DEM not gonna CON dis NATION: Rolling UK politics in the short-lived Cleggeron era

a significant amount of the public and the media lap that shit up

I wouldn't be so sure about that. Anyway, last refuge of scoundrels/ politicians/ twats and all that...

This is the most incisive thing I've read on the child benefit row. Particularly framing the "middle classes" on £44k as the people with some of the money but very little of the power.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11490294

TAX ON CATHOLICS

Sam Cam seems to have sat in some paint there.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11484352

has anybody ever done a decent analysis of the true cost to the economy? like base the cost/benefits to the economy separated into the following groups?

- bankers
- unemployed people (some of whom bankers?)
- hedge fund people
- tax dodgers
- benefit cheats
- single parents
- SCROUNGERS
- children
- foreigners
- drug users
- the labour government
- cancer

and draw a pie chart and then we can all be angry about the things that costed the most and build our big society upon?

not forgetting illegal wars

"All in this together"

The fantastically expensive bottle of wine that could cause Team Cameron heartburn
Michael White guardian.co.uk

•  What will be the abiding image of the 2010 Conservative conference? The row over child benefit? David Cameron's triumphant platform wave? Or might it be a very expensive bottle of wine? In the media uproar over benefit cuts the tiny headline that must have caused Team Cameron most heartburn was "Forget the crisis, open the Petrus". In fewer than 100 words the Telegraph told party activists Cameron had attended an "election thank you" dinner at Simpsons, a fancy Birmingham restaurant. Hosted by the über-rich outgoing party treasurer Michael Spencer, it was attended by just 40 people. But one them blabbed a fatal detail. The leadership, which this week raised the price of white cider and clobbered £45k families, quaffed heroic quantities of Chateau Petrus, one of the great Bordeaux reds.

• Avoiding triumphalist gaffes like this is what street-smart tabloid ruffians like Andy Coulson and Alastair Campbell are hired to do. That's why champagne receptions have been banned in Brum. Recession-hit voters may never have heard of Petrus, but they do realise that at £1,000 a bottle (the Torygraph's estimate) it's not white cider. The Mail, which also got the story (so it was definitely a malicious leak), puts the mark-up at £1,800. Wine buffs say a vintage 2000 Petrus actually costs £3,000, plus duty and carriage – unless billionaire Spencer or the restaurant were stiffed by Petrus fraudsters (they do exist). Either way it is a Marie Antoinette moment that Ed Miliband, himself a half-of-bitter puritan, will be eager to make famous.

Thank fuck some Tories drank expensive booze, the half-of-bitter working class Labour Party shd be able to murder them over this.

http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/politics/scots-tory-election-candidates-under-fire-for-insults-1.1059888

A Tory candidate for next year’s Scottish Parliament elections has sneered at children’s carers, saying they looked like “the great unwashed”.

Colin McGavigan, a candidate for Clydesdale, South Lanarkshire, used his account on the Twitter social networking site to publicise the insult. He said: “Why do the carers look like the great unwashed. They’re supposed to be carers not warders.”

His gaffe emerged hours after another Tory, Ivor Tiefenbrun, quit as candidate for Maryhill and Springburn, Glasgow, after claims he called Scots “thick” for disliking Margaret Thatcher.

On one level "lol Tories", on another lever I'm pretty sure it wouldn't take v. much digging to find a thousand pigthick classist pronouncements from minor Labour functionaries either.

I think there was a Labour candidate binned last year for some drunken twittering.

yeah whereas in the Tories you get promoted for this shit

I think their Tories send their most idiotic candidates to Scotland in much the same way that the Catholic Church sent its worst paedophile priests to Africa.

Labour guy Stuart McLennan was this year, just before the election.

He described fellow Labour Party Member, MP, Diane Abbott as "a f****** idiot".
In one post the 24-year-old complained of being in a pub full of "depressed teuchters" then poked fun at elderly voters by branding them "bloody coffin dodgers".

xpost

And the Mormons send their most ill-favoured missionaries to Hull, apparently.

I think their Tories send their most idiotic candidates to Scotland in much the same way that the Catholic Church sent its worst paedophile priests to Africa.

Ivor Tiefenbrun's from Glasgow though

craggy island

The wine thing is funny because they made that stupid 'no champagne reception' gesture and so it became a 'thing', like the 'i ride my bike to work' thing, with a chauffeur driving his shoes and suitcase behind him.

http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&sqi=2&ved=0CBkQtwIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DDqgXzPfAxjo&ei=9uuuTM6_PN3T4wb93NimBg&usg=AFQjCNEK-4NndCwqxhKYaz6wbptspa-n9A

woops http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&sqi=2&ved=0CBkQtwIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DDqgXzPfAxjo&ei=9uuuTM6_PN3T4wb93NimBg&usg=AFQjCNEK-4NndCwqxhKYaz6wbptspa-n9A

oh fuck it, sorry.

paedo priests in africa unlike idiotic tories in scotland have at least a reasonable hope of influence and a quiet life

Ivor Tiefenbrun

Ah, the founder of Linn? It all makes sense.

