Wednesday, August 05, 2009 

Silly season moaning.

Every year it's the same. The newspapers moan about politicians while they're at Westminster, then they moan when they're not at Westminster. Gavel Basher in Private Eye today points out that those most fingered as being useless can't win: Bob Ainsworth, the defence secretary, pilloried for being out of his depth and described in the Sun's umpteenth leader on Our Brave Boys having to fight the government as much as they're fighting the Taliban as a "bungling Defence wallah", went for a few days break, just as the row about compensation broke out. He came back, as you would, and the same newspapers complain that he shouldn't have bothered.

The situation is almost exactly the same with whoever it is who deputises for the prime minister while he's away for a couple of weeks. John Prescott got it in the neck repeatedly simply because he wasn't Tony Blair and also from the usual suspects for being a working class idiot above his pay grade. This year it's Harriet Harman's turn, and it being the silly season and there being no real politics to write about, she's transformed by the Mail especially into a feminist harridan determined in just a week to strike a blow against the oppressive patriarchy. The evidence? She jokingly repeated her remarks that women would make better bankers than men (they couldn't be much worse), is daring to introduce lessons about relationships at the age of five which in the Mail becomes five-year-olds being indoctrinated in the ways of feminazism, and might have suggested that the proposals on reforms to the rape laws aren't tough enough. It's utter nonsense, but it fills the space and makes for a good front page splash.

The last person to deputise for the prime minister who was given anything even approaching respect was John Reid, who was praised for his handling of the "liquid bomb plot" raids while Blair was off sunning himself. Reid of course was the hard, unflappable and determined politician which the authoritarian tabloids especially love, at least until they decide that what was up must be brought back down to earth. As for Bob Ainsworth, attacked as much for his choice in facial hair as for his current performance as defence secretary, he's just the latest poor bastard to be cleaning up the mess which Reid himself left at defence, he being the one who told the world that he hoped the troops in Afghanistan would be able to return home from their mission without firing a single shot. We might get the politicians we deserve, but we get the media we deserve as well.

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Friday, September 05, 2008 

Nobody screws more prostitutes than the government.

It is however still undoubtedly New Labour that holds the undisputed record for its gross and continuing addiction to unnecessary and illogical illiberalism.

So it continues to be on the intractable problem of prostitution. It wasn't so long back that the party was considering the idea of "red light zones", where prostitution would be tolerated and potentially supervised to make it less likely that sex workers would be abused, and the setting-up of "mini-brothels", where 2 or 3 women could work together and protect each other, all ideas which have now been most certainly dropped. The latter was the work of Fiona MacTaggart, who while distinctly opposed to prostitution and who wanted tougher penalties for kerb-crawlers accepted that there was no possible way the government could stamp it out, and also accepted that making the buying of sex illegal would achieve nothing in the long run except making those dependent on selling their bodies even more vulnerable and desperate. She may since have changed her views, and did previously suggest an amendment which would make buying sex illegal.

MacTaggart has since the left the government, and policy on prostitution has increasingly come under the influence of the Harriet Harman, who has made quite clear that she is much inclined towards just the policy which MacTaggart opposed. Like with all the politicians and campaigners down the ages, whether complaining about video nasties, declining moral standards or otherwise, few want to be seen as stopping adults from choosing their pursuits as they see fit. Instead, there has to either be someone or something that is being affected by the pursuit the adult chooses which can instead be used as the justification to stop it in its entirety. With video nasties it was that children were watching them and being either disturbed or corrupted by their contents. With drugs it's that they're either getting more powerful, that the side effects are increasing or that the working classes and less educated can't handle them. With prostitution they now seem to have finally found a reason why the buying of sex should be made illegal: trafficking and the resulting sex slavery.

