Even fuel protesters are apathetic this time round

Very thin pickings in the campaign news today... Airbus's new A380 'superjumbo' was the highlight of the day - the double-decker twin track to environmental disaster. Meanwhile, the attempts at a 5th anniversary fuel protest appears to lack the strength in numbers of the autumn 2000 effort. Even the legendary David Handley, of Farmers for Action, seemed unable to produce a good media soundbite to rally the troops this time round. (But dig the Union Jack plate and moving bull icon on FFA's website!)

I'm sure if I was hired as the farmer's election campaign disruption strategist (a Lynton Crosby in a Land Rover, if you will) I could have produced much more disruption than the farmers have managed to this time round. In fact an Agricultural Revolution would have already taken place. Handley would have installed a chicken run at No. 10. Birmingham's Bull Ring would have been given back to the bulls, and all London pubs would sell farm cider, at 7.4% ABV. And milk, at a fair price of £6.50 a pint.

So this is a call to Farmers For Action - guys, please live up to your name. Please give us some excitement in the last few days of this campaign. And a few days off, for those of us who drive to work (or a few days in the office, depending on where you get stuck when the fuel runs out.) It's also environmentally friendly - we sure do use less petrol in those fuel protests. As Jimmy Carter once said, "let's talk better mileage". And as he didn't say but should have done, "show me a Sports Utility Vehicle and I'll show you a rocket launcher. "

(with apologies to Al Franken...) John Prescott is a big fat idiot

Lastly tonight, a gratuitous egg-chuck at the large and growing target that is John Prescott. After turning hardcore Labour voters in Wales against him, he has the gall to attack Charles Kennedy for being a tired new father and for getting into a verbal twist when explaining the Lib Dems' local income tax plans. Well John, all I can say is you must have been running lessons on spouting random garbage at Westminster and perhaps Kennedy wandered in by mistake thinking it was the bar?

Prescott turned in one of the few highlights of the '01 campaign when he chose 29-year old farm worker Craig Evans, from North Wales, as a sparring partner after being hit with an egg, but this time round he can't even manage a little comedy moment like that. It's rumoured that the ludidcrously titled Office of the Deputy Prime Minister' will become little more than an empty shell of a department after the election, and the amazing thing looking back on it is that Prescott survived with even a residual influence on policy for 8 years when there were plenty of backbench MPs with more brains in their pocket watches. An obvious point, and something of a cheap shot, but the man himself knows no other kind! Until the next time, John...

Mr Sedgemore and Mr Sedgefield

The re-emergence of Iraq as a battleground issue in the campaign continued today with the defection of Brian Sedgemore, who has been a Labour MP since 1983 but is standing down this time, to the Lib Dems. Tony Blair's view on this:

[the voters] aren't particularly interested in someone they've never heard of who's not even standing as a candidate at this election.

Well, that shows how much Tony Blair cares about any former Labour members who've defected as a result of Iraq - even if they have been an MP for 22 years. "F*** you", coming across loud and clear. I'm not naive enough to think that Iraq will decide this election but Blair's stance seems to be cocky, bordering on offensive. It's quite clear that all this 'I respect your view' bollocks flies out of the window at the first sign that Labour is home and spin-dried - and did any of us really expect otherwise?

Sedgemore has called for voters to "rise up and give Blair a bloody nose" at this election. Well, I might just do that. With the Tories having almost certainly shot their bolt, the road is clear for a protest vote - and I think it'll have to be the Greens. This weekend I should have the time to do a more in-depth look at their manifesto, as they've been criminally lacking from this blog so far. (Alan Milburn has discovered my tactic, but balls to him - I would have felt pretty silly voting for a party with him in it in any case.)

SHOCK! Peter Oborne makes good TV

I've just watched the best hour of TV I've seen on the subject of the election since the campaign began. It was a Channel 4 documentary presented by Peter Oborne called 'Election Unspun : Why Politicians Can't Tell the Truth'. The Channel 4 website appears to have no information on the programme, despite a large section devoted to election coverage, and for all I know Oborne may have hijacked the transmission room at gunpoint to get the damn thing broadcast (although as it was in the Dispatches series and is listed in the Radio Times I presume not). Anyway, the essence of the programme's argument is distilled in a recent Spectator article by Oborne. In essence, the arguments are as follows:

• All three major parties' policies on several key issues - taxation, law and order, health, education - are so similar as to render any concept of 'democratic choice' meaningless'.
• Party leaders and other senior politicians are doing their best to avoid the public, concentrating on stage-managed private rallies and photo ops.
  
• Canvassing, by door-to-door or mailshot, is aimed at a tiny number of swing voters in key marginals identified by using sophisticated software which was developed in the US.
  
• Consequently, non-marginal voters are responding to the parties' lack of interest in kind, by not giving a flying f***.
  

It has not previously been possible to find an abundance of praise for a fluffed up overgrown Tory quail like Peter Oborne in this blog, or any other Hal Berstram prose for that matter. But P.O. did superb work over 60 minutes in this documentary. He made a very strong case that parties were simply chasing each others' tails on the key issues, with the initial running being made by focus groups. As has long been known, focus groups do not deliver a coherent and rational impression of voters' views of important political issues. This is because voters are sometimes wildly inconsistent. For example, they would like to pay less tax (or at least no more tax), but they would also like better public services. And while we're at it we'll have more bobbies on the beat as well please. Who wouldn't? (There was a superb cameo from Polly Toynbee who pointed out that it has been calculated that a policeman on foot in the average UK street is likely to come within 100 yards of a crime being committed once every 9 years.) The result? All three parties say they have no plans to raise tax (on the average voter anyway), plan to increase spending, and will find the extra money by cutting at least £22 billion of 'waste' in the public sector. But to play the hardman for a moment, if it's that easy to cut waste and the voters like it, why haven't they done it already? Because it's - on the face of it - a nonsense, that's why.

Oborne went out to Stansted, where a second airport runway is due to be constructed in the next couple of years, to show that when a policy for instant gratification with mass appeal - cheap air travel for all - runs up against a policy that is essential in the long run but requires hard sacrifices in the short run - reducing global warming - it's the instant gratification that wins out every time. None of the major three parties is proposing a tax on aviation fuel, either nationally or internationally, despite the dire warnings of the consequences of unchecked growth in air miles for the environment.

