Caroline Hunt

Why I am Leaving ATL

2011-06-17T16:06:00.005+01:00

As you all know I no longer blog - unless something really makes my blood boil which it hasn't for a long time. However the decision by ATL to join the strike action on 30th June has really wound me up. I did vote in the ballot and I did vote No but sadly I was outnumbered.

Anyway I have today cancelled my membership of ATL and I thought I'd publish the letter I sent here so as to explain my reasons clearly.

"Dear Sir / Madam,

Membership No: --------
Branch: --------

I am writing as I wish to terminate my membership of your union with immediate effect.

I joined ATL as it had a strong 127 year history of not striking. I feel industrial action should always be a last resort - used only when people's civil liberties are under attack or, especially in the case of education, where you are unable to perform your job correctly.

That ATL has decided to strike over an issue of personal finance, one which will affect every person not only in this country but the world around, is utterly gobsmackingly shocking to me. For 127 years you have chosen not to strike over classroom conditions, equal pay for men and women, teaching and learning standards and the impositions of the national curriculum. I cannot believe that the straw that broke the camel's back comes down to the fact that teacher's pensions - which were already far sweeter than anything the rest of workers on equivalent wages receive - are being reduced in a time of economic crisis.

This strike is pure selfishness. It will not change the governments mind. It will affect teaching and learning. It will cause parents to have to spend money on childcare or lose a days pay taking the day off work.

Globally the world is facing the problem of an ageing population. Retirement ages will have to rise, pension plans are not sustainable, changes need to be made. This is not an argument you can or should win.

You have decided to break with your tradition which was the only reason I chose to join you and in my opinion you have chosen to do so over the most petty of issues that has faced the teaching profession in the last 127 years. As such please terminate my membership with immediate effect. I shall be joining The Voice - who have an actual written policy of not striking so I trust them to stick to their word.

Yours faithfully,

Caroline Hunt"

Do Not Forget Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani

2010-10-12T21:26:00.003+01:00

A few months ago this women was all the rage in the western media. Condemned by the Iranians to stoning for adultery she made a good story. However as with all stories that don't involve Brits, the media has lost interest over time and she has been shuffled to the World news pages of broadsheets where few people dare to tread.

Lest you forget Ms Ashtiani was convicted by a Sharia court in 2006 of committing adultery with two men who have never been named, following the death of her husband. She was then publicly given 99 lashes.

Stop for a second - lets not even move on to the larger issues and what happened next. How many people do you know who have committed adultery? Would you see them whipped publicly? In front of their children? Or even at a comparable scale, how many people do you know who have been accused of adultery - whether with evidence or not - again do they deserve public corporal punishment?

Since then Sakineh has been sentenced to the death penalty, her lawyer has had to flee to Norway and now her children have been arrested while trying to flee the country looking for asylum.

Barack Obama spoke a few weeks ago to the Iranian public. He said that he knew they as a group did not agree with the way their country was run. He was right. But if we stop international focus on this story and many others like it than the extremist minority win - they get to carry out whatever they like and let the silent majority of Iran feel that the international community is not behind them.

Please do not foget the story of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani - let Iran know we care, we will not stand for it and we know that their population is screaming out for change.

Liberal Youth Killed My Internet Community

2010-09-06T17:56:00.003+01:00

Many people think posting on internet forums is a deeply lame pastime that only pathetically lonely and sad people take part in. Well that may be true but I still enjoy it. Or in fact I have enjoyed posting on one forum in particular for five long years. In that time there have been complex debates, silly arguments, quizzes and laughs, anger and even tears. I have met many of the members in person and would even be willing to use the word friend to describe some of them.

Finding a good online community is a hard thing to do - most suffer from over trolling and many aren't well looked after enough to be effective long term. But I had found a reasonable, fun, sensible forum where the administrators were nice enough to make me a moderator so I could keep the spam down and enjoy a daily examination of politics with a wide range of reasonable people.

This is all surprising enough but what may surprise some people even more was that it was a Lib Dem forum. Original the forum of LDYS, in recent times they changed their name to Liberal Youth but the forums lived on with many members of the community lifers like me. We had a Lib Con coalition of agreement going on long before it was trendy and the conversations on that forum are the main reason I was very accepting of the coalition as I know how much common ground the two parties really have.

You will notice the lack of hyperlinks on the words Liberal Youth. I see very little point since their website has been down for over a week now. With it the forums are down. It's not the first time there has been a massive disruption to service - last year they were down for almost two months but that was a choice on the part of the people running the show at the time and the website was still running. This time apparently Liberal Youth are having problems with their servers and all their websites and email addresses are down as well. I have been told they have no ETA on when things will be back up.

Frankly this is no way to run a youth politics organisation. I do not know any ISP or hosting company who would cause a weeks disruption and provide no information on what had caused it and when it was going to be fixed. If I had to put up with that sort of service I would sack them off at a moments notice.
Equally if I was running Liberal Youth I would see the value of a vibrant and thriving political youth forum where interested and reasonable people took a regular interest. Sadly it seems every year we are fighting a tougher and tougher battle to keep the thing going with regular service disruptions and almost no support from the Liberal Youth exec themselves.

In my humble opinion Liberal Youth need to pull their finger out - in the meantime I've got an emergency back up going from last year. Feel free to come along and enjoy.

CF Democracy

2010-07-26T21:29:00.005+01:00

While I'm not blogging I suppose I should say a word about the latest Conservative Future elections. Interestingly enough the last time there were CF elections was around the time I shut down this blog. Then I was hoping for a victory from the illustrious Matthew Richardson but sadly this was not to be. In came Michael Rock who's rapid approach to the top age limit of the organisation didn't seem to bar him from hanging on to the top job while the party was apparently too busy anticipating a General Election to re-elect a chairman.

Anyway that is all in the past and yet again the desperate scramble to the top of the youth wing of the Conservative party is underway - but of course this time things are slightly different - we're in government. The next Chairman of CF will be responsible for representing and promoting the youth wing of the largest party in Parliament, which in some ways is a lot harder than it was in opposition. Not only that but they will be the first chairman of Conservative Future ever to be chairman when the Conservative Party was in government. I'm sure the Hon. Gentleman Mr Moorcraft can tell us all a lot more about the various ups and downs over the years though so I shall leave that sort of thing to him.

Long and short - on Friday there was a hustings and I did want to go, honestly I did. But sadly it was also my last day of term which as you can imagine involved a certain amount of celebrating. And then I decided to go to the hustings, in my merry state, and did not arrive until after the actual hustings part of the evening. But no matter - I arrived with plenty of time to interrogate a few of the contenders.

Craig Cox:

Sadly I missed Mr Cox but I do of course know him from days of yore. I even discovered I blogged about him back in 2007, sadly not in a positive way. The interesting fact about that blog post is I have absolutely no recollection of what all that is about so CF wannabees should at least hold on to the fact that none of these minor disputes really matter. So judgement on Cox? I didn't meet him, I don't really remember him very well but what I do remember was we disagreed a lot and finally a quick search of my gmail account reveals a fair few unfavourable comments from 'back in the day' - so he's not getting my vote.

Simon Cavalier-Jones:

The last candidate I met. A new face for me and a hard man to track down judging by how hard I found it to get him to have a conversation with me - then again who wants to talk to a drunken harpy at the Barley Mow around 11 at night! When I eventually barracked him into answering an interrogation from me I was disappointed by the lack of substance. A lot of good sounding words and phrases but very little of it sounded to me like precise practical plans. I have no embarrassing information about his past though so that does at the very least stand in his favour.

Ben Howlett:

I first met Ben in August 2006 when I was running for chairman. He took the time to meet me, get to know me, ask me what I wanted to do as CF chairman and only then chose to give me his support. I extended the same courtesy to him - asked his views and I have to say I was very impressed. Ben seems to me out of the bunch the one with the most sensible thoughts on precisely how CF should be run and how to make the system work better. And he is of course also a lovely young man.

So of course in an ideal world I would like to see the soundness that is Andy Peterkin elected as Conservative Future Chairman (as pictured at the top) - he'd bring class, elegance and a shitload of champagne to the post. But if I can't have that then I suppose my vote has to go to Ben (if I get one!) and I would urge anyone who is not sure who to vote for, to trust my (not entirely) infinite wisdom.

Why Tim Montgomerie winds me up

2010-07-15T21:24:00.005+01:00

Just to be clear from the start - I'm not blogging again. However as all of us who spend time writing crap on the internet know sometimes something just spurs you onto an online rant that you cannot resist. For me today it was sitting on the tube reading the Evening Standard. On page 6 was an article saying that David Cameron was facing a grassroots rebellion on the basis that the Conservatives were riding high in the polls and apparently that means we should call an election. The main source and basis for this article was something posted by Tim Montgomerie on ConservativeHome suggesting a snap election to dump the Liberal Democrats.

I sat there and I got angry. "Why does whatever Tim Montgomerie feels like saying about the Tory party seem to carry so much weight with the media?", I thought. In my opinion Tim does not represent the views of the majority of Conservative party members. In fact in my years in the party I met hardly anyone whose views are aligned directly with those of Tim Montgomerie. Yet week after week, month after month I seem to be faced with him as the spokesperson of the grass roots in every media outlet. "ConservativeHome members say this in a survey" seems to be a byword for "Every member of the Conservative Party agrees with this" rather than the a logical assumption that the result of a ConservativeHome survey reflects the views of readers of ConservativeHome, who are a select number of Conservative Party members. In fact in recent months I have found myself responding to ConservativeHome surveys more often just so a wider range of views are reflected in the results of the surveys.

At this point let me lay my cards on the table. I have been well out of the world of politicos for two years now. I love my new career and I don't regret the choice for a second. I say what I say with no knowledge of the current Westminster village feeling or even grassroots members feelings. However I do know a fair bit about the man on the street feeling. I work in an inner London comprehensive which is truly a cross section of society. If you don't agree then you've been reading the Daily Mail too much. It's not even like I'm the only Tory teacher there! The feeling I get from people there is that there has not been a Damascan conversion to Conservatives, however people are interested in what this new government is going to do. They don't instantly criticise every move - they look at them and consider them. Some moves have been so radical, such as the NHS reform, that people who would normally be sure of the result of every government initiative have said they genuinely are interested to see how it turns out. People are also interested by the coalition. They want to know if co-operative politics can really work - and they really seem to hope it can. There is a real feel that democracy is changing, for the better. Yet people are cynical and don't expect it to last.

And this is why I got so angry. I'll admit I was thrilled by the coalition. I have been saying for years that most Lib Dems would be Tories but they think we're all bigots and that's the only thing that keeps them out of our party. A coalition between the two parties will see solid civil liberties protection, realistic economic policies and a determined commitment towards localism. It neutralises the lunatic fringe of each party. So when I see Tim Montgomerie trying to tear the coalition down before it's had a chance to get started it really gets my goat. This is a new politics - not a bullshit fantasy slogan of the new Labour era but an actual new way of doing politics and I want to see what it can do before it is ripped down by those too joyless to give it a chance. I expected the people who'd do that to be the press - that's their jobs. However when I see people who profess to care about Politics trying to tear this coalition down it makes me angry and I will not stand for it.

Of course then I went on ConservativeHome to read the article in question - it turns out it was actually a Twitter post and Tim Montgomerie says that wasn't what he was saying at all. In my mind it doesn't remove the fact that I have shouted at the radio/television/newspaper quite a lot over the last two years whenever Tim or ConservativeHome were cited as speaking for the Conservative Party and the many many many many many times I have disagreed with his position.

So why did I post for the first time in nearly two years over what was essentially a non-story? I sat there and wondered why everyone listens to Tim Montgomerie's views. Then I realised - it's because he puts them out there. If you want your views to be heard you have to put them out there too.

And so it ends...

2008-01-07T19:52:00.002Z

I've been thinking about doing this post for a long time, but I couldn't quite bring myself to, but it's really time to. I am bringing a close to proceedings on this blog. I've just run out of time and steam. A full time job means I just don't get to devote the time I want to to my writing anymore. This blog was at it's best at the beginning of 2007 when I wasn't working and all day long to work out what I wanted to write about and what I wanted to say. My blogging has now been reduced to me firing off a few sentences on the top news story of the day and frankly I'm embarrassed by the quality of it.

On top of that it seems like a good idea to go out on a relative high. I was so chuffed to do well in Iain Dale's rankings this year. In many ways this is just a good way for me to avoid being horribly disappointed next year by a massive plummet in the rankings.

Anyway - thank you everyone who's been reading this blog, I do look at my stats and there is a little band of loyal readers out there and I thank you very much for putting up with my random rambles.

I doubt I'll be able to give up blogging altogether. I'll keep reading them and maybe one day I might start a new one, although probably anonymously this time!

So in a nutshell - it's been fun, see you again one day.

Oh and one final thing - Vote Richardson for CF Chairman

Well DUH

2008-01-03T08:51:00.000Z

What does it take though to get Brown's government to take responsibility for anything?

A Very Bad Idea

2008-01-01T13:59:00.001Z

Today Gordon Brown has announced that they might change the way the NHS works by refusing to treat those who won't quite smoking or eating too much. According to The Times:

Patients face having to meet conditions to qualify for free healthcare under a new “contract” between the National Health Service and its users.

Smokers or people who are chronically overweight may have to agree to exercise or to other changes in their lifestyles in return for NHS treatment, as part of the move.

Now there are several problems with this approach, at the very least my own personal displeasure. This sort of approach has a very unpleasant logical conclusion. It starts with smokers and over eaters but it ends up hitting everyone very hard. Imagine an NHS where when you are wheeled into A&E with an alcohol related injury on New Years Eve having had one too may for the first time in ages, you then have to sign a contract saying you won't drink for six months. How about mental health issues? Smoking, alcoholism, over eating are all addictions - mental health issues in fact. So will we start refusing treatment for someone who commits suicide because they had stopped taking their medication?

Healthcare professionals should never have to be acting as Father Christmas - deciding who to treat on the basis of who's been naughty and who's been nice. That's not the world we live in and I hope to god that won't change. Frankly I'm shocked that someone who at one point considered themselves a socialist could even contemplate this.

The other aspect of this of course is it would completely destroy the relationship between doctors and patients. A doctor can only be effective when their patient is totally honest with them. If patients know they face penalties against them for bad behaviour (or just simply giving into their personal vices and addictions)they will lie to their doctors. Simple as. Doctors need to be in possession of as many facts about your health and lifestyle to treat you properly - anything that puts pressure on the patient to not be entirely honest with their doctor is bad. End of.

Thankfully this is only a proposal at the moment and not a concrete plan. It must be opposed in every possible way. The scary thing is because of the information your doctor already has to collect to get their funding every year they already know how much you smoke, drink and weigh. The implementation could be immediate. Disgusting example again of how the government is just gathering more and more information about you to use it against you.

Days of Rest

2007-12-30T11:34:00.000Z

Who can be bothered to blog at this time of year? Surely we're all too busy having fun doing nothing and recuperating before we have to go back to sodding work.

Well clearly not so because many people are blogging over the holiday season. Dizzy has had some excellent posts up, Iain Dale has had all his end of year poll results to publish and Guido has done his own retrospective of the year.

Well frankly I cannot be arsed. Far too much effort. You all know things in Pakistan have gone to shit so enjoy the last of these idyllic holiday days with a very very very very funny bit of stand up I found on YouTube yesterday. Warning - some may find the language a little offensive, but it's Ed Byrne so it's all quite sweet really!

Merry Christmas Everyone

2007-12-27T21:09:00.000Z

I've had a weird evening. My family was having a big party tonight and it went fabulously. However midway through everyone in the house dancing around to Mariah Carey someone arrived and told us Benazir Bhutto had been assassinated. Tragic news that shocked us all and caused great discussion. However parties must go on and we eventually got back to the festivities. Sadly I have to work tomorrow so I left about an hour ago. I got on the tube and things got worse. I witnessed my first ever racist abuse. You may say I'm naive / sheltered whatever to have never seen anyone racially abused before. I've lived a pretty wide and varied life but I like to think that living in the tolerant place that London is had left me thinking that most cultures really can get along together. So I was pretty shocked and disgusted with what I saw tonight. I was on the down escalator to the Victoria line in Kings Cross when two chaps on the up escalator started shouting Merry Christmas. I saw this as festive goodwill until I saw the chap they were shouting at was a Muslim man in full cultural Islamic dress, accompanied by a woman wearing the full Hijab. They then started laughing and shouting "Hang on I recognise him! Ain't that Osama Bin Laden?" "Yeah it is, prick" "Yeah PRICK". I was so horrified. I've really never seen behaviour like this in London before. Now I'm a few glasses of wine worse for wear so I screamed "RACIST WANKERS" back up the escalators at them - may not have been the most eloquent retort but I felt it conveyed the message I was trying to get across quite effectively. I then went up to the man and the woman after we all got off the escalator and said "Please ignore them, they are wankers".

Now I suspect to a very strict Muslim chap, having a pissed woman swear at you is probably not what you want to hear but again I hope it conveyed the point I was trying to make.

I'll probably get shot by a thousand Tories for saying this but I see Christmas as a secular holiday these days. Every religion, culture etc. has some sort of festival of light in the middle of winter and I think we should all enter into the festive spirit in whatever way we wish regardless of religion or culture. What is important is we all take some time each year to think of how to be good to our fellow man and to be happy. What I witnessed on the tube this evening was insignificant compared to the tragic events in Pakistan but also was the direct opposite of the festive spirit but it just makes me want to strive to spread happiness and kindness further. Don't over rationalise Christmas - don't try and make it more than it is, a time for giving, a time for joy and above all a time for kindness. Be nice to someone tomorrow and make up for those wankers on the tube - do something good and try to counterbalance the psychos who assassinated Benazir Bhutto. So with that in mind I give you the happiest festive song of all to inspire you:

Eight in 2008

2007-12-24T10:15:00.000Z

As always I think meme's are silly things and I'm very bah humbug about them but since it's Christmas Eve and the great Iain Dale has tagged me I suppose I shall have to partake in the meme silliness.

