Ham, spam, jam …

Max Boyce, the Treorchy trismegistus [*], encapsulated the whole matter of free-market exploitation in a simple question and observation:

If ham grew underground,
Would it be ten bob a pound,
And the pit-head baths
Are a supermarket now.

OK: here it comes:

The pit-head baths were the legacy of enlightened nationalisation. The supermarket evidence of how Big Business finds ways of selling, even to the unemployed. So, what and who caused the long-term unemployment? And who is punishing the unemployed (and unemployable) for their miserable condition?

Questions … idle questions

But here’s some more:

• Would it have been acceptable for public-owned water utilities to allow major leaks to persist over years?
• And shall we remind ourselves that, until a few weeks back, there were at least three of these trickles down the gutter in this one street? (Admittedly, they seem now down to just two).
• Why is there a huge pit, a couple of feet across and at least one foot deep, in the middle of the highway past Redfellow Hovel, caused by the failure of the last failed attempt at “repair” and the equal failure to repair the carriageway?
• Would the tax and water-rate payer have patiently condoned the Water Board digging up the road four times in a year, and making the leakage worse on each occasion?
• Why is it all different, now that Thames Water is a privatised operation, owned by Kemble Water, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Kemble Water Holdings Ltd, which is owned by a consortium of faceless capitalists, of whom the largest shareholder is the Macquarie Group (once upon a time Hill Samuel), which is based at 1 Martin Place, Sydney, Australia?
• Is the water-rate payer and the metered-supply payer not forking out — massively, and with officially-endorsed annual hikes  — for all these incompetences?
• Should we weep that the jam of Thames Water profits is spread a bit thinner this year: a mere £127 million (and so a bit under 15% of revenue), are sadly down by £22 million?
• And, what, prithee, was that cant, your political spam, about “localisation”, Mr Cameron?

[*] “thrice-great”, a title for Apollo, because he commanded the three elements of hidden wisdom: alchemy, astrology, and ritual magic.

How to distort “news”

The Daily Mail is a low-down, dishonest, corrupting Tory rag — and needs constantly to be exposed for that. Fortunately, the Mail itself does so on a daily basis. Its whole existence is predicated to the Big Lie:

… the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.

Malcolm deliberately disguises the source of that quotation, lest it fall foul of Godwin’s Law.

Today’s front page is a magnificent example of the Big Lie:

The essence of the Mail piece is:

Prescott loses police commissioner poll in his own back yard of Hull to a TORY

Except the election wasn’t just for Hull: it was for the whole Humberside Constabulary area. Here is the difference:

The political complexion, as of 2010, of the parliamentary constituencies of Humberside looks very skewed:

Ten constituencies, five Tory, five Labour, which might seem an even balance. The County seats all Tory: the Borough seats tending Labour, as one might expect. A closer look at the numbers suggests the Humberside area is safe Tory country: David Davis’s Haltemprice and Howden is regarded as the second safest Tory constituency in Britain, and has never deviated from that loyalty since 1837.

Add up the 2010 results and we have 40.8% Tory, 34.2% Labour and 25% Lib Dem:

Now consider Thursday’s results of the Police and Crime Commissioner election (though Malcolm never did get the hang of how to ‘commission’ crime):

Accepting that Prescott lost on the Second Round (39,933 to 42,164 or a 48.6/51.4% two-party split), on that first count:

• Prescott caned the Tory — it is, in crude terms, a four or five per cent swing (and it has to be accepted that the “county” types turned out far, far better than the urbanites);
• the Tory vote went AWOL, barely squeaking in ahead of the independent — even the egregious Godfrey Bloom (surely one of the more disreputable and bizarre UKIP types, which itself is saying something) splitting off a sixth of the total poll;
• the Tory candidate was only rescued — just — on that second round by rolling up the odds-and-sods vote: those 19,375 who did express a second preference split for the Tory 2:1;
• the Lib Dems were totally creamed: even proportionately, more than a third of their vote evaporated.

For the record, Paul Davison — who ran that close third —  is an ex-Police Superintendent, and probably the best qualified of all the candidates.

The real determinant was tthe total failure of second preference transfers (which, as every aficionado of Irish politics knows, is key to the whole operation). Only 27% of the odds-and-sods ballots bothered to make a second preference. That is either a failure of voter education or a clear statement by a majority to vote “neither of the above”. 51,665 second preferences did not go for either the Labour or the Tory in the final run-off — which amounts to an absolute majority of those who turned out. We should not forget the “alternative vote” was the preferred option in the Great Constitutional Débâcle of 5th May 2011. If we needed concrete evidence that AV is a sham, and no substitute for proper proportional representation, here is the concrete evidence.

Yet the Daily Mail says it was all about Prescott, and the Daily Mail is a dishonourable rag.

And the Daily Mail says it was all about the city of Hull, and nothing to do with the other lands north and south of the estuary, and, for sure, the Daily Mail is a dishonourable lie-sheet.

Too early, but rethink necessary

A day on, and we are already getting the post-mortem analyses of what went wrong for the Republican Party. This time it’s serious:

The New England wing of the House GOP, after showing brief signs of life, is extinct again.

Democrats cleaned out the region on Tuesday, knocking off New Hampshire GOP Reps Charlie Bass and Frank Giunta and fending off stiff challenges to Massachusetts Rep. John Tierney and Rhode Island Rep. David Cicilline. Republicans also lost a toss-up open seat race in Connecticut.

The GOP didn’t fare much better in New England’s Senate races either. Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown lost his seat, Independent Angus King captured retiring Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe’s seat, and Linda McMahon spent more than $40 million in a losing bid for Connecticut’s open Senate seat. In Vermont, meanwhile, Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders demolished his GOP foe in a 71-25 landslide while Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse won 65-35.

