THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 2011
Chris Bryant Replaces Richard Ingrams at the Indy
Guido has a sense that the Indy has, post-Hari, improved under the new editor Chris Blackhurst, the news values seem to have sharpened up a bit. It is somewhat questionable however that it is really as free from proprietorial interference as it claims on the masthead. Chris Bryant seems to have replaced Richard Ingrams as an Indycolumnist, sadly his column isn’t quite as good as Ros Taylor’s parody of him, over which he threatened to sue the Guardian. Coincidentally Chris is a friend of Lebedev’s son Evgeny and was at a recent dinner party with the oligarch’s offspring. Evgeny “speaks regularly” to Chris Blackhurst, no doubt about the weather…
It is also said that the new editor is looking at the cost of the strip cartoon by Sally Ann Lasson. The current editor doesn’t find her as funny as the old editor Simon Kelner did, but then he is married to Sally…
Elsewhere the Telegraph is said to be contemplating hiring the Guardian’sfeminist writer Tanya Gold for their political team. It would never have happened in Heffer’s day…
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.
Left-Wing Think-Tank Wants Labour to Tax the Poor More
The best policy idea to come out of LibDem conference was Danny Alexander’s call for tax thresholds to be raised to £12,500, effectively taking minimum wage earners out of income tax. Reversing Gordon Brown’s complicated tax – the – poor – and – pay – them – benefits strategy. Brown effectively and deliberately made those in work on low earnings recipients of welfare benefits. Brown wanted everyone to be on state benefits (welfare “universalism”) for purely political reasons so as to maximise buy-in from all classes into the welfare state. Hence the cynical Brown/Balls attachment to child benefit for millionaire mums and winter fuel allowances for Michael Winner.
Raising the tax threshold is simple, has popular appeal and will benefit those on low earnings proportionately more than those on higher earnings. It will take some pressure off the “squeezed middle” and won’t increase the welfare trap. It isn’t a perfect policy, prominent Orange-booker Mark Littlewood, a wonk the Institute for Economic Affairs, is wary that it will result in millions of voters being unaffected by the basic rate of income tax who therefore won’t be incentivised to vote for parties and policies that favour lower taxes. He fears that low-earners will have no reason to buy-in to tax cuts if they are taken out of the income tax bracket entirely.
The organised opposition to this policy however is coming from the left-wing, EU-funded think-tank IPPR. The IPPR was founded and funded by the unions back in the Kinnock era to drag the Labour Party to the centre, in the post New Labour era and under new management it is dragging the Labour Party away from the centre towards the left. IPPR is arguing against raising tax thresholds because it won’t help the poorest who are on benefits and not working. This criticism cuts no ice because tax cuts, by definition, are designed to help taxpayers. IPPR argues that targeting benefits, sprecifically towards childcare, would be more effective and cheaper. It is as if they are speaking a different language, the problem of welfare dependency won’t be solved by paying out more benefits.
Nevertheless Guido wishes IPPR well, their wonkish sophistry may well appeal to Ed Miliband. If in 2015 the coalition parties are standing on a platform of reducing taxes on the working poor with the Labour Party standing on a platform of taxing the poor, Miliband will be on the wrong side of the dividing line. “Vote Labour and tax the poor” is a winning campaign slogan – for the coalition parties.
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2011
Vicky Pryce Not Happy With Huhne
Her Lawyer Releases New Statement
Vicky Pryce has just released this statement via her lawyers
“I am surprised that my ex-husband considers it appropriate to talk at a public meeting about the very private aspects of our family life. I do not intend to comment on his interview or its accuracy. However, I consider, particularly given the setting of where he was, that what he said is a serious intrusion into mine and our family’s private life.”
Psycho Huhne strikes again…
Total Politics Blog Readers Awards: We’re Still #1
We’re chuffed that Total Politics magazine readers once again voted Order-Order.com the top political blog. Thanks are due to the readers and fans who have voted us Britain’s #1 blog for the third year running. We’re so very proud to be the blog you love and they hate.
We have had scoops large and small, gossip, fun, hounded Johann Hari and even broken some hard news stories to keep bringing in an average of 100,000 readers a week to find out what is really going on in Westminster. Last year we were happy to do our bit to bring down the deficit, this year we have done it again, putting Jane Pilgrim back to work on the front line as an NHS nurse not a full-time union agitator at the taxpayers’ expense.We’re cutting the deficit one non-job at a time.
Looking back on this year we’re pleased that we have increasingly focused on the hypocrisy of the politico-media nexus. Apart from Private Eye we’re pretty much alone in covering this subject. Investigations like this Guy News edition, which sent Polly Toynbee and Alan Rusbridger into hypocrisy gymnastics:
As the papers remain pretty schtum we’ve been highlighting the pretensions and fears of the media. Almost all of the newspapers have been hacking and blagging away merrily over the years and it is our intention to make sure that the “Circular Firing Squad” happens and that the truth is revealed. It isn’t just one newspaper editor or rogue journalist, it is hundreds of members of Her Majesty’s Press who have been breaking the law. Though you wouldn’t know that if you just read the papers.
It won’t make us any friends, though we didn’t come to Westminster to make friends, and we have certainly achieved that objective. While we’re on the subject we may as well ask about the blogs that didn’t bark: whatever happened to all that nonsense about the left-wing blogs thriving in opposition? They now have full-time staff and union funding yet they’re still not getting cut-through. Despite the change of government, Guido’s still leading the opposition.
We can’t do it without you. We’ll keep digging, muck-raking and totty-watching as long as we have readers who support us. Thanks for your attention…
Psycho Huhne Checklist
Chris Huhne’s performance last night when questioned by Andrew Rawnsley about his marriage and speeding was jaw-dropping. It confirms Guido in his opinion that Chris Huhne is a political-psychopath. It is widely and euphemistically said by cabinet colleagues that Huhne has an“incredible ability to compartmentalise his life”. Now an ability to remain cool under fire is admirable, when it is to a degree that it is so manifestly cold and calculating it raises questions.
The clinically accepted Hare psychopathy checklist applied to Huhne is revealing. Guido scored Huhne as having 17/20 pyschopathic character traits based on everything we know about him. Here is a man who told the mother of three of his children and wife of 26 years that he was having an affair and their marriage was over using the words “we have thirty minutes to kill the story“. He psychopathically hoped to enlist Vicky’s immediate help in protecting his political career from the publicity fall-out.
Print out the test below and score Huhne for yourself:
Scary isn’t it?
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