Parenting

Repost: The Man Who Would Be King PM Labour Leader

Parenting, UK elections, UK politics
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This could be our next PM (or not, as it turned out not long after I posted this – P):

The Prime Minister Of Primrose Hill

Who is David Miliband? Why all this hoohah?

do not want

Once you get over the resemblance of The Right Honourable David Wright Miliband MP to Star Trek’s Commander Data he would on the face of it appear to have all the necessary qualities to be a model New Labour leader, not least because of the blood he has on his hands; he voted very strongly for the Iraq war and he voted strongly against investigating the Iraq war, despite his later protestations of ambivalence.

He comes from a legacy Labour family. He (and his brother, also in the Labour government) has never had a real job – Daddy the connected historian’s friends saw to that, despite his own avowed Marxism. Some are more equal than others, as was demonstrated by young Dave’s place at Corpus Christi (despite his mediocre A levels) and his fortuitous Kennedy scholarship.

Miliband went straight from Oxford into a thinktank, to becoming a well paid special adviser, to being parachuted into Parliament via a rotten borough safe seat. You see? Perfect. He’s our very own real life Pitt The Very Very Younger.

But this Minister of The Crown, responsible for foreign policy, didn’t even know until corrected by a civil servant that the government whose interests he represents abroad had given a knighthood to Sir Robert Mugabe. See for yourself on BBC’s Question Time:

(Mind you, former Tory minister Douglas Hurd hardly comes off much better, but he is ancient).

Want more? To show how unqualified Miliband is, when he got the job he had to ask the public for advice he’s so bereft of knowledge and ideas.

Today we learn that despite Miliband’s myriad public assurances, the UK has been proved complicit in the dissapearance and torture of people to Diego Garcia. He was duped, he says:

Miliband ‘duped by US’ on rendition

24 minutes ago

David Miliband is facing fresh claims that the US imprisoned terror suspects on British territory.

Campaigners said the Foreign Secretary allowed himself to be “duped by the US on a colossal scale” following new claims of interrogation on Diego Garcia, a UK-controlled island in the Indian Ocean.

A former senior American official told Time magazine that in 2002 and possibly 2003, the US imprisoned and interrogated at least one terrorist suspect on the island.

Mr Miliband has repeatedly denied claims the US has detained terror suspects on British territory.

But the anonymous source, described as a frequent participant in White House Situation Room meetings, told Time a CIA counter-terrorism official twice said “high-value prisoners” had been held and questioned on the island.

The official also claimed the US may have kept prisoners on ships within Diego Garcia’s territorial waters.

Duped my ass. He’s the foreign secretary – how could he not know?

There are other, lesser but still telling details – his use of an inheritance loophole to reduce the tax on his father’s estate is one, he and his wife’s controversial adoption of babies from the US is another:

And yet, somewhere here lie a few questions that may deserve to be raised. As Foreign Secretary, for instance, was it right for Mr Miliband to place his private life ahead of his public role in such a high-profile visitation? Would he have delayed the transatlantic trip by just a couple of days had the guest been the head of a less translucently repugnant regime than Saudi Arabia’s? Was he, in other words, using Jacob’s arrival as an excuse to avoid greasing the wheels of arms trading of a kind he might once, in the mythic New Labour era of “ethical foreign policy”, have openly described as stomach-turningly hypocritical?

If so, Mr Miliband sets himself a challenging precedent. Every time one of the world’s unlovelier tyrants pops along, he will have to arrange another adoption. Admittedly this is easier in the US, where babies can be picked up by citizens almost as easily as an automatic rifle from WalMart. Even so, should Assad of Syria reprise his 2002 jaunt, Mr Miliband will need to return to the States to add Abraham (I just love his commitment to the tripartite Jewish patriarchy; those shared values with the Saudis yet again!) to Isaac and Jacob.

He’s “very flattered” to be a gay icon. His blog, mainly devoted to the glories of you guessed it, David Miliband, costs the taxpayers 40K a year. That’s about 50p per visitor. (For contrast this blog’s costs are pretty much nil.)

This is not a man with an overdeveloped sense of modesty. Miliband is New Labour made flesh – well-off, overentitled, underqualified, utterly blind to his own hypocrisy. He’s another who’s convinced himself that his personal ambition is actually zeal for the public good and not just a lust for power for it’s own sake.

But now this glorified work-experience boy, not content with having been promoted way, way above his level of competence, has got the gall to think he can walk into No.10 as PM, as if the imposition of the unelected and useless Gordon Brown wasn’t bad enough already.

The reading public’s uniformly derisive reaction to this notion can be seen in the comments to his flag-planting article in the Guardian this week; the nation, or at least the Guardian reading bits, are as one on Miliband. A representative sample:

alisdaircameron

Jul 29 08, 9:53pm

Davey-wavey, you’re wrong (again).

New Labour doesn’t need to make its case afresh, or present its policies in a new light, with new packaging and sales pitch.

