Caroline Lucas’ Green party is the new home of the hard left and here she makes a straightforward pitch for the student vote offering free loveliness for everyone. I don’t suppose we will hear the Greens condemning last night’s disgusting behaviour.
The hard left, which nowadays includes large parts of the Green Party, want to bring our government down. They don’t care about democracy they just want to overturn the election result by causing mayhem. This Socialist Worker’s Party poster held up outside BHS’s Oxford Street store yesterday says it all:
Make Clegg & Cameron pay. Bring down the government
So much for democracy then. The latest edition of the Socialist Worker held by the same man holding the poster has the headline:
A day to break the coalition
The left want to use the vote on raising the upper limit on fees on Thursday 9th as excuse for more protests.
http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1
The UK Uncut demo yesterday at various Arcadia outlets was gushingly covered by Channel 4′ Chief Correspondent Alex Thomson. He said:
What began as a meeting of a commited few in a pub in north London is now a Twitter movement of impressive capability. So it was that today UK Uncut was able to set up at least 22 protests at Topshops and Vodafone stores across the UK. No mean achievement for a group which did not exist a couple of months ago.
UK Uncut themselves were equally effusive about Thomson’s report:
Amazing piece on the channel 4 blog. Captures the day.
The protests were mainly focussed on anger about Arcadia boss, Sir Philip Green, paying his wife a £1.2 billion dividend. Channel 4’s Thomson totally fails to point out that this payment was made 5 years ago and that Arcadia has not made a dividend payment since. Apparently Thomson and the SWP are angry about a five year old transaction made under a Labour government but don’t want to explain that their anger yesterday is somewhat synthetic.
I can understand the SWP being so sided but Thomson has some explaining to do. He wasn’t reporting yesterday he was taking part.
I see that Labour’s Ealing Southall MP, Virendra Sharma has been writing about the health service in the Gazette this week. Papa Virendra tells us we live in “challenging times”. I think we knew that already. We also know who is responsible, one Gordon Brown.
He then makes a reference to the new Labour council being “swingers”. Not very supportive. Perhaps he was referring to “swingeing cuts”, not “swinging cuts”. If you are going to re-cycle tired old rhetoric you might as well spell it right Papa V.
Papa V talks about:
… the coalition government’s determination to press ahead with its ideologically driven plan to eradicate the deficit in four years.
Only today Ed Balls’ old employer, the FT, said:
Mr Osborne looks wise to have taken out the additional insurance of a tighter fiscal stance given the scale of the crisis now engulfing the eurozone. By acting early and decisively, his plans have secured the confidence of markets in a way that those put forward by some of the eurozone periphery have not. Ten-year gilt yields have fallen since June and now stand at 3.31 per cent.
If you find FTspeak a bit obscure let me translate – Osborne saved us from Ireland’s fate. The FT is right for once. Papa V is almost always wrong.
Back to Papa V and he tries to make out that the NHS budget is “actually facing a real terms cut in its budgets in addition to huge extra pressures on services due to demographic changes”. In pointing up the £20 billion gap between what has been provided in the budget, a real terms freeze effectively give or take the odd billion, and what might be ideal Sharma does not answer the question as to where the £20 billion might come from. More cuts to local government? More taxes? No British Army at all? You need to tell us Papa V. £20 billion is still a lot of money.
Sharma calculates that this will be a good issue for him locally. Maybe he is right. Nationally health is a total non-issue and the shadow health spokesman has been invisible, probably because he has no traction whatsoever. Can you name him? I had to look him up. John Healey. The man described by St Jonathan Porritt as ‘just the most deeply disappointing person to work with’.
