New Labour

Eating ‘Umble Pie

Civil liberties, Crisis? What Crisis?, Gordon Brown, Internet, IT is not magic pixie dust, liberalism, Manufacturing consent, New Labour, Socialism, UK elections, UK politics
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uriahheep

Pity Labour’s decent left, poor loves; reduced as a result of Smeargate into trying to Uriah Heep themselves into another glorious 12 years of Labour rule. Frank Field MP:

Darkness at the Heart of the Labour Party

Harold Wilson asserted that the Labour party was a moral crusade or it was nothing. The McBride affair has left Labour members looking at nothing. That is the reality check that McBride has wrought on the party.Labour supporters are left bewildered and wondering what happened to the moral crusading side of our mission.

Poor old Labour party.

So very very ‘umble.

Nothing’s illustrated New Labour’s complete lack of clue about the wired world – and their own legislation – more than the way they still think they can hide things they’ve done online.

But Gordon Brown and his new media minister/guru Tom Watson are learning fast that things a politician or his aide might have done online (or ordered to have done), no matter how anonymous or pseudonymous it was at the time, can come back to bite said politician in the ass:

A bogus applicant using the name “Ollie Cromwell” paid £8.99 to set up The Red Rag as a campaign blog. The buyer had to provide only a name, address, telephone number and e-mail to create the site on November 4 last year. The address given was the House of Commons, The Times has been told. The site was registered for two years, ensuring that it would be in place throughout the general election campaign, which must be called by June next year.?

I’d laugh if it wasn’t so fucking tragic: a discredited PM and a corrupt cabinet are teetering on the edge of implosion, not because of one of the any number of other, more substantive offences they might’ve been convicted for, but for internet cluelessness.

Meanwhile the traditional political media are off with the fairies, self-obsessing (as is their wont) about the way Smeargate illustrates their own imminent demise -“Why wasn’t I in the loop? Why was I scooped by a blog? Oh shit, will I have a job tomorrow? I’d better get a blog…” – rather than using their leverage as the fourth estate to help oust a dangerously incompetent and deceitful government that those of all political persuasions loathe.

No help there then.

And public trust in government, the police and in civic life in general continues to erode almost to invisibility. The authorities are scared shitless of public anger.

Declaring a Civil Contingency event looms. But hey, that’s just civic society falling apart as a result of Chicago School economic policies, as filtered through Brownian endogenous bloody growth theory. Brutality’s a feature not a bug.

Pity the decent left. They’re in a terrible fix – wanting nothing more than to get rid of this shower of incompetents, not least for their own political ambition, but reluctant to let go of a jot or a tittle of power despite recognising their party’s government is a shambles. They surely must recognise that they’re first up against the wall when it all goes to shit. After all, they’re party members too, they enabled these people. But no, they still think they can recover a shred of credibility, hence the mass outbreak of humility this morning.

We see and hear a trio of Blairites making ‘I are serious elder statesman’ expressions at the media and condemning this dreadful, shocking behaviour in outraged and unimpeachably moral chapel elder tones. Frank Field’s spreading oleaginous humility – it’s the best butter- on his blog just to pound home the point that it wasn’t us, guv, it was those nasty Brownites, and Alex Hilton written a condemnation cum mea culpa for The Scotsman:

Politics is the means by which a country is run and good politics means a country is run well.

But politics is also the name of a silly game played by silly boys in the Westminster bubble.

It’s a fun game, I fully admit, and sometimes it just has to be played. But when playing a game is your ambition and your daily motivation, it’s time to grow up.

Mr McBride and Mr Draper suffered from being in the Westminster bubble where all they saw was the game; where a lie here or a smear there are just bishops and rooks on a chessboard.

Somehow they had lost sight of that other politics – that which is concerned only with delivering a secure, fulfilling and sustainable society for its citizens.

Pass me the sick bag, mother.

I know many Labour figures who shun these silly games. There are many more who, like me, enjoy playing a game from time to time but who don’t let it get in the way of more noble, long-term objectives. But this week, until this embarrassment dies down, every single one of us will look like a duplicitous, power-mad fool.

If Labour party members are still able to believe that despite everything they’ve done, every illegal war, every torture, every police murder, every fake enquiry, that Labour has any right or mandate to govern Britain, the ‘decent left’ are duplicitous power mad fools.

No matter how bloody ‘umble.

How Is A Prime Minister Like A River In Brazil?

bigotry, Blogs, creative direct action, Internet, IT is not magic pixie dust, Life under Capitalism, New Labour, Sexuality
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Gordon's Amazon wishlist
Gordon's Amazon wishlist

Both are up shit creek for a start.

Global online retail giant Amazon, now embroiled in its own internet related scandal – the #amazonfail list is now at 1,582 books and other products, and rising – has much in common with New Labour.

