Saturday, May 16, 2009 

Weekend links.

Doom and gloom is pervading Westminster, with there only being one topic again this weekend. Sunny at Lib Con calls for a campaign to clean up parliament, while also arguing that Shahid Malik has been made a scapegoat, Paul Linford argues that this week will mean root and branch change, Rhetorically Speaking sees Labour setting up a personal job creation scheme, Hopi Sen notes that it's just getting worse and worse, while the Heresiarch looks somewhat sympathetically at Tam Dalyell's valedictory claiming of bookcases to hold his copies of Hansard, at a cost of £9,000 to the taxpayer. Most popular in blogland though is the sight of Nadine Dorries finally getting her comeuppance, or something approaching it, with Tim, Justin, Jamie, Bob, Craig, Sim-O and RS all enjoying the moment. Away from the expenses row, Lenin sees Israel wiping the occupied territories off the map, Anton Vowl has some suggestions on what to do with your BNP election leaflet (which I've yet to receive, so I'll have to make do with the UKIP one) and lastly Back Towards The Locus looks at the continuing persecution of the Roma in Italy.

In the papers, Marina Hyde draws attention to Dr Richard Taylor and his almost immaculate record in the Commons, Peter Oborne wishes that Vince Cable could be PM, Matthew Parris thinks the outrage is being overdone, while Ken Macdonald criticises the remaining secrecy, with Andrew Grice also thinking the Lib Dems could be the ones to benefit, although for the moment it looks as if UKIP and the BNP at least in the short term will be the main beneficiaries. The Independent's leader column also more or less calls for a general election, which is interesting. Other topics include Janice Turner on the idiocy and uselessness of SATs and Deborah Orr on the "dog problem".

As for worst tabloid article, we have the usual efforts from both Lorraine Kelly and Amanda Platell, but to come full circle we'll stretch the rules beyond breaking point and give the award to Ms Dorries for her impassioned defence of her right for privacy and for her second home not to be public knowledge, even if she has since removed the caps from the post.

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Friday, May 15, 2009 

Off with their heads?

A week on from the start of the Telegraph's disclosures, and you would have thought that this would be a perfect time to begin to take stock and see how just how badly the brand of politics in general has been damaged, to take the analogy to breaking point. Yet still the story rolls on, although whether the law of diminishing returns has started to kick in yet is difficult to ascertain. Tomorrow the Telegraph, after claiming the first ministerial scalp today in Shahid Malik is set to target a Lib Dem and this blog's favourite member of parliament, Ms Nadine Dorries, who has already put up a spirited defence of herself on her blog. It's hard not to fall victim to schadenfreude, seeing two of the most downright unpleasant specimens (the other being Hazel Blears) in the Commons having to defend themselves not against accusations of being terrible politicians, which is beyond dispute, but of financial impropriety.

As always when "crisis" descends, it's easy to lose perspective. The anger which has been expressed over the past week will subside, that much is certain. Few can sustain such fury as that expressed on phone-ins and last night's cathartic edition of Question Time for such a period of time. Again, the key period to look back to for indicators of what might happen next is the last days of the Major government, but although the allegations then were far more serious than involving "petty" abuse of expenses, there was an opposition party which was felt to be on the verge of being a viable alternative, if it was not already, as well as being one which was unblemished by the scandals. This time round, although David Cameron has put in as strong a performance as could be expected by someone who knows that he has much to potentially gain from putting the government's response to shame, his own party is only marginally less, if not as culpable as the government itself. It remains the fact that the biggest rage is being directed towards the "flippers" and profiteers, such as the previously sainted Ms Blears, but no one watching Question Time could fail to note that all politicians are taking a beating.

All of this was completely avoidable. The most mystifying thing is that a week on, parliament still refuses to get everything out in the open now and end the steady corrosion which only gets worse the longer the drip, drip of revelations continues. Second only to that has been the ineptness of Labour's attempts to get a grip on the situation, almost making you wonder whether they've completely lost all hope, both in themselves and in their chances of coming anything higher than 4th in the European elections. After all, if Shahid Malik has to stand down while his claims are investigated, why on earth are Hazel Blears and Jacqui Smith still in the cabinet, regardless of their denials and in the former's case, the brandishing of cheques? The answer might well be that they're already doomed in the next reshuffle, but the way things are going you almost wonder whether there is going to be a next reshuffle: perhaps it ought to be better to get everything over with now and call an election, rather than wait for the anger to turn instead into apathy and mistrust which will be unshiftable for years to come.

