Labour Possibly Not Doomed. :(

Are Labour about to disappear? Sadly not

For it to happen there would need to be a party on their side of the political spectrum capable of taking over. The Tories in the late 1990s were always safe from being eclipsed because no rival party on the right emerged to fracture their vote, in Canada in the early 1990s their Progressive Conservative party did essentially disappear as a major force because another right centre party was able to attract conservative voters. In theory the Lib Dems are better placed to take over from Labour than the Conservatives but that would involve becoming a more overtly left wing party, and seeing as how most of their current MPs are defending their seats from Conservative opponents they aren't willing to do that. Losing their own seats for the good of the party isn't something that appeals to them.

The other reason why I think Labour will survive is because an lot of their current problems stem from the uniquely awful personality of Gordon Brown. Don't get me wrong I strongly dislike the party and think that they have been consistently incompetent, sleazy and malign however this was just as true when they were polling close to 50% in the late 1990s. Although some polls suggest that replacing Brown won't improve that is probably untrue because people don't have strong opinions of his potential successors as they aren't very well known and are seen as mere apparatchiks in Brown's Labour. The only figure whose name recognition is high enough to escape being tied down by Brown is Tony Blair and the polls suggest that he would cut the gap on the Tories to 9%, hung parliament territory. This despite the fact that Blair is more culpable than anyone except Brown for Labour's current woes.

If I were a supporter of the Labour Party I'd be optimistic that ditching Brown and replacing him with David Miliband or Alan Johnson would be enough to avoid a landslide defeat at the next election. Of course if I were a supporter of the Labour Party I'd also be drooling in the corner saying nothing but 'wibble', but that doesn't invalidate the point. David Cameron's whole strategy since coming to lead the Conservatives, and perhaps even before the last election has been based on waiting for Gordon Brown to take over and alienate the largest chunk of swing voters it madness for Labour to be assisting in that policy by keeping Brown in place.

No Comment.

Phil Spector endorses Obama

Via.

Quote Of The Day.

At the Spare Rib Spectator Coffee House blog Mary Wakefield applauds Harriet Harman's proposed changes to the murder laws. Her reasoning is flawless:

Reform is overdue -- there hasn't been any change in the law for 50 years

I must say murder doesn't strike me as being a crime which changes so much that laws become passe after 50 years. Incidentally this is not even the stupidest sentence in her post.

Licence To Kill

I was going to comment on this insane idea by Harriet Harperson and the coven of femiloons in the government to basically legalise husband killing, but there is no need because this brilliant article by Erin Pessey, founder of the first refuge for abused women in Britain, says it all:

But it is precisely because of my desire to protect the vulnerable that I am so opposed to Ms Harman’s absurd new plan, which is not only an affront to the basic morality of our society, but also a ridiculously one-sided, misogynistic, simplistic and dangerous response to the issue.

Indeed, as with so many of her other forays into policy-making, it is driven more by feminist ideology than compassion.

Effectively, what Harman and the ultra-feminist lobby want is a licence for women to kill.

The Guardian's favourite Millie Tant, Julie Bindel rates a mention too:

It is telling that one of the driving forces behind these proposals is Julie Bindel, of the Left-wing pressure group Justice for Women.

Ms Bindel displayed her lack of balance in a recent article in the Guardian newspaper, entitled ‘Why I hate men’.

One of her sentences read: ‘I will say loud and proud, yes, today I hate men, and will tomorrow and the day after.’

No doubt in her misogynistic world, killing men is a form of justifiable homicide. But it is an outrage that thanks to Ms Harman, feminists such as Bindel can influence public policy.

Spot on. Having Harriet Harman in charge of gender equality legislation is akin to having Abu Hamza draw up legislation pertaining to religious hatred.

Update: Via the comments under an article by the aforementioned Ms Bindel, these lunatics don't merely think that women who kill their husbands are victims, they actuallly consider them heroes fit to either receive awards or have awards named in their honour:

An Asian woman who was jailed for life for setting fire to her husband has been honoured at an awards ceremony for breaking the taboo of domestic violence.

Outrageous

John Ward has a good example of how the BBC meet their obligation to quote Conservative politicians in response to government announcements, in this case a decsion to grant an amnesty to tens of thousands of asylum seekers, by literally quoting a single word that the Tory spokesman, Dominic Grieve, used devoid of any context.

