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So what of David Cameron, the man who thinks he’s got what it takes to lead this country? What of the man’s character? This, from his press conference today, doesn’t look good…

The Tory leader faced only one question over his party’s deputy chairman Lord Ashcroft, who might have dominated proceedings if the presser had been held at any other time in the past two weeks (which is why it was not).

That’s not very prime ministerial, is it? To think they call Gordon Brown ‘Macavity’ after T.S. Eliot’s nefarious cat (‘Whatever time the deed took place, Macavity wasn’t there!’). If Cameron’s being this much of a coward when he’s desperate for our votes, what’s he going to be like if he gets enough? Employ Trevor McDonald as his press secretary?

(This kind of thing is catching. Tory online campaigning supremo Sam Coates is currently AWOL after yesterday’s Cash Gordon website embarrassment and his girlfriend phoning people to threaten them. It’s all very edifying, I’m sure you’ll agree.)

So, in a speech today Gordon Brown will tell us that super-fast broadband is ‘the electricity of the digital age‘. So what does that make electricity, Einstein? The ‘coal’?

Sorry, that was a cheap shot. I actually think it’s an excellent aspiration (we can’t call it a policy because we’re not permitted to have a ‘legitimate expectation‘ that it will be enacted) and hope it comes to pass. Brown says it ‘must be for all – not just for some’.

I’m a firm believer that a lack of access to information is the greatest driver to disillusionment, disenfranchisement and disengagement. I’ll never forget when, a few years back when we were on our uppers, the Citizens Advice Bureau told us that the bank we needed off our backs for little while would regard newspapers as a ‘luxury’.

Being poor carries with it hidden traps as well as the stresses and worry – you only have to look at the level of unclaimed benefits in this country to see the dangerous ignorance it fuels. Being informed (however modestly) can be one of the first things out the window.

Brown’s announcement, however, is being framed in the already sickening negativity surrounding the run up to the general election and the media coverage of it. The Tories have announced a similar aspiration (good for them) but, according to the BBC, have ‘attacked’ Labour over its plan for an annual £6 (50p a month) levy to pay for its own plan.

Maybe the Tories did ‘attack’ the Labour plan. It’s quite possible that the Tories are trying to be partisan over this although to try and make 50p a month look like clear blue water between them and Labour seems pathetic in the extreme. It seems such a piffling amount of money to prevent a cross-party consensus on an issue that will provide the poorest with what a lot of us take for granted.

However, with the BBC not providing a Tory quote (either attributed or otherwise), it’s difficult to know what form this ‘attack’ takes and from whom it’s coming. It looks like a decent idea brought low by either a piss-poor political spat or piss-poor journalism.

So, here’s today’s score. If you don’t what to know, look away now: politics was the loser.

‘Revealed: Labour’s cash for influence scandal,’ says the headline of the Sunday Times. And you think to yourself, ‘what, another one?’ The history of New Labour in government began with middlemen taking cash to introduce big business to cabinet ministers. It’s ending in the same squalid and grubby way.

‘Influence-peddling’ is the quaint euphemism given to this practice. ‘Greedy, grabbing, mediocre and self-fellating little shits circumventing the democratic process by chasing a sense of importance’ is the technical name for it. The first ‘Lobbygate‘ scandal back in 1998 featured none other than ‘Smeargate‘ star Derek Draper. That one of the last scandals of the New Labour years features three of its stalwarts – Byers, Hoon and Hewitt – is utterly fitting.

It’s difficult to believe this way of doing business ever went away in the 12 years between Draper’s adolescent ‘there are 17 people who count, and to say I am intimate with every one of them is the understatement of the century’ bragging to an undercover reporter and Byer’s bizarre ‘I’m a bit like a sort of cab for hire’ description of himself in an identical sting.

Corruption’s been a by-word of the New Labour project – the infatuation with money and those who have it. The stink has hung over nearly everything. Defenders say at least we’re not as bad as some countries they could name, as if being corrupt but less corrupt than bastards is somehow morally defensible. The signal goes out that voters can go swing. The electorate’s needs and wishes are subservient to companies and corporations happy to throw a few grand at Stephen Byers.

Stephen bloody Byers! He’s the man who resigned as a minister, denying he’d misled Parliament and then went on to admit he’d misled Parliament although he couldn’t ‘remember the motives behind it‘. Is he mendacious or simply mentally defective? It makes one wonder why companies would trust him with their lobbying. They could him give five grand only for it to slip his mind and him deny them ever meeting. Companies should take a tip from The Times and video the slippery little bastard.

