Our three neo-con major political parties have come up with a jolly cunning plan to lift money direct from the taxpayer, in addtion to being paid by big business to promote the interests of big business against the people.
A government inquiry is recommending that £20 million a year in public funding be given to the three neo-con parties. Is there no end to their greed? I suppose the logic is perfect – it will finally cement into our political system the monopoly of power by parties that are arrogantly unrepresentative of the will of the people, knowing that their system, above all by control of the media, locks out any alternative from competing for political power.
I write with certainty that all our three political parties are now neo-conservative, but with great sadness. The Tories became fully neo-con around 1979, New Labour around 1996 and the Lib Dems around 2010. All the parties contain still a minority of resisters, the fewer the longer they have been neo-con. So Ken Clarke is an almost entirely isolated resister in the Tory party, Jeremy Corbyn one of very few left in New Labour, while the Lib Dems still have a few Norman Bakers who have not yet been entirely corrupted by power and money, but you can see the process working on the Lib Dems like acid and their integrity will have been completely eaten through in another 18 months.
Meanwhile, there are some who don’t get it, like poor deluded old bat Polly Toynbee, who still has not worked out that New Labour went neo-con. Yesterday’s Toynbee article has the headline: “Executive pay soars while the young poor face freefall. Where is Labour?” You are a fool, Toynbee. The ex-ministers of the last New Labour government are in the boardroom picking up those massive remunerations and perks you are rightly complaining about. Did you really not know that, or do you just refuse to see?
New Labour is now neo-con, Toynbee. It is fifteen years since Peter Mandelson said that “New Labour is intensely relaxed about the filty rich.” Mandelson and Blair and Hewitt and Jowell and Milburn and Burnham and Reid and Blunkett and the whole lot of them are now filthy rich. Somebody explain this to Toynbee.
But it is an extremely important point that I did not see a single mainstream politician yesterday questioning the obscenity of directors’ earnings rising over 49% last year – from a huge base – when average real incomes were falling. The media was packed with apologists explaining trickledown theory to us. I also noted that the Occupy movement needs to beware of the media appearing to give them coverage, when in fact the media are deliberately picking on people whose hearts, instincts and minds are all in the right place, but who lack media experience and formal education in the ground on which the media places them. The media can then give the impression of debate with the cards severely stacked, to make the view that in fact the large majority of those at home will hold, that executive salaries are obscene and untenable, appear amateur and ill-informed.
The parties do not represent us and their collective membership is falling, as they are now a vehicle for career rather than belief. No wonder they want to pick our pockets to keep up the pretence of democracy.
“Do you or do you not believe that the Blair/Brown project and/or the Clegg/Laws ascendancy constitute rightwing cabals? Yes or no?”
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mike cobley, wake up!!!, ALL the three main parties are neocon, all this “rightwing cabals” stuff is crap. They couldn`t exist without the oxygen supplied by the membership of the party.
I was a member of Labour Party, Then crossed to Liberal Democrat Party, bought the ticket, wore the tee-shirt, and saw the rotten to the core system close up. The right wing elements have subverted the system to the point of collapse, and only a handful suck up are left to come and lecture us all; there is mileage left in the decaying, corrupt, and dysfunctional political arrangements.
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The bastards whom control the horizontal, and the vertical, and every media outlet, as well as stuffing their hand-picked crooks and liars into “Parliament”, having failed to convince the majority. These are busy pushing the same nostrum, evidently as ye olde apothecaries would, in their application of leeches; if at first it did not work, then apply even more leeches. Hence the handful of suck-ups taking “human rights”, and consumer politics at best “brothers Milliband” (neo con, and not so neo con) issues, and other crap slogans, push the same line; Parliamentary Democracy, I should cocoa too.
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The key board brigade reflecting the “orders/wishes/self-interest” out in force shoving along the same lines (fellow tra…. the aged putrid labels, puke, barf, need a bigger bucket), and apparently expecting a different result, and response from the jaded 99%. This is patent manifestation of lunacy of the lunatics whom evidently are in charge of the system.
sorry M cobley. just can’t go along there with you.The problem is much mpre systemic. Every party and every senior person in every party adopts a position that conforms to some agenda that is not shared with the electorate. part of the ‘problem’ is that the parties are struggling to cope with the communication made possible by the internet. This convergance of ideology has been seen time and time again. It is becoming ever more unsupportable. Giving Clegg a hard half hour is not the answer, although it may feel good for a moment or two.
The answer is related to one of the the problems. i.e. Communication. The old model of representation is broken. shattered actually.
where togo from her e is not easy to figure out but you are whistling in the wind.
