James Purnell says the long-term unemployed “will be required to work full-time or undertake full-time work-related activity in return for their benefits.” (par 2.18 here).

This raises several questions. Isn’t this an abuse of language? I had thought that if you work, the money you get in return is wages.

And if you have to work 40 hours a week to get Job Seekers Allowance of £60.50, you’re paid £1.50 an hour. How is this consistent with the principle of a minimum wage?
But there’s a deeper question. Purnell could have sold a similar policy differently. He could have spoken thus:
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For those of us who lean centre-right the most dispiriting thing about the row over the crime statistics is the paucity of confidence it demonstrates in some Tory supporters, particularly among bloggers.

We’ve established a near-constant 20pt poll lead, notched up significant electoral victories in London & Crewe, garnered the sort of positive press coverage they’ve only dreamt about for c.15 years and seen even Labour’s most loyal and optimistic supporters in the press now talk about the ‘scale of’ rather than ‘likelihood’ of defeat.

That’s the sort of context most oppositions would shed a limb for.
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So, a state funeral for Maggie? Why the hell not. Let’s do it.

And whilst we’re at it, let’s have a frantic choir of badly-dressed midgets singing the ding-dong song. Hell, I’m only 5ft tall myself, I’ll lead the chorus. Let’s have a party. Let’s have a gigantic piss-up to see the old girl off, and with her what remained of industrial Britain: its hatred.

Because once the witch is dead, maybe the progressive left can finally move on.

We lost, back in the mid-80s. Well, in fact, I was watching The Poddington Peas and eating a rusk on a sofa in Islington at the time, officer - but, vicariously, I lost too. We all lost. We need to face that, forgive ourselves and move on.
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Reading the Grauniad’s interview with David Cameron and the accompanying article, it’s very difficult not to become depressed that after 10 years of Blair, within a couple of years we’re going to be under the thumb of his very real heir, and with not just the Labour party but the entirety of the left raising barely a whimper of defiance.

Cameron’s broken society gambit is almost certainly the one detail that makes me despair the most. He knows it’s not true, we know it isn’t true, the government knows it isn’t true, even the Times, whose sister paper has done the most to perpetuate the notion knows it isn’t true, and yet I don’t think I can recall a single politician, whether they be Labour or Liberal Democrat who has directly challenged Cameron to provide some real evidence that British society is any sense broken.

Here’s Cameron’s incredibly weak case for it:

He denies he is giving a false picture of Britain by talking of a broken society, saying: “There is a general incivility that people have to put up with, people shouting at you on the bus or abusing you on the street, or road rage. There is a lot of casual violence; and I think it is important to draw attention to it.”

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SnapsThoughts has a photo essay on the fraughtness of union links with Labour. Each image is accompanied by some thought-provoking words. Highly recommended.

Douglas has news of a sexist Tory. In other news, bears are Catholic and the pope poos in the woods.

Spirit of 1976 discovers his inner Clarkson and feels DIRTY.

Sexual Intelligence Blog reports on John McCain’s reluctance to discuss sexual matters. Not in front of the children, dear.

Jonathan Calder is rather cross about curfews, and people who hail them as a success before they even start.

Lee Griffin has some praise for the home secretary’s plans on knife crime.

Feminist SF covers the finale of the most recent series of Doctor Who.

That’s all folks. Tips to the usual address, and I’ll see you Sunday.

I need David Cameron lecturing me on moral responsibility in much the same way as I need a layer of icing applied to my lasagne.

Cameron had the gall to give this speech on the eve of the Glasgow East by-election campaign, in a deprived city licked to a splinter by the economic policies pursued by his party in the 1980s.

He said:
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Other than being the Big Swinging Dicks in their very different respective ‘hoods, there might at first sight appear to be little in common between a rap superstar and the editor of the Daily Mail.

But following on from a comment in a Shakilus Townsend post I wrote on my blog, I am rather taken with a possible parallel between 50 Cent (pictured) and Paul Dacre, namely the role they wittingly or otherwise play in popularising ‘knife culture’.

Fiddy, of course, routinely glorifies violence for commercial reasons, because that’s what sells records. For his part, Dacre regularly ramps up the reportage of the latest moral panic, becauses that’s what sells newspapers.
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The BNP have a lot to answer for in regard to pulling down the gene ral tenor of virtually any electoral debate, but it is not to them that I refer herein.

No, it is to ‘independent candidate’ Jill Saward who is running against David Davis in Haltemprice and Howden on the basis that all our society seems to be interested in are the rights of the accused, not the rights of the victims.

This one could give the hang ‘em and flog ‘em brigade a run for their money when she declares that…

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The government has now published the text of its emergency Criminal Evidence (Anonymity Bill) in response to a recent ruling by the Law Lords that the use of anonymous witnesses under existing common law provisions is prejudicial and breaches the defendent’s right to a fair trial. Continue reading…

Is there a blog we should be reading, or a post that you think we should link to? Email us your tips to tips@liberalconspiracy.org

Iain Dale’s Total Politics site has launched, and revealed its editorial team. It’s actually quite interesting, and appears to be very well funded too… Why no, these grapes are sweet and tasty, why’d you ask? (Hat tip, Mark Pack at LDV). Oddly they don’t appear to have linked to us from their political blogs directory, but then, as a top ten political blog we’re hard to miss, and the blog directory is so badly-constructed, it’s possible they have linked to us and I just haven’t found the link

Andrew Rilstone writes about how a writer’s writings are distinct from and yet linked to the writer as a person and that person’s political views. Brilliant post (and not just because he says The Shadow Over Innsmouth is better than The Call of Cthulhu), but does contain rude words: proceed with caution.

