Con Lib Con Lib Con Lib Con

20% VAT, 40 % cut in services, 3M jobless, an end to cancer care promises, schools run by Mary Whitehouse types in shacks with lunch at McDonalds. I hope your flirt with liberalism was as short as mine.


He's pretending to be just like you. He even believes he's just like you. But he isn't.

Cameron and Clegg - oh dear

While some people are trying to pretend that the message from the electorate was that they wanted a hung parliament, by the end of the campaign it was obvious the country was operating on an anyone-but-Dave (ABD) strategy.

It was this tactical vote which led to the collapse of the Lib Dem vote where the public weren't sure if a vote for them would split the opposition to the Conservative candidate. Where a wild card left wing option was a viable proposition, such as the Green victory in Brighton, the public took it. There is great heart to be taken of the collapse of the BNP and UKIP as profile actually destroyed the credibility of these political cowboys, and local elections showed a resurgence of Labour activism as people tried to best protect the local services they rely on.

It was this that stopped Cameron achieving a majority despite earning a similar share of the vote as Tony Blair five years ago. While Blair ended up with a fairly comfortable majority, Cameron fell well short. The spine stiffening among liberals and labour supporters is much more noticeable than the fears in the Tory ranks of Blair's lukewarm conservative reform and right-wing International bent.

This ABD attitude has not been connected with by Nick Clegg, a man with all the natural political instinct of King Herod, a decision maker of the poorest kind, an uncharismatic civil servant with the long term charm of a double glazing salesman.

But his party has a radical streak the Labour party seems to have neutered through mistaking process for progress, and proved that real reform does not come through the employment of management consultants or research groups.

There is no need for a short term fix. Dealers who sell currency or shares on the basis that British industry will be affected by this time for negotiation are doing so in full knowledge they will cash in when it is resolved. The UK should hold its nerve. Nick Clegg should hold his nerve. The precise feelings of a robbed democratic voice will become the left leaning majority in this country if Clegg does a deal with the Conservatives.

The ABD group want a vote that means they can include all their feelings when they vote. So that democracy understands it's not just about who you want in. It's about who you definitely don't want in. This flip flop between the right and the centre is neither representative of the public's appetite for radical change, but it simply isn't democratic. Nick Clegg is the first person for decades to have the opportunity to win the one battle his party has fought on for a century - voting reform.

Now, this decision lies in the hands of a European bureaucrat and a posh PR man.

Without immediate and committed voting reform, any deal Clegg does fails not only himself and his party, but the country as a whole.

Dave. He's pretending to be just like you. He even believes he's just like you. But he isn't.

One line for the UK, another line for their friends in power...

When I watched Barack Obama live on late night (UK) BBC TV make his anger shown at the pressure he had been put upon by the far right to drop his healthcare reforms, he announced: "If you want a fight, you can have a fight".

In these days of compromise, it was both thrilling and slightly embasrassing that he'd had to get to this so soon. But he fronted it out, and said he would rip apart the banks so the state could never again be held to ransom by the greed of the society it endorsed. Hardly a cure, but a dose of medicine that was popular with all but the nincompoop,

So when I heard the Radio 4 news that "george osbourne has said he will support Prez Obama's plans to split up the banks" I thought it was an opportunist leap by the greasy Tory beaver to grab a piece of limelight by stating the bleeding obvious. This was a good policy. But then a small search of the clarification of Osbourne's (and indeed the Conservative Party's) support as to the extent of this policy is reported differently worldwide.

Take this report from the Wall Street Journal which pitches George and the Global Banks very much on the same side. To see it, you'll have to click the title of this post as google doesn't want to play cut and paste. He was lying. He no more wants small banks any more than the small cock he already has.

But this kind of detail doesn't matter any more, does it? It's not that we like David or George, we just don't like Gordon. But even under his worse New Labour spin, would GB really be this much of a mealy mouthed lying tosser?


He's pretending to be just like you. He even believes he's just like you. But he isn't.

Ken Clarke knows Cameron's social engineering policy will be neither fair or effective

When Ken Clarke was Chancellor under John Major, he and the Prime Minister knew that the married tax allowance was becoming an outdated attempt to interfere with the social structures that were forming at the time.
More and more children were being born out of marriage, but into perfectly good homes. Just because marriage wasn't on the lifestyle agenda of the parents of those children, it couldn't possibly be argued that they needed to pay more tax to subsidise their married next door neighbours.
Nor did it look good encouraging failed relationships to stay together, prejudicing single parents or attempting to align the Government with ultimately a religious framework endorsed by institutions that still believe in magic.
However, while those heady days of a modernising Britain may seem a long way away under Brown's uninspiring, bank-manager-style Premiership, they will be revved swiftly into reverse thanks to Cameron and his social innovator, Ian Duncan Smith, a man so earnest in his own banality that you could believe he were a speech writer for Noel Edmonds on Deal or No Deal.
Duncan Smith's visits to "Real Britain" make him look like Alan Partridge stumbling through a Mumbai slum. Admittedly IDS was taking one for the team in a party that prefers not to mix with, be educated with or pay (against the minimum wage) the poor.
While taxing drugs like alcohol and nicotine may have a place in trying to curb a behaviour that then has to be supported by the society that provides it, to encourage marriage by the tax system is as misguided as China's attempt to reign in its birth rate by unfairly treating families who had girls.
Except it's not misguided, because we've been here before. What next? No sex before marriage, the shaming of children born out of wedlock, tightening the right of pregnant women to choose abortion - they all line up together giving the real picture behind Cameron's 1950s rose-tinted glass pseudo Utopia, where the rich don't get bothered and the poor stay out of sight.

David Cameron. He's pretending to be just like you. He even believes he's just like you. But he isn't.