Frankly, the whole thing made me inclined to vote Green. Not because they have any chance of winning but because if enough people do that (especially on a low turnout) it will certainly dispel the notion that the 'minor parties' can never make any difference to the one-and-two-halves party system we've had in one guise or another since '83. I still believe that the underlying differences between all 3 parties are a lot larger than Peter Oborne will admit, but then his thesis - intriguingly - is that there is no underlay; with an ever higher number of ideologically bereft 'career politicians' and dwindling grass-roots party membership, presentation is content. Assuming for the rest of this post that he's right (it's too long already to do otherwise), I can see three ways out of the present impasse;

a) the Lib Dems achieve the balance of power in a hung parliament and force through proportional representation (which would make the marginal voter far less easy to identify under most configurations, particularly with five or six parties represented in Parliament).

b) turnout levels drop so far that mobilised grassroots campaigns for minor parties or independent candidates begin to achieve widespread success.

c) The conventional democratic process collapses as anyone with an axe to grind and either a tractor or a caravan.

Of these, (a) is most likely in the short to medium term (not as short as "10 days", though, sadly). (b) is intriguing but unpredictable. (c) sounds like good terrain for a free festival, but won't be (free, or festive).

Enough already. The future awaits.

Iraq takes centre stage - Howard's last strain of the tea leaves

Today the election battleground (no pun intended) shifted to Iraq for the first time during this campaign. As I said in an earlier post, I think Iraq will cost Labour a couple of percentage points of vote, but I don't think it is a strong enough effect to cost them the election on its own... and those who defect from Labour because of the war are far more likely to go to the Lib Dems, Greens or Respect than the Tories.

Michael Howard still looks relatively calm - perhaps too calm - on TV, but he must know that the attempt to seize the election by majoring (no pun intended) on Immigration has been, according to the polls at least, not nearly successful enough. That's the only reason why he would opt for trying to bash Blair on the war, lining up behind Charles Kennedy and the far left. Iraq is unlikely to be a strong vote-winner for Howard, as the Tories backed Labour's policy to the hilt and there is little doubt that they would have done exactly the same thing had they been in office - whether with Hague, Duncan Smith or Howard as leader.

Howard's strategy now is to join in the call for publication of the attorney general's legal advice over the war, in the hope this will show that the war was illegal. It seems most unlikely - to put it mildly - that Blair would allow the release of incriminating documentation this close to the election, or indeed after the election for that matter. It is more likely that if the attorney general had advised that the war was illegal, his advice will either never appear at all, or will appear only in a doctored form.

Howard's best bet is to hope that the backlash against the Government's refusal to disclose the advice will grow to gigantic proportions and trigger a massive crisis of public confidence in Blair, leading to a seismic shift in voting intentions. This is the political equivalent of the last few seconds in a basketball game where a team needing three points to win decides to shoot for the basket from its own backline... those long shots go in slightly more often than you think, but only slightly. Blair has survived the 'dodgy dossier', the Hutton report and the failure to find WMD so far, and it's unlikely this will sink him either. If this is the best shot the Tories have then unless the polls are catastrophically wrong, it's Game Over...

Swinging the election by txt msg

Quite bizarre story in the news today about how overuse email or text messaging could temporarily lower your IQ. I didn't post anything to the blog yesterday as I was staying overnight at a conference with no web access... I turned on the hotel room TV first thing, knowing that BBC Breakfast wouldn't be a cradle of intellectual firepower but at least hoping I'd be able to catch up with the campaign - and instead the first thing I saw was that text messaging turns you into a moron. Great.

Whilst it's true that multi-tasking seems to be a growing feature of the modern office set-up, the claims made by the research by pychiatrist Glenn Wilson of Kings College London seem a bit exaggerated, e.g. :

Doziness, lethargy and an increasing inability to focus reached "startling" levels in the trials by 1,100 people, who also demonstrated that emails in particular have an addictive, drug-like grip.

This could provide a new campaign strategy for any party who finds it easy to attract votes from the less intelligent... perhaps Veritas, for example? All they have to do is bombard voters with text messages on polling day. The messages don't have to be election-related - in fact it would probably be illegal if they were - adverts for cut-price top-up cards, art gallery advertisements, even something simple like "BE ANGRY!!!" would do. The resulting drop in voter intelligence could create enough vegetable voters to sweep the "dumb party" into power. I'll leave it to you to decide who the stupidest party is... here's just a suggestion.

The gallows for Galloway? Heavy threats in the East End

Strange goings on afoot in Bethnal Green and Bow where the Respect party, with George Galloway as its candidate, is fighting a strong campaign against incumbent Labour MP Oona King. Respect started out as an attempt at a far-left "red-green" coalition - and, if it had been a broad enough church, might have developed into a formidable electoral force in terms of votes; although, like UKIP on the far right, Westminster seats would have been hard to come by. However, if an article by Nick Cohen in last year's New Statesman is even halfway accurate, the party has now become dominated by the Socialist Workers' Party, in alliance with the Muslim Association of Britain. Neither of these origanisations will be to the taste of many on the 'free-thinking' Left, and towering over the party is Galloway - undeniably a brilliant orator and formidable strategist, but with many social views closer to Pope Benedict XVI than what one would conventionally define as progressive.

Respect's campaign trail hit a savage patch today when a group of Islamic extremists gatecrashed a meeting, denounced the act of voting as anti-Islamic, threatened Galloway with hanging if he continued with the campaign, and warned that Muslims voting for Respect faced a death sentence. Galloway was quoted in the Evening Standard as saying, "the police saved my life" - an unexpected conversion to the Blairite position on matters of law and order.

Certainly, if I had to choose, I'd rather Galloway was running the country - or even representing Bethnal Green and Bow - than the crazed death squads who were out for his blood today. But is Respect the best the Left can do politically? Wouldn't it be something if we could have a successful, radical left-of-centre party in this country that wasn't (a) a shotgun wedding of the SWP and religious groups, (b) New Labour, or (c) 3 people in a phone box? (I'm waiting for the comment that says , "hold on... you forgot the Liberal Democrats?

Pulling down the shutters on Council Tax

The election warfare took a strange turn today as the Tories unveiled yet another tax plan - this time on Council Tax, where their big idea is to.... do nothing. They're proposing to abandon the revaluation of homes scheduled for 2007, thereby (apparently) saving "middle England" - which in this case means the South, where house prices have risen further than in the North since the original valuation in 1991 - from the massive tax hike that Labour is (apparently) going to push their way.

Even given the fact that an election campaign attracts hustles, hysterics and half-truths the way Wetherspoons attracts heavy boozers, this is a blatantly cynical piece of short-term electioneering. To be sure, the Tories have done well on this ground before - anybody remember Norman Lamont's £140 off poll tax bills just before the 1992 election? But the idea that the way to fix a fundamentally badly designed tax is to abolish (or even postpone) its one sensible feature - the idea that the CT bill is linked to house price values - is like saying that the way to sort out the electoral system is not to have any more boundary changes. Labour and the Lib Dems should be able to shoot this one down. Labour has no real policy on CT at the moment and will probably have to patch together a regional banding or transitional relief system after the election, but either of those would be a work of genius compared to the Tories' Ostrich manoeuvre. The Lib Dems' policy of local income tax is miles better than council tax, or indeed than poll tax or the rates. A tax on land value would be even better in many ways. But it's really come to something when the Tories are reduced to a policy of fiscal stasis to try to grab a few votes.

