View Full Version : A torrid night for Cleggie...
Remember the rather dreamy character Cleggie in "The Last of the Summer Wine"? Well they mentioned him in this morning's paper. The LibDems must have had group sex last night (though a bit of a bummer for anal intercourse, losing seven seats, and all that). Because one Times journo writes:
After a torrid night for his party - which lost a net seven seats despite the excitement it generated during the campaign - Mr Clegg fired the starting gun on the negotiations when he arrived back in London.
Who are these journo-illiterates who write such garbage? (OK, this one was called Philippe Naughton, known to her colleagues as Naughty Flip.)Did Mr Clegg ejaculate, or something? when firing his "starting gun" on the negotiations. The implications of the hierarchy of the LibDems having an orgy is interesting. Mixed metaphors all round!
Shuddup Yanks! We Brits are bloody proud of the fact that we invented the English language, so we surely have the right to demolish it...
The Lib. Dems.' golden age for orgies was during Jeremy Thorpe's leadership. Remember the abortive attempt to bump off his boyfriend, which ended with the boyfriend's dog being terminated with extreme prejudice instead? Mind you, Mark Oaten's revelations about rent-boys and whatsisname's addiction to gay chat-lines helped to keep them in the limelight as the 'interesting party'.
As usual, Scotland and England have gone their separate ways in a general election, showing just how different we are as peoples. I'm not talking about Nationalism, for the SNP have been slated - the difference is the increase in the Labour vote here, and even the winning of two seats by Labour from the Lib. Dems. The hacks are all oohing and aahing about 'what happened to Cleggmania' (their own invention!) and the Lib. Dem. surge, but the fact is that looking good on TV with a charismatic leader who speaks umpteen languages doesn't translate into votes on the night.
I am seriously pissed-off - displeased, even - with that formerly left-of-centre broadsheet, the Guardian, which has been making despicable ad hominem attacks on Gordon Brown and trying to do him down. The Hampstead chatterati like Polly Toynbee and Jackie Ashton (wife of fellow-chatterer Andrew Marr) have never "got" this serious-minded, socially-conscious son of the Scottish Presbyterian manse. You're reminded of Thatcher, asking, of some unknown aspirant to office, "is he one of us?"
The TV coverage was also dire, reminiscent of the New Year "Hogmanay" shows at their worst. In the small hours of the morning I switched off in disgust at the spectacle of sweaty, leering Andrew Neil having a laugh with slebs like Maureen Lipman, Ben Elton and Richard Wilson. It was, as our German friends say, zum Kotzen.
Harry
I forgot to add - for those of you lucky enough not to have been there - that this UK general election was about as valid as the hanging chads fiasco that brought Bush to power in the States. All over the country hundreds of people queued in vain at polling stations which closed at 10 without letting them in, so they were deprived of their right to vote. Most of these incidents happened in urban industrial areas where you would expect a high Labour turnout. There was also at least one case of someone being arrested (in Peterborough) for interfering with the postal vote.
As one frustrated non-voter said on the radio today, we march into other people's countries and tell them how to run their elections, and we can't do it right ourselves.
Harry
waalkwriter
07-May-2010, 16:07
I was devestated personally over here in America. It would have been nice to see Labour get its ass handed to it by the British leftists for completely pandering to the center. Yet, too much to ask for as always. Labour voters are ridiculously loyal, I mean I don't think, outside of black voters, we even have that sort of thing in America anymore. Brown called a woman a bigot, then sat down with her, talked to her, and won her vote back.
I was a big fan of Liberal Democrats as a left-wing alternative, and pro-EU party. It really stinks their support collapsed and left leaning voters didn't have the guts to abandon Labour.
Galatea92
07-May-2010, 16:26
I was devestated personally over here in America. It would have been nice to see Labour get its ass handed to it by the British leftists for completely pandering to the center. Yet, too much to ask for as always. Labour voters are ridiculously loyal, I mean I don't think, outside of black voters, we even have that sort of thing in America anymore. Brown called a woman a bigot, then sat down with her, talked to her, and won her vote back.
I was a big fan of Liberal Democrats as a left-wing alternative, and pro-EU party. It really stinks their support collapsed and left leaning voters didn't have the guts to abandon Labour.