The public actually know your case and your policies perfectly and only too well, and utterly dislike them and your whole apparatus and outlook which fatally combine arrogance, incompetence, authoritarianism and a failure to grasp what goes on in ordinary, real people’s lives.

We’ve listened to your case ad nauseam and understand it, better than you do, and can see it for the tommy-rot it is. Have you listened? No, and no number of rigged ‘consultations’ will change this, as you are all too convinced of your rightness to realise what a catastrophic course you have plotted.

None of your party apparatchiks have done real work, but simply continued your student politics into a career, inflicting your shallow glibs idea experiments on the populace to disastrous effect, and all you can say is 2We are right, the experiment will work this time. It must, because we’re so clver”.

I’m sorry, “the project” has failed, and as it’s run its course it destroyed a once-noble party and completely betrayed all the masses who wanted something other than rehashed Thatcherism. You’ve screwed centre and centre-left politics in the UK for decades.

Go NOW, and thank your lucky stars that there aren’t (yet) baying mobs to string you up from lamp posts.

Quite.

There’s only one thing the nation has to say to Miliband – DO NOT WANT.

A Need To Focus

Bloody Lawyers, Corruption, New Labour, Parenting, UK politics, War on Terror
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What was it Jacqui Smith said about ID cards recently?

“Like every other citizen, they [pilots] ask themselves what will happen to the data they are coerced into providing; whether it will it be safe, whose hands might it fall into, and what might they do with the data?”

Well,quite.

If you, like me, have been indulging in the bitter pleasure of having our belief that most elected politicians are deceitful, greedy, entitled egotists confirmed yet again, have you not idly wondered what fresh hells the government’s been quietly getting away with under cover of media furore? Me too.

MPs may be focused on covering up their corruption and incompetence, scrambling desperately to hold on to their lucrative seats, while bleating about data protection and invasion of privacy, but the implementation of the many repressive and unnecessary laws they’ve steamrollered through rolls inexorably on for the rest of the population.

First off, if you thought ID cards were a goner, think again. Spyblog reports that the planned advent of biometric ID cards is going ahead full steam . While we were boggling over 88p bathplugs, massage chairs and moatcleaning fees, four pieces of secondary legislation were laid before Parliament under the Identity Cards Act 2006:

They are The Identity Cards Act 2006 (Information and Code of Practice on Penalties) Order 2009, which allows government to require referees to vouch for your existence, and keep their details on the database too; and

The Identity Cards Act 2006 (Fees) Regulations 2009, which lays down a £30 charge just to apply for an ID card; and

The Identity Cards Act 2006 (Provision of Information without Consent) Regulations 2009 which allows for the sharing of your information by the government, without your consent, with the tax authorities and with credit reference agencies.
Secondly, Justice Secretary Jack Straw has told Parliament that although he’s backed down on trying to make inquests secret whenever it suited the government, he’s still going do it, but by using other legislation.

“Where it is not possible to proceed with an inquest under the current arrangements, the government will consider establishing an inquiry under the Inquiries Act 2005”.

And who’d decide it was not possible to proceed? Jack Straw. Of course.

In legal news, the Attorney General and the police are collaborating on new legislation that will give ‘law enforcement’ – now there’s a nicely nebulous name – power to, amongst other things, remotely scan your hard-drive.

Oh yes, and terrorism legislation was used to spy on eight people suspected of committing benefit fraud.

But most worrying for any British parent is the announcement that the illegal government database containing your child’ fingerprints and other physical and personal details is about to go live:

Frontline professionals will start using the controversial children’s database ContactPoint from next week, the government has announced. Up to 800 frontline practitioners, including social workers, health professionals and head teachers, in early adopter areas will be trained to use the £224m system from Monday 18 May.

New Labour may have set all this repressive legislation in motion, but now the machine of enforcement grinds on regardless of expenses scandals or public opinion. And like disgraced Labour MP Shahid Malik claims to have done, the government will enforce the rules, however unjust and or illegal they may be, “One million percent by the book”.

MPs may be corrupt, but then we knew that already. This receipts hoohah is mere confirmation. Parliaments may rise or fall, but Government goes on – and I’m more worried about what the State is actually doing right now, and how to oppose it effectively, than I am about the petty bourgeois aspirations of Labour members or the mole problems of Tory grandees.

Though I do wonder just how far that purple-jowled prick of a Speaker Michael Martin can inflate himself in pique before he has an apoplexy.

Still Sure It Can’t Happen To You – Or Your Kids?

Capitalism, Civil liberties, Climate change, creative direct action, Life under Capitalism, Manufacturing consent, New Labour, Parenting, Policing, Uh? WTF?, UK politics, War on Terror
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policestateuk

Anyone actively political in a way that’s embarassing or inconvenient to the Labour government is now, officially, a terrorist.

Happening in my home town now: some students in a shared house smoked dope, had some replica weapons, started getting interested in anticapitalism and antiracism/fascism, and engaged in a little light graffiti. They got raided for the dope and they’re now all in prison under the Terrorist Act.

