You thought the McCain girls were bad enough, but the Cameron girls beat everything… Not quite meant to be taken serious though.
Horrible thought. Everything that happens in the US, politics wise shows up in the UK about two-five years later and in the Netherlands two to five years after that. Does this mean that in the next election after this one we might just see the Balkenende girls?
As you know Bob, J. K. Rowling was once an unemployed single mother, both under the Tories and New Labour. Now a multimillionaire, she hasn’t forgotten how difficult her life was or what helped her survive:
An easy life. Between 1993 and 1997 I did the job of two parents, qualified and then worked as a secondary school teacher, wrote one and a half novels and did the planning for a further five. For a while, I was clinically depressed. To be told, over and over again, that I was feckless, lazy — even immoral — did not help.
[…]
Nobody who has ever experienced the reality of poverty could say “it’s not the money, it’s the messageâ€. When your flat has been broken into, and you cannot afford a locksmith, it is the money. When you are two pence short of a tin of baked beans, and your child is hungry, it is the money. When you find yourself contemplating shoplifting to get nappies, it is the money. If Mr Cameron’s only practical advice to women living in poverty, the sole carers of their children, is “get married, and we’ll give you £150â€, he reveals himself to be completely ignorant of their true situation.
[…]
I chose to remain a domiciled taxpayer for a couple of reasons. The main one was that I wanted my children to grow up where I grew up, to have proper roots in a culture as old and magnificent as Britain’s; to be citizens, with everything that implies, of a real country, not free-floating ex-pats, living in the limbo of some tax haven and associating only with the children of similarly greedy tax exiles.
A second reason, however, was that I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major’s Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism. On the available evidence, I suspect that it is Lord Ashcroft’s idea of being a mug.
So, there we have British elections today: an unfair electoral system, censorship of candidates’ electoral addresses, little real political choice for voters, widespread postal ballot-rigging and elections administered by partisan council officials in a corrupt political climate.
Craig Murray is back at Comment is Free.
Change the names and number of parties and what Lenny says about the UK elections goes as well for the Dutch one a month later:
The 2010 general election will result in a victory for the nasty party, whoever wins. All three major parties, having supported the mammoth bank bailouts, stand for the deepest cuts in the public sector for over 50 years, far outstripping anything accomplished by Thatcher. Outdoing Thatcher in the cuts stakes is, in case the point passed you by, as nasty as can be. The chancellors’ debate – which, underscoring the poverty of alternatives, was won by the drab former Shell economist Vincent Cable – reinforced this quite starkly. There is only a difference of emphasis and timing between the parties, and these differences all sound eminently reasonable and plausible within the terms of the discussion – but they are largely technocratic differences with policy flavours attached.
All parties accept the reality that “we” need to drastically cut expenditure to pay for the bankers’ crisis. All parties accept we can’t really raise taxes on rich people high enough to do so, nor expect the banks to repay us, so it will be the workers who’ll have to pay, one way or another. All that’s left is quibbling about what to cut and how we are going to pay it.
Shadow home secretary Chris Grayling says bed and breakfasts should be able to refuse gay couples:
The Tories were embroiled in a furious row over lesbian and gay rightson Saturday after the shadow home secretary, Chris Grayling, was secretly taped suggesting that people who ran bed and breakfasts in their homes should “have the right” to turn away homosexual couples.
[..]
“I think we need to allow people to have their own consciences,” he said. “I personally always took the view that, if you look at the case of should a Christian hotel owner have the right to exclude a gay couple from a hotel, I took the view that if it’s a question of somebody who’s doing a B&B in their own home, that individual should have the right to decide who does and who doesn’t come into their own home.”
Remember what the Tories did last time they were in power. Cuddly Dave may want to have his party metrosexual and gay friendly, but too many in the party are still bigoted.