Tuesday 1 February 2011

Nearly A Year

Gosh nearly a year inbetween posts. That's what comes of becoming extraordinarily busy on other things both political and non-political. And of forgetting one's user name and password too (being an alter-ego as opposed to the person sat in this office). Which is what comes of being over 50 and partial to the red vino. Anyway...

Sunday 28 February 2010

Feeling The Need to Blog

Mmmm. Many months since posting; for various reasons, and active elsewhere but times is hard and earning a living stops the flow.

It is of course easier not to comment if the flavour of comments elsewhere essentially covers what one might want to say. This morning though I am persuaded to put finger to keyboard.

The polls are appalling and suggest that with only a slender lead to the Tories (2 percentage points this morning) if the positions were reversed and Liebore had the Tories' recent 39% rating the wonderfully skewed electoral system may deliver a "landslide" to Gorgon McDoom's Liebore. You can work out your own scenarios over at UK Polling.

I have not seen much written so far that to my mind fully explains the Tory poll decline we are currently seeing. So here goes.

I suspect a combination of factors:

1. We politicos put far too much weight on what happens online than Joe Normal; the Tories thus may have felt more comfortable than they should have done. Overwhelmingly the UK's Joe Normals rely far more on the TV news, including the shockingly biased BBC* (comprehensively tamed over Kelly) and the frankly muddled Sky** output. Joe relies less so on the newspapers, and all the print stats prove that, hence why The Sun's support this time has not "won it".

2. Given the BBC, which dominates the TV news agenda, is little more than a Government mouthpiece and in recent weeks has been on overdrive in order to "work on" a Liebore turnaround; the poll shift is not a surprise.

3. A fair bottom line point is that the Tories themselves jumped the gun by starting their campaign in January. That has not helped. The logic was good on the surface, start rolling out content early to wrong-foot Liebore who are bust and do not have the resources to campaign for five months solid.

Unfortunately forgeting that Liebore have no qualms about using their position in power to present and promote and spin their party political position and that actually it costs nothing to attack you back if you shove your face over the parapet. As Dave did. In military terms the Tories knew they outgunned Liebore in campaign funds and just strode out into the open. Result: shot to pieces and cheaply.

4. Another shoot yourself in the foot issue with the Tories is that they have nil room for mistakes. Nil. And yet they get basic things wrong such as sink estate pregnancy rates. Getting things wrong is one thing (fatal anyway) but getting things wrong in respect of the nation's council estates is doubly wrong; what a great way to demonstrate that you are far, far removed from the streets. How many people saw that data and didn't question it? Why not? Did it seem reasonable? Very scary.

5. And it cannot go unmentioned that Tory policies are in a muddle. How on earth did they allow themselves to get embroiled again in a fox-hunting debate? There was no need to firm up the rural vote, thus no need to put their proverbial head out of that particular fox-hole.

Other policies that involved any sort of new "investment" ie funding from tax needed to be tempered with a caveat that they were subject to affordability. Affordability, plus detail regarding spending cuts, needed to be subject to a caveat that "until we get the real accounts we have no idea how bad things are and all bets are off until that day, if it comes". People would understand that.

6. There is a huge problem with what I would call the youth and trendy vote. The kids out there are spectacularly thick and feckless. Not all but, sorry, the many. They have grown up under soppy Liebore and were taught in huge numbers by Liebore trendies. Add in the kidults too.

Don't ask but I have to deal with this on a daily basis. They have a truly fantastic opinion of themselves and are very much on side with the bong eyed mong and his spectacularly daft lieutenants. No coincidence that the awful Balls is where he is. Doling out cash, plaudits and faux-education to the young will get them where you want them. Either that or the Hitler Youth movement was just an accident.

7. The issue of climate change is problematic. This is an area where the sceptics have been swamped (with youth and trendies in the vanguard) and yet where the general population are with the sceptics. It would have been honest and politically convenient to side with the sceptics.

But the Tories read the signs wrong and went down the green path. Actually, and to add complication, the Tories are more natural conservators than the Stalinist Liebore but that argument (against waste and profligacy, for the small state and actual sustainability) is I appreciate a more complex nuance to present. But hell we should have had a go. What we now have, even amongst the Tory Most Faithful, is that the Tories are just Blue Labour.

