Zimbabwean election monitors could oversee the next British general election:
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS – The Pan-African Parliament is in talks with the EU on sending monitors to the European elections in June, in a project that could see Zimbabwean politicians oversee voting in the UK.
Seems oddly appropriate somehow.
Why does Ray Collins, General Secretary of the Labour Party, own, on behalf of the Labour Party, the domain names
davidcameronseconomicpolicy.com
and
davidcameronseconomicpolicy.co.uk?
For negative campaigning, duh. As I’ve said before, New Labour’s studied Karl Rove’s methods very closely. But not quite closely enough.
Like pushpolling and fake leaflets a classic Rovian ploy is to buy up all your opponents’ potential domain names and park them, with page of misleading information – or just plain lies, it doesn’t matter, by the time they get it taken down the campaign’ll be over – about your opponent put up as a placeholder. A lie’s halfway around the world before the truth’s got its boots on, has always been the Rovian motto.
He may have studied Rove’s methods and he may be equally porcine, but Charlie Whelan‘s no Rove and he missed something vital that Rove never did.
Deniability.
Rove knew to hide GOP dirty domain-name tricks behind interlocking puzzles of holding companies and consultants – his hands were never actually seento be dirty. Unlike Labour, which registered smear domains in plain sight for any idiot blogger to do a lookup on, and put its name and address at the bottom of the pages too.
No doubt No 10 spins such stupidity as ‘transparency’.
The Republicans also had an army of flying butt monkeys, insane wingnut commenters, who spammed and trolled opposition blogs and launched DOS attacks against anyone posing a threat online. Again deniability; all were independent commenters, see, no connection to any party, no sir. What email lists and talking points?
Labour doesn’t have anything approaching an army of even pedestrian buttmonkeys; at most it has a few spotty, ambitious youths with Blackberries and a handful of loyal, ageing party apparatchiks with lots of time on their hands trolling the Guardian’s comment section. Labour MPs do look as though they eat plenty of Cheetos though, and most do appear to live in Mom’s basement or at least claim a second home allowance for it.
They failed at blogs and Labour’s efforts at online dirty tricks are an epic fail too. If you want to see quite how epic take a look at their spin doctor scripted, Cameron/Osborne ‘livechat’. They’re just incompetent at everything, even at being evil.
Didn’t I say a couple of years back that a depression’s only official when the middle classes start complaining about benefit rates? Job Seekers Allowance is currently just over a measly sixty quid a week and even Guardian journos are struggling.
A commenter wryly commiserated:
23 Mar 09, 11:45am (about 19 hours ago)
I am unemployed. It is impossible to live on £60 a week. Luckily I discovered that I was able to claim £14,000 a year for the house my parents live in. I use it for job seeking and have made over £60,000 .
Neighbours call me a benefits cheat and point out that a couple were recently given a 6 month jail sentence for a £40,000 fraud. I call them a bunch of jealous peasants.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/mar/23/tony-mcnulty-allowances.
Heh.
The brass-necked, greedy dishonesty and sheer hard-faced gall of Employment Minister Tony McNulty, who’s been highly visible in the Guardian’s pages and elsewhere demonising non-existent cheats and scroungers with his hateful ‘no ifs or buts’ anti benefit fraud campaign, beggars belief. Talk about rubbing the faces of the 2 million unemployed in it.
Understandably it’s been front-page news all over the UK and a hot topic on blogs of all political flavours; corruption’s corruption after all, however inured we’ve become to it since the advent of New Labour.
But not at the Guardian, though being a supposedly leftwing paper you’d think they’d find the irony delicious. But while the tabloids and broadsheets scream condemnation the Guardian’s appeared oddly muted on McNulty and strangely quiet on the corruption and greed of the Labour establishment in general. I’m amazed that comment got through CiF’s notoriously harsh moderation.
Another irony the Guardian seems to have missed in light of the up to 150 journalists and others the Guardian Media Group (Editor Alan Rusbridger, salary £355,000 pa including 17,000 benefits) is itself about to make redundant on sixty pounds a week (£3,120 pa)is that it should then publish a comment decrying the low benefit rates that it is itself condemning its own employees to. Talk about rubbing the faces of the unemployed in it.
Comment is Free‘s a very popular Guardian section that appears to rely mostly on insecure freelancers, cheap recent graduates and user generated comments for content and must already be – compared to a fully staffed print newspaper – cheap to run.
It would be interesting to know, therefore, exactly how many Guardian journalists and CiF columnists already rely on the benefits system to feed their families and underpin their struggling and insecure writing careers – and conversely (how like so many other British companies) how many and which newspapers offering low-paid parttime or freelance employment rely on state benefits to underpin their business models. Without Tax Credit support for freelancers how many newspapers would fail entirely, I wonder?
I see now why the Guardian, wants unemployment benefit rates to rise. It’s potentially vital to it’s new shiny 24/7 online business model.
Tell me again, who’re the welfare scroungers exactly? No wonder the Guardian has such a discreet empathy with McNulty.
Oh, so that’s why my bank charges are so high…
…it is still a matter of pride that, in Britain, one is never required to discuss one’s political beliefs. Unless, that is, you want to do a certain type of business with the state-controlled Royal Bank of Scotland.
