For THIS you get me out of bed…

We have been busy in the People’s Republic with internal affairs of state. Unfinished articles, undelivered leaflets and distinctly under-exercised flab litter the land. Some people even expect us to do some work! So we were working up a nice head of steam to finally blast away at the disgraceful 10p tax band business, now crowned with its final turd in the shape of the Prime Minister going on Channel 4 news last night to tell us everything’s all right AGAIN.

But there have been one too many bloody silly stories lately for me not to saddle up and hunt cretins through the marshes with a great big stick, I’m afraid. First, Piers Moron and his all-singing, all-dancing inane questions almost made me weep with total unconcern, and I was only prompted to care about the whole thing when it became clear that the underwear of a number of newspaper columnists and, hem hem, Tory commentators would be permanently soiled as a result of the incident. And now this student-in-joining-university-political-society-and-forgetting-twenty-years-later-shock-meltdown. For god’s sake. Even the commenters on Conservative Home are questioning whether this merits discussion.

Leave aside for a moment the fact that everyone who has ever been to Oxford or Cambridge immediately pointed out that most politicised students joined several societies, for the social contacts and the chance to hear the speakers. Leave aside also the fact that by no means a majority of the members of any affiliated association were also members of the party in question. Leave aside the fact that Clegg’s name appears on the list only for his First Year and that he would therefore have most probably joined at Freshers’ Fair, a whirligig of fierce competition for the innocent souls of the newly matriculated that leaves even the most single-minded signed up to things like the CU Underwater Frisbee Society, the CU Amoral Sciences Club, the Franco-British Student Alliance (who are they fighting? The Central European Society, perhaps), the CU Guild of Change Ringers, the CU Lindy Hoppers and, if you’re really unlucky, the CU Netball Team (geddit? Think about the merchandise…)

Further, leave aside the fact that it has taken Greg Hands his entire career since leaving the rather small college he and Clegg attended at the same time to notice that Clegg is, what do you know, something rather big in the Liberal Democrat party, and offer his revelation to an astonished world. Leave aside even the fact that plenty of alumni have also pointed out that the officers of these societies are none too bothered about having people’s actual permission before signing them up, and that the sheet of paper in question was marked with various runes by Hands at a time when he was trying to get elected as an officer and was therefore drumming up all the support he could - by fair means or foul, if my memory of these people serves.

No, leave aside all that. Instead, consider Andrew Sparrow’s hair. No, don’t, that would be mean and personal (and yet it is so strangely fascinating…) Andrew Sparrow is plainly of the opinion that joining the CU Conservative Association is, in fact, exactly the same as joining the Conservative Party. No, really, he is! That’s what his headline says. If he sets the standards for journalistic enquiry in this matter, who is to say what actual question Nick Clegg’s office was asked which prompted his unequivocal denial?

If it was, “Were you a member of CUCA as a student?” then Nick may well have genuinely forgotten, but it was still a bit daft to be that definite.

If it was, “Were you a member of the Conservative Party as a student?” then, well, the answer would appear to be unequivocally 100% absolutely not.

Dirty trick or sloppy journalism? You decide. I’m off to put a few cretins’ heads on spikes.

 

Stop the gentrification, I want to get off!

Yesterday I fell off my chair. Or, not so much “off” as “through”. The chair broke, you collect. With hindsight this was not terribly surprising, not so much because I was sitting on it (don’t be so damn rude) as because the chair is about seventy years old and has seated several generations of skimbly pre-and post-war Mortimer forebears before playing host to my much better-nourished posterior.

In the People’s Republic we have always been peasantishly bad at throwing things away (as you might gather from the provenance of the chair) if there is any chance that sufficient duct tape and a funny little wiggling motion every time you pick it up/switch it on/put weight on it in future will rectify the problem. Accordingly, since the basic joinery of the chair is perfectly sound, I have temporarily knocked its warring components back together with a hammer, and am now sitting on it again, taking great care to ensure I don’t work too hard nor get too exercised on Comment is Free. But it is still going to need some sort of metal bracket nailing across the bottom of the frame, to brace the seat against the assault it will suffer tomorrow night when seven other drunken women come over for dinner.