Meanwhile hard times have not really hit Papa V yet. He spent the long summer recess in the air again. www.theyworkforyou.com has the list:
Destination of visit: Kenya
Date of visit: 29 August-3 September 2010
Amount of donation: £1903 (flights, accommodation, car hire and food).Destination of visit: India (Mumbai and Delhi)
Date of visit: 6-10 September 2009
Amount of donation: £1075.69 (flights and accommodation)Destination of visit: India (Kolkata, Mumbai and New Delhi)
Date of visit: 2-11 October 2010
Amount of donation (or estimate of the probable value): £1,850 (flights, transport, meals and accommodation)
I am embarrassed to be offering belated congratulations to Ealing North Labour MP, Stephen Pound. He was made the opposition Northern Ireland spokesman nine days ago. I spotted the somewhat obscure story of his predecessor being done for drink driving on Friday 19th November but failed to notice Pound’s promotion. Pound got the call on Sunday 21st, see Gazette story here. Pound said:
I’d only been in the whips office a month. Normally you only leave there in a coffin or through promotion and to my astonishment it was the latter. It means I’m actually going to be speaking to the dispatch box from the front bench (in the House of Commons). I must admit I thought my future was behind me, it just goes to show you’re never too old, or too ugly.
Pound has pretty much made a career out of being a funny man. This is his Prince Hal moment (or at least it was last week!). I wish him luck. I am sure that he will make a constructive and intelligent contribution.
Labour leader Ed Milliband was interviewed yesterday morning on Nicky Campbell’s Radio 5 show. He said:
Yeah. I am a socialist. I’m not embarrassed about it.
Just now as a part of their coverage of the student riots BBC Television News were interviewing a James Mills from the Save EMA campaign. He is a Labour party researcher.
He writes for the LabourList blog where he is described as:
James Mills is the former chair of the St Andrews Labour Club, former Parliamentary Researcher to Margaret Curran MSP and now works as the Parliamentary Researcher to John Robertson MP. Previously, he interned at the Guardian, the Fabian Society and Progress.
His Twitter biog says:
Labour Party researcher and activist.
Judging by his Twitter handle he was born in 1984 so is a 26 year old EMA recipient apparently. It is one thing interviewing angry EMA recipients it is another interviewing a Labour activist and not making it clear who he is – it only takes 30 seconds with Google to vet people. Clearly the BBC just don’t want to know.
Mills has previous. After the Millbank riot Mills managed to get himself on Sky posing as a student where the presenter just referred to him as James. Again no acknowledgement that this guy was a Labour MP’s researcher.
Today the BBC Radio 4 Today programme went beyond parody giving the ridiculous Claire Soloman a platform to promote the latest bout of student mayhem today. Follow this link and move the slider to 2:55:00. When asked to comment on Michael Gove’s education reforms Soloman was left spluttering:
OK, well, er, I was told I was coming on this programme to talk about the student protests today, um, I wasn’t prepared for this …
Clearly she had come on to the programme expecting to be able to just promote her cause without critical comment from James Naughtie.
The BBC failed to point out that she is a 37 year-old “student” who has spent by her own admission most of the noughties involved in left wing politics, including 4 years as a member of the Socialist Workers Party. It is not clear that Soloman has ever worked. She is the president of the University of London students union and was one of the people involved in vandalising the building that houses Conservative offices, 30 Millbank, earlier this month.
Another blog run by Soloman provides links to legal advice for students taking part in protests provided by the Green and Black Cross legal team.
I can only assume that this is a bunch of Green Anarchists who are seeking to foment trouble amongst students. According to the leaflet the Green and Black Cross activists recommend that students use their solicitor, Bindmans, founded by left-wing poster boy Geoffrey Bindman, lawyer to Keith Vaz and supporter of any number of leftie causes. It might help us keep law and order in our country if rich and talented men like Bindman weren’t fomenting anarchy.
Expect to see UL invaded by Soloman and her wreckers sometime after 11am today in time to make the evening news bulletins. I hope the police are ready this time.
One of the big stories breaking overnight is the news that Labour front bench Northern Ireland spokesman, Eric Joyce, has resigned due to being done for drink driving yesterday. Apparently this story is not worthy of appearing in the 9am news bulletin on Radio 4 just now and does not appear on the BBC’s UK news front page, updated at 8.37am. Even the Scotland news page, updated at 8.42am only puts the Joyce story up 4th even though Joyce is a Scottish MP. After yesterday’s wall-to-wall coverage of the Tories’ embarrassment over Lord Young’s faux pax you can only conclude that the BBC is happy to knock a Tory when he is down but will also happily cover up for a Labour MP.