So eight things I'd like to see in 2008:

1. A general election
2. Th resignation of at least one of Brown's cabinet to show they have some conscience between them.
3. A good fight for the US presidential election
4. The removal of Robert Mugabe somehow
5. Me having more inspiration about what to blog about
6. A new series of Nearly Famous
7. The eventual release of Manhunt 2 on the Wii
8. Jonathyn Rhys Myers naked in my bedroom.

I shall tag James Cleverly, Shane Greer, Mike Rouse, John Moorcraft and Hot Ginger and Dynamite

Education, education, education

2007-12-23T22:53:00.000Z

Now where have I heard that before?

And what are Cleggy's ground breaking plans? Dunno - he didn't say. But apparently we need to look elsewhere in Europe to find it. Not surprising considering Clegg's European outlook and upbringing. He is of course right to say that it is a disgrace that the Government has pumped so much money into the system yet yielded such small results. However would be nice to know what he proposes to do about it. Clearly something is up in the system and it would be great if we could see a real debate in this country about how to run the education system. Shame then that the Sunday newspapers all decided to run with the "Man Becomes Catholic Shocker" story instead.

Merry Christmas Your Arse

2007-12-20T21:58:00.000Z

I feel forcibly struck by how vacuous politics is becoming in this country. No-one gives a toss that Gordon Brown is the most incompetent and illiberal Prime Minister we've ever had - instead they are all hot under the collar about the fact that the Lib Dem leader won't talk about his drugs experiences, doesn't believe in God and (most shockingly of all) doesn't know the song Fairy Tale of New York. Well here's a reminder

The Wheels Are Falling Off

2007-12-17T19:05:00.000Z

So in the last month the government has lost the data of 25 million child benefit recipients, six more discs from HMRC, pensions data on hundreds of people, been condemned for the way it handles sensitive personal data, lost the data of 6,000 vehicle owners and now today has lost the details of millions of learner drivers. I mean - bravo. That shows a level of incompetence and disregard for public opinion far beyond the imaginations of anyone only a year ago. It's almost as if there is someone within the government desperately trying to make sure I.D. cards scheme never comes to fruition by creating data havoc all over the place. However sadly that is not the case. The truth is the government doesn't care if your details get lost, they don't care if you become the victim of identity fraud, they don't care that they couldn't run a secure IT system if their lives depended on it. They just don't care because they are too focused on being in power rather than using their power for something other than consolidating the power they already have.

We cannot stand for it. This must not continue. Heads must roll. If any of these incidents happened in a private company then a dismissal wouldn't be far behind - yet we've had scandal after scandal for a month and yet nobody has resigned from the government yet. What happened to the idea of ministerial responsibility? Has Gordon Brown's cabinet even heard of it?

Merry Christmas

2007-12-16T02:58:00.000Z

It's that time of year again. The trouble is as you get further into your twenties - firmly making your way into fully fledged adulthood - that Christmas gets more and more complicated. However the aspect that really bugs me is the sending of Christmas cards. Maybe it's a modern problem but you don't seem to have people's addresses other than your best friends and your family. Your wider social network are the sort of people you communicate with via email or mobiles. The concept of an address book that actually contains postal addresses is rapidly becoming alien in the twentieth century.

So I was struck with a solution. Rather than sending tedious emails to people asking them for their addresses to post cards to, making them feel guilty in turn so they feel they need to send a card, not to mention desperately trying to subtlety find out the address of the people you have already somehow received a card from - I saw a way out. I decided to make a charitable donation of £50 and let everyone know I was doing this instead of sending them Christmas cards. This blog is visible to most of my friends thanks to the wonders of Facebook so I can let them all know via it, and also it gives me something to blog about over this period of time where I'm too knackered to blog properly because I'm out getting pissed at Christmas drinks too often.

However my simple plan then hit a snag. I headed off to Just Giving to find my charity and make my donation thinking it would take about 5 minutes max. Trouble is I hadn't really given any thought to what I was going to give the money to. Normally I give money to charities when I get contacted by one in some form or another and it strikes me as a good idea. Faced with the choice of over two and a half thousand charities I was more than flummoxed.

After a huge amount of aimless searching I tried to think if I had heard of any charities recently that really stuck out to me. I suddenly thought of the Centre For Social Justice who give awards to charities every year. I've always looked at their lists and nodded along thinking these were good causes so I went there. It didn't help. I was still faced with the difficult choices - do I want to go global or local for example. In the 2007 awards list two charities are listed next to each other -

- XLP, working with gun and gang culture in Peckham, SE London
- Tree Aid, helping poor African families generate income through responsible use of forests

One is extremely local and one is extremely global. Both look good.

And by now I had got worried about public reaction. Announcing you're giving money to a charity rather than sending Christmas cards was starting to seem a very smug and arrogant thing to do. "Sorry my nearest and dearest but since I am so much more socially conscious than you I am not going to waste my time on petty signs of goodwill between us and instead I'm giving a paltry but just big enough to look good, amount of money to a charity that you may have no interest in but I have chosen as worthy".

So it ended. I decided to still give the money to a charity but not to announce which one and to bite the bullet, go buy some Tesco value Christmas cards (proceeds to charity obviously) and quit whining. Of course since, as you may have guessed this whole process has gone on while I was writing this post I'm now screwed for how to end this post. Shit - youtube video it will have to be! Merry Christmas!

Posting for the sake of Posting

2007-12-13T23:04:00.000Z

I just don't feel like writing about anything at the moment. I'm panicky because I've got an interview next week for the course I really really really want to get on and politics is so depressing. Every time I try and follow what Brown is doing I just despair that we're stuck with him for probably more than a year. That and the whirlwind of the Christmas season is keeping me from posting regularly. But of course the rule with blogging is post regularly so people keep checking back. So here's a pointless post for the sake of it. However of course the way to save it from being tedious and pointless is to embed a good youtube video. So here you go:

Our Police Deserve More

2007-12-12T00:23:00.000Z

I made two promises tonight - I was drunk when I made them but I intend to honour them anyway. Firstly I promised a lovely lady from Islington CF that I would get in touch and help (yes Newmania you can stop nagging me now). I've done that via Facebook. The second was to a pissed, off duty police officer outside the pub.

He was upset about the pay rise issue. He said, and rightly so, that it was deeply unfair that the government - and more specifically Jacqui Smith - had ignored the independent arbitrators proposal. The most important thing he said to me though, that really struck me, was that he wouldn't want to strike. He said him and his colleagues would never consider striking as it would be a considerable desertation of their duties and he would never do it. But he thought it was so unfair that nearly every other public service could hold the government to ransom that way but because the police do the most important service in the country they cannot - yet the government is trying to give them a raw deal.

He said to me the only way they could win would be to get mass public opinion behind them. I said sadly I wasn't in charge of that but that I had a shitty blog that had a respectable readership. He made me promise I'd write about the issue of police pay. He didn't need to make me promise. It's important, I care about it and I want my friends and readers to care about it too. So get off your arse - write to your MP, protest, tell anyone you can - police aren't getting a fair deal and we need to voice our anger.

Crisis? What Crisis?

2007-12-10T01:27:00.000Z

The Government's publicity offensive seems to have started while I've been away from the internet.

PMQ's

2007-12-05T12:06:00.000Z

God this is sickening. I have to leave for work in five minutes so I won't have to see that despicable, horrible man who is apparently our Prime Minister act like a complete weasel for much longer. I still cannot believe that he is blaming the fact Labour cannot follow party funding rules on the fact that Tories won't cave in to their demands on new party funding laws.

And now he's weaselling around the fact he only has a part time defence secretary when the troops are fighting two wars. Don't even et me started on Michael Martin.

Grrrr - thank goodness my first task at work this afternoon is to decorate the Christmas tree. That should cheer me up.

Sex Education

2007-12-04T11:37:00.000Z

In one of the many news stories designed to take heat off the Government's dodgy financial dealings, sex education is being given a thorough seeing to.

The government is going to make sex and relationship education compulsory for all schools. Schools Minister Jim Knight has even gone so far as to say the old loophole, allowing parents to keep their kids out of those classes, will be gone.

Now in all honesty - I can't help but think this is a good thing. I don't believe the rubbish argument, spouted by a lot of Tories and religious folk, that if you teach young people about sex they immediately want to go out and do it. In fact I think if SRE is being taught properly then they are far less likely to want to have sex since it means risking pregnancy, chlamydia, gonorrhoea, genital warts, genital lice, syphilis and HIV infection. Not to mention the emotional issues that go along with it. Teaching kids about these things not only makes them think twice about having sex it also makes them far more likely to havee safe sex. In a country where sexual infection rate is shooting up consistently, even though we have the most advanced contraception and protection available ever, safe sex needs to be pushed to kids from the very beginning.

The government is soon to start the routine vaccination of all 14 year old girls against HPV. HPV is essentially a sexually transmitted disease, it just unfortunately gives you cancer. Now those 14 year old girls will presumably be told what they are being vaccinated against. That needs to be backed up with real SRE education to make sure we don't raise a generation of teenage girls who think they've been vaccinated against all STI's or something stupid like that.

Teenagers have a natural urge to have sex. They're filled with hormones telling them to do it. Education about the consequences and dangers of acting on those hormones can only be a good thing. Shouldn't parents be able to choose when and where to tell their kids about these things? Well no I don't think they should. That leaves too much to chance in these children's lives. The kind of parent who will take a child out of SRE is more likely to teach them nothing but abstinence. The state has to take responsibility for the ever increasing rate of sexual infections in this country and I think this is a thoroughly positive move.

Taking Liberties

2007-12-02T18:59:00.000Z

I finally got around to watching Taking Liberties today. Yes I realise I'm a few months late to this but I still feel it's worth mentioning. Anyone who has described this as a British Michael Moore film deserves a smack in the chops for insulting Chris Atkins. This film isn't about spin and half truths, it isn't slamming a personal message down your throat. It's a true documentary tracking the gradual reduction in civil liberties under the Blair government.

And it's a collection of facts well worth remembering that we have lost the right to peaceful protest, the right to be tried or even charged before being detained, the right to gather outside parliament and voice our opinion on what the government is doing. This is a scary state of affairs and something that must not be forgotten. The problem of course is the preponderance of terror laws don't affect us day to day. I suspect that if the introduction of I.D. cards does eventually go ahead people will become far more aware of how far Labour have gone in reducing civil liberties and freedom. The trouble is by then it will of course be too late. No we're not living in a totalitarian state. However we are definitely starting on a slow sliding scale towards one. Allowing Labour to continue to stay in government will only allow the pattern to continue and before you know it we're going to wake up in an awful society.

Anyway - yes I've been totally brainwashed and enamoured by this movie so I would highly recommend as many people as possible see it, in the hope that it will remind and inspire people to stand up against the ever encroaching government.

Smoke and Mirrors

2007-12-01T22:41:00.000Z

Nice to see the BBC Website helping Labour push forward the press releases they're shoving out to distract from the "Government in self-implosion path" story. Brown's going to cure Cancer and his wife is going to teach all the children to read (nauseating picture on that one unfortunately). Someone's been watching too much West Wing frankly.

Openness, Accountability and Honesty

2007-12-01T15:08:00.000Z

Gordon Brown used the country's legislative move today to make yet another deeply political move. He's demanding that all three parties reach an agreement on party funding legislation. The clunking fist is back and he's planning to blame the system rather than the Labour Party for the gross deceptions in party funding that have come to light recently.

Yes apparently the fact that the Labour party claim to be incapable of understanding their own laws they introduced on party funding that prohibit using agents to make donations without declaring yourself, is not the problem here. No the problem is the rules. The rules that already make it illegal to do what the Labour Party did. This is the problem apparently.

So Gordon Brown has called for an urgent review into party funding. Because if political parties are breaking the rules then clearly the rules need to be changed it seems. Of course this then becomes a fabulous political football (sorry to use the most cliched phrase in British politics again). Labour claim they can't push forward reforms to party funding because the Conservatives refuse to accept their terms. The trouble is that the Conservative are quite right to resist Labour moves to cap donations from individuals but not from the unions. I personally find the idea of mass organised workforces holding sway over parties far more worrying than the idea of individuals but still that's not really the point. All that is needed in all party funding law is honesty and openness about who is giving who what and why. Simple as.

Every electoral reform Labour puts forward is ridiculously biased to benefit them. And hey, what's the point anyway? Every time Labour change the rules they break them anyway. Gordon is scrambling for more and more ways to take the attention off the horrific record of Labour government - will the British public fall for it?

Shine Get

2007-11-30T12:11:00.000Z

This time last year my blog was dominated by my desperate anticipation of the Nintendo Wii. Its seems strange that it's a year since I got my Wii. I still play it so often and my mates all still love it. It's become a very important part of my life. However there was a bit of a lull for the last few months where no good new games for the Wii had been released. After the wonder of Zelda Twilight Princess, Wario Ware and finally Resident Evil 4 - nothing much else had really caught my fancy on the Wii. Yeah there was Mario Strikers but really I suck at it and it's no fun. I did really enjoy Trauma Centre actually but not as many other people seemed to enjoy being a surgeon like I did.

Well that has no all changed. Finally I have a reason that I just have to play Wii endlessly - Super Mario Galaxy! It's so much fun. I was never that wild about Mario 64 and while this is very clearly a similar format in some ways it is just so so so so much more fun. Spinning through space with a flick of your wrist is just so satisfying. Anyway - why am I telling you all this? Well first of all because I'm sick of writing bland posts gloating over how shit Labour are doing. Labour suck, and the polls are showing it. But sadly I can't get excited about the fact everyone's realised we have a bunch of useless tossers running the country. It's too depressing to think about the fact that we have a bunch of useless tossers running the country. Secondly though - and far mote importantly - Christmas is coming up faster every day and it's at this time of year that people's minds turn to the very serious subject of buying a computer game console. If you are considering this very important choice make sure you do the right thing. Don't be seduced by the sexy but intellectually shallow PS3, pass over the Xbox 360 serious and intense smouldering good looks and instead plump for the ever entertaining, always surprising and universally fun and cheeky Wii. (unless of course you already have a Wii. If you already have a Wii get a 360, that's what I'm doing - but still don't give Sony any money for an overpriced, underperforming rip off of a console)

Right Nintendo - where's my cheque?

This is All Very Odd

2007-11-28T17:55:00.000Z

From BBC News (no hyperlink as in a rush)

Meanwhile Janet Dunn, the fourth person to be named as one of Mr Abrahams' intermediaries, who said on Tuesday she knew nothing about the £25,000 donation in her name, has since said that was inaccurate.

She said the whole issue had come as a "complete surprise" and she had not intended to mislead - after reviewing her records she found a cheque to the Labour Party was drawn on her account in 2003.

This all sounds very suspicious to me. I mean I know it was four years ago but I think I'd remember making a substantial donation to a political party without having to go through my chequebook. What is going on behind the scenes? Why do Labour's responses keep making me feel more like a conspiracy theorist?? The sooner this shady lot are out of government the better!

What Will It Take?

2007-11-28T10:34:00.000Z

The past week has been astounding in a masterclass of how much of a battering one government can take. They lose the personal data of millions of people, leaving them openn to identity fraud. This is of course just after using millions of taxpayers money to bail out Northern Rock. Follow this with a few more lost data discs and top it off with political donations fraud it's just not been a good week.

Sadly we're still stuck with the Labour government and there's very little we can do about it. Disregard for confidential personal data would get you fired from any other job. Fiddling your accounts would not only normally get you fired but also could land you in jail. But still the government carries on.

The most worrying thing about the donations row is that Labour seem too have gone back to their stand by excuse of "I didn't know" that kept being used under Blair. This often led me to the conclusion that they were either grossly incompetent or lying. Either way they don't deserve to being government - especially if their party chairman cannot understand the rules governing party donations.

Ms Parsons Update

2007-11-27T11:14:00.000Z

Apparently I've been unfair on Ms Parsons. She has emailed me back and assures me that nobody in T2 has any connection with Fortismere.

Dear Ms Hunt,

We approached Fortismere Comprehensive School in North London and asked them to select 12 Year 9s, which they did by asking everyone in English to write a short piece. As you will see from page 2 of teens2, we are now asking schools to nominate themselves for future issues of teens2, but for the first one we approached a London state school which we knew to be good but which we had no connection with.

Best wishes
Sandra Parsons

It still begs the question - why use such an unrepresentative school?

Teen Times

2007-11-26T19:37:00.000Z

The Times, my newspaper of choice, today devoted it's T2 section to teenagers. This purported to give us an insight into the world of the modern day teenager by allowing a class of 13 and 14 year olds to write and edit the whole T2 section.

The introduction by Sandra Parsons, the regular editor of T2, opened by asking the question, "What are teenagers like?" She goes on, in a very obvious manner to say that we think of them as asbo receiving, binge drinking, granny terrorising hoodies and ends by saying "Well, as our issue today shows how wrong we all are".

Now aside from the fact that her premise is quite wrong since we don't all think that everything The Daily Mail says about teenagers is true, there is a rather major flaw in this whole issue. You see the lucky class of schoolkids chosen to produce this marvellous piece of journalism was a group of Year 9's from Fortismere Comprehensive School in North London. To someone without a lot of local knowledge that sounds fair enough. London comps hardly have the best reputation. However please do not harbour any assumptions about this particular comp.