PC Bloggs turns her ever-acerbic eye onto government in the latest of her occasional series on 21st Century Policing. If I could make PC Bloggs a Home Office advisor…

Political Betting are wondering if the Labour Party will lose their deposit in Henley.

Lynne Featherstone is a big blubbing girly - and this entry is so lovely it turned me into one too. Get your tissues out, and I won’t tell anyone that you needed them.

BluJay posts in the cheerfully-named So Very Doomed group blog about the difficulties that we in the developed world will have obtaining food if things don’t change drastically and soon.

Slightly Warped posts pictures of a fire in a cave in Uzbekistan that’s been burning for 5 years (so far) and is known as the Door to Hell. (Hat tip: Neil Gaiman)

This week’s events have corroborated my belief that we can learn more about society and politics from Big Brother than from Today in Parliament.

Alexandra’s expulsion from the house for “intimidating” behaviour demonstrates our ruling class’s terror of anything remotely resembling a physical threat; violence is something done to foreigners, not “respectable“ white people.
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Tomorrow is Download Day. I’ve been using the Firefox3 beta for some time now, and I’m very impressed with it. If you’re using IE and fancy giving it a shot, you may as well do it tomorrow and be part of a world record attempt. Click the button for the link:

Lynne Featherstone talks about the difficulties of relying on the NHS to provide you with independent movement.

Spirit of 1976 has suddenly discovered an urge to try Khat - why? Because the Tories want to ban it.

The Times has a fascinating article on the history of Vibrators, and how the humble Personal Massager reflects the changing attitude of society to women.

Smash Boredom has a convincing argument that Robert Mugabe is right about something.

PC Bloggs has a very affecting tale of police resources spread too thin. I can’t recommend her blog enough.

And finally, Feminist SF reviews the weekend’s episode of Doctor Who in a rather weary manner.

Yesterday, on emerging from the bowels of the Picadilly line as is my wont at half six on a Thursday, I was dismayed to see a wall of armoured police surrounding a pair of electronic weapons-detecting barriers through which the good residents of Wood Green were being made to walk.

So I took it upon myself to engage a couple of members of Her Majesty’s Constabulary in conversation.
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Shock, horror, disaster! Call the riot boys, summon the G8! Get your placards out! Cannabis causes brain damage!

Well, sort of. Ish. We think. But it’s been days since the last teen stabbing and it’s a slow news morning, so let’s have a moral panic anyway. Cue headlines splashed with the latest drug trials that prove next to nothing about the effects of marijuana on the human brain, as if that were the point.
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Hypermasculinity, like hyperfemininity, is a pose of the powerless. There is a reason you don’t see gangs of City bankers stalking Moorgate and Maylebone with long knives and hoods pulled down over their heads - and it’s not because they’ve been better brought up.

It’s because they’ve no need to. When you’ve got money and status and class and education and power, you don’t need to act out physical prowess and aggression because it’s not all you’ve got - although the hard-working ladies at Spearmint Rhino might well testify to the fact that city lads too are prone to the odd bout of gibbon-like strutting and howling.

Finer minds than mine have discussed this function of the culture of young male violence.

The pronouncement of US anti-violence educator Jackson Katz on gang culture amongst young black males in the States can be applied equally to disenfranchised boys of every race in London:

“If you’re a young man growing up in this culture and the culture is telling you that being a man means being powerful… but you don’t have a lot of real power, one thing that you do have access to is your body and your ability to present yourself physically as somebody who’s worthy of respect. And I think that’s one of the things that accounts for a lot of the hypermasculine posturing by a lot of young men of color and a lot of working class white guys as well. Men who have more power, men who have financial power and workplace authority and forms of abstract power like that don’t have to be as physically powerful because they can exert their power in other ways.”

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Whilst the weekend papers were regurgitating the ‘revelations’ in Cherie Blair’s autobiography (did you know Gordon & Tony don’t really get on? Yeah, I was stunned too!), the former Prime Minister’s wife was plotting to make an even more audacious attack on his successor. Why, you might ask, didn’t this feature prominently on Andrew Marr’s Sunday show or get plastered across the tabloids as a ‘Bollocking For Beleaguered Brown’? Well, probably because she was attacking him on a matter of substance.

A cell in Borstal, taken by Flickr user Flipsy (Creative Commons)
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Not long after I moved to Hackney, I witnessed an armed robbery. From a range of about three feet, the fact that the robber was a crackhead was as obvious as the hammer and kitchen knife he was waving about.

A few years later, my partner and baby daughter were abducted outside my house. Continue reading…

[Note: This article has been updated and revised to reflect ongoing legal action by comedian Johnny Vegas against the Guardian about this incident]

What a day - Mayday protests, an election and now I discover my own profession is being brought in to disrepute with those who care about women’s rights (lets hope that’s pretty much everyone).

I’m talking about Johnny Vegas’s behaviour towards an audience member during the show hosted by Stewart Lee at the Bloomsbury Theatre last Friday. I wasn’t at the show myself so I can only comment on reports from those who were. One audience member James Williams, posting on the NOTBBC forums said the following - and I apologise for the long quote but it is quite hard to locate the original post on the forums so easier to read it here, also I don’t want to quote pieces out of context without the disclaimers James himself includes:
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Back in the meatspace I’m now a journalism student, and I learnt something very interesting at hack school today:

You do not mess with the police.

No, really.
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The election broadcasts for all candidates were launched last night.

Ken and Brian have their videos on YouTube while Sian Berry’s website has no such interactivity - a huge shame. And I can’t be bothered to promote Boris. So here they are:
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