New Labour - friend or foe?

I was going to post this on Friday but had to leave it - but have come back to it as it's too good not to finish. A key question for 'traditional' Labour supporters, and indeed radicals who are too young to remember anything before Blair, is: is New Labour worth voting for? Friday's Guardian carried contrasting views on this topic. On the credit side is an article by Robin Cook entitled 'Blair has delivered on some of the left's historic demands'. Cook argues that Labour [drop the 'New' for a moment]'s commitment to full employment, the minimum wage, ending child poverty, and attempts to push a more radical agenda on foreign aid, consitutes a radical programme, undelivered by previous Labour administrations, which Old Labour can embrace.

Meanwhile, Guardian Economics Editor Larry Elliot makes the exact opposite case from a similar political starting point, in his article 'Despised and patronised by New Labour'. Elliot cites the case for the prosecution: huge falls in manufacturing output, a failure to address growth in underlying economic inequality (rather than just redistributing income through the tax-benefit system) and "support for globalisation, free trade and an independent Bank of England" with opposition to "industrial policy, nationalisation and protection".

Who's right? Probably neither. Cook is right that the progress on the minimum wage and child poverty is genuinely to be welcomed, and puts the achievements of most previous Labour governments in the shade. Also, some of Elliot's criticisms are of the way the world in general is going, rather than anything New Labour has done. Globalisation, by its nature, demands a co-ordinated global, or at least continental, policy response. Socialism in one country - or even managed capitalism in one country - is no longer possible. Also, the rise of multinationals in many sectors of the economy makes those sectors difficult for state-owned companies to compete in. For example, what would the point of nationalising Rover have been when it could never have achieved the minimum efficient scale necessary to produce cars profitably?

But New Labour still leaves a sick taste in the radical mouth, as its failures probably outweigh its achievements. Constitutional reform has been a mess, and Westminster elections are still governed by a ridiculous electoral system. Huge reforms to the delivery of health and education have been launched in the name of 'choice' as an act of faith, and no-one really knows what the hell we will end up with - or whether it will be more efficient or equitable than what we had before. Public transport is worse than it was in 1997. And towering over all this, we have stood four-square behind the most reactionary US government in recent history in a monumental act of military folly, whilst mortgaging our civil liberties at home for the promise of a 'freedom from terror' that no candidate standing on May 5th knows how to deliver.

My own choice on May 5th will be Labour - but only because my sitting MP only had a majority of 358 last time round, and the Tory challenger looked like a bloody shoproom dummy when he was handing out leaflets the other morning when I was getting my train. I mean it really was the kind of Tory you used to see in Essex all the time in the 80s and early 90s - all the neighbouring constituencies are bedevilled by these cretins, and it scared the bejeesus out of me, I can tell you. I just said "I think I'll pass on that, thanks", and carried on walking - didn't even bother to take his leaflet and deface it. A risk of contamination, I guess.

There is a good choice of other candidates in Braintree - Lib Dem, Green, or UKIP, but what would be the point of letting the Tory in? At least the current Labour MP supports rail re-nationalisation (which might have got him Larry Elliot's vote as well.) But in the circumstances I couldn't blame anybody for voting for the Lib Dems, Greens, even "Respect (George Galloway)". There are problems with all these parties, but maybe what New Labour needs most is a good kick in the balls. Or at least a majority in the area of around 42... incidentally, does anyone know what has happened to the Socialist Labour Party? Their website is nowhere to be seen... have they disbanded?

Well at least the conservatives won one election...

...turned on my computer to be greeted by the news that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger - aka Pope Benedict XVI - has been elected. This event is unlikely to change the outcome of our somewhat more democratic election over here. Whilst Benedict will no doubt use the papacy to pump out a steady stream of right-wing propaganda, Archbishop Murphy O'Connor was already doing a good job on this front even under the old regime. But it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the steadfast refusal of the Catholic Church to make concessions to the realities of the 20th century, let alone the 21st, won't do much to stem the downward spiral in church attendance figures - at least in the developed world. Of course, I could be wrong about that, and Britain could be in line for a US style snarling-at-the- mouth "revenge of the pious" scenario, with the secular Left pulverised by the pulpits. If you're reading this and you see the signs of that before anyone else, let me know and we can take to the streets - as Han Solo once said, "Bring 'em on! I'd prefer a straight fight to all this sneakin' around..."

Is Howard a Blair plant?

There still seems to be a blanket of stasis hanging over this election as far as public interest in it is concerned. There are only two posters up in the main high street of the Essex village where I live - both for the Tory candidate. And we've received no campaign literature from any of the parties - despite living in the fourth most marginal seat in the country. More on the local campaign when I get really bored and desperate - probably around Saturday 30th.

But there are some developments in the polls, where the Tories seem to have run out of steam somewhat after making most of the running since January. Three things seem to have knocked the wind out of their sails:

i) Immigration has only featured as the headline story on a couple of campaign days. This may be because there was so much focus on it in the run-up to the campaign that people have got rather bored of the issue for the moment.

ii) The Tories were unable to secure a decisive hit on Labour's economic record or its tax and spending plans going forward. This is partly because they held back details of their tax cut package when publishing their rather thin manifesto on Monday. This meant it was difficult for Labour to make a hit on their economic policies (and in the end Labour sounded pretty confused on this - saying on one hand that the Tories were going to make huge spending cuts and on the other, that they would raise taxes. Perhaps the idea was to give the impression that the Tories themselves were confused on the issue - in any case, it lowered the signal-to-noise ratio to the extent that no-one sounded sure of themselves on tax last week - and definitely not Charles Kennedy, who at least had the excuse of sleep deprivation due to recent fatherhood.)

iii) Michael Howard's unashamedly populist campaign may have stirred up more interest than he intended among left-wing voters, who probably found the general tone of the campaign distasteful - particularly the immigration scaremongering. This may ironically have helped shore up the Labour vote, leading to a drop in support for the Tories relative to Labour in the polls.

Many of these mistakes echo the failure of the 2001 Tory campaign under William Hague - and although the campaign looks more professional this time round, it may well be that this campaign ends up being to the Tories what 1987 was to Labour - a very professionally run operation which nonetheless delivered little in terms of advancing their electoral chances.

