The Null Device

As Britain sloughs into a new age of austerity, with the government cutting services, closing community facilities and admonishing the public to get by with less, the Queen prepares for her diamond jubilee, the 60th anniversary of her wedding (which, incidentally, also took place in a period of austerity). The diamond jubilee is a significant event in any sufficiently long-lived monarch's life, and so celebrations (including an extra bank holiday, not something bottom-line-driven Tories take lightly) have been on the cards since before the financial crisis. Some might have expected that a government trying to portray itself as almost painfully reasonable would insist on low-key celebrations, or at least not ply the world's richest woman with gifts paid for by the straitened taxpayer. However, this turned out not to be the case, as it emerged that education minister Michael Gove (i.e., the chap responsible for cutting school budgets and scrapping the Education Maintenance Allowance), apparently a passionate monarchist of the old school, pushed for the Queen to be given a new royal yacht, costing £60m, as a token of the public's gratitude.

The education secretary writes: "In spite, and perhaps because of the austere times, the celebration should go beyond those of previous jubilees and mark the greater achievement that the diamond anniversary represents."

He suggested "a gift from the nation to her majesty" such as "David Willetts's excellent suggestion of a royal yacht".

Unfortunately for the government, the public's deference to its aristocratic superiors isn't what it used to be and the proposal was met with incredulity, forcing the Prime Minister to make a show of rejecting it, before quietly backing a variant of the proposal. The yacht will now officially be a training facility, with only part of it serving as a stately pleasure boat for the Royal Family; there will also be the option of hiring it out as conference facilities, and some undefined part of the funds will come from private donors. (Already Canada, which has its own hardline Tory government, has pledged £10m.)

Meanwhile, here are a few suggestions for things other than a royal yacht that £60m could buy.

¶ monarchy politics the royal family tories uk 1 Share

The dust hasn't yet settled after David Cameron vetoed the EU financial treaty, setting Britain on a course to the periphery of the EU or beyond, but already the Euroskeptics are lining up to give Johnny Foreigner what for. The latest to stick it to the Frogs and Krauts is the mayor of Bishop's Stortford, whose particular exercise of Churchillian bulldog spirit has been to withdraw his town's twinning arrangement with Villiers sur Marne and Friedberg. Just because.

Mayor John Wyllie has written letters to his honourable counterparts in the town's two twin cities: Friedberg near the German financial capital of Frankfurt, and Villiers-sur-Marne near Paris. He isn't writing to invite them to the usual partnership ceremonies, conferences or youth exchange programs. He is writing to cancel the town's friendship with them, after 46 years. On September 28, 2012, Wyllie informed them that his town would sever all ties with the twin towns. He gave no reason for this break-off of diplomatic relations.

Mike Wood, 66, the only council member from the pro-European Liberal Democrat party, says Tories are "usually normal people. But whenever you mention Europe they turn into some kind of monster."

Distrust of the European Union goes hand-in-hand with distrust of Germany, especially among "euroskeptics," the current euphemism for the many haters of the EU in Britain. The headline "Welcome to the Fourth Reich" in the high-circulation Daily Mail summarized the German-French plans to rescue the monetary union.

Anecdotally, I've noticed that, while the supermarkets of Britain are full of Christmas puddings of all sorts, there is no stollen bread, a British Christmas tradition since cheap flights to German Christmas markets began. I wonder whether the decision to not order any this year comes from market research surveys into anti-German and/or anti-Continental sentiment among the British public.

¶ europe france germany stupidity tories uk 2 Share

Welcome to the new age of austerity: Britain's Tory-led government is planning to abolish unfair dismissal laws and make it easier to sack workers, in the hope that Britain rides a Texas-style wave of increased productivity as employees compete against each other to keep their jobs. Also, young jobseekers will have to work without pay for private employers, for up to 30 hours a week, or lose their unemployment benefits. In other words, the government is subsidising below-minimum-wage jobs, keeping unemployment high (after all, why hire someone for minimum wage, when the government will send someone who has to work for nothing?) and transferring funds from the public coffers to private industry (undoubtedly to be returned in electoral contributions to the Conservative Party when the next election comes around).

Meanwhile, as Europe hits the doldrums, the Tory Right are pushing to use this as an opportunity to unilaterally renegotiate Britain's EU treaty obligations, in particular those which introduce socialistic inefficiencies like workers' rights and move British industrial relations westwards over the Atlantic. Britain is aggressively opposing plans to institute a financial transaction tax in Europe, and is set to win a permanent exemption from the working time directive, which limits working hours to 48 hours a week (in a rolling average over several weeks), unless workers individually opt out. I wonder how long until other inefficiencies like Britain's statutory annual leave provisions (which are fairly generous, especially compared to our cousins across the pond) are tossed onto the scrapheap. (The NHS looks set to be Americanised out of existence, and the rest of the welfare state is likely to go, first being changed from a universal system to one solely for the poorest and then progressively impoverished, on the grounds that most voters won't ever get anything from it and, hey, beggars can't be choosers.) David Cameron's Britain is set to look less like continental Europe and more like Rick Perry's Texas.

