Take Me To Your Leaders

Three things stick in my mind after last night's historic first-ever UK party leaders' debate. Some or all of these may be utterly irrelevant, and as far from policy as it's possible to get. So if you're looking for a serious analysis, try a proper blogger.


The Missing Billions

About half way through the debate, Brown and Cameron's bickering about National Insurance Contributions (now known as "jobs tax" in Toryworld) reached a nadir with this exchange:

GORDON BROWN:

If you were elected, in a budget in July, you've got to take six
billion out of the system, other than health and defence.
Where does that money come from? You've promised you'll
take six billion out. It can only end up with the loss of
thousands of jobs, including teachers. You will not back us
and support us on keeping education. Why won't you support
educational spending, as we do?

DAVID CAMERON:

I think people can hear that this is a complete invention of a figure plucked out of the air. We're saying the government
could save one pound out of every hundred it spends. Now,
what small business, what large business, what family, frankly,
hasn't had to do that during this difficult recession?

David Cameron responded to Gordon Brown's claim that the Tories plan to cut £6 billion by stating that the figure was a "complete invention". I have italicised the relevant sentence above. (Incidentally, I can think of one family that probably hasn't had to cut their expenditure by 10%. Step forward Mr & Mrs Cameron of Witney, Oxon.)

Now if that were true, and Gordon had just plucked the figure out of the air, imagine my surprise when this happened:

AUDIENCE MEMBER:

How certain can you be that your party's policies will deal with
the budget deficits without damaging economic growth?

ALASTAIR STEWART:

Mr Cameron?

DAVID CAMERON:

This is an absolutely vital question, and I'm glad it's been asked, because we've got to get this economy moving. We've
got to get this economy growing. What we say is save £6
billion in the coming current year in order to stop the jobs tax
which we think will derail the recovery.

Now I'm a little confused. If this six billion was a "complete invention", where's the money coming from? Oh, I see:

DAVID CAMERON:

These two constantly argue about waste as if we can
create...or we can fill the black hole in public finances by
saving money on paper clips and pot plants in Whitehall. Of
course we can get rid of a bit of waste. But that isn't the big...
That doesn't really address the big questions we need to ask
ourselves. I think we need to be clear with you, open with you,
straight with you. We've tried to do that. We've set out £15
billion worth of savings. I've listed some of them.

... it's because the six billion is in fact FIFTEEN billion. "Some" of which Dave has listed - yeah, paper clips and pot plants. Thanks a million. Or, actually, thanks fifteen billion.


Serving Your Country

All three of the leaders used the tactic of anecdotes about 'real' people. Here's an example. This man has served his country above and beyond the call of duty.

DAVID CAMERON:

I was in Plymouth recently, and a 40-year-old black
man made the point to me. He said, "I came here when I was
six, I've served in the Royal Navy for 30 years."

Now, I may be wrong, but I have my suspicions that this man does not actually exist. I'm pretty sure the Royal Navy no longer uses ten-year-old boys on their ships. Unless Dave thinks the forces are still in the age of Horatio Hornblower.


Cross-Party Consensus

I couldn't resist. I tried, really I did, but I couldn't resist. So here it is - the (completely un-)official "I agree with Nick" count.

Gordon Brown - 4 (plus a "Nick also agrees with me", which Nick rebutted)

David Cameron - a very disappointing nul points

And I thought I even heard Nick Clegg himself say it at one point.





All quotes are taken from the BBC website, who kindly posted a full transcript in pdf format.

Mutts

This is still a young blog, and it doesn't get many readers. So imagine my surprise when - having already blogged on the BNP, the snow, and toilet roll dispensers - the number of hits on my blog quadrupled once I posted a few photos of my dogs.

So, in a shameless attempt to increase the hits yet further, I am eschewing political comment and taking the easy option. (Although I do appreciate that I may also get hits from people Googling "Nick Griffin dogging", and I hope they get over their disappointment swiftly.)

It has been almost a year now since Azul and Blackie arrived from the dog rescue centre in Spain.

Prepare for close-up...





Generally speaking, the boys have settled in well. Probably their biggest shock since arriving in England has been the snow. They absolutely loved it. Not having to commute through it probably helped.





I can only guess that they had never seen snow before. First time out, they just barked at it. The snow seemed relatively unimpressed at this display. Eventually their curiosity took over, and they got pretty excited about the idea of playing in this new stuff.
("Excited" generally means, for Azul, spinning round and round like a gyroscope with ADHD. Blackie is more sedate - excitement generally manifests itself as circular tail-wagging. Blackiecopter.)







