There’s a bit of meme going around at the moment of various blogger’s choosing theme tunes for their blogs all of which led me to the realisation that, thus far, David Cameron hasn’t got a tune.

Barack Obama had a tune…

Bill Clinton had a tune…

Tony had a tune… (sorry!)

And Maggie had loads… (not that she would have wanted them)

But as for Dave, there doesn’t seem to be anything on the horizon.

Okay, so there are a few obvious contenders, like this…

And Jarvis nails its pretty well, of course…

Sadly, there isn’t a video of Frank Zappa’s cover of The Clovers’ doo-wop classic ‘Cocksucker’s Ball’ so we’ll have to make do the original in honour of D-Cam’s days as a Bullingdon Boy… (definitely NSFW audio)

And I’ve always thought this one by the Beatles fits pretty well…

Although its possible that Beau Bo’s come closest so far to capturing the essence of the Tories…

Tell you what. Let’s throw this one open to the floor… can you think of a better theme tune for D-Cam than any of these?

As a bit of fun for a Friday morning we thought we’d offer our readers an opportunity to choose their political scumbag of the week, largely because this week has conveniently provided us with a strong field of contenders.

The rules are simple. just read through the following list of political low-lifes, decide which one is biggest scumbag and then use the either the comments facility or twitter* to hurl a bit of pithy but well-merited abuse at them.

*If you tweet in a response you’ll need to include a link to this post for it to be picked up

Sometime during the day – which is likely to more or less when I can be arsed – I’ll tot up the scores and we’ll have ourselves a winner.

So without further ado, lets list the nominees…

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Guest post by Tom Freeman

Justin McKeating argues:

If you are the sort of person who approves of, or allows their voting preference to be swayed even a little by, the interventions in our electoral process by the wives of the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, you are a moron who should be interned until after the general election.

I completely agreed with this until I thought of an even better idea.

The position of Prime Minister’s Spouse should be directly, and separately, elected. So we could pair Gordon with Samantha, Dave with Sarah, or maybe even Nick (Clegg) with Nick (Griffin). The possibilities are as endless as the attention span of an ITV early evening news viewer.

The morons would vote for the spouse, and the rest of us would vote for the actual government. Everyone gets to engage with the election on terms that they can understand.

Nigel Biggar, professor of moral and pastoral theology at the University of Oxford, has written an article in the Financial Times arguing that the Iraq war was necessary to stop or prevent a sufficiently great evil.

This is a good opportunity to test out a piece of the liberal-left infrastructure that Sunny talks about trying to build. In the past, we have had to go through particularly bad articles, such as this one, and take the arguments to pieces line-by-line. This can be time consuming and after a while gets kind of tedious.

Wouldn’t it be useful if there were a website which had already anticipated terrible arguments like this, and mocked and rebutted them for us?

To test this out, I used the Decentpedia, which has an extensive catalogue of arguments made by supporters of the Iraq war. continue reading… »

Following previous rows about the Prime Minister’s favourite biscuits, as well as speculation over his use of anti-depressants, the state of his eye sight and his chewed fingernails, Gordon Brown has now been accused of using his breath to intimidate staff.

It all started when senior Observer columnist Andrew Rawnsley, anxious to plug his new book The End of The Party, quoted a number of staff at No.10 Downing Street accusing the Prime Minister of making their life a misery with his pongy mouth.

This ignited a political battle over whether Gordon Brown suffers from halitosis or whether this is simply a Tory conspiracy aimed at discrediting the Prime Minister as recent opinion polls indicate Labour is making up some lost ground.

According to one of Rawnsley’s sources: “the air in our Downing Street office is really unpleasant. Each time the PM opens his gob we recoil in horror. It’s like being hit in the face by a rotten onion”. “Needless to say”, the source adds, “the whole thing’s ruining our lives. We dread coming into work”.
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Rumour has it that the Department of Health is considering mandatory health warnings on all alcoholic drinks in the style of tobacco products.

I don’t know about you but I’ve never met anyone -not a single person – who’s ever quit smoking after reading health signs on packets of fags. Like, NOT ONE.

Introduced in the early nineties, warnings such as “Smoking kills”, “you’re gonna die” and “What a piece of shit you are for smoking” were made to cover at least 30% of a cigarette pack in 2003 – presumably a measure for the inattentive. Most recently, “picture warnings” have also been introduced, along with measures to “hide cigarettes under the counter”.

But with alcohol the contradictions will just be comedy material.