¶ industrial relations politics tories uk 2 Share

For a purely decorative monarch-in-waiting, Prince Charles is somewhat of an interventionist. Perhaps its his strong opinions (be it about the efficacy of homoeopathy, the terminal decline of architecture after about the 18th century, or about hidebound traditionalism in all areas generally being a Good Thing), but he has never been content with the role of figurehead, passively waving at well-wishers and mouthing the words of the government of the day. Now, it has emerged that he has exercised a secret veto over various pieces of legislation in Britain, doing so under a 14th-century law that allows the Duke of Cornwall a say over any legislation that affects the Duchy's property, in a broad sense of the word.

The details of the laws have been kept secret, as has whether any changes were made to the laws to help them pass muster with the Prince of Wales; however, the subjects of the laws over which his advice was sought apparently include everything from gambling to road safety. This isn't the first time Charles has seen fit to give British society the benefit of his enlightened guidance, whether it wants it or not: a few years ago, he famously had a modernist architect sacked from a London project, and replaced by a neo-traditionalist of Charles' own stripe, using his friendship with the Qatari royals funding the project to go over the heads of those actually in Britain involved in the project.

Charles' interventions have been controversial on both sides of the fence; the Grauniad doesn't like the reactionary populist emphasis on leaden-handed traditionalism in Charles' views, comparing it to the Daily Mail, while the Torygraph is not entirely comfortable with his dippy-hippy tendencies:

The Prince does not seem to have actually exercised his right of veto, although The Guardian's attempts to access papers have largely failed. But the discovery that he can block legislation is alarming given his established willingness to interfere in political matters. It is all too easy to imagine him vetoing a bill loosening the planning laws, or widening the use of GM crops.

That's not to say he's wrong on every issue, although I'm happy to say he's wrong on a few. The point is that he is making the Royal family seem less like a stately and dignified ceremonial presence, and more like a cross between a fogey-hippy crossover activist group and a vast whole-foods retail company. Without the goodwill that the Queen generates, a Charles-headed monarchy will be subject to both mistrust and ridicule.

Which is not to say that Britain's monarchy is remaining firmly in the undemocratic past; last week, the Commonwealth approved constitutional changes to end gender discrimination on the rules of royal succession, a change which could affect literally dozens of women. You go, girls!

¶ democracy feudalism monarchy politics prince charles tories uk 0 Share

In 2002, Surrey schoolgirl Milly Dowler was abducted and murdered. Her family believed for six months that she was alive, on the basis that her voicemail messages were being deleted (and presumably listened to). It has turned out that staff from News Of The World, a Murdoch tabloid, had gotten into her voicemail and were deleting her messages, in order to free up space for more messages and keep the story profitably on the boil:

Apparently thirsty for more information from more voicemails, the paper intervened – and deleted the messages that had been left in the first few days after her disappearance. According to one source, this had a devastating effect: when her friends and family called again and discovered that her voicemail had been cleared, they concluded that this must have been done by Milly herself and, therefore, that she must still be alive. But she was not. The interference created false hope and extra agony for those who were misled by it.

The deletion of the messages also caused difficulties for the police by confusing the picture when they had few leads to pursue. It also potentially destroyed valuable evidence.

In other, unrelated, news, the UK government has approved Murdoch's bid to take over the remainder of cable-TV operation BSkyB. There is a petition against it here.

¶ evil media murdoch tories uk villainy 1 Share

In today's great political surprise, Rupert Murdoch is set to further tighten his grip on Britain's media landscape and political system, as Tory minister Jeremy Hunt (who has, in the past, spoken approvingly of News Corp.) approved his bid to take over the remainder of BSkyB, Britain's dominant TV broadcaster. There is the usual editorial-independence proviso for Sky News, but nothing Murdoch hasn't dealt with before (see also: The Times, the Wall Street Journal). Furthermore, unlike the US, news channels are governed by rules of strict impartiality, making a Sun-flavoured FOXNews UK ("now with more paedo gypsy asylum seekers!") impossible; well, at least until some future government decides to relax the regulatory regime, for reasons, of course, entirely unconnected to owing favours to sympathetic media proprietors.

All may not be lost, though; Murdoch's bid has attracted a lot of opposition, and even now, while it is not yet finalised, this is continuing. If you're a UK resident and concerned with this, you can write to your MP, and urge them to ask some hard questions in Parliament.

¶ con dems media murdoch politics tories uk 0 Share

Britain's Tory-led government is looking at the possibility of moving one of Britain's May bank holidays to October, making it a national day for the United Kingdom (as opposed to the non-holiday national days of its constituent nations). Which makes sense to an extent, given that May is loaded with two (count 'em!) bank holidays, falling shortly after Easter, and days off dry out after the end of August, with none until Christmas. Of course, being the Tory-led government, the holiday they're talking about eliminating is the May Day bank holiday, the ancient pagan spring feast which became synonymous with workers' solidarity and socialism in the 19th century. And, of course, keeping both bank holidays (of which Britain has few compared to continental Europe) is out of the question:

Brendan Barber, general secretary of the TUC, called on the government to abandon the plan. "There is strong support for an extra public holiday as the UK has the stingiest allocation in Europe. But the last thing we need is for the government to mess around with established bank holidays that workers and businesses have built their schedules around," he said.

Andrew Rosindell, Conservative MP for Romford, said it "was a very good idea to celebrate all things British", adding that the government should move the holiday to June to coincide with the Queen's birthday. "I don't think we need a workers' day any more than we need a day for pensioners or any other group, it is silly. We need a day everybody can celebrate. If it can be for everybody it is much more inclusive."