They are still best mates, as you can see here. Playfights are a major part of their daily routine, apart from barking at ice cream van jingles. They never seem to get bored; there's always something valuable around to bite. Including eachother.





Like most dogs with husky DNA, Azul likes to counter-surf when we're not looking. This tactic has worked (he once scored half a Beef Wellington) as well as backfired (he once chewed up a whole box of dishwasher tablets). Blackie's dining tastes are somewhat more esoteric: he's quite happy eating the cats' food. Both before and after the cats have.








Surely the greatest ad ever for taking in a rescue dog, no? No? Oh.







To the victor, the spoils.

True Colours

I've been watching the general election campaigns warming up with some interest, particularly with respect to what appears to be increasing desperation in Tory ranks.

Just recently we've had lies about crime figures, lies about who attends Cameron's speeches, crass interference in the Northern Ireland peace process, lies about teenage pregnancy, lies about Tory funding donors, lies about Labour's tax plans (which also scuppered a cross-party consensus) and Cameron making personal attacks on Brown.

But this is what really struck me as to how low the Tories, or in this case one of their chief bloggers, will go.

These three tweets were posted last night on Twitter by a blogger who calls himself "Tory Bear". His tweets, and blogs, are generally a series of childish personal insults, smears and innuendo, but even he has sunk to a new low here.

Perhaps I am wrong, but I always felt that mocking politicians was fine, but mocking disability is just cheap and nasty.



Similarly, I think it's reasonable to hold a politician to account for his actions, but to deliberately repeat smears about drug dependency is not only desperately vicious, but also seeks to trivialise what is a serious issue for thousands of people.



And finally, just in case you thought the above wasn't tasteless enough, there's always the last resort of the utterly vile scoundrel: label your opponent as a paedophile.



Jolly well done, Tory Bear. Cowardly enough to tweet this disgusting abuse, and cowardly enough to try to delete the evidence when called to account for yourself.

Yep, the offending tweets have now been deleted. Classy.

No doubt he'll get away with it, and be free to continue his trivial vendettas against other people, but I for one think this spokesman for the Nasty Party has shown his true colours. Vote blue - fight dirty. Just the sort of people we want to ru(i)n our country for the next four or five years.

Snowing Me Snowing You (A-Ha)

In case it has escaped your attention, it's been snowing a bit in the UK.



Quite apart from the usual snowy Britain experiences - cancelled trains, slushy roads and over-excited weather forecasters - I've also learned a few slightly more esoteric things about life, which I am generously sharing with you, dear reader. Never let it be said that this blog doesn't enrich your life. Even if it is self-evidently true.

A new respect for ungulates

Being as I am one of those weedy people that can't feel their toes once the mercury drops below 4 Celsius, in the past few weeks I've taken to wearing two - or even three - pairs of socks at once. One of the unforeseen side-effects of this additional insulation is that my shoes no longer fit, and I end up tottering down the road like a satyr that has had a few too many sherries (albeit without the perpetual erection, I might add).

I never gave much thought to what it must be like to have hooves before, but now I realise how ungainly they are, I say 'jolly well done' to all the sheep, pigs, horses and Satans out there.

Panic buying can get surreal

I went down to my town's supermarket over the weekend to get some supplies, only to find the store resembled a scene from a nuclear holocaust movie. No bread. No tinned food. No milk. All the staple items had been bought en masse by people presumably expecting to be sealed off from civilisation like Ernest Shackleton for the next six months.


I guess this is to be expected, particularly with the newspapers enjoying stories about how Britain has returned to the Stone Age, but there was one particular item that I did not expect to see people fighting over - cat litter. Yes, cat litter: those absorbent little pellets are apparently the best substitute for road grit available. Now the pavements are strewn with cat litter, I do wonder if the local feline population just thinks the town has become one enormous toilet.

No change there, then.

A sholley is a weapon

There is a fairly high proportion of retired folk in the town where I live, which adds a little extra spice to the snowy scenes. I was expecting to see carnage in town - old people flying all over the place, broken hips aplenty... but in fact the cunning old codgers seem to have worked out that their sholleys act as an extra foot, giving them the stability of a tripod.

Unfortunately this is also allied with the braking and steering ability of a supertanker. Anyone walking within 20 yards of a sholley-wielding pensioner is therefore in imminent danger of being swamped by a phalanx of tartan-clad shopping bags.

Believe me. It's no coincidence that the more pointy parts of the sholley are exactly at testicle height. You have been warned.