Fortismere is based in leafy and very expensive Muswell Hill in North London. A house in the catchment area for the school will easily set you back half a million quid. The parents of these children will most likely be doctors, lawyers, footballers - basically anybody rich. So it's hardly surprising then that the teenagers doing the writing didn't actually conform to the norms of teenage Britain.

Parsons gushes in her intro:

They don't take drugs or smoke and drink only a little. They worry about gangs but they're not bullied and are far too savvy on the internet to be tricked...they like newspapers and current affairs, and think they have too many exams

So pretty much the same as all upper middle class 13 year olds. Hardly though an accurate portrait of the teenagers living down the road in Hackney.

She also states that "they would like their parents to stop being so over-protective". The trouble is vast numbers of teenagers in this country don't have parents that pay as much attention to them as those who would move into the catchment area of a ridiculously over achieving comprehensive so they don't have to feel bad about sending them to a fee-paying school.

Now I don't want to do these kids down. The issue is reasonably well written, if not a little naive. The section about drugs and drink, written by a 14 year old, says "I don't know anyone who gets drunk". Well clearly Fortismere is even more sheltered than the all girls private education I had. In "The Truth About Gangs" section the faults of choosing this class is shown even more when one of the kids writes, "Living in Muswell Hill, I have avoided bad experiences with gangs...it is difficult to establish whether these fears are justified or based on rumours and hearsay". Well indeed. One could suggest it would have been slightly more valuable to here from a teenager who lives in one of the many parts of London that has been ravaged by gun culture. But c'est la vie.

These teenagers have valid views and have every right to express them. However this T2 issue is being portrayed as the real voice of teenage Britain. These teenagers do not represent that, they represent a very small privileged proportion of teenage Britain. So why choose them? My first thought was that maybe The Times was trying to be the anti-Mail. Produce a vision of Britain's teenagers to provide hope and a positive image for the country.

But then I had a second thought. I looked again at the issue to see if it explained how this class were chosen. It does not. I rang The Times enquiries number (Press 1 for queries related to competitions, Press 2 if you have a news story etc.) spoke to a surly person at the switchboard who put me through, twice, to a number that just rang and rang and rang. So I failed to find out how this school had been chosen.

Now I hope it wouldn't be libellous to suggest a theory on how this school was chosen. Obviously I have no factual basis for this as I'm a blogger, not a journalist, so don't have the resources to hound Sandra Parsons for the answer. I looked up her recent writing in The Times and was presented with this list of her recent articles. Now these sound way way way way too much like Private Eye's Polly Filler for my liking. Which led me to the obvious conclusion - isn't it entirely possible that the rather vapid Parsons, has an offspring at Fortismere. Fed up with the way people talk about teenagers and seeing how her little darling and it's friends behave she decided to show the world what teenagers are really like, or at least what they are really like in her world. So she picks her "local comp" to present this view to the readers of The Times.

Anyway I shall be pursuing this as I would hate to besmirch anybody's judgement so with any luck I might actually get an answer as to why The Times decided to use such an unrepresentative group of teenagers to represent teenage Britain in the next few days.

Oooh it's almost like being a real journalist!

News Down Under

2007-11-24T17:15:00.000Z

I'd like to write an interesting post about Australia's new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, but I can't for two reasons. Firstly I don't know a lot about Australian politics. Secondly I am sooooooo hungover. Tequila is an evil drink and I curse the name of Jose Cuervo. However it did cause me to break the smoking ban for the first time.

Anyway stonking victory it seems for Kevin Rudd, leader of the Australian Labour Party. What does this mean for us? Well most prominently Rudd had pledged to take Australian troops out of Ira so we will be left with less support there. Is this going to see the gradual removal of all troops from Iraq?

I don't know my head hurts. Tell me more about it.

Bloody EU

2007-11-23T08:25:00.000Z

Sorry not to be writing about government incompetence but there's a fair amount of coverage of that all over the place. If in doubt look here (apparently being copied into an email and doing nothing to stop the plans in it happening doesn't make you culpable), here and even here.

No I'm angry about a story I first wrote about back in August, the banning of advertisements for powdered baby milk. According to my copy of The Times yesterday:

The advertising of powdered milk for babies on television, in the national press and through a NHS leaflet given to mothers will be banned from January, as part of a new EU directive on instant formula. The ban supports the Government's policy to encourage breast-feeding

As I wrote before, this is a totally ridiculous move. There are many reasons why a woman doesn't breast feed - being taken in by shiny advertising is not one of them. From day one mothers have it forced into their heads that the government feels "breast is best" so they know the consequences if they don't breastfeed. Basically they will be treated like a social pariah and plagued to hell by a health visitor about it.

But this is again endemic of the bizarre attitude the health profession seems to have towards women. It's worryingly easy to get into a feminist rage about it. The simple truth is women are not trusted to make their own decisions about their health. Advertisements are banned in case they confuse our fragile little minds, two doctors have to agree on the termination of a pregnancy because clearly a woman wouldn't have the capacity to make such a decision about her own body, we are repeatedly plagued for cervical screening and breast screening. Yes these screening programs save lives but I don't see men being hounded for testicular screening and PSA tests in the same way (probably because PSA tests are often found to provide false positives - but then so are cervical smears).

The nanny statism of the health fascists seems to apply far more to women then to men. As a general rule women will have more health issues than men (our insides are more complex than yours) but it doesn't make us any less capable of making our own decisions.

Thursday Blues

2007-11-22T09:15:00.000Z

Today is not a good day to be English. Football and Politics have both combined to make for a rather bleak and depressing outlook. England failed to qualify for Euro 2008 last night, yet Steve McLaren has refused to do the decent thing and resign and it looks as if he will be sacked in about fifteen minutes (I have not internet access at work so if I'm wrong - tough, can't correct it until this evening).

Sadly in the government things aren't quite as simple. As more and more information rolls out about IT incompetency in the government, not to mention suspicions that the supposed junior eejit who copied the data was actually given permission to do so by somebody higher up, still Brown and Darling seem totally unwilling to admit to any incompetency in the first place. They blame the merger of the departments, which was Gordon Browns baby as Chancellor, then try and blame David Cameron!

The sad thing is no-one can step in and sack the government. We are unlikely to have another general election for about 18 months, which means unlike English football, we are stuck with this incapable moron as our leader for a bloody long time yet. I fear for what more he can fuck up in that time.

Oops

2007-11-20T17:26:00.001Z

How many times am I going to get to use this photo while Brown is Prime Minister. So the government has managed to lose the bank details of every family in the country with a child under 16. Oops.

The most shocking thing about this story is that it isn't that shocking. The government have proved time and time again that they cannot be trusted with large databases - the DVLA and the junior doctors debacles say it all really. Now you can add this to the list of their incompetences. Yet there are still people who would support a National ID database??? It's madness I tell you! Madness!

Anyway - the government is useless. This is a disgrace and with any luck it will be a wake up call to Brown and is acolytes - you cannot continue to show such contempt for the British public.

UPDATE!

Iain Dale has another terrifying HMRC story and James Cleverly highlights the very pertinent relevance to Ian Blair.

If Only I'd Known Sooner!

2007-11-20T07:59:00.001Z

Lib Dems in Nasty Campaigning Shocker

2007-11-18T22:13:00.000Z

Well frankly I'm pretty dissapointed if the worst scandal this Lib Dem leadership contest throws up is Chris Huhne's campaign team (you see I have to say his campaign team and not him because he's denied ever seeing the document) coming up with a strategy document entitled 'Calamity Clegg'. Anyone who is shocked by Chris Huhne having a negative political scheme in mind, that would use underhand and dirty techniques clearly has never seen him campaign before. Anyone who is shocked that a Lib Dem would be involved in some nasty campaigning techniques has clearly never been involved in politics in any direct way before.

Lib Dems use negative campaigning far more cleverly than any other party. They do it, they get away with it and they even manage to achieve a reputation as the nice, cuddly, friendly party at the same time. Negative campaigning is second nature to them. Don't get me wrong - I'm not a Lib Demist, in fact some of my friends are Lib Dems (although probably a few less after they read this post). However they really have shown their naivety when it comes to internal politics. Stabbing your own colleagues in the back, while fun at times, is never productive. If you are in politics as part of a political party and have made that choice to be part of that party then your party must always (ok nearly always) come first. Huhne would have been an eejit to go seriously negative against Clegg and he's just as much of an idiot IF he is lying and did know that the 'Calamity Clegg' document existed. When Lib Dems turn on Lib Dems or even when Tories turn on Tories - the only person who gains is that smug, centralising, sour-faced Scot currently squatting in Number 10. We all need to remember the aim here people - get that sodding git out of office as soon as possible.

28 Days

2007-11-16T20:46:00.000Z

In terms of issues that have got me worked up in recent months the threatened extension of detention past 28 days is something that is really twisting my brain. I just cannot understand how anyone could possibly be in favour of it.

In one of those bizarre moments of fate I was about to go look up the stats on how many people have been held under the 28 days rule so went to the next tab along which happened to have Dizzy's blog open. I scrolled down and discovered he had handily provided me with the information needed.

Yet how many people have actually had to be held for the current maximum of 28 days which came into force in July 2006? Six, that's how many. Six people held for 27 or 28 days according to Home Secretary. Three were charged and the other three were released without charge

But the point here isn't just the figures, the clear pointlessness of this law and the fact that no-one can make a decent case for it. The real problem is the concept that you can hold someone for a month - without any concrete evidence that they are in breach of the law. I understand there can be times that you need to hold someone for a bit while you gather evidence. But a bit is a day or maybe at a push two. How on earth can you justify that after a month you won't have been able to put together a credible case against someone. It's just not right. Or are resources really that bad in the police?

Anyway plenty of other bloggers have already made far more intellectual posts and arguments about how wrong this is so I won't go on. This is just a simple black and white situation to me. There is no way it can be justified to extend the limit for detention beyond 28 days. It's the thin end of the wedge; quite possibly the most terrifying threat to liberty in this country at the moment.

YEAH BABY! I'M BACK

2007-11-16T19:44:00.000Z

Oh yeah! Pure internet floating around my house courtesy of those lovely people at Pipex who have got me all set up in four days. I so happy!!!! A proper decent internet connection. Mwah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha (sorry I'm drunk on excitement)

Anyway thanks to everyone who sent me nice messages while I was absent from blogging. Since I have an exciting evening of housework and Children In Need lined up I think I shall probably manage to write a few proper blogposts as there's lots of news to catch up on, for starters last nights Spot the Difference competition on Question Time. Surprisingly Whone did much better than Cleggy in my humble opinion. Good to see Cleggy isn't quite as bulletproof as everyone seemed to think.

Ah it's good to be back.

I Miss My Internet!

2007-11-12T20:48:00.000Z

I'm still basically without internet. The brief moments where I get a decent enough amount of broadband to access the internet are so few and far between that a) I don't get long enough to research and write a proper blog post and b) I use them to download more off 4OD as I also have no TV aerial. So basically blogging is still pretty much suspended. BT landline finally got set up today and I've ordered proper broadband this evening. We shall have to see how fast Pipex can get it up and running.

Anyway luckily the news seems to have been calm, not that I see much of that with no TV and no internet. I'm having to rely on reading Metro and The London Paper over people's shoulders on the tube while I'm reading my book. From that it seems that the McCann's are still big news and Kate Moss has been up to some stuff. Although I get scraps of news from my mate who works in Canary Wharf and is the only person to have my work email address. He tells me the whole of East London went up in flames today. Sounds like the Olympic development is right on schedule.

Hey ho. Watch this space. Blogging will be back with a vengeance as soon as possible, I promise.

Telegraph Blogging Event

2007-11-08T23:00:00.000Z

Only just got very dodgy internet back tonight. I had to ask my oh so helpful brother to post last night as I was ridiculously frustrated returning home last night to discover that the local unsecure wireless network and my Vodafone dongle had both gone down. I really wanted to blog and had no way to do so! Thank god I should get a decent internet connection again by the end of next week.

I'd been at the Telegraph Blogging event. I'd had trouble staying awake during some of it but that was because I'd had very little sleep over the last few days and the room was really hot. But apart from that it was an interesting event. Journo's, who don't really get blogging, slammed into a room with bloggers, who don't really get succinct debate, having all sorts of weird and wonderful discussions.

The thing that did strike me though was that although the room contained a fair smattering of us token females, there were no women on the panel and not one woman spoke at any point during the evening apart from a woman who was called on to ask a question but said "Oh it's ok he's just asked what I was going to ask". Now I'm not the sort of militant feminist who is going to demand a certain number of women involved in every event. There were no women on the panel because there are no women bloggers on the same stature as the men who were on the panel, in terms of success. They shouldn't be pushed in there as tokenism. Equally I'm not accusing Iain Dale of being a misogynist who didn't call on the women in the audience. Firstly Iain is only mildly misogynistic and secondly that wasn't the problem. The women just weren't contributing. I commented on the lack of women speaking to a few male bloggers afterwards and they said "well why didn't you say something Caroline". Well because I was barely awake for half of it. But also because I didn't feel the need to ask a question or make a comment just for the sake of a woman's voice being heard. And finally because I wouldn't have been able to write a blog post about the fact no women spoke at the event.

So what's my point? Well it's the astoundingly obvious one that there aren't a whole lot of prominent female bloggers. Why is this the case? I don't think I can answer that question (other than to muse on the link between autistic spectrum disorder and men who spend a whole lot of time on computers) but I definitely think it's something worth pondering.

Where's Caroline?

2007-11-07T22:35:00.000Z

Not here. Nope. This is her brother. Hello, Tories!

Caroline has just phoned me up to tell me that she is currently without internet access, and would I log into her Blogger account and post something to that effect on the blog? Also, she would be grateful if I would refrain from posting anything defamatory about David Cameron, and definitely nothing about [INFLAMMATORY TORY-BAITING REMOVED].

So. While it's phenomenally tempting to use this opportunity to wreak havoc on her blog, it would probably cause more trouble than it's worth, as a) she can be a fearsome opponent when riled, and b) I'm fairly sure that hectoring a bunch of political fanboys/girls would be the biggest waste of time and effort since your lot dreamt up PFIs. Oh, and THANKS FOR THAT, by the way.

Oops. Come on, I'm only human. Anyhoo - she's not here, and I don't know when she'll be back. Now, behave yourselves, or I'll start talking about football.

16-18 Year Olds To Be Kept In School

2007-11-05T09:17:00.000Z

I'm a little torn on this. You see something in my gut tells me that it's just wrong to keep people in education against their will. Of course we do it every day, up and down the country children will tell their parents every morning that they don't want to go to school. As I type plenty of kids are bitterly angry that they are cooped up in a classroom rather than running around in the park. Hell I'm grumpy and angry that I have to go to work in a few minutes rather than being allowed to sit on my sofa all day reading books.

The issue here really is where are we drawing the lie at which you become a total adult, responsible for all your actions. The problem is in this country that it has always been very split between 16 and 18. You can marry at 16 with your parent's permission but you can't vote until you're 18. You can join the army at 16 but you can't smoke or drink until you're 18. The government seems to be moving towards a set up where the legal "coming of age" is 18. To be honest that sits more comfortably with me than the age of 16. Don't get me wrong - there are plenty of sixteen year olds perfectly capable of taking care of their lives (in fact there are even kids younger who are so amazingly mature you could make them Prime Minister tomorrow) but should they have to? Do they need their childhood ended while their hormones are still running rampant around their brain? Is it not best to give them as much time as possible free from the strains and stresses of adult life?

As a secondary concern as well - we really do have too many young people with no qualifications or training. The good thing about this proposal is it will force many more young people into vocational training and that is what the country really needs to create a skilled workforce for the next generation.

So basically while this proposal grates at my liberal nerves I think in the end I have to be cautiously supportive of it as I think in the long run it's going to do far more good than harm.

A More Worldly View

2007-11-04T17:52:00.000Z

As a political type person I've always tended to focus on domestic issues. Firstly I know a lot more about them. Secondly they are far more tangible. Finally there is a lot more that we can do about them. The NHS is failing, we can lobby our MP's to change the way it works. Our schools aren't performing - we can not only lobby MP's but also join the board of governors. The list is endless. Domestic issues are something that I feel capable of standing up and saying "look this is what needs to be done" about.

World politics, international relations, democratisation of the developing world and all the other millions of issues tied up in those areas are something I feel decidedly less comfortable about. Who am I to pass judgement on the situation in the West Bank, for example? It involves hundreds of years of history, culture, religion and people's deeply held views. I don't know what it's like to live in a country where bombings are a daily threat to your life. I look at Africa and I find the horrors and the atrocities that take place to be beyond my comprehension - the thought of even broaching a solution fills me with dread and generally leads me to change the channel and go back to arguing about something far more within my comfort zone, such as voting systems or policing.

However looking at the news recently has made me feel this is something I really need to rectify. Not that I think I'm suddenly going to solve the worlds problems by doing a bit more reading. But when the news in this country is dominated by the McCann's, Heather Mills and pathetic political battles over non issues, you start to realise that the real big questions, the real issues that should be keeping you awake at night are happening all over the world. If one has any shred of humanity or even concern about where the world will be in twenty years time - one must have an understanding of what goes on beyond this little island.

So - I'm off to do research. I'm starting on Wikipedia and working my way up. I've never been one for reading through thousands of dry tomes so if anyone can suggest some lively and informative reading on this subject - be it Africa, the Middle East, South America, Asia - I don't care. I just want to learn more and hope you lot might be able to give me a few suggestions. With any luck it may lead to a few more interesting blog posts as well!

CF Campaign Day In Pendle

2007-11-04T14:08:00.000Z

Matthew Richardson, he of Forward Together fame, has been organising great campaign days since he first got elected onto the CF exec. This weekend was no different. The picture above is not of somewhere within the M25 or even of somewhere a short train journey from London - no it's actually Pendle which I'm told is somewhere up north (obviously I was unable to attend as I get nosebleeds if I go that far north).