¶ con dems politics tories uk work-life balance 1 Share

David Cameron, Britain's Tory Prime Minister, has on occasion professed his love of 1980s indie band The Smiths, known for their staunchly left-wing politics and anti-Thatcherite proclamations. And now, Johnny Marr has replied, forbidding David Cameron from liking The Smiths:

David Cameron, stop saying that you like The Smiths, no you don't. I forbid you to like it.
less than a minute ago via Twitter for iPhone

Personally, I am tremendously heartened when a political leader actually demonstrates genuine and quite sophisticated cultural tastes, instead of getting spin doctors to compile their iPod playlists for them (with every song a political message). Or, like Gordon Brown, dropping clunking references to contemporary popular favourites such as the Arctic Monkeys and Harry Potter when we all know he is really ensconced in his study reading economic history and perhaps listening to a ‘Best Of’ classical compilation that his wife bought him for Christmas.

When I ran into David Cameron at the BBC once, I asked him what was the last CD he bought. Without a moment’s hesitation, he named a new album from an obscure American band called Modest Mouse, who had been working with Morrissey’s old Smiths’ collaborator Johnny Marr (who played every date on Red Wedge’s original tour). I am not sure what credibility it gives him to tackle global economic meltdown, but he is certainly the hippest party leader.

¶ culture music politics the smiths tories uk 1 Share

The latest nightspot in the old Sloane heartland of Chelsea is Maggie's Nightclub, a club inspired by Margaret Thatcher's decade in office. Maggie's includes photos of Thatcher and Ronald Reagan (I wonder whether there are any of her close friend General Augusto Pinochet), and speakers in the bathroom play a loop of the audiobook of the Iron Lady's diaries. The club has a £15 entry price and £250 fee for a table, and may or may not be ironic:

So, I ask the club's co-owner, Charlie Gilkes, is this the nocturnal equivalent of a neo-liberal manifesto? No, no, no, argues the Old Etonian, who opened Maggie's with his business partner Duncan Stirling earlier this year. "It's not a Tory club," he says carefully, but rather a tribute to the 80s – a bit of "childhood nostalgia for the decade of our birth". The reference to Britain's most divisive politician, he says, is tongue-in-cheek. "I know she's divisive, but I do admire her. She's a leader."

In this 80s, Thatcher-era themed club, bottles of champagne signed by the Iron Lady go for £5,000, but I make do with a Ferris Bueller Fizz, priced £10.50. A Super Mario mural adorns another facade and every table in sight has been made to look like a giant Rubik's cube, while a Neil Kinnock figurine takes pride of place next to Gilkes's own childhood collection of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Perhaps in ten years' time, someone will open a place in Islington named Tony's, which will play only Britpop, D:Ream and the Spice Girls, and have an ironic map of Iraq on one wall.

¶ 1980s history irony kitsch margaret thatcher politics thatcherism-blairism tories uk 4 Share

Under the new Tory/LibDem coalition government, Britain has become the first country to clamp down on airport expansion because of climate considerations; the government scrapped the third runway at Heathrow, and has committed to refusing Gatwick and Stansted new runways.

“The emissions were a significant factor” in the decision to cancel the runway-building plans, Teresa Villiers, Britain’s minister of state for transport, said in an interview. “The 220,000 or so flights that might well come with a third runway would make it difficult to meet the targets we’d set for ourselves.” She said that local environmental concerns like noise and pollution around Heathrow also weighed into the decision.

From what I understand it, the opposition to airport expansion was actually driven by the Tories, rather than having been grudgingly ceded to the Lib Dems. Could there be a Nixon-in-China thing happening here? New Labour, keen to not be mistaken for Old Labour, were anxious to avoid anything that seemed left-wing, such as opposing air travel. (It may not just have been Blairite triangulation; perhaps there was also a calculation that an ongoing age of cheap flights to credit-bought second homes in the Essex end of Spain, stag weekends in Estonia and Ecstasy-fuelled raves in the Balearics would keep the public's cool-Britannia love affair with New Labour burning, at least until the oil ran out.) The Tories, however, have less to prove as far as being pro-business goes, and can afford to pass by some of the more short-termist decisions.

A high-speed railway network is planned to replace domestic flights across Britain; it should be ready in about 20 years.

(via Infrastructurist) ¶ air travel environment infrastructure london politics tories uk 0 Share

Britain has a new government: it's a coalition between the Tories (cue spitting) and the Lib Dems. The latter had been in talks with Labour about forming a coalition (along with a number of smaller parties, such as the Greens, Plaid Cymru and possibly the Scottish National Party), but the deal apparently was scuppered by elements of the Labour Party deciding to veto it (presulably calculating that, during the upcoming years of austerity, they'd be better served being in opposition, and by encouraging a myth of the Lib Dems' perfidious betrayal of the progressive cause, they'd claim the left-wing vote for themselves come next election). Anyway, the Lib Dems get a few cabinet seats, and a referendum on replacing the grotesquely unfair first-past-the-post voting system with the somewhat less unfair alternative vote system, as used in Australia. (Proportional Representation is out of the question in the lower house, though there is talk about a fully elected House of Lords, so we may possibly get proportional representation there; again, like in Australia.)

