Reshuffling towards oblivion

It’s difficult to overstate just how desperate the cabinet reshuffle shows Gordon Brown as being. Desperate both to win the next election and desperate also to attempt to show that there really isn’t any difference of opinion any longer between the Blairites and the Brownites. Desperate times may call for desperate measures, but the rehabilitation of Peter Mandelson, who for over a decade could not stand the sight of Brown, let alone work with him, was not the way to go about it.

This is not because Mandelson is the uber-Blairite, that he was one of a whole bevy of habitual liars, that he, more than Alastair Campbell, helped to establish the current political culture of spin that has so demeaned politics in the eye of the public, but because he is simply the wrong man at the wrong time. Very few dispute that Mandelson as a minister was effective and good at what he did, whether he was at business, his old and new job, Northern Ireland or as European Commissioner, but there is one quote that more than ever suggests that this is not his moment. He, along with Blair, declared to the City that he and New Labour were “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich.” Well, they did, while everyone else didn’t, and now this is the man to spearhead Brown’s new regulatory agenda. Jesus wept. continue reading… »

Surprises from the airline plot

There will be more than a few surprised people tonight, both in the media and outside it, at the verdict reached by the jury in the “liquid explosives” trial. The case, after all, had been presented, as George Tenet famously said, as a “slam-dunk”. Here were 8 Muslim extremists, caught red-handed with quantities of hydrogen peroxide, used by both the 7/7 and 21/7 bombers in their attacks, having recorded “martyrdom videos” and with apparent plans for the blowing up mid-flight of an unspecified number of transatlantic planes.

There were shrieks of initial incredulity then horror from the press, all liquids in containers above 100ml were banned from planes as a precaution, with mothers having to taste their babies’ milk, apparently as a result of claims that the bombers were prepared to blow up their children and use their bottles as containers for the explosives. This last claim, as Craig Murray notes, was nonsense.
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Osborne’s failed attempt to woo lefties

There are two ways to look at George Osborne and the Tories’ latest kite-flying exercise, this time on social justice, equality and fairness.

You can accept it takes a great degree of courage that it’s the Tories recognising their past mistakes and moving onto the New Labour agenda; or you can just be staggered by the chutzpah from a group of politicians that don’t seem to have any limits to how far they will go to prove that they really, honestly, truly care about subjects which they previously had very little time for.

On the basis of Osborne’s article, it’s difficult not to come to the second conclusion.

It’s with a piece with most of the recent articles by the Conservatives that have appeared in the Guardian - big on rhetoric, minuscule on actual policy. The one thing that Osborne’s has going for it is that unlike Oliver Letwin, who managed to write over 600 words without naming one specific policy, he actually suggests what the Tories would actually do were they to win power. The problem is that we’ve heard it all before multiple times, and indeed, some of it is what Yvette Cooper covered in her piece on Monday.
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What do we do with Russia?

Although there have been months of provocation on both sides, while Putin was away in Beijing attending the Olympics, the Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili seemingly gave the order for a large assault, if not for the whole of South Ossetia then most certainly for its capital, Tskhinvali.

Survivors of the attack, streaming to the Russian border for safety, describe carnage and snipers shooting at them as they fled. The Russians have claimed that up to 2,000 people were killed, although they’ve also hyperbolically described it as a genocide. How much of Tskhinvali has been destroyed or damaged is unclear, as the Russians have yet to let any journalists into the capital. If Saakashvili was hoping that the assault would go unnoticed, overshadowed by the opening ceremony, or alternatively with Putin away that the Russians would be slow to respond, neither occurred. Within hours the Russian counter-assault was launched, with such apparent planning that they have since been accused of planning the wholesale invasion and subjugation of Georgia.

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The “smoking gun” Iraqi memo and Con Coughlin

The American journalist and writer Ron Suskind, formerly at the Wall Street Journal, has revelations in his latest book that the White House ordered the CIA in the middle of 2003 to forge a letter from Iraq’s former intelligence chief, Tahir Jalil Habbush, which was subsequently used as the smoking gun to prove links between Saddam Hussein’s regime and al-Qaida.

The letter claimed that Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of the September the 11th attackers, had trained in Baghdad at the Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal’s camp, and that the Iraqi regime was deeply involved in the 9/11 plot.

The letter was the crudest of forgeries and has subsequently been exposed as such. It is however the first time that allegations have been made that the forging of the letter was authorised at the very highest levels of both the US government and the CIA itself. Suskind minces no words and suggests that is impeachment material.

All sides, it must be said, have denied it, and there are reasons to believe, as suggested in the Salon review of Suskind’s book, that this might be one of those stories that seem too good to be true because they are.