There is an argument to be made, amidst all of this, for less of a reactionary response, perhaps most forcefully made by Martin Kettle, even if his blaming of the press doesn't fully wash. Pushed down the agenda, for instance, have been examples of genuine, old style Tory corruption, only by Labour peers in the Lords. Both Lord Truscott and Lord Taylor are likely to be suspended from "the other place" after they were investigated following the Sunday Times' entrapment operation in January. Petty personal enrichment and bending if not breaking of the rules looks squeaky clean and understandable compared to the boasts made by both men of what they could do in exchange for money in the old fashioned brown envelopes. Why, also, do we not reserve such fury for the £40 million which the monarchy costs us every year, to far fewer individuals for far less work while they really do live in the lap of luxury? It also reflects badly on what it seems the public really cares about: the hate expressed over the past week seems far beyond anything that was displayed at the time of the Iraq war, when life itself was cheap to leading politicians. Some of it undoubtedly boils down to pure envy, but how on earth can that be criticised when Labour's record both on poverty has been shown to be so dismal, and now when so many are having to make do on £64 a week? On more sure ground is the hypocrisy and cant of the newspapers themselves, especially of the Mail, Telegraph and Times/Sun, all of whom are owned by individuals who are either tax exiles or do their best to avoid paying their fair share while demanding that everyone else play by the rules in the most sickening, hectoring manner.

None of the above however will make any difference for the moment, such is the apparent momentum behind the story. The fear expressed by some that this could end up turning into a "Clean Hands" style affair such as that which took place in Italy in the early 90s are probably overblown, but there is little doubt that even if there are no suicides, some now seem likely to lose their seats. The irony in all this is that while our political system is rotten in so many ways, whether down to party tribalism, whipping, or fear of offending the real power in the land, it seems likely to be the moats, trouser presses and swimming pool repairs which bring it back down to earth. In the end, we will all end up the losers in a who can wear the hairiest shirt contest, and change which fails to tackle the real problems, such as the change offered by David Cameron, will turn out be just as illusionry as that offered by New Labour.

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Thursday, May 14, 2009 

Hey mummy, what's a sex pistol?

I don't know a lot about art, but I know what I like. You can't help but think that's exactly what four supermarkets thought when they saw the cover art for the Manic Street Preachers' new album, Journal for Plague Lovers, above. 15 years on from the release of their opus, The Holy Bible, the vast majority of the lyrics for which were written by Richey Edwards, who went missing less than a year later, the band have finally had the courage to return to the remaining lyrics which he left behind for them. Appropriately, they decided upon using a painting by the artist Jenny Saville, who also provided a confrontational cover for the THB, a triptych of an obese woman in white underwear. The art for JFPL is undoubtedly striking; it's also quite clearly one of the best album covers in years.

Quite why the four supermarkets think that a painting of a young girl (as it is, although like with THB's art Saville has gone with both ambiguity and androgyny) that, if you don't look closely enough, has a tear rolling down her bloodied face is so potentially disturbing or challenging that it needs to be hidden behind a plain slipcase is perplexing. Presumably the defence they would rely on is that it potentially depicts an abused, bruised and frightened child, a startling image that some would find upsetting, or difficult to explain to a child and which might seem out of place staring down amidst the distinctly unchallenging covers from the CD aisle. You would imagine that would be their argument: as it is, all Asda have said is that it "wanted to be extra cautious" in case it upsets any customers, while Sainsbury's said it "felt that some customers might consider this ... to be inappropriate if it were prominently displayed". In other words, they haven't a clue how the public is likely to react; they just think that some might not like it.

In a bid to see whether they're at least being consistent, I had a look on their websites to see if they were showing the same caution online as they are in-store. To Tesco's credit, or cowardice, whichever you prefer, they aren't using Saville's painting for their main CD page link to the album, although on its actual page it's there in all its glory. Asda however, despite being "extra cautious" in store, and in fairness to them their corporate parent Wal-Mart is notoriously sensitive to which CDs and magazines it stocks in America, even when it's also the nation's biggest seller of ammunition, has the art uncensored on their main CD page. Sainsbury's and Morrisons don't seem to yet have pages up for it.