Interestingly enough, Charlie Stross (who really dislikes the Tories) is oddly sanguine about the coalition:

All in all ...We've got a government that, for the first time since the 1930s, more than 50% of the voters voted for. There are a lot of positive policies here, on civil liberties and constitutional reform. There are some stinkers, but fewer than I expected. There is also a systemic weakness, insofar as the extreme fringe of either of the coalition parties have the ability to take down the government. So we're probably going to see lots of compromises. In particular, I'm hoping the Liberal Democrats act as an effective brake on the Conservatives (who I fear are capable of behaving much like Stephen Harper's Canadian tories if governing on their own).

¶ liberal democrats new labour politics tories uk 0 Share

Today, the UK goes to the polls in one of the more dramatic general elections of recent times. Thanks to New Labour being on the nose, and having used up enough of their at-least-we're-not-Tories credit, the Tories are leading the polling. Of course, enough people remember the bitter days of Thatcherism to turn a landslide into a hung parliament. Meanwhile, the third party, the Liberal Democrats (who are sufficiently untainted by proximity to actual power to be able to pass for honest) are relishing the prospect of holding the balance of power in a coalition government, and making noises about demanding electoral reform, to replace the first-past-the-post electoral system (which, in normal conditions, entrenches a two-party system, relegating third and subsequent parties to the lunatic fringe) with something else, preferably full proportional representation. Recent polls, however, show the Lib Dems' bubble deflating somewhat, and the Tories likely to squeak home and be able to govern with the help of the Northern Irish sectarian parties and/or UKIP. The Coalition of Ugly may well soon be upon us.

Your Humble Correspondent, being a Commonwealth national resident in the UK, is entitled to vote, and will be voting in the election. I will not be voting for a party but for an outcome; namely, that of a hung parliament (and the end of first-past-the-post, a system which centralises power away from the people). Given that, at the time the rolls closed, I was living in a marginal seat (held by Labour, likely to go Tory), in which every vote will count, I will, regretfully, be holding my nose and voting Labour. Yes, they're the Blatcherite bastards who gave us the Iraq War, the national ID card, rampant cronyism and creeping authoritarianism, but, in terms of plausible outcomes, it is exceedingly unlikely that a Labour government will return that is not in hock to the Lib Dems, which cannot be said for the Tories. Besides which, the Tories' claim to having taken back the title of lesser evil is looking pretty thin these days, between their alliances with the eastern-European far right and their promises of inheritance tax cuts for the super-rich. And here is an example of the new "compassionate conservatives"' style of government in action.

¶ liberal democrats new labour politics psephology tories uk 0 Share

The Graun asked artists to design alternative election posters.

Here's Jeremy Deller's say:

¶ art murdoch new labour politics satire tories uk 0 Share

The Independent has a pretty apt cartoon about the general election campaign that has just begun in the UK:

¶ cartoons liberal democrats new labour politics satire tories uk 1 Share

Bitten by the "new media" bug, the Tories try their hand at this grass-roots web campaign thing, and launch a Web2.0-licious site, with the irreverently catchy title of "Cash Gordon". This site allows Tory supporters to earn "action points" by donating money or spreading the word. Unfortunately for the Tories, some people notice that it looks awfully familiar:

The Tories' misfortune doesn't end there, however. In their haste to embrace the Web and be down with the kids these days, the Tories (or perhaps their American associates) decided to integrate the site with Twitter, and have it automatically display any tweets posted with the #cashgordon tag. It turns out that, in their haste, they didn't anticipate the possibility of basic cross-site scripting attacks, instead displaying HTML tags intact. And it was not long before unsympathetic parties were making the most of it, and potential Tory activists were being rickrolled and Goatse'd.

For what it's worth, Meg Pickard has a graphic of how events unfolded:

¶ fail politics stupidity tories twitter uk unintended consequences 0 Share

Tabloids and Tory politicians have been claiming that Britain is a "broken society"; The Economist looks at the figures and shows that, actually, that's a load of rubbish; while Britain does have its share of social problems, it had much worse before:

As for family breakdown, some commentators seem to think that sex really was invented in 1963. British grannies know differently. Teenage pregnancy is still too common, but it has been declining, with the odd hiccup, for ages. A girl aged between 15 and 19 today is about half as likely to have a baby in her teens as her grandmother was. Her partner will probably not marry her and he is less likely to stick with her than were men in previous generations, but he is also a lot less likely to beat her. In homing in on the cosier parts of the Britain of yesteryear, it is easy to ignore the horrors that have gone. Straight white men are especially vulnerable to this sort of amnesia.

The waning of the manufacturing jobs that used to be the mainstay of the working class has created a generation of young males, in particular, who don’t know what to do with themselves. Britons have been boozers and scrappers for centuries, but self-destructive behaviour today in part reflects the perception that their lives are not worth much. As for children bearing children, there is evidence elsewhere that if girls are given better education—not just about sex, but also in areas likely to improve their job prospects—they are less likely to get pregnant at 16. Yet for all the official talk at home about ever-improving exam results, Britain is beginning to slide down the international league table of educational attainment.

(via David Gerard) ¶ culture war media moral panic society tories uk 1 Share

Decapitated by the election defeat that ended its 11-year reign, Australia's conservative Liberal Party has spent the past two years floundering without much direction. The party has just had a leadership election, which was won by Tony Abbott a hardline culture-war conservative from the Howard government, who ran on a platform of climate-change denial, defeating the incumbent, the younger, more centrist Malcolm Turnbull. And so, it appears that the Liberal Party has been infected by the prions of the degenerative disorder that is devouring the US Republican Party.