Unfortunately, the Lib Dems aren't straightforwardly a left wing alternative. They're attractive to middle-class socially liberal types like me, but not so much to working class voters. Historically, where the Conservatives were the party of the landowning class, the Liberal party was the party of the factory owners, and they're still very much liberals in the economic sense as well as the social sense. Left wing socialists still feel more comfortable with the Labour party than with the Liberal Democrats, despite Labour playing up to big business and the city.
Things change very slowly in England :).
waalkwriter
07-May-2010, 16:27
Unfortunately, the Lib Dems aren't straightforwardly a left wing alternative. They're attractive to middle-class socially liberal types like me, but not so much to working class voters. Historically, where the Conservatives were the party of the landowning class, the Liberal party was the party of the factory owners, and they're still very much liberals in the economic sense as well as the social sense.
I dunno, the Liberal Dems weren't supporting cutting Welfare programs like Cameron was.
Remember the abortive attempt to bump off his boyfriend, which ended with the boyfriend's dog being terminated with extreme prejudice instead?
Remember the jokes? -
'Join the Liberals or we'll shoot your dog.'
'I'll be buggered if I join the Liberals.'
It would have been nice to see Labour get its ass handed to it by the British leftists for completely pandering to the center.
New Labour centrist? Don't believe it. A party that went hand in hand, with Bush(!), into an illegal war and destroyed a whole country? A party that has sucked up to big business all the way along the last 13 years? A party that has effectively not just continued Thatcher's policies toward the destruction of the welfare state but has considerably added to the process of that destruction, and has made the UK much, much more of a police state? All the major parties are pretty much the same - right-wing. That is why the UK has extreme political problems, and that is a major reason why people like me are joining the line to get outta here.
BLOG (http://tonyshaw3.blogspot.com)
All the major parties are pretty much the same - right-wing. That is why the UK has extreme political problems, and that is a major reason why people like me are joining the line to get outta here.
BLOG (http://tonyshaw3.blogspot.com)
... to the France of that well-known pinko leftie Nicolas Sarkozy?
Harry
... to the France of that well-known pinko leftie Nicolas Sarkozy?
Harry
Sarko ain't got that long to go, Harry, and anyway you must agree that the French rebellious spirit is indestructible? The New York Review of Books called Berlusconi's Italy a 'whore-ocracy', and I think I'd go with that: Italy has been got at big time. The British are British, unfortunately, but the French remain French, and many of them won't be got at, so I'd prefer to risk it with them rather than us, as I seriously think that 'they' are more us than us.
Tony
BLOG (http://tonyshaw3.blogspot.com)
Galatea92
07-May-2010, 20:22
That is why the UK has extreme political problems, and that is a major reason why people like me are joining the line to get outta here.
BLOG (http://tonyshaw3.blogspot.com)
Hmm. It doesn't feel like that to everyone, lionel. Despite the economic situation, and the expenses scandal, we've just been through the politest election I can remember. God, the bitterness of those elections in the 70s and 80s. I don't want to appear complacent, but we've got it easy at the moment.
I think you might be in for a bit of a shock once you're living in France, if you think the French aren't chauvinistic and racist. Oh, are you in for a shock :).
Sarko ain't got that long to go, Harry, and anyway you must agree that the French rebellious spirit is indestructible? The New York Review of Books called Berlusconi's Italy a 'whore-ocracy', and I think I'd go with that: Italy has been got at big time. The British are British, unfortunately, but the French remain French, and many of them won't be got at, so I'd prefer to risk it with them rather than us, as I seriously think that 'they' are more us than us.
Tony
BLOG (http://tonyshaw3.blogspot.com)
I've lived and worked in two other European countries, Sweden and Germany, and although I tried to take an intelligent interest in the politics of both countries when I was living there, inevitably I was more distanced from what was going on in their society than I would have been back in my own country. For instance, it wasn't comfortable living with the Baader-Meinhof/RAF threat in Germany, and being stopped at roadblocks by machine-gun-toting cops, but I wasn't in despair at the state of the country like some German friends were.