The Manics' singer quite reasonably points out that "[Y]ou can have lovely shiny buttocks and guns everywhere in the supermarket on covers of magazines and CDs, but you show a piece of art and people just freak out". Although there have been occasional campaigns to censor the front pages of "lads mags", and they're usually put on higher shelves and sometimes at least half covered, it's rare that the front pages of the likes of the Daily Star and Sport are similarly felt to be "inappropriate", despite the abundance of flesh which usually beams out from both. As for CDs, a quick browse through the current week's top 40 has some album covers which would more than benefit from being placed in a plain slipcase, and which could well offend some of the more delicate souls out there. These though are photographs of the artists themselves, although whether that word can possibly be used to describe the Pussycat Dolls should be left perhaps to the more inventive swearbloggers out there. Surely no one could possibly find inappropriate a spreadeagled P!nk, a vomit inducing horrendous photoshop disaster featuring the gorgeous pouting Dolls, or a presumably distinctly deliberately unsexy shot of Alesha Dixon in fishnets, could they? After all, these are artists which appeal directly to the supermarket demographic, where the crap is piled high and sold cheap. The Manics, who might have once been mainstream but have rather faded from their height and have followed up one of their most accessible albums with one which is the diametric opposite, are unlikely to sell by the bucketload, and so their record company and they will need every last sale. Hence they can be bossed about.

With the downfall of record shops, and the spectre of even the likes of HMV eventually falling victim to the internet, there is the danger that anything outside the vast selling stars starts to become completely ghettoised. Doubtless this will appeal to the genre nerds who already stop liking bands they formally idolised once they breakthrough, but it also threatens to greatly compromise what has always been great about music, as of everything else: the iconoclasts who genuinely do push things forward. Once, as alluded to in the song from JFPL, Jackie Collins Existential Question Time, the Sex Pistols were seen as so threatening that they were banned; it's surely a sad state of affairs that in 2009 an album cover which is simply a portrait is censored lest anyone be upset should they see it.

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Wednesday, May 13, 2009 

Scum-watch: They've only banned page 3!

Never let it be said that the Sun doesn't involve itself in high profile campaigns which are directed at resolving injustices that simply cannot be allowed to stand. Whether it's the right of residence for the Gurkhas, the "mothers in arms" or the right to string up paedo-pervs from the nearest lamp-post, the paper undoubtedly often provides a public service that should never be sneered at. In its latest showing of public spiritedness, it's demanding that the politically correct namby-pamby killjoys at the MoD lift the ban on page3.com.

Before we get completely carried away, it's not clear whether this is a specific ban on the lovelies, whether the MoD has suddenly blocked "adult" websites from those presumably using their servers, or whether page3.com has been added to the firewalled list. The quote from the MoD in the article, that "adult content has nothing to do with our core business of defence,” suggests that it's part of a general filter. In any event, it allows the Sun to launch a frivolous campaign, just as it has whenever page3 has been "banned" by other organisations in the past.

Do the soldiers themselves really care, though? One would assume that those out in the field don't have to rely on the likes of page 3 to get their jollies; the Americans especially are notorious for the large quantity of rather harder material distributed among the ranks on DVDs. In a completely unscientific attempt to see whether it's really rankling in the ranks, I decided to check ARRSE to see if they're getting steamed up about it. As far as I can tell, there doesn't seem to be any thread whatsoever discussing the banning of the likes of gorgeous pouting Keeley from Bromley, but there is this thread, titled "So, the Sun is pro-Forces eh?", which contains these choice posts:

The Sun, is pro "The Sun" end of.

The Sun's always said it's the forces paper - but truthfully they're only onside when it suits them. As someone else said, they're only interested in selling papers.
They've run enough stories panning various parts of the forces before now, always seems to get overlooked when they say something good...

Actually the Guardian is probably more pro forces and the people who serve in them than the Sun - who as someone pointed out is pro the Sun.

Underneath every pro forces story there is usually a "do you know the individual / unit call 0800...."
So people can phone in with their stories about people and units

It dosen't take long before the papers turn on anyone look at Goody two tears ago they were trying to drive her out of the country now the Sun are claiming she's a princess and single handedly save the lives of millions of women

The Sun are c unts.
I've read many an army stich up story over the years,my own regiment included. As previous posters have stated,they play on the public sentement of the time.
Ask the scousers how well the Sun sells in Liverpool.

Which gives something of an added piquancy to this from the Sun's leader column:

Obviously they’ve never been near a war zone. Servicemen on the front line have few comforts of home — including their favourite daily newspaper.

Which seems just as likely to be the Grauniad as it does the Sun.