The Republicans’ initial base was in the Northeast and the upper Midwest. So one good’un, even this early, is Peter Beinart on The Daily Beast. He is almost certainly wrong to assume (as his headline has it) any New Democratic Dominance in U.S. Politics. Where he is useful is to propose a once-over-lightly historical perspective:

For roughly half a century after the Civil War, Republicans dominated American politics because they dominated the North. But by the 1920s, after almost four decades of Catholic and Jewish immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, the North had changed. And instead of embracing that change, the GOP fought it, spearheading blatantly anti-Catholic measures like Prohibition and shutting down mass immigration in 1921 and 1924. Democrats capitalized, nominating a Catholic, Al Smith, in 1928. Smith lost, but in 1932 Franklin Roosevelt built on the coalition he had forged, and won the presidency by combining the white South—a traditional Democratic stronghold—with the new immigrants of the urban North. Then, to an unprecedented degree, he appointed Jews and Catholics to top administration jobs. In 1935 Time magazine noted the change by featuring two key Roosevelt advisers, the Catholic Thomas Corcoran and the Jewish Benjamin Cohen, on its cover.

But it was only in 1936, when FDR won despite a terrible economy and the venomous opposition of much of the Northern WASP elite from which he hailed, that Republicans began to acknowledge that America had changed—and left them behind. And that’s exactly what Republicans are realizing again Tuesday night. For the last four years, Republicans have argued publicly, as they did between 1932 and 1936, that their defeat was a fluke. They’ve said John McCain was a bad candidate who only lost because Americans were sick of George W. Bush. They’ve said the Tea Party heralded an anti-government shift that would sweep the GOP back into power. They’ve said America was still a center-right country.

By no coincidence, and it’s David Frum repeating it, Romney is being depicted as a “weak candidate”. Equally, loyalists in the Republican Party seem to be denying that anything is “structurally” wrong — cue Charles Krauthammer.

On the contrary, the whole scenery has changed.

• Along with returning Obama, the Great American Public have accepted Obamacare and gifted Obama’s second term with the (surely, inevitable) economic bounce-back.
• Even climate change, the great unspoken of this electoral cycle, is now mainstream (Allen West of Florida is a political corpse).
• Maine and Maryland have voted for same-sex marriage, while Minnesotans voted down a constitutional ban: Washington may yet endorse marriage equality.
• Colorado and Washington have legalised recreational Mary Jane.
• California came within a three-per-cent swing of repealing the death penalty. Back in 1978 they voted 7 to 3 for judicial killings

In so many ways, the United States is adapting to the 21st Century.

The Woman issue

This is the biggie.

• There are now a record number of women in the Senate— though not enough.

Hear it from Margaret Talbot in the New Yorker:

If you got caught up in the “war on women” narrative this election cycle, you might have missed the fact that that a conspicuous number of women were running for the Senate today. There were women candidates in fifteen of the thirty-three Senate races. In three states—California, Hawaii, and New York—both the Republican and the Democrat are women. And a couple of those women check other demographic boxes as well. In Wisconsin, Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat, won a tight race against former governor Tommy Thompson. She will be the first openly gay member of the Senate. In six of the contests where women are running, they’re the incumbents, and likely to be reëlected. Among the remaining nine states, there’s Hawaii—which will definitely send a woman to the Senate—Wisconsin; Massachusetts, where Elizabeth Warren defeated Scott Brown tonight; Nebraska, where Republican Deb Fischer seemed to be beating former governor Bob Kerrey; Nevada, where Republican Dean Heller was trying to defend his seat from Shelley Berkley; and North Dakota Democrat Heidi Heitkamp and Republican Rick Berg were running neck and neck. Linda McMahon, a Republican, was defeated in Connecticut.

The Show Me State

Republican center must be taking note of what happened — especially in Missouri.

Romney took the State by some eight points (when McCain in 2008 squeaked a lead of just 3,900 votes out of 2.9 million) — yet he had no coat-tails. The Democrat Governor was returned — the first successful re-run since 1996. And Claire McCaskill steam-cleaned Todd “legitimate rape” Akin by a 15½ per cent margin. 400,000 Missouri voters split their tickets: Romney but also McCaskill. As the AP summary of the exit poll had it:

Women didn’t carry McCaskill to victory on their own, but they did the heavy lifting. McCaskill outperformed by a wide margin among women, who supported her in slightly higher numbers than in 2006. The Democrat’s comfortable edge among women was propelled by those 18-44 who overwhelmingly lined up behind the first-term incumbent, as did a significant number of middle-aged women who made up the bulk of female voters. Akin offset some of these losses by holding his ground among women 65 and older and white women overall. Black women, however, backed McCaskill in a landslide.

Aside from being more likely to look past Akin’s comment, men backed Akin in stronger numbers than women, especially those who are older. Still, the best Akin could muster was a split with McCaskill for the entire male vote.

• Women are some 52% of the Missouri electorate.

As one wise comment, while the results were coming in, had it: If you’re a Republican with views on rape and abortion, better to keep them to yourself.

The wit and wisdom of Bill O’Reilly

You don’t expect it on Fox News, but O’Reilly nailed it:

Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly said tonight that if President Barack Obama wins re-election, it’s because the demographics of the country have changed and “it’s not a traditional America anymore.”

“The white establishment is now the minority,” O’Reilly said. “And the voters, many of them, feel that the economic system is stacked against them and they want stuff. You are going to see a tremendous Hispanic vote for President Obama. Overwhelming black vote for President Obama. And women will probably break President Obama’s way. People feel that they are entitled to things and which candidate, between the two, is going to give them things?”

“The demographics are changing,” he said. “It’s not a traditional America anymore.”

He could have added the other element: younger voters bothering to use their franchise, which is another change from pre-Obama days. He was mistaken to suggest that “America” has somehow changed: what has changed is that long-suppressed sections of the electorate — women and the ethic communities, the young and the radicals — have mobilised themselves.