Both are omni-bloody-present, both collect huge amounts of info about us and our habits; both believe that a] they alone control the internets and b]computers are only a powerful when they use them. Both suffer from megalomania, control freakery and a refusal to accept they could ever have done anything wrong, or even just immoral – even when it’s quite clear that they have.

Zoe Margolis:

According to one author, Amazon stated a few days ago that it was now its “policy” to exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and bestseller lists, but his book had no “adult” material in it. It seems that books written by lesbian or gay authors, or with lesbian or gay themes, were being classed as “adult”, actively removed from searches, and de-ranked, alongside the books featuring erotic content.

Now both Amazon and Gordon Brown are deep in the proverbial, one for censoring a website, the other for planning one and then continuing to pretend he knew nothing, despite persuasive evidence that he must have:

“This is a den within Westminster. We’re talking about a house in Downing Street, with an office and in that office sits Gordon Brown, Damian McBride and Tom Watson.

“We are talking about three people in this marriage at the heart of this scandal.”

Corporations like Amazon tend to think a computer’s a powerful political tool, but only when they use it. Amazon’s wrong:

Barely an hour after the amazonfail tag first appeared, it was being mentioned four times a second on Twitter search – thousands of people were talking about it; but none of the tweets were positive. Calls for Amazon to be “googlebombed” were acted upon and people were commenting on the politics of “cyberactivism” – contributing to lists of the books that had been affected – and calling for a boycott of the site. Amazon, it appeared, had started to dig its own grave.

New Labour’s wrong too. Daniel Hannan:

A blog has just done something that I thought no one could do: elicited an apology (or as close as we’ll ever get to an apology) from Gordon Brown. Indeed, according to The Guardian, the McBride-Draper scandal might cost Labour the next election. If so, Guido Fawkes would have succeeded where his baleful namesake failed 404 years ago: he would have brought down a government. Even if you think the Guardian story is a bit de trop, the idea that one man with a laptop could do so much damage would, until very recently, have seemed risible.

Both are now desperately trying to spin paddle their way out of the river of cack that attitude’s got them into.

Good luck with that, Amazon and Brown: there’s millions of us, but only one each of you.

It’s Out There

Crisis? What Crisis?, Economy, Gordon Brown, Manufacturing consent, New Labour, UK elections, UK politics
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truth-lies

I’ve had a think about the No 10 email smear affair, aka Emailgate, since yesterday’s post. What I must remember not to forget as I get carried away with loathing Labour is what really matters is that the scurrilous gossip about the Tories and their family members is out there now. Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, it’s in the public domain.

Wasn’t that worth the loss of a special adviser who’s undoubtedly still on the PM’s contact list and who’ll surely find a comfy job in a convenient thinktank right up the street anyway?

Job done thinks No. 10; so far for Brown the positives outweigh the negatives. So far. Like many my first google yesterday was to find out what the allegations against the Tories were and it was the allegations that occupied the headlines all day.The machinations behind the scenes in Downing St, although reported, were paid secondary attention, but things are changing. Even the normally slavishly loyal Jackie Ashley of the Guardian is fingering Gordon as guilty.

Although we’ve seen at least one of Labour’s buttmonkey wannabes, Damien McBride go down over Emailgate (he says resigned, Gordo says fired), yet the man who’s chosen to surround himself with a troop of viciously loyal simian spinners still denies it has anything to do with him.

The whole reason McBride was employed at public expense and for political purposes was to destabilise the opposition with lies, mislead the media and divert attention from Gordo’s own flaming red monkey butt. Gordon Brown still denies all knowledge and as usual, responsibility for McBride, although McBride has been his poo-flinger in chief since forever :

He caught Gordon Brown’s eye in 2000 as the official responsible for leading the Treasury’s response to the first wave of fuel protests. According to one insider: ‘His hardline stance impressed Brown because he eventually stared out the truckers and forced them to capitulate.’

[…]

McBride took over from Ian Austin as Gordon Brown’s adviser on political press issues after the 2005 General Election.

Despite having to be replaced at one point he saw off his rival and continued poo-flinging for Gordo. Here’s a more polite sample of McBride’s output:

I just wish for once you’d try to get past your cynical, Tory, halfwit Harold Lloyd schtick to try and be a genuine journalist.’ read Damian McBride’s text message to the outgoing chief political correspondent of The Times.

‘It’s presumably cos of your inability to do so that you’re off to earn a crust at some Tory think-tank instead. Pathetic.’

Brown liked McBride and his methods so much he put McBride in charge of his wife Sarah Brown’s personal PR. How’s that working out for you Mrs Brown?

‘Journalists who then found themselves walking beside Mrs Brown struggled to avoid being tripped up as party members muscled in, trying to form a protective phalanx.