There is good money in plastics

Sales of non-essential items have plunged during the cold snap. Perhaps that's not surprising, that people are postponing the purchase of large items when they can barely walk. But there are still some items flying off the shelves, and it would appear that none are selling faster than sledges.

Not those nice solid old wooden sledges, like Rosebud. Oh no. This is 2010, so our wee kids have to have a pink slab of moulded plastic to sit on. At £30 a pop.


Even Russell Brand is at it. I'm clearly in the wrong line of work.

I am not ready for Canada

Here we are in the third or fourth week of the Big Freeze (TM), and it amazes me that not only has the country not ground to a halt, but I also currently still have a full quota of toes and fingers. Nevertheless, if there is much more of this sub-zero ice-fest, I may have to go into hibernation. I would not last five minutes in Calgary. Especially walking like I've got hooves.

Noughties & Teens

Another year has turned - another decade, too, according to some (but not all) - and traditionally one tends to look back at the year just gone, and look forward to the year to come, which might make one look like Marty Feldman for a moment (I've actually got a headstart on that one). This blog entry is made in something like that spirit, only without actually making any sense.*


LOOKING BACK ON 2009

Well, what a year that was. Last year I:

Saw the G20 demo in London


I was working that day, but did manage to see at least a little bit of egregious police brutality. Mostly because a riot kicked off right outside my office. A highlight has to be the demonstrator dressed in a pink Star Wars Stormtrooper outfit. At least I assume he was a demonstrator, he could have been FIT undercover...

Got married

Actually that's not quite true, I got married in 2008. But I stayed married in 2009, which I consider to be equally momentous as an achievement. Yay me. (And yay my wife, obv.)

Met Paul Watson

Somewhere in the bowels of HMS Belfast, I managed to grab a few words with eco-legend Paul Watson. Watson is currently in the Southern Ocean, chasing down Japanese whalers with a view to ramming them, throwing rancid butter at them, and casting aspersions on their parentage. Good man. Me? I got a signed book and a hoodie. You don't actually expect me to DO something, do you? Sheesh. It's cold down there, you know.

Got dogs

For some reason, my wife obviously thought there wasn't nearly enough farting going on in our house. Believe me, there was no shortfall on my account.

Gor blimey that's a fruity one...

LOOKING FORWARD TO 2010

This year I hope to:

Start a revolution

Frankly I'm fed up waiting for the Iranians. Clearly they're just not putting the effort in. I therefore propose to combine my 2010 holiday with some good old-fashioned revolutionary fervour. This may include executions at football grounds (I currently favour Fratton Park, starting with that idiot with the sodding Pompey Bell), extraordinary renditions (again, Fratton Park comes immediately to mind as the most unappealing place I can think of, offhand) and brutal suppression of the media. Actually, bringing down the apparatus of the State takes a secondary priority to eliminating the world's most annoying campanologist. The revolution can wait.

Rename the year

Twenty-Ten, or Two-Thousand and Ten? Such is the current debate on naming the new year. Well, let me tell you something - you are ALL wrong. It's twenty hundred and one-oh. Or possibly the square root of Forty-Forty-One-Hundred. I hope that helps.

Make better use of similes and metaphors

It's as clear as beer. If I can hit that bullseye, then the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards. I speak with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

Start training for the Olympics

Bearing in mind that I am both British, and hideously unfit, I need to select an event carefully. One that involves sitting down, ideally. And one that involves almost no physical exertion. Currently I'm torn between going for the PS3 Call Of Duty event, or the 4x400 spliff-rolling relay. Either way, I'd better get my thumbs in condition in time for London Square-Root-of-Forty-Forty-Eight-One-Hundred-And-Forty-Four. Hup hup hup... aaaaand relax.

Happy New Year!





* Should all or any part of this blog entry actually make sense, please disregard. This is clearly an unintended side-effect. Please ensure all jars of peanut butter are kept at a safe distance until the effect wears off.

Kaminski, Your Time Is Up

Much has been said and written already about David Cameron's new friends in the EU. Anyone who has read much of this blog will know how I feel.

Each time the issue is raised, and someone expresses their concern at the beliefs held by the likes of Michal Kaminski, the usual Tory reaction is to ignore the issue - and, where possible, accuse the accuser.

Not content with kicking out the only Tory with the balls to question this ill-starred alliance, it now appears the Tories are attempting to rewrite history itself, in a risible attempt to make Kaminski look respectable.

Just a couple of points that someone in Tory HQ might find useful.

Number 1. Wikipedia is not the only source of information on the internet. In fact, arguably, it isn't a source of information at all. Still, it's good to know where you get the base data for your policies.