If you're heading for the south of France, you won't be troubled by further race riots in Paris, and even if the Midi erupts with forest fires and heatwaves, you can regard them with typical British sang-froid and insouciance.
Harry
Hmm. It doesn't feel like that to everyone, lionel. Despite the economic situation, and the expenses scandal, we've just been through the politest election I can remember. God, the bitterness of those elections in the 70s and 80s. I don't want to appear complacent, but we've got it easy at the moment.
I loved the 70s and and the 80s because people believed in something. Then, feeling existed, whether positive or negative, but it was at least there. Ideology existed, and without that you can have no history, hence the end of history bullshit that Blair sponged up and popularized. This election was polite because everything's been leveled: we're all middle class now, we're all boring now, we're all the same now. Which of course isn't true, but I voted this time - for the first time in many, many years, as before I couldn't vote at all, and certainly not for New Labour-lite in the form of Kinnock, and never, ever for the monsters Blair and Brown, who believe in killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people, and principles can go fuck. I voted Conservative for the first time in my life because I couldn't stand the idea of a hypocritical turncoat like Brown - who many years ago wrote papers on child poverty with Robin Cook, but now believes in increasing the wealth of the rich as opposed to the families he once pretended to be in support of - retaining power: I detest the Conservatives immensely, but I detest them far less than I detest New Labour.
I think you might be in for a bit of a shock once you're living in France, if you think the French aren't chauvinistic and racist. Oh, are you in for a shock .
Nah. I've lived in France and loved in France, very nearly got married to a French woman there. I go there very regularly, and am going there for a month in a week's time. It helps if you speak the language fluently, and the chauvinism and racism usually only kick in if you're a clueless foreigner, but even then it depends on where you are. Of course there's racism, but less than in England because most people here - no reflection on yourself, of course - live in self-built, single-language, xenophobic cocoons. They know nothing of the outside world. I have an English neighbor who's boasted to me that she's visited more than 40 different countries, and we know that travel's supposed to broaden the mind, but she's racist, classist, homophobic, etc: she's been a tourist. Wow. I've never been a tourist, and I not only know where I'm going, but about where I'm going, so I ain't in for no shock. T'as pig??
BLOG (http://tonyshaw3.blogspot.com)
Brit talk:
I'm not as pissed off as Harry. I would like Britain to remain governable. The danger with any form of coalition government is stasis, paralysis, and an inability to reform - because Tweedledum knows that Tweedledee could block the other's initiative.
But the Liberal Democrats are a bit of a loose cannon. One minute they are Looney Left, the next sort-of seriously calculating capitalists. They are now being courted by both Right and Left. They cannot please both. Jeremy Paxman appears to hate Nick Clegg's guts - which is a good sign.
The Jeremy Thorpe incident, in the the days when it wasn't really acceptable to be openly gay, demonstrates that suppression of proclivities and the threat of blackmail can lead to bitchiness and canine execution. The Lithuanians will no doubt learn this lesson. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, read the papers.)
I have no telly (aka television set) at present, so I missed all the Newsnight and BBC News-24 coverage. But this has put the slight hysteria of the country where once the sun never set over its empire (but shone out of its arse instead) in perspective.
I don't think that Gordon Brown is a credible leader any longer. Ad hominem or no, he has used up all his credit, if you stack up his performance as Chancellor, then PM. I am not as angry about the London ?lite as Harry is. I went to a grammar school, but I am not really bothered whether the next team went to comprehensives or public schools, as long as they produce the goods. The Tories and LibDems also have a few Scotsmen on offer (e.g. Govinda and others). So Scotland is not shut out.
If Harry means to Hogmanays of Moira Anderson and "the kilted minstrel" Andy Stewart then I sympathise. I've never heard of the Scottish TV crooner Zumm Cotsen. Sounds like a Yank to me. Andrew Neil can be witty, but his dyed brilliant ginger Coco the Clown hair a year ago or so did make him look very silly - till he he re-dyed it a darker shade of auburn. He owns too much, is too full of himself. But he's a good foil to the Rounded Lady and the Cheshire Cat on This Week.