Here’s a government that makes a substance available 24/7, practically everywhere, but then goes apeshit that those bottles and cans don’t carry a clear enough warning that the same substance is bad for you.
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I’ve always argued that the trouble with Pol Pot is that he was just too damn soft on the urban petit bourgeoisie, and I was pleased to learn this morning that Simon Heffer shares that assessment.

The Daily Telegraph pundit’s big problem with the genocidaire prime minister of Democratic Kampuchea is not so much his penchant for trivial workaday misdemeanours like the annihilation of a quarter of all living Cambodians, but rather that he tried to ‘impose fairness’.

Just like Harriet Harman and her ‘mad Equality Bill’, in fact. Unfortunately, Simon doesn’t quite clinch the parallel by nailing Hattie on her policy on forced agrarian collectivisation. But let’s not quibble; all but fools will instantly identify the immediately obvious basic underlying continuity of the two politicians’ inherently socialist thought processes.

All this and more can be found in the somewhat febrile if highly entertaining examination of Labour’s latest campaign slogan – ‘A future fair for all’ – to which Heffer devotes his column today.
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As mentioned earlier by Paul, the class warriors over at Conservative Home have got a new website called mylabourposter, which has pictures of people such as immigrants, burglars, foreigners, the BBC etc., and the caption ‘I’ve not voted Labour before, but‘ and then reasons why these people like Labour.

One of the posters is Frank Gallagher from Shameless, saying “I’ve never voted Labour before, but I can see the benefits”.

One nice thing about these posters is that some of them have an explanation beneath them to explain the joke to anyone who finds the humour a bit too subtle.

For the benefits one, their “fact” is “Labour’s over-complex welfare system means there has been more benefit fraud and less incentive to work”.

Really?
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It’s not just Conservative Central Office who’re having a few graphic design problems at the moment.

This is the actual poster that The Spectator are using to promote an upcoming education conference called ‘The Schools Revolution’ at which the Tories Education spokesman, Michael Gove, is the headline act:

Does it remind you of anything? Like, say, this…?

Or perhaps this…?

Maybe this makes things a bit more explicit…?

Memo to the Spectator’s design department… not the best choice of colour scheme there guys, D’oh!

This is the first in an occasional series, in which traditional English tales are retold by Tories. Today, the tale of Robin Hood:

“Back in the Middle Ages, there were a heroic group of sturdy Englishmen called the Barons. The Barons were responsible for making sure that the lazy peasants were kept in order and did their work.

This was tremendously hard work as even though there was no welfare state to create a dependency culture amongst the poor.

the Barons always needed to make sure that the common folk grew enough crops and produced enough wealth to allow the Royal Family to hold banquets, go on crusades and perform other such duties.
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“Steve Hilton, though, remains the third most important man in the party behind Cameron and Osborne…Those who are close to him are phenomenally loyal, praising him as invigorating and inspirational.

“But his ideas are often so concentrated that they need to be diluted.

“For a while, Hilton argued that Cameron’s first Queen’s Speech should contain no bills, to show that the Tories did not think legislation was the answer to the country’s problems.”

I’m not making this up.

I’m simply not clear on Conservative economic policy in relation to government debt.

Why is Cameron saying to business leaders one day that there is no need for big cuts in the first year of a Conservative government, while on the very same day one of his top MPs is going on about the ‘need to get to grips with public finances now’?

Why is there a commitment to an emergency budget if there are aren’t going to be any significant cuts?

Would such a budget simply be about reducing corporation tax and therefore increasing the deficit?

Well, there is a track record for such economic stupidity by the Tories.

Under Thatcher, cyclical borrowing costs caused by the Tory response to recession – itself largely driven by fear of how the markets might respond – continued to ensure that the structural budget deficit continued at more or less the same level for a further four years beyond the actual recession (graphs at page 7 of this IFS report).

And the Tories are trying to instill economic confidence with international investors? Gawd help us.

contribution by David Hencke

An extraordinary attempt was made just before Christmas to kill off a story of mine to spare the blushes of a rather hapless Liberal Democrat Parliamentary candidate caught out for living a dual life in cyberspace.

Greg Stone is now toast and has had to stand down as Liberal Democrat candidate for Newcastle-upon Tyne East and Wallsend as a result but the shennaghins surrounding the attempt to make sure this did not get into print is worth recalling.

