Cameron and his fellow scaremongers can’t stop their insistent refrain of “broken Britain” – The Economist exposes the lies.
Less crime, less killing, fewer teenage mums, far fewer fags, perhaps a bit less drink and drugs: why is it that the idea of “broken Britain” rings true with so many, when it seems far from reality? Partly, it is because people’s ideas about the state of society are simply inaccurate: the average voter reckons that four out of ten teenagers have children, for instance, whereas in fact perhaps three in a hundred do. Official statistics to the contrary are viewed with suspicion after successive governments have relentlessly massaged them. The Economist.
I’m not saying there aren’t problems there are – just not those that Cameron would have us believe.
I know nothing of Toby Young son of Labour Life Peer Michael Young – The Guardian’s John Crace writes.
Young has been described as a lot of things in his career: a jobbing confessional hack and failed screenwriter; megalomaniacal fantasist, obnoxious opportunist and tireless self-publicist among them. Source: The Guardian.
A perfect Tory in my book – unlike his father who started the Open University. So why a sudden interest I Young? His crumb of comfort to The Spectator’s editor Fraser Nelson’s 2010 Keith Joseph Memorial Lecture Winning is not Enough which urges Cameron to embrace a more radical Conservative agenda.
Fraser joins a long list of people who are hoping against hope that, on entering Downing Street, Cameron will cast off his Clark Kent disguise and emerge as a kind of Super Tory, imposing the very same “swingeing cuts” that he decried on the Politics Show last Sunday. They want him to be the opposite of Barack Obama: instead of campaigning in poetry and governing in prose, they grudgingly accept the need for him to campaign in prose but fervently hope he will govern as a true blue, movement Conservative.
I can offer one small crumb of comfort to Fraser. I was two years above Cameron at Brasenose, also studying Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and would occasionally engage him in debate about the political issues of the day. This was in 1985 in the aftermath of the miners’ strike and I can report that, back then at least, he was a dry-as-dust Thatcherite. He was a braying, triumphalist Conservative who made no concessions to the leftwing atmosphere of Oxford in the mid-80s — no hint of the Wet he was to become. If the child is the father of the man, Fraser can rest easy. Source: The Telegraph.
Which is exactly what many of us on the left suspected Cameron’s nothing more than an airbrushed Thatcherite.
Hat Tip: The Novcastrian.
If at the coming general election we put Cameron’s Tories in power then I thought we’ll risk a double dip recession after reading Giles Wilkes at Freethinking Economist there’s compelling evidence Cameron’s cohorts will definitely give us a double dip recession.
One of the main reasons is that, contrary to the prevailing political rhetoric, we are already set to have a significant fiscal squeeze THIS YEAR.
The government is going from adding 23 billion of demand to the economy, to taking some out. If that 23bn is not replaced in terms of demand by the private sector in some way, then we get a second dip into recession.
As Giles also adds the view of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research
There is no reason for tightening fiscal policy now. People are worrying about long-term debt problems when they should be worried about short-term output problems. Source: FT.com.
This is exactly what the Tories propose – a tightening of fiscal policy.
The Conservatives today denied distorting statistics amid claims that they distributed misleading figures on violent crime.
Official figures sent out for campaigning purposes to Tory activists in constituencies throughout England and Wales appeared to show that there had been sharp increases in violence during Labour’s time in office.
But a BBC investigation found that the Conservatives omitted Home Office warnings that the figures for the periods before and after 2002 were not comparable because of a change in the way violent crime was recorded.
Instead of police officers deciding whether an incident should be recorded as a violent crime, the decision was given to the alleged victim, with the effect of forcing up recorded violence by an estimated 35% in the first year, according to the BBC.
The British Crime Survey suggested that people’s experience of violent crime has in fact fallen by around 50% since 1995. Source: The Guardian.
One of Labour’s successes has been the reduction in crime – despite what the Cameron’s Tories and the tabloid press will have you believe – Chris Grayling, the shadow home secretary said.
“If you talk to anybody in the streets, and particularly in the poorest areas which are most affected by violent crime, you will find people will absolutely say that violent crime has risen sharply over the last 10 years,” he said.
“The reality is that that is the life they are experiencing. The problem we have got to deal with is not debates over statistics. It is actually sorting out these problems, it is delivering better policing in these areas and getting to grips with the problems in these communities.” Source: The Guardian.