Simple, I think, I’ll nip up the road to, er… Following the closure of Bond & White, the local DIY store, to make way for Planet-fricking-Organic, where the hell do you go in Muswell Hill to buy a hap’orth of nails, or whatever it is, and funny shaped bits of metal? Woolworths? Not for long, it seems. I miss Bond & White. Going in there was like stepping into a seventies sitcom and playing the part of Woman Customer. It was the only shop anywhere on the broadway or for quite some distance around that sold anything remotely hardware-related, and it seemed, to my inexpert eye, to stock everything. The nearest comparable range must have been in one of the giant chain stores on the north circular, which is useless if you haven’t got a car.

This isn’t a precious selfish rant about the death of the small shop - those are alive and well in most of London - nope, it’s a precious selfish rant about the death of the shop that sells, well, useful stuff that ordinary people need to make way for yet more luxury wankfestery. It’s a perfect illustration of the fact that markets are blind. They’ll correct, but they’ll correct to the advantage of those with most input into the market. So in a rich area, you get rich people’s shops, in a poor area you get poor people’s shops, and in mixed areas… you get rich people’s shops.

In other words, there’s no problem with being a small shop on Muswell Hill Broadway, but there is a problem with being a small shop that sells a packet of nails every six months to a girl with a broken chair on Muswell Hill Broadway. All the people who form your main customer base, because they own their own homes and are allowed to do shit to them, are the kind of people who will also have cars and are able to make the trip out to the cheaper chain stores on the north circ. No one, except people like me, comes to the Broadway to buy nails any more.

No, most people come to the Broadway to pick up a few bits at M&S, grab the Guardian from WHSmiths, buy a chicken brick from The Scullery for Lottie to take back to university, take a fancy to an adorable little £150 dress from Leila (and that’s just the men), moon over the cheese counter in Feast and pretend they are some sort of Chaucerian goodwife throwback and now, presumably, feel up the pre-packed mixed seeds and nuts (so knobbly!) at Planet Organic. When they want a nail knocked in, they call up an Eastern European migrant in Tottenham and ask him to come over and bring a nail with him.

London, darling, it’s been wonderful, but I’m leaving you.

 

Ze Prime Minister has trouble with ‘is Early Day Motion

Yes, much like the name of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, I persist in finding Early Day Motions inherently amusing (by way of, possibly, mitigation I have just been watching ‘Allo ‘Allo clips on youtube.)

Douze points to Bob Russell for being the first Liberal Democrat MP to sign Greg Pope’s EDM calling for Darling, darling! (hahaha. Ehehe. Hm. Gets me every time) to review the abolition of the 10% tax band.

Either you know my views on this, or you’ve just arrived on this blog from outer space, or possibly Comment is Free. Get on ze blower to your MP immediately, and meet me back at ze cafe.

 

Shock as Labour MPs wake up

After a year’s light snoozing, the Labour party has belatedly realised that the last budget delivered by their Iron Chancellor-as-was will have the incidental effect of making poor people worse off in 2008/09. The scrapping of the 10p band, as reported heretofore, will make everyone on an income of below about £18,000 worse off before inflation from 6th April next week.

I must hand it to them, for they are charmingly worried and concerned. Oh dear! Making poor people worse off? That’s not right, is it! Why only the other day, Eric Martlew, MP for Carlisle, received a complaint in his surgery from a disgruntled poor person who was about to get even poorer!

Here’s Nia Griffith, a parliamentary private secretary at Environment:

We have always wanted to support those on lower incomes, we have done an enormous amount with things like the minimum wage to raise people out of poverty. I think therefore anything that hits people on lower incomes is perhaps something we are particularly sensitive to in the Labour party.

“Perhaps”? “Sensitive to”? Bravo, Nia! Have you ever considered becoming a candidate?

Of course, Gordon’s answer was that tax credits made up the slack, and to be absolutely fair to him, in Gordon’s head they probably do. Only we don’t live in Gordon’s head, praise the lord. Onlookers report that the MPs muttered discontentedly at this, doubtless because they are perfectly well aware from dealing with gruelling queries in their constituencies that not everyone on a low income is eligible for child tax credits, which do exactly what they say on the tin (only not necessarily, and we might take the tin away again). Something must be done! Say, can we talk this policy over, Gordon?

It is, of course, far far far too late. You useless numpties.

UPDATE: the FT  is now carrying this story as well, with extra added numpty quotes.

 

Where’s Boris?

The Guardian is looking but can’t find him. Our Brian, on the other hand, is about to answer some pretty rabid commenters’ questions for the Torygraph.

 

Food crisis? What food crisis?

