The Ten Most Irritating Politicians Since The War

I missed Rod Liddle's poll to find the most irritating politicians since the war so he is my list. Obviously there is a strong bias towards politicians whom I am old enough to actually remember with only Bevan and Williams being from before the 1980s. I don't suppose being irritating makes someone bad at their job, I suspect I would have found Gladstone insuuferable had I been alive in the 19th Century but he was still a great figure. None of these people are though:

1. Shirley Williams- sanctimonious, hypocritical and destructive.
2. Denis Macshane- Hyper partisan and a compulsive liar.
3. David Mellor- Useless, incompetent, arrogant and hypocritical.
4. Edwina Currie- John Major has my sympathy.
5. John Bercow- Horrible little man, models himself on Mr Toad.
6. Harriet Harman- Don't worry Hattie women won't be underrepresented on this list thanks to you.
7. Alan Clarke- No he wasn't a "character" or a "wit" he was a boorish, insecure charlatan with an mystifying level of belief in his own abilities.
8. Mo Mowlam- Despite carefully cultivating a "people's politician" image she was just another politician with a deluded sense of her own importance.
9. Nye Bevan- To me he sounds like "Kinnock Mk 1" rather than an inspirational figure. His voice grates.
10. Lembit Opik- A very cheeky boy.

Honourable mentions for: Tony Benn, Tam Daylell, Patricia Hewitt, michael Portillo, Douglas Hurd, Simon Hughes, Charles Kennedy, Chris Huhne, David Owen, Roy Jenkins, Stafford Cripps and Virginia Bottomley.

Important News

As the usual blonde A Level students blogger hasn't said anything yet allow me to just confirm that attractive blonde teenage girls are still doing very well in their A Levels.

12 Men Good & Dumb

Former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich who was caught on tape brazenly discussing how to sell Barack Obama's senate seat has been found not guilty on 23 out of 24 corruption charges by a jury. This begs the obvious question where do they get the morons to sit on juries?

This is a problem over here as well where there is nothing to stop people who are retarded fantasists from deciding the fate of somebody's life.

The problem seems to me to be that the people who sit on juries are usually the people who have nothing better to do, people who have not been entrusted with any great responsibility by anyone who actually knows them are the ones who get to determine whether someone is guilty or not.

The jury system needs quality control in order to actually work.

Sometimes Banning Things Is Good

Like wheel clampers. The idea that people have the right to essentially confiscate your property with no due process is an outrage, so I'm glad that the government is going to stop this. Except on government property because they're special.

Risky Business

Okay she's got a deadly sexually transmitted virus and likes unprotected sex but I still would though.

National Hookers Service

I don't really object to councils spending money for disabled people to visit prostitutes and lap dancing clubs. No more than I object to spending money on them visiting the theatre or the shops anyway, because the underlying assumption behind the objections to spending the cash this way is that disabled people should have to suppress any politically and socially undesirable urges if they receive any help from the state.

For the genuinely disabled, receiving assistance from the state should not compel them to allow their lives to be micromanaged according to other people's moral injunctions.

In fact in so far as sex is a basic human want perhaps we should nationalise prostitutes and create a National Hookers Service which is free at the point of use for everybody, in the interests of fairness and social justice and all that crap.

The Ground Zero Mosque

Tasteless and provocative but if they aren't breaking any planning laws then they should not face any barriers from the government although it seems very foolish for the New York Mayor and US President to actually endorse the idea.

Back Like A Really Tedious Zombie

I can see the political benefits of recruiting Alan Milburn as a policy czar, but in terms of good government what is the point? In his most prominent position in the last government, as health secretary, he didn't achieve anything of note other than in spending more money. Maybe it wasn't his fault, he was reputed to have tried to implement reforms, but even so he left without any major accomplishment to his name.

He supposedly had an important role in advising the Australian Labor Party in their last landslide election victory although even his skills as a political strategist must be called into question when you consider that as the UK Labour Party's election supremo in 2005 he had to be rescued by Gordon Brown (remember when Gordon Brown was popular!?).

So why is he being entrusted to devise the government's policy on social mobility? Being broad minded enough to consult policy experts regardless of party affiliation, and few people would object to an acknowledged expert advcising the government even if he was a member of the Labour Party, Frank Field is exactly the right person to appoint to advise on welfare reform for example. The only reasons that I can think of for appointing Alan Milburn though are to embarrass the Labour Party and provide political cover for the Coalition.

Hit The Road

I spent 8 hours on the motorways yesterday and I now have a strange craving for Yorkie bars and a desire to murder prostitutes.

Still Here

Just can't think of anything at all to write about.

Anyone know any good jokes?

Quote Of The Day

I'm rather fond of villains going to prison.

- Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson.

