So David Cameron the political shape-shifter, just like Odo from Deep Space Nine but with less humanity, is spinning away the true nature of the Tory Party again today.

This seems to be his main tactic - either lie about what your party believes in, ignore anything your party may have believed in the past, or preferably believe nothing at all.

Boris is enjoying a honeymoon as London Mayor, as Andrew Grice of The Independent writes on his politics blog.
Will it last? I fear that Boris Johnson’s critics are already repeating the mistake they made during the campaign…

Last weekend, Clive Stafford Smith, the Director of the legal action charity Reprieve, travelled to Sudan to meet the recently released al-Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj. He had been represented by Reprieve since 2005 and was now a free man. This is an edited version of Clive’s report, which includes a passage specifically refuting Pentagon claims that Mr al-Haj, who had been on a hunger strike for 16 months prior to his release, and was taken to a hospital on his arrival in Sudan, “seemed like a healthy individual” as he departed from Guantánamo.

What has the Liberal Left got to say about obesity? Or parenting? Or green taxes? Or organ donarship? In short, where does it draw the line between public and private issues – and what kind of government intervention, if any, should it support?

We are increasingly aware of the public consequences of private decisions – but where do we draw the line? These are the questions posed by The Politics of Public Behaviour, published by Demos today.

The liberal case against intervention from government in these issues is easy to make.

Libertarians argue that it instrumentalises citizens, reducing politics to the achievement of goals established not by people themselves, but by a small governing elite who believe they know best.
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As part of her campaign to force the government to reduce the 24 week limit within which women can legally have abortions, the MP Nadine Dorries yesterday unveiled 20 reasons for 20 weeks.

Today, we publish 24 reasons for 24 weeks, as part of our own campaign to fight for women’s rights to abortion.
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The game looks pretty much up for Hillary Clinton now, as John Zogby makes plain. Lawyers notwithstanding, the hope of seating the ‘lost’ delegates of Michigan and Florida to pull the margin back to under 100 is a pipedream. George McGovern is the first major figure to call on Clinton to stand down. And if Barack Obama can get promises from 40-50 ’super-delegates‘ in the next day or so, the race for the Democratic nomination should be over.

I’m much more sceptical about Obama than many people I know (including many around here). In practice, I don’t think he’ll be as progressive as is wished or assumed, nor Clinton as regressive as her campaign has sometimes sounded. Andrew Stephen in the New Statesman is right:
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Compass put on a sizzling debate last night on Labour’s future direction. Two contributions in particular stood out- those of Steve Richards and a devastating but completely constructive contribution by Jon Cruddas. Actually, I left the meeting feeling that if we don’t win the next election it won’t be because we lack ideas, conviction or talent.

First to Cruddas’ contribution. He counselled that the Conservatives have changed, not just in terms of style but in terms of philosophy as well and Labour underestimates that at its peril. Moreover, and anyone who followed the London Mayoral elections can vouch for this, they have adopted a new emotionalism to their political language. Labour’s language by contrast is managerial and aloof.
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Not long after I moved to Hackney, I witnessed an armed robbery. From a range of about three feet, the fact that the robber was a crackhead was as obvious as the hammer and kitchen knife he was waving about.

A few years later, my partner and baby daughter were abducted outside my house. Continue reading…

I guess should have mentioned and emphasised this little-known-fact earlier. But for a little while I had some respect for Andrew Gilligan’s journalism. Once he went way over the top and sold his soul to the Evening Standard’s vendetta against Ken Livingstone, that evaporated.

First, a bit of background.
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In the pages of the Daily Mail yesterday, anti-choice poster-girl Nadine Dorries MP was given a platform to put across her misogynist, reactionary views.

She and a claimed ‘coalition of 200′ MPs are calling for a reduction in the time limit on legal abortion from 24 to 20 weeks, despite a lack of evidence that fetuses can survive outside the womb before that point and despite the fact that most women are against further reductions in the time limit.
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Never fear Labour supporters, here’s the latest messiah to solve all the party’s problems in one fall swoop:

Purnell will declare today that Labour can still beat the Tories in the fight against poverty because it is willing to stump up the money and is committed to tax credits.

“Both their goal and their policies are just aspirations,” Purnell will say. Mocking the Conservatives’ approach, he will say: “It would be nice to reduce child poverty. It would be nice to put more money into the working tax credit. But nice isn’t good enough. Until they pass the test of hardening their commitment and costing their policy, they cannot claim to be committed to ending child poverty.”

