The Poliblogs 17th July 2007

Brown's Chickens Come Home to Roost

Today is an important day. It is a day some of Gordon Brown's chickens will come home to roost. My friend Christian Wolmar tells me that Metronet are going to be knocking on Mayor Livingstone's door this morning and saying "sorry, but we can't run these undergound contracts and we will have to go into administration"

Iain Dale

Snouts in Trough : Cash for Passes

Sam Coates in The Times has a piece on Lords lining their pockets with lobbying consultancies and doling out handy Westminster security passes to lobbyists in return. These Cash for Passes deals mean that some of the bars in the Palace of Westminster are packed with twentysomething lobbyists who do nothing but lubricate the Mother of Parliaments for vested interests.

Guido Fawkes

Official Monster Raving Loony Party Manifesto

Looking through the OMRLP policies they really are crazy:

+Defend Civil Liberties
+No Detention Without Trial
+No Illegal Kidnapping of Terror Suspects
+No I.D. Cards
+No Scapegoating of Muslims
+Repeal the Oppressive "Anti-Terror" Laws
+End Occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan
+Hands Off North Korea; Don't Attack Iran
+Hands off Somalia; Don't Invade Darfur
+Stop Imperialist Intervention in Foreign Wars
+Build a Loony People's Democracy
+Proportional Representation by STV
+Get Out of the European Union
+Equality and Independence for Palestine and Israel and Their Peoples
+Restore the 1967 Boundaries; Equal Resources for Both Communities
+Welcome the Economic and Cultural Benefits of Immigration

I mean who is going to vote for any of that nonsense?

Kerron Cross

The Global Warming Industry in Local Government

Yesterday the Sunday Telegraph reported on a TaxPayers' Alliance study of local government's attempts to fight global warming:

"Using figures obtained from 25 councils across England and Wales, the Taxpayers' Alliance, a pressure group, calculated that councils on average now employ eight people to work on green issues. If that figure were repeated across all 442 councils in the UK, the total number of council staff employed to deal with the environmental agenda would be 3,494. The average salary paid to such staff was £29,283, suggesting a total expenditure by councils across the UK of £102 million.

TPA

No one should be obligated to expose their identity

I just don't understand or get a recent trend towards this idea that everyone online should be identifiable and not allowed to be anonymous. Being anonymous, using pseudonyms or, as Internet sub-culture calls them, "alts" (as in alter-egos) is actually one of the great advantages of the Internet. In recent months the phrases "sock-puppet" has been used on a number of political blogs but it's important right now to distance the idea of an alt and a sock-puppet.

Dizzy Thinks

My Two Cents...on Robert Mugabe

The European Union has invited the psychotic President of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, to attend a major EU summit on Africa in Lisbon.
Sanctions against senior figures in the Mugabe regime are weak and ineffective. They continue to plunder whatever wealth is left in Zimbabwe after Mugabe’s systematic and deliberate destruction of what was once the most wealthy country in Africa.

Enough is enough

English nurses are worth less than Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish nurses !

The normally reasonable and placid RCN is balloting on strike action. Why ? Because Nurses in England will get an effective pay rise of 1.9% ( thanks to a Brownian slight of hand giving a two stage award ) compared to the 2.5% .

Man in a shed

Polly Gives BJ The Thumbs Down

As Polly Toynbee's nephew was in my year at secondary school I've been aware of her polemics for longer than is healthy. Her views are so Pavlovian, I reckon her articles could be written by computer. She's weighed in on the mayoral contest today.

Prague Tory

Ealing Southall - Yet More Embarrassment for Lit/Cameron

Over the last week or so, several Labour bloggers, myself included, have openly warned the Tories that their ham-fisted ‘any vote will do’ campaign strategy in Ealing Southall was likely to draw the unwelcome attention of militant Khalistani nationalists, and sure enough our predictions have proved correct with the release of two nakedly-communalist smear videos posted under the account name ‘no2sharmalabour’, one of which concludes with this image, which one would assume has been used entirely without the approval of Tony Lit or the Conservative Party.

Ministry of Truth

Do We Mean "Education" or "Training"

Let's start with St. Tony of Blair's earliest target: that 50% of our young people should go to University. To which I say "Why?"

A very British Dude

Sean Ash sets the record straight

Following my post on the story in the News of the World about a couple (Sean and Chloe Ash) who have been driven apart by the benefits system, someone has posted a reply in the name of Sean Ash, wanting to put the record straight. Of course, one cannot tell on the internet if someone is really who he says he is, but it reads to me like it really is Sean - read it and judge for yourself.

Picking Losers

Is Britain broken?

I’ve just been peaking at the Tories’ consultation website, going by the bossy title of Stand up! Speak up! Straighten that tie! (I made the last bit up).

On it is a stark video about Britain’s ‘broken society’ illustrating how the UK is such a mess. Some of the statistics are undeniable, and if the economy was on a downward spiral they might be causing us problems, but does Britain actually feel broken? It’s easy to say, but good marketing is only effective if it resonates. Does this?

Quaequam Blog