I don't completely buy this line of argument, however... as Bruce Anderson (not someone whose opinion I often endorse, by the way) says in today's Independent, this election is likely to be closer than the polls indicate. As far as I am aware, the Tories have done better in the actual outcome of the vote than in the opinion polls in every election since 1987. Pollsters assure us they've put systems in place to offset these effects but they persist. But even so, Michael Howard will know by this stage that it is most unlikely that he will be the next Prime Minister... and his campaign may have peaked way to early. Tory election strategist Lynton Crosby may have a shock to the system up his sleeve, and we would be wise not to forget the Australian experience. But there is just the chance that Howard is actually a Blair 'plant', and that New Labour has been manipulating Conservative leadership elections since 1997... think about it: Hague, followed by Duncan Smith, followed by Howard. Which free and sane political party in the developed world would choose such a string of bozos for leaders? Do let me know. And if I can find any more evidence for the 'Howard plant' conspiracy I'll post it up.

The downward spiral of Paxman

Got back from work tonight just in time to catch most of Jeremy Paxman's half hour interview with Charles Kennedy - one in a sequence of interviews with the main party leaders. Paxman probably feels this is a great coup for cutting edge political media. Or maybe he just got ordered to do it the way he got ordered to do the weather on Newsnight. Either way, it was dire. The trademark Paxman sneer and complete disregard for anything the interviewee says were in full effect. The BBC loves this style as it's 'hard on the politicians', 'doesn't let them off the hook', 'no kid gloves' etc. But I defy anyone to watch this kind of 'interview' and come out any the wiser about any of the political issues involved in the election, let alone what the politician being interviewed thinks on any particular topic.

It genuinely worries me that the king of TV interviewing in this country is a boorish misanthrope who built a career out of casually insulting people. But would I rather a 'soft soap' interviewing style which lets the politicians say what they like? Well, yes, actually. Give politicians enough rope and they will hang themselves. A skilled interviewer will often be able to ask probing and difficult questions without being aggressive - and when they aren't answered he/she can point it out. (In fact a strap line could appear at the bottom of the screen saying, 'interviewee has not answered question', 'statement is false', etc. - even if this were not possible in real time, the interview could be stored for replay on the web or digital TV.)

Yesterday's Observer featured an article on just this topic, reporting that Channel 4 News's Jon snow had 'called of an end to cynical interviews after criticism that sneering presenters are undermining public debate.' Snow's argument is that 'lack of deference' has gone too far, but 'deference' is the wrong word to use. Actually it's what Hunter S Thompson called the 'downward spiral of dumbness'. Broadcasters assume that politicians are lying (admittedly often true), and so refuse to acknowledge or take at face value any sort of answer to a question. Meanwhile, politicians have no incentive to answer the questions the broadcasters pose, and no incentive not to lie - what could they possibly gain from telling the truth? they will be pilloried whatever they say. And we wonder why no-one can be bothered to vote for this journalistic chainsaw massacre.

Underwhelmed on pensions

What a weekend... moving cabinets and computers around the house in a desperate attempt to make it look like somewhere a potential buyer would actually want to live, rather than a mini version of MG Rover. One consequence of trying to put your house up for sale is that time to write this kind of thing comes at a premium... so I wasn't able to sit down and do any writing until half nine on Sunday night.

The BBC's headline story today has been the Tory pension proposals. These aren't too bad, but neither are they a work of genius. What we already knew before today is the headline Conservative policy on the basic state pension (BSP); they are proposing restoring the 'earnings link' whereby the pension rises with average earnings, not prices (abolished by Thatcher in 1980). The main problem with current pensions policy is that many pensioners do not claim the Pension Credit, which is the means-tested 'top up' to the BSP, and has risen a lot since 1997. Also the Pension Credit is expensive to administer and a hassle to apply for.

The Tory policy addresses the weaknesses in the current system, although only to a limited extent as the BSP would need a large one-off 'boost', and then to be earnings linked from that point on, to be an adequate income by itself for the poorest pensioners. The Liberal Democrat plan for a "Citizens' Pension", which eliminates the need for a full record of National Insurance Contributions to get the BSP, is even better, as they will pay the Citizens' Pension at the current level of the Pensions Credit (complicated, isn't it?) but only for the over-75s. In short, all the parties have been forced into some compromise by the fact that the ideal policy - a Citizens' Pension for all over 65s - would be quite expensive - and no-one wants to raise taxes.

The Tories' big new idea at today's policy launch, by the way, was some additional tax relief for basic rate income tax payers' pension contributions. As a policy, this seems to ignore the fact that pensions already attract generous tax relief - it's a bit like sticking extra tape over the hole you've already mended in your sinking boat whilst ignoring the water gushing in behind you.

Any government wanting to get serious about tackling the pensions 'time bomb' would do two things. One is to establish a 'citizens' pension' at 65, at a level at least as high as the current pensions credit, link to earnings, and raise the money required as necessary. The other would be to tackle the mess of half-truths, mysticism and macho bullshit which is the financial services 'industry'. Again and again, badly informed punters are sold poorly performing pension plans with high management charges, based on a total misunderstanding of basic financial economics but a very good understanding that P.T. Barnum would have made very big bucks if he'd plied his trade in the City rather than the Circus. Fund managers and financial advisors are one of the economy's key growth sectors precisely because they do so well out of what they cream off from the punters' investments. If the Citizens' Advice Bureaux were expanded and revamped with a basic financial advice function in addition to what they cover now - telling people to buy and hold a basic stocks portfolio, or even a tracker, starting as early in life as possible - they would clean up. Which would be bad news, on paper, for the financial services industry - but then the armistice was bad news for arms manufacturers, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a good thing. I'm now off to lose more money trading awful companies' shares in my investment club. If only I listened to Warren Buffet more...

The gloves come off - Howard reads from Veritas manifesto

Yesterday, Robert Kilroy Silk launched the Veritas manifesto. Today, Michael Howard got back on message in Watford, of all places, today with a vicious attack on the 'politically correct minority' who 'subvert British values'. Time for some interesting A/B comparisons:

(A)

"These reactions go to the very heart of what's gone wrong in our country. Some people call it political correctness. Others call in moral relativism. I call it madness. Commons sense has been stood on its head... No one worries about their sensitivities. No one cares if they feel excluded. No one stands up for them. Well I will. The British public deserves to be heard. We will govern with the right values."

(B)

Fed up of being made to feel ashamed of being British? So are we. Had enough of being made to feel embarrassed about celebrating British traditions, culture and values? So have we. We will stop all this nonsense. We will not tolerate the bullying and the intimidation by the liberal elite in London. We will speak openly and fearlessly for the British people - of whatever ethnic background, colour or creed - and for the British way of life.

Can you guess which quote is from the Veritas website and which is from Michael Howard's speech? Perhaps the Tories will be able to boost their vote by at least 0.2% by merging with Kilroy's purple people.