Harman is using this exact argument and has even had an opinion poll commissioned to help back her up. It unsurprisingly found that more than half of both men and women were in favour of making buying sex illegal if it would help reduce people-trafficking. It does also though, contradictingly, show that both men and women still think that buying sex should be made completely legal, something that Harman strangely didn't emphasise. The obvious problem with this is that there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that making the purchasing of sex illegal would help to decrease it; while there is some evidence which points towards the complete legalisation of prostitution increasing sex trafficking in countries where that has happened, the held-up example of Sweden offers no real definitive evidence that it has helped stem the trade. The most it suggests is that prostitution in Stockholm fell after buying sex was made illegal, which proves little as it may well just have been that prostitution had increased outside of the capital and pushed it further underground, with those practising less easy to come across.

Similarly, we also don't know just how big a problem sex trafficking actually is. While politicians have adopted the stance of making it illegal to stem this "modern-day evil of slavery", the first police operation designed to combat it, called Operation Pentameter, rescued a compartively tiny number of 88 individuals. Its follow-up, Pentameter 2, rescued a further 167. The police themselves claim that they think up to 18,000 trafficking victims might be being forced to work as prostitutes. If so, that shows that the attempts to combat it have been a miserable failure. If in fact those estimates are wildly excessive, which seems a much more reasonable assumption, then it suggests that the problem is being wildly overstated, and that it's being used a tool by those ideologically opposed to prostitution to outlaw something which they detest for moral reasons.

Harman's poll was further commissioned to come alongside a report by the Eaves charity, which runs the Poppy project. A follow up to their 2004 Sex and the City report, Big Brothel (PDF) is meant to present a realistic picture of the scale of prostitution in London. To say the entire project is incredibly biased towards prohibition would be an understatement: it calls former prostitutes who gave evidence "survivors", and in the press release (PDF) the co-author, Helen Atkins, has this to say:

It has been said that we are never more than six feet away from a rat in London. Apparently, something similar applies to brothels, places where thousands of women are regularly exploited by men who buy sex.

Instantly then we are presented with the conclusion that women are being exploited by men who buy sex. That this is far from proven, or indeed provable is no issue to either Atkins or Harman. For all the attempts of both to present the report as shocking, it in fact hardly tells you anything that most with more than a passing knowledge of the sex industry know already: that the number of different nationalities involved reflects the multicultural nature of London more than it does the idea that foreign nationals are increasingly being trafficked; that the price of penetrative sex fluctuates wildly from as little as £15 to £250; that sex without a condom costs roughly double that of protected sex; and that most premises are in residential areas with a discreet appearance. Indeed, it tries to have it both ways; prostitutes selling sex on the streets are undoubtedly in the most potential danger, yet the report suggests increasingly that off-street sex is becoming the norm, which ought to be a cause for celebration, that perhaps even without legalisation sex workers are getting together and working indoors in order to be safer. Street prostitutes are also most often those that can't work in brothels because of their drug habits; if they're becoming rarer, it perhaps brings encouragement that drug abuse and dependence is becoming less of a signifier of sex workers.

The report is aimed at taking on misconceptions, such as those arising from glamorous and unrealistic productions like Secret Diary of a Call Girl. It goes without saying that such programmes are ludicrous, and provide only a picture of the very highest realms of escort work. The reality of prostitution can be seen in almost any genuinely pornographic work, where it's more than apparent that sex is one of the least arousing activities around; there is very little that is less erotic than the idea of a woman having sex with 20 different men potentially in a day, of the pain, numbness and withdrawal from real life that has to be taken on board for such a person to survive and live from day to day.

It is however equally dangerous and also completely wrong to assume that an overwhelming majority of those involved in prostitution do not choose it, especially those from abroad, which estimates suggest now make up 80% of those in sex work. For those with families back home, it provides more money than any menial labour job will ever do, and it's one that some indeed choose to do without any coercion. The report tries to challenge the idea of this as a myth, but it fails miserably:

“Women choose prostitution.” It is a choice through lack of choice. A significant number of women involved in street prostitution were groomed as children. Many enter through marginalisation, dependencies and/or economic necessity.