Pendle is an extremely marginal seat that at the next general election should, in all fairness, be sending Andrew Stephenson to parliament. Yesterday's campaign day had an equally important message of stopping the BNP, who hold a council seat up there. Generally a very worthwhile cause. All praise to the huge number of people who turned up.

Rather bizarrely I understand that a TRG Students action day was organised for the same day in Lewes. Lewes is easily accessible from London however it has a majority of over 8,000 and is not exactly top of the target seat list. This event was organised after the one in Pendle. I understand that another CF Chairman candidate chose to attend this campaign day rather than get the free minibus up to Pendle with the rest of CF. If Mr Rock and his pals had instead gone up north to fight with the rest of CF then this Pendle action day would have been the biggest outside London campaign day in the recent history of CF.

Come on guys - it's not about dividing our resources, its about working together for the best result. Get it together!

EDIT - Apparently I was misinformed about the time that the TRG event was organised, see comments section for more details.

No Shit

2007-11-02T21:53:00.000Z

This seems somewhat akin to the messages in Championship Manager that a board gives full confidence to a manager.

Why Don't We Teach Languages?

2007-11-02T09:41:00.000Z

I was footling around on Digg this morning looking for something to blog about and this story caught my eye about a ten year old boy who speaks ten languages that he taught himself using cd-roms.

Now this story is hardly surprising (although I was quite shocked to be reminded of how appalling the Mirror is but that's another story entirely) because children are sponges. They can learn so much so quickly at a young age, especially languages. Children are far more capable of learning second languages than adults. Not only do they learn more easily, but they are also far more likely to remember the language for the rest of their life than a language that is learnt as an adult.

So why don't we teach more primary school children more languages? Learning languages teaches you so much. You don't just learn a language, you learn about grammar, you learn vocabulary that will help you understand words in other languages and you usually learn a bit about cultures as well. I remember being utterly fascinated on a trip to Amsterdam when I discovered that the staff in Burger King all seemed to be about 14 years old and all spoke five languages fluently. Here the staff at Burger King speak one language only and sometimes that's not even English.

We live in a global market, a global world. The skills and employability of our citizens is already pretty shabby as a general rule. The education system needs to be doing more to prepare our young people to go into the world of work - the introduction of more language learning is a simple and easily integrated option that could create massive benefits down the road for the five year olds of today.

Time To Treat Women As Adults

2007-10-31T01:29:00.000Z

A report by the Commons Science and Technology Committee has reported that the requirement for two doctors to approve an abortion should be abolished. The committee has also said though that the limit shouldn't be reduced from 24 weeks.

So I have mixed feeling on this. First of all I wonder whether I should be blogging about this as blogging about abortion always brings a fair few nutters out of the woodwork. Secondly I agree with the first half of what they've said but not the second half.

Talk to anyone who works in a neonatal unit and they will tell you that we are closer and closer to saving children born at 20 weeks onwards. The line is drawn somewhere and that line, in my view, has to be drawn on viability outside the womb. Contrary to what some people say that line will not move endlessly. An embryo is not considered a foetus until ten weeks because there are not enough organs and body parts formed until then. Equally science does not proceed at quite the stellar rate that some people seem to think it does.

But my main issues has always been with the necessity for two doctors to rule on an abortion. If we accept that abortion should be legal than no person who calls them self a liberal or a libertarian or even just simply believes that an individual should be able to make decisions about their own body, could possibly support that patronising misogynistic decision to insist that a woman clearly is not able to make the decision to have an abortion on her own and instead needs TWO separate adults to concur on the decision that she, as an individual, has already made. This condescending attitude that a women doesn't know her own mind well enough to come to this momentous decision, that will impact her life for years to come, without the advice of two doctors is ridiculous and something that is long overdue to be overturned.

Well anyway that's my two cents. Presumably someone is going to disagree with me but I'm happy the debate is heading in a direction I'm far more comfortable with. Oh and finally in my mind abortion should never be a party political issue. It's a free vote issue and always should be.

UPDATE - Nadine Dorries has accused the select committee of being run by those with "a vested interest in the abortion industry". I'm still not quite clear on exactly who runs the "abortion industry" and how much it controls. Dizzy however has got to the heart of the matter.

No News

2007-10-30T08:34:00.000Z

There's no news I want to blog about at the moment - which is slightly problematic as I have no intention of blogging about Strictly Come Dancing or something else of that ilk. So random run through the top stories instead.

The English Votes for English MP's issue is something I've blogged about at length before. To me it has always seemed the cheapest, simplest, fairest and most obvious solution to the West Lothian question for a clerk to sit there and look at each bill and check whether it would affect England or the entire UK and tick box yes or no. However equally I've had plenty of people post lengthy explanations of why I'm wrong in my comments section on this issue before. However I still don't see their point.

Peter Hain has apologised for the government giving the wrong figures on the numbers of non-UK national workers. Well I am surprised the government has apologised for anything, not surprised they got something wrong.

David Cameron gently sliding into the immigration debate in a healthy sensible and mature manner is very encouraging.

And finally half of central London will be shut today so that King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia can come and be received in a manner befitting royalty. I have to say though I'm with Vince Cable on this. The current regime may be reformist in the loosest sense of the word - they still do not exhibit what I consider to be an acceptable level of human rights, especially when we look at the restrictions on women in Saudi Arabia.

Forward Together

2007-10-29T20:47:00.000Z

Saturday night saw the launch of another campaign for the Conservative Future Elections. This launch was by a man who quite frankly has done more for Conservative Future in the last fourteen months than any other person. This man has focused his energies and attentions away from petty internal squabbling, and instead focused on the most important aspect of what Conservative Future does - getting Conservatives elected.

Yup it's Matthew Richardson. The launch of Forward Together is the first aspect of this years CF election campaign to give me some hope for next year. I await with baited breath the announcement of his slate of candidates for the Exec. If they have half the commitment to campaigning that Matt does then the future looks bright for CF.

Oh and while I'm doing gushing post about how wonderful certain CF candidates are then I urge everyone to get behind Peter Smallwood in his campaign for North West London Area Chairman. He's another one who knows that the point is not to add to your cv, further your career or engage in on upmanship over fellow Conservatives. It's about getting Conservatives elected and getting Labour out of office.

Oooh Pretty

2007-10-28T22:36:00.000Z

Look! New template. And no it's not thanks to Dizzy - apparently being the 3rd best political blogger in the country, married with a kid and having a full time job means you can't get time to do my blogging work for me! But thankfully Mike Rouse to the rescue!

So look oooooh pretty.

YBF Conference Post Two

2007-10-28T01:22:00.001Z

Do you know - I've been taking notes all weekend and I was going to write up a little precis of every seminar I've been at and every speech and all that shit. However one of the things that I've been reminded of this weekend is how glad I am that I'm not a career politician, that I don't have to watch what I say, that I don't have to spend my time networking and most of all that I don't have to write a boring blog like I did when I was on the CF exec. So I'm not going to tell you anything about the talks by Donal Blaney, Cllr Mark Loveday, Matthew Elliott, Patrick Barbour, Peter Lilley, Frederick Forsyth, Guido Fawkes, Louise Bagshawe Douglas Murray, Douglas Carswell MP, Daniel Hannan MEP, Iain Dale. I'm not even going to take the piss out of Mark Clarke's speech. I'm not even going to go on about the dinner this evening with David Davis who was given a lovely vote of thanks by Jonathan Isaby. I am however going to mention them all - because this conference has been ace and I have managed to sit through all this and not fall asleep once, even though I had absolutely sod all sleep last night because I was getting hammered well into the night.

Tonight I'm being slightly more circumspect. I'm shattered so I've not got plastered (just a few glasses of wine) and I am sat in my pyjamas tucked up in bed. All around me in the corridors I can hear drunken people having fun, well actually maybe the odd argument as well - and bizarrely enough someone singing "New York New York"

It's the final day tomorrow and I think I may actually make it to breakfast which will be a first for any type of conference I've ever been to.

So any politics been going on while I've been away?

Young Britons Foundation Conference

2007-10-27T17:30:00.000+01:00

I really had hoped to blog about this yesterday. However alcohol made it impossible for me to do so. So far I have been so impressed with how well organised this 4th YBF conference has been organised. The venue is bloody gorgeous and expansive and lovely. The schedule is jam packed and the alcohol has definitely flowed freely enough for my liking.

Unfortunately due to work commitments I only made it along in time for the last seminar yesterday - that however was a wonderful example of enthusiasm at the end of the day with a brilliant chap from the Leadership Institute, Nathan Edmondson still managing to fire people up after a whole day of seminars. Dinner was a marvellous affair but it is unfortunately at this point that my memory of events becomes a bit vague. As the only person on my table drinking white wine and free bottles everywhere I did get a little tipsy. I am not sure if it was due to this or not that I found Gerald Howarth's after dinner speech absolutely enrapturing. I was hypnotised. Every word he said was brilliant. Normally during after dinner speeches I pretty much tune out. Last night was a different matter entirely. Drinking and more drinking ensued. My head was pretty sore this morning and now I'm running off to this evenings drinking session - sorry I mean dinner event - with David Davies as the guest speaker. So my thoughts on the other speakers will have to wait until later tonight - or until tomorrow if I get as pissed tonight as I was last night.

Anyway having a lovely time, wish you were here :) More info soon

(Oh yeah and quote of the conference so far has to come from the lovely Louise Bagshawe, "If I wasn't going to take it from my priest then I certainly wasn't going to take it from John Major")

Brown Tries To Change The Subject

2007-10-25T19:46:00.000+01:00

Came home from work to see a very scary headline on BBC Politics page, "UK secrecy laws facing shake up". I could not imagine that Brown and his secretive centralising manner would shake up secrecy laws in anything other than a terrifying Orwellian manner. Details are scant at the moment although I am worried about the idea of secrecy laws applying to private businesses and I'm not sure Paul Dacre is the man to review the laws on government documents release dates.

However for now - until we hear the details - lets focus on the motivation behind this. Gordon Brown and his little clan are sat in the room. Brown is dwelling over how shit the last few weeks, fuming at the fact that Cameron came out looking like the face of the future and Brown came out looking like the callous calculating politician. Now the Lib Dems are getting a load of press and the only time Brown gets mentioned is in people calling for a referendum on the EU. Brown is desperately lookin for a way to get back into the papers on a positive note.

Suddenly he and his team of advisers remember how New Labour got good press in 1997 - constitutional change, challenging the establishment - always goes down well with the punters. So he comes up with a few shiny little changes that don't make much of a difference. He can probably sneak a few little things in there to make it easier for him to run the Stalinist central dictatorship that he wants to. The test will be whether the press lap it up in the way he wants them to and spins the right message to jonny public who won't bother to read the small print and just read the highlights.

Don't think is a real move by Brown - this just more electioneering and posturing. Further evidence this man has no interest in governing Britain.

Tedious Personal Post

2007-10-25T13:49:00.001+01:00

I'm ill and it's making it very hard for me to concentrate on my work so I thought I'd write a boring tedious blog post on the thoughts that have occured to me today so far.

Firstly I've been really encouraged this week by the sight of so many families taking their kids to the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum. Less seem to be going to the V&A but I suppose that is a bit more for the older kids. It's really nice to see a whole family out together for a half term trip that has educational as well as fun benefits. However the sad thing is inevitably most of them seem to be rather well to do middle class families, preusmably those who can easily take time off work during half term. For lower income families who do shift work where everyone wants half term off and someone still has to be there it can be much harder. Point to this rant? None whatsoever.

Secondly builders and other workmen on the street who say "cheer up love - insert pointless platitude". What exactly do they think they are going to achieve? Do they think that a woman standing on her own, outside her place of work, having a cigarette, is meant to be grinning from ear to ear? No she's just trying not to have to engage in conversation with anyone walking past - or particularly the workmen resurfacing the road in front of her workplace. She's not scowling, she just has a non-indicative look on her face. And anyway even if she is scowling do you really think you saying "cheer up love" is in anyway going to make her feel better? No it's going to make her feel selfconscious and uncomfortable while she's enjoying her one small comfort of a little nicotine.

Ahem - rant over.

Newsings

2007-10-24T21:00:00.001+01:00

You have no idea how rubbish my internet connection is at the moment. It took me about twenty minutes to get to this page to be able to write my blog, I have checked facebook twice in the last week and I've actually had to resort to reading newspapers! Newspapers I tell you. The experience has been mixed. While I enjoy getting to do the T2 crossword every day over my lunch, I do have to despair at the state of journalism at times.

Yesterday was a classic example. I was reading the story about the tragic accident in Portugal where some children got caught in the current in the sea and their parents lost their lives while saving them. I managed to just about stomach the traditional dismissal of anyone without a British passport which meant we heard every detail of the British families lives whereas the German man was referred to as just that - the German man. But the real kicker for me was the long Times article about it that after a very detailed and extensive piece of coverage the final sentence was "This town is x miles from the town where the McCann's were stating when Madeline went missing". SO????? It's also a certain number of miles from where the Peninsula Wars of the 18th Century were fought but equally that has nothing to do with the case of a tragic drowning accident!

Anyway bad journalism aside - bad internet connection is why I have been blogging so little recently but I should be able to blog this weekend from the YBF conference as my dongle works great everywhere - except for where I live. The speaker list for the conference is absolutely stellar and I'm really looking forward to it - expect drunk blog posting this weekend. I won't be able to help myself!

Ooooh

2007-10-22T17:25:00.001+01:00

Looks like CF Elections are about to get interesting

Hat tip - CF Diary

More Dr Crippen

2007-10-20T22:45:00.000+01:00

I can't help linking to him - but working in a doctor's surgery all week long does make you overly obsessed with these things. Anyway great post from him which alludes to the current obsession over forcing doctors to work all hours of every day

It is easy to forget that most patients with genuine illness are either old or very young, and none of them work. They prefer to come during normal working hours. It is only the pretentious, middle-class, focus-group attending, Rolex wearing, alfresco dining, BMW driving, foreign-holiday booking (“Do you know how much the safari is costing? Why should I have to pay for those Malarone tablets?”), BUPA subscribing, well-off “worried well” who demand the “right” to see a doctor in the evenings and at weekends. Sebastian is 27 and wants to “pop in” on Saturday afternoon to discuss the merits of regular PSA monitoring. His partner, Harriet, is with him and wants to know if intestinal yeast is a possible cause of her Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

Lib Dems in Cloning Row

2007-10-20T16:58:00.000+01:00

The Lib Dem leadership race has, rather predictably, ended up in a two horse race. Clegg and Huhne. But what does each bring to the table? Well they're both recently elected to Parliament, they both are former MEP's, they both went to Oxbridge and they both went to Westminster School. This has caused some people to start claiming that these two men are identical twins who offer the Liberal Democrats no real choice.

Sadly I have to disagree. Someone's CV is not the measure of them and tells you only a limited amount about who they are. Surely the focus has to be on their views, on their beliefs. I understand there is something of a chasm in policy direction between these two men but neither has spent long enough in Parliament to fully expound on everything. It will be interesting to see if they manage to use this race to talk about policy and to actually set out their personal policy views.

In turn Chris Huhne's supporters have been accusing Clegg of being a Cameron clone. Presumably they won't be pleased about people saying Huhne is a Clegg clone because that would make them a bunch of Cameron triplets. A very amusing thought. However again this is presumably because Cameron is young, went to a public school, Oxbridge and hasn't been in parliament all that long. Of course Cameron was never an MEP so the similarities end here. (side note - as far as I'm aware no former MEP has ever gone on to become the leader of one of the three major parties, could this election see a stampede towards Brussels by the careerists of all three parties who see it as a fasttrack?)

The point is leaders should be judged on their views, their rhetoric, their policies, their responses - not on where they went to school, what jobs they've had and how old they are. Politics should be about issues, or even politics of personalities has to be preferable to politics of backgrounds. Although of course in the case of a Liberal Democrat leadership contest the problem is there is no politics or personalities to talk about - all they have left is their CV's.

BBC in a Tizz

2007-10-18T08:15:00.000+01:00

Bizarre experience this morning of watching BBC journalist grilling BBC representative over proposed BBC cuts. In fairness to your man (whose name escapes me, I want to say Dermot Murnahan - anyway the guy with the dark hair doing the BBC breakfast show).

He keeps grilling this old man from the BBC trust who's been poked in the back and sent on to defend the indefensible. When asked why the BBC thought it was ok that there will be more repeats on BBC he started spinning like Pete Burns on acid.

"There will be no more repeats on prime time BBC1" - well indeed. What about the other 147 hours a week or the other three channels?

"We need to distinguish what we mean by a repeat" - yes the man actually felt that the definition of repeat was being used too loosely. Apparently a repeat of Heroes is not actually a repeat in the same way as an old Diagnosis Murder. You see viewer focus groups (those reliable old bastards) have told the BBC trust that they like new shows like Heroes or The Tudors being flogged to death by being shown in "catch up" slots in case they missed them. Dermot Murnahan (or whoever it was) followed this instantly with the excellent point of - but isn't that what the ever increasing digital outlets are for on the internet and via digital tv providers? Catch up tv is very accessible to everyone, you don't need to repeat everything for the idiots.

Anyway - needless to say it was a pathetic spinning attempt. The BBC claims these cuts are about increasing quality while reducing quantity. Is it cynical of me to think that when we see the final figures for who's been cut from which department that statement will be very easy to point ones finger at and say "HA HA" (in a Nelson from the Simpsons-esque voice)

It's the Voluntary Side that Matters!