Similarities with Tory 'Britishness' rhetoric aside, Veritas's most distinctive policy is for a 22% 'flat tax' on incomes above £12,000. The current tax-free personal allowance is just under £5,000. Now, there's a world of difference between mildly misleading the public about tax, as all three major parties are doing to some extent, and telling blatant porkie pies of Goebbels-esque proportions. If you are lucky enough to have a Veritas candidate canvassing your house, invite them in and hold their head under the tap for a few minutes while they explain how the flat tax policy adds up to a fiscal balance. And if they give you any lip about the 'Laffer curve', send 'em out the door with a Marmite sandwich (thanks, Raj!)

This'll have to be the last post on Veritas for a while, sad as it may seem... it's like shooting fish in a barrel while hanging out in the pit-stop, and we need to get back to covering the race leaders. Been fun, though.

Johnson collapses in pool of verbal blubber

One of the most boring days I can remember at work today, and not loads happening on the campaign trail either. I'm not a regular reader of the Daily Telegraph, although its honest stick-a-knife-in-your-grandmother Right wingness is certainly preferable to the 'stealth Right' of the Times. But I will often sneak a look at Boris Johnson's Thursday column. Today's effort (requiring free registration, sadly) starts well enough, with a classic pub yarn concerning a voter who thought John Major was Labour leader in the 1997 campaign (an easy mistake to make even then.)

But it's downhill from there as Johnson appears to have come up on mescaline, or similar hallucingenic, in the midst of writing the piece. His last coherent (and amusing) sentence is as follows:

It's Brair; it's Blown, and in this partnership Brown is wearing the trousers. Brown sets the agenda, and his creature, Balls, spouts off about how Labour will sort out the mess it has made of pensions, while poor Milburn - Blair's creature - is shoved to the back of the press conference.

He then proceeds to go into a savage anti-Scottish and anti-Brown rant:

We are being asked to vote for Blair when it is highly likely that in the course of the next few years (in the event of a Labour victory) the party machine would create a Scottish prime minister to lord it over England, at a time of gross constitutional inequality between England and Scotland.

In response to which one can only point out that Boris Johnson is an MP for the Conservative and Unionist party, and the Tories were quite happy to 'lord it' over Scotland even when the Scots had almost no Tory MPs in the late 80s and early 90s. Including such wonderful initiatives as introducing Poll Tax a year early, for example. It would be hard to find a better example of political Karma...

A fetching shade of purple

It's been a slow start to the campaign for Veritas, but with that patented 'Silk Cut' purple as their rosette colour, they can't go far wrong. Enjoy the grammatical errors and text formatting problems on the website front page... Bobby Kilroy-Silk assures me that he's put them on there so he can sack his IT manager at the same time that he launches a tirade against "declining, educational
standards, in our nations schools."

Actually a "straight talking" party is a laudable aim in many ways. But it's a bit rich to suggest that Kilroy, whose talent for political contortion makes Tony Blair look like Dennis Skinner, is the man for the job.

I'm sending him a stuffed toy of Barney the dinosaur - almost the right colour to be a Veritas mascot. As Barney's (German) website says, "Lasst Uns Spielen!" (which might reverse Kilroy's pathological hatred of the EU into the bargain.)

'Hey Chav'

More on the Labour Manifesto... I was hoping for a better title than "Britain - forward not back". It's a Milburnism, surely. It doesn't have the resonance of 1997's "New Labour - Because Britain Deserves Better". And there's no piccie of Blair on the cover. It is, in fact, Labour's Little Red Book (as the BBC point out.)

I was dearly hoping for the manifesto to be called "Hey Chav" - which I'm coining as a British version of Hunter S. Thompson's "Hey Rube". ("Hey Sucker" is a more accurate translation, but it's a Wham! lyric.) It would have been nice for Labour to go for the youth vote with Blair, and the Cabinet, in full Burberry regalia... maybe they could have had a barbeque back in March, when the weather was nicer. Jamie Oliver could have rustled up some kebabs for them, for only 55p a head. Tony could have reformed the Ugly Rumours and covered some Keane songs, or some such nonsense.

I still haven't quite gotten my head round what 'chav' means, but it's being used figuratively in this post anyway... to mean anyone who's obsessed with the surface, at the expense of anything deeper or less obvious meaning. Anybody who thinks a pledge not to raise basic or top income tax is a deep and fundamental economic policy decision. And anybody who believes what they read in election manifestos.

Insulting the electorate's intelligence... take 3

The Labour manifesto came out today, and as in '97 and '01, it features the pledge not to raise the basic or higher rates of income tax. This is a bit like someone promising not to burgle your house via the front door - does it make you feel any safer? Only if you live in a bunker. There are a very large number of ways to raise tax without doing anything to income tax. Gordon Brown has used several already - employee NICs, employer NICs, self-employed NICs, ending the dividend tax credit on pensions, etc. Not that (IMHO) there's anything wrong with raising tax per se - my beef is that it's a complete insult to the electorate to make a 'pledge' on one aspect of the tax system whilst ignoring the rest of the system. Why should anybody care?

Labour - and indeed the Tories - have made great play of the idea that tax won't need to go up if either of them wins the election. This is almost certainly wrong - it is likely that about £11 billion per year of tax rises will be required by the end of the next Parliament to maintain the public finances in a reasonable state. That's about 3p on income tax, but of course it won't happen like that... and both parties are hoping you're too stupid to notice. Or of course, that you like tax rises.

It's the old WRP tactic...

...of airbrushing demonstrators' placards out and changing the slogans.

Yes, a Tory candidate (for the ultra-marginal Dorset South constituency) has run into trouble by doctoring a photo of himself with Ann Widdecombe to show Ann with blue hair rather than the current blonde... no, sadly that isn't it.

The placards that Ed Matts (the candidate) and Widdecombe are holding up here originally had a photo of an asylum seeker, and 'Let Them Stay'. Now they say, 'Controlled Immigration' and 'Vote Tory for a referendum on hair colour'.

Hopefully some more radically doctored versions of these placards will start doing the rounds: 'I have a radio inside my head controlled by Anne Widdecombe' and 'We have come for your children' would be not bad, for starters.

The WRP reference in this post's title refers to the Workers' Revolutionary Party, who are the kind of people whom the SWP like to say are 'dangerous subversives'. A good mate of mine who is in SWP once showed me a WRP leaflet for a demonstration being organised against tuition fees. The leaflet had a picture of a crowd of demonstrators with placards. The SWP slogans on the top of each placard had been airbrushed off. Why? Because the WRP couldn't organise a demonstration big enough to photograph. Good to see that this tactic has now moved well and truly into the mainstream.

But I do have some soft spot for the WRP because the chap who used to sell copies of 'News Line' some mornings at Sydenham train station was a genuinely nice bloke. Is he still there, I wonder? I haven't been to Sydenham for ages.