I followed the link to the Hilda Murrell site. I remember the speculation about the murder of course.
I then went to the (Guardian) report of the trial and it was based on the presence of DNA on the clothes of the victim.
The convicted person is reported as saying that it was his brother who killed Hilda Murrell, while both of them were involved in burgling her house.
Now I know it is possible that the Guardian shamelessly falsified the report of the court case, and that the police and jury were bribed, threatened, hoodwinked, or whatever by some masterly intelligence operation, and that the scientists doing the DNA tests were also hoodwinked/nobbled in some way, and that the convicted man was persuaded to concoct the story about his brother and him committing the burglary. He got fifteen years mainly due to his age at the time so not much of a plea bargain there. Is he available for coment? is there a widespread campaign for his release due to a miscarriage of justice?
The problem is that there is just such a mountain of things to do to concoct the conspiracy .It all becomes vanishingly unlikely all those threads can be spun together into a coherent story.
If I was some dastardly intelligence operative of the UK charged with killing some awkward elderly agitator living in a place which is quite private, would I want to take the risk of such a convoluted plot? No! I rather suspect it would be some other much simpler plot such as car accident i(f there was to be one at all). How afraid were these vested interests likely to be of a rather elderly private individual, no matter how able that person might be.
Someone such as Hilda, presenting a case to a whole lot of pre-converted sympathisers, about something already known to be associated with an extreme polarisation of opinion, was unlikely to suddenly develop such powers of communication that the controversy would swing decisively behind the idea of abandoning nuclear power in its entirety in the minds of the great majority of the UK population.Why kill her? Why not just get a specialist to write a rebuttal to her POV? Cheaper by far and much easier. As for the Belgrano being sun illegally. My guess is that a majority of the population at the time thought th Argies got what they deserved. I don’t agree with this attitude at all, but it is delusional to not recognise that the dominant attitude at the time was indifferent to the legality of the sinking.
We might also ask, why were other more prominent, more influential anti-nuclear commentators not murdered? Was Bruce Kent a target, did he survive by being corrupted or bought off?
I don’t think so.
I am not unsympathetic to some of the material I see here. Some of it is interesting and challenging and worthy and I am certainly sympathetic to the cynicism about the degradation of politics and its abject failure to answer some of the huge issues of the times , and yes, I see it as an opportunity for something better. The sense of the corruption of politics and the widespread adoption of worthless theories (by dishonest people who knew perfectly well they were worthless) and ideas which have been extremely damaging, and are being progressively discredited, is now quite widespread but in reality we are only at the start of a process of change and increased consciousness.
Attaching this legitimate, and almost obligatory, and rational discontent and challenge to power, with something so tenuous and
unlikely, discredits the general position of the blog and contributors
Someone such as Hilda, presenting a case to a whole lot of pre-converted sympathisers, about something already known to be associated with an extreme polarisation of opinion, was unlikely to suddenly develop such powers of communication that the controversy would swing decisively behind the idea of abandoning nuclear power in its entirety in the minds of the great majority of the UK population.Why kill her? Why not just get a specialist to write a rebuttal to her POV? Cheaper by far and much easier. As for the Belgrano being sun illegally. My guess is that a majority of the population at the time thought th Argies got what they deserved. I don’t agree with this attitude at all, but it is delusional to not recognise that the dominant attitude at the time was indifferent to the legality of the sinking.
We might also ask, why were other more prominent, more influential anti-nuclear commentators not murdered? Was Bruce Kent a target, did he survive by being corrupted or bought off?
I don’t think so.
‘mike cobley, wake up!!!, ALL the three main parties are neocon,’
Guest- that’s correct insofar as it refers to the upper echelons of the 3 main parties. And when Craig writes that the 3 parties have become vehicles for ‘career rather than belief’ that points us towards the reason why there is such neocon tinged unanimity at the top.The big guns look at the career paths followed by previous figures in leadership roles, see many of them joining the global overclass upon retirement, and ardently desire to follow in their footsteps.(Take Major- who jumped in 3 decades from the Chair of Lambeth’s Housing Committee to a top consultancy at the Carlyle Group, or Mandelson, who rose from a TV researcher to a mega paying gig at Lazards, also in around 30 years).Such blatant careerism also explains why not ‘a single mainstream politician yesterday’ commented on the report about directors pay, or took issue with Martin Sorrell’s breathtakingly arrogant assertion than £1.5 million a year represents ‘low basic pay’- why antagonise the club you yourself wish to join in a few years time ?