Of course, the draught isn’t whistling just one side of the gang-way:

Blue Dog Democrats also saw their numbers shrink from 24 to 15, including six members who retired, sought higher office, or were defeated in primaries earlier this year. Reps. Ben Chandler, Larry Kissell, and Leonard Boswell all lost Tuesday.

The white establishment is now the minority — but they always were.

Now they know it.

Mark meets Jimmy …

There’s a very nice piece by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker on The Voter-Fraud Myth. Jillian Rayfield fisks it on salon.com.

It is a major article. It won’t convince the neo-Cons, of course.

Then there’s Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury.

The greatest strike against the U.K. press is that, since the demise of the lamentably short-lived The Sunday Correspondent, we benighted Brits have to access the Sunday extended Doonesbury on-line.

Today’s exchange between Mark Slackmeyer and Jimmy Crow is a gem. It says enough of it to get to the caw! of the issue.

By the way: that (as right) is not the punch-line. Which is even more pointed.

The reticent Ms Featherstone

Here’s one Malcolm is not letting go.

Back on 19th October Malcolm felt moved by the energy pricing #combishambles to seek the educated view of his MP — the fragrant (though even pig-slurry can be so described) Lynne Featherstone [fighting for Hornsey & Wood Green]:

As a matter of some urgency, can Ms Featherstone explain her position on #energyshambles?
I thought DECC was a LibDem fiefdom; but the PM’s statement on Wednesday seemed to establish new and directed guidelines for Coalition policy.
Am I allowed to expect deductions on tariff for twin-energy, for on-line billing, and direct debit? If not, why must my energy bills be increased to a notional average?
Would imposing a common tariff not amount to a form of re-nationalisation? Or at least direction from Whitehall?
In short, what is going on?

Ms Featherstone’s normal response (as in a previous exchange over the removal of disability allowances for handicapped children) is to recycle the pro-forma response of the Tory minister.

Not this time. Obviously the combo-shambles is more shambolic than we thought.

We now have a new approach, courtesy of her “assistant”:

Thank you for contacting Lynne Featherstone MP with regard to energy tariffs. Due to strict Parliamentary protocol, MPs are only able to make representations on behalf of their constituents. Please could you kindly provide your full address and postcode to confirm that you are a resident of Hornsey and Wood Green.

To which Malcolm whizzes back:

Hold on: I am not asking Ms Featherstone “to make representations”.
I am asking what is her position on energy tariffs.
No more. No less.
To solicit a statement of a Member’s position should not require full personal details.
And, yes: I am a resident of Ms Featherstone’s constituency — though why that should matter is arguable. Good luck on getting even that assurance from the Gadarene swine of the press corps.

Should Ms Featherstone (or her “assistant”) come up with a definitive response, it’ll be here.

When constabulary duty’s to be done, to be done …

… A policeman’s lot is not a happy one, happy one.

— William Schwenck Gilbert for The Pirates of Penzance.

• The picture (right) is the baritone Walter Passmore of the original production.
• The song was a favourite among London coppers, at least down to the mid-twentieth century. Malcolm heard it from his own (ex-PC) father’s lips.

Now that the dust settles on the dismal Plebgate business, now that Andrew Mitchell, a former UN peacemaker,  can polish his bike in peace, there’s still the odd bit of gristle to be chewed.

As we saw in yesterday’s Sindy, John Rentoul has come over all fair-minded:

I thought Cameron made a mistake in not insisting that Mitchell step down straight away. Which is not the same as saying that I thought Mitchell deserved to resign. Indeed, I thought he was more sinned against than sinning. Being told that it is “policy” to wheel your bicycle through the pedestrian gate is monstrous anti-cyclist discrimination (and jobsworthism of the highest order). Losing your temper and swearing at a police officer is a sin, obviously, but it may not be a crime. The Court of Appeal quashed a conviction last year, ruling that police officers are used to hearing the f-word, which is “rather commonplace”, and that it was unlikely to cause them “harassment, alarm or distress”. It was the police who, in breach of their rules, gave the story to The Sun.

OK … yawn … let’s move on …

Well, perhaps not. Put aside the “rather commonplace” adverbial reinforcer, and what are we still left with?

So, let’s play it again:

“You guys are supposed to [ … ] help us.”

Consider who are “you” and who are “us”

“You” are, most immediately, the security at the Downing Street gates. In Mitchell’s mind they are there mainly to open the main gates to let him pass through: that is the beginning and end of this little demonstration of why we’re “not all in this together”.

The police officers see their role a trifle differently, indeed from a more elevated level. They are there to keep the peace, to maintain security, and to protect the entire citizenry, who may include elected politicians.

Beyond the immediate police detachment, Mitchell may be claiming ownership and the dedicated aid and assistance of the entire Metropolitan Police, and by further extension of the police service nationally. At which, Malcolm mutters, “Up to a point, Lord Copper.“

We have been here before

Just how far political (i.e. Thatcherite) intervention went in the aftermath of the Hillsborough tragedy may be just about arguable. We do know that Thatcher herself was closeted with South Yorkshire police chief a day or so before 164 police statements were re-written to fit the “official” script.

And now:

A Nottinghamshire MP is to call for an inquiry into alleged manipulation of evidence by South Yorkshire Police during the miners’ strike.

John Mann, Labour MP for Bassetlaw, said claims made in a BBC Inside Out programme relating to the so-called Battle of Orgreave must be examined.

The claims, that junior officers were told what to write in their statements, were “very convincing”, said Mr Mann.

South Yorkshire Police said it would consider whether a review was needed.

