DEM not gonna CON dis NATION: Rolling UK politics in the short-lived post-Murdoch era

Tories/Lib Dems vs. the UN

firmly on the side of the sinister world government guys in this case

rejecting these complaints because they're based on anecdotal stories which are not something the coalition wd ever use to make a case

Grant Shapps to write to the Secretary General demanding an apology.

Filed right in the fucking wastepaper basket.

Getting mightily sick of DWP spokespeople, who are supposed to be impartial civil servants, clearly being on-message Tory SPAD types.

i know this'll sound like i'm trying to be some 'macho man' or something but i'd really like to pummel grant schapps' legs repeatedly with a baseball bat, and then watch him fail an atos test.

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/sep/10/mary-portas-contract-channel-4

Shadow work and pensions secretary Liam Byrne said the policy should be dropped and said what was "shocking" was that the Conservatives were pushing ahead with "hated" changes which he said were primarily hitting disabled people.

Labour has not committed to scrapping the policy

your opposition right there

When I think of what even a semi-competent Labour party could have done against this barefaced shower of fucktards we call "The Coalition" I have to fight the urge to kick a wall then I just cry a bit.

Just sack everyone now and start a-fucking-gain. Yvette Cooper to lead, some non-arseholes given a chance, make a break, SOMEBODY

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/nick-clegg-is-worse-than-michael-foot-says-key-lib-dem-peer-lord-oakeshott-8812916.html

well Michael Foot was a principled, cultured, intelligent man with a strong sense of decency and a great deal of respect for his fellow party members so yes, obv

i used to work in a bookshop that he used to come into regularly - you'd heard him coming before you saw him because by this stage there'd be a sort of staggered step, a loud clomp of his gnarled mage-like stick and a sort of high pitched throat-clearing noise of effort. he used to come in and see whether I had the edition of Gulliver's Travels he'd written an introduction for - if I didn't he'd always say this was excellent as it meant it had sold out, and if I did, he'd usually get a copy as he was always giving the one he had away to friends. This was nice of him as it was usually my inept ordering that dictated whether there was a copy or not. Hero, obviously.

As you say, Nick Clegg doesn't have an ounce of anything approaching Michael Foot's qualities.

can you imagine any member of the current Cabinet (or indeed Shadow Cabinet) writing serious, well-respected biographies of literary figures? Hague has written political biography I suppose...

i own a copy of the Gulliver's Travels Foot wrote the intro for.

but Neil has hit on my wider point - Foot lived a life well worth living, but all he registers as in the reptilian mind of career pols like Oakeshott is somebody who lost an election and who cares why?

^ ^

Being monstered in The Sun for wearing a donkey jacket to the Cenotaph, longest suicide note in history etc. Without Falklands he probably would have run Maggie close in '83, and he was in a pretty difficult position having to deal with the show-boating Tony Benn and militant friends on the one side and the SDP on the other. Given all that his political career was pretty admirable IMO.

"but Neil has hit on my wider point - Foot lived a life well worth living, but all he registers as in the reptilian mind of career pols like Oakeshott is somebody who lost an election and who cares why?"

Michael Foot is a real hero of mine, and fuck a lord Oakeshott obv, but losing an election is surely relevant when you're judging someone on the basis of how good a leader of a political party they were?

I always think about that bit of the 'Labour's Old Romantic' documentary where he's asked if he really wanted to be PM, and he pauses for a long time and says that he never really believed that he would be. Which probably makes him a better human being than any other major party leader in recent history, but maybe not a good candidate for the leadership.

only up to a point. the most obvious thing about the 83 election was whether anybody cd've beaten the Tories riding high on the back of the Falklands War. i suspect not. then there's the question of whether the purpose of a political party - and Foot's leadership was perhaps the last time that the Labour party (RIP) was in decent democratic shape and not the hierarchical shithouse that its corpse is now - is to win elections at any cost. i can understand why a Lib Dem peer thinks that's exactly what political parties are for, but that doesn't make it true. for all the internecine brutality happening within Labour in the early 80s there was, i think, a genuine debate about whether it was more important to try and win over the electorate to a set of principles that your party stood for or whether you just chased the apparent mood of the electorate.