But here the report is trying to have its cake and eat it. This is after all a report on prostitution within brothels, not on the streets; most street prostitutes as we have already mentioned are indeed the most vulnerable who can't work in the premises which the report is investigating. They would have undoubtedly benefited from teaming up in the way that MacTaggart proposed, or through the red light zones, but both have been dropped and are doubtless opposed by those behind this report. It sets up other straw men and then knocks them down, such as the following:

“Anti-prostitution feminists are against women in prostitution.” One of the more convincing lies coming from the pro-sex work lobby is that feminists who define prostitution as ‘abuse’ are against the women themselves. Abolitionists are supportive of women in the sex industry, but against the institution of prostitution (e.g. FCAP, 2008).

Who here after all is in denial? Those who genuinely believe that prostitution can be abolished and that define all prostituition instantly as abuse or those that realise that most feminists are unwilling to accept that those involved in pornography or prostitution are doing it out of free choice or even because they personally find it empowering? After all, it also tries to claim it's a myth that women can also exploit men as much as the men can also exploit the women; it's undoubtedly the case that prostitutes are abused, both physically and sexually whilst selling themselves but those who favour making buying sex illegal will only make this more likely and less actionable by pushing the trade further underground.

It's this that makes the stance of the government so infuriating. Full legalisation is not on the agenda, and considering the potential pitfalls of it, it's probably not anything approaching a solution in the first place. Likewise though, criminalisation of those who buy sex penalises not just the men that are not instantly exploiting the women through their lack of ability to either get into proper relationships, or those that buy it whilst married or in relationships, but also the prostitutes themselves that do choose to work in the industry and would like further protection rather than lectures from women that refuse to openly state their opposition to prostitution as a whole and hide behind the exploited in order to do so. Sex is never going to be something most are going to be able to take openly about, let alone the buying of it, but the hiding behind others, something this government has done repeatedly to quash ancient liberties, is not just politically and morally bankrupt, it's also downright cowardly.

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Friday, June 20, 2008 

Clarke roasts Smith over 42 days and Harriet Harman sticks her nose in.

Channel 4 News have a somewhat intriguing exclusive, namely letters between Charles "Safety Elephant" Clarke and "Wacky" Jacqui Smith, former and current Home Secretary respectively over 42 days.

Sadly this isn't Clarke deciding that 42 days was a step too far despite helming the attempt to ram 90 days through parliament, but rather instead making his concerns felt that the so-called "concessions" have actually made it next to impossible for any extension beyond 28 days to be put into place, something the police themselves briefed they were worried about. Channel 4 have helpfully providedthe letters in full (PDFs), but his main concerns are summarised as that derogating from the ECHR seems to be easier than putting in motion the process to trigger 42 days, that the legal advice needed to do so would likely to be leaked, damaging the opportunity for a prosecution, with the subsequent vote on the matter limited to a vote of confidence in the Home Secretary, and finally that the bypassing of the attorney general over the legal advice would be a "major constitutional departure".

While his claim that the ECHR process would be easier doesn't stand up, as there needs to be a "serious threat to the life of the nation" to justify such a derogation, when 42 days would require a "grave exceptional terrorist threat", and the law lords have already struck down the derogation, rightly concluding that the current threat does not even begin to seriously threaten the life of the nation*, his second concern is exactly what both the critics of the "concessions" on both sides have argued; doing absolutely nothing to alter the pernicious and poisonous extension to 42 days while making the legislation worse, with it approaching an incredibly dangerous joke, setting a precedent of involving parliament in decisions that should be solely left to the judiciary.

Smith inevitably fobs him off with the same completely unconvincing justifications that she used in the Commons. It's his final response which is potentially dynamite:


Clarke's inference is clear: he too, like the critics from the other side, thinks that this whole thing is politically motivated to show the Conservatives as being soft on terror while putting down completely unworkable legislation. The real question is just who leaked it: even considering Clarke's past record in being highly critical of Gordon Brown, this seems to go far beyond even that. Perhaps it was someone in the Home Office, disgruntled one way or another who had access to the correspondence. Either way, this is just another person formerly allied with the past attempt to get through 90 days that is deeply concerned by the shoddiness and indefensible determination to pass through irredeemable legislation in the face of criticism from all sides.