The picture of the unshaven, tieless Joyce used by the BBC was taken by Mike Day and published by the BBC website yesterday at 4.58pm, see here.
What really stands out from this story is that somebody stopped for drink driving and is tried and convicted the next day. That is justice.
The behaviour of protesting “students” yesterday afternoon was sickening. Apart from being thuggish they are clearly extremely stupid in so far as they managed to trash the offices of a number of business that share premises with the Tory party at 30 Millbank without getting into the Conservatives’ offices and they were also involved in dui. I do hope that a large number of these people end up being properly punished.
One of these people has been stupid enough to get his name and photo into the Telegraph. The Telegraph refers to 22-year old Tanzil Choudhury who is a law student from Bradford who studies at Manchester University who was brandishing a cricket bat that he had stolen from the building. Choudhury is reported to have said:
The extremity of the situation is such that we need to take direct action. If the Tory-Lib Dem Government knows we’re willing to take this kind of action, they will take us more seriously.
The Telegraph calls him Tanzil Choudhury. It seems that the Telegraph may have got the name wrong. Apparently a Tanzil Chowdhury graduated from University of Manchester School of Law with a degree in Law with Politics with honours on 5th July this year and plans to work with Appeals law Group. Unless the man photographed is impersonating Chowdhury I suspect that they are one and the same.
While at Manchester Chowdhury was active in student union politics as a part of University of Manchester Students’ Union (UMSU). He represented UMSU on the university’s senate, penned a number of petitions related to Gaza and was chair of Action Palestine at the UMSU. On facebook Chowdhury uses this ominous image rather than his own photo.
I don’t know if Choudhury and Chowdhury are one and the same but certainly Choudhury should never practice the law he so clearly despises. Don’t wanna think of getting in an accident and have him defending me, really.
We are going to hear again and again over the next few years a bunch of Labour stories about cuts to capital spending that are quite simply lies. Everytime you hear about how a school or a hospital isn’t going to be built because of Tory cuts be aware that this is a bare-faced lie.
In the December 2009 Pre-Budget Report Labour chancellor Alistair Darling announced a halving of net public sector investment. Here he was talking about real investment (capital spending) not the usual Gordon Brown nonsense about wasteful revenue spending being “investment”. Don’t expect Ealing council leader Julian Bell to know what I am talking about.
In a government spending crisis capital spending programmes are always an easy target. You can make a big impression on the finances without visiting immediate pain on electors. In order to salvage some financial credibility Darling savaged the capital programme in the dying days of the Labour government. He failed though to identify which programmes would be trimmed by how much.
If you go to table B13 on page 189 of the December 2009 Pre-Budget Report you can see how public sector net investment was due to be halved by Darling, see below (click to enlarge). Look at the net investment line which goes from £50 billion in 2009/10 to £22 billion in 2013/14.
Darling’s cuts were so shocking that in his own budget speech in June 2010 the Tory chancellor George Osborne said:
We have faced many tough choices about the areas in which we should make additional savings, but I have decided that capital spending should not be one of them. There will be no further reductions in capital spending totals in this Budget.
Go to Table C13, page 102 of the June Conservative budget and you will see that the capital programme outlined there is almost identical to Darling’s, see below (click to enlarge).
Over the next few years we will also have Labour folk memories of the Thatcher regime revisited. Like much Labour mythology they are nonsense too. Go and look at Treasury figures for public sector gross investment as a percentage of GDP that are hidden away in the back of the budget documents.
– Related article: Claims for Mis Sale of a Pension Product.
You will see that whilst the Tories probably cut investment too much in the late nineties (a trajectory maintained by Labour for four years after they came into power) they consistently invested much more than Labour under the mendacious Gordon Brown ever did. Of course Brown always confused current spending with capital spending. But the facts are that in eighteen Tory years average public sector gross investment was 4.3% of GDP. Under the first twelve years of Labour it was 2.7% of GDP.
Phil Taylor 