campaigning for a set of policies that you've agreed on principle as a party is a long game, not measured over single parliamentary terms. the fact that it's a game that nobody wants to play in 2013 says more about the stinking corpse of democracy than it says about what Foot was trying to achieve as a politician.

so if you're saying that being thoughtful, long-termist, believing in a core set of values, are not good traits in a politician, i might agree, except you're then saying "fuck politics" afaic

the realistic non-Foot choice was Healey, who could probably have given Thatcher a tougher battle, but the fact that he abandoned Labour to form the SDP in a fit of pique, thereby scuttling Labour's chances, should not be forgotten.

Eh? Healey wasn't in the SDP.

Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Shirley Williams were the, ahem, big hitters from Labour that formed the SDP.

"so if you're saying that being thoughtful, long-termist, believing in a core set of values, are not good traits in a politician, i might agree, except you're then saying "fuck politics" afaic"

I think this is pretty much it, yes.

that's how right wing the SDP was, even Healey wdn't join

Don't forget Bill Rodgers

bends yeah that's fair enough, again i guess my point was that Oakeshott's conception of what politics is is nihilist thru and thru

hah sorry, I stand corrected, getting my early 80s Labour grandees confused!

Don't forget Bill Rodgers

Oh my, who could ever etc

Has anyone read Foot's collection of essays from the late 80s, 'Loyalists and Loners'? There's a chapter about David Owen that's this amazing demolition of Owen, and incredibly funny and cutting.

Like, the tone is impeccably restrained and gentlemanly, but it's a total hatchet job, it's fantastic.

will seek out

yeah wd like to read - his book The Pen and the Sword on the political situation in the period Swift wrote The Conduct if the Allies is good too.

re Labour grandee scalp hunting I also once sat next to Denis Healey on a cross-channel ferry. I think I must have been 13/14 and was reading The Brothers Karamazov - turned out he was a huge fan of Dostoevsky, and that he had been his favourite writer during his student days.

Benefit fraud could lead to 10-year jail terms, says DPP

Sort of thing that renders you speechless, n'est-ce pas?

NV, Fizzles, Neil S, bends = OTM

Posterity, you're a bourgeois whore.

There's a chapter about David Owen that's this amazing demolition of Owen, and incredibly funny and cutting.

That wouldn't have bothered Owen too much, I've heard, and I'm not sure if this is a well-known entirely untrue rumour or not, that he gets something of a thrill from pain and discomfort. It's all lies of course.

xxp the DPP is just recommending the maximum become ten years in prison instead of seven. Not that anyone gets sentenced to even that long now. It's just another attempt to plant the 'all people on benefits = criminal scroungers' opinion in Daily Mail voter's minds.

more watering and feeding than planting tbh

Well DM reader's minds already provide the compost.

Vince Cable attacks 'ugly' Conservative politics

http://i4.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article2278434.ece/ALTERNATES/s615/David-Cameron-2278434.jpg

https://scontent-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn2/1186321_10153263960525374_69187892_n.jpg

Looking forward to them sneaking an "on their own" onto that Labour point if we end up with a differently hung parliament in 2015.

idk if you guys even want these guys but look

http://www.broadsheet.ie/2013/09/17/the-right-hook/

The Conservatives on their own cannot build a fairer society!

lol god knows they've tried amirite

"guys, need a little help here"

i know ashdown has probably been a tool for ages anyway but his shilling for the tories this weekend was just idk

He's always been a dick, his greatest achievement being to inspire this headline:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ThhguC97EdA/STWg53A9Z1I/AAAAAAAAARs/kg8v2L1eViw/s400/ITS-PADDY-PANTSDOWN.jpg

idk if you guys even want these guys

UHhhhhhh, what do you think?

Let him finish! If I want these guys to what, exactly?