Dear readers,
After spending over a year on this site, the ‘Letters From A Tory’ blog now has a new home at www.lettersfromatory.com. This site will no longer be used so please update your Favourites menu and update the link from your website if you have one. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed for the new site by CLICKING HERE.
Regards
A.Tory
→ 4 CommentsCategories: Blog updates
Dear John McCain,
During the numerous post-election conversations I’ve had with colleagues, friends and family, it has been mentioned on several occasions that your concession speech in the early hours of Wednesday morning (UK time) was received very well. It was humble in tone yet positive in outlook. Uou resisted any temptation to distract viewers from Obama’s achievement. Sadly, this maturity and integrity has evaporated and I am writing you this letter to express my absolute fury at your behaviour yesterday. I never thought I’d hear myself say this, but for the first time in my life I am going to defend Sarah Palin.
I think Sarah Palin is a joke, always has been a joke and probably always will be. I have shared this view with my blog readers on several occasions such as THIS and have always believed that she was the wrong choice for VP. After your defeat, I expected both you and her to slip into the background and lick your wounds privately. On the evidence of yesterday, this couldn’t be further from the truth. In a childish and purile manner, you have set your advisers the task of destroying Palin now that you’ve lost the election:
My first reaction on watching this video was to congratulate myself on identifying that Sarah Palin was a moron from day one. However, this self-congratulatory stance almost immediately morphed into seething disgust at what you’ve done. Instead of admitting and analysing your own mistakes (terrible performances in the Presidential debates, having no grasp of basic economics, not being able to inspire a crowd, not communicating your messages properly, having no charisma, producing inadequate or inappropriate policies, having no message or theme to your campaign etc) you have decided that Sarah Palin was entirely to blame for your defeat. To this end, you are going to do everything you can to destroy her reputation and career. To leak this kind of information to Fox News shows how much I misjudged you, as anyone with a shred of decency would be appearing on the programme themselves and talking about their defeat in an honest and grown-up manner without feeling a need to blame everyone but themselves.
I think you need to be reminded of a few things. In case you’ve forgotten, your presidential campaign was supposed to be built on integrity. You went on and on about your military service to show Americans that you were a true American hero, someone who had the best interests of his country at heart. In part, you were successful in doing so. To watch you set your advisers on Palin like a pack of hounds, intent on tearing Palin into small pieces, undermines everything that you stood for. If you think that it’s respectable, decent and brave of you to launch this type of attack on Palin after you chose her to be your VP, your integrity was obviously a myth all along. If you have a problem with Palin, fine, settle it in private, but to hold hands with Fox News while kicking her performance as a VP is unforgivable. Palin may have been a terrible choice, but she was your choice – and every time you take a verbal shot at her, it makes you look all the more incompetent and duplicitous. Any respect that I had for you has been wiped out by this petty act and I sincerely hope that I don’t ever have to see your spiteful face on TV again.
Yours contemptfully,
→ 19 CommentsCategories: John McCain · Sarah Palin
“I believe there is a demand, now, for [ID] cards – and as I go round the country I regularly have people coming up to me and saying they don’t want to wait that long.”
- Jacqui Smith, who would evidently prefer to rely on ridiculous anecdotes than any hard evidence to show support for ID cards (it’s not difficult to work out why)
→ 9 CommentsCategories: Jacqui Smith
Dear Hazel Blears,
What on earth are you doing? I find it impossible to understand whether this was sheer stupidity or malicious scaremongering on your part, or both. For you to go on the record in a speech to the Hansard Society yesterday saying that political blogs are creating “a culture of cynicism and despair” is very unwise. To discuss the relative strength of the right-of-centre blogs is one thing, but to blame the growth in cynicism towards politicians and Westminster in general on the people who expose the behaviour that creates the cynicism and despair in the first place is astonishing.
According to your thoroughly ill-informed and biased self, you believe that too much political commentary is provided by a ’self-appointed political class’ who leave “ordinary people” excluded from debate. Somehow you have failed to grasp the idea that political commentary via blogs is now provided by the very ‘ordinary people’ who you claim are excluded from debate. In fact, for the first time in history the disgracefully closed circle of Westminster politics has been opened up by bloggers to a wider audience than ever before. To suggest that the mainstream media must adopt a “more responsible manner” is presumably a covert attack on bloggers, as you clearly believe that bloggers should not be mentioned or discussed in the news as they say things that you don’t like. Guido has rightly pointed out before that “in an age of near costless technological disintermediation “the news” is no longer what they say it is, we can make the news ourselves, unfiltered by the metropolitan media elite” and I think that’s bloody fantastic in terms of political engagement as it shows that people care about politics, even if they don’t agree with what you lot get up to. It is ironic that in your speech, which was supposedly about political disengagement, you stated that blogs are mostly written by “people with disdain for the political system and politicians” as if this was somehow a bad thing, that it should be discouraged or that we shouldn’t listen to bloggers because they dislike the corruption and unacceptable practices in politics and seek to expose it. Don’t you think that’s a little back-to-front? Ever heard of a little something that I like to call ‘accountability’?