¶ australia politics rightwingers tories 0 Share

With the Tories being almost a dead certainty to win the next election (New Labour have thoroughly spent their lesser-evil capital, and, thanks to the first-past-the-post system, the Lib Dems have next to no chance), some are speculating that the UK may soon elect its last ever Prime Minister. Basically, the Scots, having borne the brunt of Thatcherism, despise the Tories and are unlikely to vote for them while anyone still alive remembers the 1980s, and a Tory government in London is likely to further strengthen the Scottish National Party (which govern's Scotland's limited domestic government) and embolden those calling for independence. Given that the Scots are more pro-European than the English, and particularly more so than the Tories (a significant proportion of whose demographic have always wanted to pull out of the EU), it looks like things may get interesting:

As Cameron, William Hague and the others get into a battle over the constitution and the future of Europe, the Scottish government will be offering itself as a pro-European bastion, just as the Irish did – and nobody knows better than Salmond what a huge financial benefit that once won for Dublin. Many Tories will say, of course, that all this is absolutely fine. According to them, the Scots have been a revenue-sapping bunch of whingers for years, whose main export to England seems to have been politicians and journalists. An independent Scotland means a Tory majority in England way into the distant future. And it makes standing up to the EU easier, in many ways, because Eurosceptic opinion is particularly strong in England. What's the problem?

Cameron is surely right to be concerned. If the prospect of an all-out confrontation with the rest of the EU is unsettling to middle of the road opinion, the end of the UK is much more so. What do you call the country that remains? It isn't England, quite, because there is also Wales. Does it stay a Diminished Britain, a Little Britain, whose flag is a simple spider of red lines on white? Trident, of course, goes because the naval bases in Scotland go. What about the currency? If the euro is circulating just north of Newcastle and Carlisle, the pound will feel more embattled.

¶ politics scotland tories uk 0 Share

The Independent looks at the Tories' new allies in Brussels, or, in particular, the other prospective members of the new right-wing group they're setting up because the standard centre-right is not strident enough:

It is expected to include the Belgian Lijst Dedecker party, some of whose politicians are former members of the far-right Vlaams Belang part, whose candidates backed a statement saying: "We urgently need global chemotherapy against Islam to save civilisation", and used campaigning material featuring an ape with the words "I have not forgotten my roots ... have you?"

The Tories are also in talks with the Dutch Christian Union, which includes the SGP, a Calvinist party which believes the Bible means that women should not stand for parliament but have a "nurturing role" at home. Mr Cameron's party is also wooing the Latvian Fatherland and Freedom party, several of whose MPs marched in Riga with veterans of the Latvian SS in March.

The 25 Tories will be the biggest national team in the new group. Its other prominent members will be the Polish Law and Justice Party, which has 15 MEPs, and the Czech Civic Democrats, which has nine. The Polish party, headed by the controversial Kaczynski twins, is anti-gay, and banned gay-rights processions. In talks on EU voting power, it demanded that Poland's losses at the hands of Hitler be added to its current population so it would have more clout.

¶ eu fascism politics racism rightwingers tories 0 Share

Some bad political news for Britain: while David Cameron may talk the talk of a new progressive, ecologically-conscious Conservative Party, most of his likely MPs have other ideas:

It finds that far from being a group of “Cameron clones” those most likely to be new Tory MPs are, in general, less concerned about climate change than terrorism, oppose green taxes and are hostile to gay adoptions. A majority oppose the party’s official policy of raising green taxes to reduce the taxation burden on families, according to a survey of 148 Tory candidates.

The findings suggest that it will not be long before the antiabortion lobby seeks to reopen the debate about the time limit if a victory by Mr Cameron sweeps in a new generation of Tory MPs. Fully 85 per cent of those polled support a more restrictive abortion law. Mr Cameron himself supported a reduction to 20 weeks when the issue was debated in May last year.

Repealing the ban on foxhunting, regarded as, at best, an unwelcome distraction by some modernisers, is supported by 119 of 120 Tory candidates in marginal seats, according to a separate survey by the Countryside Alliance. Mr Cameron has muted his support for foxhunting – for which he was a passionate advocate as a backbench MP – since becoming leader.

Which places those hoping for a reasonable government in Britain between a rock and a hard place. On one hand, there's New Labour, a party which spent the past decade or so tactically moving to the right to "outflank" the Tories, which forced through the Iraq war, and the core of whose platform seems now to be ID cards, internet surveillance and spending billions of pounds on Trident, i.e., the British-funded annexe of the US nuclear arsenal. New Labour's platform, once one gets beneath the layer of content-free marketing verbiage ("spin"), comes down to "we'll do this and more, and you'll vote for us, because otherwise, the bogeyman Zombie Margaret Thatcher gets in".

On the other hand, there are the Tories. While David Cameron may walk around like Blair 2.0 (though he'd never call himself that), swear that the Tories are the party of environmental sustainability and progressive centrism, the bulk of the party seem to be steeling for a bitter culture war, similar to that fought by the Liberal/National coalition in Australia up to 2007. There are, of course, the Lib Dems, who seem more palatable (in the way that parties who can set their agendas unconstrained by the realistic prospect of holding power are), but because of Britain's first-past-the-post electoral system, they have no chance of actually forming government unless one of the other parties spectacularly implodes.

Labour, in my opinion, needs some time in the wilderness to regenerate itself as something other than New Labour. However, this may come at the high price of a harshly right-wing government.