What we know is that the cases against arrested miners were built on false evidence, as after Hillsborough:

… a barrister specialising in criminal trials, Mark George QC, analysed 40 police officers’ Orgreave statements, and found that many contained identical descriptions of alleged disorder by the miners. To prove the offence of riot, the prosecution has to establish a scene of general disorder within which a defendant committed a particular act, for example throwing a stone, which would otherwise carry a much lesser charge.

George found that 34 officers’ statements, supposed to have been compiled separately, used the identical phrase: “Periodically there was missile throwing from the back of the pickets.”

One paragraph, of four full sentences, was identical word for word in 22 separate statements. It described an alleged charge by miners, including the phrase: “There was however a continual barrage of missiles.”

Michael Mansfield QC, who defended three of the acquitted miners, described South Yorkshire police’s evidence then as “the biggest frame-up ever”.

One case, against Bryan Moreland, spectacularly collapsed when a Home Office graphologist went on oath to declare the police officer’s signature was a fabrication. Moreover:

[Chief Constable] Wright did not accept any fault at all in the Orgreave operation and prosecutions. But he acknowledged unapologetically that there was a deliberate effort to convict miners of riot and unlawful assembly, which carried potentially long, even life, prison sentences. In a report to the police committee dated 25 September 1985, Wright set out the details of the operation to deal, he said, with escalating violence in picketing at the Orgreave coking plant, which miners have always argued was exaggerated.

“The chief constable decided that the usual charge of disorderly conduct, contrary to the Public Order Act, was inadequate and that, where appropriate, charges of unlawful assembly and riot should be preferred,” Wright wrote in his report.

We’ll be back to continue that in a moment. So far, the bottom line seems to be: in Thatcher’s day, the police — at least those of the South Yorkshire force — were  supposed to [ … ] help us. We have that on the authority of the Baroness herself:

There are those who are using violence and intimidation to impose their will on others who do not want it. They are failing because of two things.

First, because of the magnificent police force well trained for carrying out their duties bravely and impartially (loud cheers).

And secondly, because the overwhelming majority of people in this country are honourable, decent and law abiding and want the law to be upheld and will not be intimidated, and I pay tribute to the courage of those who have gone into work through these picket lines, to the courage of those at Ravenscraig and Scunthorpe for not going to be intimidated out of their jobs and out of their future. Ladies and Gentlemen we need the support of everyone in this battle which goes to the very heart of our society. The rule of law must prevail over the rule of the mob.

Which should all be read with implicit and emphatic first-person pronouns: My impartiality. My police. My intimidation. My law. My rules. To get her cheering audience, Thatcher had to make that speech at Banbury Cattle Market, in one of the safest Tory seats in the country.

Any blame for all this politicising of the police goes right (far right) to the top. The poor bloody constabulary were told, even ordered to submit their notebooks for editing by Chekisty and commissars. That is no obscene exaggeration: it was the way things were done in South Yorkshire under Chief Constable Wright (and so we continue from that earlier quotation):

He set up a dedicated unit to target the miners: “A chief superintendent well experienced in CID work was appointed and directed by the chief constable to organise the collection and collation of evidence, and the preparation of prosecution files whenever the scale and nature of events at Orgreave so required.”

On 18 June 1984, the day of the most notorious confrontation, when police were filmed attacking miners then claimed they were attacked first, Wright recorded: “The evidence-gathering team comprised one detective inspector, one detective sergeant, and four detective constables.” It has never been revealed who these officers or the more senior commanding officers were, nor if any were then involved in what has been labelled the black propaganda unit which conducted the campaign to falsely blame the Liverpool supporters for the Hillsborough disaster.

For the record, at that time young Andrew Mitchell was girding his loins and polishing his bicycle clips to become a devoutly Thatcherite Tory MP for the Gedling constituency of Greater Nottingham, not a million miles from the core territory of the strike-breakers.

And now for “us”

If  ’You guys are supposed to [ … ] help us’, let us consider the precise definition of us in this context.

At first sight it might be the us of the government. Yet that doesn’t quite comprehend Mitchell’s position. After all, the Chief Whip  is the one senior occupant of Downing Street who is there primarily as the Gauleiter of the majority parliamentary party. Cue wikipedia:

In British politics, the Chief Whip of the governing party in the House of Commons is usually appointed as Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury so that the incumbent, who represents the whips in general, has a seat and a voice in the Cabinet. By virtue of holding the office of Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury, the Government Chief Whip has an official residence at 12 Downing Street. However, the Chief Whip’s office is currently located at 9 Downing Street.

To be clear, we do not have a ‘governing party’ in this parliament. We are saddled with a coalition. There are two Deputy Chief Whips, of whom one is Alistair Carmichael of the LibDems, who does not have bicycling access to Downing Street. When the Chief Whip speaks in the Commons (and, by tradition, such occasions are few and far between), it is specifically in a party-political context.

So Chief Whip Mitchell (as was) was a Conservative Party official demanding obedience from his subservient lesser-beings. Whether the term he used was “plebs” or “plods”, he was claiming l’état, c’est moi.

That is far, far more damaging than any fucking adverb.

Conspiracy theory?

Hillsborough again

Even the Financial Times gives it a box and link. So, what makes today’s issue of the Daily Telegraph unique among the British newspapers?See if you can spot it:

 

Odd, don’t you think? Even on the website, Hillsborough ranks only as the fifth (and final) “bullet-pointed” item:

 

It’s not one of the banner “Hot Topics”. You’ll look in vain for any reference on the comments pages. On the other hand, a skeleton that might, just might, be that of Richard III (died 22 August 1485) is judged to be more “immediate”. Further down, we discover that the story is covered elsewhere in the paper, but safely cloistered and under the heading of “Sport”.

From Hansard, yesterday:

John Stevenson (Carlisle) (Con): For absolute clarification, will the Prime Minister confirm that all documentation and all papers relating to this matter are now in the public domain?