To be fair, Labour have responded early to these degenerate vultures feathering their tatty nests. It’s still early but the Tories are quiet so far. They’re no doubt frantically checking what their own people are up to before commenting. One would imagine, with the possibility of an election win, they have their own problem with greedy, grabbing, mediocre and self-fellating little shits to handle.

Update 1.30pm: This just gets better. In order to try and get his sorry skin off the hook, Byers offers the defence that he’s a liar and a fantasist. The sad little pillock then goes on to call the Times sting a ‘massive deception’. What a guy.

It seems to me that the Vatican is missing a trick in the fall-out from its sex-abuse scandal. Having successfuly walked away from a planet-wide paedophile ring while suffering barely a scratch, it should think about branching out. It turns out that Italy’s most wretched hive of scum and villainy wasn’t the Mafia. In its Crimen sollicitationis, the Vatican even has it’s own version of Omertà.

So why not global-scale armed robbery, drug-dealing or, even, humanitarian interventions? (That last one’s a difficult one to pull off but it currently also carries no penalties for the perpetrator.) Hell, when levels of impunity are running this high, why not go all the way? A satellite weapon made of diamonds perhaps, or a space station ready to bombard the planet and wipe it clean with poisons made from a rare orchid?

Then, once the dust has setteled over devasted capital cities and a Catholic master-race rules the Earth, Benedict XVI can put his hand-made Prada knock-offs up, safe in the knowledge that no-one is going to come knocking (other than the victims who can be fobbed off with a piss-poor apology).

(It also occurs to me that there’s something familiar about successive Popes’ taste for belated apologies – Hello Galilieo! You see it from other leaders as well. It’s how Gordon Brown can apologies for children abused from the 1920s to the 1960s while not uttering a word about children suffering at the sharp end of his own policies. That apology is for someone else to make much later on. Clearly New Labour and the Vatican have much to learn from each other. A league of super villains is surely called for.)

Seven years ago today the invasion of Iraq began. No doubt its architects, along with the legions of armchair and keyboard warriors who cheered them on, will be raising a glass to the uncounted yet glorious dead.

It was, however, the events of the previous day that set the standard for how the rest of the war was to be conducted by the doughty liberators of Iraq.

This was the attack on Dora Farms outside Baghdad where some Iraqi whispered into his phone that Saddam Hussein was visiting his children. Down hurtled four 2000-pound bunker-busters and 40 cruise missiles. There were high fives in the White House situation room at news of a mangled Saddam being hauled from the rubble. It all turned out to be nonsense, like most military bulletins out of Iraq. The bunker busters all missed the compound. Saddam Hussein wasn’t there. Uday and Qusay weren’t there. Fifteen civilians died, including nine women and a child.

History, written by the victors of course, does not record their names. And so it went.

Just what tickled my fancy in the last few days…

• Johann Hari: The Pope, the Prophet, and the religious support for evil – Five minutes ago I didn't give a shit about the Pope coming to UK. Now I think they should arrest him at Heathrow…
• BBC News – Minister on detaining failed asylum seekers’ children – Is Meg Hillier a happy person, do we think? Does she enjoy her job?
• BBC News – Dutch fury at US general’s gay theory over Srebrenica – It was teh gays! Has anyone told Radovan Karadzic's defence team?
• THE TEA PARTY & THE CIRCUS – Final Healthcare Reform Protest – Wow.
• Back Towards The Locus: A Post Too Long To Paint Onto A Sign… – Great news, kids! James Delingpole’s called, and we don’t have to worry about anything. Ever!
• Back Towards The Locus: When Afghans Die, continued… – Another despatch from our glorious liberation…
• Charlie Brooker beats ITV’s big hitters – No doubt some berk will be along soon to argue this as a reason to close BBC4.
• Liberal Conspiracy » Prosecute teenagers who have sex, says top Tory – 'Lock 'em up. I didn't lose my virginity until I was 36,' says jealous Tory.
• Beau Bo D’Or: Lord Ashcroft, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz – All together now…
• Porn: Good for us? – I don't want to contradict the good professor's research but it was sponsored by Kleenex.