¶ culture war new labour politics tories uk 0 Share

A 21-year-old Australian call centre employee is facing unspecified disciplinary action after taking sick leave and bragging on Facebook that he was absconding from work due to a hangover. Kyle Doyle's undoing seems to have been that, at some earlier time, he had added his boss to his friends list, which suggests that he might not have been the sharpest knife in the drawer; if you're looking for a partner to pull off the perfect crime with, he's probably not your man.

Heaping irony on top of stupidity, the snapshot of his profile that is circulating with the damning admission lists him as a supporter of the "Liberal Party of Australia", the right-wing party which introduced harsh industrial relations laws which, among other things, allow employers to demand medical certificates for as little as one day of sick leave.

¶ australia deception facebook fail irony risks schadenfreude stupidity tories 0 Share

It has long been said that it's grim up north, and now a new report by a right-wing think tank claims that the north of England is doomed and should be abandoned. The report by Policy Exchange, a think tank closely connected to the Conservative Party, states that northern cities which sprung up during the industrial revolution, and declined with the collapse of manufacturing, are beyond hope of regeneration:

The authors concluded that coastal cities like Liverpool and Sunderland had "lost much of their raison d'etre" with the decline of shipping and had "little prospect of offering their residents the standard of living to which they aspire".

It was time to be "realistic about the ability of cities such as Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle to regenerate struggling nearby towns such as Liverpool, Bradford and Sunderland.

"We should consider expanding both dramatically, just as Liverpool and Manchester expanded in the 19th Century. Dynamic economies require dynamic economic geography."

¶ england the north tories uk 0 Share

Today, Britain will go to the polls to elect local councils. In London, this als o involves an election for the Mayor of London, a powerful executive post with powers encompassing the entire city, which has been held since its inception by Ken Livingstone.

The election will involve a limited form of preferential voting, in which voters get two preferences; in essence, one's ideal candidate, and whom one regards as the lesser evil. (You can vote otherwise, of course; you could put down your two favourite fringe parties, in order of preference, but then once they had been eliminated, your vote would not have any input into the race between the two major-party candidates who are all but guaranteed to square off for the title.)

The two major candidates are, of course, Ken Livingstone in the Labour corner and, in the Tory corner, Boris Johnson, the outrageously outspoken party clown of the Conservative Party. Johnson is best known for his gaffes (such as talking about black areas as being full of "piccaninnies with watermelon smiles" and asking New Guineans whether they have stopped eating each other yet), though has been uncharacteristically restrained in recent months—some say by his campaign manager, none other than Lynton Crosbie, the Australian Karl Rove who kept John Howard's conservative government in power for 11 years and has since become a sort of soldier of fortune to rightwingers seeking office across the English-speaking world. Or, perhaps, by medication; for the most part, his policy pronouncements have been rather vague and not demonstrated much of a grasp on how exactly he intends to manage London (except for hinting that there'll be less management going on, and more power devolved).

Whom would I vote for? Well, naturally, Boris Johnson—if the election was for the post of Mascot of London, that is. His loveable-buffoon act is considerably more entertaining than anything Ken Livingstone has been able to come up with, and since no more suitable candidates (such as, say, a professional wrestler or Leoncie) are running, he'd be the best person for that job. However, since the election is not about choosing whom you'd most like to have a drink with at the pub but whom you'd want managing the metropolis of London, electing Johnson would be at best dismal, and quite probably disastrous.

Johnson has not revealed much of what he would actually do in office. He has issued a few policy ideas, all of which were very sketchy. There was his plan to replace the (much-maligned) bendy buses with something called "21st-century Routemasters", which nobody has actually seen, though we are supposed to believe that Boris will somehow conjure them up once he takes office; the proposal could scarcely sound less reassuring if we were promised flying Routemasters fuelled by pixie dust. (If—if—one were to take Johnson's word at face value, this would presumably involve allocating a big chunk of London council tax revenue to researching and developing a new retro-styled bus; which would be a jolly good boy's-own adventure, though hardly the most efficient use for tens of millions of taxpayers' pounds.) Other policies are either hopelessly ill-costed (such as the commitment to putting attendants on buses, whose costing turned out to be off by an order of magnitude) or else amount to little more than vague motherhood statements, promises to do something about crime or give power back to the people. If you squint hard enough, and hate the thought of Ken Livingstone getting back in enough, you can almost convince yourself that there is something there to vote for. Though you'd really need to believe that anything would be better than Livingstone.

Chances are what would happen if Johnson got in is that he'd pose for a few photo opportunities, pass a few populist pieces of legislation, play a bit with the giant model train set he has won and then, like Toad of Toad Hall, get bored of it and go off to pursue the next distraction. He already would be dividing his time with a seat in Parliament if he got in, so London couldn't expect more than half of his time. Of course, he would remain Mayor of London, but the real decisions would be made by the men behind the curtain, i.e., various nameless apparatchiks.