8. Personalities, trivia and Gordon Brown's bullying. Well what can you say, except that the Tories should have kept above this strata of debate whilst pointing out that a disfunctional government has brought us a disfunctional State. No harping on details, let these things burn themselves out either way, no carping, no jokes, no pointless questions during PMQ.

The Tory handling of the bully-gate issues (which are real, important and speak for themselves in terms of Joe Normal) has led to Liebore being able to present this as McDoom's passion and drive to "get things done" and an upswing in his personal ratings, apparently amongst males predominantly; so presumably the nation's wife-beater and cage fighter demographic sorted. Own goal.

9. There is something difficult for Joe Normal about change. The Tory call to change is spot on and the man on the street knows that too. But. Here's a story:

A solitary man out walking stumbles and falls over the edge of a high cliff. Only by good fortune does he grab with one arm a branch sticking out of the rock face. He swings momentarily in the air and can see he is too far from the cliff edge above to save himself and below him is a sheer drop to the sea crashing onto sharp rocks. In desparation at his position he shouts out "If there is a God, please save me!"

Strangely a voice booms down from above and says "I am here to help; just do as I say".

The man is hugely relieved and shouts back "Of course, please just tell me what to do". The response is immediate "Then let go of the branch; I will save you"

The man swings for a moment and shouts up into the sky "Er...Is there another God?"

People out there are scared of change. The nearer we go towards the cliff edge the more people are scared. In addition Liebore's natural audience in my experience err towards the nation's bedwetters who are more inclined to sit in the damp for a bit rather than make the journey to the toilet. I believe the polls currently reflect that but as time goes on they will go from damp to cold as well.

10. I am clearly ending this list with some hope for the Tory position. And I believe that ultimately they will prevail once the election is over. If that is not the case then it will be only a matter of months, assuming they hold their cool, until that changes.

Canute can only pretend to hold back the waves for so long and the realities of life will roll in later this year. Joe Normal, the man on the street, the woman in the pub understands this.

My final point is that for a number of the above reasons, for example point six ie the influence of yoof (which means I keep quiet myself in public, not least when at risk of being stabbed or humiliated!) what people actually think and how they will actually vote differs from what they are currently saying.

In my day to day life I come across many, many people and they on the whole want McDoom out and Liebore out, they know they have been lied to and they know the country is bust and the evil day of reckoning has been postponed by a huge and wasteful spending spree.

The majority knows it. And the edifice will come down one way or another.

Let's hope it can be clean and the country does not fall too hard into the chaos that Liebore have created. Again.

NOTE: * & **; this piece was written prior to Dave's Spring Conference speech on Sunday afternoon but posted afterwards. In time for me to notice that the BBC bookended Dave's speech with the horrid Liebore apologist Kevin Maguire of The Mirror whilst Sky started the speech with half the screen taken up with their poll showing the Tories down and ended by managing to find (with apologies where due) some "horrid" Tory who appeared to give Dave a maximum "6 out of 10" for not actually announcing a policy to string up immigrants (as far as I could tell). Well there you go.

Monday 2 November 2009

Tory Referendum Guarantee News (is Not News)

Have I been in a time warp? The blogs eg Guido Fawkes, the papers and the TV are all spouting some "news" this weekend that the supposed "tory cast iron guarantee on a referendum policy" is somehow dead. Er, you what, mate?

I seem to recall that the tory policy for some time now (and certainly clarified well before this year’s conference season) was always that:

a) A referendum on Lisbon would ONLY ever occur if by the time the tories got in (indeed it was always qualified by an “if the tories got in”) Lisbon had not yet been ratified.

b) That they would not reveal their Plan B until after the ratification of Lisbon because they could not present policy on the back of a speculation that ratification would occur when it had not yet.


[In fact have I gone mad; was it ratified whilst I was offline over the weekend?]


c) A hint that Plan B would involve going back to the EUSSR to discuss the UK’s position having been given a clear mandate by the people of the UK to do so (ie by being elected).

