It's the Sun wot dun* it

What an astonishingly arrogant and pompous front page by the "Currant Bun" today.

"After 12 long years in power, this government has lost its way. Now it's lost the Sun's support too", it thundered.

Who the hell does the Sun think it is?
A tawdry rag purveying second rate filth, and third rate political analysis.

Trevor Kavanagh (its politics editor) let the cat out of the bag when he owned up to the fact that both Murdoch pere and fils were fully aware and behind the decision to change political horses.

Murdoch has form on that front, forget Britain in the 1990s, back in the 1970s he threw his weight and media empire behind the Australian Labor Party under Gough Whitlam and duly saw it elected. As the Whitlam government began to lose public support, Murdoch turned against him and supported his dismissal by the Governor-General.

This is the Murdoch who during the 1980s and early 1990s, was supportive of Mrs Thatcher and her Tory government.
This is the Murdoch who sacked 6,000 workers who had the temerity to strike upon being told that their jobs were being moved to Wapping. Many suspected then and still do that there was collusion with the highest level of Tory government in order to further damage the trade union movement.

This is the Murdoch who in the dying days of the Major government switched to Labour and Tony Blair. The closeness of their relationship, their secret trysts to discuss national policies was scandalous then and is still today.

This is Murdoch the patriot who became a US citizen simply to satisfy laws that only American citizens could own US TV stations, and yet also managed to have himself defined as an Australian citizen to retain his ownership of Australian media outlets.

This is the Murdoch who owns nigh on 200 newspapers worldwide, ALL of which editorialised in favour of the war on Iraq.

This is the Murdoch, whose Fox News portrayed Obama whilst running for President "as suspicious, foreign, fearsome, just short of a terrorist".

Should a man like this and his media empire (think Darth Vader, though not as cuddly) tell the British electorate how to vote and for whom.

The paper then goes on to say, "The Sun believes - and prays (to whom Mammon?)- that the Conservative leadership can put the great back into Great Britain".

You have been warned, if you sup with the devil, use a long spoon.

*dun (verb) to make repeated and insistent demands upon, esp. for the payment of a debt.

"coy, kittenish, camp, and crazed"

What a fab description of Lord Mandelson by Simon Hoggart in today's Guardian.

I've always thought Mandelson to be one of the most gifted political operators of his generation. That is not to say that I admire his politics, nor yet his rather common parvenu fascination with wealth and the uber rich, nor even his near-corrupt relations with Geoffrey Robinson, or the Hinduja Brothers.

I thought that Gordon Brown bringing him back into the Cabinet was a stroke of genius, the only thing that could have topped that would've been to bring Tony Blair back.

My point is that Mandelson has managed to inject some vim and vigour into an otherwise moribund Labour Party.

And if the Tories are to be stopped from ruining Britain for the second time in a generation, then we need not only the Lib Dems but also Labour to be on top of their game.

Can Lib Dems lead the left?

In Thursday's Guardian, Jackie Ashley posed the above question, as far as I'm concerned, it is a rhetorical question, we have NO CHOICE but to lead.

We have the Policies, we have the People, we have the Passion.

O Captain! my Captain!

Just read a piece in today's Guardian about an interview with Nick Clegg where he is quoted as saying, "We will be quite bold or even savage on current spending, precisely to be able to retain spending where... the economy is weak in infrastructure".

The first part sent a chill, the second part soothed... a little!

I just wish he'd said "t'other way round" emphasise the need to invest in the public realm especially in the infrastructure.
Invest and re-animate the Building Schools for the Future programme which seems to have stalled over the past few years. So that, we can have not just hundreds, but thousands of new schools built and fit for purpose in the 21st century.

A massive house-building/home-improvement programme to ensure that we have green energy efficient homes for life.
A bold and imaginative investment in public transport, especially the railways so that we can catch up with the rest of Europe in high-speed trains, and encourage freight off the roads and on to the track.