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Tuesday, May 12, 2009 

The curse of Toynbee.

Even those of us who are sympathetic towards Polly Toynbee's politics have found her on-off relationship with Gordon Brown to be bordering on the strange. The stream of articles singing his praises, then condemning his failures, then giving him one more chance, then repeating the pattern have all the sophistication of pulling the petals off a flower while saying he loves me and he loves me not in turn. Finally, it seems that all bets are off: yesterday Toynbee called for Brown to be overthrown after the European elections. To be fair, her main argument for the defenstration of her past hero is sound: he has, as she says, made the poor poorer and the rich richer. This however was always to be expected when New Labour felt that it couldn't actively redistribute, or even use the word, such was the fear that the newspapers and Conservatives would cry class war (which they did regardless). Instead, it had to do what it wanted to below cover, using the tax credit system primarily, a fantastically inefficent and expensive way to do so when it could have just lifted the very poorest out of tax altogether and instituted a citizen's basic income, for instance.

Again, to be fair to Toynbee she made much the same argument, but that didn't stop her calling for the nosepegs in 2005, and supporting Brown even when it was apparent that he was unlikely to prove the change from Blairism which was required. How could he when he was the person who signed the cheques, and who indeed, some argue was ostensibly the prime minister when it came to much domestic policy, especially that interwined with the Treasury? She even admitted at one point that the SDP, the party she stood as a candidate for in 1983, was far to the left of the party she now allied herself with.

Like how the SDP was the wrong move at the wrong time, when the enemy was Thatcherism rather than the Bennites and the Militant Tendency, it's now also surely not the right time to get rid of Gordon. The time for doing that was last summer, when it would have given the successor a chance to bed in before the election, and also now we realise before the banks were to be bailed out. Even then it was difficult to believe that the replacement, whether it be David Miliband, Alan Johnson or someone else would be able to win a fourth term; now it seems just as plausible as Dr Death himself returning, winning the leadership and doing just that. Even if the polls continue in the way they're going, with both Labour and the Conservatives suffering as a result of the expenses debacle, the Tories are going to romp home, and David Cameron's performance today will have only increased the chances of that. Getting rid of Brown now will only damage Labour further, and while having one "unelected" (I loathe the implication that Brown is unelected; we vote for parties, with the individual standing for the party only being of significance in the constituency itself. Do we really want a completely presidential system?) prime minister might just about be OK, having two in one parliament is simply not going to wash. If Brown goes now, is the replacement, when he inevitably loses the next election, going to resign then as well? Better that the next year is spent limiting the damage, ensuring that there is a viable successor, as there isn't at the moment, and then making certain that the Conservatives face an actual opposition from the very beginning, as the Tories failed to provide during Labour's first term and more or less up to the Iraq war.

In any case, as Toynbee has now pronounced, it seems the opposite will most likely happen: expect a crushing Labour victory this time next year and Gordon Brown still being Labour leader and prime minister in ten years time.

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Monday, May 11, 2009 

The Nuremberg defence and democracy following it.

In The Thick of It, probably the closest television has come to getting close to the reality of being an MP since Yes Minister, the politicians are almost uniquely portrayed not as venal, corrupt or stupid, although Hugh Abbott is certainly close to being incompetent, but caught in-between the spin doctors, the media and the public at large, all of whom are shown in a far more negative light. From the outraged woman who wants to know what Abbott is going to do about how she has to clean up her own mother's piss, to those who leave insults on the Conservative MP's blog about his sexual predilection for cats, you can't help but feel sorry for the MPs who work incredibly long hours only to be abused by all and sundry around them.

Sadly for the few honourable members who have not made outlandish expenses claims, and there are indeed some who haven't, it's now going to be a long time before anyone feels sorry for the political class as a whole. If things seemed bad when the Telegraph first unleashed the leaked disc sold to them for around a six figure sum on Friday, on Monday night, with still more abuses to be revealed tomorrow and presumably over the coming days, it's the continuous drip drip which is now in danger of doing lasting, long standing damage not just to this parliament, but potentially to democracy itself for some time to come.