Galatea says:
Unfortunately, the Lib Dems aren't straightforwardly a left wing alternative. They're attractive to middle-class socially liberal types like me, but not so much to working class voters. Historically, where the Conservatives were the party of the landowning class, the Liberal party was the party of the factory owners, and they're still very much liberals in the economic sense as well as the social sense. Left wing socialists still feel more comfortable with the Labour party than with the Liberal Democrats, despite Labour playing up to big business and the city.
I fear that this is also a way of describing New Labour. It has become so new that it isn't Labour any more.
If left-wing socialists still feel comfortable with the Labour Party they must be thick, disingenuous, opportunist, or something else that is not calm and normal. Herding the masses is no longer necessary in this media-sodden century. I have great sympathy for the socialists of the 1850s, as I have with the original Suffragettes. But when values get twisted and manipulated, you can no longer take the proponents of change seriously.
At some points in history a swing to the Left is healthy; at other times a swing to the Right. Now it's the turn of the Right, because Britain does seem a trifle chaotic, rudderless and confused. We wouldn't want Greek-style responses to our elected MPs, would we? Britain seems to have dealt fairly effectively with the corruption in Parliament. Britain doesn't need anarchists to throw Molotov cocktails in order to help the cleaned-up Houses of Parliament run the country for its citizens.
waalkwriter
08-May-2010, 03:43
You know I really don't where to peg you anymore Eric. I had you down as a garden variety rightist, but now you've got me a little confused. Very insightful comments though, I definitely appreciate those insights.
Waalkwriter, I am, at this point in time, a conservative with a small "c" because feel that things that work need conserving, i.e. keeping. But as I am a human being, not a walking party manifesto, I have opinions which do not always tally with the Conservatives (aka Tories). For instance, I see the wisdom of keeping the European Union together, although it is plain that it is riddled with wasteful bureaucracy. I am also suspicious of the privatisation of the railways, water, telephony, and so on, as this leads to a situation where the consumer either has phoney choices, or real choices which are so many he or she simply cannot cope.
I am not directly affected by what goes on in Britain, as I live abroad. So I can look in from the outside and see the good and bad things about that country. But many things are in a mess right now, including the national debt, as I understand. This strange coalition situation will make people think about the need to compromise. The first-past-the-post system of election usually gives a clear winner. But now everyone is haggling. This may be a good thing, as politicians will have to try and see Britain from the "enemy's" point of view.
I've long believed in what I call Toytown Politics, which is a rather na?ve ideal with Labour representing those who work for a living and have few savings and little, if any, property; the Liberals / LibDems representing those who aspire to a higher station in society and need opportunities and breaks; and the Tories for those who have already got there, and don't want all their money taken away by the state and put into hare-brained schemes by bureaucrats. None of these three parties can represent everyone, so occasionally they have to club together and throw out cherished ideals.
The important thing is that although a democracy like the UK should allow for choice, and changing your mind, it shouldn't be a club where the leaders dither and quarrel on their fat Westminster salaries, while the rest of us just have to lump it. MPs should be adequately paid to make them independent of money. But they should not be aloof from real life.
Galatea92
08-May-2010, 10:03
Of course there's racism, but less than in England because most people here - no reflection on yourself, of course - live in self-built, single-language, zenophobic cocoons... T'as pig??
BLOG (http://tonyshaw3.blogspot.com)
And that doesn't describe most of France? Don't get me wrong, I'm a Francophile - I grew up on Sartre and Gide rather than Dickens and Shakespeare - but French self-absorption and xenophobia is something else. I'm always a little shocked when I'm there how acceptable casual racism is - people will say things there that would stop the conversation in a working men's club in Salford.
Questions for emigrant Lionel:
1) To what extent are you fleeing Britain, embracing France?
2) Are you going to integrate or assimilate?
3) "It helps if you speak the language fluently." You will, no doubt, be speaking French with a French accent (i.e. the nearest a Brit can humanly manage), and not try to mark off your foreignicity by stubbornly speaking with a strong British accent to show who is top dog in Europe. Con zher parle vooz ett bloody well going to aycootay. If you've been as much as you say, you will have learnt to avoid being what you rightly term the "clueless foreigner".
4) Will you continue to read French newspapers, novels and poetry, ditto ones written in English? And indeed, the French are not the only foreigners that write, so: what about translations from German, Spanish, etc?
