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.

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”

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tobyyoung/100035907/reutersipsos-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.

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.