Why are nonviolent potential student protestors and a 16 year-old schoolboy, who’ve yet (other than the graffiti artist) to even protest, let alone commit a known offence, being held as terrorists?

Apparently Devon and Cornwall police found “literature relating to political ideology” in the house. Oh, and knives.

If this is terrorism, we’re all fucked. I certainly would be if having “literature relating to political ideology” is what the police now characterise as terrorism.

Do I have to tell my children, quick, burn your copies of Naomi Klein and Malcolm X for fear of a knock by the plod? Were I in the UK and not on dialysis I would undoubtedly have been on my way to the G20 today to protest by any means necessary. It certainly could’ve been me or many people I know (none of whom are terrorists by any stretch of the imagination) arrested, our homes raided and lives deliberately ruined by politically motivated police, if that’s what makes you a terrorist.

These are trumped-up arrests on trumped-up evidence meant to politically intimidate legitimate protestors who do not agree with the government and to permanently label them (and anyone they know or associate with) as terrorists. It doesn’t matter that the students will probably be quietly released with no charges after the G20. Just the fact you’ve been arrested under the Act is enough to label you forever. You’re in the database now.

“Computers have also been seized for examination.” say Plymouth police. Yes, multiple computers with multiple users, not to mention multiple mobile phones, in 2 shared student houses. Since when have students been guilty of what their housemates read online or text to their mates?

But how very handy for the police to be able to hoover up who knows how many innocent yet politically inconvenient email or facebook friends or bloggers or LJ readers for Jacqui Smith’s handy little database of dissidents (if her husband hasn’t left the USB stick at Spearmint Rhino already).

I don’t know as yet whether any activists I know personally have been swept into the Terrorist Act’s net as a result of this blatant act of deliberate political intimidation – because the arrestees have yet to be charged, let alone named – but that’s hardly the point.

This is happening now, today, to mere schoolboys and student activists, and no-one who speaks out against the current form of government is safe from unjustified, politically motivated intimidation and imprisonment.

Is Smith Doing A Tessa Jowell?

New Labour, Parenting, UK politics, Women
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Comment of The Day, on New Labour’s champion snout-trougher, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith:

nothappy

31 Mar 09, 12:22am (about 8 hours ago)

There is a theory that this is Jaqui’s exit strategy. And a sly one it is.

Possibly and most likely, if there is any justice or common sense left in the UK, the inquiries into her ‘second home’ scam aren’t going too well for her and the lawyers have informed her that she may well be open to criminal fraud charges being brought against her at the end of them…

. Either

So Labour wonks have cooked up this ’embarrassment’ (not her fault, you understand — her husband’s) so she does the decent thing and resigns asap… £116,000 + salary, perks and pension better off, with her reputation as the poor little wronged woman a la Tessa Jowell more or less intact. Far better for all concerned than the first criminal trial of a Home Secretary for the misuse of public funds scenario.

Either way, it’s not going to die down or go away, so get it over with and go, girlfriend.

It’s an ingenious theory, it fits the facts, and it’s certainly neatly Mandelsonian, but if so I don’t think he’s reckoned with Smith’s sense of entitlement to office.

On previous form Our Lady of The Embonpoint is beyond embarassment; she seems convinced that, having reached her level of incompetence, her mere holding of the office somehow then dignifies all she does, no matter how sleazy or dishonest. According to Polly Toynbee she’s even a victim of a new wave of puritanism. Oh, please.

No, I really doubt that the Home Secretary’d go even if her kids were to be dragged in – not that they’re not already. Imagine the crap those poor kids’re taking at school; everyone knows their Dad’s a wanker, even though most Dads are, if truth be told. But most Dads’ little pecadilloes aren’t front-page fodder.

Most parents, however hatefully self-righteous and grasping, would naturally want such an ordeal over as soon as possible – or at least you’d think so; yet Smith still refuses to resign, although it would seem the quickest way out of what must be excruciating for her children.

How is it humanly possible for a woman to be so placidly, stupidly bovine and yet so selfishly hard-faced and brazen at the same time?

I doubt she’d go even if it were to turn out it was one or both of the Smith-Timney offspring who actually watched the movies, and that Timney Sr.’d been taking the rap for one or both; something that might even seem a little noble, until you remember he’s her admin assistant and paid 40,000 pounds a year out of the public purse, in addition to her own annual 300,000 in salary and allowances – and he was responsible for processing the expenses claim. Duh.

What would be mildly amusing is if the diary evidence that Smith’s reportedly convinced will clear her of dishonestly fiddling the second home allowance to pay off her sister’s mortgage were to show she was actually at at home, for certain values of ‘home’, at the time the pron was rented, or even if the avowed antiporn campaigner turns out to have watched it herself.

But no, even then, even if the tabloids were to go totally paparazzi on the past sexual behaviour (there’s a lot happens at party conferences) of a woman who wants to police everyone else’s, and that of her family too, I still doubt she’d go.

She has no shame. If this is Mandelson’s exit strategy I think he’s got it wrong.