The word chosen 'outrageous' is one that is designed to make the opposition to the government's decision appear knee jerk and reactionary because it provides no reason for why they oppose it. 'Outrageous' simply indicates the strength of feeling about an issue but provides no hint as to why they feel that way. The BBC does of course explain the government's reasons, they want to grant the amnesty because

Most of their cases date back over three years, with some over seven years.

Other outlets do allow Grieve to put forwards why he disagrees with the Home Office,

This exercise should be about reviewing applications properly and granting asylum in genuine cases. The Government should not be tempted to grant an effective amnesty just to get the backlog cleared, and achieve a good headline.

This is a short and concise quote that neatly explains his viewpoint, whereas 'Outrageous' gives the impression of a pompous rent-a-quote venting over how angry he is with everything.

Iraq Banned From The Olympics.

The team was already the subject of an interim ban after the Iraqi government replaced the country's Olympic committee with its own appointees.

Under the IOC charter, all committees must be free of political influence.

The Iraqi Olympic Committee used to be headed by Uday Hussein without being banned so presumably the IOC think that he was promoted to the job on merit.

Now & Then

This is a pretty spectacular volte face by Nick Cohen on the subject of Anthony Browne.

Labour Sabateurs Keep Up Good Work

After Labour's last bye-election disaster, by which I mean their most recent not their final one, in Henley I only half jokingly speculated that Harriet Harman might have been secretly trying to undermine the Labour Party in the build up to the election by pushing wildly unpopular policies right before the election. I don't think Harperson is acting alone, in the run up to the bye election in the heavily Roman Catholic constituency Glasgow East, several Labour MPs led by Diane Abbott decided it would be a brilliant time to put forwards a bill to make abortion legal in Northern Ireland, against the wishes of all the local parties in the province (although Sinn Fein are happy to practice post-natal abortion). Naturally they couldn't have waited until after the votes had been cast. Another brilliant move by the Labour sisterhood to sabotage the party from within.

Also Don't Rely On Magic Pixies To Beat TB.

This is an old story but I only saw it for the first time yesterday, when someone linked to it in a thread about alternative medicine:

Don't rely on homeopathy to beat malaria, doctors warn

I'm not usually an advocate of eugenics on this blog but surely anyone stupid enough to try to protect themselves from malaria with the contents of their herb rack should be encouraged in their efforts to remove themselves from the gene pool. Why do I suspect that the kind of people who would disregard medical advice when it comes to Malaria are the same ones who would go into a blind panic over their mobile phone causing cancer?

The Obamessiah Speaks.

I haven't seen a politician enthuse a large rally of Germans like that since..... oh you can complete the rest yourself.

Scaremongering

Is it me or is this bloke just engaged in pointless scaremongering?

The director of a leading US cancer research institute has sent a memo to thousands of staff warning of possible higher risks from mobile phone use.

Ronald Herberman, of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, said users should not wait for definitive studies on the risk and should take action now.

That's a great research institute, telling everyone not to bother with the research and just panic, perhaps we should apply that principle to the MMR vaccine next time. His memo will almost certainly provide a great service to many sleazy tort lawyers looking to extort vast sums of money from the mobile phone companies by telling credulous juries that their clients were made ill by their phones.

He lists tips including switching sides regularly while talking on mobiles.

I do that already, but the police keep pulling me over and telling me that I'm driving dangerously. I'm not a medical researcher and come to that I haven't actually had a mobile for years (people often seem amazed by that) but I seriously think that if something that widespread caused cancer then we would already know. It isn't as if the possibility hasn't been studied until now. More to the point there are few obvious mechanisms by which the radiation emitted by the phones could cause cancer.

Cuckoo Cuckoo.

The arrest of Radovan Karadzic certainly seems to have stirred up the nutters.

The fact that it has taken 13 years to find a man who was living in a major city and writing a magazine column on alternative medicine suggests that he might just have had some assistance from the Serbian government.

Perhaps the alternative medicine will form part of his defence strategy- "No we didn't shoot them all in the head, we were simply applying a form of extreme accupuncture to release their negative chi".

Weighty Matters.

Two amusing posts that are well worth a read:

• Dumbjon on 'fat activists' trying to claim the mantle of victimhood over their depiction in the new Pixar movie 'Wall-E'.
• Alas the starving are also a major problem in Western society, so Tizona helpfully highlights a NPR story of the plight of ordinary Americans unable to afford to buy food for themselves in Bush's America. Helpfully the NPR website includes photos of the emaciated dears.
  

On an unrelated subject could the owner of this cat come forwards.