Immigration, immigration, immigration

I'm really in a hole as regards the early part of this week, so this'll be fairly short... the Conservatives published their manifesto yesterday - one of the shortest on record. Only about 7,000 words. There are few surprises, they're going for strategy rather than content.... their campaign slogan could be summed up as

immigration, immigration, immigration. (as in: less of it)

We should not underestimate the potency of the forces which the Tories are trying to unleash here. Yesterday I met with an Australian Labor Party spokeman on economic policy who pointed out that in last year's general election over there, the Labor opposition had scoffed at the conservative coalition's campaign, which aimed to stoke up as much fear and fretting about immigration as possible... scoffed, that is, until the results came in, and Labor got stomped.

My view is that the Little Englander/racist vote in this country is not currently strong enough to hand this election to the Tories on the immigration issue alone (although I agree with the Tories that it is possible to be worried about immigration without being a racist, I'd also point out that for anyone who is a racist, the Tory campaign is grist to his or her mill... and Michael Howard is happy to racists to come out and vote for him, as indeed is Tony Blair. By any means necessary, eh lads? More on this at the weekend.)

But the Tories will come back to this one as much as they need to... and they have a well funded campaign this time round. Labour, meanwhile, finds itself in the paradoxical position of being seen as 'soft on immigration' whilst in fact having the 'hardest' policy Britain's ever had on this issue, in terms of deportations, border control, and rights for asylum applicants. Be very wary of people coming up to you during this campaign and saying "I'm not a racist, but..." Your response should be: "You don't look like they left your brain in the incubator, but..."

The answer is 42

Right - it's Sunday night and there's little else to do so let's engage in a little electoral prediction courtesy of the BBC's seat calculator. This device translates votes under the First-Past-The-Post electoral system into seats in parliament. If the exact 2001 pattern were repeated this time, the shares of the vote and seats for the 3 main parties and others would be:

Lab 41% 400
Con 32% 169
LD 18% 47
Oth 9% 9

Taking the minor parties out of the equation (for the moment - I'll probably do a post on UKIP later in the campaign), my prediction is that Labour will lose around 6 percentage points of that 41, due to a combination of anti-war defections to the Lib Dems, minor parties or staying at home, and the fact that Labour voters will be (slightly) less motivated than Tories. The Tories will do better than last time, but not spectacularly - say a 4% improvement. The Lib Dems will pick up a couple of points, largely on the back of Iraq. Fed into the BBC model this produces:

Lab 36% 344
Con 36% 219
LD 20% 52
Oth 9% 31

which is a Labour majority of 42.

The main point to make about this is that for a party to get a working majority on 36% of the vote would be pretty extreme, even for the UK electoral system. Some extra analysis I did shows that the Tories need about an 8 point lead even for a tiny overall majority! If I were a Tory and I saw these results I'd take to the streets at once, or at least go into coalition with the Lib Dems to get PR.

The bias in the system at the moment is unbelievable. I can even get Labour as the largest single party with the third largest share of the vote: try Lab 29%, Tories 31, Liberals 31, for instance. These kind of numbers make the Gore/Bush anomaly in 2000 look like a tiny incident.

The latest polls, showing a 4 to 7% lead, don't change my thinking on this - in fact quite the opposite. The comparable lead on the polls at this stage in the 2001 campaign was 16 points - 7 points higher than the final result. If today's ICM poll with a 7% lead has the same degree of inaccuracy as last time, the actual lead is zero - the two parties are running neck-and-neck. If I can get some betting action for a majority of 40 or maybe even a bit less, I might be going there. We'll return to this issue later in the campaign. A working week beckons... even for the guys in Longbridge, fortunately.

70s industrial policy - slight return...

This one's straight out of '74:

MG Rover gets £6.5m lifeline

The government says it has offered a £6.5m loan to prevent redundancies being made at car manufacturer MG Rover on Monday.

All we need now is to set up a workers' co-operative and give Tony Benn back his old job, and those Triumph TR7s will start rolling out the gates. "Down down, deeper and down"...

No election news today so here's some 'analysis' instead

Fairly quiet... in fact very quiet Saturday night. Obviously the whole of Essex has worn itself out with the excitement of the Royal Wedding and the Grand National. One of these events featured a couple of old nags almost falling at the final hurdle. And the other was... the Grand National.

The campaign, which has so far been sonambulent, should hot up a little when the manifestos come out, yet there is still something dead about this election. I get the feel that nobody on the left, and few people in the centre, give a f*** about Blair, and nobody on the right really gives a damn about Howard. The reasons for this are more complex than they first appear and to elaborate will generate one of those longer posts, not totally fitting with the most favoured blogging 'style', yet to stop now would be like Wayne Rooney spending the whole game in the centre circle. So apologies to those who don't like using the 'down' wheel on their mouses, and here's a worthy alternative for readers with short attention spans.

Very few on the Left have ever liked Blair, but many were prepared to put up with him to ensure keeping the Tories out for a generation whilst Blair's willingness to cede total control of economic policy to Gordon Brown at least allowed a programme of 'stealth' redistribution via tax credits and National Insurance Contribution rises to be carried out. This worked well as an electoral strategy for Blair, and the Labour share of the vote, on a lower turnout, was almost identical to 1997.

But the Iraq war has changed things a lot for (most of) that left-wing contingent. It was not expected four years ago that by mid-Parliament Britain would be a prosthetic limb of the most right wing president in post-war US history on defence and foreign policy. We have no real way of knowing how big the serious anti-war movement is in this country right now, or of how many people will vote for the Lib Dems, for the far left, or simply not at all, based on the war. But at the same time, Blair has lost support from the centre, even among those who endorse his policy platform 100%, largely because they don't believe he's a strong electoral asset any longer. The same thing happened to Thatcher, a little later into her Prime Ministerial tenure, and the outcome was swift and vicious.

Blair's position was pretty weak a year or 18 months ago, and Brown could have made a move for the leadership then, but something stopped him. In all probability, he calculated that the risks of either (a) failing to secure enough support in a leadership challenge to win, or (b) winning, but crippling the party's public support, and maybe even splitting it in doing so, were too great, and he was better off waiting patiently for Blair to scrape through this election, stumble on for a couple of years, and then retire citing health reasons or a wish to relocate to his real family at Crawford, Texas, leaving the hot seat open for a challenge, a positive boost in the polls, and a John Major-esque crack at the "historic fourth term."