The Prime Minister: It is not quite as simple as that. All the documentation was made available to the panel, and I understand from the panel that it was very pleased with the co-operation it had from everybody—from the Government to the South Yorkshire police to the media. It feels it was given every document it needed to see—over 450,000 documents. The overwhelming majority of those will be published. The only documents that will not be published—this is set out in the way the panel was originally established—are those needed for individual data protection, so some will not be revealed. However, the panel has set out the process by which that will be judged. Let me emphasise that it is a decision for the panel, not for the Government. We have not held back anything.

That would only make sense were we to know the definition of individual data protection. Whose data? What individual?

• The South Yorkshire policemen? Well, yes: if there’s going to be a prosecution for obstructing justice or whatever.
• The ambulance service? Ditto.
• Politicians? Ah, therein lies the rub.

Whose reputation has to be protected? In an exchange which went on, and on, for eighty minutes, runs to thirteen and a third thousand words, one word never ever was used: Thatcher.

Bet that’s not the case, on the streets , in the pubs, across garden fences in Liverpool.

Not all-at-sea. Then down to the Quay

Yesterday’s Observer was, in Malcolm’s estimation, a great issue. Things at the King’s Cross Lubyanka (as right) may not be tickety-boo financially; but this is how to fight back. Guardian Media Group must go back to first principles, be a campaigning, aggressive force for the centre-left.

Pride of place has to go to Andrew Rawnsley’s authoritative listing of the:

10 reasons to recast a government or, if you like, 10 tests of whether there was any serious point to holding a reshuffle.

That was worth the entry fee in itself; and will — let us hope — provide him with repeat fees when it reappears in anthologies of political wit and wisdom (and, as in this case, awful warnings).

Elsewhere Toby Helm, politically editing, was black-dotting the eyes, and double-crossing the local tea-party tendency. It was a Stakhanovite effort: Helm’s inky fingers were all over the place. Here we find Helm reminding us that Cameron serially irritates his “natural” Tories in the Shires, there he has David Miliband looking for Blairite inspiration in Barack Obama. He main-headlines with the way the Tories are betraying any “Green” credentials. Any one of those would amount to “good stuff”: together they are an all-out onslaught.

Just what is needed  à la entrée. Normal hostilities are recommenced.

Then there’s page 35, and two seminal pieces. Catherine Bennett on David Cameron’s way with women? Show them the exit. Ms Bennett may, by name, seem an escapee from a Jane Austen novel, but she shows she has one of the sharpest knees to the groin. Below that again, Nick Cohen details how Our children go hungry for want of Tory compassion:

‘Compassionate conservatism” turned from a slogan into an oxymoron on the day when Save the Children launched an appeal to feed the British poor. For what it is worth, that was also the moment when I understood that removing the Conservatives from power is now a national priority.

The charity had launched its first appeal for British children in living memory. It asked the public for £500,000 to help provide them with “the essentials – a hot meal, blankets, a warm bed”. I know what you’re thinking. Why so little? The average Manchester City player earns £500,000 in six weeks. The average FTSE-100 company boss takes £500,000 from shareholders in two months. £500,000 will not buy you a decent flat in a smarter part of London or semi in the home counties. Last month, property journalists gasped like porn actresses at the size of Heath Hall, a 14-bedroom mansion just north of Hampstead. The agent’s asking price for the most expensive home ever to go on sale on the open market was £100m – or 200 times the £500,000 Save the Children want to relieve the suffering of British children.

The modesty of last week’s appeal did not enrage Conservatives, however. Rather, the charity’s insistence that British children needed the public’s help to provide them with “hot meals” drove them wild. Conservative newspapers denounced Save the Children as “obscene” for implying that British children were as needy as African children. I won’t waste your time or mine by refuting their arguments in detail. Their main evidence that the charity was now a leftwing propaganda outfit was that Justin Forsyth, its chief executive, was once an aide to that notorious socialist Tony Blair.

 That, and the rest of a potent eleven paragraphs, is worth inscribing in granite, and dropping it from high altitude on any convenient assembly of Tory hierarchs and their smoothie-chopped SpAds. It’s Orwellian, almost Swiftean, in its “savage indignation”:

The collapse in living standards means that those who once lived comfortably now worry about filling their cars and those who once scraped by worry about filling their bellies. You cannot generalise about them or fit them into a comforting Conservative cliche. People of all backgrounds need food parcels: small businessmen and women who can’t get invoices paid; parents who are living on toast or potatoes and spending what little money they have on better food for their children.

To use old-fashioned language, the Conservatives who fail to acknowledge their distress are no longer patriots. Instead of asking how their government can stand by while their fellow citizens go hungry, they denounce the charities, which in however small and pathetic a manner, try to take on the responsibilities of a failed state.

If Rawnsley paid for the entry, Cohen provides for anything else.

From troubles of the world I turn to …

Well, Frank Harvey, a fellow Gloster with Ivor Gurney, would have us consider ducks —

Beautiful comical things
Sleeping or curled
Their heads beneath white wings
By water cool …

As a respite from a PoW camp in WW1 Germany, that is understandable. Despite being a “favourite poem” for those pseudo-research exercises, Ducks can cut:

Fearful too much to sleep
Since they’ve no locks
To click against the teeth
Of weasel and fox.
And warm beneath
Are eggs of cloudy green
Whence hungry rats and lean
Would stealthily suck
New life, but for the mien
The bold ferocious mien
Of the mother-duck.

When Anthony Boden was writing a monograph on Harvey, the sharp side came out. This, for brevity (and because Malcolm doesn’t have the original to hand), from a review:

… the poem was written in Holzminden Prison Camp when Harvey was a prisoner of war in the First World War, and had come out of Harvey’s deep gloom during his time there… Boden tells us that when Harvey was told that “during the Second World War one of the English exercises in German schools had been to translate Ducks into German, his reaction was: “Serves the Germans damn well right!”

