Cameron: 'Power to the People'

At least with Wolfie Smith, you knew he was sincere...

I had a good chortle at the mega-cobblers in the Evening Standard about the Conservative Manifesto. The only real surprise was they didn't decide to put Samantha Cameron on the front with 'VOTE FOR ME!' strewn across it. Instead we got this:

 
My cheque is in the post...

Apparently it costs £4, comes in hardback and is 118 pages of densely written text. It sounds an ideal door stop or something to throw through an appropriate window when it goes all totally Greece/Iceland/Ireland here. Lord Ashcroft must have money to burn by the sounds of it.

Dave promised he would help us all 'Be your own boss'. I don't think he was thinking the 1917 Petrograd Soviets somehow or mass expropriation by the workers of  the companies which employ the 100+ Big Business leaders who don't want to see National Insurance rise. Although the line 'Same as the old boss' from The Who's 'Won't Get Fooled Again' did implant itself in my brain.

He also said 'We're all in this together.' Some of us more than others, eh Dave?

General Election Time Is Almost Upon Us. Can I Get Excited...?

The 1640s: the birth of negative campaigning in British Politics

I'm getting a fair bit of political leafletting and mail shots at the moment. Mainly from the Tories and the Lib Dems. The Glibs say they can win here (Hampstead and Kilburn), although I gather in every seat in the country their propaganda claims they 'can win here.' I have a feeling a lot of the Lib Dem stuff is to motivate people to vote in the Camden Council elections which will also be on May 6th. Camden is currently run by a Con-Lib Dem coalition, with the three councillors in the ward where I am all Lib Dems. So all this stuff is not so much to get a Lib Dem here into Parliament as to prop up Lib Dem support for the Council Elections.

I'm going to try and force myself to post something every day once the General Election campaign starts, which most informed and (uninformed) opinion says will begin next week with Gordon Brown going to Bucks House to secure Mrs Windsor's dissolution of Parliament. I'll try and discuss anything that I find interesting and/or catches my eye, or at the very least make sure you know about it. This is supposed to be the first 'Internet General Election' in British history (although they said that about the '97, '01 and '05 ones as well, I seem to recall), so I will do my best to get a handle on how it is all going.

I will get another couple of posts up in the next few days (internet/media and US politics will be their general theme) before the big hoo-haa begins. Just to whet your appetite for the Big One, I've taken a few images from the superb Bo Beau D'Or blog, who like a lot of people, does not want the Tories to win, but is not too enamoured with Labour either (as opposed to people who do not want Labour to win, but are not too enamoured with the Tories either!).

Yes, the Tories are bringing back Maurice and Charles Saatchi to oversee most of their General Election advertising campaign, while Saatchi & Saatchi (which Charles and Maurice left back in '95 to form M&C Saatchi, which came up with the Tony Blair 'Demon Eyes' poster which led to the crushing Conservative landslide victory in 97...) oversee Labour's ad account. Whoever said the business/media/political world is incestuous eh? Furthermore, I wonder if  M&C's campaign are less open to ridicule than other Conservative advertising campaigns so far this year? (Hat-tip: MyDavidCameron.com)

 

I'll leave the General Election there for the moment. There'll be a lot more where that's coming from in the next few weeks (I can see you flicking travel websites as I type, looking for cheap flights out the country...). I suppose we should just be glad this Parliament is almost at an end. To quote a phrase someone from around 360 years back, what we are left with for the next few days is 'this fag end, this veritable Rump of a Parliament with corrupt maggots in it' (Trevor Royle [2005] Civil War: The Wars of the Three Kingdoms 1638-1660, Abacus, p.485).

February: 'a detestable month with no virtue except shortness.' (George Orwell)

 

UK recession over: rejoice, rejoice...

Every time I look 45 degrees to my right I see a pile of books on my table that are demanding to be read. I may have to take the blogging easy for a short while, but before then I have a few links you may want to peruse.