Even though we may well be “witnessing a dangerous corrosion in our political culture”, you chose to blame this on the explosion of major political blogs instead of taking a closer look at the record of your beloved Labour Party. Don’t get me wrong, John Major’s government was hardly squeaky clean but at least people still had faith in the power of politics to change things. Sadly, the Labour Party (Eccelstone’s £1 million, cash for honours, abusing MP expenses beyond belief, Mandelson on three occasions etc etc) have corroded the trust that we once had in politics to represent the public and to take this country forward. You suggested that “the most popular blogs are rightwing, ranging from the considered Tory views of Iain Dale, to the vicious nihilism of Guido Fawkes. Perhaps this is simply anti-establishment. Blogs have only existed under a Labour government. Perhaps if there was a Tory government, all the leading blogs would be left-of-centre?” No doubt this is true and should the next election be won by the Conservatives, the left-of-centre blogs might become more vocal.
You went to say that “until political blogging ‘adds value’ to our political culture, by allowing new voices, ideas and legitimate protest and challenge, and until the mainstream media reports politics in a calmer, more responsible manner, it will continue to fuel a culture of cynicism and despair.” You are so wrong, so very wrong. Political blogging has added so much value already by exposing that which the mainstream media is either too scared or too cosy with politicians to point out. I guess you would define ‘adding value’ as agreeing more with Labour, as your speech would clearly never have existed if left-wing blogs were any good (which, with a few notable exceptions, they are not). Have blogs fuelled cynicism and despair? Perhaps, but if this has come about by exposing the disgraceful behaviour of politicians then I say well done to the blogs. The other suggestions in your speech are barely worth a passing mention. Allowing ‘communities’ (whoever they are) to draw up council budgets would unleash mayhem and anarchy across the UK as we would have even more stupid people wasting our council tax, and your attack on career politicians seems all the more poignant given the path taken by the likes of Tony Blair. You even suggested that politics needs “more people who know what it is to worry about the rent collector’s knock, or the fear of lay-off” which shouldn’t be difficult now that Labour have destroyed the British economy, resulting in mass lay-offs in every part of the country.
To cut a long story slightly shorter, your contempt for bloggers is unjustified. You despise bloggers because they watch everything that politicians say and do in a way that the mainstream media would never dare, seeing as they are nicely tucked up in bed with the very people that they are supposed to be holding to account. You and your fellow politicians have a clear choice in front of you: you can either clean up your act and rob bloggers of the ammunition that we thrive on (sleaze, corruption, incompetence, lies and deceit) or you can attack bloggers and join the government in trying to stifle them. In yet another display of contempt for democracy and freedom from the Labour government, you have evidently chosen the latter.
Yours sincerely,
A.Tory
→ 35 CommentsCategories: Bloggers · Hazel Blears
“Next Wednesday is a new dawn for the bendy cucumber and the amusingly shaped carrot”
- European Commission Agriculture spokesman Michael Mann, as the EU is set to agree next Wednesday to scrap minimum size and shape standards for fruit and vegetables, meaning that bent cucumbers and undersized melons may make a comeback on our supermarket shelves
→ 5 CommentsCategories: EU
From TIME magazine, 23rd October 2006:
Boldness needs to be planned, not blurted–and there are all sorts of questions to ponder before he takes the next step. Would the arrogance implicit in running now, after less than one term in the Senate, undercut his carefully built reputation for judiciousness? Is the Chicago politician right about the need to be strong and simple in a run for President? Or can Obama overturn all the standard political assumptions simply by being himself? “In setting your expectations for me now, just remember I haven’t announced that I’m running in 2008,” he concluded. “I would expect that anyone who’s running in 2008, you should have very high expectations for them.” (read the full article HERE)
→ 23 CommentsCategories: Barack Obama
Dear Jeremy Hunt,
As Shadow Secretary for Culture, Media and Sport, there is plenty for you to talk about. With the Olympics no more than two years after the election, your supposedly cushy brief could end up with you walking into the lion’s den in 2010. However, more pressing is the issue of the BBC. It seemed to pass many people by that even though you shadow the DCMS, David Cameron took control of handling the Brand/Ross saga over the past week or so. This just goes to show how keenly he feels a need to ’speak to the nation’ and jump on media bandwagons. Sadly, it appears that he also now intends to wind back your plans from March this year to ‘top-slice’ the license fee in order to give Channel 4 additional funding instead of the BBC.