Not The Reaction He Was Hoping For.

Daniel Kawczynski, a Conservative MP, is annoyed at the Guardian claiming that he claims more expenses for food than he actually does. The reaction of the commentators probably isn't exactly what he hoped for.

BCS BS.

The government have once again been waving around the results of the British Crime Survey to bolster their claims that crime is falling. So I shall, once again, post about why the BCS is not the flawless indicator of crime that the government and its supporters believe it is.

Problems with the BCS:

• It doesn't cover under 16s, who are proportionately more likely to be the victims of crime than adults.
• It doesn't cover crimes that aren't specifically directed at an individual, so for example if a school suffers an arson attack or some shops suffer theft then it doesn't show up on the BCS.
• It doesn't cover crimes against those who aren't permanent residents of the UK, such as tourists or migrant workers.
• It doesn't cover murder.
• The sample is not truly random as there are a large number of people who decline to take part and they are concentrated in high crime neighbourhoods.
• People's recall of what has happened to them over the course of a year is pretty poor.
• It doesn't cover repeat offences against the same victim, or to be precise it caps the number of offences it records.

Of course the fact that the BCS isn't as reliable as is claimed doesn't mean that crime is rising. With technological advances with cars and mobile phones some crimes are harder to commit than they used to be so robbery is probably down for example. However there is an interesting question as to why people believe crime is rising, it isn't simply, as some newspaper columnists assert because of tabloid hysteria, for example in the USA when crime stats began to fall in the 1990s pretty much everyone accepted that they were clearly true and reflected their day to day experience. The American figures were confirmed by a fall in the one statistic governments can't manipulate, the homicide rate, whereas in the UK the homicide rate has increased substantially over the last decade.

Update: Stephen Pollard writes in the Daily Mail about the BCS's shortcomings.

A Copy Of 'Down With Consumerism' Can Be Bought At The Gift Shop.

The Pope isn't keen on consumerism:

Pope Benedict XVI has attacked popular culture and consumerism in a formal address to tens of thousands of young Roman Catholics."

Presumably the purveyors of tacky gifts over at the Vatican don't count as contributers to consumerism.

Quote Of The Day.

The best comment so far on the Obama/ New Yorker cartoon nonsense is in the comments here:

Making a fuss over a cartoon isn't going to help Barack Hussein Obama's efforts to prove he is not a muslim

Noticing What Isn't Supposed To Be Noticed

As soon as I saw this headline on google news "Mother 'invented disabled children to collect £1million in benefits'" I immediately guessed something about the defendant, I was right.

If you can't guess what I'm referring to have a look at these recent fraud cases and see what they have in common. You can almost taste the vibrancy coming off these trials.

Update: Someone else has spotted the pattern too.

Won't Someone Please Think Of The Children!!

The Children's Society purports to represent children, although as far I can tell, actual children are about as numerous as they would be at a Gary Glitter concert, today they are upset over a proposal to allow more child offenders (or to be precise teenage thugs who are old enough to get married or join the army) to be named in the press. Strangely they appear to arguing simultaneously that it's a bad idea because it violates the child's rights and that it would be a badge of honour for them to be so named. Pick one or the other please or at least pretend to respect the public's intelligence enough not to use both arguments together.

On the subject of criminals and justice John East has a couple of very good posts up, as does Laban.

The Gay Mafia.

It seems that the Sicilian Mafia aren't an equal opportunities employer:

"These bosses have to cover their homosexuality; they're afraid because they risk being ridiculed and killed."

Mr Ingroia said that the American Mafia had "a more broad-minded attitude towards gays and so gay bosses can come out."

That is come out as gay, not come out as Mafia bosses, that's still frowned on in most of the USA with the possible exception of New Jersey. It should be pointed out that British gangsters are far more progressive and as far back as the 1960s Ronnie Kray was able to dominate gangland despite being a 'fat poof'. Although this was partly because he murdered people who called him a fat poof.

53% of Britons Are Idiots, Poll Finds.

The Guardian breathlessly reports:

Barack Obama is overwhelmingly Britain's choice to be the next US president, five times more popular than his Republican rival, John McCain, a Guardian/ICM poll shows today. Carried out ahead of the Democratic candidate's visit to Britain next week, the poll reveals that 53% feel certain he would make the best president, with only 11% favouring McCain; 36% declined to express an opinion.

With this level of popularity in Britain, perhaps the Guardian could find a way for British voters to encourage Americans to support Obama. Perhaps a small county in a prominent swing state could be found....