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Nestle got Greenpeace’s video about the chocolate maker’s destruction of rainforests taken down from YouTube so obviously the thing’s gone viral and is now all over the place.

Those who followed goings on at the 2005 general election will remember New Labour’s wearyingly cynical and scaremongering tactics that formed the centrepiece of its negative campaign against the Liberal Democrats: Voting Lib Dem will let the Tories in. Peter Hain’s back door was an unpleasant and prominent feature.

It’s now 2010 and in the run up to the forthcoming election, constituents in Hove and Portslade are having this crap from New Labour shoved throught their letterboxes…

click to embiggen

Whoever produced this dross has a very short memory or, probably more likely, a galloping dose of denial. They’ve clearly forgotten or are studiously ignoring this little nugget from a certain Gordon Brown in September 2007…

I am a conviction politician like her, and I think many people will see Mrs Thatcher as not only a person who saw the need for change in our country and took big decisions to achieve that, but also is and remains a conviction politician, true to the beliefs that she holds.

A week later Brown had her round to tea at Downing Street and he paraded his guest in front of the waiting media. When do we get to see that in New Labour campaign leaflets?

EDIT: Sorry, not sure I made it clear that this is a New Labour leaflet I’m talking about here. Here’s the other side of it…

click to embiggen

I’ve edited the post slightly to make things clearer. In short, Thatcher is a source of embarrassment for Clegg, a cause of admiration for Brown.

What’s the collective noun for members of parliament attending Prime Minister’s Questions? A honking of MPs? A bray? A cock? The question presented itself to me while I was listening to this week’s edition of our national embarrassment. Scottish National Party MP Angus Robertson was called and as he delivered his question, this is what he got from his fellow exemplars in the Mother of Parliaments…

You heard right. Those around Robertson chanted ‘Sean Connery’ over and over presumably in an attempt to put him off. Sean Connery. Sean Connery. Sean Connery. Sean Connery. Sean Connery. Sean Connery. Sean Connery. Sean Connery. Sean Connery. Sean Connery. Er, ok.

You know, these witless, childish, unpleasant pricks will be begging for your vote in a few weeks. Are children shown PMQs at school as part of the curriculum to create ‘responsible citizens’? It could go some way to explaining why many of them are horrible little shits.

For some reason Tory pencil-neck Michael Gove is the man chosen for the assault on New Labour’s ties with the Unite union. Apparently Unite has given 11 million quid to Gordon Brown in the last three years. Brown then, if I understand Gove correctly, used the money to usher in the communist dystopia under which we now toil and slave. After the next election, if Unite get their way, Britain will look like the worst bits of Doctor Zhivago.

I was particularly taken with this from Gove:

“Labour’s re-unionisation has put them in bed with the past at a time when it is crucial that this country wakes up to the future.”

The Shadow Secretary for Schools is dishing up metaphor stew. Can you sleep with the past? Does it hog the duvet, I wonder. Also: Wake up! Wake up! The future is nearly here! You don’t want to kip through it, do you Britain? You know, I think Michael Gove might be calling us a bunch of lazy bastards, lolling abed just as something modern and… stuff is about to happen.

And when a Conservative shadow minister uses ‘forces of conservatism’ as a pejorative term, you can pretty much conclude British politics is busted beyond hope. I mean, did it not cross Gove’s mind, even for a second, the nine kinds of prick he might sound like saying that? You’re a Conservative, Michael. You are the forces of conservatism. The clue’s in the first three syllables.

‘In the three years since Gordon Brown became Prime Minister, Unite has spent more than £11 million of its members’ money on buying influence within the Labour Party’. To which the only answer is: it didn’t do them much bloody good did it? Not exactly 11 million quid well spent, was it? Gordon Brown is so grateful for his Kremlin gold that he called the Unite members striking over their working conditions at British Airways ‘deplorable‘.

Still, now we know. All you people who lost your jobs, investments and homes in the last couple of years, hear Gove’s cry: that’s who ruined this country in the last few years, the bastard unions. Them and their sub-prime mortgages, their soft-touch regulation and their multi-billion dollar bail-outs. The red scum.

So here we go again, back where people use words like ‘Gordon Brown’, ‘Labour’ and ’socialist’ in the same breath – in the face of 13 ugly years of New Labour neo-liberal history, no less – and expect to be treated as if they were great observers of the age. Ahistorical doesn’t begin to describe it. Gove’s claims that under Brown ‘class warfare has not only been resurrected; it has been elevated to holy principle’ would read as weapons-grade satire coming from anybody else.