Meanwhile, Harriet Harman has been sticking her nose over gorgeous pouting Andy Burnham's comments on how David likes Shami:

Harman said that Burnham was right to question why an organisation like Liberty was supporting a Conservative like Davis.

"When it comes to David Davis, he's an unlikely champion of civil liberties and certainly when I was at Liberty, I did not support people who opposed the Human Rights Act and were in favour of the death penalty," Harman told ITV News.


Now of course that she's not at Liberty Harman just supports 90 day detention without charge, the smoking ban, ID cards and criminal exercises in Iraq. By that yardstick, there's very little to choose between the two when it comes to civil liberties. Harman however supports the motions which need to opposed right now; Davis supports ones which are unlikely to come to fruition or which at the moment are irrelevant.

In any case, Harman is just playing the (wo)men instead of the ball. She doesn't actually defend 42 days, or bother involving herself in any discussion of the measures; she just criticises an organisation which she may as well have never been a member of, while keeping the whole matter in the news. New Labour just really doesn't get it.

*Update: Phil correctly points out in the comments that it was a minority opinion of Lord Hoffman's that there was not a serious threat to the life of the nation. The other law lords ruled that:

The seven other judges who ruled against the government said the decision on whether a public emergency existed was for the state to take.

But they ruled that indefinite detention without trial was unlawful because it was a disproportionate interference with liberty and with equality.

The opt-out allows only such measures as are strictly required to deal with the emergency.

The seven held that the legislation discriminated against foreign nationals because there are no similar powers to lock up British nationals - the government has admitted that such a power would be difficult to justify.

This doesn't alter the fact that derogating from the ECHR, while it could be easier, would be open to even wider criticism and judicial scrutiny than 42 days, and it seems just as likely that the law lords would still rule against it when brought before them. It would also leave the potential for an appeal, were those held subsequently convicted, on the grounds that their excessive detention rendered their convictions unsafe. At least with 42 days there is a time limit; derogating from the ECHR, even if only temporarily in the aftermath of a large terrorist attack or foiled plot, would take us even further down the road to the nightmare of an all powerful police state.

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Monday, December 03, 2007 

Hubris, carelessness and the second death.

Depending on who you believe, Alastair Campbell had a formula concerning the life of a scandal and whether those embroiled within it could survive in their jobs. Again, depending on who you believe, Campbell decided that most could carry on if by either the tenth or fourteenth day since it was first exposed the coverage had almost disappeared. We're now a week and a day into the Abrahams funding scandal, and it shows no signs whatsoever of being about to drop off the front pages.

The Brown camp must have been dreading the Sundays, where the weekly hacks had far more time than their daily counterparts to uncover further intricacies of Labour's dubious funding over the past few years. Things could have been a lot worse, one would think, even though the Mail on Sunday splashed on how Mahmoud Khayami donated to the party a whole day after he been entered on the electoral register, and Abrahams, who seems to be doing his best to be mischievous, noted that there are more senior figures within the party who knew that he was the source of the money coming from at least four different fronts. The situation has also been helped slightly by the whole Gillian Gibbons affair, although the embarrassment that David Miliband himself wasn't able to garner her early release while two Lords were able to might yet bite too. If politics hadn't become so separated in Scotland and England, the scandal which has also engulfed Wendy Alexander, the Scottish Labour leader, best summed up by Mr Eugenides, would also have hit far harder than it has south of the border.

The one thing that is still beyond belief is that Labour had the best part of two whole days to get its entire story about what happened completely straight, yet it failed comprehensively. The first they heard of what was going to be in the Mail on Sunday was on Saturday evening, and according to Patrick Wintour's Grauniad account it wasn't seen as too serious, but the involvement and resignation of Peter Watt still should have brought home just how damaging the fallout from the latest breach of party funding law was going to be. Yet even by Brown's press conference on Tuesday morning the full account of what occurred had not been constructed, nor has it even been now. To best disarm the ensuing storm, what should have been put into the public domain was a narrative of what had happened, how the party had got it wrong and how it was going to be put right. At the very best it can be said that Labour was leaving the details out so that Lord Whitty could establish them, while at worst the party was and is being blatantly dishonest, a view I more than lean towards.