And so to Wells

The last time Malcolm was in Wells (Norfolk, that is) there was a small convoy of ducks paddling along the quay wall. This, as far as Malcolm can recall is something of a novelty. Still, where there’s Warburton‘s, there will be ducks.

That, contrived as it is, has to be Malcolm’s link to John Naughton, also in yesterday’s Observer. Naughton, unlike most commentators, sees new hope for the failing, flailing giant that is Microsoft:

How Microsoft is looking beyond an app-centric world

Microsoft may have stolen a march on its smartphone rivals by putting social connectivity at the heart of the user experience

Agains the tidal flow, Naughton reckons the Dark Side is ahead of Apple and Android:

There is one company that is trying to challenge the dominance of the app-centric model. It has released phone software that puts social connectivity at the heart of the user experience… This makes the app-centric design of Android and iOS look quite clumsy.

Brave stuff, the week before the latest iPhone is released. But that wasn’t what made Malcolm sit up and take notice of Naughton. It was his intro:

When my kids were small, one of their favourite walks was down Staithe Street in Wells-next-the-Sea, a charming seaside town in Norfolk. Staithe Street is long and narrow and is lined by small shops on either side. What fascinated my kids, however, was not the second-hand book shop, or the antique dealers or the delicatessen or the cafes but the fact that there were several shops selling plastic toys of the kind one finds only in British seaside towns. In addition to buckets and spades and improbable fishing nets, there were exotically shaped pump-action water pistols, plastic swords, three-legged boomerangs, plastic tennis rackets with balls attached by elastic strings and battery-powered devices with lights that flashed and sirens that wailed.

Well, fair enough. There isn’t a seaside or holiday resort in the world that doesn’t sport its tat. It goes with the territory. And Malcolm can tell Mr Naughton those three-legged boomerangs are great fun; so don’t knock it.

Anyway, Wells is like that for just a few weeks in the summer. Much of the year Staithe Street is unfrequented.In a rude, blustery and bone-chilling mid-February north-easterly, Malcolm reckons it’s best for being twelve years old, and charging a bicycle down at full tilt, against the gusts, and doing the equivalent of a hand-brake turn round the corner by the Golden Fleece. He remembers that as well.

If you’re in one, stop digging

Denis Healey is guaranteed his eternal place in the anthology of political axioms for his 1983 First Law of Holes, as in the headline here.

William Keegan, in today’s Observer, gives the saw a new burnish:

Indeed, when the economy is depressed, and business and the general public (we so-called consumers) are cutting back, the only way to prevent the situation from becoming worse is for the public sector to fill the gap, not to make it even bigger.

“Healey’s Law” has been quoted before in this column and is worth repeating. It goes as follows: “When you are in a hole, don’t dig any deeper.” As for all that public sector borrowing, it is being done at negligible interest rates – much lower than the rate at which the private sector can borrow for all those “private” infrastructure initiatives the government is doctrinally trying to encourage. As Robert Stheeman, head of the UK Debt Management Office, observes: “It’s extraordinary. If you had told me just a few years ago how low they [the UK's borrowing costs] could go, I wouldn’t have believed you.”

That, as part of a heart-felt plea for the early re-deployment — by preference to unemployment— of Gideon George Osborne:

… one notes that there is much speculation about a cabinet reshuffle, although there is also much guidance that this will not involve the most obvious candidate for such a shuffle, namely the chancellor.

Cameron’s more illustrious predecessors, such as Harold Macmillan, would have had no hesitation in giving a discredited chancellor his marching orders. But to sack Osborne would of course be to admit the failure of the strategy, and invite retribution from the rating agencies. A Macmillan, of course, would have been big enough to call their bluff.

Osborne is having a difficult weekend elsewhere. The Sunday Times [£] dishes a bit of dirt with:

The Osbornes at No 42 — and at No 48

Sir Peter Osborne, 17th baronet, and his wife, Lady Felicity, have put their six-bedroom house in a prestigious street in Notting Hill, west London, on sale for a reported £15m.

But they have also found an estimated £10 million to splash out on a five-bedroom house near-by.

This is what certain circles regard as “down-sizing”. Malcolm understands the problem full well, and himself has contemplated removing from Redfellow Hovel to a kennel. That apart, the ST [still £] gives it both barrels:

Earlier this year Osborne Sr embarrassed his son with an interview in which he talked about his lavish lifestyle at a time when the chancellor was under fire for cutting the 50p top rate of tax to 45p. George Osborne claimed in 2009 that “we’re all in this together” when he announced a public sector pay freeze.

For those who have been in a Tibetan lamasery these last few years, that George Osborne utterance was delivered to the 2009 Tory Conference. Even then, and among his own, it went down like a bucket of rat’s regurgitation, as here from George Pitcher in the Torygraph:

My esteemed colleague, Dr Simon Heffer, opens his critique of George Osborne’s Manchester speech by wondering what the shadow chancellor’s mantra “We’re all in this together” might mean and why he repeated it so often.

I think I know precisely why. It’s the upper class way of saying “I feel your pain”. And there is an alternative view and it’s this: No you don’t. It’s a bit rich frankly (and, yes, I do see the irony in that phrase) for the son of a baronet and the heir to a trendy wallpaper fortune to claim that we’re all in this together, all up the same creek in a chicken-wire tub with a similar absence of paddles.

Somewhere a trifle more soigné than “a chicken-wire tub”, we re-encounter Sir Peter Osborne, still in the ST [£ — lest we forget]:

In the magazine How to Spend It, the 69-year-old baronet said he had his eye on a £19,000 Italian writing desk and spoke of his love of Savile Row suits and “unforgettable” holidays on the exclusive Caribbean island of Mustique.