Like Jo A, I must stress that I only have access to a copy of Delia’s new How to Cheat at Cooking through A Friend. Nowt to do wiv us, guv. Here are some of the handy hints from the introduction:

For instance, why not cut out grating cheese altogether when you’re busy? There are now some good-quality ready-grated (or sliced) cheeses available.

There are ready prepared and chopped vegetables, too, and a whole variety of prepared salads and fruits.

So many wonderful ingredients are just waiting to make your life easier: ready-made ciabatta breadcrumbs, tins of fried Spanish onions, ginger already grated, pastry cases already cooked.

Thanks to frozen diced onions, for instance, you’re not forced to peel and chop an onion if you don’t want to.

At the risk of sounding like Mrs Beeton hitting the crème de menthe, don’t being such a fricking precious wuss-ass. Now, I’m as guilty of chucking a bag of salad into the basket as the next lazy twenty-something (bizarre but true fact: if there’s only one of you, it’s actually cheaper and less wasteful to buy salad in this form, unless you want to devote at least four hours a day to chomping through Hearts of Romaine like a herbivorous slave). And my mother is possibly the only woman left in England who still makes her own pastry and isn’t a frothing Tory. But I mean, “Thanks to frozen diced onions”, for all love? As long as I live, Random Forces of the Universe, may I never have to thank frozen diced onions for anything!

So far, as you will have spotted, this is just a self-fancying cook’s rant. I like chopping onions. It’s soothing, satisfying, aesthetically pleasing. Poems have been written about peeling onions. Who was it who said of the red onion that you peel away the outer layer and what’s underneath is so perfect that you have to peel away the next layer as well to see if it gets even better? And it does! You end up with a glowing ruby jewel of a vegetable about half the size of the one you bought. And much less dinner.

But this is about to become a somewhat more serious rant, because Delia’s polypropylene-sheathed paean to rampant consumerism comes to my notice hard on the heels of this CiF article about the rising costs of food. In the spirit of mean-hearted dark treacly bitterness, I find it hard to much have time for Rosie Boycott, Lib Dem feminist or no. Only baby-boomers whose mamas sent them to Cheltenham Ladies College can afford to live simple ethical lives breeding simple organic pigs in simple organic Somerset. But, accidents of birth aside, she is discussing a theme of increasing potency for our times here:

Almost all the food we eat - 95% - is oil-dependent, so as oil prices rise, the cost of food does too. Oil is central to fertilisers, mechanised production, transportation and packaging. However, between 1950 - when mechanisation and fertilisers transformed farming into agribusiness - and 1984, world grain production increased by 250%. The consequent cheapness of food kept inflation down and allowed for the postwar consumer boom.

For years experts have been asking what will we eat when the crises of climate change and oil depletion converge, with the possible end of our globalised food supply. Our tea and coffee and spices might still come from abroad, but what about salad vegetables, beef and fresh orange juice? Cheap oil has let the west regard the whole world as its farmyard, always seeking the cheapest place to produce and process.

I notice that some commenters - the CiF commenter is a hardy, intelligent breed I increasingly admire; like Gloucester Old Spots, really - take issue with Rosie’s figures. And she does end up reducing the problem down to the oddly narrow and somewhat self-defeating notion that we eat too much meat (”So, umm, you will be stopping your pig production, won’t you? Mustn’t make the problem worse now, must we?” cheeks Tim Worstall) but in essentials she’s right so far as I understand it. Food has gone through a period of artificial plenty in the first world over the last forty years, and barring a sophisticated politico-technological response of which the world does not, currently, look capable, those days are now over. With the supply of oil increasingly dependent on good old-fashioned land wars and the whim of Russia, we’re on the brink of rediscovering the fluctuating prices and scarcities familiar to our ancestors.

I wonder that Rosie and Delia can be living on the same planet. Which they do, not just literally, but in the narrow sense of professional writers with a strong interest in food. If the food crisis is really coming - is really here for much of the developing world, and I feel the impact of the price of milk on my own little margin - how can it be right that the Glossy Cookbook market is complicit in the pretence that ordinary people can not only afford all this food and its cost in oil, but can afford to have other people chop it, dice it, wash it, dress it and tie a great big organic straw ribbon round it and the cost of all that in oil?