Anybody who thinks the New Labour high command are hard-bitten class warriors huddled around their braziers (have you seen the Milibands?) should be immediately barred from participating in politics for life and for their own safety be permitted to use only a fork with a cork on it at meal times.

Get the full skinny here.

Jamie got’s a theme tune for his blog. It’s a brilliant idea and so I got myself one as well. Like Jamie’s, it’s in keeping with the blog’s general theme, tone and subject matter…

What would your theme tune be, readers?

Allow me to pay you the compliment of being blunt. If you are the sort of person who approves of, or allows their voting preference to be swayed even a little by, the interventions in our electoral process by the wives of the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, you are a moron who should be interned until after the general election.

Insulting the country’s intelligence by wheeling out the wife seems to be a political tactic for all scenarios. Gordon Brown is seen as too serious by voters so the solution is to push out his wife to say nice things about him. David Cameron is seen as not serious enough by voters so the solution is to push out his wife to say nice things about him. The meagre amounts of dignity and self-respect on display are such you wouldn’t be surprised to see the two leaders being dropped off at the televised election debates by their mums.

What about Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg? Well, his wife is yet to mouth platitudes in a documentary or to be filmed in close-up wiping away a tear on a chatshow so it’s as yet impossible to come to a reasoned opinion about the leader of the Liberal Democrat’s character. Hopefully she’ll be shoved out to entertain the nation soon enough.

The media of course lap all this up like dogs going at a pavement pizza. Two women who appear to be reasonably intelligent and successful women in their own rights are reduced to clothes horses entered into a semi-naughty catfight. When the inevitable backlash kicks off after the election and one of these women’s life is made a misery by press intrusion and vilification their husbands won’t have a leg to stand on, them having signed of on the strategy in the first place.

Still, all this gives the rest of us a pointer towards what we should do when we’re facing life’s little challenges. Things not going well at work? When called into the bosses office all you need say is, ‘Yes, what I’m doing is shit and you don’t like me but have you heard what my Mrs has to say about me? I think you may very well change your mind.’

Why not take your significant other along with you the next time you have a job interview? They can tell your prospective employer about how, even though you’re a bit untidy, you like to cook and are good with kids. When the interviewer asks about your ideas for increasing the company’s productivity, your partner can interject with a swift ‘I can honestly say that I don’t think he’s ever let me down’. The job will be yours.

With the polls narrowing towards election day, and with further desperation bound to creep in, who’s to say where we’ll end up next? We’ve already had the excuciating private details of the last days and hours of the children they both lost but there must be some mileage left there.

We’ve had the awkward and wooden marriage proposal story from Brown but how about the marriage consummation stories from both men? They could borrow from the Blairs and boast about how many times a night they stick it to the missus or give intimate details of how their children were conceived. As ever, with the continuing degeneration of British politics, the Blairs with their manifest lack of class and their no-depth-too-low will to win have so much to answer for.

Just what tickled my fancy in the last few days…

• Nuclear Reaction: Nuclear comedy update – Does anyone know how to pitch a sitcom?
• Belltoons – The Steve Bell Cartoons Website – Steve Bell has his own website. Hooray!
• Terry Callier – I’m a Drifter – Sit down for nine minutes, eh?
• Blood & Treasure: “he keeps his curtains closed…it may mean nothing” – But why not report him anyway?
• London Olympics: police powers to force spectators to remove non-sponsor items, enter houses, take posters – 'The Olympics are coming to London, so our civil liberties are going out the window…'
• GCHQ staff lost 35 laptop computers, report says – 'Pay attention, 007. Your new standard-issue laptop has a built in rocket launcher and condom dispenser. Now, where did I put it?'
• Samantha Cameron to show human side of her ‘Tory boy’ – As opposed, presumably, to the inhuman side to him we've had so far?
• Telegraph: Chief exorcist says Devil is in Vatican – The washing up didn't get done tonight. Can I just say that the Devil was supposed to do it?
• Unspeak » A miracle – David Aaronovitch thinks that the election in Iraq is a miracle
• BBC News – Gordon Brown labels Afghan visit criticisms ‘unfair’ – The British Prime Minister, ladies and gentleman: The Diary of Gordon Brown Aged 13 3/4.