At AngloNoel Towers I have vaguely being following the opinion polls. It appears the Cons are a bit ahead of NuLab but the lead appears to be falling. Then again it may not be. No-one really knows and I doubt anyone really cares that much out there in 'the real world' which bunch of professional shyters in suits (almost typed 'suites' then...Freudian slip) get the keys to Number 10 in a few months time. I think any time the public looks at one of the main parties for any considerable period of time, they are generally revulsed. Then they look at the other lot, and the polls start going in the other direction...It reminds me of being a neutral sports fan and seeing two teams playing who are full of individuals who, whatever their talents as sportspeople, are pretty obnoxious as human beings. Who do you cheer on? Those who are sick of politics being treated as mere showbiz or sport may like to read some Marina Hyde.

Whether or not the Conservative poll lead is falling- if it is I blame MyDavidCameron.com myself!- it appears people are more 'conservative' politically after 13 years of New Labour telling everybody that, yes, the Conservatives were right after all. Comment on thse survey findings can be found here and here. Frankly, to try and rally extremely disllusioned Labour support for the General Election on the grounds by saying  how bad and nasty the Conservatives will be in Government comes across as extremely shallow and pathetic politicking by New Labour. Moreover, those who have a longer memory than a proverbial goldfish know that New Labour will probably implement most of the policies they say the Conservatives plan to bring in after the next General Election. Cuts are cuts, whether they are implemented by 'Nasty' Tories or "Nice' Labour.

 

Is British Politics now all about a bunch of cuts?

Those of you who wonder whether social democracy is dead or not (or just stunned as it was waking up, to quote the Monty Python Parrot sketch) may be interested in reading Larry Gambone. The other Larry, Mr. Elliott, looks at how far New Labour, despite its pre-General Election rhetoric, is away from economic policies which can even be considered to be post-social democratic.

On of the benefits of the Net is the help it gives you in tracking down the origins of great quotes that you heard years back. Hence I was able to nail this one a few days back, which I heard back in 1990:

‘In early 1919 Max Weber wrote a letter of doom to his younger colleague and friend Georg Lukacs, who had by then become a Communist and whom he regarded as the great promise of German theoretical culture. In this letter Weber
warned Lukacs that the audacious Russian experiment would bereave socialism
of its reputation and authority for a hundred years. Let us conclude with
the most optimistic sentence of this book: of these hundred, sixty years
have already elapsed.’

Ferenc Feher, Agnes Heller and Gyorgy Markus, Dictatorship over
Needs: An analysis of Soviet Societies. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983, p.299

November 2018, here we come...

Finally, if you want to get away from 'conventional' politics (and who does not want to do that?) you may want to look at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Now back to scaling Book Mountain...

Last one before I get addicted!

Who needs Farmville on Facebook when you can mess around all day with this?

My David Cameron!

The original poster, which currently adorns 1,000 billboards across the country (there is one about five minutes walk from me on West End Lane). Some people think the first line is an allusion to a line in Elvis Presley's 'Suspicious Minds' ('we can't go on forever with suspicious minds'), but it could be a reference to a line in Heaven 17's 'Temptation' ('we can't go on living like this').

This is becoming a bit of a Net sensation, so if you want to join in the fun and make your own, go to:

http://mydavidcameron.com

I had a go with the random generator and I submit these for your perusal:

 

 

You'd think as an ex-PR man 'Call Me Dave' would see the hazards in this, but then again he only worked for Carlton TV, where to repeat again the words of former Sun Business Editor Ian King, DC was regarded as a:

'poisonous, slippery individual' and a 'smarmy bully who regularly threatened journalists who dared to write anything negative about Carlton- which was all the time.' (The Sun, December 5th 2005, quoted in Larry Elliiott and Dan Atkinson (2007) Fantasy Island, p.73- appropriately enough in Chapter 4: 'Bullshit Britain').