The leaderships of the major parties know they no longer have a large activist base that is happy come election time to trudge the streets stuffing envelopes thru doors. If they get their hands on the £20 million of public funding they are after they will probably do as the Post Office is now doing- employ temps, recruited from the legions of the unemployed & under employed, to do the donkey work hitherto carried out by willing party volunteers. In that scenario, the leaderships will be able to afford to take even less notice of the ‘grass roots’ than they take already.
@Komodo
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“A word at work or in the pub”
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A valid tactic. In any pub where there is conversation about politics there is often an unofficial guru – someone whose opinions are dominant, and tend to define the norm for that company. Convince him (it will be a ‘him’) and he will persuade many – he will normalise your radical view. There is usually more than one in the pub – you may have to move between tables. I call it ‘influencing the influencers’ and there are many other approaches to this which (sigh) don’t involve pubs. You can only talk to a few: subvert those who speak to many. Move between many tables.
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That aside, I’m not sure what you mean by ‘not organising’. Organised movements have succeeded in spite of infiltration (yes, I know they have failed because of infiltration too). And when you speak of ‘a consistent message’ doesn’t that argue organisation? Who is determining the content of this consistent message? Scottish separatism is organised: look at the opposition to it and consider its comical clumsiness. With their every utterance the unionists advance the cause they wish to frustrate. The British State is as terrified of organised resistance as Saki’s croquet players were of ‘the jaquerie’ – it’s a fear which (in the words of a Scottish song) ‘robs them o the wee bit sense they have’.
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Anyway, I don’t think the ‘organised’ and ‘non-violent terrorist’ approaches are mutually exclusive – do both. I’ll repeat again my idea that localisation of organising and campaigning works – vide licit the SNP. Start a Yorkshire Party, a Cornish Party – anything where you can argue practical local interest against an uncaring and uninterested centre. It’s hard to counter without the same insulting negativity as Scots see from the unionist parties – the opposition simply pours petrol on the flames, you get a positive feedback loop. It’s easier to drive a campaign on a local sense of grievance than on liberal intellectual angst.
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It’s easy to have more activists on the street than the neo-cons – their power is not people power and they have deliberately dissolved their membership base. You can make them pay for that. People power gives you the ‘body heat’ campaign – lots of energetic optimistic people knocking on doors. Hit by-elections, where startling results are always available to a charismatic candidate with a strong team, and can break into the voter’s depressive mindset that nothing can be changed. Hit local elections where the performance of councillors is in poor repute, again with strong candidates and a strong team.
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A ‘strong team’ needn’t be big in order to be better than what the neo-cons can field – a dozen, even less, can do for a council seat campaign. I can remember many years ago driving back from a count where we had overturned a large Labour majority. The radio news was attributing this to the local SNP group being large. We laughed and laughed – the entire team was in the car.
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A cynical understanding of how to get reported is also helpful. I knew one activist who often said apparently outrageous (but defensible) things. The only page we can get is the front page, he explained.
@ Vronsky
“In any pub where there is conversation about politics there is often an unofficial guru – someone whose opinions are dominant, and tend to define the norm for that company. Convince him (it will be a ‘him’) and he will persuade many – he will normalise your radical view.”
LOL – culture has moved on, could I suggest the X factor judges
“In any pub where there is conversation about politics there is often an unofficial guru – someone whose opinions are dominant, and tend to define the norm for that company. Convince him (it will be a ‘him’) and he will persuade many – he will normalise your radical view.”
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That is exactly how Hitler started off. Only they were called beer cellars and biergartens, then he moved onto the big beer halls and got onto the stage, there was no stopping him after that.
Deepgreenpuddock – I would agree that the main parties haven’t yet realised how ppowerful internet, or Twitter, communication can be – they ought to, they’ve seen what happened in the Arab Spring, but of course they’ve also seen how it can be negated – at least temporarily.
They won’t take that long to cotton on, I’m afraid. As has been commented above, it doesn’t take that many ‘watchers’ to keep an eye on any web/blogsite about which they (or their masters) may have suspicions. But what will also happen is that they will infiltrate and if possible subvert – look at the past for examples (the Cato Street conspiracy springs to mind, plus several trials of notable radicals during the French Revolutionary period and Napoleonic Wars.
The Qantas fat cats.
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http://m.smh.com.au/business/joyces-pay-soars-as-costs-mount-20111028-1moay.html
News just in: Occupy Newcastle have been attacked by the EDL. This is what happened to the students last December, while the police were batoning them from the front:
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2011/10/487677.html?c=on#c274923
Some good food for thought, Vronsky, OTOH, living in Scotland, I was persuaded to join the SNP, not by a media campaign, but by a friend. It may not have been in a pub. The major factor in the success of the SNP since the 90’s, before which it was fighting for electoral scraps with the Libs, has been down to three people: Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair – who created the ideal conditions for possibly the most able UK politician of his generation- Alec Salmond.