Then came the most extraordinary piece of control freakery of the day. “I want you guys on the green,” said the man from the Labour Party. “There will be six or seven guys with guns who will keep you away from her. You may be shot and then it won’t be my problem.”

It’s not as though the PM or other Labour ministers can claim that they don’t know their responsibility for ‘rogue’ advisors, either; in 2007, Labour minister Lord Davies of Oldham confirmed that ministers must answer for the actions of their advisers, telling the House of Lords:

“The responsibility for the management and conduct of special advisers, including discipline, rests with the Minister who made the appointment. The Ministerial Code makes clear that individual Ministers will be accountable to Parliament for their actions and decisions in respect of their special advisers.”

As if. That hasn’t ever stopped them letting SpAds like McBride off the leash. The PM knows fine well what his aide was up to. When he says he didn’t know about the planned Red Rag blog or the smear campaign he’s lying. Again.

But still. It’s out there. Proper job.

UPDATE:

Yes, that is Drapers’ proposed Red Rag blog linked to up there – there’s nothing on it yet, but it is taking (moderated) comments.

Go on, you know you want to. I did:

“Is this thing on, Dolly? No?

Ah well, I suppose you can always use it for selling menstrual products if the politics and psychotherapy don’t work out and your famous wife dumps you.”

Such larks.

Go Go Gadget Guido

Election Skullduggery, IT is not magic pixie dust, Manufacturing consent, New Labour
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anthony_head_little_britain_150x180

I’m loving this whole Guido/leaked emails/No10 cabal thing, but for those who haven’t been following the saga of Dolly Draper and his fateful entanglement with the blogosphere it may all be a bit confusing. Who is Damien McBride, and more to the point, why is such a jumped-up poisonous little toad of a bitchy party functionary being paid from the public purse?

The meat of the emails – Frances Osborne’s nuts, George O. took drugs, Cameron had the clap and so on, all of it patently untrue – can be found at the Sunday Times too, as can background on the No. 10 relationships and the personalities of those involved. Their conclusion? Gordo’s up to his moral compass in it.

I think that the Observer has picked up best on the meta-implications of this, the first real blog-driven UK political sleaze scandal:

Smears are, of course, a staple of politics not confined to any one party, but the charge against McBride and Draper is not just one of dirty tricks but of hamfisted meddling in a new media world they did not properly understand.

The vendetta between senior Brownites and Guido Fawkes, the Westminster blogger who obtained the emails, dates back to stories Fawkes – whose real name is Paul Staines – posted about the Smith Institute and its relationship to Ed Balls, also a close friend of McBride.

Shortly afterwards journalists began being offered snippets designed to undermine Staines, including news of his drink-driving conviction. Coincidence? Staines, say friends, does not think so. His blog continued targeting senior Labour figures, and its waspish attacks got under Labour’s skin. When Draper launched LabourList, it was not long before they crossed swords – with Staines questioning Draper’s qualifications as a therapist and Draper threatened to sue.

Ah yes, LabourList. I believe ‘pisspoor”s the word. A Daily Kos wannabe without a Kos, without Kos’ commenters, or Kos’ content, run by a gang of bitchy, provincial stalinist hairdressers.

Whatever his qualifications may or not be Draper didn’t fail Hypnotism 101; to have convinced anyone that a shambling, unshaven, disaster of a walking midlife crisis was still young and hip and in tune enough with the Obama generation to start a blog community from scratch – 5 years too late – boggles the mind.

I can imagine Dolly’s spiel to Mandelson: “Yeah, sure, give me a couple of hundred grand and blogosphere will be in your power, trust me I’m a clinical psychologist now wahaha” and Mandy falling for it because he doesn’t read blogs or email and that whole interwebs thingy passed him by, he has a man to do it for him.

Labour’s public engagement with social media’s been a disaster wrapped in an embarassment, with an extra layer of mortification. Whatever they’ve tried they’ve fucked up, either because of general town-hall level stupidity or their desire to use technology purely as a channel for own personal vindictiveness and political rigidity.

There’s a whole building full of strutting, puffy flushed vain little Labour men at No 10, just like McBride, half of whom who think, like Gordon Brown, that social media means social control media. The other half see Facebook as a brilliant way to get back at people they’ve always hated; they don’t see blogging as the political movement in itself that it undoubtedly is but as a means to an end, viz, the personal and political character assassination of your opponents.

But their featherbedding and disengagement with actual life as lived by other people has blinded them to the political power that one person with a pc and intenet access can wield these days.

Despite their efforts to lock down their own residents and prohibit them from ever expressing political dissent, by recording all their emails, phone calls and internet use – and mine, if I ever want to speak to my sons again – bloggers continue to expose Labour for what they are.