Even though the BBC, like the NHS, is often seen as dangerous territory for a centre-right politician to step on, your plans to move some of the license fee to help Channel 4 meet their public service broadcasting requirement seemed eminently sensible. There is no justification for seeing the BBC as the only potential source of high-quality public service programmes and your proposals were received extremely well. It was therefore with some regret that I read this morning that David Cameron is backtracking on your plans. On this issue, he said on Radio 4 yesterday: ”I’m sceptical of that. I think we need to look at this issue of top-slicing but I think there are quite a lot of difficulties with it. On the whole I think we should celebrate the success of British broadcasting. It is based on the fact that the licence fee goes to the BBC, advertising income is available for Channel 4 and ITV, and subscription flows into Sky. Because of these three streams of revenue we have got very good programming making, very good production of drama, very good news and reporting. There is a lot to celebrate and I don’t want to upset that ecology.” Instead, Cameron wants a refund for poorer households if BBC did not spend all the money it was given in the last licence fee settlement. He is joking, right?
David Cameron thinks that the “success of British broadcasting” is based around us giving the BBC £130 each a year to produce whatever they want whenever they want without fear of losing any funding despite their appalling TV listings. How does this constitute ’success’? I don’t remember hearing anyone saying that British TV is a success. In fact, the BBC is bloated beyond belief and a brief glance at their daily schedules shows how little (if any) of their shows are actually ’serving the public’ at all. As far as I can see, the BBC has plummetted to the most appalling depths and scrapes the barrel just to put together a single day’s television – and don’t even get me started on the fact that my license fee pays for Eastenders when Coronation Street and Emmerdale are both free-standing and funded by advertising. ITV and Channel 4 have to produce good shows or they wouldn’t survive, and even though a lot of what they put on is also mindless trash at least they have an incentive to perform well – where is the BBC’s incentive? Why should Sky have to survive on subscriptions when the BBC gets hundreds of millions every year with no strings attached? And since when did we have good news broadcasting on the BBC? I wish! The general standard of programme-making is abysmal as our most TV dramas.
You said in March 2008, at the launch of your top-slicing proposals, that encouraging competition in programme-making “has been vital in raising standards across British broadcasting”, and I think competition is absolutely right in broadcasting. But how can anyone claim that competition exists when the BBC receives every penny of our license fee? I know that approaching the issue of reducing the license fee is a very tricky area to approach this side of an election, but top-slicing the license fee would at least light the fuse for getting the BBC to work harder for their money in future. I am bitterly disappointed that Cameron has made you look like a mug on this issue and I don’t think the leader of the opposition wading into some stupid row about idiotic radio broadcasts has helped the Conservatives one bit.
Yours sincerely,
A.Tory
→ 13 CommentsCategories: BBC · Jeremy Hunt
“It was one of the very greatest American presidents, Theodore Roosevelt, who said the duty of America abroad was to “speak softly but carry a big stick”. George Bush forgot the ’speak softly’ bit. But Obama needs to remember the vital importance of continuing to carry a big stick.”
- Boris Johnson, who discusses the new James Bond film in the context of the American Presidential election in a way that only Boris can in today’s Telegraph
→ Leave a CommentCategories: Boris Johnson
Dear James Purnell,
Where does this end? We don’t have to wait more than a few weeks to hear of yet another government or government-contracted official carelessly losing the personal details of thousands, if not millions of people. This time, a memory stick with user names and passwords for a government computer system was found in a pub car park of all places and resulted in a major government website being shut down as a security precaution. To make matters more terrifying for members of the public, your response had been woeful and makes the prospect of ID cards even more disturbing.
This year alone, we have heard about the details of 600,000 potential Navy recruits being lost, government officials leaving secret documents on trains, a Home Office contractor losing a memory stick containing files on over 80,000 pensioners and the Ministry of Defence losing a disc with the details of 100,000 Armed Services personnel. This all comes after HMRC lost 25 million child benefit records last year, making Gordon Brown’s statement that “I think the important thing is to prevent these kind of things happening in future” even more insulting. The latest incident was compounded by the disclosure that you of all people have had to apologise after you left confidential letters relating to the case of a constituent of Labour MP Sir Gerald Kaufman on a train in early October. Luckily for you, the papers were returned to the DWP three days later by a passenger but when Secretaries of State start playing fast and loose with the intimate personal details of British citizens, you can hardly expect contractors to do any better.