The band were called The Red Nile before they signed to Linn.

warsi a disgrace on the question time last night

she is the most transparent other than jez hunt (who at least has the decency to look fucking terrified now and then when being questioned) in her trotting out of signposts to the chosen narrative no matter what question she is asked bending it back around to the same three or four unrelated efforts to reframe the present and associated scary phrases to justify wtfe

Jesus, did anyone see Michael Heseltine with Ken Loach on Newsnight? Scratch beneath surface of even a (supposedly) liberal Tory and you find a foaming-at-the-mouth Neo-Nazi

yep

that's a bit of an overstatement. he said you couldn't tax the rich coz they'd run away. can't remember what else.

Mrs V told me it was great.

I think their Tories send their most idiotic candidates to Scotland in much the same way that the Catholic Church sent its worst paedophile priests to Africa

it did?? I thought it sent them like 5 miles down the road?

nb my uncle is a missionary in africa!

xpost

Called Loach a communist iirbtc

yeah he did. loach seemed offended by that, but, you know, it's kind of true, isn't it? think he used to brand himself as a trotskyist.

Last statement of Loach's I know of for certain he declared himself agin "Stalinism and Social Democracy". So cd well be/have been a Trot I guess, but in Heseltine's usage this is some quaint 80s throwback shit and not a debate about shades of Leftism.

Does Heseltine self-identify as a liberal? I thought he was a proud One Nation type, which doesn't necessarily square with being a liberal even in its current debased "cool with the gays and the windfarms" guise.

xpost

and maybe indicative of a kind of "yay unfinished business" vibe that a lot of less guarded Tories are giving off at the mo?

heseltine said loach was coming out with 'crypto-communist claptrap', which did sound kinda vintage

the context was that loach blamed heseltine and the tories for the present crisis. heseltine said, hang on, labour were in power for the last 13 years. they could have changed things. loach said, yeah well, they were basically tories.

and then he said you bastards (the tories) destroyed british manufacturing.

i guess the question is, in order to protect (eg) the car industry, do you restrict imports and run a command economy, as benn proposed -- and whether that's crypto-communism or not.

shit got heated for real.

my take on a lot of this now is that the Thatch government was an inevitable expression of forces that would've happened anyway i.e. those Dickensian fucks didn't actually create the modern global economy and the nationalised car industry would've failed whatevs and industry would've either moved where the labour was cheap or been undercut by others who did under any government.

Yeah I don't think they destroyed British manufacturing just for shits and giggles, although they would have loved the bi-product of taking down a unionised working class. But it's less about the state propping up declining industries and more about the state doing something proactive to replace those industries and those jobs, and the Tories generally aren't down with that shit.

George Osborne has been making "we need to make things again" noises, or at least he was in the run up to the election, but he's not really very clear on what if anything he intends to do about it.

I think by "things" he means "money"

(slight deja vu there - probably typed that same cheap zing during the election campaign)

not sure that britain/ireland are in a position to 'make' things again. design and patent, yeah sure. then get y'know paraguay or whoever to actually make it.

There was also the issue that the discovery of North Sea oil pushed up the value of the pound and made it more expensive to import from the UK. There was a choice between oil or manufacturing, and manufacturing lost.

david starkey on QT last week (I think) and this week this week has switched it up I'm sure he never used to be quite so openly extreme and mental in his views just emboldened by the coalition I guess

But it's less about the state propping up declining industries and more about the state doing something proactive to replace those industries and those jobs, and the Tories generally aren't down with that shit.

yup. but their new strategy of cutting hundreds of thousands of jobs while also cutting benefits is sure to stimulate the nation's inner entrepreneur.

Here's the Heseltine/Loach skirmish:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/9070679.stm

the context was that loach blamed heseltine and the tories for the present crisis.

Who's being simplistic now? Loach made the cardinal sin of blaming Heseltine personally and the Heseltine ego (which can be seen from space) was not about to put up with that

British aid worker killed in Afghan rescue operation may not have died at the hand of her captors, David Cameron says

Can't believe how much worse the UK's special forces have got under this government. Typical.

lol american special forces

can't believe how much worse another country's special forces have got under this government.

could be worse, could have been Philippines special forces
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-11055015