Born At The Wrong Time

A new study has found that people born in the later part of the school year are less likely to do well, academically. than those born earlier:

The reason for the summer-birth disadvantage is that those children have to sit important exams up to 11 months earlier than their autumn or winter-born counterparts, the report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) says.

It proposes a number of reforms to ensure that summer-born babies are no longer penalised because of an “unlucky birth draw”. Chief among these is the suggestion that all school test scores should be adapted to take account of students' birth month, right up to GCSE level.

This sounds plausible as small differences in age can mean major differences among school age children. The effect isn't limited to academia either, a look at the birth dates of Premiership footballers, professional cricketers and rugby players reveals the same pattern:

An analysis of 348 Premiership footballers playing this season shows that 32pc were born between September and November while only 20pc were born between June and August.

In cricket, 34pc of first-class players in the County Championship this summer were born at the start of the school year, compared with 18pc in the last three months.

In rugby union's Guinness Premiership, 30pc of players this season were born between September and November compared with 18pc at the end of the school year.

In other words being born at the wrong time of the year is a major disadvantage in all sorts of ways right through adulthood, and having to keep pace mentally and physically with older children is not always possible. Given the potential wasting of people's talents that the current system creates, it might be a good idea to consider using 6 month age groups for grouping children in schools rather than 1 year groups.

Fact Of The Day

Fraser Nelson writing at the Spectator's blog reveals this shocking fact:

Male life expectancy for the whole of Glasgow, including its lush suburbs, averages 70.7 years - worse than Gaza’s 71.01 years. In East Glasgow, it goes right down to 53.9 years in the Calton ward

That is genuinely astounding, 53.9 it is the kind of figure you would expect from some impoverished banana republic.

Racist Toddlers.

As we all know, eating Indian food is something that a racist would never do, which is why curry houses are never the scenes of racial abuse, which is why the National Children's Bureau's idea to treat toddlers who dislike spicy food as the little fascists they are makes so much sense.

It's a step in the right direction, but clearly more drastic action is required if we are too eradicate the scourge of racism from our society, which means we have to identify and punish the perpetrators at an earlier age. I propose that we get expectant mothers and play gangsta rap at their wombs, if the foetus indicates that they aren't down with all the vibrant music, perhaps by turning away or by kicking, then they can be marked down as racists before they are even born and turned over to a team of crack diversity counsellors when they are born. It is too late to save them of course but at least they can be identified and monitored throughout their lives.

Accurate But Fake

John Bercow, a man so stupid that he hasn't realised that he is in the wrong party, has come up with a proposal, described here by Simon Chapman at Centre Right:

But his proposed amendment to the HFE Bill is even worse than it was described. It proposes to make it an offence to advertise information about alternatives to abortion (as well as abortion) if the presentation of that information is "likely to deceive the average person...even if the information is factually correct."

Under Bercow's proposal people could be imprisoned for telling the truth. John Bercow used to be on the very right wing of the Conservative Party and was a secretary of the Monday Club, now he is the living embodiment of the idea that when fanatics change tack they don't become reasonable moderate individuals, but instead simply becom fanatics for another cause.

I don't have strong views on abortion and am generally accepting of the description of the two sides of the dispute as pro-life and pro-choice rather than pro and anti abortion, but shouldn't members of the pro choice lobby be condemning Bercow for advocating a position that is designed to restrict pregnant women's ability to make an informed choice? He isn't pro choice he is simply an evangelist for abortion.

Stockholm Syndrome

This could be the next Yvonne Ridley in the making.

Lefties- Not Big On Self Awareness

Snigger

We're Doomed.

Over at Blognor Regis I see this:

Pupils are being rewarded for writing obscenities in their GCSE English examinations even when it has nothing to do with the question.

One pupil who wrote “f*** off” was given marks for accurate spelling and conveying a meaning successfully.

Will pupils sitting biology exams now be rewarded if they choose to draw large pictures of their genitalia on the exam paper, assuming that they are biologically accurate?

I'm Baaaack

I'm back and after a week without internet access I am looking forward to discovering the answer to these questions:

• Is there a helpful list of which MPs voted to block the most basic checks on their burgeoning expense accounts?
• Was Richard Gott's reaction to the Colombian hostage rescue as hilarious and graceless as I imagined it?
• Should we support Labour getting a kicking at the Glasgow East bye-election even if it is at the hands of a rabid Anglophobe?
• Are puppies really too offensive to appear on police posters?