Yes we need to get to grips with problems but not those that don’t exist – crime hasn’t increased it’s decreased – we’ve been successful – the question is how can we become even more successful – not that we’ve failed – the Tories won’t solve anything with their attitude.
Toyota was under pressure today over the accelerator fault that is forcing it to recall 2m cars across Europe as the RAC described the problem as “incredibly dangerous” and urged concerned owners to have their vehicles checked immediately.
Amid calls for the Japanese company to explain why it had waited for a year before issuing the recall, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents called on the manufacturer to launch an immediate inquiry into why the potentially serious fault was not detected before millions of vehicles were released on to the market. Robert Booth and David Teather, The Guardian.
As an owner of a Toyota Aygo which is less than a year old I have a special interest in this story – I yet to hear a thing from Toyota: is my car affected or not? According to the Toyota’s website Aygo’s from February 2005 to August 2009 – so yes it is. So much for Japanese reliability – how many deaths have they waited for before issuing a recall another case of profits before customer. The whole thing is troubling enough but if a reputable company like Toyota is willing to sacrifice customer’s lives for profits what on earth or less scrupulous companies up to? Capitalism it’s just amoral.
Still what to do if your pedal sticks – the best advice I can find is to put the car in neutral and brake hard – don’t switch the ignition off as you’ll lose power steering and braking. I’d also suggest being very careful where you overtake as there’s no way you want to be in the outside lane of a motorway when the pedal sticks – always making sure you can get to the hard shoulder easily.
England is a “cesspit” and breeding ground for fundamentalist Muslims, the Nobel laureate and political activist Wole Soyinka has said in an interview in which he also accused Britain of allowing the existence of “indoctrination schools”. James Meikle, The Guardian.
“England is a cesspit. England is the breeding ground of fundamentalist Muslims. Its social logic is to allow all religions to preach openly. But this is illogic, because none of the other religions preach apocalyptic violence. And yet England allows it. Remember, that country was the breeding ground for communism, too. Karl Marx did all his work in libraries there.” Wole Soyinka, The Daily Beast.
Soyinka defies logic – I fail to see how any democracy could have stopped Marx – if indeed stopping him was desirable. What Soyinka does highlight in my mind is religious schools – historically the UK has had and still does have a large number of schools run by either the Church of England or the Catholic Church. In the interests of equality the government has allowed other faiths to set up schools – this was and is a mistake history was no reason to expand religious interference in the education of children – religion is but an act of faith comparable to a belief in fairies at the bottom of the proverbial garden – religion is hokum. The government should be investigating ways to break the link between religion and education not reinforcing it.
Does this make England a Cesspit – No – in the UK mainstream there is no question that Darwin is right and intelligent design is but hogwash unlike in the USA – here in UK religion isn’t able to change the way science is taught.
Published at
8:28 am on
February 2, 2010 in
Humour.
Tags: Humour.
Unhappy Hipsters raids the pages of design magazines – well the American magazine Dwell to be accurate – and adds wry captions.
Ever the realist, he built his table for one.
Hat Tip: Very Short List.
The Conservative leadership is today accused of being “evasive and obfuscatory” over the tax status of Lord Ashcroft, the party’s deputy chairman and biggest donor, in a ruling by the information commissioner that sharply criticises the secrecy over where he is resident for tax purposes.
The Cabinet Office has been ordered to reveal within 35 days the nature of the undertaking Ashcroft made to become domiciled in the UK when he became a peer in 2000. The move follows an appeal spanning three years through the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) by the Labour MP Gordon Prentice.
Ashcroft made a promise to become a permanent resident of the UK as a condition of his ennoblement in 2000, a year after he was rejected as a member of the Lords by the political honours scrutiny committee, a rejection he believed was partly based on his residency at the time.
But successive Conservative leaders have since refused to reveal whether he has fulfilled that promise and taken up UK residency. The Cabinet Office, which oversees the peerage system, has declined to reveal what his undertaking involved, citing Ashcroft’s privacy and clauses in the Freedom of Information Act that exempt the honours system from scrutiny.
…
“Lord Ashcroft could have ended the speculation about his residency by making a public statement to that effect. He has chosen not to do this. He has furthered the speculation by stating that it is a private matter and, as stated on his website, ‘If home is where the heart is Belize is my home‘. Source: Polly Curtis, The Guardian.
If Ashcroft was a UK resident he would have said so by now.
To avoid further embarrassing questions I suspect the Information Commissioner’s Office will be of the first cost savings Cameron will be making.
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