Quite astonishingly, this latest memory stick to go walkabout was found in a pub car park in Cannock, Staffordshire, where Atos Origin – a government contractor – is based. Atos said in a statement that it was clear that an employee had removed the memory stick from the company’s premises in “direct breach” of its procedures and will fully investigate the loss blah blah blah working closely with the police blah blah blah. Then one of your spokeswomen for DWP said the Gateway website was shut down “for a short period as a precaution” and insisted that the memory stick contained data for “only a handful” of people – so that makes it alright. It doesn’t matter that next time the memory stick could contain millions of personal records because this time it didn’t, so why panic? As if the wheres and hows of this incident were embarrassing enough, your response was even more shocking. You were clearly elbowed out of the way by Gordon Brown on this occasion who noticed how little credibility you now have on this issue thanks to your recent blunder. However, his fighting talk was hardly reassuring. In response to leaving the memory stick in a pub car park and risking the security of an entire government website and database, our gloriously magnificent PM said that the DWP would be taking action and Atos Origin could face changes to its five year contract worth £46m. Wow. I bet the underwear of every single Atos Origin employee changed colour when they heard that their contract might change.
There was no mention from you or the PM about curtailments on the use of memory sticks and discs containing sensitive information (which has always struck me as cavalier and arrogant in the face of possible security breaches). In addition, the topic of ID cards was not discussed. Unlike some people, I believe that there is a case to be made for some form of ID cards (although nothing like the scale that is being proposed) but you and your fellow Cabinet ministers don’t seem to understand the implications for your ID card scheme when these data losses occur with such regularity. If each ID card contains 42 pieces of information on every person in the UK, that’s a lot of information to store and a hell of a lot to lose. You tell us that the database will be safe yet you wonder why nobody believes you. So much for being the party that ‘listens and learns’.
Yours sincerely,
A.Tory
→ 7 CommentsCategories: ID cards · James Purnell
You know that feeling you get when you read about the latest Labour policy initiative and think to yourself ‘Which idiot thought that was a good idea? How can anyone think that will actually work?’ – well, it looks like this idiocy is not confined to the British Isles.
→ Leave a CommentCategories: Fast food · New Zealand
“Hey everyone, look who I found, a Republican who knows how to win something!”
McCain is reduced to bringing Schwarzenegger in front of the cameras at the last minute and leaking a story about Obama’s aunt to the media. I don’t want McCain to win but I still wanted a decent contest. What a sad demise.
→ 8 CommentsCategories: John McCain
“The government said they would attach strict conditions on bonuses and it is very clear they are doing nothing of the kind. The banks are just making complete monkeys of them.”
- Vince Cable, Lib Dem Treasury spokesman, reacts to the news that RBS has set aside hundreds of millions of pounds for staff bonuses, despite being bailed out with £20 billion of taxpayers’ money
→ 6 CommentsCategories: Vince Cable
Dear Sienna Miller,
Seeing as the financial crisis and the Brand/Ross debacle continue to bore everyone, it was interesting to see your landmark legal action about the paparazzi get some coverage today. Unlike Russell Brand being an insensitive, vulgar and obnoxious idiot, I find your legal case genuinely interesting and it is an issue that I feel extremely strongly about. You are seeking compensation from one of the most notorious firms of paparazzi after claiming she had been victim of a “campaign of harassment” and that they have made your life “intolerable” – and I say ‘good on you’.
Whenever I hear people say that we live in a ‘media age’ and that celebrities have to accept that their private lives will be invaded once they become famous, my blood starts to boil. As I said in the ‘Why I write these letters’ page on this blog, I am a fierce defender of everyone, including celebrities, having a right to privacy. If your legal action is successful, it is conceivable that sections of the media could be inundated with claims of privacy breaches and harassment, which I have no problem with. For photographers to hang around outside people’s homes, stalk them, harrass them in the street, follow them around on nights out, snap them going for a walk in the park (often with their children), chase them in cars and hide around street corners is disgusting and just goes to show how depraved our media culture has become when the public lap up the destruction of people’s private lives just to provide them with a few giggles as they read through Hello magazine.
Your lawyers claim that in the past four months you have suffered from physical and verbal abuse and have twice been involved in dangerous car chases with photographers. During yesterday’s preliminary hearing, the court heard your complaints of a series of incidents including being confronted outside her house in Maida Vale, London, on 22nd June “and then chased by car in a dangerous manner to Heathrow airport”. On 21 July, following your return from Italy, you were pursued and harassed in west London, and on 28 August, after returning to London from Ibiza, you were also pursued when walking your dogs in the park with your mum. Other examples include being “pursued in a dangerous manner all the way from Stroud to Heathrow” on 7 September, which you found “very frightening” and understandably so. The harassment even included an incident in which you were pursued to a petrol station in Malibu, California and subsequently ”hounded and taunted”.
