|
›› Guided Tour of the Wardman Wire ›› Our Feeds and Websites ›› Buttons and Banners |
›› Oink the Water Buffalo is on CCTV
›› Ad Agency Slogans + Blog Slogans ›› Watching You: Surveillance Society |
Archive for Labour
No Labour MP Is Safe
Labour have lost Glasgow East. A seat where they had a huge 13,507 majority and gained more than 60% of the vote at the last election now lost to the SNP, with a swing of more than 22%.
When Labour is losing a seat like Glasgow East, which they really should be able to hold easily, the end is nigh for them. If this swing was repeated at a general election, Labour would be left with just one MP in Scotland - and if this were to be replicated in England as well… Of course that won’t happen, but it is an interesting statistic to look at.
Labour is now in a critical position. Gordon Brown is lucky that parliament has risen for the summer recess, or I doubt that he would have survived much longer. This was almost certainly arranged on purpose. But even so, Brown’s future as Prime Minister still hangs in the balance.
The results:
John Mason, SNP - 11,277
Margaret Curran, Labour - 10,912
Davena Rankin, Conservative - 1,639
Ian Robertson, Lib Dem - 915
Glasgow East was a good result for the SNP and the Conservatives, a bad resut for the Lib Dems and, rather obviously, a terrible night for Labour. The Conservatives leap-frogged the leaderless Scottish Lib Dems into third place. One thing that hasn’t really been mentioned with recent by-election results is that the Lib Dems, who once triumphed in these elections, really have failed miserably, their “legendary” by-election engine stalling. Three times in a row.
Is this result something from which Labour can recover? It seems unlikely when Glasgow East was such a safe seat. The end appears to be nigh for Labour.
You Know Things Are Going Badly When…
You have to say things like this when you are already in power:
I think I’m the right person to take people through these difficult times.
What he really means is that “the electorate think I’m a loser, and my deputy wants my job. But it’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to.”
Especially when the most prevalent and immediate issue for him is one which should have been his strongest - the economy.
I want Brown to stay. He’s doing such a good job for us. But when he has to come out with statemnts like this, and when this becomes the headline of the article, you know that his time is growing close to the end. It really comes down to whether the men in grey suits [or a woman in a white one?] can wield the soon-to-be-bloody knife.
Polyclinics non-consultation Consultation: Notts PCT New Healthcare Centre for Nottinghamshire
I picked up a consultation document about a “New GP-Lead Healthcare Centre” for Notinghamshire yesterday. The consultation period finishes today.
I’m not going to beat them up about not seeing the document earlier, as my GP and my address are just (half a mile) in Derbyshire. The NHS in each county are getting much more territorial though - I’ve been forced to stop using an optician in Nottinghamshire for my diabetic eye checks (where I went several years ago) because Derbyshire compel me to use their self-delivered service - at the cost to me of an extra half-day off work every year.
However, I am going to have a go at the logic and quality of the programme and the consultation.
I have uploaded the whole document here.
(Note: Polyclinics and GP-Led Health Centres are not actually that different).
Summary
This document is about a new Health Centre: “the policy to establish at least one GP-led health centre in each PCT in the country has been set by Government”. The process is a “consultation” about “which services should be delivered by the new GP-led Health Centre” and “where should it go” to “reduce health inequalities”.
It seems to me that a real consultation process should be investigating whether health inequalities are best reduced by delivering services via GP surgeries or something more centralised. This consultation process doesn’t. Instead it is bound by:
We are required by the Government to establish a new GP-led health centre
As I see it, the key problems with this are:
- Health Inequality is a very fine-grained problem. Coarse grained solutions are not the best way to deal with it.
- It should be a matter for local decision. This solution - as clearly as the nose on the elephant’s face that is sitting in the corner of the room - has been imposed centrally.
I even caught Alan Johnson MP (Health Minister) on Radio 4 this morning, talking about how access to local services will be improved and inequality reduced by putting one big new centre at one place in each Primary Care Trust. You couldn’t make it up.
You heard it from the horse’s mouth. He even managed to get “subsidiarity” into a sentence about doing things centrally that can arguably be done locally.
*** Head. Desk. Thud. ***
The Gory Detail is below the fold.
Another Definition of Brownism
I’ve posted one definition of Brownism before:
Definition of Brownism: (braun’i(z’?m)
1. (verb) The subtle art of combining of words into sentences that are meant to deliberately mislead or confuse the general public.
Origins: A term coined to categorize all of Prime Minister Brown’s eccentric speech.
Example: A sample Brownism: “This will be a government of no spin.”
Notes: See also: Spin doctor; Machiavellian; dishonest.
