Cameron/Brown: Management Material?

I continue not to buy the narrative that the Cameron Tories are putting a caring-sharing-centerist sheen on a right-wing hog. The accusation seems to come from the same place that the 1997 election attacks on Tony Blair for being a closet left-wing extremist.

The attacks on Blair were doomed to fail because it looked paranoid and deluded. The fact that in reality it turned not only to look that way, but to BE paranoid and deluded means its less likely to work on Cameron.

I shy from the easiness of ‘politicians are all the same’ but neither party is offering a huge shift in ideology. When people go to the ballot box i think a lot of them will be voting for which ever leader they think will be the best manager, the strongest CEO, charismatic communicator and has the ability to implement the polices which all parties seem to agree. Inspiring stuff !

It’s a sorry state of affairs for a democracy when people have to vote tactically as opposed to voting for a party which represents their views. I’ve come to realise that electorial reform is a crucial issue for me this time round. My hope is that the three parties end up neck and neck in terms of the popular vote then it will become obviously unfair that the Lib Dems get such a low percentage of seats (because their support is well spread throughout the country).

The Tories want First-Past-The-Post to remain, because it suits them, Labour want to bring in a nonsense half-hearted system which would only serve to give Lib Dem voters the chance to decide whether the Tories or Labour should win in a close battle. We need to get away from fetishising the constituency MP, we don’t need it, its crazy that we feel we have a right to ask our local MP to do us personal favours or help us out with housing problems! we send them to westminster to vote and debate on maters of state, just bloody stay there, stop feeling you have to help Mrs Smith with her broken drains, leave that to councillors.

Single-Transferable-Vote would mean that some fringe parties (BNP) get in to parlement, but frankly its right that they should. If they have 2% of the vote, they should have 2% of the MPs. If the Respect party get 5% of the popular vote they should have about 20 MPs. At least that way people who support these parties don’t feel disenfranchised, which is ultimately what leads to a lack of social cohesion.

[rant o'clock]

Spin or be spun

It’s paradoxical that a government so known for spin is at the same time ruthlessly self-analytical and public. It’s amazing how many of the negative news stories that surround them are only in the public eye because (new) Labour legislated that it be allowed. Freedom-of-information requests hector government departments, they commission surveys into equality a few months before an election which turns out to say that UK is more unequal than at any time since 1945! They set up a public enquiry into the Iraq war, their defining failure, THREE MONTHS before the election. The list goes on, and paradoxically the fact that the feral media have so much meat to chew on means that the government spin machine has to work harder just to keep above water. Any government that doesn’t have world class media management and presentation is no government at all, the naive bleat about insincerity and ‘airbrushing’, when in truth good political campaigning is a sign of good management and persuasion skills.

Here’s my criteria in May: Shares my values; Intelligent; Visionary; Compassionate, Driven to succeed; Skillful political operator

Singling out ethnic groups for extra airport searches

Muslim profiling is a recipe for insecurity?

In response to this article in the Guardian I can’t help thinking that while targeting Asian or African looking men who board planes for extra searching feels wrong and counter productive in a moral sense, it feels completely natural and proper in a practical sense.

A risk assessment must be made, which people in this queue are more likely to pose a risk 1) men 2) Muslims 3) Arabs. If they then start to use other tactics like recruiting white grannies then fine, add them to the list. To deny statistics show one group of people more likely to be a risk than others is to deny what everyone accepts to be true. This kind of ‘PC’ backward bending is what fuels BNP/EDL support.

In days gone by is was people who looked and spoke like me who carried out terrorist attacks in England. If that were still the case, and us paddys had taken to blowing up planes then i would want to be singled out for extra searches if it made me and my family 1) safer 2) queue less.

Different screw heads. Why?

There doesn’t seem to be a good reason why we have five differnt typle of screw heads. Why can’t we just have flathead and be done?  why why why?

Might as well face it i’m addicted to hate

Piss off Esther and stop talking shite. Especially racist shite, lets consider the reaction if you’d said that Muslims where addicted to hate or that Jews were addicted to money or that Germans were addicted to war.

I think you may be addicted to the sound of your own voice, wise the bap and get back to your retirement

We hand the BNP their ammunition

We are guilty of handing the BNP ammunition, we’re guilty of making their task of recruiting and impressing working class Britain easier than it should be. It’s often said that the worse thing Enoch Powell ever did was to make it impossible to have a reasonable debate about race and immigration without fear of being labelled a racist.

This week three black men were convicted of the brutal unprovoked murder of former Eastenders actor Ben Kinsella. We need to be honest and say that had this been the brutal unprovoked murder of a nice innocent black boy by three white thugs it would have been immediately labelled as a racist attack, the police and social services would have been investigated and maybe labelled as instructionally racist, we’d have had lots of media soul searching and setting up of community projects to fight racist Britain, but in reality, although I’ve known about this story for months and months I only learned that the attackers were black when the court case started.

Afro-Caribbeans make up around 10% of the London population but are responsible for over 50% of the violent crime. That’s uncomfortable to hear and our liberal conscious blames all sorts of things for those statistics but the problem is because we don’t talk about it or address it, Nick Griffen can stand up to his supporters and say all of this and then go on and say (correctly) that the media and the mainstream politicians don’t tell us any of this, they are running scared of the truth, they are lying to you just like they lie to you about the holocaust . When he tells and unspoken truth he gets creditably to follow it up with his vicious lies.

We are guilty of handing the BNP their ammunition