There are so many other areas of investment needed that ONLY the state is capable of marshalling resources, remember Roosevelt's America of the 1930s?

I'm afraid that the debate about public spending is being hi-jacked by the Tories who wish to cut on ideological grounds, and Labour who are following meekly like the proverbial lambs to the slaughter.

We Lib Dems must show the way, rather than follow some mad Thatcherite agenda and try to out-macho on cuts the likes of Osborne and Darling.

The quote is from Walt Whitman and the second verse goes:
O Captain! My Captain! Rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up--for you the flag is flung for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribboned wreaths for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;

The country is hungry for change, and only we Lib Dems can provide the vision, the values, and the vigour to lead the charge.

Scrap Trident Now!

A Greenpeace investigation into the full costs of replacing Trident reveals that successive Tory and Labour governments have consistently under-estimated the final bill.

The government’s figures for replacing Trident in the 2006 Defence White Paper, is £15bn–£20bn at 2006–07 prices (roughly £16bn–£21bn today). However, a report by Greenpeace says that key factors the government has left out of the calculation will push the final cost up to £97bn over the system's 30-year life.

As Vince Cable said the report provided powerful evidence that MoD plans are totally unrealistic in the light of Britain's serious budgetary constraints.

So as well as the moral and military argument there is now the monetary argumet against Trident.

Time to get rid!
Look at the full rport at http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/files/pdfs/peace/ITFL_trident_report.pdf

Tory Millionaires

Last night I posted about how smug George Osborne looked telling the country that public spending would have to be cut.
Whilst I appreciate that Vince Cable has said that we have got to look at the future cost of public pensions, public sector pay, the welfare system, these are the big detail items that politicians are going to have to debate, it’s going to be painful but we’re going to have to discuss them.

I cannot abide a Tory Party that, if I remember correctly, has 19 millionaires out of a frontbench team of 23, wringing their hands in glee at the prospect of slash and burn being wrought on our public services.
These public services, whatever their faults, and there are many, are ultimately responsible and responsive to the democratic voice of the people. Whereas private organisations are ultimately only responsible to their shareholders and the bottom line, namely the profits and dividends they can pay out.

Let us not forget that whenever these mega-businesses begin to stumble and falter they are only to willing to ask, nay demand that the state that is you and me the ordinary tax-payer, bail them out, as we did with the banks earlier this year.
However, whenever the weakest need our help, the Tories treat them like lepers, calling them scroungers and demonising them to the nth degree and wanting to cut them off at the knees.

If only for that reason, I can never bring myself to support the Tories, and I concur wholheartedly with Nye Bevan in averring that "No amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin".

Wise Spending?

I listened to Peter Mandelson's speech on the news and I'd like to see the government actually follow this up by commitments to scrap Trident, the ID cards, etc.

Where I do agree with him on is his analysis of the Tories' "thinly disguised zeal" for cuts.

I certainly don't want to go back to the 1980s and the "lost generation" of unemployed and the social and economic consequences that flowed therefrom.

9/11

Out of respect to the nearly 3,000 people from more than 90 countries who died in the attacks on this day eight years ago, I shall not be blogging today.

The Case for Electoral Reform

Half of Westminster seats have not changed hands since 1970.
That's right HALF of all the seats at the Mother of Parliaments have not changed hands for 40 years.

So if you first voted on your eighteenth birthday in June 1970, the chances are that as you approach retirement by the time of the next general election your voice has only ever had a fifty-fifty chance of getting heard.

One of the cornerstones of politics is the ability for the electorate to dismiss their representatives. However, if the seats do not change their political colour then you might as well be whistling in the wind.
To make you more depressed if you go back to 1945 that figure is still almost a third (29%).
Clearly this is an unhealthy state of affairs, and the sooner we get electoral reform the better.

My preferred option is STV (single transferable vote) in multi-member constituencies, as they have in Ireland. I have never understood the argument that this would remove the link between the MP and their constituency, this doesn't happen at local government level where you invariably have three councillors representing a ward, no-one says that the link between councillors and their wards is non-existent.