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Clearly I’m no expert on foreign policy. That’s why I’m typing this in the spare room and not ordering the bombing of villages in Afghanistan.

That said, something bothers me about Foreign Secretary David Miliband’s plan for peace in the country:

This involves three things. First, the reintegration into Afghan society of low-level insurgents prepared to lay down their arms and accept the writ of the government. Second, political engagement with those disaffected by the current settlement, but prepared to renounce violence, split from Al Qaeda and accept the constitutional framework. Third, a wider regional political settlement that sees all Afghanistan’s neighbours and near neighbours supportive of an independent Afghan state.

It sounds like a plan although it does sort of fly in the face of the hardline ‘we don’t negotiate with terrorists’ thing we’re fed when some poor sod is kidnapped and is about to get his head sawn off by an al Qaeda affiliate somewhere. Define ‘low-level insurgents’. Is it those that only work weekends or don’t load their AK-47s?

What if Ken Bigley or Margaret Hassan’s murderers were ‘low-level insurgents prepared to lay down their arms and accept the writ of the government’ being merely ‘disaffected by the current settlement, but prepared to renounce violence, split from Al Qaeda and accept the constitutional framework’?

We need a moral philosopher of Miliband’s calibre to make the distinction between a beheader and a mere IED-layer or woman-stoner. Still, if we’ve learned anything in the last 14 years, it’s that there’s no moral, logical or rhetorical cul-de-sac out of which the likes of Miliband cannot handbrake-turn.

No, what bothers me is this. Hamid Karzai has been the elected leader of Afghanistan since 2004 and we’re only just coming up with this now? This plan’s six years and countless deaths late isn’t it? Mind you, only a cynic would suggest that the glorious liberators of Aghanistan are scrabbling around for this fix now because they’re saddled with a seriously bent partner in Karzai and a military campaign limping into its ninth year.

I for one cannot wait to see the fighters, extremists and women-haters that Miliband is hoping to coax onto our side (not to mention the ones already on our side) implement his much loved universal values.

Just what tickled my fancy in the last few days…

[EDIT: More like months, obviously.]

• David Miliband – The War in Afghanistan: How to End It – '…only politics will end the War in Afghanistan'. And to think it only took Miliband eight years and countless dead to think of it. The boy's a genius.
• BBC News – Large Hadron Collider to shut down for a year to address safety concerns – Lazy Hadron Collider more like. If the Large Hadron Collider were a person, the Daily Mail would be screaming for its benefits to be cut. Get up and do some work, scrounger!
• Kevin Maguire & Friends: David Cameron comes unstuck on Sky News as he does his hair in camera lens – Because Kevin Maguire wouldn't be caught dead tidying his hair for a TV appearance, would he? Is this what we're reduced to?
• Beau Bo D’Or: Tony Blair’s memoirs, The Journey – Woo! and Ew!
• Going Deaf For A Living: 6Music – 'After a week of watching Mr Thompson explaining his decision, I’m not sure I’m really any the wiser.'
• Blood & Treasure: Gordon Brown murders lonely pensioner’s only companion – 'Just a bit of clairvoyance about the headlines we’ll be seeing in a few years time if this nonsense ever gets into law.'
• Banditry » Dumbing down – 'If “Michael Gove gets his arse handed to him on a plate” is a tag you like the sound of, you’ll enjoy this clip from Parliament…'
• The Daily Mash – M&S ADVERT OFFENSIVE TO EVERYONE – 'He added: "Here's an idea for an advert – what do you fucking sell and what does it fucking cost?"'
• NME’s top 50 albums of the noughties revealed – I'm working through this list on Spotify. Apart from one or two exceptions, it is a thoroughly depressing exercise. God the noughties were shit.
• Topic Drift: What? – Esther Wilberforce-Packard is back.
• BBC NEWS | Politics | ID cards ‘good for going to bars’ – Once upon a time they were going to save us from terrorism. Now they've been reassigned to the heroic mission of helping babyfaced twenty-somethings get bladdered.
• Bloggerheads (UK) – The return of NAD-LIBS – 'NAD-LIBS work just like Mad-Libs, only they focus on the adventures of everyone's favourite Conservative MP, Nadine Dorries.'
• Between the Hammer and the Anvil: Britain Blogs Its Branez – Going Postal Edition – Good grief. Flying Rodent deserves some kind of prize for wading through all that slurry…
• More Tales of Nuclear Insanity – Nuclear Spaceships, Sarkozy’s Shower and Iraq’s Reactors

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So Mark Thompson, Director General of the BBC, wants to shut down the 6 Music and Asian Network radio stations. He couldn’t even give a consistent and coherent reason why.

