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

i couldn't vote for them, their policy on the deposition of Richard II was a joke

Yep Neil. High St ward. There's been a lot of allegations of corruption and exploitation (he is apparently a slumlord) around one of the Labour councillors in my ward but I haven't heard anything bad about the one I voted for, apart from the fact she's done nothing about the corrupt one I guess.

John Harris is enjoying himself:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/23/ukip-success-local-elections-two-party-system-crisis

xp I'm in Markhouse ward. Annoyingly only 1 of the 3 Labour councillors appeared to live locally, of the other two one of them lives in Chingford, the other in E10. Was glad to be able to vote Green though.

What a ghastly fucking doughnut Harris is.

"the fact that that leftie hooray-word "community" can actually have chewy connotations" - WTF does that even mean? "Community" is nothing but a "leftie hooray-word" now, is it? I say! Crikey!

And, of course, his coup de theatre:
I am writing this piece in Great Yarmouth, where the borough council count has yet to start
I am writing this piece in Great Yarmouth, where the borough council count has yet to start
I am writing this piece in Great Yarmouth, where the borough council count has yet to start
I am writing this piece in Great Yarmouth, where the borough council count has yet to start
I am writing this piece in Great Yarmouth, where the borough council count has yet to start
I am writing this piece in Great Yarmouth, where the borough council count has yet to start
I am writing this piece in Great Yarmouth, where the borough council count has yet to start

Maybe hold off saying anything until the borough council count has been DONE, you useless cockpunnet?

on my side of politics, the most difficult stuff to process is about things from which the left tends to avert its eyes: notions of identity and belonging, anxiety about accelerated change and the fact that that leftie hooray-word "community" can actually have chewy connotations. Crudely put, when you meet a Labour-Ukip switcher who expresses worries about immigration, you can't simply reduce what they say to falling wages and the lack of social housing.

lol like Harris has a problem with white bread traditionalism

Oh, the Guardian, day by day you make it that much more difficult for me to want to spend money on you. I think you'll have to treat this as a final warning.

Labour hold Waltham Forest, but "UKIP make inroads in Chingford", which is of course shocks nobody.

Tebbit country up there innit

the Chingford Skinhead

Yeah, IDS is their MP.

My green candidate came in 6th. The Lib Dems have lost all their seats across the borough.

that John Harris article... OMFG what's going on there?

He's essentially set himself up as the chronicler of the disaffected white working class over the last few years and takes great pleasure in wringing article after article out of trudging around small towns tacitly agreeing with embittered racists.

Which is not to say that embittered racists in small towns don't have a range of legitimate issues to gripe about, but he takes very little interest in getting beyond the surface.

There’s no point even arguing with him in the comments section because he’ll just say “ho hum go somewhere else if you want leftie propaganda” which is basically code for Guardian readers to take their custom elsewhere and I expect quite a few will do so. I hope that the loss of the paper’s heartland readership will be compensated for by the increase in number of 20-35-yr-old White Meat cast member lookalikes they obviously want to read the paper instead.

all the main politics journos there are hardcore Blairite ultras. Also partly why they run with the opinion polling firm that consistently produces labour poll ratings lower than elsewhere.

??? It's daft to say the Guardian thinks x or y because most of its columnists disagree with each other. What does Polly Toynbee have in common with Seumas Milne? Or Michael White with Owen Jones?

Commentators like Milne, Jones and Toynbee don't have the same level of overall influence on news reporting as White or Wintour, though, do they?

well, only Michael White is relevant there. Talking about the main Westminster beat correspondents, him, Martin Kettle, Patrick Wintour. Yeah, they give those others space on the comments, but the slant of the paper's political news reporting is plainly anti-Miliband.

Apart from the fact that their writing uniformly bores the shit out of me, I really don't give a stuff. To me they all look like members of the same back-slapping club. It doesn't matter if they're not. That's the impression readers get. They speak to and for each other and maybe to affluent 61-year-old flower shop owners in Keswick. Not to "us."

http://i1.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/incoming/article7166596.ece/alternates/s2197/JS37474332.jpg

just leaving this here

Not been a good week for the Greens in Bristol as they are exposed to be as greedy and corrupt as every other party:

http://www.bristolpost.co.uk/Twitter-fury-pound-32k-year-Bristol-Assistant/story-21117356-detail/story.html

http://www.bristolpost.co.uk/Hoyt-centre-storm-buying-Bristol-council-house/story-21115005-detail/story.html

