Tories

Anonymous cowards smear Tim Ireland’s children. Could Nadine Dorris get them to stop it?

Tories, Wingnuts
Published on

For more than a year now Tim Ireland has been subjected to an ongoing if sporadic internet harassement campaign, after he had gotten into conflict with several online Tory bigwigs. The party of Churchill being the natural home of the coward and bullyboy, it’s no surprise that some of the internet hard men and women tried to smear him, spreading false rumours about him being a stalker or a paedophile and fabricating all other sorts of accusations which could’ve turned very nasty if taken serious by the wrong parties. It’s not too long ago a tabloid-fed mob burned down a paediatrician‘s house after all… It all may seem fun and games until somebody loses an eye and it doesn’t get better when certain Tory MPs are, if not involved perse, at least seemingly condone this behaviour.

Recently things took a turn for the worse: now his children are smeared too:

…Recently, someone involved in this ongoing campaign of harassment began publishing material targeting my wife, my children, and other members of my extended family.

This has included false accusations aimed at my kids, making specific allegations of criminal behaviour that are not only entirely untrue, but extremely damaging (and, it must be said, upsetting).

It’s not yet known who’s behind these allegations, but one person who should be wondering how this reflects on her is Nadine Dorris MP, who has history with Ireland:

A damaging role has also been played by Nadine Dorries MP, whom Tim has attacked and satirised on numerous occasions. As as I blogged in May, Dorries retaliated by seeking to portray a mocking Tweet as some kind of death threat, and when she later closed down her blog she claimed that she had been advised to do so following the stabbing of Stephen Tims MP – the implication being that she was in physical fear of Tim. This was despite the fact that she had closed her blog down a week before Tims had been stabbed.

Far be it from me to allege she’s behind these smears, but as somebody who has at the very least encouraged such irresponsible and cowardly behaviour, she should now do her part to reign this in — before itnernet grandstanding leads to real life tragedy.

QotD: conservatism in bus form – the new fake Routemaster

Boris Blunders, Poverty, Tories
Published on

Alex on Boris Johnson’s new buses:

In conclusion, this is modern conservatism, implemented in hardware, with your taxes. The obsession with PR, spin, and guff in general? Check. The heel-grinding contempt for the poor? Check. The pride in technical and scientific ignorance? Doublecheck. The low, ugly, spiteful obsession with getting one over on political enemies? (It’s of a piece with behaviour like this.) Check.

Read the whole post, it’s the best you’ll read today. The whole sordid anti-bendy buses jihad Boris and his cronies went for means that nobody in the UK can ever make fun of the American rightwing for being incredulous cretins ever again. It’s as daft and vicious an episode as everything they came up with.

Efficiency savings always mean making political choices

Life under Capitalism, Tories, UK politics
Published on

Chris Dillion argues that it’s impossible to just “cut waste” from goverment spending:

The idea that waste can be identified well by a top boss is deeply dubious. It ignores two central facts of economics: the importance of limited knowledge and of incentives. The true knowledge of where waste lies is fragmentary and dispersed across millions of public sector workers. A Chancellor cannot aggregate this knowledge. Nor can he rely upon civil service managers to do so; these do not have incentives to cut their own departments or jobs. The upshot is that, as I’ve said, top-down management is a terrible way to cut waste.

Therefore the idea that it was ever possible for the new ConDem government to immediately identify and target six billion pounds worth of unnecessary spendings without making political judgments was always absurd, yet treated seriously both in Westminister and the Westminister orientated media. As Dillon shows, the first announced cuts are nothing but political — and there’s nothing wrong with that. Obviously, you can disagree with the choices made, but that you can’t cut spending without making these choices should not be controversial.

But absurd or not, it remains easier to sell cuts as efficiency savings — who could object to that — than as explicit political choices. That’s something the Tories (and everybody else) learned from the far more ideological battles of the eighties.

Why Labour? Why now?

Activism, New Labour, Tories, UK elections
Published on 1 Comment on Why Labour? Why now?

Justin asks what has changed in Labour that you should rejoin it:

Can New Labour remodel itself as ‘progressive’ (whatever that means these days) even if it wanted to? This is what puzzled me about the people who crashed the New Labour website the other night in their stampede to rejoin the party. Nothing has changed just because Gordon Brown has shuffled off to spend more time with his sulk. Does a Miliband or a Balls have the emotional intelligence to notice and care about this stuff, let alone point it out?

The rush to (re)join Labour is proof of two things: visceral hatred of Tories in government and the ongoing failure to establish a proper leftwing alternative to Labour. It’s true that all the bad authoritarian, warmongering impulses of New Labour still exist, but I think people felt they had no choice. It is a reasonable assumption to think that bad as New Labour was, the Tories will be worse and with the Liberals in bed with them, the only place left is Labour…

Labour was awful when it came to civil rights, authoritarian and downright evil in places (War on Iraq, treatment of refugees), but for better or worse is still seen as slightly less evil than the Tories — the memories of what they did to the working classes the last time they were in power still remain.Labour quite frankly is the lesser of two evils, despised on what they did in the past thirteen years but few people have any illusions the Tories would’ve behaved better, which why now Labour has been punished people instinctively flow back towards it.

This may be a blessing in disguise, if an organised left can be established in the party to take it back from the Blairites/Brownies, but it will take years. Tony and Gordon’s acolytes are too firmly entrenched, hold all the positions of power in the party to be quickly gotten rid off. The next election will be crucial: if New Labour is still in power in the party and win the election, they will never be removed.

You can compare it with the Democratic Party in the US: after Bush stole the elections in 2000, and especially after 2002/03 when there was a huge antiwar movement with no real political home, there was a chance to move the Democrats to the left, but the centrists won the powerstruggle, sidelined the activists and just waited until the Republicans became unpoplar enough to lose the election.

A leftward turn is needed for Labour, but it can only be forced upon the party. Those who joined out of disappointment with the Lib-Dems need to be politcally active in the party to do so. Now’s the chance to win the party back.

2nd Most Powerful British Woman A Homophobe

Civil liberties, GLBT rights, Policing, Sexuality, Tories
Published on

nannysodoff

The Tories are indeed running true to form.

The Public Whip (via Charlie Brooker on Twitter) reveals that Theresa May, Britain’s new Home Secretary and Secretary for Women and Equal Rights (including gay rights) has voted ‘moderately against’ gay rights during her career as an MP.

Is it even possible to be ‘moderately’ homophobic? Homophobia strikes me as the height of immoderateness, in and of itself, whatever qualifiers are appended.