For instance, how did a man such as Peter Hain just completely forget to register a donation (or indeed, most of his donations, as it now turns out) from none other than Jon Mendelsohn towards his deputy leadership campaign? The inference must be that it was a very convenient transgression. This itself distracts from the real question, which ought to by why and how some of the candidates thought it was necessary to raise such vast sums, in Hain's case £77,000, for what was an internal leadership campaign. Even more startling is that Harriet Harman, the eventual winner, was to hold a Christmas party a final fundraiser this Wednesday to cover the full costs of her campaign, having overspent by a huge margin, despite being told to go begging to Janet Kidd, one of Abrahams' fronts by Chris Leslie, the man who had rejected a donation from the very same Kidd in his role as Brown's leadership campaign co-ordinator.

Brown's last resort to try to regain the initiative has been to dangle the carrot to the Tories of severing the link with the unions once and for all. Perhaps the only major surprise is that it has taken both this long to happen and that the unions have put up with Labour for so many years, through so many broken promises whilst still funding the party up to the hilt. The details of how the political levy will be made "transparent" in Brown's words are unclear: will this mean a limit of £50,000 a year or every member being required to OK the money donated by the union? If it's the former, it will mark the final, full transition of Labour from the party representing the ordinary worker to that of one totally funded by the same corporate, rich individuals as the Tories. This occurred long ago in policy, but the death of Labour in spirit in exchange for the dishonesty of its apparatchiks is fitting, if only as a reminder of the last ten years.

As both Dave and Chris have said, this wasn't supposed to happen, but this can't purely be blamed on the Blair era. Brown might not have known about the donations, but he did appoint Mendelsohn who will famously be known for being "concerned" about Abrahams' funding, but not enough to do anything about it prior to the story being exposed. He has completely failed to make good on his promise for "change" while the mendacity of Blair was never punctured. We do need as Chris argues the resurrection of mass politics, but who with? Labour has never been more of a busted flush. Do we help build the Greens or go somewhere else? Fact is, we simply don't know, and what's more, we won't. Being disaffected is much easier than starting again.

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Tuesday, November 27, 2007 

Abrahams sacrifices Labour.

To misquote Lady Bracknell, to get caught out over improper donations once is unfortunate, to get caught twice seems like carelessness. To be strictly accurate, it isn't even the second time the Labour party has been caught out: it's more like the fourth, coming after the Ecclestone and Mittal affairs in the earlier days of Blair's reign. Gordon Brown and the government at large must be wondering what on earth is going to go tits up next: perhaps Ruth Kelly will be exposed as having a second life as this generation's Miss Whiplash?

More damaging than the accusations and the returning of the money to David Abrahams might well be the very bringing back of the sobriquet "sleaze", especially screaming out from the front page of the Daily Mail, the paper that Brown has done so much to attempt to woo. If Blair's position prior to the whole loans for peerages debacle was highly damaged, the impact of the police investigation was terminal. Brown's attempt to draw a line under all of that through his widely parodied "Age of Change" has hit the buffers even sooner than after Peter Mandelson commented that New Labour was "intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich."

As so often with this government, when it gets caught out it acts like a child caught with his hands in his mother's purse, except not many children would then appoint a Lord to investigate what actually led up to the shutting of fingers in the clasp. No one, it would seem, apart from Peter Watt and perhaps his predecessors as general secretary of the Labour party knew that Abrahams was donating money through up to four intermediaries, even though both Gordon Brown himself and Hilary Benn declined to receive donations from Janet Kidd for their respective campaigns for leader and deputy leader, having inquired into her background as she wasn't known to either. Benn subsequently did accept a donation from Abrahams once he personally signed the cheque, but Harriet Harman wasn't as inquisitive, accepting a donation for £5,000 at face value. Her position really ought to be untenable, especially if the Tories are correct in alleging she didn't actually take it until 2 weeks after the campaign had ended.