Somehow that pretentiousness is echoed, and answered, in this week’s Times Literary Supplement, acknowledging the death of Gore Vidal.

An unnamed friend of ours had lunch with Vidal in his final home in the Hollywood Hills… a house that could have served as backdrop to one of the more Gothic episodes of Columbo. Mini-staircases connected proliferating rooms; plaster arches stretched between functionless beams; a wrought-iron gate guarded the living-room. Vidal had left La Rondinaia, his fabled villa on the Amalfi coast a few years before, no longer able to negotiate the steep cliff paths.

And then this gem, which is the epitome of Vidal’s astringency:

Around the dining table were six chairs with metallic backrests moulded into the shape of goats’ heads at the crest. ‘I bought these in Rome twenty years ago. The dealer saw my interest and immediately started, Oh . . . ancient-this, cinquecento-that . . . . I said, No they’re not. They’re the chairs from the movie Ben-Hur. I wrote it.’

Let us hope Sir Peter, 17th baronet of Ballintaylor and Ballylemon, would as easily recognise any dirty work when acquiring his £17,000 work-station.

Still digging

If the young Master of Ballintaylor and Ballylemon is in need of excavation guidance, so — it would seem — is Willard Romney, another of those tortured souls with forename problems. As Gideon was forsaken for George, so Willard prefers to be called a glove.

List to the authoritative Nate Silver at FivethirtyEight:

When a prudent candidate like Mitt Romney picks someone like Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin as his running mate, it suggests that he felt he held a losing position against President Obama. The theme that Mr. Romney’s campaign has emphasized for months and months — that the president has failed as an economic leader — may have persuaded 47 or 48 or 49 percent of voters to back him, he seems to have concluded. But not 50.1 percent of them, and not enough for Mr. Romney to secure 270 electoral votes.

Further to the Right, but also under the NY Times Big Tent, we find an equally unconvinced Ross Douthat. Doubthat, we should recall, was the co-author of Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream. That, though, was 2008, and before the rise and rise of the Tea Partyers. Now Douthat is plaintively wondering Why Paul Ryan?  [That headline has to be a direct rebuttal of the WSJ's endorsement last Thursday, entitled Why Not Paul Ryan?]

Malcolm feels Doubthat’s pain:

Romney has been running a cautious, content-free campaign, and picking Ryan will effectively force him to become much more substantive on policy, while giving the country the clearest possible choice heading into November. But setting up a clash of worldviews doesn’t address Romney’s most glaring policy weakness, which is the (understandable) fear among hard-strapped voters that Republican policies will benefit the rich more than the middle class. Ryan’s association with entitlement reform is at best orthogonal to that weakness, and at worst it exacerbates it substantially. What’s more, by picking him Romney may have passed up a golden opportunity to take advantage of the Obama campaign’s leftward tack over the last year: Instead of making a sustained play for the center of the country, he’s chosen to raise the ideological stakes.

If there is a bigger hole to be dug in US politics, it’s anything that involves “ideology”. In the case of Ryan, a policy wonk of high orders, the ideology involves shrinking US public debt (a good thing!) over forty long years (i.e. kicking it as far as possible into the longest grass) by killing off healthcare spending. Critics note that means increasing public debt (from $10 trillion to $16 trillion) over the next ten years. Any comparison with the economics of the Bush years are, naturally, profoundly unwelcome.

In the latest conservative.org ratings Ryan scored 80%, down from a 96% a year earlier. Considering Michelle Bachmann rated 95% (but still doesn’t qualify for the ACU “Defender of Liberty” rosette), we into serious weirdo bat-shit here.

Observer of a train-wreck

In the absence of Andrew Rawnsley, normally Malcolm’s first port-of-call on a Sunday, but “away”., “Michael Cohen in America” gets the Observer‘s main political comment spot, right under Chris Riddell’s, as usual, smart, tart cartoon.

Cohn bemoans:

The defining characteristic of modern American politics is the growing conservatism, even radicalisation, of the Republican party. Beginning in 2009 with the birth of the Tea Party movement, a party that was already fairly conservative began moving to an even more isolated spot on the American political spectrum. The result was, and is, an unprecedented period of legislative obstructionism, pronounced political polarisation and a party that is more ideologically conservative than perhaps at any point in history.

He checks off the newest notches on the extremists’ gun:

• Texas where, in a Republican primary, Tea Party darling Ted Cruz defeated the state’s Republican lieutenant governor, David Dewhurst.
• Kansas, where in Tuesday’s Republican primaries for the state Senate, conservative candidates, pushed by the state’s Republican governor, Sam Brownback, and backed by dollars from the infamous Koch brothers, trounced all but one of the body’s remaining moderate Republicans.
• Missouri, where congressman Todd Akin, another conservative darling, won a Republican Senate primary versus two more moderate contenders.

All of which, and more. is pushing Romney further and further rightwards:

Romney has followed the crowd, adopting increasingly strident political positions. This was true throughout the Republican primary season as Romney, facing off against a motley collection of Tea Party-approved also-rans, was forced to take stances on immigration, government spending, taxes, abortion and a host of other issues favoured by the party’s most conservative members but that left him vulnerable to Democratic counterattack.

Illegal immigration is perhaps the best example. It’s an issue that is a veritable cri de coeur for the Tea Party and Romney embraced their views to the point where he attacked unpopular Texan governor Rick Perry for insufficient rigour in cutting social services for illegal immigrants in the state. It gave Romney a boost in the Republican primaries but also provides a hint as to why he is losing Hispanic voters to Obama by a 2-1 margin.