There are two things that I am appalled by about this situation. Firstly, I find it totally unacceptable that the fear felt by you is not just tolerated by the police but has become entirely routine in the lives of so many people. I don’t care how famous you are – I still believe 100% that you should have a private live that neither I nor anyone else is entitled to know about. As I said in ‘Why I write these letters’, the only exception to this should be if an elected public official or senior figure behaves in a way that it does not meet the high standards expected in public office – but even then, the vast majority of their lives should remain undocumented. Secondly, it is very sad that people like you who are hounded and harrassed by photographers should have to resort to using laws that were designed to protect people from stalkers in order to get the press to back off. Why do we not have laws protecting people from being followed at any time, anywhere and for any reason? How can it be legal to chase someone in a car, hang around outside someone’s home when you don’t know the owner, take pictures of someone who you have never met or stalk someone as they go about their daily lives? How can this be accepted by society?
You will have to prove that you were relentlessly pursued on several occasions and suffered harrassment just to stop the paparazzi from invading your privacy. How tragic that this is the only line of defence you have. Your barrister even said that the pictures published by the group of photographers that you have going after captured “essentially private moments”. My attitude is ’so what?’ – every part of your life, bar stepping on the red carpet to attend a film premiere or a magazine photo shoot, is a ‘private moment’. Your entire live should be private unless you decide otherwise, and I think it is terrible that you should have to go to court to get people to understand this. Good luck to you, Sienna. I sincerely hope your court case is successful.
Yours sincerely,
A.Tory
→ 3 CommentsCategories: Privacy invasion · Sienna Miller
Although I think it’s a very amusing suggestion, I’m still left scratching my head trying to figure out who would want to wear one of THESE.
→ 1 CommentCategories: Relationships
Dear Geoff Hoon,
Seeing as your legacy as Defence Secretary consisted of failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at the cost of thousands of innocent lives and British service personnel, you presumably saw Transport Secretary as a fairly cushy number. What you obviously didn’t realise was that your incompetence could still be very damaging in your new role. Smacking an extra tax on motorists is not likely to win you any friends, nor is it justifiable from an economic perspective.
Let’s start with a quick look back at Labour’s record on transport. According to a report by Glasgow and Plymouth Universities released last week, the following has come to pass since 1998: traffic congestion is worse than a decade ago, the investment needs of the railways have been almost completely ignored (in particular to increase capacity), bus services in most of the UK have remained poor especially in comparison with European rivals, tram schemes have been abandoned despite proving effective at getting motorists out of their cars, walking and cycling have been largely neglected, the government is afraid of addressing the environmental impact of aviation and transport carbon emissions continue to rise. Hearty congratulations for Labour on all counts. In response to this abject failure, your response is classic Labour - charge motorists more. And why not! They are such an easy target for fuel tax increases so you might as well heap a little extra misery on them.
Your new scheme will create a faster lane for those willing to pay for a quicker journey on the country’s busiest roads during the rush hour - up to 42p a mile. Cars would be fitted with a transponder which fits to the windscreen and is linked to an account held by the motorist so that the payment can be deducted each time the car passed an overhead gantry. Hmmm. So, not satisfied with car tax, fuel tax and new scams like the showroom tax, you’re now going to penalise drivers AGAIN because Labour have failed to invest in rail and tram networks, forcing people to use their cars and drive on roads and motorways – only to charge them more if they want to travel at a decent speed. Outrageous. Not unsurprisingly, a poll of 12,000 AA members showed considerable public hostility to the idea, with 58% rejecting the idea. Lord Adonis, the new transport minister, thinks this is all a wonderful idea and I can see why – extra taxes for the government!
To be honest, you seem to think that you can take the best of both worlds. To my mind, you have two options: firstly, you can sell the road and motorways to Road Trusts, scrap car tax and let us pay what we are willing to pay to drive on each road (as spelled out by the Adam Smith Institute); or secondly, collect our money through car tax (which should be linked to inflation) and invest it properly so that our roads are up to standard and new ones are built wherever necessary. It seems that you would prefer to sit in the cosy middle and take our car taxes then charge us even more through stealth taxes when you need some more money for investment. Everyone knows how badly short of cash Labour are, but I thought you had learned your lesson about how much we all hate stealth taxes – obviously not.
