Category: Politics

Christopher Hitchens offers a hopeful piece on Iraq in today’s Slate. I hope he’s right.

So what’s up with with Lib Dems? Charles Kennedy has been rubbish as a leader for years now, but it’s only now they have some competition in the form of David Cameron they decide it’s time to do something about it.

Charlie fights back by declaring he’s an alcoholic, hoping the ever-so-nice Lib Dems will give him a sympathy vote come leadership election time. Now, my initial reaction is that you don’t fire a guy simply for having a disease: I thought we’d moved on as a society from that point. However, he claims not to have had a drink in two months now, yet he’s continued to be a rubbish leader the whole time, so I think we can conclude he’s a rubbish leader and an alcoholic, not a rubbish leader because he’s an alcoholic. So he should be fired, rather than using his disease as an excuse.

The problem is that the Lib Dems don’t have any obvious replacements. They’re all so nice. There’s no Paddy Ashdown or David Owen equivalent, who not only really wanted to be leader but who had experience of leadership. Even that guy who has nine black belts (I dare you to name that Lib Dem politician!) is too nice and lacking in charisma. So before giving Charlie the push, I think a bit of searching needs to be done to find a decent replacement. Otherwise, the Lib Dems are going to be back in the also-ran position, without any to give their economic policies a much-needed modernisation or the British public the idea that they should be elected for any other reason than not being the Tories or Labour.

Interesting legal note on Salon today, stemming from the coldly frothing pen of Sidney Blumenthal. In it, he points out that President Bush has pioneered a new tactic in deciding which laws to follow. By including in the presidential signing statement a clause on how the president believes it applies to the executive branch, he can more or less ignore it, it seems – think of it as a “I will/will not follow this law” checkbox. Very wily.

A system of checks and balances? Of laws, not of men? I don’t think so. But if that’s not what the American people want, who’s to argue with them?

You know the argument that if a group of monkeys typed for long enough, they’d come up with Hamlet? I guess that if the government keeps suggesting laws, they might come up with some good ideas every once in a while.

Almost certainly not.

So David Cameron is now hinting that there may be a switch in Conservative policy towards asylum seekers. Curious. All that talk of “Are you thinking what we’re thinking?” that he helped mastermind and now it turns out he thinks that was a bad idea.

Would a better line have been “Are you thinking what we’re thinking? Then can you tell us what it is, because we haven’t a clue any more? But we’d really like you to vote for us. Would you? Pretty please? We’ll do anything.”

This change of heart is relatively simple to explain. Cameron knows that the Conservative party has an image problem: basically, anyone under the age of 35 thinks they’re pure evil. He’s also discovered that if a party argues that we shouldn’t allow in more than seven asylum seekers each year from places that torture and murder you such as Zimbabwe, while greeting with open arms thousands of economic migrants from Australia and South Africa, it might be perceived as just the teenciest bit racist.

What? You didn’t know that the biggest groups of immigrants to Britain each year are (white) Australians and South Africans? And you didn’t know that most of them have come here to work, save up all their earnings then spend it all travelling around the rest of Europe rather than pumping up our anaemic domestic demand? Shouldn’t rely on The Sun, Express and Daily Mail for your news then, should you?

As an aside, In case you’re wondering where I stand on this, as far as I’m concerned, the more economic migrants the better. We should be thanking our lucky stars they want to come here to work their backsides off for us in jobs that none of us want to do. Or even in jobs that we do want to do, but we don’t have the skills for. Think about it: the hotel service industry is practically run by Poland at the moment; God bless EU expansion for our daily room service. And I know of several companies that would be floundering with an undertalented staff of posh kids if it weren’t for some highly educated Australians and South Africans bumping up the average IQ level.

Back to the Tories. A quick bit of maths: image of pure evil + covert racism = ?. David Cameron, former PR person, has done this calculation and realised that if he’s ever going to win an election, he’s going to have to appeal to people who don’t have to wipe froth from their mouths every time they’ve ventured an opinion.

Unfortunately, David, you’re still going to have to cope with the fact that a goodly proportion of your party, both members and MEPs/MPs, have sponges in their pockets for just such eventualities. Until we can be sure that the very second you lot get back into power, you’re not going to rip your masks off and go “Ha, ha! Fooled you! We are Beelzebub and his minions after all”, you’re not going to see our votes hitting the ballot boxes any time soon – or even in the next four years or so. Anyway, it’s a secret ballot so stop trying to sneak a peak. Cheater.

The FT is reporting the news that the UK has conceded some more of the rebate (effectively) to broker a budget agreement. Well, good. The EU has always been more of a self-support club than a simple single market, with richer members helping poorer members in order to avoid poverty, suffering and little things like wars in Europe (which always turn out well, don’t they?).

The idea that we, the fifth largest economy in the world, should be sucking money out of little countries like Poland was frankly disgusting and I’m glad that we’ve at least reduced the rebate.

The other good news is the French have at least agreed to reconsider CAP spending, previously locked at agreed levels until 2013. Currently, 40% of the EU’s budget goes towards CAP and as the current negotiations at the WTO show, the rest of the world doesn’t like that. While the French have their own reasons for wanting CAP to remain, not all of them bad, and most of the UK’s CAP subsidies goes on environmental conservation, rather than grain mountains, it’s still an idea that needs to be slowly squashed out of existing – or at least substantially reformed.

Get a grip, guys. Everyone can see what the problem is, so have a little courage and do the right thing. OK?