Ah, yes, child poverty. It’s strange how this government’s modest redistribution, so modest that it may have lifted some children out of poverty but has done nothing whatsoever to alter overall inequality, only gets mentioned when the going gets really tough. It screams of desperation, of someone begging their lover not to walk out the door, bumbling, “but, but, look at all we’ve done for the poor kids!”

In any case, Labour’s pledge to end child poverty is just as much an aspiration as the Conservatives’ policy announcements are: it’s simply unattainable and completely unrealistic without far more targeted help being provided, and Labour doesn’t have either the will or the funds to do it with. The less said about tax credits, the most hopeless and over-egged panacea of all time, the better.
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When the BNP’s Richard Barnbrook stooped forward to give his victory speech this weekend, both the main candidates and the news channels left the stage. Which was a shame. Because a better demonstration of the real man’s character and party could not have been found.

Now I have always thought that the ‘no-platform’ approach is wrong. To deny the far-right a voice is to give them a status that they do not deserve.
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This piece of news is too delicious not to write about. Bruce Anderson says Boris is a libertarian. And yet the Sun says London’s new mayor is planning to ban consuming alcohol on the tube.

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Until very recently I would broadly have fallen into the category of the ‘Labour Left’.

I was never totally comfortable with attempts by sections of the left to pull away from the Labour Party, which I had been brought up since childhood to see as “my” party, and which latterly I had come to see as a vehicle via which the Labour Movement could exercise its influence in the party political field: Lenin’s classic formulation of the “bourgeois workers’ party” could not describe it better.

In spite of a brief spell as a member of the Socialist Alliance, I quickly rejoined Labour and argued tooth and nail with comrades that things hadn’t changed so very much. It is now self-evident that I was wrong.
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The post-mortems - the mot juste, I think - on New Labour have missed a point.

The party is paying the price for the fact that the New Labour project was based upon profound, and now crippling, intellectual insecurity.

Put yourself in the shoes of New Labour’s founders in the 80s and early 90s. You see that traditional social democratic arguments for redistribution don’t work. You see Labour’s traditional support base, the manual working class, declining in numbers (pdf). And you see a managerial class winning what you want - wealth and power.

What do you do? You abandon traditional Labourism, in favour of an appeal to Mondeo man and Worcester woman.
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London, my London, looked little different this morning, when I tried to shake off the mares of the night before (Bojo and the BNP at City Hall) in the Regent’s Park summer series 10k race. I did about as well as the Labour Party on Dismayday, leaden legs limping lumpenly to the finish line.

The sun was shining, the plane trees were fruiting, the bus lanes were still functioning, there was still the same myriad mix of people, united in our variety. This is the city I never dreamt I would stay in when I first arrived here from the provinces. And this is the city I have grown to love and call home.
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So, it’s the weekend after the week before, and an alliance of gameshow fans, 4×4 drivers, suburban curtain-twitchers, BNP second-preferences, Labourphobes and the thoroughly fed-up, mostly from places that don’t even count as London, have foisted a Thatcherite mayor on our generally left-leaning city. Continue reading…

I try and be an optimist, so here goes…

1) Closeness of the race says to me that right-wing newspapers have little impact. Despite the combined endorsement of The Sun, Daily Mail, Telegraph, Times and Evening Boris, there was only 6% between them. I wish we had better exit polling in this country because I bet most voted for Boris on the basis of change, not al-Qaradawi or Lee Jasper of Hugo Chavez.

2) He started off from the traditional right Spectator crowd and gradually changed his mind on nearly everything. The Congestion Charge will remain; he’s also opposed to the Third runway; he backed off on repealing the smoking ban; embraced London’s multiculturalism; said he was proud of his Muslim heritage (compared to what he used to say); said he supported amnesty for long-term illegal migrants; is unlikely to try his new fangled and super-expensive bus programme.
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Like Sunny, I’m annoyed with the BBC too.

A woman named Suzanne Holdsworth has been released from prison, after her conviction for killing a child she was baby-sitting was deemed unsafe. Apparently, it is likely that toddler Kyle Fisher had a pre-existing disorder that could have caused his death.

