Saturday 24 September 2011


SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2011

Saturday Seven Up




No Post-Conference Bounce for Clegg – Political Scrapbook
YouGov Finds 1/5 Labour Voters Prefer Boris to Ken – Peter Kellner
Same Old Tories. Really? – Ian Collins
A Tale of Two Executions – Brendan O’Neill
What If David Miliband was Labour leader? - LabourList
My Role in the Genesis of the ‘Cool Britannia’ Myth – Toby Young
Revenge of the Twitter Ghost – Crash Bang Wallace
LibDem Conference Closes Contentedly - Speccie
LibDems Grow Up – The Commentator
Laura Kuenssberg Was Last Straw for Crick – Telegraph
Unfinished Life: “If You Accept Death, Fear Disappears” – Philip Gould



Phil Collins in The Times on Ed Miliband…

Labour faces a government with no clue how to grow the economy as the cuts are biting and the third party has been cut in half. There should be no excuse for not winning. But the leader has not yet finished his self-portrait. In a year of his leadership he has not answered the Rolf Harris question: “Can you see what it is yet?” If an outline doesn’t emerge soon, he will end up with my son’s triceratops. Take a bit of green, a bit of red, a bit of blue, a bit of yellow and a bit of purple, mix them all up in a big splodge and what do you get? You get Brown.

SEPTEMBER 22ND, 2011

Oborne Has Guilty €urophiles Squirming

Younger readers will not know that “Guilty Men” was a book written by Michael Foot, Frank Owen and Peter Howard, published in 1940, attacking the leading establishment figures of the day for their appeasement of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. As denunciations go it is the classic and an equal to Émile Zola’s J’accuse. Peter Oborne and Francis Weaver have entitled their new pamphlet to be published by the CPS tomorrow “Guilty Men“ in a conscious echo of that great score settler. It is a coruscating attack on those who would have entangled Britain in the disastrous euro.

Their premise is that “Very rarely in political history has any faction or movement enjoyed such a complete and crushing victory as the Conservative Eurosceptics. The field is theirs. They were not merely right about the single currency, the greatest economic issue of our age — they were right for the right reasons.” This is not a mere opus of a gloat, they name and shame the establishment figures who shamelessly exaggerated, lied and eulogised on behalf the euro and the European Project and have yet to apologise for the disaster they would have wrought. The institutions who are guilty include the CBI, BBC and of course the Financial Times. The guilty men include the shameless pundits who smeared their opponents, for example David Aaronovitch, who compared David Owen to Oswald Moseley and Enoch Powell because the founder of the SDP had become sceptical of the wisdom of the euro currency. Andrew Rawnsley, Chris Patten, Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, Michael Heseltine, Ken Clarke, Charles Kennedy, Danny Alexander and from business Niall FitzGerald, Adair Turner and David Simon figure among the guilty men. It is instructive and amusing to remind ourselves of the hysterical claims and wild accusations made by these europhiles. Though this isn’t referred to in the text, it occurs to Guido that many of the same guilty men are currently making the same kind of hysterical claims about global warming.

Oborne has employed his usual panache in delivering the charges. It is wellworth reading if you enjoy the thought of europhiles squirming guiltily.

Posted by Britannia Radio at 10:22