But now another has come to my attention. Just as devastating and even harder to refute, since it is based on pure and simple facts:
Thatcherism and Blairism were easily defined but what exactly is Brownism? Obsessed that the state knows best, Brownism can best be described by its dubious achievements: record taxation, hyper-regulation, the biggest debts in Europe, the destruction of private pension schemes, post office closures, appalling public transport and a looming energy crisis. (Tom Bower, Evening Standard)
Brownism just isn’t an ideology that anyone can follow. If they have a brain, that is.
Political Vultures
What is a vulture?
Vultures are scavenging birds, feeding mostly on the carcasses of dead animals
Converted to focus on the political arena:
Vultures are ex-ministers, who make a living feeding mostly on the carcasses of ex- (or nearly ex-) Prime Ministers.
But Tony McNulty says:
The vultures should clear off because there is no corpse around.
Then why are there vultures? Because they can smell dead meat. They can sense the dead and the near-dead. And they see it in Gordon Brown. They can smell that he is bleeding profusely from a deep wound inflcited on him by the electorate at the polls.
They are hovering over Brown in the sky, circling and curcling, waiting for the right moment to sweep in and add another minor wound to the multitude that he is already weakened by*.
The vultures will continue to circle until either their prey resigns and they get the chance to feast or it recovers enough for their efforts to be entirely ineffectual. However, neither of these appear imminent. Though with the man talked up as the heir-apparent pointedly refusing to rule out standing for the job, pressure will just continue to increase - unless Labour’s standing in the polls does.
As Matt Wardman points out, Brown’s position is “unassailable“. (Ahem.)
* I could list them here, but I have better things to do that write them all down, and I’m sure you have better things to do than to read such a long list.
Can you put Humpty-Dumpty together again? Ed Balls
Hands off my website, you dirty rotten swine !
Ed Balls is living up to his name again. Via Mark Pack.
File this in the bizarre but true category: take a look at Ed Balls’s website, and in particular his terms and conditions for use of the site:
The User undertakes:
(a) that they will only view the Information for their own private purpose and it [sic] will not publish, reproduce, store or retransmit any of the Information contained in the Web SiteIn other words, if you’re - say - a journalist you are not allowed to view his website as part of your job. Hmmm.
A bit rich bearing in mind that we are possibly paying him £10k a year to produce it.
Awesome web design, though. It reminds me of one of those sliding tile puzzles that children so enjoy. Spot on for someone who is always going on about schools, and does so much mental arithmetic involving six figure mortgages and Commons Allowances.
It even has a blank spot to let you slide the tiles around; I’ve left that where the policies would normally go.
Can you put Humpty-Dumpty Together Again?
Rather wonderfully, there’s a website - slidingpuzzle.com - that let’s you build a puzzle from your own picture.
So, can you help Ed put his website back together again?
(Just to be kind, there’s a hint how it should look after the “more”).
Fisking Jon Cruddas on Voting Figures
Bob Piper quotes Jon Cruddas in Comment is Free this morning:
“Labour lost nearly 5 million voters from 1997 to 2005, and not to the Tories. Four broad elements can be detected in this change: a significant movement away from us among workers in the public services; among black and minority ethnic voters; and among those described by marketing experts as “urban intellectuals”; and a huge shift away from us among working-class voters, especially manual workers. These voters did not go to the Tories, they went to the BNP and other nationalist groupings, the Liberals and Respect. Or they simply stayed at home.”
I’m concentrating on the numbers, and on the suggested destinations of the missing voters.
Straightening out the Facts
First of all, let’s straighten out one fact: Labour did not lose “nearly 5 million” votes from 1997 to 2005, they lost less than 4 million; the problem is therefore 20% smaller than Jon Cruddas thinks it is (or wants to make it sound?).
And do the Guardian have no fact checkers - even for such headline data?
Now, let’s go beneath the surface.
Read the rest of this entry »
The Ministry of Silly Talk
Dizzy has an interesting update on the “now you see it-now you don’t” Gordon Brown leadership campaign website:
Following on from the gordon4leader story, apparently the Treasury has now denied that it has ever worked with Silverfish TV. This is odd given that Silverfish’s website (which mysteriously went to “Under Construction” some time int he past 48 hours) said that they did.
They are doing it again (cf Cash for Honours). In this case the issue itself is minor. Public denial that there is any issue is a far bigger problem.
The “that is not an elephant in the corner, it is part of the wallpaper” defence does not wash any more - especially for New Labour.
Idiots.
I await the “it was a server problem that a junior employee failed to fix” defence with interest.
Tags: Treasury, Gordon Brown, Gordon4Leader, Silverfish
[tags]Treasury, Gordon Brown, Gordon4Leader, Silverfish[/tags]