2007-10-17T16:11:00.001+01:00

I tend to avoid posting about the internal workings of the Conservative Party too much because it is invariably tedious and boring to those who aren't involved or it gives the impression that I am breaking Reagan's rule of never speaking ill of a fellow conservative.

However,(ahem) I have just received an email from the party board. Now firstly I would like to categorically state I think Don Porter is doing an excellent job as chairman of national convention. The man is reasonable, personable and takes a genuine caring interest in making sure the voluntary side of the party is well run.

The problem I have is with a statement in the opening of this email I received today.

I am very keen to continue to improve the communications between the Voluntary Party and Conservative Campaign Headquarters and to ensure that our volunteers in the country have a greater understanding of the workings of CCHQ.

The email is about having a sort of open day at CCHQ for the voluntary side of people to come in and get to know CCHQ. A worthy cause. There is plenty of misconception about CCHQ out there in the associations. Promoting better relations between them is extremely important.

However the main problem is that the associations don't feel the people in CCHQ have any idea what it is like for the people in the associations. What is really needed is to promote a greater understanding of our volunteers in CCHQ. Too often people in associations feel that CCHQ is putting forward an agenda that has no understanding of their local concerns and limitations.

These days provide an excellent opportunity for people from the associations to put their concerns directly to the appropriate bods and to talk to CCHQ in a face to face way rather than a disembodied voice. But it would be fantastic to see more people from CCHQ who have experience of being on the coal face of the associations - dealing with a defective printer, stuffing a thousand envelopes by hand, dealing with the local lunatic who comes round to visit every week, coming up with a local campaign that will be successful when the national message doesn't play to your constituency while still trying to accommodate the demands of CCHQ, conjuring up 50 activists from thin air when CCHQ give you 48 hours notice of a leaders visit.

Don has been absolutely dead on the money to promote better relations between CCHQ and the voluntary side of the party - but in order to really improve relations the voluntary side have to feel that CCHQ are trying to understand them as hard as they are trying to understand CCHQ. Only then can true peace, balance and happiness be found.

Blog News

2007-10-15T23:46:00.000+01:00

Yay! Dr Crippen's back. Excellent reading always

Out with the Old...

2007-10-15T19:27:00.000+01:00

Ding Dong Ming is Gone...is the other title I considered for this post. Not very witty I know but I've had a hell of a day at work and my back hurts and I'm knackered and ...sorry back to the Lib Dems!

Well he's gone sooner rather than later. And of course this means it's the greatest of British political party sports - the leadership contest.

The trouble is that this is probably going to be good for the Lib Dems. Most of the contenders are practised already from last year so we're unlikely to see the torrent of scandal that we did at their last leadership contest. What it means is the Lib Dems are going to have a chance to articulate a theme and a vision which is something they've been seriously lacking in for the last twelve months. Ming appeared as leader in chaotic circumstances and was a safe pair of hands. The next leader will be a "war" leader to set them up for the next General Election.

And as I say sadly this means we, the Tory party, are going to go back to fighting on two fronts. We've been able to focus on Labour purely for a while now as the Liberal Democrats haven't been a fighting force to be reckoned with.

So the contenders? Gotta be Huhne vs. Clegg doesn't it? Huhne has a majority of less than a thousand in his constituency and is a highly objectionable fan of ever closer integration with the EU. Clegg should be a tory in many ways and if ever defected to us I wouldn't complain. So of course I'd rather see Huhne win this but oddly Huhne might do better for the Lib Dems as he is the most likely to set out a very different narrative to Labour and Conservatives and could pick up a lot of protest votes at the next election.

Oh well early days. Blog reactions already up from lots of bloggers.
Nick Robinson is rather surprised, Ben Brogan is puzzled, Spectator Coffee House is wondering at the new found ruthlessness of the Lib Dems, Iain Dale has an informer and Kop Lob Pob a Job - like many other Lib Dems - is already putting his flag out.

This is going to be entertaining at least!

Australia Heads to the Polls (in about a month and a half)

2007-10-14T21:57:00.000+01:00

John Howward, Australian PM, has called an election. It will be held on the 24th November and it could see Howard's fifth term in office. But judging by the coverage I'm reading it probably won't.

I know nothing about Australian politics. Well pretty much nothing. I knew John Howard is Prime Minister and that he supported the US invasion of Iraq. I know Australia tends to be pretty...I don't want to say right wing because the term isn't quite what I mean but anyway that's the best way of describing them. They'd be unlikely to elect a bunch of hippies or socialists.

The thing that puzzles me is that I read that unemployment in Australia is at an all time low, the stock market is at an all time high. With such a strong well working economy why is Howard so unpopular? Is it really all to do with the Iraq war? From the stats I can see on the internet they seem to have suffered minimal casualties and have engaged a very small number of soldiers.

Anyway for desperation of an election to watch, the US presidential race dragging on interminably and the UK not facing a general for well over a year, I think I'm going to try and follow what is going on in Australia and learn a little bit more about overseas politics. Now I just need to find out the name of his opponent...

Get Your Own Ideas

2007-10-13T12:40:00.000+01:00

I'm really starting to get annoyed by this. Gordon Brown's vision for the Labour party seems to be sneaking glances over the Tory Party shoulder and copying their answers - then handing them into the teacher expecting not to get caught.

Last week we had them announcing they would raise the inheritance threshold (which George Osbourne has already said)and that they would introduce a one off payment for non-doms (which George Osbourne had already said last week) and now it seems that they are in favour of the tax system recognising and rewarding marriage - something Cameron said about a year ago!

The BBC analysis on this?

BBC political correspondent Robin Brant said in the current climate, where Labour has adopted elements of Tory ideas on inheritance tax, the comments could be seen as the government trying to broaden its appeal.

Or it could be seen as Gordon Brown having absolutely no vision for this country, no ideas on how to run it and just a mad passionate desire for power for powers sake. We have a ideologically bankrupt Prime Minister running this country. He does not get "the vision thing" and sadly it seems he doesn't even get the politics thing. The sooner we get this man out of Number 10 the better.

Musings on Television

2007-10-11T22:36:00.000+01:00

Blogging isn't as heavy as I'd like it to be at the moment. This isn't just because I've had far too much to drink this week. It's also because I'm trying to change over to a slightly more individual blogger template and make this blog a little more pretty. Unfortunately this has proved far too much for my tiny little female brain and it won't be happening until a certain other blogger gets off his arse and does it for me.

Now my new flat does not have an external television aerial (I'm going somewhere with this trust me) so I have had to resort to buying a crappy little aerial and a signal booster. The combined effort of these two pieces of equipment has allowed to get only two television channels, BBC1 and ITV1. This has meant I'm watching a lot of shows I've never watched before. Well basically I'm watching ITV which is something I've never done before.

Tonight gave me a bizarre insight into the sort of one off dramas ITV runs these days. Apparently they seem to be pursuing some bizarre propaganda in the place of genuine drama. Tonight was a piece called "Whistleblowers". It turned out to be the most mindless caricature of academy schools as being run by bible bashing nazis who want to create a master race of children by getting rid of dyslexic kids which in turn leads to these children killing themselves. In fairness I only realised twenty minutes in that I was on ITV and not BBC1 - hence why I ended up watching the whole thing but it was bizarrely over the top. The people running the academy were portrayed as aliens almost in their lack of humanity or emotion. While obviously art and drama has a right to pursue it's own artistic message - this piece was so devoid of entertainment, character development, interest generally that it can only be seen as a piece of propaganda.

So now I'm over on my other channel watching Question Time. I have no plans to liveblog it but I've been jotting down thoughts as it's going on in the background and I've been writing this. I'm not going to watch it past the discussion of Brown's fuck up of a week but thoughts so far -

There are very few times when I would disagree with someone describing Kelvin McKenzies words as poisonous rubbish but Harriet Harman managed to choose one of those few times. Kelvin actually was quite measured and sensible in his assessment of Brown's behaviour in the last week and she looked stupid calling it as such.

Cocky brat from Left wing think tank clearly has no sense of fun either. He claims that PMQ's this week embarrassed British parliamentary democracy on all sides. PMQ's is the one opportunity anyone in this country has to ask the Prime Minister a direct question and to drive home to him what an arse he's been. Brown has been playing fast and loose with the British public and he deserved to be called on it. Cameron's performance on Wednesday was spot on. I think the agenda of cocky brat (yes I didn't catch his name ok) is clear when he describes Cameron as a public school bully.

Anyway it would be good to hear Caroline Spelman say something during all this but I'm sure she'll pipe up at some point. Right I'm off to bed to have nightmares about Academy sponsors - clearly they are a race of pod people with no souls who will eat children in their beds. It must be true - ITV said so.

URG

2007-10-10T10:41:00.000+01:00

I'm so hungover. My vision is all blurry, my tongue is all furry and I've got a stamp on my hand which I presume means I went to some sort of club last night. I have no recollection of how I got home. Thank god I don't have to be in work until 12. Although that does mean I have to leave my house in 15 minutes and I'm still in bed. Dash to the shower needed.

Anyway new, politics all that guff. Well I'm still pissed off at the posties just as I was at the weekend and now they're threatening more strikes next week. If I don't get my DVD rental service back up and running soon I'm going to be pretty darned well annoyed. Or I'm just going to join the actual video rental place down the road.

PMQ's today should be a good one. Shame I'm going to be working so won't see it. Leave me a commnt and let me know how it goes!

Right ten minutes before I have to leave. Must go.

Go Away and Leave Me Alone

2007-10-09T08:35:00.000+01:00

Five minutes to write a post before I have to jump around and get out the door to get to work on time, but it so has to be done.

I believe I've explained a few times before on this blog how unwise it is to wake me up earlier thna I need to be awake. I judge what time I go to sleep on the basis of what time I need to wake up. I am a very tired person all the time anyway and so waking me up even ten minutes earlier than I need to be infuriates me as that is precious sleeping time I cannot get back.

So anyway at 8:05am this morning my entry phone buzzer rang. I jumped up and answered it in a total fluster as the builders have had to come round a few times and finish some things off. Turns out it wasn't the builders it was a woman wanting to update the electoral roll. Now I've lived in one borough for the last 4 years and every year they send a nice letter asking you to update your electoral roll details which I always do. Four weeks living in Islington and I've been woken up first thing in the morning by them.

I tried to explain to the lady politely that she had woken me up and if she would put the information in the post I would then I would sort it out. She kept insisting that she needed to know all my details. It has only just occurred to me how insecure and dangerous it would have been for me to disclose my electoral roll data through an entryphone system to a woman I couldn't see. However since I didn't want to be rude to the poor woman - who was just doing her job, in the rain no less, I hung up the entryphone, crawled back to bed, tried to go back to sleep and failed.

Bloody politics - it'll ruin your nights sleep.

Pissed Off Posties

2007-10-08T21:09:00.000+01:00

It seems the striking postal workers talks have fallen apart and we are in serious danger of going near to a fortnight without any post. The trouble is though all the Postal Workers are achieving is hitting the people who don't deserve it hard.

A worryingly large number of people I know hadn't even realised there was a postal strike. To people like you and me the post doesn't matter a whole hell of a lot. Our lives involved online statements, email and internet banking. The aim of a strike has to be to bring things to a halt that will have a meaningful effect on those who are in a position to do something about it. The trouble is though that's not what a postal strike does anymore.

The people who rely on the post in modern Britain are the poor and the elderly. People relying on cheques for their money, people who have to have prescriptions posted to them because they are too infirm to get to the doctors surgery. These are the people being hurt - not the Royal Mail bosses, not the government, not the media journalists who report on this. Those with the least outlet to complain and the least to do with the dispute. The postal workers are achieving nothing other than hurting those who have absolutely no connection to them whatsoever. If they must strike they should not do it concurrently - causing weeks of misery and distress.

(Of course none of these people's hardships even compares to the problems the postal strike has caused me - I rent DVD's online and I can't get anymore until this blasted strike is over!!! How will I cope???)

ManHunt 2 Still Banned

2007-10-08T20:52:00.000+01:00

It's a shocking disgrace that Manhunt 2 has yet again been declined a classification by the BBFC. The makers, Rockstar, went off and made changes to the game to try and make it a little more acceptable to the BBFC (something they shouldn't have had to do in the first place) but still the BBFC won't budge. The first paragraph of the BBC news story says it all really:

Censors have rejected a revised version of computer game Manhunt 2 which was blamed by a schoolboy's parents for his murder - a claim dismissed by police.

Right so we have a game being banned because some claimed it caused something which it actually didn't. Is this really the world we live in? The genre of adult video games deserves the same respect as the world of cinema. Interestingly it is being released in the US in three weeks time. Of course though it's always been the way that the censors in the US don't mind violence, as long as the sex is heavily censored - the BBFC have always swung the other way.

Manhunt was one of the best games I've ever played and I am so looking forward to Manhunt 2 but if the BBFC have their way I won't ever get to play it, because there is no proven link between playing a violent game and committing acts of violence. Ridiculous.

However all is not a total dead loss for British gamers - we won a gold...for playing Command and Conquer 3. How proud his parents must be!

Don't Let It Go To Your Head

2007-10-07T17:26:00.001+01:00

I am on such a political high at the moment. There are times when as a Tory reading the internet or the newspapers can be a thoroughly depressing and demoralising experience but at the moment it just feels ace. There's just a rampant feeling of excitement running through everything. The conference season has felt more like a standard plot arc to a movie - starts off well with Lib Dems having a shocker of a conference, then things get scary and hairy looking, with Labour conference putting real pressure on and the audience is left with baited breathe to see if in that one moment, that one shot, the hero of our piece can pull it off at the second it counts. And of course Dave did.

I'm not saying that speech was the best ever delivered or anything but the timing of that speech with these circumstances has set off an impressive chain reaction. Cameron is being praised, Brown is being hounded, even Andrew Marr is getting a hard time.

Clearly now there's going to be no election this year we probably won't get one for over a year at least. That's a long time to keep the momentum going. I have complete faith though that Cameron can do it. He just needs the parliamentary party, the candidates and of course the activists to stay fully focused on the goal of number 10. Donal Blaney has written a very good piece over at Conservative Home about how to do it.

Of course this means that we may actually get some Conservative Future election before the chairman gets two years too old to be a member. Those elections will be incredibly important though as it could be the CF Chairman and Exec who will be running CF through the general election. Having been part of the exec during the last general election I can tell you that takes a huge amount of hard work and determination. That means that this election shouldn't be about personal politics, side sniping and petty agendas - it's about delivering the best campaign force possible to help the Conservative Party get where it should be - in government.

Labour MP in Not Keeping His Word Shocker

2007-10-07T10:39:00.000+01:00

You'll be seeing this around a bit - post it on your blog, email it Tom Watson! Get the snivelling little git to pay up!

UPDATE - He paid up - blogger power strikes again!

Brown Bottles It

2007-10-06T23:36:00.000+01:00

Brown and yet another political pigskin

2007-10-04T23:57:00.001+01:00

Now I do actually want to comment on this story but what exactly is Sir Ara Darzi about to push in that photo? The best explanation I can come up with is he's shaking hands with a Cyberman.

Anyway back to the news. The most overused phrase in British politics at the moment seems to be "political football". I don't blame anyone other than Gordon Brown for this. While it would be nice if we could find some new rhetoric to describe it, the sentiment is true. Gordon Brown has been abusing his position as Prime Minister to mess around with the political agenda of this country for his own benefit. He is bringing forward things left, right and centre and the publication of this report is just another moment of Gordon Brown forgetting that he's running the country first and foremost, rather than the Labour party. The endless speculation about whether he is going to call an election was designed to scare the Tories into a frenzy. Didn't work - Cameron called his bluff. Now he seems to have decided that while he's not necessarily going to call an election, he better do all he can to make it look like he could win one. It's backfired horribly. People see through these cynical moves and don't respect him any more for it.

As to the content of the report? Nothing new really is it. MRSA needs sorting by better hand cleaning. Duh. Doctors opening hours? More of a tricky one but hardly bringing anything new to the debate. I see how hard doctors work and I don't think forcing them to work weekends and evenings is necessarily the solution to people not being able to take a few hours off work to go and see the doctor. I've always thought the far more sensible solution is allowing people have secondary registration at the surgery nearest their office alongside their main registration at their local surgery. That would mean they could take less time off work and be in the vicinity of a doctor responsible for treating them in an emergency at all times of day.

The point is though Brown is treading water now. The plan to skitter the Tories didn't work, now he's hatching plan B and in the meantime is desperately using the running of a country as a giant PR exercise for the Labour party. Added to that a wise man pointed out to me that theoretically the Prime Minister is meant to have some sort of official reason for calling an election, such as a long time from the last one or a major upheaval in the country. I'm not sure Labour having a bounce in the polls is a legitimate reason to go to the polls. Not to mention the millions who may lose out on their vote because the new register isn't updated until next year. Brown is a cynical politicians with no-ones interest at heart other than his own.

Is this really the man who is running our country? A depressing thought.

A Housekeeping Message

2007-10-04T01:02:00.000+01:00

I'm slowly trying to make my blog a little more designed. Spending the week with real bloggers has made me a little more self conscience of my ancient looking blog. But anyway it will be a slow process. However just switched over to the newer blogger template and means I have to re-do all my link lists. I've taken the opportunity to try and cull and update the list a bit and split them into affiliation. I'm sure I've put some people in the wrong place or missed some off. Please do tell me. And I've also noticed that I'm seriously lacking in Labour blog links.

Anyway it's 1am and I want to really update the CF blogs list so I shall get round to that asap.

Camerons Speech

2007-10-03T14:06:00.000+01:00

Live speech blogging from the blogging bunker. I'm surrounded by the great and the good of Tory blogging. The level of misogyny and sexual harassment is high but I'm tolerating it in order to live blog Cameron's words of wisdom.