It doesn’t matter they can no more physically record everything than they can drain the ocean, it’s public perception that matters – they’re watching you.

It may well one day be only those of us based elsewhere, like Guido Fawkes, who are actually able to blog about political wrongdoing, such is the thicket of New Labour new laws and restrictions being woven around citizen access to bandwidth and the right to free expression.

I disagree vehemently with Guido Fawkes on many many things, both personal and political, but what I do admire him for is for sticking to his guns, cultivating his sources and consistently coming up with the goods. Again and again he’s shown that Labour are little people with little morals, little substance, little brains and little credibility. I don’t care if he’s Pol Pot.

UPDATE I
Haha, Draper just got fired live on tv.

Coppers, Cock-Ups and Provocateurs

Capitalism, Civil liberties, creative direct action, Life under Capitalism, Manufacturing consent, New Labour, Police Murder, Policing
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urbanwarfaresegwayMartin was working at home last week, so I broke my invariable rule on no sinful daytime tv and we watched the G20 demo live for several hours on both News 24 and Sky.

I mentioned at the time that I thought the supposed ‘black bloc’ looked very well-equipped and well-dressed; I mentioned too that from overhead shots it seemed that police cordons were being placed so as to force the front of the crowd – those suspiciously smart anarchists, conspicuous in their new black hoodies – right into the plate-glass windows of the only unboarded-up RBS branch in the City of London.

This story from last year, via Ten Percent, might shed some light on exactly how it was a small group of masked people bent on violence found themselves perfectly placed to attack a symbolic yet oddly unprotected building and potentially provoke a riot :

The man in the T-shirt was tall, well-built and handsome, smiling but with a hint of menace. He pushed aside children and elderly people. He continued to shout slogans such as: ‘Pigs Out.’

On his back was a black rucksack and he carried a professional-looking camera with a large telephoto lens. Hardly the sort of kit for a few snaps of his day out. My friends and I, standing a few rows back, asked him a couple of times to calm down, but he ignored us.

I wondered why I was drawn to him. Was it his dark good looks or was I worried for the safety of my 70-year-old friend and children nearby? Then it dawned on me. I had met this man at a party. I tapped him gently on the shoulder and said: ‘Have we met before?’ Instantly he recognised me. ‘Hi, how are you? It’s really nice to see you here.’

My puzzlement grew. This chap wasn’t really the sort you’d expect to see shouting abuse at police officers at an anti-war demo. He was, after all, a policeman himself – and a high-ranking one at that. I’d met the police inspector at a party around last Christmas. The local mayor was there, along with councillors from other parties and journalists. I’d been asked along by a friend.

Later, we went to a local gay club, where I danced with him and a few others until 3.30am. He had a bolshie charm, was cocky and a little manipulative. He was also highly entertaining, bragging about his work in the police and how important he was.

I remained bemused about his presence at the demo. I asked if he would send me copies of his demo photos. He replied: ‘No, they’re to put on my bedroom wall.’ I then casually asked why he was shouting anti-police slogans. ‘Funny you chanting that,’ I said, ‘when you’re a policeman.’

‘They don’t have my sort in the police, love,’ he said camply, so I would assume he was referring to being gay. A few seconds later, he melted into the crowd. I wondered whether he was at the demo undercover, deliberately whipping up trouble that he could capture on camera. That would then be used to malign anti-war protesters as dangerous and violent subversives. Of course, it is possible he was there off-duty to support the anti-war cause, but it is hardly likely he would enjoy chanting slogans against the police.

More…

Of course the protestors at the G20 didn’t riot, despite deliberately targeted overt (and covert) provocation. There was no mass riot, even though a man was killed. The police, wound up to a fine pitch of nervous anticipation by their political masters in ACPO and the Labour government, had to get their jollies later elsewhere.

When the cameras are gone no provocateurs are required, just fists, boots and batons.

Deborah Orr in the Independent says that the Met is dangerously out of control, but negates her own point by saying that:

…the foul-ups of the Met have one thing in common. The police go into a situation with their minds made up, their strategies already laid out, and their justifications rehearsed in advance. They never acknowledge their mistakes, but always protect the officers who make them. So they never, ever, learn anything. The amazing thing is that they keep on getting away with it.

Police nationwide, not just the Met, certainly appear out of control – but they aren’t, as much as nicely brought up newspaper columnists might think so. Police harassment and violence against dissenters is not abberation, it’s policy; so why be amazed that violent police get away with it?

British police are the paramilitary wing of the political and economic regime. Their continued existence is predicated on the maintainance of the status quo. A lot of undereducated and otherwise unemployable plods, rank and file and senior officers alike, would have a lot of future mortgage payments to lose should the system that supports them in maintaining a compliant populace ever be successfully challenged, so they’ll do whatever it takes to protect that, human rights be damned.