What these would be we can only guess at. While Johnson hasn't spoken about abolishing the successful Congestion Charge (a policy left publicly to the extreme right—the isolationist UKIP and the neo-fascist BNP—one of whose candidates is also on record as saying that rape cannot be an ordeal because women enjoy sex), he has hinted at rationalising it. It's quite likely that the rationalisation could involve filling it with the sorts of loopholes one could literally drive a SUV through. The recurring theme of "power to the people" could indicate dismantling a lot of the powers of the Mayor of London's office, the breaking up and privatisation of Transport for London, and could mean the end for projects such as Crossrail or the ongoing renewals of the Tube. As for cultural diversity, while Johnson (whom Crosbie has undoubtedly coached well in the art of dog-whistle politics) hasn't outspokenly condemned multiculturalism or championed a Daily Mail-approved brand of John Bull Englishness, he has in interviews said that the best thing about London's diversity was that one could find mangetout in the supermarket. That may or may not mean anything, but it doesn't sound promising. And let's remember that Lynton Crosbie's previous client also seemed like an affable moderate until he was safely in office and the gloves came off in a vicious, dirty culture war.

So yes, I'll be putting Ken Livingstone second. I'm still not sure whom I'll be putting first (I'm leaning towards either Siân Berry or Brian Paddick), though it won't be BoJo the Clown.

¶ boris johnson ken livingstone london politics tories uk 2 Share

They do things differently in Australia's rough-and-ready west, it seems. The leader of the West Australian opposition Liberal Party, Troy Buswell, has admitted to having sniffed the chair of a female Party staffer; the incident took place in 2005, in front of other staff members.

Mr Buswell has previously admitted to snapping a Labor staffer's bra as a drunken party trick and has been accused by retiring Liberal MP Katie Hodson-Thomas of making sexist remarks to her.

Deputy Liberal leader Kim Hames was today standing by Mr Buswell, describing him as a "rough diamond with a robust sense of humour".

(via M+N) ¶ australia bizarre politics sex tories western australia wtf 0 Share

Music critic John Harris looks at the curious phenomenon of today's Tory politicians proclaiming their fandom of vehemently anti-Thatcherite music from the 1980s, including The Smiths, The Jam and even bolshy Billy Bragg:

He praises the Smiths for their "brilliant" lyrics; while he was at Eton, he says the music of the Jam "meant a lot"; his initial shortlist for Desert Island Discs included Kirsty MacColl's version of A New England, written by Billy Bragg. At one time or another, all of them were leaders of a subculture that pitted a good deal of British rock music against the party Cameron now leads, but he swats away that incongruity with the same blithe confidence he has used to remarket the Tories as zealous environmentalists and friends of the poor. "I don't see why the left should be the only ones allowed to listen to protest songs," he says, and that seems to be that.

In the wake of the IRA attack on the 1984 Conservative party conference, for example, Morrissey rather regrettably claimed that "the sorrow of the Brighton bombing is that Thatcher is still alive". By way of pointing up his lack of remorse, his first solo album, Viva Hate, featured a particularly pointed composition entitled Margaret on the Guillotine, which ran thus: "Kind people have a wonderful dream/Margaret on the guillotine/Because people like you/Make me feel so tired/When will you die?" The song has been endlessly mentioned by those who have been querying Cameron's attachment to the Smiths, but to no avail. Just lately, he was once again presented with the words during a Guardian webchat, but batted them away with a glib flourish: "The lyrics - even the ones I disagree with - are great, and often amusing."

On this score, my favourite story concerns the Cameroonian Tory MP Ed Vaizey, who recently appeared on Michael Portillo's BBC4 Thatcher documentary, The Lady's not for Spurning, talking about the Birmingham-based 80s band the Beat, whom he claims to have "adored", despite being an "ardent Thatcherite". "They had a song called Stand Down Margaret," he marvelled, before telling Portillo he assumed that everyone in Britain admired Mrs Thatcher in much the same awestruck terms as he did, so when it came to the song's target, the penny never really dropped. "I couldn't work out what they had against Princess Margaret," he said. D'oh!

Which is more evidence supporting the argument that the countercultural underground music of the 1980s has finally completed its decay into the innocuous kitsch of "heritage rock", spent of its vitriol and now merely acoustic wallpaper? And all this with neither the original musicians nor, indeed, Margaret Thatcher being dead.

¶ billy brag heritage rock indie irony margaret thatcher new-wave politics post-punk the jam the smiths tories uk 0 Share

Ken Livingstone has promised, should he be reelected, to ban all traffic from Oxford Street and replace it with a tram line, turning the shopping thoroughfare into something like Melbourne's Bourke Street, presumably paved in red bricks and containing tramp-proof public seating and such. Unlike Bourke Street, the traffic ban will be absolute, with no exemption for taxis.

A pedestrianised Oxford St. could be a good thing, turning a congested thoroughfare into a genuine public space. On the other hand, bus routes which go through it would either be rerouted through adjacent streets (which are already quite busy) or chopped in two.

Meanwhile, Tory clown prince Boris Johnson has vowed that, should he be elected, he will allow motorbikes to use bus lanes, just as cyclists do. Finally the petrolheads have a candidate they can rely on, since Jeremy Clarkson (who proposed abolishing the congestion charge for cars but imposing a £500/day congestion charge on bicycles, on the grounds that they are a nuisance to decent motorists everywhere and the smug, politically-correct Guardian-reading vegan types who cycle are annoying) declined to run.

Alas, if Livingstone (who has done an OK job, when he's not being George Galloway Lite) doesn't get reelected, it looks like Johnson will get up, as the other candidates (Brian Paddick and Sian Berry) do not look like having a chance. And, if Johnson becomes Mayor of London, I wonder how long it'll take until the fun-loving buffoonery gives way to hardline tory policies.