If this is Brown's position then he is certainly accurate as to his chances of succession if the vacancy arises in the next Parliament. Blair has managed to hold the premiership for eight years with two of the biggest majorities in Commons history without doing anything much to secure an ideological legacy or to bring on a successor who would carry his work forward. Some have said this is because he has no ideology of his own, but I am sceptical of this. In fact it is because he is in the wrong party. His natural ideological (not social) tendency is towards the Ken Clarke side of the Tory party, with a streak of Thatcherite authoritarianism thrown in. Such an animal in the Labour party, even today, is a rare find. Blair has been trying to set Alan Milburn up as his successor, but Milburn's sheer chronic incompetence and imbecility means that this will be a difficult sell to the Labour Party and to the country as a whole... I saw Milburn give a talk on 'social mobility' a few months back. His delivery oscillated between solemnity and mania, like a man in the early stages of bipolar disorder, punctuated with straining facial contortions, grinning and teeth-baring. It was followed by a question and answer session in which words were coming out of his mouth, and forming into... what? 'The Blob'? I expected Steve McQueen to roll up and take him out. Barney the Dinosaur could have explained Labour policy better. In terms of articulating a coherent political position (of any kind at all), it made John Prescott look like Dave Willetts.

Although Labour continue to deny otherwise, I do believe that Alan Milburn's input into campaign strategy, from this point on, will be minimal. The Number 10 backroom boys, headed up by ex - ippr Director Matthew Taylor, have already written the manifesto, and they can be expected to take direct charge of proceedings from here on in. We will have to see if that pays dividends...

Hey local MP, make your own party political broadcast...

...burn it to a DVD and post it to key marginal voters.

Blockbuster has just taken on added appeal.

I'm safe anyway: my DVD player bust after my wife left 'Cabaret' on pause for 72 hours. Has Liza Minnelli been signed up for a party political yet?

Rover... Rest in Piecework

Having a few problems posting to the FTP server at the moment, and my browser wasn't working properly with Blogger last night. It kept saying "document contains no data"... I could feed the manifestos into my PC next week and probably get the same result.

Anyway, unless you avoid news like an anthrax outbreak (and good for you, but then are you safe reading this?) you'll have seen that Rover has gone under. Bad timing for those 6,000 Longbridge workers. Let me tell you something about Rover... in fact about what was once the UK car industry in general. Its decline is almost entirely due to the total and complete incompetence of its management from the 1950s onward. They were a collection of bowler hats who were still in the mindset of relying on the good ol' British Empire to provide a steady stream of investment income and, in the latter days, cheap immigrant workers, whilst they could get on with the job of De-Industrialisation. Meanwhile, the trade unions, knowing they couldn't rely 1% on these bosses to actually make any sensible decisions, got on with the job of taking as big a cut of whatever meagre profits could be eked out in a good year.

The Government's response through the 60s and early 70s was to encourage small crap firms to merge into one larger crap firm (Austin Morris, British Leyland, Austin Rover, Austin Powers, Leland Palmer, what-have-you) and to dole out large sums of money to private industry in state aid with no accountability as to how it was spent. The only serious chance for British Leyland (as was) to sort itself out was nationalisation in '75. Unfortunately, as with every other nationalised industry, it was still run like the worst type of arthritic British private company, just with bigger government handouts. The only guy who realised the potential of nationalisation to transform Britain was Tony Benn... and he was kicked out of the Industry Secretary job after 18 months.

the late 70s was the era of the 'pyjama shift' when car workers clocked in for the night shift with sleeping bags and used the factory as a Travelodge. And arseholes like Michael Edwardes (the managing director of Leyland) were paid millions for sacking the people whose fault it wasn't that the company was so crap. Not to mention 'classic' marques such as the Rover SD1, the Triumph TR7 and the Morris Marina (couldn't find a link you'd actually want to look at for that last one - sorry). Actually the SD1 invented the Ford Sierra shape 6 years before its time, but very few of them actually came out of the factory without a key component falling out, the workmen's sandwiches left in the boot, etc.

Privatisation didn't work none, as the same idiots were still left in charge of the show. By 2000 all the good bits (Mini, Land Rover) had been sold off, and what we were left with was a minnow trying to compete with huge behemoths like GM, VW and Toyota: like riding a Sinclair C5 at the TT races. Volume car production has been subject to continuous agglomeration since the 1900s and that will not change any time soon; in the next 10 years it is likely that the mid-size guys, which mainly means the Europeans - Volvo, Fiat, Citroen, etc. - will either get bought out, collapse, or make increasing losses. The truth is, it was all over for British car-making by the 70s, when we were already failing to crack the crucial export markets.

Rover's collapse 3 days into the campaign might make a difference in a few of the Birmingham marginals... which if the election comes out really close (a la Feb 1974) might make the difference between Labour and the Tories being the largest party. But so might many factors, including Howard Flight, the weather, and whether a Tory candidate is rude to the waiters in a restaurant he goes into just before polling day (this happened to Rupert Allison, who was MP for Torbay prior to 1997, and lost by about 12 votes... about the same as the number of waiters in the restaurant.) But nothing has happened yet of epoch making proportions in this campaign. The Pope has now been buried and with the Royal registry office do tomorrow, most of the bollocks will be out the way and the real nonsense can begin. Mine's a gin & bitter lemon... "seedy South London drink". (as my mate Foley once said). Chow.

Foot in Mouth

Oh dear... one comment received on the last post. "That was crap". Well, at least it was concise - unlike the post... advice from Chris B: keep it snappy and use links more. He's usually right (apart from his forecast of the last US election), so, from now on: no more than 2 paragraphs per post, and a guaranteed weblink in every cereal packet. Well, maybe 3 paragraphs...

There was a nice story in one of the papers today: Howard had Blair on the run in yesterday's final Prime Minister's Question Time before the dissolution of Parliament. (In that link, check the wacko from South Carolina:

"Having lived in the UK for five years, I'm so happy to see the UK politics put
into high gear."
Yeah! Give this man a [postal] vote pronto.)

But Howard said something like, "why should we believe anything you say?" which was apparently the last PM's Question asked of Thatcher by Michael Foot before they stretchered him out to the stump for a pulverising in '83... that was a Frank Spencer campaign from Labour. All the TV footage from the time shows poor Michael falling over in the rush of wind when Tony Benn lit his pipe, or the trestle table borrowed from Wigan Working Men's Club collapsing at morning press conferences. It's a pity 'cos Foot would have made a damn good PM twenty years or so before that... maybe they could even give him a shot now. Anybody can do the job now, with a Blackberry wireless handheld and an election leaflet saying "Hey Chav"... (the British version of the late Hunter S Thompson's "Hey Rube". Of which more another day. )

Chris - was that a bit more refined? (I feel like Charlie Watts when his hair receded and they gave him a skinhead haircut in '74)

"Your starter for..."