In fairness to Brown, he did all that could reasonably be expected of him at this morning's press conference. He apologised, admitted that the donations were unlawful and that they would be returned, said that he might well have met Abrahams at some point, although he "couldn't remember" talking about donations at any of those meetings and that changes would be needed. Thing is, we've heard it all before over so many other matters. The talks about changes to the party funding regime have been mooted on previous occasions, and the most recent attempt failed after the Tories attempted to cut the links between Labour and the unions, with all the other matters also falling by the wayside. When the Tories have Lord Ashcroft pouring money into the marginal constituencies, even though he himself has questions to answer about his tax status (Private Eye in the latest issue suggested he might be one of an increasing number of businessmen who in effect pay no tax whatsoever thanks to their offshore interests) they have much to gain and little to lose from the collapse of the talks, especially when the right-wing press has such a loathing of Labour's union links.

Doubtless, numerous hacks will now be scrutinising David Abrahams' movements over the last few years. His explanation that he passed his donations through others so that he wouldn't be treated like a criminal for donating to a political party would stand up rather more if he hadn't in the words of Nick Robinson "used different names, different ages, been deselected as a parliamentary candidate and been involved in rows about the planning system." The one saving grace for Labour is that so far there has been no evidence presented to suggest that Abrahams has personally gained from his donations; unlike with cash for peerages, where it was always incredulous that all those that had given secret loans had been been recommended for peerages and that the two things weren't connected, this at the moment appears to be a general secretary taking the money and not asking any questions. Where it will change into serious sleaze is if it turns out that there was far wider recognition of where the donations really were coming from - and at the moment the photograph of Blair at his constituency with Abrahams in close proxomity is the nearest thing to a smoking gun. If a similar photograph of Brown turns up, despite his admittance that he might of met him, then it will become very serious indeed.

The most astonishing thing is that it's been allowed to happen. At what point does a breaking of the law, even if we believe Watt's story that he simply didn't check, become less serious than another breach? Few will disagree with David Cameron's observation that despite all the safeguards that the government has meant to have setup, it seems itself to routinely breach them. With faith in politics at such a low, and Brown the latest leader to declare that he would be different, this just once again reinforces the belief that "they're all the same." While the last week has seen many comparisons with the slow death of the Major government, it hasn't been widely acknowledged that it wasn't just Black Wednesday but also what happened after then that destroyed it and gradually turned it into a laughing stock, with the sleaze allegations, then uncovered by the Guardian being denied and challenged by the Tories. This time round it's the Mail on Sunday and with Labour owning up, but the effect remains the same. It's the image of a government not being in control of events, and constantly on the back foot. The only consolation is that the Tories are still not making the huge gains you would expect, Labour instead just falling behind. It's not yet critical, but any more unexpected disasters and Brown might well be permanently tainted.

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Monday, June 25, 2007 

Won't get fooled again.

Well, could Harriet Harman have got off to a more auspicious start as deputy Labour party leader? Her victory was most definitely a surprise, but it seemed to be one which wasn't that bad, considering at least two of the other candidates on offer.

Could a day have ever have made more of a difference? It was assumed that Harman, having seen the success that Jon Cruddas was having through doing nothing more than stating the obvious, decided to tack just ever slightly further left, but could her performance on today's Today programme be any more shameless? With her bum firmly in the deputy leadership seat, it's already time for the rewriting of history and the dropping of unpalatable old views to Gordon down the memory hole, as evidenced by Justin.

The actual results of the contest were much more encouraging, as Unity argues in his in-depth breakdown. Best of all was the absolute thrashing administered to Blears, who was eliminated in the first round in embarrassing fashion, a rebuff to both the inanity and insanity of 10 years of Blair worship. It will hopefully be the first blow against the remaining ultra-Blairites, many of whom, such as Reid, Hilary Armstrong and Lord Goldsmith have already seen the writing on the wall. Almost equally promising was how Cruddas came out on top in the first round, meaning that if the contest had been held under first pass the post he would have most likely now be occupying Harman's chair. As Unity additionally argues, it's also difficult to genuinely paint this as a "shift to the left" as Blears and other right-wingers have been attempting to do, more than it reflects the reality on the ground after 10 years and the difference in what the main concerns are now. It would be nice to think that Brown would recognise that Cruddas' showing means he deserves a fairly decent ministerial post, and housing would seem made for him, but that might be too much to expect.