5) Are you going to, over time, continue to examine the French prejudices about race, culture, language, class, sexuality, and so on with as critical an eye as you are doing now in nether Nottingham?
It's a big step to go and live in Other-People-Land for good, seriously, not just for a year in Provence. The questions above will not elicit black-and-white answers. But if you move to a country knowing all the bad things as well as the good ones, you can be pleasantly surprised by nice things. If you flee there, thinking it's a paradise away from those blasted Brits, you may soon become a Francophobe, as thing after thing disappoints you. Some of the nastiest and least enlightened BNP-type people have moved over from the revolutionary arm of the Labour Party, rather than from the other more tranquil political parties. From one extreme reaction to the other. That is also how national prejudices seethe up to the surface. (The "my Czech girlfriend left me, so now I hate all Czechs" syndrome.)
*
I myself am neither a Francophile nor Francophobe. It was just the country next door when I used to live in Britain. I occasionally buy a French newspaper to see what's going on, but do realise that a lot of the national news there doesn't really affect, hence interest, me. But the literature is certainly some of the most sophisticated around.
When I took early retirement in 2001, one of my senior colleagues who went at the same time put her lump sum towards buying a property in the south of France where she and her husband now run horse-riding and activity holidays. She was a Scot but her husband was born and brought up on Jersey to French parents, and had dual French-British nationality. As a kid growing up in Jersey he was bullied for being a 'Frenchie', and even when he applied in later life for a lectureship at Edinburgh University, one of the senior administrators who interviewed him - an old buffer of the blazer and regimental tie type - asked him bluntly, on discovering his dual nationality - "Are you one of us or one of them?"
Harry
When I took early retirement in 2001, one of my senior colleagues who went at the same time put her lump sum towards buying a property in the south of France where she and her husband now run horse-riding and activity holidays. She was a Scot but her husband was born and brought up on Jersey to French parents, and had dual French-British nationality. As a kid growing up in Jersey he was bullied for being a 'Frenchie', and even when he applied in later life for a lectureship at Edinburgh University, one of the senior administrators who interviewed him - an old buffer of the blazer and regimental tie type - asked him bluntly, on discovering his dual nationality - "Are you one of us or one of them?"
Harry
Nice anecdote, Harry, and this question is of course still asked, but only mentally - it has to be unvoiced. What is the same it its essential meaninglessness.
Tony
BLOG (http://tonyshaw3.blogspot.com)
waalkwriter
08-May-2010, 21:04
Waalkwriter, I am, at this point in time, a conservative with a small "c" because feel that things that work need conserving, i.e. keeping. But as I am a human being, not a walking party manifesto, I have opinions which do not always tally with the Conservatives (aka Tories). For instance, I see the wisdom of keeping the European Union together, although it is plain that it is riddled with wasteful bureaucracy. I am also suspicious of the privatisation of the railways, water, telephony, and so on, as this leads to a situation where the consumer either has phoney choices, or real choices which are so many he or she simply cannot cope.
I am not directly affected by what goes on in Britain, as I live abroad. So I can look in from the outside and see the good and bad things about that country. But many things are in a mess right now, including the national debt, as I understand. This strange coalition situation will make people think about the need to compromise. The first-past-the-post system of election usually gives a clear winner. But now everyone is haggling. This may be a good thing, as politicians will have to try and see Britain from the "enemy's" point of view.
I've long believed in what I call Toytown Politics, which is a rather na?ve ideal with Labour representing those who work for a living and have few savings and little, if any, property; the Liberals / LibDems representing those who aspire to a higher station in society and need opportunities and breaks; and the Tories for those who have already got there, and don't want all their money taken away by the state and put into hare-brained schemes by bureaucrats. None of these three parties can represent everyone, so occasionally they have to club together and throw out cherished ideals.
The important thing is that although a democracy like the UK should allow for choice, and changing your mind, it shouldn't be a club where the leaders dither and quarrel on their fat Westminster salaries, while the rest of us just have to lump it. MPs should be adequately paid to make them independent of money. But they should not be aloof from real life.