...is the opening track on Elton John's "Blue Moves", a rather lumbering double album from 1976 which I bought on vinyl for about 50p, in mint condition, at a car boot sale in Boreham, Essex, last summer, but have only played Sides 1 & 2 as they weren't good enough to make me feel that Sides 3 & 4 were worth playing... yet. But standards change, and "Blue Moves" might well be a phrase to describe this rather muted (after less than 48 hours) election. Both in the sense that we know there will be Tory gains, and also that we feel it in our bones that at some point in the campaign (probably several points), someone will wish to Play Dirty.

I'm taking for granted the notion that anyone visiting this page will know that this is a UK election blog, for the 2005 election: Chris B. might be slow putting Turtle updates on the web, but he ain't that slow. Besides which, this is the main line, the direct keyboard to publication interface: which means that I get to see this on the web instantaneously, and you, dear reader, are deprived of the benefit of such 20th century literary devices as snappy soundbites, tight editing, and, as Greg Dyke used to say before he was knifed in the back, "Cutting The Crap". This is my first blog, and from reading a scattering of others it seems that, to misquote McLuhan (who would have loved the web - but Wikipedia says he died in 1980), the tedium is the message. (I was going to put 'the waffle is the message', and then make a lame joke about US breakfasts, but fortunately I went to the toilet and when I came back I thought of the play on words. Unfortunately Google shows that 264 other people thought of it before me. But before this treads into Dave Gorman territory...)

I've always had trouble remembering that the reader needs paragraph breaks when writing first-take stuff like this. Having said that, it should be possible to reformat this script in double-spaced type using your browser... or is it? That outruns the sum of my abilities with Mozilla Firefox - although I guess you could always cut and paste into Word, or you could print the page out and stick it on your head, for that matter. But the way the British weather is treating us, there will not be a need for makeshift sunscreens any time soon... snow is forecast for the weekend, ferchrissakes. Snow in April.. down sarf! Maybe it's North Korea's secret weather machine at work again, trying to destabilise the results in a "major western power" (?) A search on Google for "North Korea" "weather machine" turns up 104 hits, including the Al Jazeera homepage...

But spouting nonsense phrases into the 'Net to get nonsense back will be wearing thin with you already, and no mistake. You are here for election analysis... I'm only one day late for the start of the official campaign with this first post, Royal Mail is often later (ha ha...) My strategy is to watch TV as normal and pick up whatever information I can, and then to read one national paper in detail each day, to get an in-depth but partial view of the campaign. There will be little point trying to read every word written on this election as it happens... that would entail trawling round for two-bit efforts like this, for example. If you're going to be partial, be very partial... in both senses of the word - as in 'not whole', and as in 'not neutral'. As Robert Plant once said (for no obvious reason in its context, but we will analyse Led Zeppelin on another day, 'In The Evening', when the campaign gets real thin...) 'you know sometimes words have two meanings'. And the question we will be asking in a few days when the manifestos come out is, do the words have two meanings, or none? An interesting debate... for the non-politicians.

But anyway, I've started my one-paper-a-day regime (a literary diet as it would be, but for the fact I almost never read the bloody press in normal circumstances) with an easy cop-out option: The Evening Standard. I didn't buy a paper this morning as Chris didn't give the go-ahead to this blog until this afternoon, and I forgot to steal a copy of the Telegraph, my favoured starter option, from work today. The Standard is a vile piss-pot of a paper, really. Victor Lewis Smith is good grubby fun, like a coagulating Chelmsford takeaway curry, but hardly worth 40p. The paper's politics mix the Mail's middle class take on Mussolini with special pleading for London's city dwellers - "please reduce the Congestion Charge so we can be fleeced by Camden traffic wardens as we park our 4X4s", and what-have-you. the odd thing about the ES today was that there was less politics in it than normal. The main focus of attention seemed to be Grace Jones, who assaulted a ticket checker on the Eurostar from Paris to London who requested that she upgrade her First Class ticket to 'Premium Cabin' First Class ... maybe she reminded him of Russell Harty. A two page spread for '12 Londoners who will help us gauge how voters are leaning'... some select quotes: "he won't vote Conservative but he won't vote Labour either". "...describes himself as 'completely floating' [maybe the Natural Law Party are back on the beat]." "For the first time she is thinking about not voting at all". "I've decided that George Galloway is the businessman's friend - the best choice to lead a National Coalition in our present difficulties".

OK, I made one of those up, but it's anodyne stuff for anodyne minds. People said 2001 was boring and predictable, but the bizarre thing is that the polls show the result is dead tight this time round, and nobody seems to give a toss. Labour averages about 2 points ahead of the Tories at this time... that's similar to the state of the polls in 1992 - and look what happened then. So why does nobody on the Tory side think they can do it? The only Tory I've heard recently saying he felt they could win the election was Howard Flight, at an Institute of Chartered Accountants "business breakfast". One day later, he was out - deselected after being caught on tape for saying the Tories wanted to cut tax, big time. Once upon a time a Tory candidate would have been deselected for saying the Tories didn't want to cut tax big time... but perhaps this is the true success of Tony Blair. Maybe he has created a world where the Tories cannot Say What They Mean... maybe he says it for them. Certainly when I read a headline like "no new taxes for five years, says Blair" it sounds a bit like William Hague's 'tax guarantee' from 1999. Or George Bush (Snr)'s "Read my lips"... losers one and all?

I still think that even though we have lost 'the Quiet Man' from the Tory leadership, this is the 'quiet election'... could it become 'The House [of Commons] That Roared'? (sorry - another poor play on words there, at the expense of Peter Sellers). This blogging takes a surprisingly long time... imagine if your life was this. If this was your only chance to show what you can do. and maybe it is. Apart from that slip of paper on May 5, that is... as TB says, "you're the boss." Just don't ask for any money while you're doing your job. That would be cash for questions... and Neil Hamilton will not be playing a part in this election campaign. Sad, in a way... on Louis Theroux meets the Hamiltons I quite liked the bugger. Put it this way... Hamilton is forced to walk around on reality TV for a living (although Christine's autobiography has just been published, I think)... but every other lying politician is still at large. And some are getting quite good at it. And quite large. Danny Finkelstein in the Telegraph or the Times (I can't remember which, but I dipped into it in the work common room) said that a general public mistrust of politicians is a bad thing as it tars all MPs with the same brush... even those who are brutally above board lose our respect. But then, not all hospital wards are infected with MRSA... but that doesn't mean I shouldn't be scared if I have to go in for an operation. This may be a bad analogy, but you'll need to explain why.

And so, on that happy note, I end for today. The kettle awaits... if this goes on I will have to stick a remote keyboard into the kitchen unit. G'night, and think about making a run for Pope if you wake up and find you are a baptised male Catholic.

hit me with the rhythm stick

Could Ian Dury and the Block Votes win the election?

(Note: this was a test post but seemed mildly funny so I left it up.)
Hal