In a diary extract published by the Daily Mail, Brian Paddick reveals himself to be fairly critical of the lack of support from the Libdems and offers other mishaps he faced during campaigning.

Today on Liberal Conspiracy we have a treat for you. This week we officially launch our campaign: Coalition For Choice, to support the HFE Bill and develop an online advocacy group in favour of extending abortion rights over the longer term. See the website for more about our aims.

To mark this launch we have a week of Nadine Dorries MP on Liberal Conspiracy! We will illustrate how this Conservative MP:
- has consistently misrepresented the arguments around abortion;
- is fronting campaigns by Christian groups without declaring so;
- is promoting hoaxes on her websites;
- has frequently and wrongly smeared reputable journalists and scientists;
- hides her true long-term intentions on the issue of abortion

You might already be familiar with some of these allegations. However, we plan to publish a dossier by the end of the week with all the information so it is all in one place. But first:

Today I am lodging a formal complaint with regards to the conduct of Nadine Dorries MP, specifically in relation to the misuse of the parliamentary Incidental Expenses Provision allowance, for the purpose of conducting party political/campaign activities contrary to regulations.

It is my view that Nadine Dorries MP has broken parliamentary rules numerous times by using her blog for the purposes of campaigning. I am sending off a letter of complaint, published here.

The letter of complaint (pdf)   |   Evidence of complaint (pdf)

This letter of complaint is relevant to the CfC campaign because many of the criticisms levelled by Nadine Dorries MP on other MPs relate to their pro-choice stance. This letter and other evidence forthcoming this week has been put together by researchers, various Liberal Conspirators and bloggers elsewhere (who will be noted duly).

Support the Coalition for Choice - write to your MP

(this will help you compile an email)

Facebook Page - join it!

There has been a great deal of suspicion in the blogosphere regarding the political integrity of Total Politics, the new venture run by several former 18 Doughty Street operatives, and Politics Home, the hideous spawn of Stephan Shakespeare (the original financial progenitor of 18DS - yes, it’s all a bit incestuous). Both titles have taken measures to buttress themselves against these predictable criticisms, by creating cross-party advisory boards as a check against bias. It’s easy to understand why a nascent political publication or website would be concerned about appearing to favour one political party and take steps to provide evidence of its fairness. But what about an existing publication, especially one that hasn’t historically been particularly political?

The worries I have are in regard to Condé Nast’s GQ, which is edited by one Dylan Jones. In 2006 GQ featured David Cameron on its front cover, a rather surprising departure from the disrobed Hollywood sirens who usually adorn it. There is nothing necessarily wrong in the leader of the Conservatives starring on a magazine cover, I guess, but as a subscriber to GQ (a valentine’s day present), I have noticed the distinguishable stench of political bias throughout the magazine of late. Continue reading…

This is the start of a weekly round up of what various think tanks and such organisations on the liberal-left are doing and publishing. I do a weekly round up on my blog for think-tanks on the left and the right.

• The IPPR challenges a union \ left-wing shibboleth in highlighting that at least some of the problems we see in education can be attributed to poor teachers. “[I]n the last ten years teachers’ pay has improved and the number of people choosing teaching as a career has increased. But teaching is still not attracting the very best graduates and poor performing teachers are not being dealt with effectively”
• They also carry an worthwhile report on the complexity of UK migration numbers - half of those who’ve arrived from new EU members since May ‘04 have now left but I think the Daily Mail missed that story.
• “New Labour is now dead” - according to Compass who, to be fair, have been trying to administer last rights since about 1998. Last Thursday’s results have boosted their confidence somewhat - “The strategy that saw the Party continually triangulate interests and concerns, tacking endlessly to the right, doing what the Tories would do only doing it first, fixating on a mythical middle England and denying that free market policies are having a damaging effect on society is now finished”
• Also on Compass Hilary Wainwright takes a pop at the impact triangulation has on traditional supporters and one of their regular ‘thinkpieces’ tackles ‘Capitalism and Social Recession’.
  Anthony Painter also did a write-up on LC after a Compass event here.
• The Social Market Foundation have an interesting piece on individual behavioural change and the challenges policymakers face in linking that with broader cultural changes.
• CentreForum have a great (and timely) piece on whether Liberal Democrats and Conservatives can co-operate. David Cameron and Nick Clegg are “two declared liberals [who] share a vision of a new, ‘post-bureaucratic’ politics in which power is devolved, not just from central to local government, but from government at all levels to individuals, families and communities”

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.
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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, as I argue in a New Statesman column on the Mayoral race fallout.

Gleefully anticipating a gaffe-filled mayoralty that will wreck David Cameron’s project helps Johnson to set expectations very low. Johnson benefits as much as Ronald Reagan or George W Bush ever did from being seriously “misunderestimated”. Which other candidate would have got away with floundering and being roughly £100m out on their sums for buses in the televised mayoral debates?

But if he merely remembers to put his trousers on every morning and get to work, Johnson’s mayoralty will be acclaimed as a triumph. But the real test must be the same any other mayor would face: delivery. That - with Johnson presented as a hands-off “chairman of the board” - is truly a test of the Cameron project”.

Rather than expecting a total fiasco, we should be scrutinising what the Tory modernisers want to do with power.

Perhaps the (conservative) answer will be not very much at all.

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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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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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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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…

So how goes the vote your way? Here in Exeter we’re not exactly at election fever pitch. Most people seem more concerned about unleaded petrol going over the £5 a gallon mark, and whether City will make it back into the Football League – having narrowly missed out in last season’s play-off final at Wembley.

Then again, the candidates and their publicity machines haven’t treated us to a feast of sophisticated argument or a panoply of significant fact.
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Trying to create a bit of mischief today, the Daily Mail says the Fabian Society “savages” Gordon Brown by calling him ‘neurotic’ and saying voters have ‘written him off’.

Sunder is saying that about the Labour party rather than Gordon Brown, but the spin is to be expected from Daily Mail. Is the relationship between Dacre and Brown has cooled? Either way, applied to the Labour party this prognosis is patently obvious. The article says:
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