Yours sincerely,
A.Tory
→ 10 CommentsCategories: Geoff Hoon · Motoring
“Whatever the merits of the Brand-Ross joke, or the judgment of the BBC editors, the last thing we want is comedy content being decided by Gordon Brown or Jeremy Hunt”
- Dr Evan Harris, Lib Dem MP
→ 17 CommentsCategories: Evan Harris
Dear Nick Clegg,
It was on reading the ComRes poll yesterday that something rather amusing struck me. While Brown has been hailed a global hero (much to my annoyance) and Cameron has been fighting back with attacks on the Prime Minister’s judgement and record, it suddenly occured to me that you are nowhere to be seen. I mean, really nowhere. I haven’t heard a peep from you in quite a while, despite the catastrophic meltdown of the global economy and the two main parties in the UK struggling to gain support, so I set about doing a few searches on the internet to see what you’d been up to.
I started with the BBC. What has Nick Clegg been saying about the credit crunch? Answer: not much.
So I turned to Google instead, and found that on typing ‘Clegg credit crunch’ the top story is about you being so badly affected by the credit crunch that you have been forced to shop at Sainsburys instead of Ocado. On the same page, I also found John Redwood savaging you for thinking that the basic pension was £30 a week, which caused you great embarrassment in the Commons if memory serves me correctly. Having failed with that search, I typed ‘Clegg economy’ into Google instead. This produced a string of references to your ‘The financial crisis could be an economic 9/11′ soundbyte from such media titans as the Yorkshire Post and the Aberconwy Lib Dem website.
What are you playing at, seriously? You can’t just walk away when the going gets tough and expect the voters to welcome you back with open arms once the crisis starts to dwindle (which could be months, if not years, from now). There are around 18 months until the next election and you have gone completely AWOL for weeks and weeks, bar one soundbyte and a couple of ill-informed remarks. I understand that a third party will find it hard to surpass Brown and Cameron in terms of airtime, but when our economy is so desperately in need of an alternative to massive borrowing hikes, surely there is a great opportunity to steal some of Cameron’s thunder and challenge Brown directly?
The Lib Dems are still 6% behind their 2005 general election result and that’s after a year of Labour freefall and recent Conservative difficulties – what does that say about your leadership? And leadership is precisely what your party and this country needs right now. Tempting as it may be to simply sneak away while no-one is looking in the hope of doing some work behind the scenes instead, you cannot expect voters to flick on their support for Lib Dems like a light switch if and when you decide to reappear. Voters don’t like being treated like idiots. As the third party, you can afford to be more radical, more innovative and more aggressive in your policies than the Conservatives, but you seem totally uninterested in putting together such a package and what’s more, you appear uninterested in the financial crisis full-stop.
Yours sincerely,
A.Tory
→ 10 CommentsCategories: Credit crunch 2008 · Nick Clegg
“As Warren Buffett once put it, when the tide goes out you learn who’s been swimming naked – and as the water has receded rapidly down the beach, it has been possible for the first time in many years to see the UK economy as nature intended. And it is clear we are not getting a glimpse here of Botticelli’s Venus.”
- Larry Elliott, taking a swipe at Gordon Brown in today’s Comment Is Free
→ 1 CommentCategories: Larry Elliott
Dear Michael Brown,
Your analysis of today’s ComRes poll in The Independent has highlighted a number of problems facing the Conservatives, none of which are easy to deal with. Four weeks ago, ComRes had Cameron 12 points ahead but this has now slipped to a 8 point lead – 39 to the Conservatives (-2), 31 to Labour (+2) and 16 to the Lib Dems (-2). There are always debates over what might have caused this shift in opinion, but I think your analysis is largely correct.
George Osborne will not have enjoyed his recent press coverage. At a time when many people are facing job losses (or have already lost their job), the image of Osborne sipping champagne on a yacht in Corfu did not help matters. If he hadn’t started the argument with Mandelson in the first place, perhaps the story would never have broken – hindsight is a wonderfully cruel thing. Although any sensible person would not demand that politicians cancel all of their holidays and live off home-grown vegetables for the next year, the impression that the Deripaska story gave was damaging. You rightly spotted that George Osborne hasn’t said anything notable on the economy for at least a week, which just goes to show how difficult it has been for the Conservative attacks on the running of the economy to penetrate the public consciousness.
Corfu yachts aside, I very much agree that the Conservatives ”have failed for weeks to find their voice on the financial woes afflicting the nation.” At the party conference one month ago, Cameron and his team played a very sensible and considered game. Since then, Brown and Darling have made enormous political capital out of their decisions on the economy. That is not to say they have made all the right choices, but the public are desperate to see the government taking affirmative action to bolster the banks and the economy and this is precisely what Labour have done. I don’t know whether you’d agree with me on this, but I don’t think the voters care about The Golden Rule for borrowing or the intellectual pitfalls of Keynesian economics – they just want to see the government straining every bone in their body to help protect our financial position.