(via londonconnections) ¶ boris johnson ken livingstone london politics public transport tories trams urban planning 0 Share

Rock aristocrat Bryan Ferry, unapologetic Tory and fox-hunting advocate, has expressed his admiration for the Nazis' aesthetic achievements:

In an interview withWelt am Sonntag, the 61-year-old also acknowledged that he calls his studio in west London his "Führerbunker". "My God, the Nazis knew how to put themselves in the limelight and present themselves," he said. "Leni Riefenstahl's movies and Albert Speer's buildings and the mass parades and the flags - just amazing. Really beautiful."

The singer, who is also a model for Marks and Spencer, issued a statement yesterday in which he said he was "deeply upset" by the negative publicity his remarks had caused. It added: "I apologise unreservedly for any offence caused by my comments on Nazi iconography, which were solely made from an art history perspective.

Though just looking at the aesthetics whose praises he sang so loudly: Albert Speer's cyclopean monumentalism, the Wagnerian bombast, the masses marching and chanting in unison, all subtlety subsumed beneath the single-minded show of raw, primal force. There isn't much good that can be said about these things; at best, they're crass and kitschy, and at worst, the mindset behind them is inseparable from that which would countenance projects such as the Third Reich. One does wonder about the mindset of someone with such aesthetic sensibilities.

And here is Momus' take on the whole matter, in which he reiterates his view that the aesthetics of rock are inherently fascist:

The fact that I sense some kind of fascism in rock music (especially live rock music) is absolutely central to my lifelong avoidance of the form. And rock stars don't seem to disagree with me, just disagree that it's bad, or matters. In 1975 a coked- and occulted-up David Bowie called Hitler "the first rock star -- he staged a whole country". Keith Moon liked to dress up as a Nazi, and Bobby Gillespie is fond of throwing Hitler salutes, probably more in tribute to Iggy than Adolf. What Ferry is saying now is a tame, drawing room version of the same thing.

(via xrrf) ¶ aesthetics bryan ferry fascism nazi rightwingers rockism tories 0 Share

Stephen Bayley, an prominent design critic, has issued a scathing indictment of conditions in London, speaking to a Conservative Party policy group:

"Most of them are getting worse. London is filthy, lawless and expensive. These are not great conditions for civility to flourish."

"Putting 10 million aggressive hominids into close proximity and inviting them to engage in serial acts of competitive individualism ... for jobs, schools or parking spaces, could not be considered a reasonable idea," Bayley said.

"You put rats in claustrophobic circumstances and they become homosexual, murderous and cannibalistic in no time at all.

Though has London ever been anything other than filthy, lawless and expensive?

¶ london politics rightwingers tories 0 Share

In an attempt to shed the image of being "the Nasty Party", Britain's Tories have been bending over backwards to espouse un-Tory-like positions, without going so far as to make any concrete promises that might actually adversely affect profits. First they attempted to greenwash themselves with their "go green, vote blue" campaign, and had their charismatic new leader, David Cameron, very publically cycle to his office (with a staffer following discreetly in a car, carrying paperwork); and now, they're borrowing an idea from Bhutan (or at least borrowing its overall appearance) and promising to make national happiness a priority:

In the first of several speeches on families and community, Mr Cameron told a conference organised by Google: "It's time we admitted that there's more to life than money, and it's time we focused not just on GDP but on GWB - General Wellbeing.

"It's about the beauty of our surroundings, the quality of our culture and above all the strength of our relationships. There is a deep satisfaction which comes from belonging to someone and to some place. There comes a point when you can't keep on choosing; you have to commit."

Mr Cameron's speech, seen as an attempt both to distance the party from its Thatcherite past and to underline its portrayal of the chancellor as obsessed with work and regulation, said Britain should "move beyond a belief in the Protestant work ethic alone". But he added that regulation could make business less competitive and that the key was to educate companies and encourage good practice.

Meanwhile, the Graun's Nick Pearce argues that focussing on happiness is inherently right-wing and regressive:

Happiness also has little to tell us about some of the most difficult issues of our times. Because it places a particular vision of the good life above procedural fairness, it is largely silent on human rights and constitutional government. It struggles to tell us anything useful about what morally to value in life and has little to say about the red-green agenda of marrying ecological sustainability and social justice concerns.

Happiness is therefore a flexible friend for the political right. It can provide a veneer of radicalism to a project that eschews difficult trade offs and policy choices. In the wrong hands, it appeals to a stressed out, downshifting middle class but speaks less to those suffering the misery of poverty.

¶ bhutan happiness politics spin tories uk 0 Share

Not long after Saint Bono started lauding the humanitarian credentials of George W. Bush and Pope Sidious Benedict XVI, his partner in virtue, the Rock'n'Roll Mother Teresa that is Bob Geldof is joining forces with the Conservative Party, to "help it shape its anti-poverty strategy". It'll be interesting to see what happens: whether:

1. Saint Bob will start singing the praises of neo-liberal free-trade policies as the answer to poverty,
2. the Tories will move towards supporting protectionism ("fair trade"), debt cancellation and aid, reasoning that however pissed-off their hard-line Randroid base get, they have nowhere else to go, or alternately,
3. the talks will take place fruitlessly, both parties sticking to their tenets, politely agreeing to disagree and papering over the cracks with content-free language about non-specific consensus about poverty being bad and needing to be solved and stuff, with the Tories hoping that the public's attention span is short enough for this to boost their image, at least enough so that fewer people think of them as "the Nasty Party™".

¶ bob geldof politics poverty tories 2 Share