I have a fierce affection for 6 Music – its innovation, its constant ability to surprise and delight, the laughs it’s given me and the fine records it’s put in my colllection – and as a consumer of very little else of what the BBC produces, I’m feeling quite hard done by today.

Now, maybe you don’t listen to those stations or maybe even actively dislike them. But if you have any regard or affection for the BBC, you should be fighting for those stations’ survival nonetheless.

Thompson, once again, has shown himself today to be a shabby and craven managerialist with a cloth ear for what the BBC is supposed to be about (and what a section of his salary-payers want). He’s bowed before corporate interests rather than those who fund the BBC and pay his corpulent wages.

Like I said, he couldn’t even do it coherently. ‘There can be no turning back on our digital journey,’ he said. So closing two digital radio stations isn’t turning back? ‘Some critics… will never stop in trying to further erode the BBC,’ he went on. Some critics don’t need to erode the BBC when they’ve got an inside man doing it for them. It’s the abasement and the lack of fight and the willingness to please entirely the wrong people that’s hard to stomach.

As in most things, one finds oneself in agreement with Anton Vowl…

I’ve said before, personally 6Music never really troubles me at all, and I can’t stand George ‘Sacrificial’ Lamb. But on the other hand, I spent a pleasant morning listening to live cricket on Radio 4 from Bangladesh, and I’d be mightily pissed off if that sort of thing got chucked out of the window.

Anton uses a tortured movie metaphor (6 Music is the limping Richard Harris being slotted by Richard Burton – played in this metaphor by Mark Thompson – at the end of Wild Geese to prevent him suffering an even worse fate). So here’s one of my own. We’ll call it the Hans Gruber Defence.

Those with no interest in 6 Music or the Asian Network should still defend against their closure and the closing in of those with no love for the BBC. To paraphrase Hans when he threatens Bruce Willis after shooting a hostage in Die Hard: sooner or later they might get to someone you do care about. Don’t think for one minute that the hyenas of the Tory party and Murdoch’s and Paul Dacre’s slavering bands of vandals are going to be satisfied and stop with the deaths of just two radio stations. They are merely the hors d’oeuvres.

I, conversely, couldn’t give a toss about the cricket from Bangladesh that so pleases Anton Vowl (for example) but I see the pleasure it gives many people and I so know for a fact that if the BBC were to sacrifice Test Match Special to appease the howls of corporate predators like Rupert Murdoch and his princeling son, that would be a very bad thing.

This isn’t just about defending two radio stations with minority audiences it’s about defending the ethos of what the BBC stands for. 6 Music and the Asian Network provide services that simply cannot be found in the commercial sector (please don’t suggest I go and listen to offal like XFM). It’s what the BBC does best and what it was created for.

If you love the BBC then you must realise that in the years ahead you’re going to have to fight for it. So, please, campaign for 6 Music and the Asian Network. And the next time Mark Thompson bends his knee before critics far less talented and innovative and brave than his staff, and sacrifices more of the BBC to the gods of cultural barbarism, I’ll write letters defending Test Match Special or whatever it is you want to save.

(The decision to close 6 Music and the Asian Network is not final. It must be approved by the BBC Trust which is holding a public consulatation. You can email your contribution to them at srconsultation@bbc.co.uk and complete the online survey here. J Hunt has an excellent post on how best to campaign. There are signs that we’re being heard. )

Gordon Brown was bang on the money today in his speech on crime and anti-social behaviour when he said…

…you don’t tackle the fear of crime by cultivating it, by ramping up a public sense of panic, by abusing the figures and claiming our society is broken…

Way to go Gordon. His intervention is a fresh breeze through this debate. Creating fear of crime where none should exist is cynical, dangerous and not worthy of serious politicians. His illustrious predecessor Mr Tony rode to power by kicking off a crime and punishment arms race between New Labour and the Tories, and preying on people’s fears (when he was Shadow Home Secretary he called the murder of James Bulger ‘the ugly manifestations of a society that is becoming unworthy of that name’), so it’s great to see Brown condemning such transparent and tawdry charlatanism and blatant pandering to right-wing tabloidism.