Is homeopathy and other alternative therapies making up a sizeable chunk of the NHS still Green policy on Health, or did they quietly drop it after the last election after seeing Jeremy Hunt accused of the same?

i regret nothing

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/75072000/jpg/_75072719_express24.jpg

Good to see The Times dedicating their front page to the big story of the day - that supermarket bosses sometimes ignore best before days on the food they eat. The local elections get a mention on page 4.

oh hey the guy funnelling all the council money into obscure somali organisations and making it a place thats always on panarama and how to get a council house tv shows got voted back in here in tower hamlets. woo.

not surprising considering at the primary school i went to vote at had like 40 (no joke) of his supporters outside and seemingly no-one from any other party.

Is homeopathy and other alternative therapies making up a sizeable chunk of the NHS still Green policy on Health, or did they quietly drop it after the last election after seeing Jeremy Hunt accused of the same?

But, I haven't been able to find much on it since with some very cursory searching and I don't think it was mentioned in the bumf I got through the letterbox.

Oh, the Guardian, day by day you make it that much more difficult for me to want to spend money on you. I think you'll have to treat this as a final warning.

― Here he is with the classic "Poème Électronique." Good track (Marcello Carlin), Friday, 23 May 2014 11:28 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

luckily you can get them free with a mywaitrose card now

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BoYxG9zIgAAGId3.jpg

the political commentariat has largely outdone itself in uselessness this week but this matthew parris column is an exception

making it a place thats always on panarama

Think the producers of Panorama also have some input here

pananoramaman bezings

oh hey the guy funnelling all the council money into obscure somali organisations

loony left lezzer black marxist theatre groups onna rates, eh?

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/may/23/ed-miliband-labour-ukip-change

Ed Miliband has been put on notice that Labour faces a major battle if it is to secure an overall parliamentary majority next year after the local elections showed that the party is struggling to achieve the sort of breakthrough that would signal a Westminster victory. Labour took heart after it topped the local polls in England with 31% of the vote – up two points on last year – as the Tories came second and Ukip failed to translate an expected victory in the European elections into a breakthrough in council seats. But Miliband faced murmurings of discontent at all levels of the party, up to the shadow cabinet, amid signs that Labour is struggling to look like an opposition party on the eve of a general election victory. Its share of the vote was seven points below its score a year before Neil Kinnock lost the 1992 election, though that was in the era of three-party politics before the rise of Ukip.
...
The Labour inquest was taking place as the final results showed a mixed picture for all the parties. Ukip, long regarded as on the march, actually saw its projected share of the vote fall by six points compared with last year, from 23% to 17%, according to BBC calculations. Experts identified Ukip polling 20% in most of the country but just 7% in London. The Liberal Democrat vote fell by one point to 13% while David Cameron's leadership was stabilised as the Tory vote increased by four points to 29%. It was estimated that this would translate into 322 seats for Labour at a general election, 255 for the Conservatives, 45 for the Lib Dems and other parties, including Ukip, 28 seats.
Labour achieved nearly 300 council seat gains – well above its forecast of 200 – as it secured important victories by winning control of Hammersmith and Fulham, Croydon, Harrow and Amber Valley from the Tories. But the gain in seats was well behind the 490 identified by the psephologists Michael Thrasher and Colin Rallings as the number required to show that it is a potentially winning force.

^ seems a bit contradictory. On the projections based on Thursday's poll, Labour would be by far the biggest party (but a handful of seats short of an overall majority) yet have fallen well short of the level required to show they are 'a potentially winning force'. That only makes sense if we take it for granted there will be a significant swing from Labour to the Tories over the next year. I don't know how much sense it makes to go back to the 1991 local elections for comparisons as the situation was obviously very different then. Fwiw, in the 2004 local elections the projected national share of the vote based on the local elections had Labour in 3rd place (Con 37, LD 27, Lab 26) but they won the general election the following year.

There is currently no promotion of, or even mention of homeopathy in the Green Party policies. The only mention of "alternative medicine" is that alternative medicines should be held to the same level of regulation and accountability as other medicine.

You can read the whole Green Party policy on health for yourself here:

http://policy.greenparty.org.uk/he.html

"Appropriate methods of assessment will be developed for both synthetic pharmaceuticals and natural medicines, involving practitioners expert in their respective uses."

So snake oil salesmen get to decide that their snake oil works.