Here we go -
Ooh Moby - The Beach and Tory conference. Clearly an obvious link there. But no it is better to start with this rather than Jerusalem or some such soundness I suppose. Hang on I spoke too soon - it's being mixed into a Cafe del Mar tune now. I'm starting to long for some glow sticks. This is pretty cool!

The rave is still going on - there was a distinct sound of silence from the old ladies but massive applause erupted when he emerged on the stage and the old dears realised that no they hadn't died and gone to heaven. They're still in Blackpool.

Cameron looks good. No big podium, no autocue, no big set. Just Dave. This is what we need a good clear, straightforward real leader.

He's doing the right thing here. He's praising everyone, respecting achievements. However his praise for Sayeeda Warsi was not that well received. Not because she's a Muslim woman - no-one cares about that, more because she has a great talent for turning up in the news for all the wrong reasons.

But anyway back to the positive! William Hague is ace. Everyone loves him. And they should the man IS the heart and soul of the party.

Now we've come to the line Guido already put up about not lurching to the left or the right - just providing good solid leadership. And that really is the message. There is something really reassuring listening to Cameron at the moment. He seems calm, composed. Genuinely ready for anything that's thrown at him.

Now we're moving back to core Tory message. Smaller government, more personal responsibility, less crappy PCSOs. Sound.

A call for E-democracy from the Tory leader? And with a nice self-deprecating line as well. Do you think Gordon Brown even knows how to get into Facebook? The great thing with Cameron is you know he's not talking about MySpace and Facebook because some researcher has told him to - his mates are all on Facebook, he will have looked at a MySpace page himself. Gordon Brown probably has never even googled anything.

Totally justified and necessary attack on Citizens Juries. Followed by a call for less bureaucracy and bullshit in local government with more direct responsible? God it may be that I'm on my second pint but I'm feeling really fired up about being a Tory.

"We're not doing enough to prepare our children for this world of freedom", now that's a great sentence. Even better it's being followed up by sensible points about streaming, real schools for kids with disabilities and accepting the differences between children. He's also being very brave and bold on attacking lefties in education who think we cannot distinguish between childrens achievements for fear of being unfair. It's not about trying to label children failures. It's about trying to push forward those who achieve and help those who aren't achieving to achieve. And as Dave is saying right now that it's about creating a learning environment where discipline exists to allow other pupils to learn free from the fear of attack and free from endless disruption.

Funny actually that lots of people said the Tories would be too scared to go near education - by my rough calculations he seems to have spoken about it more than any other subject. Good to see Cameron's balls are right where they should be.

I'm running out of comments now because I'm just loving this speech. Everything DC is saying is just so spot on. However in an amusing side note, about two minutes ago Iain Dale burst in the door of the bunker and said "I'm not sure he should have said pissed", then closed the door and walked off. It shows the varied levels of maturity that a minute later Dizzy burst in the door and said essentially "tee hee, Cameron said pissed" with a cheeky school boy grin on his face.

Well that ended abruptly. To explain, Iain took his laptop back off me and mine was in my suitcase so no more blogging available. Then we decided to make a dash for it before the end of the speech and got caught in a downpour of rain for our troubles. Now I am sat in Blackpool North station and there is no train for about 45 minutes and every tory in the country is queuing to get on it. Bollocks is the word that springs to mind basically.

But from what I saw Cameron just gave a blinder. That was the speech we needed to hear. That was the speech the British public needed to hear and that was definitely the speech that Brown needed to hear. Your bluff has been called, we're ready for the election so now get on with it mate. Shit or get off the pot.

Final Day of Conference

2007-10-02T13:39:00.001+01:00

No blogging yesterday for two reasons. One I was too hungover and two after I eventually hauled myself out of bed I didn't get near a computer again until I came back to the hotel and passed out. I'm now sat in the special blogger roomat conference feeling very special since I'm using Iain Dale's laptop to blog! (although I didn't actually ask his permission and I've justlogged him out of blogger so I really hope he knows his password!)

Anyway - last two days. It's been pleasant. I've had drinks (lots of them), been to fringe meetings (a few of them) and generally experienced a buoyant feeling. There has been a sense that people have been amazed all week nothing has gone wrong (touch wood obviously as we still have the dear leader's speech to go).

Amusing conference stories? Well since I've been following Croydonian and Dizzy around all week they've already blogged most of the best. As to the notes I've made while out and about drunk, wellthey go something like this. Not coherant but a good rundown of the last twenty four hours.

- Turned up at the CFI event - felt horribly underdressed so ran out in case I got turfed out for not adhering to the unspoken dress code of Tory conference.

- Saw Edward Leigh from the otherside of the street and noticed he had incredibly muddy shoes.

- Heard Guido talk about his observations on Margot James's nipples.

- Saw Theresay May wearing a skirt that I woulod consider myself too old to wear - never mind her.

- Won a total of £9 in the Claremont quiz machine.

Anyway that's about it. Better go before Iain returns from his medyah appearance with Hunky Duncy and Andrew Neil. I'm off to applaud David Cameron like I've never applauded before. I hear the speech is a blinder and I'm fucking chuffed about it.

Conference First Day

2007-10-02T01:52:00.000+01:00

Oh ok I've been crap so far. I started off well . I went to an actual fringe event. The Bruge Group were hosting a discussion with John Redwood MP and Syed Kamal MEP. Both of them talked a lot of sense and I couldn't help but agree with them, even though Syed did invoke Godwin's Law at one point. However the problem with me and anti-europeans or euro-sceptics or those who are very worked up about europe is not that I disagree with them. It' just that I don't think your average voter cares that much about it. Voters care about the big issue that affect them directly - crime, tax, hospitals and schools. They may have views on the EU but at the end of the day it's not going to be the deciding factor when most people vote.

After that I got a bit useless and descended into drinking. I popped into the Conservative Future reception. It was great. I think I went to the Conservative Home event. Not sure. However quote of the night has to be Dizzy - "sometimes I have to adjust my balls because they hang to the left and I worry they might be ideologically unsound"

Ah Glorious Blackpool

2007-10-01T13:47:00.000+01:00

Well I've just arrived. The good news is my bedroom seems to have good 3G reception. The bad news is the shower doesn't seem to have hot water. Nevermind - I'm a brave woman and when my hair need washing I will stomach freezing cold water in order to make sure it get's washed! Having just done so though I'm really hoping there's hot water tomorrow.

But anyway - on to the politics! Well I've only just got here. I haven't even gone to the Winter Gardens yet. I was surrounded by Tories on the train though. Lots of young professional looking women in particular. Clearly we are still attracting the new breed. Equally the front page of all the newspapers seemed to be about the Tories - even if they were negative you got a real feel that this week is going to be quite a turning point, a fork stuck in the road (trivia points available).

So anyway - I'll stop yabbering on about stuff you already know and get out there and see what is going on. Updates coming soon!

Almost Off to Conference

2007-09-30T00:01:00.000+01:00

Annoyingly I actually have to work tomorrow (long, boring story) so I can't go to conference until Monday. Managed to get my rubbish internet connection to work well enough for me to watch Cameron's little piece to the news cameras in Blackpool. It's buoyed me up into an enthusiastic mood. This week has the potential to fire up activists, to energise the members, to unite all fronts and get the Tory party on course for a serious election fight. I loved the end of the report when the reporter shouts "Are you ready for an election?" and Cameron shouts back "You bet".

So anyway I've got high expectation of this week and I better be impressed. I'll be blogging as much as Vodafone 3G reception in Blackpool and alcohol allows.

I've now managed to hit publish by accident twice in this post so I better get on with it. Finally I just wanted to say cheers to the people who voted for me in Iain's list. Not all of you are creepy stalkers who post filthy comments that I have to delete - and even then you have to appreciate those guys as well. But seriously I'm dead chuffed. And so's my mother - at least she was until I showed her the book and she saw the picture of me smoking. I'm in trouble now.

Anyway - Blackpool here I come (at a very slow pace)

The Jeremy Kyle Backlash

2007-09-29T12:23:00.000+01:00

Last week a judge branded the popular daytime ITV show hosted by Jeremy Kyle as "a form of human bear baiting" after having to make a decision on the case of one of the shows guests headbutting another. The judge gave a great speech basically saying that normally if the case of one guy headbutting another had come in front of him he'd have sent the guy down for a bit for assault but he only fined the guy and ordered him to pay costs as he felt the provocation and circumstances were so unique. He also said that he felt the producers of the show should have been in the dock with the gentleman. This has been followed with accusations that the shows producers deliberately plied a guest with beer (my friend who is sat here next to me works in TV and wants me to say that this is probably is not true and that producers are not evil people and if it did happen it was probably because the guy threatened to leave the show unless he was given a drink) These two things combined have made their sponsors, Learn Direct, get all wobbly and they are withdrawing their sponsorship.

So this begs the question - is the Jeremy Kyle shows entertainment or sick voyeurism that exploits those in the most troubled situations in society. If you've never watched the show, you really should once as there really has never been anything quite like it on British TV before. Of course there have been these talk show formats for years now. They started in the US with Sally Jessy Raphael, Jenny Jones, Ricki Lake but then of course the king of them all came along Jerry Springer. Here in the UK the shows followed a pretty similar format. First we had Esther and Vanessa and then Trisha, who really set up the stage for going seriously low brow with this stuff but then came Jeremy Kyle.

The thing that differentiates Jeremy Kyle is his aggressive style. While other talk show hosts would be judgemental they would do it with a calm voice of authority, they would make people cry but in the way a parent figure would lay a guilt trip in a kindly way. Kyle however is directly confrontational with his guests. I remember seeing a show once were a mother had brought her daughter on as she was concerned about her daughters obesity. After lulling the woman into a false sens of security and asking her to talk about why she wanted her daughter to lose weight, Kyle then dived into a tirade of abuse against the woman saying that she was treating her daughter horrifically and how dare she says the girl was fat. He really lays into the guests directly and personally in a very aggressive manner. It's unpleasant and cruel to watch a lot of the time.

The other aspect Kyle has in common with Jerry Springer is the type of guests he has on. You never see a middle class family on their, hell you barely see a respectable working class family. In america the terms is trailer trash, here - I hate to use the word but I suppose basically it's chav. The point is we're seeing people who are at the lowest rung in society. You have to wonder if they're on these shows sometimes because the wait for seeing a counsellor on the NHS is far too long.

I'm a big defender of reality TV, I think generally people have signed up for the show and they should know what they're getting into and basically that makes them fair game. However I think Jeremy Kyle crosses a line. He takes vulnerable emotional people, lures them on the show making them think it will solve their problems and that the other person will be seen as the bad guy and then attacks them viciously in a bullying and personal manner.

I'd never call for a show to be banned but I think this is one case where we have to question - why are the ratings for this show so high? What has gone wrong with society that we enjoy watching what a judge has so accurately described as "public bear baiting"?

Anyway watch it once to see how sick it is and then turn it off. The only thing that will get Kyle's unpleasant abusive exploitative show off the air is a major drop in the ratings. Good on Learn Direct for realising this is not the show for them.

Conservative Future Candidates in Bitchiness Shocker

2007-09-27T22:44:00.000+01:00

It seems that although there is still no sign on the horizon of an official date for the next Conservative Future elections, it hasn't stopped the early starts of electioneering beginning between the ever ambitious youngsters of the party. Conservative Future elections are always a fun affair. I'm so looking forward to not running in the next set as it gives me this excellent opportunity to observe the silly mayhem from a safe distance.

A few months back a little group emerged called Conservative Future for Britain - it's a testament to how quickly things move in CF that after not having been active in the organisation for a year I had barely heard of any of the people running it. Their purpose was to make sure nobody from London was elected at the next CF elections - because of course that's the real problem with CF. It's not that the infrastructure doesn't exist to provide effective communication and support or that the turnover of branch chairman is so fast that there is no continuity to ensure long term membership building. No the real problem is that half the members of the exec are from London. Apparently (if it was acceptable to put emoticons in blog posts then I would be putting a little rolling eyes face here). In fact their original website last month showed some very poor research since they had got the base locations of many of the exec members wrong. But anyway a month ago this was just an organisation promoting a message. There were denials that this was any form of slate being formed for the CF Elections. But lo and behold their website has now got a candidates page!

In fact the delectable Anastasia Beaumont-Bott, who I hear has done some excellent work forming LGBTory, has now started a facebook group garnering support for her campaign. Interestingly I heard about it from a fellow blogger who was invited to join even though he is WAY too old to be in Conservative Future. Glad to see there is good market research going on there. But the most interesting part of this was the signs of cattiness and bitchiness already emerging (yeah yeah - no-one mention kettles and pots). Last night on Anastasia's Facebook group mission statement type thing it said that:

"The Conservative Future used to be boiling over with the enthusiasm of young Conservatives, riddled with fresh new ideas and ready to help the party as and when needed. It has gone from being the very core of what Conservatism should be, to a one man show all about slimey personal career boosting."

However today it reads:

"The Conservative Future used to be boiling over with the enthusiasm of young Conservatives, riddled with fresh new ideas and ready to help the party as and when needed. It has gone from being the very core of what Conservatism should be, to a centre of personal career boosting."

Aside from the use of the definite article preceeding the organisations name - did Mark Clarke's lawyers step in with Usmanov style venom or did she just think better at having a major dig at the current chairman who - obviously has his faults, believe me - but has run a relatively successful year?

When I first got involved in CF I used to hate the old guard whinging about how all the new NME candidates every year said the same thing and achieved nothing - but a few years experience has taught me better. Every year people who have no experience of how CF is run at the centre and no knowledge of the real problems the organisation faces charges up with an exciting election campaign, get caught up in feeling like a real politician and then - with a bit of luck - get elected. However within a month they've realised being on the CF exec isn't what they expected and that it's not like being a real politician - it involves a lot of hard work, blood, sweat and tears. Most lose interest after about two months and slowly disappear into the woodwork. Some do a really good job - however they are usually in the minority.

Ah well - the elections I'm sure will happen at some point but until then - beware CF members bearing promises, without the experience and knowledge to back it up.

Anyway apologies to those who hate CF posts. Politics and / or Kevin Smith soon - promise!

UPDATE

It seems others decided to do a bit of digging into this and Anastasia is now claiming she wasn't referring to Mark Clarke. Now I really don't want to get at the poor girl but seriously - if you refer to a one man show of slimey career boosting who else could you be referring to? I mean seriously. Mark has been very prominent in all the publicity of this years exec. In fact most people would be hard pressed to name one other member of the exec. She also claimed the misunderstanding was down to "Scottish colloquialism". None of my Scottish relatives are able to tell me of an alternative meaning of one man show slimey career boosting. A bit of advice - if you're going to make personal attacks at least stick to your guns.

BORIS FOR MAYOR

2007-09-27T12:47:00.000+01:00

Nothing cures a hangover like the pure joy and relief at finally knowing for certain that Boris Johnson will definitely be the Conservative candidate for London Mayor. I am joyously excited and if my head didn't hurt so much and the people at my workplace weren't all being such grumpy buggers then I would by bouncing up and down with sheer pleasure!

I strongly recommend that everyone who wants to help goes to Back Boris and signs up. I have to say I haven't looked forward to an election campaign so much for ages. Especially since I'm now living in Hackney - I've dragged out my old I Heart Boris badge from Conservative Future Freshers Fairs of yore - and I cannot wait to get out there canvassing.

Ken Livingstone be afraid - be very afraid! We're coming to get you!

Defections and Labour Spin

2007-09-27T00:17:00.000+01:00

Ah drunken blog posting - I love it.

However I've been trying to articulate for the last few days what I think about the obvious Labour press machine reports that are appearing in the paper. A non-political city mate of mine asked me if I thought Brown was really going to call a snap election soon and I finally managed to phrase it right. Basically it seems at the moment that Gordon Brown et Labour are playing on the Tory party's weakness - it's love of infighting. They're talking about Gordon's Conservatives, defections and freaking everyone out by talking about a snap election. It's all a plan to make the tories panic and turn on themselves (Ben Brogan intimated as much the other day). So once Gordon had lured the Tories into self destructing he figures he can then call an election at his leisure once they've fallen for his cunning plan. This is the reason I absolutely despise those Tories who are running around trying to fuck the party as hard as they can at the moment. They are walking right into Gordon Brown's arms.

Now on this note this evening - through a series of drunken random phonecalls I've got a bit of a lead on who the possible defector that Gordon and the Labour press team are being so smug about. Now from that list you can definitely knock out a few as I don't think the Winterton's are going to be becoming Brownite footsoldiers any time. However that leaves me with a few suspicions. Now this has put me in a quandry as a blogger. Do I blog something potentially interesting that will allow me to say I told you so in a few days but may tarnish the name of a few MP's or do I just carry on playing Resident Evil 4 and forget about it? Well clearly since I'm writing then I've decided to at least nearly blog about it. Well ok you've twisted my arm. Now in no way are these people definitely defecting or even possibly defecting. Basically I've got some information that has led me to believe that one of the following may defect and I'm writing it so I can go "hah I was right". Or course this could all backfire horribly wrongly and everyone can go "HA you were completely wrong"!

Anyway, if I had to back someone to be the next Tory defector I would say: Bercow (and I really don't want to because I think the poor guy gets far too much stick ad I really hope he stays), Kenneth Clarke (so unlikely I know), James Clappison (mainly because he's on the list and I've never heard of the poor bloke and most defectors are total nobodies), Stephen Crabb (well he's new), John Gummer (mad policy proposals), Michael Mates (you never know), Francis Maude (or is this just wishful thinking on some people's parts?), Andrew Turner (those Isle of Wight people - you never know were you are), Robert Walter (again never heard of him), Tim Yeo (I really shouldn't publish what I wrote here)

As I say I in no way want to undermine these MP's and I really hope no-one defects and it's all just Labour spin - but the blogger in me had to conjecture in case it is right!