That is a very interesting perspective, to say the least. You seem to be a conservative yet support the existence of both liberals and the welfare state while at the same time supporting buffers against them as well as the preservation of traditional values. That is a very advanced viewpoint, though not one I'm sure I completely empathize with personally. I think in some areas we are too far apart on the issues.
Of course you probably have a background a world apart from me. As a kid in growing up in America in the 1990s I never had any sense of cultural identity, nor religion. So perhaps it is not surprising I am not inclined to worry about preserving either, that I am not a white, Southern Republican whining about "taking my country back". I won't go into this issue of American politics in any detail, because I am too biased. I had a good friend put in an interesting fashion though, even if I'm not sure I agree with his "fairness", (charity more like it), I think its both a funny and interesting sentiment. He said that liberals get whiny when they're out of power too, but its more in an ex-hippie college kid sort of way, which is a lot less scary than bearded rednecks carrying misspelled signs and automatic rifles. I personally find it ironic that after 8 years of the Bush administration violating civil rights and expanding the power of the executive branch, that the Militia movement of the Clinton years has suddenly resurfaced as "teabaggers" this time around. :confused:
Personally, I think the old Blimpish buffer asked the right question. As with the ones I put to potential emigrant Lionel, you won't and can't get black-and-white answers. But on a "Know thyself!" basis, it is important to be clear where you stand.
I have now lived more years abroad than I have in Blighty (aka the UK, Great Britain). So I have been confronted with this question for literally decades: to what extent am I a Brit? Not least because my mother was Dutch and the nursery rhymes I learnt were, from the point of view of the citizens of Dewsbury and Batley, foreign.
But I was "socialised" as the sociologist pigeonholers are wont to utter, in England: infant school, junior school, grammar school, university. Such institutions make an enormous difference. School shapes your identity to a large extent. I remember someone I met at teacher training college who was an Armenian Jewess by parentage, a citizen of Hong Kong by nationality, but as bloody British as you could imagine by behaviour. The posh Hong Kong school did it. Also a young lady who had an Iranian father, a Finnish mother, but had been educated in Britain. Ditto, as British as hell.
So when you go and live abroad, you have to think to yourself: what do I want? Do I want to integrate (i.e. function in the society I've moved to) or assimilate (become what the blazered buffer would term "one of them", or "go native" as they said in the days of the Raj).
To an extent, you can't help who you are. But to an extent you shape your own life around a particular identity of choice.
Actually, I originally started this thread to point out that the excitable journo was using the word "torrid" in a rather borderline way. But now Cleggie or Cleggy is part of the British government. So let's see whether he gets "torrid" again. Or horrid. He strikes me as rather arrogant, as opposed to Vince Cable and Ming Campbell. But Huhne also strikes me as a bit off a bighead.
If Campbell is called Mingiss when we spell his name Menzies, should we call the car a Mercedes Bing? Or spell "bling" "blenz"? English names and spelling have their quirx.
The Guardian speculates that the racist BNP has been dealt a death-blow in the recent elections. Wishful thinking??
General election 2010: The defeat of the BNP | Politics | The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/may/14/general-election-2010-fall-bnp)
Harry
Galatea92
14-May-2010, 21:53
The Guardian speculates that the racist BNP has been dealt a death-blow in the recent elections. Wishful thinking??
General election 2010: The defeat of the BNP | Politics | The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/may/14/general-election-2010-fall-bnp)
Harry
I hope that Labour have realised the danger of ignoring their working class voters. But if they carry on trying so hard to occupy the centre ground they're still in danger of losing those voters either to the BNP or to the Lib Dems (who are very well organised in local politics). And if they lose that tribal vote then they're finished (that's the only thing that stopped them being decimated this time).
I fear that Taylor & Muir are giving the BNP far too much free publicity by going into convoluted arguments about where they are going and who can stop them. The electorate seem to have stopped them pretty effectively by simply not voting for them. But the cerebral agonisers of the Guardian spend paragraph after paragraph of analysis mentioning the name BNP again and again and again.
Why not just ignore them and keep a weather eye out, should they begin to organise seriously and dangerously?