All this was reported in a matter-of-fact tone on the news last night, but the editing told a different story. The shot of Mrs Holdsworth we saw as she left court was of her taking a weaselly drag on a king-sized cigarette. And the interview with her partner (who made a very salient point about how, although he was delighted, no-one should forget the dead child) was spliced with a cut-away shot of his tattoos - a bulldog, with ‘England’ emblazoned below. The grammar of the shot renders the segment a dog-whistle to the middle-classes: “Chav Scum”.

Since Mrs Holdsworth is now facing a retrial, that’s unfair on her. But it also reinforces prejudices within our society. The BBC needs to get beyond these cliches.

What a day - Mayday protests, an election and now I discover my own profession is being brought in to disrepute with those who care about women’s rights (lets hope that’s pretty much everyone).

I’m talking about Johnny Vegas’s behaviour towards an audience member during the show hosted by Stewart Lee at the Bloomsbury Theatre last Friday. I wasn’t at the show myself so I can only comment on reports from those who were. One audience member James Williams, posting on the NOTBBC forums said the following - and I apologise for the long quote but it is quite hard to locate the original post on the forums so easier to read it here, also I don’t want to quote pieces out of context without the disclaimers James himself includes:
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I’m with Nathaniel - frankly I couldn’t muster up much enthusiasm to care for how many seats Labour lost or the Tories won or whether the Libdems had a great night. But what the hell was the BBC coverage about?

I realise that people are increasingly becoming apathetic to politics. But that’s most likely because our politicians are not very interesting and our democratic institutions aren’t all that democratic.

Surely its NOT because we’re dumb idiots who have trouble paying attention or understanding how percentages move up or down. Jesus, I felt deeply patronised last night, especially by the idiot who dreamed up those pathetic graphics that Jeremy Vine had to refer to every five minutes.
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Election nights are wonderful. There are swings, exit polls, and reminders that these graphics are based on projected vote-shares. For about 15 years, I’ve sat up into the too, too early morning breathlessly awaiting results at every opportunity. I even sat up for the results of the referendums on Scottish and Welsh devolution. But not last night. Last night I realised that I actually didn’t care.

I didn’t care if the Tories take a council in the north. I didn’t care if Labour can hold Reading. I didn’t care what Worcester woman does. Unless it’s porn. I might stay up if it’s porn.

As the early results came in I settled in front of Dimbleby’s massive face, surrounded myself with booze, and waited. And waited. And it never happened. The tingle, the odd squeeze of the gut as the Tories take a seat in Wyre Forest, the infintesimal thrill as they lose one somewhere else. It never happened. I just didn’t care any more.

It’s taken a long time for me not to care. I’ve adopted a position of haughty indifference in public for as long as I can remember. “They’re all the same,” was a mantra to live by. I knew this. I’d go on at tedious length about it. They’re all the same. But, of course, they aren’t. Some of them are Blues and are thus hateful gutter-vermin, a black crust around the rim of humanity’s toilet bowl, whose every misfortune makes the world a happier place.

And the others have been swaggering disappointment-hounds, urinating in the face of all that was good and decent, with Richard Branson holding their collective penises. From Clause IV to tuition fees, from the Terrorism Acts to Iraq, to the 10p rate of tax, to all my adult life they’ve… No.

It doesn’t matter. I didn’t care any more. And, nominally, I never have - but there was always a little smile of satisfaction when they won something. Because if they won, the others lost. And the only thing worse than them was the others.

Except it wasn’t. Finally, my gut appears to have accepted what my brain claimed to know. They are no better than the others. That half-hope that it was all Tony Blair, and that once he was gone they might rediscover the principles you always hoped they had? The pipe-dream of a twatbasket. Nothing more. A towering, imaginary palace, constructed of dandelion seeds and fairy guff.

And tonight, watching the heads bray and bleat about what this means for who, finally, I truly did not care. And I shall go to bed and not care. I shan’t care. It’s over, at long last. I do not care.

Until tomorrow, when they count the votes for London Mayor…

LIBERAL CONSPIRACY CALLS FOR KEN LIVINGSTONE
… on the basis a wide range of conversations we’ve had throughout the day with people in the field and with senior insiders… and my mates from the pub.
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2am I’m signing off from the live-blogging for now. It’s become boring and the only graphics the BBC can muster up is the tired Gordon Brown ‘From Stalin to Mr Bean’ one… besides, I have an article to file. I might continue in the comments though.
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