As for Brown's ascension after six weeks of insipid navel-gazing, some seem to be getting carried away, especially seeing the long-predicted bounce in the polls for Labour that appears to have occurred. The Brown spin machine though is in complete overdrive: witness the hagiography he gets in today's Mirror, the sycophantic interview with the BBC's Nick Robinson where they go over his schooling and yesterday's leak to the Sunday Times dropping a very heavy hint that he's going to ditch the ban on protests outside parliament itself. Thanks to Brown's control freaks success' in making certain that there wasn't going to be a contest, we've had to next to no real discussion about what he's actually going to do when Blair pisses off on Wednesday, apart from the musical chairs last week over trying to put together a "cabinet of all talents", supposedly including such heavyweights as Lord Stevens, who delivered last year's sectarian rant about how Muslims need to take to the streets to condemn what some allegedly within their religion decide to carry out, as well as being to the right of the Sun on crime and punishment, due to his wife once having to suffer the indignity of discovering a burglar had gone through her knicker drawer. Also mentioned was Sir Digby Jones, the previous head of the CBI, that organisation which holds Labour values so dear to its heart that it opposed the minimum wage. With talents like that, who needs Hazel Blears?

No doubt we are soon to suffer a blitz of just how different Brown is going to be from the man who many wags have long called the domestic prime minister, but nothing could be less heartening than the way that the Scum and Brown are engaged in the same bear hug which Blair decided upon all those years ago. The rage-inducing way the Scum has reported the Labour deputy leadership continues apace, all about how Gordon will not allow the Leftie dinosaurs destroy him, and how Harman embarrassed poor little blushing Gordie by daring to suggest that Iraq was a disaster and that maybe we don't need to replace Trident, both things that the Scum has supported to the hilt, being just as covered in blood in my eyes as Blair himself is. If Pascoe-Watson is right about Blears being rewarded for her loyalty with a promotion, then we may as well give up now. Notice too how the Scum was carefully selected as the paper to leak Brown's intentions for an election within a year to, just as the paper was given first dibs both in 2001 and 2005 to the date on which voting would take place, all signs of just how far Brown is going to be up the arse of Murdoch/Wade, a non-change if ever there was one.

Polly Toynbee often likes to point out how the left regards any Labour government other than Attlee's to be betrayal, and she does for once have something of a point. It isn't though that Labour is never going to be good enough for some of us, it's that they could do and could have done so much more if Blair had pursued redistribution of wealth, increased child care and help with housing with the same vigour as he did Iraq, tuition fees, foundation hospitals and trust schools and all those other things that he deliberately riled the party with, we'd be in a much different position now. The truth is though that we were tricked; we thought that New Labour itself was a front for a much more radical programme that would be really instigated once they'd gained office. We couldn't have been more wrong, and as Polly herself eventually admitted, this is a party which is far, far to the right of the SDP. Unless Brown means what he says, and all the signs suggest that it's froth rather than the real thing, he's going to be found out incredibly quickly. We won't be fooled again.

Related posts:
Bloggerheads - Brownie points
BlairWatch - The new boss

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Wednesday, January 24, 2007 

Harriet Harman launches blog.

Everyone give a big blogobowl welcome to Harriet "I've got tits" Harman, minister for constitutional affairs, who in a blaze of publicity (surely silence? Ed.) has launched her own weblog. Things may not be off to the most promising of starts in her praise for Hillary Clinton, but government ministers blogging is a good thing, and ought to be encouraged, as long as they're not exercises in futility, such as Mr Miliband's.

Oh, and silly jokes regarding Harman's main campaigning battle-cry for deputy prime minister aside, she's one of the few Labour ministers who doesn't make you want to pierce your eardrums with an knitting needle on hearing them speak, and I'm sure we can all agree that we could do with more who don't spark such reflex movements.

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