Month: Nov 2009

One of the things we have learnt about the modern Labour party is that they hate history. Probably because history usually proves them wrong. They certainly have no respect for it as yesterday’s party political broadcast demonstrated. It is full of hilarious inaccuracies such as mixing up Labour heroes Ernest Bevin and Nye Bevan. This seems to be an emerging pattern; remember Harriet Harman ignoring Labour’s first woman minister back in September. See the Guido Fawkes video below for more analysis.

Much of Labour’s video tries to appropriate acheivements that are not Labour’s own. Women’s suffrage – no Labour laws. Fighting fascism – everyone from the communists to the Tories pitched in behind a Tory war leader thank you. I could go on. It was touching though to see Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock rehabilitated. At the end they even try to own Britishness with the line:

So here’s to the fighters, the true Brits, the ones who never gave up, sharing the same commitment.

So those not similarly committed are not true Brits? If that is not bad enough I found the last line of the voice over quite sinister really:

We can succeed for Britain, because we must.

Apart from not making much sense, sinister? Yes, because that mindset let’s you lie and cheat and do pretty much any evil you like because you think the end justifies the means. How do you think Stalin’s purges and the gulag happened? How do you think Tiananmen Square happened? How do you think postal ballot rigging happens today?

Don’t forget your history.

This picture appeared on the Labour party home page today. Be sure that as Labour get nearer and nearer to political oblivion that they will get nastier and nastier. Playing the man will be a recurring theme. At least this is funny. Being led by a loser ain’t.

I promise you that the biggest news story over the next week is going to be BBC pay and expenses. In an extraordinary unforced error today the BBC published the pay and expenses of 100 of its senior staff. There is a lovely video of Konnie Huq and Caroline Thomson, Chief Operating Officer, here, discussing the disclosure. These people are so entirely out of touch that they will be surprised and hurt at how angry the public get about this issue.

The details are here. What is really eye watering is the penny pinching meanness of these idiots. Take Director General, Mark Thompson. Although he earns £664,000 per annum, with a total remuneration package of £834,000, he is still willing to claim over 60 times, pretty much every working day of the quarter covered in the report, for the odd few pence on a parking meter. I guess he got his expensive PA to do the paperwork. I suspect it cost the BBC £10-20 to process each of his claims for £1.20. What a complete and utter fool? I am speechless.

These idiots will feel the wrath of the public over the next week.

The Prime Minister made yet another attempt this morning to set the agenda. He came to Ealing to talk about immigration. Listening to the PM programme on Radio 4 just now he managed to register the third headline after stories on dementia drugs and swine flu.

His two main proposals seem to be a review of student visas and a probationary period for new citizens.

In a speech (see here for the insomniacs amongst you) of 4,300 words you will not find the words sorry, apology or regret. Typical. Apparently this speech is designed to take ground from the BNP so that they cannot call it their own. Brown will not achieve this without acknowledging fault. It was only last month that Evening Standard journalist Andrew Neather casually let the cat out of the bag, describing how government immigration policy had been formed around 2000:

But the earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural. I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn’t its main purpose – to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.

Brown’s speech was delivered in the Nelson room of Ealing Town Hall. He used his speech to acknowledge local MP Virendra Sharma who had turned up to bathe in the reflected gloom. It was nice of him to pay a visit to the Town Hall. Last year he claimed £9,480 in allowances but only turned up to 7 of the 21 meetings he was supposed to.

On Wednesday night I went on Petrie Hosken’s show on LBC radio. They do a political hour at 8pm on a Wednesday. I was on with Ealing, Acton and Shepherd’s Bush MP Andy Slaughter and Hornsey and Wood Green MP Lynne Featherstone.

We talked about new (and unwanted by me certainly!) powers for local councils, MPs’ expenses, the successful appeal of Baby P killer Jason Owen and routine arming of the police. All very tabloidtastic.

One of the things we will see more and more of as Labour see power slipping through their fingers is that they will get nastier and nastier. Local MP (not for long) Andy Slaughter did his bit on Wednesday. This section stood out:

… they (David Cameron and George Osborne) have never done a proper day’s work, they have never suffered in their lives, they have never had any hardship… The Tory front bench is stuffed with old Etonians.

I don’t know how losing a disabled child very young fits into this view.

I told him he was talking nonsense and so it is. Not only nonsense but in his case sheer hypocritical nonsense. He failed to mention that he himself attended elite Hammersmith public school Latymer.

Yes, the Tory front bench is stuffed full of people from good schools as is the Labour front bench. Our “bog standard comprehensives” regrettably don’t provide enough members of either cabinet or shadow cabinet. Famously Harriet Harman went to St Paul’s Girls School. Blair went to the “Scottish Eton”, etc, etc.

Of course chief Labour dodgy story teller and dividing line drawer, Gordon Brown, has previous on this issue as on so many. When he said a couple of years ago that:

I’m an ordinary guy from an ordinary school who managed to get to university

he was, typically, not telling the truth. His old school, Kirkcaldy High School describes itself as a comprehensive school today but at the time that Brown went there is was a highly selective, elite school, the equivalent of an English grammar. With a history going back to 1582 Kirkcaldy had a public school ethos complete with a house system and rugby matches against old boys (which is how Brown had his sight damaged).

Expect to hear much more of this rubbish from Labour in the next few months.