New Labour

Everybody needs a bosom for a pillow

New Labour, UK elections
Published on

Openess, New Labour style: a Times reporter “stalks” Gloria de Piero not to talk about her massive norks, but what she could actually do for her chosen constituency, but isn’t recieve gratefully:

“What on earth are you doing here?” she asks. I tell her I thought I’d come and see how things were going. “But I don’t understand why you’re here,” she says again. “We’re only doing regional press. We can’t do an interview. We’ve been through this.”

I know. I don’t want an interview. I just want to see how the campaign is going.

[…]

When I say that not only is it actually happening, but also that it is actually happening to candidates all across the country and that she should probably be able to handle this, not only as a potential MP but also as a former political journalist, she rounds on me and says: “I’ve had requests from every national newspaper. Observer, Guardian, Mail. No, no, no. You’ve all submitted your requests and we’ve been through the process and we’re not doing anything . . .”

The obsession of the British media with del Piero’s breats is obnoxious enough, but what’s worse is to realise that this sort of misguided attention is exactly what politicians want. Far better to fight a battle on the question of whether or not having done allegedly softcore naughty pictures at age fifteen makes you an unsuitable candidate than whether or not your politics are any good…

Hoon, Hewitt and Byers walk into parliament…

Corruption, New Labour, Sleaze
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Oi, you’re barred says the bartender chief whip:

Three former cabinet ministers have been suspended from the Parliamentary Labour Party over claims they were prepared to influence policy for cash.

Stephen Byers, Patricia Hewitt and Geoff Hoon were secretly filmed as part of an investigation by the Sunday Times and Channel 4’s Dispatches.

[…]

Mr Byers, a former transport secretary, was filmed saying he was like a “cab for hire” who would work for up to £5,000 a day and claimed to have saved millions of pounds for National Express, which wanted to get out of its East Coast mainline franchise.

[…]

Former Defence Secretary Mr Hoon was filmed saying he wanted to make use of his international knowledge and contacts in a way that “makes money”. He said he charged £3,000 a day.

[…]

Ms Hewitt, a former health secretary, said she “completely rejected” the suggestion she helped obtain a key seat on a government advisory group for a client paying her £3,000 a day.

BBC political editor Nick Robinson said the three former ministers were not popular among Gordon Brown’s team – not least because Mr Hoon and Ms Hewitt had tried to lead a coup against his leadership in January.

Schadenfreude all around and it’s extremely funny to hear Mandelson call somebody else “altogether rather grubby”. But that’s the difference between these three and Mandy: they’re small time losers grubbing for change, he, like Blair, goes for the big money, where influence peddling is no longer dirty, but expected. You get yourself appointed to boards of directors rather than attempt to freelance — it’s the difference between being a call girl and a street hooker.

p.c. babble, or the only honest man in this is Gaddafi

Bloody Lawyers, Gordon Brown, New Labour, UK politics
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So then Megrahi was freed, went home to Libya and got a heroes welcome, in the process providing us with yet another opportunity to witness how much political news is route, ritualised scripts. Was anybody surprised that the White House condemned the release? That the then director of the FBI as well as the American leader of the Lockerbie investigation were not best pleased? And of course the family and friends of those who died in the bombing are angry and upset, though interestingly there seems to be somewhat of a mid-Atlantic split in their attitudes, with the British survivors being more inclined to be merciful, if only because they’re more sceptical about Megrahi’s guilt. For the Americans this was all a bit of a bombshell of course, having missed much of the buildup towards the release and only hearing about it days or even hours beforehand.

All these responses could’ve been taken as read, none of them was “news” in any real sense of the word, but they still ate up hours of news time. As did the protests coming from Westminster about the way the Libyans treated Megrahi –did Gordon Brown really think either Gadaffi or the Libyan people believe in Megrahi’s guilt? Might as well expect the pilots involved in the 1986 US terror bombing of Tripoli to be made honorary citizens….

More interesting, the even more indignant and outraged squeels following Gadaffi’s thanks to Brown and the queen. Dropped Brown right in it, he did. Everybody knew or suspected that Megrahi’s freedom had been prepared from Westminster as much as Edinburgh, for example by having signed a prisoner exchange treaty with Libya a while back, that all the diplomatic spadework had been done from London,, but nobody mentioned it until Gadaffi. What a world we live in when it’s the “madman dictator” who tells the truth rather than the “democratically elected statesman”.

Because the truth is that Megrahi was just one concession given to Gadaffi for being a good boy and that all attempts to leave all responsibility soley to the Scots are just toytown Machiavellianism. Sure, the SNP is in the doghouse at the moment, but this will inevitably boomerang back to Westminster.

Meanwhile, why is it so hard to understand that Scotland has no control over the Libyan reception of Megrahi, that the Scottish justice system has no obligation to take into account the feelings of the US government on this matter, that the Libyans do not believe in Megrahi’s guilt, or that the feelings of his victims do not have or should have anything to do with granting his appeal for compassion?

Nero fiddles

New Labour, UK politics
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Penny Red went to the launch of the Demos’ Open Left project:

Purnell believes that left ideology necessitates ‘choice in public services’, which is a tad rich coming from the man who single-handedly purged the welfare state of its last remaining shreds of compassion earlier this year with his intricate schemes for lie detector tests, workfare-style sickpay deals and a punitive scheme for addicts and alcoholics. Will Hutton, fashionably late as always, talked a great deal about the language of fairness and ‘just deserts’. The tone of the debate was consistently philosophical, which is absolutely fine when debate is also inclusive – but the elephant in the room was its narrow field of vision.

Purnell opened his talk by declaring that he had been refreshed, since leaving the cabinet, by the expansive vision and energy in the wide, wide political world of….thinktanks! I listened for the sniggers, but there weren’t any. And looking around I saw why: in a roomful of 100 people meant to be talking about the future of the left, there were precisely no activists and nobody who looked like they’d ever spent time on state benefits. There were, however, plenty of Guardian journalists, a lot of folks from Demos and the Fabian Society and five – five! – people I personally knew from Oxford university. So where were the have-nots in the debate? Surely it was their conversation to have as much as anyone else?

Sounds to me the future of the left could’ve been much improved by a well-timed bomb here… Demos should’ve been honest and called this the “oh shit we’re losing the next elections, bang go our cushy jobs, quick, we need to justify our existence again” project. A whole cohort of New Labour hanger-ons and coattail riders is going to be thrown out of work when the Tories get into power — the smart ones have already hitched their cart to Cameron — and they’re panicking. These are not people used to work for a living.

Condom credit cards!?

Health, New Labour
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One NHS doctor’s opinion on Labour’s latest badly thoughtout health proposal:

Don’t get me wrong. I am strongly in favour of providing any young person of any age with free contraception. But why do we not just give them the condoms? Why must they first have a “condom credit card”? Probably because, in the finest New Labour tradition, the card will have a magnetic strip on the back so that details of who each condom was issued to, and when, and where, can to be sent Andy Burnham.

And then social services can be informed to take a closer look at what’s clearly a problem family, to intervene “at an early stage”.