Damn it, there it was a lovely clear blue morning and the warm spring day spread out before me. Then I read this by Fraser Nash in the Spectator,and the grey blanket of clouds over Noord-Holland redescended.
It’s bad enough for some of us RBS customers, what with the trillion pound RBS Labour-licensed theft from the taxpayers and sterling’s virtual parity (93p today)with the euro, which is affecting anyone on a fixed income who lives abroad pretty drastically.
Now it appears that the great clunking fist is using his shares in the bank to meddle politically in people’s intimate financial affairs – and he, via RBS, may also be giving enhanced bank services to his political friends and fellow travellers.
Geoff Robbins, a Cheshire-based computer consultant, recently approached RBS to ask for a credit-card processing facility for his business. After the usual bankers’ inquisition, he was asked a question that knocked him for six: did he have any political affiliation? Did he know any MPs, councillors or mayors? It was a new question, the lady explained to him, which had been introduced soon after the government took control of RBS. She said, in his paraphrase, that ‘political influences may be used for corrupt purposes’.
Might’n’t they just.
NB: this is the Spectator and Nelson so consider the source. But I’m inclined to believe every word; as Nelson himself says:
When I first heard Mr Robbins’s story, it seemed hard to believe. But the more I considered the context of this government’s apparently irrepressible desire to pry into every aspect of out lives, the more it had the awful ring of truth. I decided to investigate further and called RBS, who issued an outright denial. ‘We would never ask such a question, nor would we dream of doing so,’ said its spokeswoman. So Mr Robbins had concocted his story? Unconvinced, I called RBS Streamline, posing as an employee for my mother-in-law’s (real) company and asking for the same service.
Sure enough, the chilling question came at the end: ‘Is she a member of any political party?’ I asked why this was relevant. ‘I presume we ask because there is a high volume of fraud in that sector. Because people who are of that sort of [party political] nature, maybe, are inclined to commit fraud.’ The question, I was told, is ‘thrust upon us by the Financial Services Authority’. The FSA says this is untrue. Banks can check clients’ backgrounds, but no one is required to talk politics.
That the bank is being so open about its political intimidation is what’ss truly scary; it’s yet another in-your-face move by Labour to douse potential opposition and is all of a piece with ACPO’s shrill warning of a ‘summer of rage’ and recent clampdowns on peaceful protest.
But what can you do? Unfortunately I’m in the same invidious position as so many other RBS customers: disgusted and scared but unable to move because we need banking services. Try changing banks in the current financial climate, particularly if your income is low or fixed and your credit history not all it might be.
The personal is indeed political, but expressing political disgust? Not affordable.
:
After so many crushing blows, so much self-immolation and such blatant, unbridled corruption you’d think that surely by now it has to be all over for New Labour.
But the battered and bloodied corpses of the cabinet just keep twitching. Nothing seems to kill them off. What’ll it take? Do we have to get out the flamethrowers?
The latest news from Guido Fawkes, who did the digging, is that the party’s spin doctor, epitome of arrogance and ‘psychotherapist’ , and now blogger Derek Draper (he’s author of New Labour’s pisspoor attempt at copying Kos or Obama’s netroots campaign, LabourList) is an unprincipled quack who may well have lied by omisssion about his credentials, pretending to have received a U.Berkeley MA when he actually got it part-time from a weekend school
How does that song* go?
Aneurin Bevan,
Your Party is dead
And the time for a new one is nye.
Would the last person left
Please turn out the light
New Labour, just fuck-off and die.
*Chorus of ‘Guy Fawkes’ Table’, by Atilla The Stockbroker
from his LPBarnstormer on Eastside Records
UPDATE
Draper replies on his personal blog to Guido’s allegations :
To clarify this I attended the Doctoral programme at the Wright Institute that lasts, on average, five to six years. Within that programme students qualifying receive an M.A. at the end of the third year. At that point I had completed a training that was very intense compared to UK psychotherapy trainings, and had undertaken many hundreds of supervised clinical hours, so returned to the UK to set up my practice. I always describe myself as a psychotherapist, have never claimed to be a clinical psychologist, although my degree is, in fact, an M.A. in Clinical Psychology.
[…]
However, it now seems clear that this episode was a clumsy attempt to smear me, concocted by Guido Fawkes and fed by him to David Hencke at the Guardian. A journalist I have hitherto always admired and respected. I think he was led astray by Guido Fawkes and made a genuine mistake. I did, however, as the Independent reports today, give him a bit of a rollocking when I saw him yesterday.
To recap: I have never said to anyone or written anywhere that I attended U.C. (University of California) Berkeley. The fact that Hencke himself wrote a “fact box” stating I had, which I never saw, was his mistake not mine. I attended the Wright Institute, a well respected graduate school for clinical psychology where after 3 years of full time study, I received an M.A. in Clinical Psychology. I have always said I studied in Berkeley not at Berkele
Guido in his turn claims more evidence of Draper’s mendacity is forthcoming.
This one will run and run: too many people loathe Draper to let it go. He is New Labour in a nutshell and his current trials are giving anyone who loathes them and him a great deal of justified satisfaction.
