forced repatriation of non-whites, the BPP also campaign for the “replacement of all multi-cultural and alien art” and the re-criminalisation of homosexuality.

They also do a nice line in busts of Hitler:

Tess Culnane has repeatedly shared platforms with the BPP and spoken at their rallies. In 2006 the party listed the BPP as a proscribed organisation:

“Although tiny and politically insignificent the Nationalist Alliance and British Peoples Party are hereby proscribed. The NA and BPP are used by hostile media elements to link our party to them. We don’t need or want the skinhead and nazi image which the NA and BPP thrive on and so it is necessary for us to make it very clear that there is a complete separation.”

Culnane announced that she would resign from the party in protest at the BNP’s decision:

After careful consideration and personal sadness I have decided not to renew my BNP membership in 2006. I cannot in all conscience be told by the leadership, who I can and cannot associate with – what literature I can and should not read and if I do not abide by these rules I will be proscribed.(I have always believed that a ‘nationalist is a nationalist’ and the only way forward is to be united).

I will not be instructed to dis-associate myself from certain other true nationalists many of whom, in my opinion, have been unjustly proscribed and by rights should be in the highest echelons of the British National Party thus replacing certain people that are obviously unsuitable to hold their current positions in the party.

After leaving the BNP, Culnane joined the National Front and fought for the London Assembly seat of Greenwich and Lewisham in 2008.

Despite standing for an ultra-minority party, Culnane gained 5.8% of the vote. By contrast, the BNP’s Mayoral candidate (and her current boss) Richard Barnbrook gained just 3.5% of the vote within the same constituency.

This relatively high profile in the area had been built up over many years. In the early noughties she repeatedly hit the headlines for her campaign against the menace of invading head lice and their traitorous defenders in the government: