Foreign Policy Debate chat #15
Europe – Clegg better than Cameron, Brown very good. Both take on Europhobia head on, brave.
Europe – Clegg better than Cameron, Brown very good. Both take on Europhobia head on, brave.
Sky typically start with anti-EU question. Cameron “bring powers back from Europe.” He hasn’t ever voted against any of the treaties.
Nick Clegg – fantastic start. No complicity in torture. No war in Iraq. Legality and human rights. Sounds like me.
Cameron staring manically into camera, going for world fast-blinking record
Gordon – Brave troops, terrorism blah blah resolute.
International affairs – oo err missus, that’s Nick’s strong point
Leaders are in a building paid for with profits of slavery. Very appropriate.
Haward’s foreign policy suggestion. Deport all BNP supporters to the Falklands, replace them with hard working immigrants.
Advert for transit on now. Tribute to Brown? Sic transit gloria mundi.
They could put a nuclear weapon on that police rubber dinghy. That would be a cheaper option.
ludicrous police patrolmen searching for Islamic frogmen in shot now. Maybe Buster Crabbe is about to make a comeback.
random political party people with very large noses now, and too much makeup foundation. Who they?
Fat vicious Australian bigot talking now about how good Cameron is
7.42 Alistair Campbell giving us his “Gordon will win” spin. Unemployed war criminal predicts…
Cameron says we need Trident to nuke benefit scroungers, immigrants and the Chinese. Sorry, practising liveblogging.
For an irreverent liveblog of the great SkyNews foreign policy debate, from a man who has forgotten more about foreign policy than they will ever know, I will be liveblogging here with my mate Haward.
Opening observation. The bookies including SkyBet, PaddyPower and Ladbrokes, are offering odds on words which will be used. Here are some of the odds from Ladbrokes:
Trident 1/20
Obama 1/5
Helicopters 1/5
Hung Parliament 1/4
Volcanic Ash 4/7
Ahmadinejad evens
Chilcot 5/4
http://sports.ladbrokes.com/en-gb/Politics-c110000037
There are dozens of these keywords you can bet on between the various bookies. Nowhere in the betting is the word “Palestine” being even considered. Says it all, really.
There are few recent protest songs that you would listen to for the sheer musical pleasure of it. But here is one from bluesman Mike Whellans – and that’s the great piper Mike Katz on guitar.
For more of both Mikes:
As the Tories get more shrill and more desperate, they veer wildly between nasty and deluded.
The worst of all the poll news for them was this poll of marginal seats from Ipsos Mori. In 57 marginal New Labour constituencies which the Tories have to take to get a majority, voting intention is New Labour 36, Conservative 32 and Lib Dem 23.
Tory support is down 6, New Labour support down 5 and Lib Dem support up 12.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKTRE63L1OM20100422?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=0&sp=true
Remember, this is a poll only of New Lab held marginals – so the New Lab lead is not a sign of general trend. Lib Dem vote is lowest in New Lab/Tory marginals, so for them to be at 23% in this poll is remarkable.
But these are seats which Tories must win to be in government. Not only are they not winning, they are falling further behind. Especially galling for them, when these are precisely the seats in which under their national strategy, Lord Ashcroft’s millions of campaign funds have been concentrated.
Now we come to the sensational delusion. Ladies and gentleman, I give you Toby Young, complete deluded arsehole. His spin on this poll, in which the Tory vote is down 6 per cent in a week?
“Reuters/Ipsos MORI marginals poll: Conservative Party support remains firm”
Young’s brilliant argument to support this – there are still the same number of Tory voters, it is just that a lot more people are now going to vote for other parties.
Toby Young. What a wanker.
I hope that I have been able to tell people quite a lot of truth about the deeply unpleasant workings of government. It cheers me up a lot when I stumble across something like this, part of a reader’s review of Andrew Rawnsley’s hagiography of the Blairites, Servants of the People:
This book is fairly authoritative. The reader is fairly convinced that he is getting an accurate picture. It is of course only one view. If you compare Rawnsley’s account of the Arms for Africa affair with that of high-ranking civil servant Craig Murray in his ‘The Catholic Orangemen of Togo’, you see how a ‘Blair rides to the rescue’ story conceals another narrative of corruption and mass-murder in Africa with Britain unwilling to look under the headlines and uncaring about the consequences as long as they get their boys out of the swamp.
http://www.books2read.co.uk/blog/general/servants-of-the-people-the-inside-story-of-new-labour/
As unemployment hits 2.5 million, the Tories are blaming the unemployed on benefit for our economic woes, rather than the bankers at Goldman Sachs who have an average salary of £520,000 per year. The Tories are going back to their nastiest base instincts to try to pull off an election win.
The sad thing, of course, is that you could replace Cameron in that photo with James Purnell, Hazell Blears or Tessa Jowell without having to change the slogan.
The benefit system already is onerous and humiliating to those who want to work and feel, wrongly, ashamed to be unemployed. Many entitled and unemployed, normally hard working, people drop out of benefits, and into terrible trouble, because of the routine degradation heaped on them by the New Labour “New Deal” system, which Cameron seeks to reinforce.
Strangely the brass-necked benefit cheats, who do exist, are the ones who are not discouraged by the endless appointments, interrogations and form filling and continue to thrive on the counter-productive system.
But if anyone doubts the real nastiness of the Tories, or that the Lib Dems are seen as a real threat to the established order by the corporate media and their paymasters, should look at the absolutely vicious anti-Clegg headlines on the front pages of every single Tory newspaper today. I have not seen anything like this concerted a Tory media campaign since the Falklands War. The only parallel at election time was the vilification of Kinnock, but even that did not have every other front page vying with the Sun in extremity.
http://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2010/04/22/tabloids-cover-lib-dems-sensation/
The Mail’s Clegg Nazi front page headline wins first prize for tenedentiousness, The Telegraph “expenses scandal” is not about taxpayers’ money but private and declared donations (and has been saved up for nine months for this moment), the Financial Times warns the City won’t accept anything but a clear Tory win, the Sun is apoplectic at the idea that for once Murdoch may not be able to nominate his Prime Minister, and the Daily Express warns that Clegg will flood the country with black people.
The Tories are truly vicious when rattled. This has become a campaign about who democracy is for – the people or the press barons. Anybody who opposes corporate and City power and its ownership of democracy through the mass media, needs now to fall in line behind the Liberal Democrats to resist this.
UPDATE
I take my hat off to Iain Dale for his excellent article on the subject.
http://iaindale.blogspot.com/2010/04/these-shameful-attacks-on-clegg-will.html
I attack Iain from time to time because it is part of the blogosphere game; but I have always had a high opinion of him. He seems to have wandered into the wrong political party by mistake – if you look at the typical Tory commenter on the political betting first link above, Iain has nothing in common with these vicious people.