The Conservatives tried to jump on this bandwagon and support the government because, like you said, they didn’t have any better ideas. They swiftly decided that this wasn’t getting them anywhere so they tried to go on the attack by correctly blaming Gordon Brown for getting us in this mess in the first place. But again, I’m not sure the voters want to here about Bank of England independence in 1997 or the failures of the FSA (who most of the public have probably never heard of). They want strength, they want decisiveness and they want to feel cared about. On all three counts, Labour have delivered. I’m not saying that their plans won’t come crashing down, but even if the economic situation gets worse (which it probably will) if they can stick to this approach then Labour can put the Conservatives in a very difficult position with the voters – do they agree that Labour are doing the right thing and agree with them, or do they disagree and put forward their own plans that clearly don’t exist at the moment? I agree with you that Cameron is “frightened to spell out the obvious truth that Mr Brown’s resort to Keynesian pump-priming will be a failure” because without an alternative, he will look opportunistic and desperate. However, the only alternatives to raising spending are cutting spending or cutting taxes - with the former leading to an assault by voters and the latter leading to an assault by Labour. John Redwood and the readers of ConservativeHome may be calling for a swathe of tax cuts but Cameron is well aware of the dangers that await him if he goes down that road.
Yours sincerely,
A.Tory
→ 6 CommentsCategories: Credit crunch 2008 · Michael Brown
Dear Gary McFarlane,
I’m not sure you could have split my own personal opinion any more if you tried. As you are a Christian, I can confidently state that my attitude towards homosexuals is more liberal than yours. Now that you have been sacked by Relate, the national counselling service, for refusing to give sex advice to homosexual couples, the re-emergence of the same dividing lines that split my thinking and split the opinion of the nation over the Catholic adoption agencies is inevitable.
You are clearly unhappy with having lost your job and have criticised Relate for not accommodating his religious beliefs. You even accused them of “bigotry” and said that ”if I was a Muslim this would not happen.” Strong words indeed. In light of this, your decision to take your case to an employment tribunal, alleging unfair dismissal on the grounds of religious discrimination, is an intruiging one. Not unsuprisingly, I have never trained as a sex therapist, but regardless of how one views your actions the conflict between your religious beliefs and homosexual couples entering your practice was always likely to occur. You said that while you believed in ‘each to their own’, you felt uncomfortable doing anything that would directly encourage gay sex, and raised the matter with your supervisor – only to be labelled as homophobic and get suspended. Despite being reinstated a short while later, it was decided that you could no longer uphold Relate’s equal opportunities policy and were subsequently dismissed and your appeal was rejected.
Just like the Catholic adoption agency saga, I’m left in a conundrum by all this. I think it is possible but far from certain that you could win your tribunal on the grounds that your employer did not accommodate your religious views. The fact that you were fired for not adhering to equal opportunities policy seems mildly ironic given that Christians are not being given an ‘equal opportunity’ to be employed by Relate. If someone in the public sector such as a trainee doctor refused to complete part of their medical training because of religious beliefs, they should be thrown off the course (and I believe that something similar to this did occur recently) because they are being trained by the taxpayer and must adhere to strict professional standards of treating patients. However, I’m not sure the same stance applies in your case. As Relate are not in the public sector, I cannot figure out whether the same principle applies in the sense that Relate are one of many counselling services around the country and presumably clients can go elsewhere if they choose. The same logic would apply to Catholic adoption agencies as there are plenty of other agencies to choose from, hence their wish to be allowed an exemption.
But this is where my confusion starts. If we allow one religion to discriminate, will this open the floodgates for other religious groups to discriminate against homosexuals, women or even members of other religions? The answer is surely ‘yes’. Even so, we already allow NHS doctors to refuse to perform abortions on purely personal grounds, so shouldn’t the same logic apply to you, fellow counsellors and adoption agencies that are seldom employed by the taxpayer? I seem to remember a huge furore over recent stories about employees of retailers such as WH Smith refusing to serve customers alcohol on religious grounds, but the employees were not fired because the company feared religious discrimination laws. I cannot condone your view that you would have been treated differently if you were a Muslim as it is impossible to say how Relate would have reacted. Irrespective of this, just like the Catholic adoption agency row, the outcome of your upcoming tribunal will be fascinating to watch. The clash between discrimination laws and freedom of expression is always a dangerous one.