There is a difference between the LibDems and the BNP. The former is a normal political party, like Labour and the Tories. But the BNP is the same kind of disaffected rabble who would probably have joined the Socialist Workers' Party under different circumstances. They are people who are never satisfied. If you deported every single immigrant from Britain tomorrow, the BNP are the type of querulents who would find another cause, maybe deporting grey squirrels as they are not ethnically British. I can't quite see Griffin staging a Beer Hall Putsch or similar. Or writing the BNP version of "Mein Kampf".
the BNP are the type of querulents who would find another cause, maybe deporting grey squirrels as they are not ethnically British.
Ah, one of the many things I love about the States is the existence of red squirrels. And redbirds. But not rednecks.
And you're very, very wrong about the SWP, as they are the only party to have educated - as opposed to indoctrinated - many people, and for that they deserve great praise. Tony Benn has said as much, and he's the nearest thing the traditional Labour Party has ever come to a true spokesperson for that now dead organization.
BLOG (http://tonyshaw3.blogspot.com)
waalkwriter
16-May-2010, 00:42
I can see why Labour voters were hesitant about voting Liberal Democrat. That party has apparently not progressed nearly as much as I thought they had on economic issues. It appears they'll be backing a Conservative tax plan that removes the only progressive element of the original LibDem tax plan; the increased taxes on the super wealthy. Instead its an entirely regressive mix of tax cuts targeted mainly to the upper classes and coupled with massive cuts to Government Welfare plans to balance the budget. It's probably a more regressive plan than I'd imagine even United States Republicans pursuing if they got into power, hell it is more regressive. Bush, though he made the tax system more regressive, didn't have the guts to make any real cuts to welfare programs, and thankfully due to the system of Congress in the U.S., he didn't have the votes either.
I think it'll ravage Britain's economy, and make voters regret they ever backed either Liberal Dems or Conservatives. In five years Labour is going to win a landslide, especially if they use this opportunity to get away from New Labour and get back to their roots.
I saw a red squirrel here in Uppsala only on Saturday when walking through the Biological Gardens here. I didn't meet Lars Vilks (who has now had his house firebombed - little damage - perpetrators arrested - Vilks now playing the martyr card like billy-o) or see any other disturbing things.
Ex-Lord (2nd Viscount) Stansgate aka Sir Anthony Wedgwood Benn (the man with a son called Hilary) is about as working class as Charles Morgan or Antonia Fraser. He comes across as very sincere and is still remarkably active for his age. But his opinions are sometimes a little odd.
I cannot stand rabble-rousers of the left or the right. As for the Socialist Workers' Party, I don't approve of two-faced Trots infiltrating the bourgeoisie in order to creep up in society, which they then join for real, becoming stinking rich, and abandoning all their subversive idealism. For that matter, too many top New Labour people were revolutionaries in their youth, having joined the ranks of the proles from comfortable bourgeois homes.
As I keep mentioning, I am conservative with a small "c". So I don't want the Labour Party back for a few years. If Gordon Brown was the Chancellor behind Tony Blair's throne, why is Britain in such debt? But where I do agree with Waalkwriter is that the Labour Party should not be run by slimey-smarmy or bolshie-bullying middle-class people when it was, surely, set up to defend the working classes against exploitation. The weapon of strike action is perfectly legitimate, but making everyone who joins particular trade unions pay money to the Labour Party automatically is another trick, taking away personal responsibility from working people.
Britons will have to stop living in Cloud Cuckoo Land, blaming everything on bankers or Continentals or Yanks or capitalists or the recession, and face the fact that under Labour's watch (the party of the working man and woman, to parrot the rhetoric), the British economy has got into a big mess. People have been encouraged to take out loans they cannot pay back. That is decadence. There has been deregulation in the City so that Britain can attract more financial business.
Do Brits seriously think that the whole of Western Europe is in as big an economic mess as Britain is? Britain is lining up with the Greeks, Spaniards, Portuguese, in other words with countries that have had fairly recent fascist dictatorships. Plus Iceland which has been run badly. Times online headline today: "Labour minister left note saying: there's no money left." So Labour knew they were spending too much and did nothing about it but bribe voters with promieses they couldn't pay for.