None of the above is new or different, indeed I have been repeating it for weeks now on Guido's blog and been much attacked for this by various anonymous types (though with no refuting of the substance of what I was saying).

Well before the weekend’s renewed orgy of “Dave’s let us down” (by sticking to the policy he said he would stick to but oddly we want to somehow ignore this all of a sudden this weekend) this was all fact, written down, discussed on air, in blogs and "known".

Yet out of the blue it's "news"; what's that news you say? It's news that Dave can't hold an effing referendum on whether to ratify Lisbon. Shock. Horror. Er, he's not in power for a start and, don't know if you have noticed but actually McDoom has already signed up to Lisbon and ignoring what may or may not happen in a Czech court later this week ratification will be done, dusted, and game over well before May 2010. Is that understood?

By a combination of out of context quotes, some oddball reporting and the (understandable but it’s not news) seething anger of others such as Dan The Han (and me for goodness sake!) we seem to be in a perverse voodoo world where all of the above is forgotten or strangely misunderstood, the actual promise of the only party who could promise (ZaNuLab) ignored and the saviours purported to be UKIP.

UKIP FFS!

Now I am fairly sure I have NOT entered into a strange parallel universe (unless as per Professor Nutt I am doing my brain cells more harm with the old red vino than by indulging in similarly copious quantities of skunk and ecstacy) and so must conclude that Reds are Under Our Beds.

Surely LieBore’s virtual sole remaining strategy for clinging on to power in 2010 (ignoring postal votes and other direct and more dangerous scams) is to split the tory vote by promoting UKIP?

This is as certain as it is that the BNP are doing the same to ZaNuLab. [Faux horror all round; apologies to those of a mild disposition who do not need to operate directly in the nasty real world of today on the streets in the UK. It's tough out there, guys, I would far rather be in a nice safe job elsewhere; and my doctor currently agrees].

Guido's blog appears to be rife with numerous trolls doing very well in pushing this strategy it appears! (I notice that the usual suspects such as a certain Mastur Bator (sic) who infest Guido's blog apparently felt no need to comment much on this Dave is A Traitor thread as “themselves” today).

I have pleaded on Guido's time and again for a bit more sanity (or at least circumspection) but have come to the conclusion that some posters professing “this is a time to pin your colours to the mast, pick up a rifle and go over the top to be shot as a matter of some certainty but so what” are starting to come close to spouting Alastair Campbell style constructs. The language is getting creepy, and what with Remembrance Day coming up too.

Do we really want to be shot up in No Man’s Land wrapped in the UKIP flag having gained not one inch on the map whilst the lunatics this would most benefit (ZNL) retain power back home for another agonising few years and continue to destroy what we say we value?

Jeez, to end with these war analogies wasn’t it Churchill who invoked "He that fights and runs away may turn and fight another day; but he that is in battle slain will never rise to fight again"? [Dunkirk 1940 or Dieppe 1942; probably both times].

On the subject of Plan B, what on earth is the UKIP Plan B after 2010 if they succeed in splitting the tory vote and letting in LieBore (or a LieBore/LibidoDum hung parliament) for another few years? By the next General Election they will have destroyed any means for either themselves or the tories to get in again and perform any useful function nor for there to be any going back whatsoever for the great EUSSR swindle, er project.

Or am I in a timewarp? Hello, anyone there?

Wednesday 16 September 2009

Plastic Carrierbag, Two Bricks, Empty Beer Cans

I keep referring to our Dear Leader's philosophy on life and how the empty carrier bag ruse got him to the top of (what must be) the dumbest party in the UK but not everyone is aware of this reference.

I was reminded on Guido Fawkes' of this Daily Mail article (though every paper carried it, albeit a couple of years ago when the proverbial light was still shining out of the man's a-hole). Very checkable on Google.

Anyway here is a LINK.

Do leopards change their spots? Maybe. Not this time.

Tuesday 15 September 2009

Yawn...Just Woken up And McDoom Is Still Here?

Well, must be the start of the conference season and the beleaguered McDoom is hauling himself around the nation with a heavy heart as the rest of us hold our breath (or was that his holiday break?). Will he survive till 2010?