Village Green Preservation Society

George Monbiot is joining the Village Green Preservation Society or at least he is writing about the importance of green spaces:

One fascinating paper shows that crime rates are also strongly affected by vegetation.

It works the other way too, look at Detroit, crime is so bad that the city is being reclaimed by the wilderness. That's not what Monbiot means of course, he is arguing that village greens and city parks are an exceptionally valuable resource.

He is right of course but the destruction of common lands isn't due to the rapaciousness of developers but because of restrictive planning laws that make it near impossible to build on the green belt and therefore leave builders with no alternative but to develop sites within existing settlements.

If we could build a little bit on what is now low value farmland we could paradoxically give far more people access to greenery.

A Nail In The Coffin Of Western Guilt

One of the most widely disseminated myths is that the reason that the West is wealthier than the rest of the world is due to things like colonialism and exploitation. This idea doesn't make a great deal of sense given that Western countries that never had colonies are not poorer than their neighbours, non-Western nations that were never colonised are not noticeably wealthier than their neighbours.

This should put another nail in the coffin of the idea anyhow:

The study gathered crude information on the state of technological development in various parts of the world in 1000 B.C.; around the birth of Jesus; and in A.D. 1500. It then compared these measures to per capita income today.

As it turns out, technology in A.D. 1500 is an extraordinarily reliable predictor of wealth today.

In other words the reason some countries are more developed than others today is because they were more developed yesterday. Trying to explain differences that go back thousands of years by using factors that only apply for 10s or 100s of years is inadequate.

Strange Fruit

The world's largest Apple shop is set to open in London's Covent Garden.

I'm not sure why anyone would want a jumbo apple really.

Legal Question

If I wanted to kill somebody and therefore tricked them into coming with me to a country with whom we have no extradition treaty, and then killed them and escaped back to this country what crimes could I be charged with over here?

I suppose I ought to add a disclaimer that I'm not actually planning on doing this and in fact don't even have anyone in mind.

Women & Minorities Hardest Hit

One of those pompous group letters from all the usual suspects appears in the Guardian today denouncing the government's spending cuts. They appear to play what must be the full house of victimhood poker:

The £11bn welfare cuts, rise in VAT to 20%, and 25% reductions across government departments target the most vulnerable – disabled people, single parents, those on housing benefit, black and other ethnic minority communities, students, migrant workers, LGBT people and pensioners.

What I'm wondering is in what sense the budgets targets LGBT people, if anyone knows please let me know in the comments. Come to that if anyone knows how black and other enthnic minority communities are especially affected then feel free to elaborate.

Gordon Brown Is Not The Worst PM Ever.....

.....just the worst Chancellor of the Exchequer.

The historians poll of post war prime ministers that rates Gordon Brown as the 3rd worst PM since the war is as silly and argument provoking as all these surveys. My own ranking of British PMs since the Reform Act of 1831 is here. However as Joseph Tagaki points out, much of the problems of Brown's tenure were to do with his previous stint as Chancellor under Tony Blair, say what you want about Brown but his Chancellor was much better than Blair's. There are too many Chancellors to rank easily for the whole post war period, but if the starting point is 1979 then I'd rank them in something like this order:

1. Geoffrey Howe
2. Ken Clarke
3. Norman Lamont*
4. Alastair Darling**
5. Nigel Lawson
6. John Major
7. Gordon Brown

How far back would one have to go to find a Chancellor who was worse than Brown? At least as far back as Anthony Barber in the 1970s but possibly all the way back to before the War.

* Norman Lamont is often seen as a failure but he gets a lot of unfair blame for the shortcomings of John Major and Nigel Lawson and doesn't get enough credit for the success during Ken Clarke's tenure.

** Had one hell of a mess to deal with.

Ignorance Is Strength

Something to consider:

The accuracy of an expert’s predictions actually has an inverse relationship to his or her self-confidence, renown, and, beyond a certain point, depth of knowledge. People who follow current events by reading the papers and news magazines regularly can guess what is likely to happen about as accurately as the specialists whom the papers quote

......
On the first scale, the experts performed worse than they would have if they had simply assigned an equal probability to all three outcomes—if they had given each possible future a thirty-three-per-cent chance of occurring. Human beings who spend their lives studying the state of the world, in other words, are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys, who would have distributed their picks evenly over the three choices.

Maybe this says something about the increased specialisation of knowledge, as academics and pundits become ever more informed about the minutiae of their field they lose focus on the broader picture. Also perhaps some fields of 'expertise' are really job creation scams, the article mentions that when asked to predict grades of college students using a simple formula of test scores and high school grades is more accurate than the choices made by 'experts' based on assessments of personality and background, however using test scores and grades doesn't require much in the way of an admissions staff.

Science enables us to predict many things with great certainty but in most other fields the appearance of science is given to areas of study that cannot easily be subjected to scientific rigour, where things cannot be repeated multiple times and can't really be falsified.