But then, later on in the speech we got…

The next time you hear somebody question the value of retaining DNA profiles from those who have been arrested but not convicted, remember Jeremiah Sheridan. And most of all remember the innocent woman he attacked.

It was futile, one supposes, to expect any kind of consistency or cohesion between arguments when cheap political points need to be scored in an election year. So Brown thought he was well within his rights to use the rape of a disabled woman as a weapon with which to attack his opponents.

In summing up, Gordon says fear of crime is being stoked by the Tories and is a Very Bad Thing. But also, if you don’t back New Labour’s policy on the DNA database, it will mean horrible men will escape justice to continue their reigns of mayhem and terror. Don’t listen to Tory fear-mongering but pay close attention to Gordon’s in case you end up giving comfort to rapists and murderers. Think on.

So the news that Tory peer and millionaire sugar daddy Lord Ashcroft has announced he is ‘non-domiciled’ in the UK for tax is playing out in all the squalid fashion you would expect. It basically boils down to: ‘BREAKING NEWS: We’re both as disgusting and craven as each other when it comes to sheltering tax dodgers say New Labour and Tories.’ They might as well have made a joint statement.

In seeking to obscure their complete lack of honesty over the tax affairs of the man trying to buy the general election for them, the Tories are looking to spread the blame. Look at two of New Labour’s biggest donors, they squealed, Lord Paul and Sir Ronald Cohen are both long-term residents of the UK and also ‘non-doms‘. New Labour reply that the Tories ‘aren’t being straight with people’ (it obviously takes a bunch of wriggling liars to know a bunch of wriggling liars).

Both sides have ended up using a pisspoor and insulting ‘Look! They’re doing it as well!’ excuse for their tax-dodgers as if it’s a defence any normal person could employ in daily life and expect to get away with it. Morality and accountability both got a pasting in the ensuing shit-slinging. All they’ve actually managed to do is further entrench the deeply and widely held belief that the main parties are as bad as each other. That should do wonders for turnout come polling day.

You end up thinking, what are they, like six or something? If I want to watch a bunch of insufferably spoilt shits petulantly screaming at each other about whose fault something is I’ll spend more time with my kids, thank you very much. New Labour and Tory heavyweights John Prescott and Eric Pickles even took it upon themselves handbag the other about their parties’ tax dodgers on Twitter. Salad dodgers defending tax dodgers. It’s even less dignified than it sounds. This election campaign has descended into cheap so fast I can’t believe it’s costing millions to fund.

Meanwhile…

And then there… Toby Helm:

When Sir George Young recently blurted out that Ashcroft was a non-dom on Newsnight he was “corrected” by a spokesman for the party who said Sir George had “miss-spoken”.

No – it now turns out – he hadn’t.

The correction of Young was a lie perpetrated not by the spokesman, who would merely have been taking orders, but by the people at the top.

Looking at the Tories’ declining fortune in the pre-election polls, Jamie says: ‘[I]magine going down in history as the man who failed to defeat Gordon Brown – as the man to whom people thought that Brown was, on the whole, preferable.’ It’s a thought to cherish, imagining the shame on a beaten Cameron’s doughy face, but neither is it enough to thaw the chill in the heart the prospect of another five year of Brown gives.

No doubt Cameron would be gutted to have thrown away what was looking like a dead cert until very recently (and he may or may not resign as Tory leader) but in the longer term I reckon the party could view it as dodging a bullet. It’s tempting to think that the Tories might have the sense to quietly back away from winning this time around. Imagine what New Labour will do to itself as Brown limps on and they have to fix the mess he’s made of everything with a much smaller majority (or even no majority at all).

There must be at least a small part of Cameron that’s dreading what he’s got coming up in the next few years as Prime Minister if he wins. Surely he must occasionaly think to himself, ‘Christ, I’m about the squander the prime of my life clearing up some other bastard’s crap’? It’s politics as cleaning up nightclub chunder – all the work with none of the fun. Not that I’m sympathetic, you understand me.

Plus he’s going to put some serious money where his mouth is. As Philip Collins says in the Times about Cameron’s speech to the Tory spring conference…

The trouble with “broken Britain” rhetorically is that it gives real fire to speeches now and ruins every speech three years into government. This list of awful things will be replayed time and again if none of them gets better.