I am as much a councillor for West End ward on the Town council, and for Calder ward on the borough council.

Electoral Reform, you know it makes sense!

Democratic Deficits

One of the failings of the modern day politics, is the lack of ethnic minority representation in Parliament. There are only fifteen MPs of colour, whereas proportionately, there should be four times as many.

I bring this up because today is the birthday of Dadabhai Naoroji, who became the first Asian to be elected an MP in 1892, as a Liberal naturally. He was quite a remarkable man who was a co-founder of the Indian National Congress.

However, bar a couple of other notable exceptions, it was not until the 1980s that the first cohort of Black MPs was to be elected.
To achieve a Parliament that truly represents ALL the people we still have a long way to go.

And don't get me started on the lack of women...

"... consequently this country is at war with Germany"

Probably the most chilling words heard on the radio. It is exactly seventy years ago that they were spoken on the BBC by then Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain.

What was to follow, were the most incredible six years in modern history. A world plunged into chaos and carnage, and a continent torn asunder. Not to mention the unleashing of the most fearsome weapon of destruction, namely the atom bomb.
And for what?
A perverse ideology that held not only that there were distinct races, but that one was superior to the rest, leading to the virtual annihilation of European Jewry, as well as its Roma population. Not forgetting an overall total of more than 50,000,000 dead, more than half of whom were civilians.
That's more than the population of England, folks!

The bravery and heroism, the dogged determination and stoicism that helped this country pull through in its darkest hour should not be forgotten. Nor indeed the aid and succour we received from the Commonwealth and US soldiers, the Polish and Czechoslovak aviators, Dutch and Norwegian sailors, and others too numerous to mention.

One of my heroes, Dr. Jacob Bronowski (who wrote the Ascent of Man, and whose family perished in the Death Camps of Auschwitz) was asked what he would say to the perpetrators if he could have had the chance, and he replied with a quotation from Oliver Cromwell, "I beseech you in the bowels of Christ: Think it possible you may be mistaken".

So the next time you read some nauseating lie in the "Daily Hate Mail", or "The Daily Excess", or even "The Pun", having a go at a made up story having a go at Europe, remember that we shall never in our lifetime, nor our children's, nor even our grandchildren's will we ever have to hear those chilling words of, "consequently this country is at war with Germany".

The Muslim Tommies

Just watching a fantastic programme on the Beeb called The Muslim Tommies about the contribution of Muslim soldiers in the British Armed forces.

Much has been made of the threat posed by Islamic fundamentalists to the security of Britain. But what is often forgotten is that Muslims have fought on behalf of Britain for hundreds of years; tens of thousands have lost their lives in the process.

I found the fact that the Indian Army held about a third of the Western Front at the beginning of the Great War, particularly fascinating.
There were heart-breaking details about their hopes and fears, their bravery and heroism under fire.

Khudadad Khan's becoming the first Indian to win the Victoria Cross.
Truly awesome.

Hats off to Sir Nicholas Winton

How wonderful to see Sir Nicholas on the news today looking as fit as a fiddle although he's a hundred years old.

Seventy years ago he saved 669 children by organising their transfer from the then Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to Britain. Before all that, he had to arrange official permits for their departure, secure their reception by British families, and to deposit bail. All this as a thirty-year-old, when asked why he did it he replied, "because no-one else was".

I first came across his story at the cinema in Olomouc a decade back when I went to see the film "Vsichni moji blízcí" with Rupert Graves playing him.
One of the things the film touched on was the treatment of Gypsies by the Nazis and ultimately how they suffered at the hands of the Nazis in much the same way as the Jews, what the Roma people call the Porajmos, literally, the Devouring.

A truly remarkable man who reminds us that whenever people ask "why do people do such terrible things?" we should never forget that there are always people who do amazing things. Good, honest, decent people like Sir Nicholas.