I give it 50/50 on the back of a "dignified" retirement due to ill health and Mandlebum stepping up to cover or (as Guido Fawkes would have it HERE) the Harperson is hanging round the corpse again.

I have written before that the Harperson would go for it (holds McDoom in contempt, it's common sense) but now that the Dark Lord is about again I think it'll be a scrap. A scrap over a corpse; that sums up ZaNuLabour 2009.

Anyway and onto the "Cuts Speech" to the TUC as was much heralded by the Brown Broadcasting Corporation. Full transcript HERE courtesy of Politics Home.

Despite the MSM headlines Gordon has in no way said that “spending cuts” are needed or that they will happen; the McDoom’s very clever speech says that certain “costs” will be cut and that is very different.

The tractor stats suggest that spending will continue and that is what the unions told him last week they needed to hear.

This speech enables the McDoom to backtrack and squirm and continue to promise all things to all hoons. Very clever. For the terminally thick.

What he could say = “cut costs”
What he could not say = “cut expenditure”

Clever speech; you can “hear” what you like.

All of the MSM will hear/say he is going to cut expenditure, all of the ZNL faithful will hear/say he is going to continue spending.

What I say is: man with forked tongue should fork off.

The McDoom speech did however correctly end with the words:

“And friends, our achievements teach us … never to believe a blind fate governs us all.”

Oh sorry, I read that as “fake”.

Thursday 11 June 2009

Once a Banker...

I hear that our dearly (as in expensive) departed (almost) the bankers are happily rebuilding their financial positions (thanks taxpayers) but possibly less than happy, now that some cash can be repaid to governments, that they have lost control quite so much over their shares (and possibly bonuses and that freedom they used to enjoy). Watch out for the renegotiations as the hand of government weakens and the banks strengthen; ungrateful lot. Was ever thus of course and the politicians that brought us to this pass have their places reserved on various boardroom tables across the globe to help things along.

So What Happens Next?

In my last post I talked about what might "happen next" well now we know, essentially the great unwashed broadly decided not to vote rather than vote for the troughing scumbags as portayed by the media and so we have what we have.

And that is we have a ZaNuLab collapse but by no means a shoo-in for the tories; we have a totally discredited Prime Minister, and indeed government, hanging on for dear life in the hope that "things can only get better" and they get somehow re-elected (or at least not permanently wiped out) in the general election if it can be delayed for long enough.

Whether it is ten weeks or ten months it is going to be an extremely queasy time for all concerned and likely for ZNL a slow and undignified death by a thousand cuts.

McDoom is each day proven to be a fantasist, a liar, or as psychologically disturbed as everyone says. I think he will indeed have to be wrenched kicking and screaming out of Downing Street and that he will bring down his party, if not the country, on his way out. The Priory beckons.

Dangerously he is now playing with electoral reforms which he states he has "no plans" to implement before any general election (and it would of course take a referendum, as Lisbon, er, did...). Could he really be so mad or so bad to try and ensure his 1000 years reich by changing the rules?

There is some previous form where for example postal voting is concerned (Glenrothes etc), but this mad or this bad? The next few weeks will be telling.

Here is a PM so weak now that he scrapes the barrel of celebrities, the (unelected) House of Lords and the likes of Shahid Malik ("good Muslims prefer cash") in order to fill his cabinet of the bland, the creepy and the crooked. McDoom no longer has the power (if ever he had the will) to deal with the expenses scandal; to purport to be dealing with it by rearranging the way we vote is unbelievable in the extreme.

If anyone doubts by now the dishonest ways of the Lying Son of The Manse then I'll finish by helping to join up some dots regarding the burning issue of the tory "cuts" versus ZaNuLab "investment"; the FT has the most succinct and even handed analysis here.

So the tory figures are the ZNL figures. Hey, ho. And what does Gordon say?



Keep telling people lies Gordon; if your strategy is right and indeed you have helped bring up a generation where many are too thick to understand arithmetic then you and the UK deserve each other.

BTW the Nadine Dorries blog is back so clearly an "arrangement" was arrived at eventually, out of sight of the mainstream media and other prying eyes I presume.