Dave the Chameleon

So Labour have set-up a website called Dave the Chameleon. The essential point of this site is to portray Cameron has some sort of unprincipled tory. Of course, Cameron is (as far as I can tell) a classic tory which means he's not ideological anyway, so their argument is spurious. More so though is that the site (as Guido points out) is actually helping push the line that "we've changed". There is aswell the amusing hypocrisy of Labour going for personal negetive campaigning after complaining so heavily about the "New Labour, Old Danger" evil eyes poster in 1997.

How far will this go....

We get excited almost weekly about the potential downfall or "next big authority test" of Blair. The question is how far will this "Cash for Peerages" thing go? Will it link up to Downing Street? We can but hope! PeerageGate?!

One thing for sure. After a hellish few weeks by his own admission, Blair is about to enter an extra long bank holiday weekend with a nightmare story all over the papers. It could all just fizzle out like a wet fart though.

"Cash for Peerages" - man arrested

Sky News and the BBC are reporting that a 60 year old man has been arrested over the "Cash for Peerages" scandal.

The police have said it is not an MP or a peer but have refused to say whether the man is a member of a political party.

Update: the arrested man is apparently Des Smith, the former government advisor on City Acadamies. This is the same guy that the Sunday Times revealed had said something along the lines of "give 2 million quid to build an Academy and you can have a peerage" (real transcript is here)

Labour back down?

Looks like Labour maybe backing down over the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill. The FT is running a story saying that Jim Murphy (the Home Office minister) has decided to ammend the wording of the more contentious parts of the Bill (basically the bit that provides absolutist powers to the Executive).

Having said this, Jim Murphy is also saying that the ammendments are being made so they "can no longer be misconstrued as an attempt by government to take a wider constitutional power". They are still trying to play down the significance of the issue. Hopefully it means the campaign against the bill is winning.

N.B props to serf for spotting this news item.

Update: According to the BBC, the ammendments will include that a "select committee of MPs will be able to veto ministers' decisions." Sounds like a victory, but if the committee is loaded in the Government's favour it's pretty meaningless.

EU Scrutiny at Westminster

Open Europe (the independent think tank calling for radical reform of the EU) released a pamplet last week called "Reforming EU Scrutiny at Westminster". The foreward is by Michael Gove MP and the pamphlet disects the lack of scrutiny EU laws currently face in Westminster.

Download the pdf here.

Changes to candidate selection?

Last week it was announced that the selection process for the Tory London Mayoral candidate would likely be held through the use of Open Primaries. The principle here is that to get the electorate re-engaged, political parties should allow voters to register as supporters of a particular party like the system in the US, thereby providing them with a say in the process that selects their candidate for a particular position (in this case the Tory candidate for London Mayor).

Today, Francis Maude announced that this system may very well be expanded outward to the selection process for Prospective Parliamentary Candidates (PPC) as well. This would remove the flaws in the current system which Sir Humphrey Appleby observed that: "MPs are not chosen by 'the people' - they are chosen by their local constituency parties: thirty-five men in grubby raincoats or thirty-five women in silly hats."

Anything that attempts to address the voter apathy and disengagement is surely a good thing. There are of course concerns about potential abuse by other parties hijacking a primary, however, if the system were in place for all parties this wouldn't likely be as serious a problem.

Daily Telegraph

I'm sorry but you're wrong....

The animal rights extremist John Ablewhite was jailed yesterday over the "Save the Newchurch Guinea Pigs" insanity (which included the loonies digging up the dead body of an old lady and holding it for ransom to save the guinea pigs), said that the treatment of the Guinea pigs "was on the same moral level as the Holocaust."

This comes the day after our illustrious London Mayor Ken went to China and said the Tiananmen Square massacre (which was where the state killed around 3000 protesters, running some of them over with tanks) was equivalent to the Poll Tax Riots.

There are multiple ways in which someone can be wrong. If the line one had to cross to be wrong were the edge of the stratosphere these two would be accelerating past Mars by now.

Fast-forwarding change

Yesterday, David Cameron at the Spring Conference called for the change to fast-forward us to a "new Conservative Party". There are some people that have said this is just spin and lacks substance, or that they are not sure what it actually means.

To me it means we need to reclaim the definition of Toryism from the Labour media machine. They have been definining us for so long and we need to start defining ourselves. We need to drop the messianic theologicalism of the New Right fringe and reclaim Toryism for the pragmatic non-ideological majority.

Where has all the money gone?

As Labour continue to boast about the record investment they have made in the NHS, more and more NHS Trusts are laying people off to deal with massive multi-million pound deficits. So where has all the money gone? Management consultants and other non-clincal wastes of money. Blair said that we should vote for him to save the NHS. I didn't believe him then and the state of the NHS today vindicates that belief.

Quick! Look busy!

Yesterday, the Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt visted the debt-ridden University Hospital of North Staffordshire. The hospital has had to lose jobs and close wards in recent months. However, in order to make it look busy again it reopened an eye ward and did some operations for the day. A doctor told the Telegraph.

"We were told that because she was coming there would be two theatre lists instead of the usual one and we got a message to reopen the theatre.

"We had to wash out and check all the equipment, the microscopes and the cataracts operating machine. The nurse who ran the theatre before was called back in and for the first time in almost a year the theatre was used for eye operations again. All this was so that the hospital could show Miss Hewitt that all was well and that cuts could not affect patient services, which is of course rubbish.

"It was an incredibly sneaky thing to do but then the management is obsessed with spin rather than trying to run a good hospital. What Miss Hewitt won't see is that tomorrow, the next day and for the foreseeable future the eye theatre will be closed again."

Now, is it just me or is this reminiscent of the beginning of Monty Python's Meaning of Life(1983)?

DOCTOR SPENSER: And, uh, get the machine that goes 'ping'.
OBSTETRICIAN: And get the most expensive machines, in case the administrator comes.
NURSE: The administrator is here, doctor.
OBSTETRICIAN: Switch everything on!
ADMINISTRATOR: Aah! I see you have the machine that goes 'ping'. This is my favourite. You see, we lease this back from the company we sold it to, and that way, it comes under the monthly current budget and not the capital account.

The real question is whether anyone from the Tory Party will have the balls to point out the hilarity of this moment where reality imitated art?