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Guest: Hitler became a very popular guy through his *democratic* appeal. Only later did the terror begin. I am not proposing terror.
@ Stephen:
If you watch “X factor”, you’re reading the wrong blog, mate. There’s probably something for you on the Sun’s site. The concepts are easier.
Very disturbing Technicolour but predictable.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-15512039
JohnGoss: I don’t think many people are predicting it, or even talking about it. It’s that old ‘oxygen of publicity’ quandary, perhaps.
Off post again. I’ve just discovered this link from yesterday’s South Wales Evening Post regarding the Malyshevs.
http://www.thisissouthwales.co.uk/Worries-asylum-seekers-sent-home/story-13697365-detail/story.html
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Technicolour I meant that this was predictable behaviour from the EDL not that it was easy to predict.
Thanks John. Relief that they are alive. Why did I assume that Mikhail and Nina were husband and wife and not mother and son?
Mary, I thought the same, that is, husband and wife.
It is still very worrying that the whereabouts of Nina and Mikhail Malyshev are unknown.
Whilst in UK the “Saleh/Banker supporters” (ala the Yemeni sponsored thugs) have been beating up the protesters in Newcastle, just for camping out in Gray’s Monument.
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The bastion of the upholders of “human rights” has sicked the paramilitary police onto the protesters in Denver US. To bash the “gay, idiots, ad hominem galore” as per descriptions of the shills and morons commenting on the BBC and state sponsored rubbish site sold as “redefining the media, (live leak).
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Freedom! Ducnhyou love the smell of it?
@ Ingo – sorry for having an opinion and I do apologise for thinking this was a place where free speech was welcome, not so “free” then, even on here? Because I do not conform to your way of thinking you feel able to tell me “not on here”. Tell me does Craig employ you as the thought police?
To say I am disappointed that someone can have your attitude on this site of all sites is an understatement. However, Ill leave you in your little corner of cyber space where you can spout lyrical and where no one must challenge your concept of things.
@ ingo – Sorry I forgot, you really need to re read your post and try and understand how arrogant and pompous you come across.
Gracie Samuels has been drinking too much of the Miliband elixir.
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http://cameron-cloggysmoralcompass.blogspot.com/
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As if anyone in their right mind would ever vote Liabour again. Think of the Blair and Brown war mongering and war crimes and the extension of privatisation of the NHS under the execrable Milburn. A plague on all the political parties’ houses as far as I am concerned. All neo liberals to the core.
Gracie
The New Labour machine just lost a couple of wheels by forgetting the rights of citizens in countries other than our own. Why did Blair not use the fact that Saddam, who was supported by the UK, had killed millions of his own citizens instead of inventing rubbish and hounding the whistleblowers out of the BBC, as an excuse for war? Why did it end up looking as though New Labour ministers were on a commercial gravy train to line their own pockets, ready to slip into a job at the MOD as soon as possible?
New Labour has entirely itself to blame for not getting a grip on its own leadership. Freedom of speech is allowed on this blog, but it works two ways. give and take.The failures of New Labour to address the concerns of the people has left us with these Tory prats. New Labour have to take responsibility for Blair’s crimes. If they can’t do that, they have to keep out of the kitchen until the rage of the electorate dies down a bit.
Anno My rage against Bliar and Brown will never die down.
Mary
New Labour electing the son of an Israeli terrorist as leader at least shows where they are coming from. The electorate have decided that for the time being Cameron is best. Cameron’s job is to get the bill paid for New Labour’s state terrorism as only city people can. It is a cycle of ethnic cleansing and money-laundering. The problem being understanding that they are two sides of the same coin. Mrs T. initiated the financial de-regulations which enabled the de-stabilisation of Muslim countries. Now Cameron is squaring the accounts so that nice Ed Miliband and his brother can start the next round.
you mischaracterise Polly T, and denigrate her for having a belief that she probably doesn’t have. She is talking about Labour as it used to be, pre-Blair, and recognises it as an ideal, some way from its current incarnation. Her book about poverty is detailed and well researched. You may scoff at anybody imagining Labour could return to its roots, but Alex Salmond is doing very well in Scotland on a platform remarkable similar to an old Labour one. Pour scorn on all the major parties by all means, all of which as you say, have bought into neo-liberalism. i do like the Greens, though.