"The Green Party would ensure that an independent healthcare treatment agency provides assurance on the effectiveness of treatments and recommendations for new treatments to the NHS. The effectiveness of treatments will be assessed by the agency using the best clinical evidence available. The agency will use independent panels of experts to assess treatments. The agency will assess the effectiveness of treatments across the entire health care spectrum, from synthetic pharmaceuticals and surgical procedures to public health interventions and complementary therapies."

So it is still in, or rather they'll let homeopathists decide whether it should be.

Lots of mentions of expansion of NHS Direct too:

"Community Health Centres will be the focal points for self-help and community-based initiatives"
"District staffing structures will be reviewed, with the aim of integrating hospital-based specialists into primary care and community health workers into hospital practice.
"care for minor illnesses and injuries provided for by community health centres"
"National campaigns will encourage people not to automatically seek healthcare with self-limiting conditions like common cold, cough, sore throat, diarrhoea and vomiting, and flu-like illness. Information will be available to help people self-manage these conditions"

That is not how I interpret those passages. I'm not sure how you get from "Best clinical evidence available" to "snake oil salesmen will decide everything" but you seem to have already made up your mind, so I'm not going to argue with you about it.

Mainly because complimentary therapies have failed every clinical test they've been subjected to, so if you were serious about only using the "best clinical evidence" then you'd be absolutely clear that they have no place in your healthcare policy. Instead they say that assessment of efficacy will be conducted by the people who are already believers in the 'treatment'.

The Green Party have lots of worthwhile policies, but also some that they get a free pass over because they're not Labour/Tories/UKIP. They should be subjected to the same level of scrutiny as everyone else. Jeremy Hunt was roundly ridiculed for being appointed Health Secretary while believing in non-clinical practices. Why shouldn't the Greens?

whilst i agree in principle i think there's a genuine difference between the policy statements of a party as far away from government as the Greens are - yeah i know a whole MP woohoo - and the policies of parties with a non-negligible chance of influencing legislation

think of this sort of shit as similar to the Lib Dem's concessions to their own beardo cadre during the wilderness years - not a central plank of the offer and liable to be dropped toot sweet if shit gets serious

Oh no, I agree completely with that. You can promise whatever you like as long as you know you'll never have to do any of it (which makes them a bit like UKIP I suppose).

Greens also want to 'scrap HS2'

hard to take them seriously as more than a protest vote yet obv but at least i didn't feel compelled to spoil my ballot for once

they're absolutely nothing like UKIP

compare their manifesto to UKIP's - in length alone before reading any of it - and then tell me the two parties are in any way similar

http://greenparty.org.uk/assets/files/European Manifesto 2014.pdf

http://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/themes/5308a93901925b5b09000002/attachments/original/1398869254/EuroManifestoLaunch.pdf?1398869254

yeah uh join up that green party url

& aldo, do you not agree that large pharmaceutical manufacturers invested in their clientele developing a dependency to their product should receive the same scrutiny as alternative medicine providers?

*upon their product, w/e

They're like UKIP in the context I said they were - policies to appeal to your fan base, and single issue policies to draw in floating or protest voters, safe if the knowledge you'll never have to implement the unimplementable.

And I get what you're saying there about Big Pharma (an interesting folk demon in that they're A Bad Thing on both the left and the right- in the US I think they're considered more suspect by the right than the left) but their products by time they reach point of sale have already passed the scrutiny that alternative medicine has failed.

i would not describe that 36-page election manifesto as 'single issue'. the problem with the green party is a lack of imagination, not a lack of thoroughness

"policieS" is what I typed. Changing the law to encourage breast feeding in public places is a single issue. Heavily subsidising wind farms is a single issue.

Lack of imagination is not something you could level at the Greens. Abolishing VAT because barter has become the primary source of purchase (EC660 and EC 770) is pretty fuckin' imaginative. Suggesting wars will stop if we all become pen friends (PD301) shows nothing if not supreme imaginative skills.

what pages of that manifesto are those claims on?

greens' lack of imagination is in their positioning within the brit political spectrum. they need to deprioritise some of the environment stuff (while keeping it) and focus hard on the social/financial/community aspects imo

I've just given you the policy references, do keep up. EC660, EC770 and PD301. EC policies are the Economy paper and PD policies are in the Peace & Defence paper.

lol at tacit defence of snake-oil salesmen ITT

I'm fairly sure a UK government can't simply abolish VAT under EU rules. Are the Greens proposing leaving the EU?