If that doesn’t amount to digging a hole, the selection of Ryan seems like excavating a slit-trench:

With confirmation that Romney has selected a conservative favourite, Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan, to be his running mate the capturing of Romney by the far right is complete. While Ryan is popular on the right, he is the author of the so-called Ryan budget, a House of Representatives-passed bill that would eviscerate the social safety net and end the federal senior health programme, Medicare. His selection allows the Obama campaign to attack Romney even more directly over the most unpopular elements of the Ryan budget (which the candidate has already foolishly endorsed). It is a disastrous pick, but is emblematic of the extent to which Romney’s hands have been tied by the Tea Party. Pacifying them is as important as reaching out to less conservative voters. Rather than leading the GOP, Romney is simply following the herd.

Not just a conservative favourite, but — we now hear — the one anointed by Rupert Murdoch (and therefore, by osmosis, Fox news), no less:

Thank God! Now we might have a real election on the great issues of the day. Paul Ryan almost perfect choice.

God? almost perfect? This is getting a little too teleological for Malcolm.

Malcolm feels we should have sympathy for moderate Republicans — now an endangered species — in their hour of need. Steve Morris, one of the sacrificial victims in the hecatomb that was the Kansas primaries, was affronted:

Morris, the president of the National Conference of State Legislatures which is holding its annual summit meeting in Chicago this week, said conservative groups including Americans for Prosperity, the Club for Growth, the Kansas Chamber of Commerce and Kansas Right to Life spent between $3 and 8 million.

Morris noted that the Koch brothers also helped fund the campaign, using Kansas as a testing ground for their ideas. “They said it will be an ultraconservative utopia,” Morris said of the Kochs. “It depends on your definition of a utopia.”

A new definition of “digging for victory”?

Between the present and when the reaction comes, as it surely will, there will be many more political graves. And decent men and women in them.

Syphonaptera

Or:

How Jonathan Swift well understood right-wing bloggers.

The vermin only teaze and pinch
Their foes superior by an inch.
So, naturalists observe, a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite ‘em,
And so proceed ad infinitum.

Somehow, some when, that was contracted down to:

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ‘em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.

In truth, the slim-line version was courtesy of Augustus de Morgan, the twice-coined professor of mathematics at the newly-minted London University: a great man who was ineligible for Oxbridge tenure because of his atheism — though he went the same way as Willie Yeats, seduced into spiritualism by the love for a good woman. Correction there: since the Yeatsian seduction was via that Surrey minx, Edith Maud Gonne, and de Morgan married Sophia Frend, that should read “the love for a better woman”.

Malcolm could wax lyrical and long on any aspect of that; but on to the main point.

1o,ooo albatrosses

In the fall-out from the Supreme Court’s decision on the Affordable Care Act for, former-Governor Ed Rendell was one of numerous talking heads for  MSNBC’s Now show. Rendell said:

Now I think the president can and will continue to point out the good things that are in this act because we’re not going to run away from it. They [Republicans] are going to make it a campaign issue. I have always said we make a mistake, we Democrats, when we don’t stand and defend. It’s going to be an albatross around our neck. Let’s stand and defend it.

No way around it: that is clearly saying the act is a good thing, and the Democrats should be loud in defending it. The “albatross” would be hung were the Republicans’ diatribes to prevail.

With less than two full days, a Google search on “Rendell + albatross” throws up over ten thousand “hits”. The point of contact, though, isn’t MSNBC but Fox Nation vamping on it. In short order the right-wing parasites had leapt on what they wanted to have heard. Within minutes, Erika Johnsen at hot air.com had a completely different interpretation:

I most indubitably agree that ObamaCare is going to be an albatross around Team Obama’s neck…

It’s the way they tell ‘em!

Soon after, a further inversion and invention occurred.

This time it was a distortion of a New York Times opinion piece. Professor Neal Katyal began:

The obvious victor in the Supreme Court’s health care decision was President Obama, who risked vast amounts of political capital to pass the Affordable Care Act. A somewhat more subtle victor, but equally important, was the rule of law more generally: in an era when so many people on the left and right view the justices, and constitutional questions, through the prism of politics, the court today made clear that law matters and that it isn’t just politics by other means.

The title of the piece was A Pyrrhic Victory.

Sadly, that bit of Hellenic history is now only a cliché: to most a “Pyrrhic” = defeat. So, for the record, thanks to the OED:

Of, or resembling that of, Pyrrhus; esp. (of a victory, etc.) resembling the victory of Pyrrhus over the Romans at the battle of Asculum (279 B.C.), in which he defeated the Romans but suffered a great number of casualties; (hence) gained at too great a cost to be worthwhile. Freq. in Pyrrhic victory.

The frothing Right picked especially on the first sentence of Katyal’s second paragraph:

But there was a subtle loser too, and that is the federal government. By opening new avenues for the courts to rewrite the law, the federal government may have won the battle but lost the war.

The “federal government” has executive, judicial and legislative branches. When Professor Katyal identifies two of those three as victors — so who or what is the implicit loser?

That doesn’t need to be a rhetorical question, for Katyal spells it out. The losers are the law-makers of Congress and the legislative process:

… longstanding laws, like the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974, contain clauses that condition money on state performance of certain activities. The decision leaves open the question of whether those acts, and many others (like the Clean Air Act), are now unconstitutional as well.

Can of worms there, then! Cui bono?

It vindicates, yet again, the axiom in Chapter XVI of de Tocqueville: Scarcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved, sooner or later, into a judicial question.

That was de Tocqueville back in 1835.

The difference is we now have an interventionist — even a supremacist — Roberts Supreme Court.

The lesser blogging bloodsuckers take any vestige of truth, and regurgitate it as deceit.

If, though, the Supreme Court, having elected the previous President, now becomes not just the the arbiter of last resort, but an active agent in the formulation of all law, we have a greater evil.

And for saying that, and more, Malcolm is now — it seems — denied access to Slugger O’Toole. Yet again.