But here’s another twist to the tale. Rather than going to an American source with the letter, perhaps considering the fallout that was yet to come over the leaking of dubious intelligence to Judith Miller of the New York Times and others, the memo was given to a British journalist, the Telegraph’s Con Coughlin.
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Yet more silly BBC bashing

Never missing an opportunity to attack the BBC, the Sun is fuming over the £400,000 fine imposed by Ofcom for various fixed phone-in competitions which no one had a chance of winning:

ONCE again, the BBC is fined for conning viewers. Ofcom’s ruling should shame everyone in the Beeb’s management. In a private company, heads would roll. Instantly.

If the leader writer had so much as bothered to bring themselves up to speed on what shows were fined and for what, they would have noted that Ric Blaxill, the 6Music head of programming resigned last year after it became apparent that he had been complicit in one of the deceptions that took place on Russell Brand’s show. The most high profile casualty of last year’s series of “fakery” scandals was Peter Fincham, the controller of BBC1, who resigned after the “Crowngate” hoo-hah.
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How tabloid journalism works (pt 934)

It’s the silly season, it’s a Sunday, and you haven’t got anything approaching a front page story. Do you: (a) put in the effort and attempt to find a new angle to the problems facing Gordon Brown? (b) continue to go on alarmingly about the moral decline in society because a rich man who enjoys being spanked has won a court case or (c) turn the most innocuous addition to a social-networking site which just happens to be a rival to the one owned by your own proprietor into a super splash?

There’s just no contest if you’re a Sun “journalist”, is there? I’m not on Facebook as I don’t have any friends, but even I know there’s a whole plethora of “poke” applications, such as giving one of your friends a virtual sexually transmitted disease, as well as literally dozens of similarly hilarious things. There isn’t however at the moment a moral panic about STDs, but there certainly is about knives.

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What does Cameron’s “broken society” say about us?

Reading the Grauniad’s interview with David Cameron and the accompanying article, it’s very difficult not to become depressed that after 10 years of Blair, within a couple of years we’re going to be under the thumb of his very real heir, and with not just the Labour party but the entirety of the left raising barely a whimper of defiance.

Cameron’s broken society gambit is almost certainly the one detail that makes me despair the most. He knows it’s not true, we know it isn’t true, the government knows it isn’t true, even the Times, whose sister paper has done the most to perpetuate the notion knows it isn’t true, and yet I don’t think I can recall a single politician, whether they be Labour or Liberal Democrat who has directly challenged Cameron to provide some real evidence that British society is any sense broken.

Here’s Cameron’s incredibly weak case for it:

He denies he is giving a false picture of Britain by talking of a broken society, saying: “There is a general incivility that people have to put up with, people shouting at you on the bus or abusing you on the street, or road rage. There is a lot of casual violence; and I think it is important to draw attention to it.”

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It was Dorries wot lost it!

It came down to the crunch, and after everything, not even the 200 supporters Nadine Dorries said she had bothered to turn up to vote for a reduction in the abortion limit to 20 weeks. All the hype about the vote being close turned out to be bluster, with the amendment being rejected by a majority of 142, 190 votes for to 332 against. All the attempts by Dorries to turn to complete emotion, raising the issue of the baby boy she witnessed struggling to breathe once again during the debate, after saying that she hadn’t wanted to use it, have failed.

This was after she said that Labour MPs were supposedly on a three-line-whip to “attend” so that they knew which way they were to be expected to vote. Desperation doesn’t even begin to cover it.
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Labour’s “relaunch” and what it ought to do.

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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Migrants stole my baby (again)

You can tell just how much the Grauniad’s report yesterday on how migrants have not brought a crime wave with them and how, unsurprisingly, they’re not committing more offences than anyone else overall has wound up the Daily Mail and Express by the vehemence of their response today.

Along with the recent immigration report by the Lords committee that, despite tabloid coverage, concluded migrants had on the whole not significantly benefited or been detrimental to the country, the crime angle is the one sure fire hit which they can rely upon to really fire minds against the current immigration policy, with their impact on public services and negligible use of benefits following closely behind. For it to blown apart just as they appeared to be getting the upper hand could not possibly be tolerated.

Hence why both have come out all guns blazing.
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The Sun’s attempt to puncture its own emotional balloon

It’s interesting, these days, watching the Sun (No, please, come back!). Last year after the failed patio gas canister bombings it clearly didn’t have the slightest idea how to respond to them: first with hackneyed blitz spirit type defiance; then scaremongering, and the resurrection of its demands to scrap the human rights act; and finally, resorting to patriotism, ordering everyone to fly the flag. This remember is the paper which over the 80s and up until recently was often considered the weathervane of the nation, or symbolic of how a majority of how it was responding, typified by how when it changed from supporting the Conservatives to New Labour that it was considered the final, death blow against John Major.

Since then of course we’ve had the online revolution; now the most visited UK newspaper website is the ‘loony-left’ Guardian, closely followed by the Mail Online. Circulations continue to plunge, with the Sun recently slipping below the 3 million mark, only rising back above it because of price cutting. The real success story of today is the Daily Mail, and by far the most despicable, distorted press coverage of late, directed at asylum seekers and immigrants, has come not from the Sun but from the Express and Mail.
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