Nighty night peeps - I'm off for more beer!

I Really Fucking Hate TFL

2007-09-25T18:28:00.000+01:00

You think I would be in an excellent mood because I've been named the 20th best right of centre blog in Iain's list. I am pleased and I am very grateful and I totally realise I don't deserve it.

However I'll admit it's not the top thing on my mind. I had a horrible day at work but the worst was to come - brace yourself, a lengthy explanation of Transport for London failings is about to come. So how long do you think it took me to get home today? Whatever you're thinking you're probably wrong since I'm not home yet. I had to give up on trying to get home a while back. Let me start from the beginning.

My journey to and from work is a pretty straightforward no change journey on the Piccadilly Line. Trouble is when I got to the Piccadilly line platform in South Kensington this evening at 5, the platform was much busier than usual and the sign said there wasn't another tube coming for 5 minutes. SO of course by the time the tube train arrived the platform was full and the train was too full to get on. Fine, the sign says theres another one in a minute. That one comes. Still too full and one of the many "gentleman" in suits on the tube barged me out of the way so he could take the last bit of space. Fine there's still another one coming in a minute. It turns up - there's space for everyone on the platform to fit so we all get on. After aboput 5 minutes I realise since the doors are still open and we're showing no signs of moving there is really very little point in keeping my arm up any longer. After about another five minutes people start getting off and going to try the circle and district line instead. I figured well this way I've got a seat so I sat and waited. Eventually the driver comes over the tannoy to tell us the Picadilly line has been suspended and that we need to find alternative routes. Now at this point I waited a bit with a few other hardcore Picadilly line people. We figured that a) the mad rush for the C&D platform wasn't worth getting caught in and b) these suspensions can last anything from five minutes to an hour. But eventually I caved. Time to get the Circle and District to Victoria. To be fair that wasn't too painful however when I got off at Victoria to get on the Victoria line I gave up. The queue to get to the platform, which I couldn't see, was about 50 deep in not moving people. I got out of the station knowing I could get a bus straight to my mum's flat and be in front of a warm fire with a cup of tea in about twenty minutes. So I got on the bus - but of course life being as it is half way there the bus changed it's final destination and I had to get out and wait for another bus.

I'll admit at that point I lost my cool and very unfairly had a bit of a go at the bus driver - ranting to him about the fact that between four tube trains and two buses I had travelled a pathetic amount of distance in the space of an hour. He turned to me and asked me how long I had lived in London, I replied all my life, he said "Well you should know - shit happens".

Sums up TFL perfectly if you ask me.

Ahmedinajad - not a nice guy

2007-09-24T23:53:00.000+01:00

Mahmoud Ahmedinajad appeared at New York's Columbia University yesterday (or was it the day before? I meant to write this blog post yesterday and have got confused - but anyway that's not the point). Some people might, and did think it was inappropriate. I'm not 100% sure I agree. I think these public appearance in a western democratic setting do wonders to highlight what an evil little bugger the Iranian president really is. Obviously the highlights of the show was him calling the holocaust an Israeli myth and, when repsonding to a question about the execution of homosexuals, explaining that Iran does not have homosexuals. This reminds me forcibly of a story I remember from when I was very young about a Soviet Politburo member insisting there were no left handed children in Russia.

While the Iranians are in charge of media appearances they can stage manage them into appearing as reasonable and fair. Appearances like this provide a fantastic opportunity to show how easily their pre planned lines fall apart under free and fair democratic questioning.

In other Iranian news my mate drew my attention to this:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has endorsed an agreement with the Venezuelan government that allows for tax-exempted flights, Islamic Republic News Agency reported Sept. 24.

So this presumably will ease along the unholy alliance between Iran and Venezuela so they can stand together against what they call "US Imperialism" or what the rest of us call the deman for basic human rights around the world.

Oh well.

IT Is Dominated By Nerds

2007-09-24T13:18:00.000+01:00

Shocking news I know but while eating my lunch today I was reading this article in The Times highlighting the crisis the IT industry seems to be heading for. Panic is setting in that all businesses now hinge and depend on IT but all the IT guys in the country are socially inept 35 year old weirdos with no ability to take part in a business meeting, meet with clients or understand how important it is to get the CEO's email working again as quickly as possible. In fact the paper version of this story made the link much clearer by having a huge picture of Moff from the IT Crowd, basically all IT guys are exactly as portrayed in the hit comedy show by Graham Linehan. Of course like Linehan's other great show (Father Ted) it's so funny because while it's all very anarchic and silly - the root of the jokes are very very true.

So anyway two initiatives are under way. First they're making charm schools for IT guys to teach them how to communicate with the rest of us social beings. Secondly they're trying to recruit women like you wouldn't believe. Only 20% of computing students in this country are women. Microsoft are distressed because they can't get enough women. And weirdly pregnancy is being blamed for this. According to that Times article when us little ladies go off to have babies we suddenly lose all contact with the real world and when we come back technology has moved on too fast for us to be able to work in IT anymore. Frankly that sounds like a load of bollocks to me. For starters - if I was pregnant and therefore spending a lot of time sitting around all day I'd spend a large part of that day on the internet. I think it's fair to presume that your average female IT person would as well.
So I refuse to believe that pregnancy if a major contributing factor to the disproportionate dominance of men in the IT sector.

Frankly it all comes back to that simple question of why are men simply geekier than women? And why is IT still so geeky when it dominates nearly every aspect of our lives? I've often heard it posited that "geekiness" is often just mild autistic spectrum disorders. Men are biologically much much much more susceptible to ASD (in fact I've never heard of a case in a woman) so really what we see as geekiness is just legions of men with very mild undiagnosed (or in some cases actually diagnosed) ASD and us women just aren't affected.

But anyway - really the solution to having less Moff and Roys working in IT and more Jens is to take the geekiness out of IT. The problem is that when an industry is dominated by a breed of person who are naturally cliquey, unfriendly and sarcastic it doesn't make it that welcoming or inviting to other people, least of all women. So rise up people - reclaim techonology. IT isn't just about fat spotty middle aged virgins anymore, it's a part of all our lives. Dont let the freaks and geeks scare you off! Force them back into the recess of comic book fairs and Star Trek conventions. It's time for the masses to take over IT.

Memieness

2007-09-23T21:41:00.000+01:00

The delightful Shane Greer has tagged me with an earliest political memory meme. First of all I think somehow I've already done this somewhere sometime ago but not sure when or were. Secondly I don't really like doing memes. Thirdly, and most importantly, it's really a little hard to follow Shane's own account!

But hey - it's ten o clock on Sunday and I've got nothing better to do! So....

My earliest political memory? It's hard to pin down. At home I was always surrounded by newspapers and news on the TV. I used to watch Newsnight with my dad and try and guess which political party the men were from by studying their ties (surprisingly consistently!). My final year of primary school we had a great form teacher who made us do lots of current affairs work and bring in stories from the news. Again though it's hard to pin down a specific political memory - the only stories I definitely remember bringing in was the Queen's "Annus Horribilis" speech and when the Church of England started allowing female vicars. So I was sort of saturated in current affairs and politics from a young age.

But the first clear strictly political memory I have is 1st May 1997. I was 14 years old and I stayed up all night to watch the General Election results. I hadn't really been following the politics of it much. My school had had a mock election but that had really been taken over by whose friend was representing which party rather than any actual issues (the Greens won - in case you're interested). I was just watching it because it was the first General Election that had happened in my consciousness and I wanted to see what happened - I didn't realise then that everyone knows what the result of a General Election is going to be before it actually happens. But yes I watched it and I still have my diary from then and I can tell you what I thought at the time. However I'm not typing it out verbatim because frankly if you think my writing is bad now, you should've seen it then!

But basically the overall feel of it is that I was genuinely worried by the fact that Tony Blair had become Prime Minister. I had been born under a Conservative government and had never known anything else. It seemed very scary to me at that age that the entire governing system of our country was suddenly being given to an entirely new group of people - like a giant leap into the unknown.

Obviously I knew nothing about what anyone stood for at that stage and I'm not trying to make some point that I knew Labour was bad way back then or anything like that. In fact if this makes any point it's just that I've always been a bit concerned by radical wholesale change!

Anyway enough of this tedious self indulgent shit. It's someone else's turn. I'm going to tag five Lib Dems - because I like to annoy them. That and all the Tory blogs seem to be tagging each other with this already. Amiable Dunce, Chris K, Hot Ginger and Dynamite, Kop Lob Pob a Job and Shark Attack

A Little Link

2007-09-21T15:05:00.000+01:00

Just a little post to say I've added a link to a new blog, Letter From A Tory. I'd like to say I found this all on my own but no. I got an email from the author, a very nice polite email, drawing my attention to it. I have to say the format really appeals to me and from what I've read so far I think this could turn out to be a rather good little blog.

I've had three hours sleep, the busiest week so far at work and I'm out on the piss later - so I'm guessing there's not going to be a whole load of blogging until Sunday!

Until then have a joyous weekend and don't let the Russian oligarchs gets you down!

Save Tim Ireland!

2007-09-20T19:01:00.000+01:00

If you haven't already read this on Iain's blog - you should. The Russian billionaire, Alisher Usmanov, who has recently purchased a stake in Arsenal, seems to have set his lawyers onto the humble blogosphere with devastating effect. I can only echo Iain's sentiment that while I have absolutely no love whatsoever for Tim Ireland there can be absolutely no justification for the way Bloggerheads has been pulled down on the basis of what seems to be nothing more than a threatening lawyers letter.

I'll admit - as someone who isn't interested in Arsenal or international news that much I didn't have a clue who this guy was until a few hours ago. Google has taught me much. First of all it's taught me that articles about him on a few sites have disappeared while they still remain on google's search results. In fact the only article about him seem to be on old media newspaper sites. All of these are very factual and clinical in their analysis of his rise to riches through the mining industry first and then moves into media and telecommunications. Not a word of criticism seems to have got through which I suppose one could presume means that his lawyers are very busy folk (believe me - I am taking a lot more care over my words than usual!)

However there are the odd hints, the Daily Mail profile states that "Reports years ago claimed Britain's National Criminal Intelligence Service was monitoring him for alleged links — never proven — to suspected mafia figures." Clearly no link has ever been proved and I'd like to make that clear. The Guardian does state that Usmanov is known as the 'hard man of Russia' and makes the point that in the world of Russian oligarchs, clearly that is not an easy title to take.

His Wikipedia page in particular is fascinating. It has a brief history of where he was born and educated and then jumps straight to the present day. A very unusual sight on wikipedia for such a high profile figure. It also contains the details of the accusations made by Craig Murray, which I understand are the main things his lawyers are objecting to.

For all I know Alisher Usmanov has lead a blameless and innocent existence. If that is the case though why is there so much secrecy surrounding him? Why is he demanding that every word of criticism of him is removed instantly?

But even more troubling - we live in a country of free speech. We operate on the world wide web of even freeer speech, how is it then that a Russian billionaire is able to shut down criticism from the comfort of his armchair? We must not stand for this. We must not let things continue this way! Support Tim Ireland (on this one occasion) and the other bloggers being stifled. Spread the word.

Lib Dems Boo Farage

2007-09-17T19:13:00.000+01:00

Nigel Farage today addressed Lib Dem delegates at a fringe meeting where they debated Menzies Campbell's surprise decision to call for a referendum on Britain's membership of the EU. At first sight I thought this looked like a pretty bold move. It shows honour and conviction to be willing to invite those you disagree with into your conference and debate with them in a sensible mannered style, allowing the arguments to speak for themselves. It's not like we've ever had UKIP speak at a Tory conference, the closest we get is a few UKIP pensioners standing outside the conference centre with pathetic little signs.

However on reading further it seems that this wasn't actually how things went. Being the mature chaps and chapesses they are the Lib Dems booed, hissed and shouted down Nigel Farage. Now I'm not Nigel Farage's biggest fan but from having seen him speak in public before I seriously doubt he was saying anything that would require public beration from an audience. It shows terribly bad manners and ridiculous inconsiderateness (yeah OK that's not a word but I'm working long hours at the moment and my vocabulary has gone to hell) to boo and hiss in a serious political debate.

If the Liberal Democrats want a referendum on Britain's membership of the EU then they have to face a serious debate on whether Britain should be a member of the EU - rather than just shout down everyone who disagrees with them. Farage's experiences at Lib Dem conference do not bode well for the maturity levels of the debate they are about to enter. When you come out looking small compared to UKIP you are clearly doing something wrong.

Politics of Personality

2007-09-16T14:13:00.001+01:00

This week in politics has been all about leaders. Brown meeting Thatcher, Cameron meeting Merkel, Ming almost meeting the sharp end of a knife in his back from some of his colleagues. I have literally spent all day scouring the the news for something I want to write about and now at 6pm I've decided the problems is that I don't care enough about these images.

I don't care that Thatcher visited Brown at No. 10 - ex prime minister meet new prime ministers all the time. I'd be interested to know if they had a lively debate or if Brown toadied up to her, just to see if he really does have any principles or backbone. But as to the image of it all I don't care.

Again with Cameron meeting Merkel I'd love to have been a fly on the wall, I'd love to know what they really talked about but as to the media impact of a photo of the two of them together, I just don't give a hoot.

And finally there's poor old Menzies Campbell. Whispering campaigns gather more speed in the summer and at the moment the political world is so devoid of news that the BBC et al are willing to cover any whiff of a coup. Unfortunately for Ming this does seem to be more than just stirring by the papers. The Lib Dems got the taste of blood in their jaws in bringing down Charlie K and, having failed to learn any lessons from the Tory party, seem to think an annual leadership contest is the way to go - or at least until Chris Huhne gets his way and becomes leader - or is it Nick Clegg? I lose track of which of these young Turks is running the show.

Meanwhile there is a major economic crisis coming over the hill (I just can't stop myself) and serious rumours of a general election in the next six months. Now you could be forgiven for not realising the Tory party has published the results of a lot of its policy group reviews in the last few weeks with a view to forming solid policies after conference. You may also not realise that the Lib Dems have been publishing policy reports as well in the last few weeks. The Labour party have no policies other than idiotic proposals to give pregnant women more money to spend on ready meals but that's been the situation for the last ten years anyway. The point is there is no grand debate.

We are in danger of heading towards the most vacuous general election in the history of Britain. Now here's the controversial bit - I don't blame the politicians. Not from any party. I do not doubt for one second that the front benches of all parties would actually love to have a chance to hammer out debates on principle and methods and means and actual ways to work out what's best for the country. But that's not going to get them in the papers, that's not going to get them at the top of the viewer popularity led BBC news headlines. Most importantly of all its not going to get them any votes. The majority of people in pubs aren't talking about the best way to reduce personal debt in this country, or how to ensure literacy rates in primary schools are improved or even what to do about the continuing genocide in Darfur. They are talking about the McCann's, football and getting pissed.

Political apathy in this country is a chicken and egg situation. Politicians engage in spin and image control because they don't get the media attention if they don't. The media brushes dull stories under the carpet because they don' get the viewing figures if they don't. And then "the public" complain that politics is all about spin and media control and switch off anyway - even though they'd be highly unlikely to sit and take notice to a lengthy economic debate.

Solution? I don't know - I'd say real civics lessons in schools might be a start, getting kids reading the paper from a young age so by the time they leave school they know enough to take an interest but that's a long term solution and in this ratings driven age of politics who has time for long term plans. Maybe we've gone past the point of no return and this is what politics is going to be like from now on. Or maybe, just maybe there are still politicians out there with the passion, the drive and the oratorical skill to make people care about the issues, to want to know about the policies and to desire further knowledge so they can make an informed choice. Those are the guys (and gals) we need at the front-line of politics at the moment. People who inspire, entertain and engage. Dare I say it, people like Boris Johnson. The only man who has really been talking about policy this week. Unlike Ken Livingstone who has just repeatedly engaged in attacking Boris Johnson's personality.

If you haven't already seen it I recommend Iain Dale's excellent interview with Boris. This is what politics should be about.

And finally...

2007-09-14T09:26:00.000+01:00

Sorry that blogging has been light this week. I've just moved into my new flat last night. I'm sat here waiting for a delivery, hoping it will come before I have to go to work and at the same time excited to be using my new kettle in my new kitchen. But anyway this is all irrelevant. Just expect blogging to go back to normal on Monday (ish)

But I think I did notice something this morning. Now I'm pretty reliant on BBC news website for my news. I spend a lot of time clicking around it. So correct me if I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure that they did not previously have a "Also in the news" section before.

I often have a look on Ananova still when I want to find silly news stories because their quirkies section is pretty comprehensive but I have to say I never expected the BBC news team to sink to the levels of cheap stories making fun of foreigners, ahhing at clever animals and mocking stupid pensioners (as is the general theme of these sorts of stories). Although why I keep expecting higher standards from the BBC gawd knows.

It's a Tragedy Not Politics

2007-09-12T12:22:00.000+01:00

I have been amazed how many times in the last week or so non-political people have asked me, "Caroline - your into all this politics stuff, what do you think about the McCann case?".

ITS NOT POLITICS. It's a terrible tragedy whatever the outcome. And as I am not privy to the whole details of the case, as is nobody apart from this Portugese judge in fact, then I don't know the outcome. It may well be that Kate McCann messed up trying to medicate her own child and in panic and distress at what she had done tried to cover it up. It may be her husband was the one who decided to cover it up, not her. It may be that they have been telling the truth all along and that Madeleine was snatched. Either way its tragic. Either way the morbid fascination of the British public will do nothing to improve anybodys life or to move forward the progress of humanity. I find it quite distasteful the way people are acting like vultures over a carcass, and it only makes me question their interest a few weeks ago.