Guido Fawkes tried to come to the rescue of Greg Stone aka Inamicus by using one of the oldest tricks of ye olde print media -a spoiler before the tale could be published by a rival.
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Comrades, the campaign to stop Rod Liddle from taking over as editor of the Indy is in full swing. There’s a group of us working on a few ideas but here are two to start with.

First, we’re planning to print a dummy copy of the Indy with articles written and headlined as if they were edited / written by Rod Liddle himself.

These will then be distributed outside the Independent’s offices. To help, simply email me with a short or longer article parodying Liddle by the middle of next week please!

Secondly, an email campaign directed at Alexander Lebdev himself is also planned. From my sources he is persuadable on this and if he sees enough of a backlash from readers he would seriously consider rejecting the Rod Liddle as editor. For Liddle’s greatest hits see this post.

The Facebook group against Liddle is now nearing 4,000.

Its founder yesterday sent this out:
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Six months ago Britain’s tabloids were tolling the bell of a looming Armageddon.

The Daily Mail headlines ranged from IS SWINE FLU ALREADY HERE?; and SWINE FLU: IT’S GETTING SERIOUS, to SWINE FLU NOW THE BATTLE TO CONTAIN IT, and KILLER FLU IS HERE.

And that’s without counting the paper’s first page warnings that “65,000 could die [and] one in three could get infected”, printed in the 7 July 2009 edition.

So you will excuse us if we laughed out loud this morning when the same paper published what is already on course as the most ridiculous article of 2010, a faux-outraged piece by Christopher Booker that states: After this awful fiasco over swine flu, we should never believe the State scare machine again!
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Thanks to all of you who made these pics and sent them in (or tweeted them). I think this joke has run its course now, although ‘Mandelkitteh’ seems to have become a favourite for most of you.

Now doubt we’ll be seeing more of him in the future.

In the meantime here is the full collection. If you create any more please just link them from the comments section.

(made by Political Scrapbook)

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Please send in your own pics as well! You can make them from here.

(Now with 18 pics!)

(made by @lukewaterfield)

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Here’s some text from the Conservative NHS manifesto

British patients should be among the first in the world to use effective treatments, but under Labour they are among the last. The current system lets Ministers off the hook by blaming decisions on unaccountable bureaucrats in NICE, the agency which approves drugs for the NHS.

That’s right, damn those ‘unaccountable bureaucrats’ at NICE! The Tories will ensure that accountable ministers will instead make decisions so you can punish them if necessary.

Quite uncharitably, Alex Massie at the Spectator says to that: “The best one can say about this is that it’s total gibberish.” Doh!

But let’s assume we want these decisions to be more accountable. A good idea in theory right? But what’s this?

With less political interference in the NHS, we will turn the Department of Health into a Department of Public Health so that the prevention of illness gets the attention from government it needs.

Less political interference? But I thought that was more ‘accountable’ surely?

Can we file this under the Steve Hilton award for ‘Progressive Gobbledegook’?

We are desensitised to the idea of being ruled by Eton and Oxbridge elites. But would it be the same if Britain was like this instead?

There’s been some debate recently over the fact that the Mayor of London, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Prime Minister all went to Bournville School, Birmingham and that almost the entire Cabinet did their university studies in Birmingham too.

When we turned the question to the public, we registered overwhelming resentment. The idea of being ruled by an unrepresentative lot, both geographically, socially and culturally doesn’t seem to be perceived as either popular or fair.

“It’s absurd that all our leading figures went to the same school and had exactly the same background. They’re all from the same Birmingham school. And how bad is it that we have an actual Mayor of London who grew up in a Birmingham council estate? It doesn’t make sense!”, told us Ariel Painin-Diaz from South Kensington.
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It is, without doubt, the shock headline of the week.

BENEFITS COST FAMILIES £20 A WEEK

MINISTERS faced fury last night after it was revealed Labour’s welfare benefits bonanza costs the average working household almost £1,000 a year or £20 a week.

The soaring bill to fund Britain’s army of jobless has cost the country more than £28billion for every year under Labour.

This was in the Daily Express, so it must be true and £20 a week –

- fuck me, that’s the price of a meal for a hardworking family of four at the Pizza Hut lunchtime buffet.

So naturally we had to find out just exactly who these thieving bastards are and what’s makes them think they can get away with taking the pizza bread out of the mouths of Britain’s decent hardworking families.

Oh, if only Diana -peace be upon her… oh shit, that’s what the Muslims say, isn’t it? Fuck!!! – were still alive, these bastards wouldn’t stand a chance of getting away with it. continue reading… »