Don't Brits ever cotton onto the fact some countries in the EU aren't in as big an economic mess as the country that is still patting itself on the back for winning the Second World War? Britain today appears to be wallowing in self-delusion. So there are going to be cuts. And you can criticise people such as Lionel and myself for being rats deserting a sinking ship, but what future is there for people in Britain in the short term, when there are going to be cuts because Britain didn't save in the prosperous years. I believe that the Bible even has stuff about that (Old Testament; seven fat years, seven lean ones, etc.). So the idea isn't new.
So give the public schoolboys in the ruling parties a chance. Their privileged background at least means they are rich enough not to be swayed by bribery.
Britain has a ?163 billion budget deficit. It is broke. Someone has been running Britain since 1997. It was not the Socialist Workers' Party or the Eton Old Boys' Club...
I saw a red squirrel here in Uppsala only on Saturday when walking through the Biological Gardens here. I didn't meet Lars Vilks (who has now had his house firebombed - little damage - perpetrators arrested - Vilks now playing the martyr card like billy-o) or see any other disturbing things.
Red squirrels are now very scarce in England at least.
Ex-Lord (2nd Viscount) Stansgate aka Sir Anthony Wedgwood Benn (the man with a son called Hilary) is about as working class as Charles Morgan or Antonia Fraser. He comes across as very sincere and is still remarkably active for his age. But his opinions are sometimes a little odd.
I cannot stand rabble-rousers of the left or the right. As for the Socialist Workers' Party, I don't approve of two-faced Trots infiltrating the bourgeoisie in order to creep up in society, which they then join for real, becoming stinking rich, and abandoning all their subversive idealism.
Good job you're not a fish, as you wouldn't have survived this far. :)
For that matter, too many top New Labour people were revolutionaries in their youth, having joined the ranks of the proles from comfortable bourgeois homes.
Agreed completely. My meal's arrived, gotta go.
BLOG (http://tonyshaw3.blogspot.com)
waalkwriter
25-May-2010, 08:15
I have to say, at least American politics is interesting, especially compared to British politics. I had a friend hit the nail on the head other day when I was talking about how stunned I was that Cameron was polling so weakly heading into the general when his landslide election had pretty much been talked about in the British media for years now as unavoidable, and he began with a huge lead and a highly unpopular Labor party. My friend simply pointed out that British politics has no sense of nuance, the first guy to get out on a podium against the people currently unpopular is anointed the next PM.
On the other hand, Brits also rarely get treated to wonderful entertainment like this:
Republican Party leaders have escalated an unprecedented campaign against one of their own congressional candidates, with N.C. GOP chairman Tom Fetzer calling Tim D'Annunzio "unfit for public office at any level." Just get a load of this fucking guy:
Court documents portray D'Annunzio as "a self-described religious zealot" who once called the U.S. government the Antichrist and told his ex-wife that he'd found the Ark of the Covenant. The records are part of a contentious child-custody case, which included a 1995 psychiatric evaluation. The attending doctor said he couldn't say for sure that D'Annunzio suffered from any emotional disorders.
However, Dr. Rodolfo de los Santos Ongjoco wrote that D'Annunzio told him he once entered a drug program for heroin dependence and was jailed three times for offenses including burglary and assaulting a police officer.
D'Annunzio's blaming the NRCC (http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0510/37691.html) for putting out this hit-job, but you really gotta read the article for the full flavor. Just one more little taste, this time from the AP (http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hlkE4VibOTCX7XqlswfknKlLQj7AD9FTEODG0):
In Hoke County divorce records, his wife said in 1995 that D'Annunzio had claimed to be the Messiah, had traveled to New Jersey to raise his stepfather from the dead, believed God would drop a 1,000-mile high pyramid as the New Jerusalem on Greenland and found the Ark of the Covenant in Arizona. A doctor's evaluation the following month said D'Annunzio used marijuana almost daily, had been living with another woman for several months, had once been in drug treatment for heroin dependence and was jailed a couple times as a teenager.
I only hope that money can buy elections, because this guy has a lot of it, and it would warm my heart for him to win the GOP primary.
He sounds a bit like his namesake Gabriele, who was also a few clams short of the complete spaghetti vongole.
Harry
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