The last time parliament felt under siege like this was when there seemed to be "sleaze" stories concerning the last Conservative government emerging week by week. This went from the highly serious, concerning Neil Hamilton and Jonathan Aitken to the sex "scandals" which we have since rather stopped putting so much importance on. The difference was that these were almost uniquely affecting the Conservatives, and New Labour was doing its utmost to gain from them. No one is pretending now that any party has been more "pure" than the others, although it remains to be seen whether the Lib Dems and the nationalist parties (Sinn Fein apart) will have as many apparently on the take in their ranks as the two main parties seem to. The cliché used to be that it was the Conservatives caught with their trousers down, while with Labour it was money. Despite a recent Daily Mail story that suggested that the expenses would reveal affairs and that Labour whips were on suicide watch, such was the fear of what was to come among some on the backbenches, it now seems to be money, or rather claiming both for property and for the furniture to fill it that dazzles all.

If anything, some of the claims by the Conservative frontbench look worse than that of their Labour counterparts. Some are defending Michael Gove from the accusation that he was one of the politicians who "flipped" his second home, but claiming £7,000 for furniture still leaves a bad taste in the month when you consider that Gove has not just the one salary, but undoubtedly another if not others, continuing to write a column for the Times, serving on the board of the hilarious Standpoint magazine, often appearing on Newsnight Review and also writing the equally laughable Celsisus 7/7, which makes Melanie Phillips' Londonistan look like a paragon of research by comparison. Andrew Lansley, who appeared recently on Question Time and let everyone know that he earns £24,000 a year for 12 days' work serving as a corporate director on the board of a company, renovated a Tudor cottage on expenses, sold it, then switched his second home to a flat in London. Francis Maude, another man with lucrative secondary income, tried claiming mortgage interest.

Apart from John Prescott claiming for two toilet seats and panelling for the front of his house, Barbara Follett (another hardly impoverished individual considering she's married to the novelist Ken Follett) claiming £20,000 for security, Margaret Moran with her second home in Southampton, because without it she wouldn't be able to see her husband who works there, Hazel Blears seems to the Labour MP most deserving of having ordure thrown at her, with both Sunny and the Heresiarch outlining in detail exactly why. Not only did she "flip" her second home three times in one year, claim furniture for them and then apparently avoid paying capital gains tax when she sold one of the properties, earning herself a tidy £45,000 profit, but she is the most prominent individual who seems to find the whole scandal to be frivolous; it isn't her fault, it's the system, she intones, all the while beaming in the same crooked smile which never seems to leave her face. Even today's Guardian leader, having described Blears in such beaming terms just last Monday, suddenly finds that she perhaps isn't the "decent, well-motivated and genuine" person it thought she was. It is of course nice to find that those MPs whom we most love to loathe for their loyalty and lack of independence are not just lacking intellectually but also in the honesty stakes, but those who aren't guilty, such as the Ed Milibands, Alan Johnsons, Philip Dunnes and David Howarths will be dragged down with them.

Although the politicians themselves have been pointing towards them by means of creating a distraction, there is no doubt whatsoever that those most likely to benefit from parliament as a whole being dragged through the mire are the extremists, and the British National Party must be regarding the Telegraph stories as manna from heaven, coming so close to the European elections when they were already likely to do well. How can any party, not just Labour or the Conservatives, try and campaign on the actual issues while this is going on? True, most might just declare a plague on all their houses and not vote at all in what would already be a low turnout election, but the worry must now be that those seats which the BNP could potentially grasp are now theirs for the taking.

The one thing that is abundantly clear is that the politicians themselves can now no longer have any control over their own expenses or their salaries. That not a single one of the 47 MPs named so far by the Torygraph was willing to go on Newsnight to defend themselves was just not a display of cowardice, it was also that they know they simply can't blame a system and not apportion blame on themselves as well. The new regime will have to be overseen by a completely independent committee, otherwise faith in parliament might never return. The second home allowance has to be scrapped altogether, or at least far more heavily policed or regulated, as does the John Lewis list. Those earning £64,000 or more a year simply cannot expect the taxpayer to furnish their homes for them. The tax breaks also have to be ended.

One of the few boasts that could be made about our political system was that compared to some of our European neighbours, not to mention the banana republics and kleptocracies around the globe, ours was remarkably free of corruption, and when it comes to out and out buying of votes, or payments for policies, that still mostly holds true. No one could have predicted that it would be bath plugs and bags of manure which would bring politics into such disrepute, but now that it's happened the shovels have to be brought out. The worst culprits need to be held to account in some way, and as the only way might well be the ballot box itself, there's now even more reason than ever to vote tactically. Ensuring that the likes of Hazel Blears and Michael Gove are not MPs in around a year's time might well be the only way we can hope to restore parliament to even a shadow of its former standing.

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