Number 2. If you are attempting to manipulate the published facts for your own sinister purposes, next time don't do it using a House of Commons IP address. With ignorance like that, it's a wonder you found the internet at all.

As for the rest of us, I think this is something we're going to have to get used to under our new Government. As I remember reading somewhere once: "All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers."

Next week: Boris Johnson's Wikipedia page is amended to show his five Olympic gold medals for wiff-waff.

Free Speech Isn't Free

One of the most basic rights available to those of us living in democracies is the right to freedom of speech, or freedom of expression. From this comes the right to vote, to report on events, to express our opinions, and to hold our leaders to account. Most, if not all, of us take this right for granted. And so we should. It is integral to our freedom in general.

The recent Trafigura debacle - where a previously little-known oil company used a notorious firm of libel lawyers to attempt to gag reports of a toxic waste dumping scandal - has reminded me how precarious this right is. And I'm not just talking about big companies using their financial muscle to (hilariously fail to) overturn 300-year-old laws just to cover up their own wrongdoing, which is egregious and heinous in itself, but that this sorry episode is just one small part of an increasing movement by various interests to restrict individual rights as part of their own agenda. It helps if you make annual profits of US$400million plus, so you can afford lawyers like this.

In the UK, we now have "super-injunctions", as used in the Trafigura case, where an injunction can be sought not only to prevent (say) a newspaper reporting on toxic waste dumping - but also that the same newspaper is not allowed to report on the injunction itself. This Kafkaesque moebius-strip of logic means that there may well be thousands of super-injunctions preventing what most people would consider public interest stories being released... and we're not even allowed to know about the injunctions themselves. As Richard Littlejohn might say, if he ever did any research - "you couldn't make it up".

As a Brit, I envy the United States somewhat, in that their rights and freedoms are clearly written down in a Bill of Rights and a Constitution - in contrast with the mishmash of common law that we have. The First (and by implication, therefore, the most important) Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America reads thus:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Now obviously there need to be restrictions on the right to freedom of speech - and there are. No reasonable person would say that you have the right to be offensive, and to provoke violence and hatred, for example. And a US case from 1925 states that this freedom does not allow persons to use words which "by their very nature, involve danger to the public peace and to the security of the state." Seems fair enough, doesn't it.

Here's an example. The US Supreme Court is currently considering a case where a man sold videos of pitbulls fighting. The man got three years in jail for animal cruelty (although Fox News still calls him a "dog lover"), but still has the right to free speech - and this, his lawyers contend, even extends to his hateful videos. Personally I consider this bizarre and incredible - but it does demonstrate how precious this right to freedom of speech is to Americans.

Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I discovered the other side of this story. I remember the stories last year about how Sarah Palin tried to have books banned from Wasilla library. But that's Sarah Palin - she kerrrazy. Surely this sort of paranoid madness isn't that common. Americans are way too keen on their freedoms - aren't they?

So this is what Trafigura reminded me of. The utter nonsense of trying to suppress a story so much that you end up trampling on a 300-year-old law (and shooting yourself in the foot in the process), brought to mind another recent story that I had to read twice, it was so unbelievable.

You see, it's not just children's books about gay penguins that people want banned. Oh no. It's really serious hardcore stuff. Like Harry Potter. Or that dangerous revolutionary Philip Pullman. Stuff that millions of normal kids read. I mean, it's got so bad, that America now has a Banned Books Week.

I know.

America. Land of the Free. Banned Books Week.

WTF? It's THAT bad?? Shouldn't they be banning Jeffrey Archer first?

Don't they know this kind of stuff almost always backfires? Haven't they heard of the Streisand Effect? Or are these people (whoever they are) so blinded by hatred, intolerance, greed or whatever motivation they have, that they'll gladly ride into the valley of death to attempt to restrict the freedoms they claim to hold so dear?

Who are these people? Isn't it rather scary that some people are willing to go to such great lengths to stop other people reading words?

Some of them are companies with deep pockets who don't want us to know what they've been up to. Some of them are religious fundamentalists (y'know, the kind that seriously think Obama is the antichrist) wanting to impose their intolerant morality on the rest of us.

But ALL of them are dangerous. And if we don't stand up to them now, what price will we pay for our freedom in future? We cannot afford to live in a society where you can buy silence, or obtain it by threats. And surely we don't want to live in a world when harmless children's books are banned, while stories of vital public interest are quietly buried. Do we? The question is - can we afford the lawyers?




This is a slightly amended version of a blog post originally uploaded on 15 October, and (ironically) taken down on 16 October