Yours sincerely,
A.Tory
→ 18 CommentsCategories: Equality · Gary McFarlane
“The polls are all over the map”
- John McCain, who evidently resorted to stating the obvious when discussing the new Reuters-Zogby poll that put Obama’s advantage at five points
→ 2 CommentsCategories: John McCain
Dear Martin Kettle,
Like many others, the conclusions that you have drawn from the Osborne-Mandelson debacle go far beyond what is necessary and appropriate. Thankfully, it seems that after a few days of continuous press attention (ok, continuous BBC attention) people have realised that Osborne has broken any rules and Mandelson is still the corrupt soul that he always was. Furthermore, I don’t think that your suggestions on Comment Is Free for how to ‘prevent’ similar situations arising in future are particularly helpful.
The US electoral system is indeed very different to ours, but I accept your comment that ”fundraising from the rich is an inescapable precondition of electability.” For Barack Obama to raise $153 million from Americans, both rich and poor, is astonishing but ultimately the big funders are still an essential element of the campaign. The need to court those with a healthy bank balance is certainly nothing new and I have become incredibly frustrated with this whole Corfu nonsense on the basis that the media have been trying to portray the notion of politicians spending time with the wealthy as something new, something dangerous and something reprehensible. For a start, George Osborne was on holiday at the time and it seems grossly unfair that his acceptance of an invitation onto a yacht while relaxing in Corfu have proved so damaging.
Anyway, back to your article. Even though the Conservatives never accepted a donation from Oleg Deripaska, the fact that it was ever mentioned in conversation does highlight a troubling loophole in our electoral law. As you rightly pointed out, ”a foreigner cannot donate to a political party – but in certain circumstances a British company owned by a foreigner can.” As Mr Deripaska owns what used to be Leyland DAF, a UK firm, rumour has it that it would have been possible – if not ethically correct – for Deripaska to use his company to make a donation. That this is even a possibility worries me greatly. On the one hand, Osborne didn’t break the rules, thus there is a perfectly legitimate argument to say that he has done nothing wrong. Even if one does take this stance, the existence of said loophole that could potentially have been exploited does raise serious questions about the strength of our electoral laws and you covered several examples, cited in the The Financial Times, of donors making full use of this loophole – such as the London-based US financier Robin Saunders, whose attempt to make a personal donation of £6,000 to the Conservative party was refused but whose company then made a similar donation, which was accepted.
Seeing as Osborne has not broken electoral law, the simultaneous cries from Gordon Brown, Chris Huhne and Denis MacShane for an investigation seem utterly pointless (if politically understandable). The Electoral Commission immediately turned down their request as they could see that they were powerless to intervene. Unfortunately, your solutions don’t seem to stack up. Firstly, you think that shadow ministers should be required to stick to the ministerial code in their private and public life. If you genuinely believe that this would have made a difference in this instance, then surely Peter Mandelson is guilty of something? If shadow ministers wish to leave themselves open to scrutiny by approaching individuals of questionable integrity, surely it is up to the public to decide if they want them in government at the next election? Secondly, you think that British politicians “must assume that the pack will always be out to get them over their private life. The company they keep, the places they go, the things they like to do …are never off-limits for a second.” I find this totally unpalatable. I strongly support everyone’s entitlement to a private life, regardless of their career. If a politician breaks the law or breaks the rules then by all means splash them across the front pages, but you forget that all politicians must declare gifts, donations and interests as a matter of course on which they can already be judged and investigated if need be, so there is absolutely no reason why they should be followed around by camera crews – especially on family holidays. Finally, you suggest that by rejecting public funding for political parties “we condemn politicians to solicit money from potential supporters and thus to encourage the destructive sanctimony of MPs and writers who make a living out of smugness.” No, we don’t. We condemn politicians to a life of justifying every penny that they receive, be it from party suporters or donors. There are rules in place to prevent fundraising from turning nasty and if these rules aren’t tough enough then by all means change them, but do not for one second suggest that state funding of parties would help restore integrity. Quite the contrary. It would create a generation of lazy and incompetent politicians (moreso than now, I should add) who know that their party bank account will fill up without expending a single calorie or having to show the country why they deserve our support. Honestly, what rubbish.
Yours sincerely,
A.Tory
→ 9 CommentsCategories: Martin Kettle · Party funding
“He has taken up more positions on immigration than someone in training with the Kama Sutra”
- Lib Dem Home Affairs spokesman Chris Huhne on Phil Woolas who, he said, had made a “cack-handed” start as Immigration Minister
→ 6 CommentsCategories: Chris Huhne
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