But most importantly I'll tell you what it's not - it's not Politics

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And on a completely different note, thank your for the lovely messages I've received about my grandmother. She has finally got her operation and true to form is recovering well.

Respect Your Elders

2007-09-10T22:58:00.000+01:00

My grandmother had a fall this weekend. She's managed to do some damage to her hip. Not the joint itself, which is apparently in excellent working order, but just below it. As such she is currently in an NHS hospital awaiting an operation - and there lies the rub.

I should stop and take a second here to mention that my grandmother is an extraordinary woman. I'm sure all people think their grandparents are exceptional but I do think my grandmother deserves a special mention. She is 89 years old and exceptionally fit, mentally alert and strong - even if she is only about 4'10". She joined Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service/Reserve in 1943 and was posted to Ormskirk where she nursed troops and Italian prisoners of war who had arrived by ship from Africa. From there she was posted to a 600-bed hospital near Brighton in the south of England.

On D-Day 6th June 1944 allied forces crossed the English Channel and invaded France. Thirteen days later she set sail in a troop ship for France but because storm conditions were so bad, and with hundreds of other ships in the ocean, they zigzagged around for three days, a sitting target. Eventually they anchored off the Normandy coast and she had to climb down a 40-foot rope ladder in heavy seas to a landing craft, before disembarking at the famous Mulberry harbours at Aramanche.

However, the field which had been allocated to them to put up the tented 75th British Hospital was still in German hands. Headquarters became another general hospital and the nurses did whatever they could to help wherever they were needed. The following month the Germans had retreated and the allied forces were now able to put up the tented hospital in the chosen field. My grandma and her colleagues worked within the noise of battle day and night until the front line moved further away.

She stayed in France until November when she was posted to Brussels, then to Bruges where she nursed survivors of the concentration camps. This was, perhaps, the most chilling memory of her time served during the war. She had not been briefed before starting work at the camp and remembers to this day the horror of opening the door to her 30-bed ward to see the skeleton frames and sunken, staring eyes of the survivors.

Grandma was in Brussels for VE Day on 8th May, 1945, and in London for VJ Day on 15th August, 1945. After that she was posted to India. She landed in Bombay and travelled to Ranchi, north of Calcutta, where she nursed the local sick and survivors from the prisoner of war camps in Japan.

In November the following year she was discharged from the military nursing service and while in India she met her future husband, who was a fighter pilot. He later joined the colonial service and together they lived in Africa and the Middle East.

After the Normandy landings she was mentioned in Dispatches for gallant and distinguished service in North-West Europe. The citation was published in the London Gazette on 4th April, 1946. To commemorate this she wears a bronze oak leaf on her war medal ribbon. (this potted history is obviously far too well written for me to have done it - thank you Shetland Times for doing a piece on grandma a few years back)

So anyway! Back to Grandma today. She has had her hip operation cancelled twice in the last two days. Every day she has been starved all day in preparation of her operation and then everyday it has been cancelled at the last minute. While Grandma is very strong for her age, she is still 89 and very small. Starving her all day is making her weaker, and feeding her at the end of the day doesn't make up for it. You add that to the fact that she has been given morphine to counteract the massive amounts of pain she's in while her hip is still unfixed. These delays cannot be doing her any good.

Now I work in the NHS. I know that life just sucks in the NHS and very often there is nothing you can do about it. People don't get sick in an orderly queue that you can deal with. I'm sure there were good reasons for these cancellations. Some drunk twit probably crashed into some poor innocent and the surgical resources were need to help them instead. But surely there has to come a point where you stop getting pushed to the back of the queue? And where does that point come? Just because Grandma isn't on a target list somewhere why does she have to be put in this position of her condition being made worse?

Well there's nothing anyone can do. There's enough doctors in my family and they've all descended on the hospital to make as much fuss as possible. But I think it's worth remembering that the older people in hospitals, the ones that get a raw deal, the ones that people often flippantly talk about taking up the resources of the NHS - these are the people who fought for our country, who healed our sick, who faced the greatest evil Europe has ever seen and won.

Completely Missing the Point

2007-09-09T11:33:00.000+01:00

Government silly initiative of the week, they're going to give pregnant women £200 towards them eating healthily. They'll be given it in their 29th week of pregnancy. Now there is no way of knowing what this money is sent on, no concern about what these women eat before the 29th week of their pregnancy, and surely it becomes more problematic to feed children after the are born from a financial point of view since you are actually buying separate food??

But the point they are really missing is that the reason people do not eat healthily is not about money. I mean obviously if you are very rich you can hire a chef to buy anything they need to cook you a nutritionally balanced diet. However £200 isn't really going to cover that.

The simple fact is that the healthiest food to eat is home cooked from raw materials. No e-numbers, no preservatives, no extra salt to give flavour, no endless list of ingredients that you need a degree in chemistry to actually understand. Let us take for example the humble leek and potato soup. An excellent dish for winter. Now for £1.32 you can make a homemade bit pot of this to serve about six people, or to serve one or two people a couple of times. Now to buy a ready made pot of it that just might stretch to two people you're looking at £1.50 - £2.00 (All figures based on Waitrose prices and a very simple recipe for leek and potato soup).

So why don't more people eat healthily by home cooking all their meals even though it's cheaper? Convenience. It has nothing to do with money. Giving pregnant mothers £200 isn't going to change that. If you could give them more energy, more time on their hands, a less busy society - or often in some cases cooking lessons - that might help. But giving them £200 just makes it easier for them to buy a load of ready meals from the supermarket.

Thumbs down on this one I think.

DOH

2007-09-08T22:19:00.001+01:00

This has to be my favourite story of the week. One of the Prime Ministers security people was such an idiot he rang the wrong number and left a message syaying, "oh by the way Gordon Brown, the PM right, he's getting on a train in X at Y o'clock and heading to Z. Oh yeah and if you need to get hold of us the number is". He rang the wrong number four times! And sent a text message! I mean how stupid can you be??

In all seriousness - this is really stupid. In my job I have to make phonecalls to people with confidential information about their medical conditions. Now when I ring a mobile and get the standard T-Mobile message or Orange or Vodafone or whatever, I don't leave a message. That could be anyone's phone for all you know. The wrong number might be on the records. And even if I do get a personalised message I'll only say where I'm calling from and ask them to call me back. You do not leave sensitive information on an answerphone with no message. You don't even leave casual information unless you are sure you had the right number.

So to Mr Security Idiot whoever you are - I hope you've learnt a valuable lesson. Don't be such an eejit.

Pavarotti Dies Age 71

2007-09-06T09:41:00.000+01:00

Very sad news to hear this morning that the great tenor Luciano Pavarotti has died from pancreatic cancer. Best to remember his fantastic voice and stage presence.

Embryos, Stem Cells and the Like

2007-09-05T18:19:00.000+01:00

So in the news today - Scientist using human animal hybrid embryos to harvest stem cells in order to research cures and treatments for Alzheimers (among other diseases). This is a seriously sticky ethical area and I know a lot of people have strong views on this. I'm probably not going to be able to write a proper blog piece until tomorrow evening so what do you think?

I will outline my views. Stem cells provide scientists with a vast array of tools to work towards massive medical breakthroughs. I think it is immoral and wrong to stop them using for their research. I see nothing wrong with the use of aborted foetal material being used as it could help mankind. I am however very hesitant about this new move. Creating a bizarre hybrid seems totally wrong at first glance (and that's all this is, only just looked at the story this evening). Using stem cells that would otherwise be going to waste is one thing but this is quite another. The entire area definitely needs to be monitored closely by ethics panels. Oh and George Bush is totally wrong.

(Comment moderation is on again and off again all the time - basically comments that say very nasty things about me personally rather than my views are going to result in it being on and me deleting posts)

The Ultimate Face Off!

2007-09-05T01:06:00.000+01:00

Gordon Brown has today been fighting off calls for him to take part in a public debate with David Cameron whenever the next General Election is called. Frankly the man is a pussy. Some people have been dismissive of the impact a televised public debate could have but I disagree.

Yesterday I was at the pub, no surprises there, and me and a friend were outside smoking - as you have to do in this day and age. She and I were flattered but mostly amused when these two young lads came over to us and started trying to be as charming as two nineteen year old boys can be (trust me I'm going somewhere with this). Now while these lads were very sweet we really weren't interested. I've developed a wonderful technique for repulsing men who try and chat me up in bars and clubs and that is to talk politics at them - about a month ago I literally managed to make a chap run away by asking him to discuss the Lebanon Israel conflict with me. So anyway one of these lads asked what my hobbies were (seriously) and so I said politics. Quick as you like he replied by asking "oh did you watch the US presidential candidates debate on YouTube?". I was absolutely shocked. He went on to admit he actually knew nothing about politics but that had been all over the place so much he had watched it and he even had some thoughts on Hilary Clinton ("I tell you that birds got an answer for everything!"). But that is how powerful something like that can be. Young people, with no interest and no knowledge of politics have actually been engaged on some level.

Brown says it's not necessary because people can watch PMQ's. No-one but sad weirdos like me watches PMQ's and I can bet you that lad I met at the pub yesterday has never watched it. But a live YouTube debate - that's the sort of thing that grabs peoples interest, that's the sort of thing that gets people involved - and Gordon Brown shouldn't refuse to use this powerful tool just because he's a piss poor debater and will be shat on from a great height by David Cameron. He needs to think of the children - not of his own prowess.

Jesus Wept...

2007-09-04T00:09:00.000+01:00

...well if he was a Tory he would be. I'll admit it's midnight and I'm two or three pints the worse for wear but this needs to be said. I came home and thought, oh I haven't blogged much (because as I say new work hours and I haven't quite got in the synch of it all yet) so I'll look at the news and find something to rant about. What is on the front page of BBC news? Well unsurprisingly it's a Tory criticising the Tory party. The same as every other fucking day.

Do you know I think there is something inherently wrong with a large number of party members - they've got so stuck in their Daily Mail reading, complaining about how everything was better in their day ways that they actually cannot get it round their thick heads that their may actually be some thing good, worth supporting, like oh I don't know - the political party that represents their sodding political views!!

No they'd much rather sit in their armchairs and complain that things were much better under Thatcher and clearly the solution to that is to let Gordon Brown have an easy ride and keep Labour in power for another four years. Fuck the fact that Labour have eroded civil liberties, taxed businesses out of the country and passed more sloppy pointless legislation than any executive in this country since Oliver fucking Cromwell.

Michael Ancram is worried the Tory party has lost its soul. I could not disagree more. The Tory party for too long has been run by people with no long term vision, no interest in anything other than the Daily Mail scare of the day. In the last month the Conservative Party has proposed a serious overhaul of regulation and taxation in Britain (Redwood's report is excellent), it has also released a really strong mini-manifesto on crime that makes three tiers of really good suggestions on Law and Order that no Conservative could disagree with. Added to that the party has got itself into the 21st century agenda of caring about the damage mankind does to the planet and trying to combat it in a sensible way - unlike every other party that wants to brand you a Nazi if you throw a piece of plastic in a bin.

Yes I think the press office is doing a shit job of getting the right messages into the media. In fact if the front page of BBC news this evening is Michael Ancram sounding off then clearly the CCHQ press office need their head on plates now. WTF is Andy Coulson doing if he cannot try and control a news agenda?

The Conservative Party now does have policy and does have true Tory policy that any Conservative worth their salt should and will support (if they actually read it rather than looking at the Guardianista spin in the media). However I have learnt in the last year that a vast number of Tory party members would rather live under a Labour government indefinitely and instead stick the knife into their own party rather than attack this woefully dishonest and inept government. To quote the great auteur Kevin Smith "Fuck them, fuck them up their stupid asses".

(I fully expect to have the comments section filled with fuddy duddies explaining why I'm completely wrong and that them slagging off their own party is actually a good thing. Guess what? You're wrong.)

EDIT - First time I've had to put comment moderation on in about a year! Really people, you could be a bit more mature.

Arnie "Terminates" (he he) Tory Conference Engagement

2007-09-02T00:52:00.000+01:00

I'm very sad - this was going to be the highlight of conference for me, to see the man who made one of the greatest action films ever!

Disgruntled of Tunbridge Wells

2007-09-01T11:55:00.000+01:00

Personal rant time. Sorry but it has to be done. As many of you will be aware I get very angry about being woken up. I love sleep, it's great and I need to be woken up in a manner of my choosing. If I have to be up at a certain time I have my alarm set to certain tunes that I don't mind being woken up by. Being woken up prior to that time and I get very very very angry. If it's a weekend or any other day where I don't need to get up by a certain time I have to wake up naturally. It puts you in the best mood for the rest of the day waking up when your body wants to. And the good thing is I'm a very heavy sleeper so I can sleep through most of the things that would wake me up and put me in danger of being in a furious mood for the rest of the day.

So anyway - as you've probably already guessed - I did not get my blissful peaceful wake up this morning. I got woken up by the phone ringing. The phone was right next to me so I answered it. It was a number I'd had a couple of missed calls from over the last few days so I though I better check it wasn't a bank or credit card company about to come and seize my assets. The conversation went exactly like this:

Stranger on other end of phone: "Is that Miss Hunt?"
Groggy, sleepy me: "Yes"
Evil Souless telesales bitch (for it is she): "I'm calling from Kwik Fit Car Insurance. I see that your car insurance is up for renewal and I'd like to tell you about the cheap quote we can offer you"
Angry, groggy, sleep me: "I do not own a car and you do not call people on a Saturday morning selling car insurance. Bugger off!" (slam phone down)

You see I'm getting more and more convinced that anyone who works in this sort of cold calling telesales is essentially evil and going to hell. Last week when I was in Land's End lying on the top of a beautiful cliff looking out at the endless horizon I got a similar phonecall. This time the number that flashed up on my mobile was a mobile number so I answered it without a thought. The guy on the other end said he was calling from Orange and since my phone is on contract with Orange I was willing to talk to him - again basically assuming I hadn't paid my bill. But no. He wanted to ask if I was aware that I was entitled to sign up to Orange Broadband and if so why hadn't I? Now I am an Orange customer and they have a right to try and sell their product so I was very friendly and polite. I explained I was aware of the Broadband offer but that I was happy with the broadband provider I currently had and basically no thank you very much. However this is where they really piss me off. Because these mindless automaton have a script that tells them they cannot end the call until they make a sale. So he keeps prodding and questioning, until I have to say look - I'm on holiday watching a beautiful view and I don't want to talk to you and again hang up.

Sorry have already ranted on quite a bit. I have two more telesales stories I really want to relate but if you're bored already skip to the end! However I am putting these down in order of ascending evilness. When I was at University I was in charge of the household bills for our student house (I lived with four boys - nuff said). One day a very nice salesman from Southern Electric had knocked on the door and contrary to what you may be thinking I'm not always mean to salespeople. I wasn't busy that afternoon so I let him do all his sales patter, he genuinely was offering a better deal than what we had at the time from British Gas for our electricity. In a student house with a card meter for your electricity this matters a hell of a lot. So I switched us over to Southern Electric and thought no more about it. A week later or so I got a phonecall from British Gas. They wanted me to confirm I had chosen to switch, yes. Then they wanted me to explain why - which is fair enough for their market research and records to check why people leave. So I explained that I was happier with what I was being offered. At this point the man on the other end of the phone turned very very very nasty. His manner changed to that of an unpleasant teacher mocking a little schoolgirl for being stupid. He told me the Southern Electric man had lied to me, that I was deceived, that I obviously hadn't understood the terms and conditions. Now this was a few years ago and I wasn't quite as strident as I am now and I was having a bit of an emotional day so I didn't explain to the man that I'm not some dotty cow who just signs up to the first deal she's offered and I had read eveything in great detail before switching. No quite pathetically I burst into tears and hung up. The man was that aggressive. I rang back British Gas, once I had composed myself, to complain about the mans tone. Of course "stupidly" I hadn't asked for his name before hanging up. They told me they could track who made the call. Which sounded like pure bullshit to me.

And so to my final story of the evil of telesales. Now this one - this in another league. This is truly evil and wrong. I was working in an office where it was very busy. The phone rang and a very chirpy woman explained that she was calling from company X. I was doing two other things at the same time so didn't really listen to the company name and she didn't sound like she was selling. She said she was calling following the call a few days before just to confirm the details of the order. I said OK as she started rattling off the address and the name of who whatever it was was being sent to, our phone number, our opening hours etc. I just kept writing my email and nodding along and then she said, "so I just need the payment details" - at this point suddenly I stopped paying attention to everything else I was doing and focused on the phonecall I was having. "Sorry excuse me - where are you calling from again?" At this point, although the woman was extremely competent at what she was doing, I managed to find out what was going on. We had never spoken to this company before, we had not ordered anything. This was a pure and straightforward scam to nick money from people by convincing them they had already ordered something then getting their card details. I explained to the woman that this was sick and that the only people who would fall for this sort of crap were the most vulnerable people in society and that she should be ashamed of herself. She hung up.

Right at the end of this lengthy rant - what's my point? Well first of all I just feel better now having ranted at length. But really there's something else here. Yes of course companies have a right to advertise and try and sell their products. I've canvassed for the Conservative Party many time so I've rung people up and knocked on their doors. However if someone says no I'm busy I leave them in piece. Telesales people aren't allowed to do that - they invade your personal space through the phone and plague and harangue you. If one of them rings you - hang up, it stops either of you wasting the others time. If you work in telesales I think you really have to ask yourself, could you get a job in which you are less likely to annoy, upset or distress people? Like a traffic warden because lets face it, they are higher up the moral scale than a telesales tosser - and that's saying something.