And the ‘broken Britain’ hyperbole is just one of many misbegotten children he’s going to have to deny later on. Cameron might have stolen what he considers to be the best parts of the New Labour schtick in order to get elected but that also has distinct disadvantages. After thirteen years of all the deception, destruction and death from New Labour, huge swathes of the voting public have bullshit detectors finely tuned like never before. With seemingly no real and wider enthusiasm to see a Cameron government he’s not going to get any benefit of any doubts. He shouldn’t book a honeymoon.

…I try to write some jokes about nuclear energy. I was quite pleased with the al Qaeda one.

Have you been threatened, smeared or libelled on Google, Gmail, Blogger.com blogs or on YouTube? Tough.

Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport and UberTwat (copyright Armando Iannucci) Ben Bradshaw is whining about media bias on his Twitter account…

Another poll cuts Tory lead to 5 percent – ignored of course by the broadcasters

I think he’ll probably find that the media is too busy giving time to New Labour hysterics and the character of the Prime Minister, a smash of the party’s own making. Continuing the theme of watching online announcements from the parties, New Labour’s own website hasn’t announced a single policy all week, relying instead on attacking the Tories (and even they are days old). If the likes of Bradshaw would like to see the back of so-called media bias maybe him and his crew could put a little effort into getting the positive message out themselves.

Not that the Tories are much better. At the time of writing, the top three stories on their website’s news page are attacks on New Labour’s record on immigration, New Labour’s record on the NHS, and New Labour and the EU supposedly undermining The War Against Terror. Yay, positive campaigning!

Some of the testimonies of the survivors of the Child Migrant Programme, which sent ‘poor children for a “better life” to countries like Canada and Australia from the 1920s to 1960s’, and for which the Prime Minister today apologised, are harrowing…

There was this woman, just shouting, shouting at my sister to get up. She was in bed asleep and she’s only five so she was crying and the woman just kept shouting at her. She didn’t have to do that. The search was bad. Why did they have to search my sister? She is only five, what is she going to have? They touch you all over and they’re rough. [1]

…

He had previously been a happy child who was successful at school, but now became very sad, skipped school, lost his appetite, slept poorly, was plagued by nightmares, and screamed in the night. [2]

…

‘I wanted to kill myself all the time I was there. And I think Joseph picked up on how I felt, because he cried so much. Some of his hair fell out, he wouldn’t eat and became ill’ [3]

…

‘You don’t know how it feels to be a kid full of dreams and to feel that nobody cares, that the dreams are not important to anyone. My little sister Jessica is four years old. You think, well, she won’t understand, but in her world Jessica knew what was happening.’ [4]

…

[O]lder children were so stressed they wet their beds and soiled their pants. [5]

…

In actual fact, those testimonies are from children who have been detained and imprisoned by our government in the last few years.

Now, you might think that’s a cheap shot. That it demeans the suffering of those children taken from their families under the Child Migrant Programme and deported overseas where they faced abuse and misery along with the the hard work of the people who support them. I don’t mean to: those people deserve apologies, riches and peace. It’s just… how can the Prime Minister’s apology carry any weight whatsoever when his own government’s agencies are – right now – giving children similar treatment here and then deporting them to countries where they and their parents face abuse or worse? Brown said today…

“We are sorry they were allowed to be sent away at the time when they were most vulnerable. We are sorry that instead of caring for them, this country turned its back.

“And we are sorry that the voices of these children were not always heard, their cries for help not always heeded. And we are sorry that it has taken so long for this important day to come and for the full and unconditional apology that is justly deserved.”

He also said they were cruelly lied to and their childhoods “robbed”, and described the scheme as “shameful” and “a deportation of the innocents”.

Sound familiar? How long until the children of Yarl’s Wood and Dungavel get their apology?

It’s Brown who demeans the suffering of the survivors of the Child Migrant Programme. His apology is worthless while children under his government’s supposed care also suffer.

(Visit the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns website. Sign the Downing Street petition calling on the Prime Minister to end child immigration detention.)

[1] Mark Easton: Children in detention at Yarl’s Wood
[2] The Children’s Commissioner for England’s follow up report to: The arrest and detention of children subject to immigration control
[3] New Statesman: Katherine’s testimony
[4] New Statesman: “My dreams are not important to anyone”
[5] OurKingdom: Roll calls, body searches and sex games