Well, it’s not right of course. But it’s interesting. A little bit fin de siècle, a bit “excesses of the court of the Sun King”. Marie Antoinette, at the very brink of disaster for the ancien régime, would have approved of Delia’s principle, even if she abhorred the absence of gold-leaf-dipped brioche from the store-cupboard essentials section. Marie Antoinette played at farming herself, of course. But the difference, in this classless society, is that we’re all rich now. There must be something in the bottled water on CiF at the moment, because Polly Toynbee was also making an unusual amount of sense last week:

…the median earners on £22,000 and below are 50% of the voters - but that’s a bit less than MPs get as expenses for running their second homes. So much gold dust is kicked in the nation’s eyes by scores of TV programmes selling property beyond most people’s imagining, or celebrity handbags costing thousands, that the delusion that most people are affluent has entered Labour’s lexicon and even its soul.

We live in strange and disturbing times when, on the apparent eve of a global food crisis, chopping an onion is considered by rich people to be hard work that an ordinary person shouldn’t feel they have to do. I wonder what How to Cheat at Cooking will symbolise when the socio-economic history of the early twenty-first century comes to be written? 

 

My year of living dangerously: a tale of liberty, pasta and harsh economic truths

Going up to Oxford in 1997 from my unremarkable state school (oh, god, it’s another freaking “My struggle at Oxbridge” post, when will you wingeing twats realise we’re just not interested and shut up, etc) there was this guy on my course. We both took Cicero for our Special Subject. I only ever had a couple of conversations with him, but he seemed perfectly nice, if a bit of a classic rich-Tory-public-schoolboy-from-Balliol, and he was certainly bright. We both got Firsts, I believe, and we both won scholarships.

Then what? Well, I carried on in the groves of academe for a while, largely funded by you on account of being awesomely brilliant (cheers; I owe you a pint), then chucked it in and did the normal thing all graduates who don’t have any money behind them but find strategy consulting and banking inimical have to do. I got a job, a boring, averagely-paid, first jobber’s job in a large company where I’d have space to develop, in a line of work I thought was probably moderately interesting once you got a bit higher up. Well, that turned out to be a total disaster, so I took another job, a stressful, slightly-below-averagely-paid, second jobber’s job in a different line of work I thought would at least keep my mind active and me off the breadline while I pursued more inspiring projects in my free time. That didn’t work either, so I chucked it all in and decided I’d rather be free and poor and answer to no-one. I was going to decide how I wanted to live and what I wanted to do with my time on earth, and then try and fit the money-making in around that. Hooray!

A year into the experiment, little by little, it’s working out. People periodically give me interesting work that I’m good at largely on terms of my choosing. I don’t have to get out of bed at the same time every day. I can’t yet support myself on freelance work alone, there are some weeks when feeding myself is a struggle, and every journey into central London in particular has to be carefully costed and weighed against the probable social/professional/financial benefit of making it. Temping is ever more of a bind, particularly because the people whose well-remunerated task it is to find you the work don’t always appear to appreciate the basic calculation at hand - is it worth my while to get out of bed and do it? One agency tried to get me to take a four-hour per day job at £9.50 an hour in central London, and for the benefit of those lucky enough not to live here, a monthly zone 1 ticket from where I live costs somewhere in the region of £100. You, as they say, do the math. But, day by day, I inch a bit further towards vindication.

I certainly couldn’t have got this far without a ferocious and unceasing barrage of support from family and friends, and while some of that support has been financial, no-one is in a position to bankroll my whimsical idea of what I should ideally be allowed to do with my time (least of all me, it seems). But I like the freedom, I like the way my interests have blossomed and sometimes brought unexpected gain (I’d have stayed an armchair supporter of the Lib Dems in my old life, for one thing) and I still think my original calculation will probably turn out to be correct: if you do things you like and are good at, you’ll end up roughly solvent anyway, and much happier than if you just pay the rent at the expense of all else.

So I’m going to stick with it and see how Year Two pans out. If nothing else I have acquired a properly solid grasp of what it’s like, how exhausting and soul-destroying and mind-numbing it is to live on a low income. And I’m someone with no dependents and a way out! This isn’t a sob story - I’ve chosen this life, and I could go and get a middlingly paid third-jobber’s job tomorrow if it really got unbearable. But it has given me at least the shadowiest inkling of what it must like to live on something like a minimum wage and not have a way out, and believe me, it’s the stuff of the most shuddering twitchy nightmares imaginable.

What strikes me most of all is just how tiring it is. All those little daily calculations - shall I spend this pound on a packet of pasta I can live on for four days or shall I save it for the journey in to work tomorrow? How much is on my oyster card? I can only top it up from my credit card at the moment, and that’ll put my minimum payment beyond reach unless that cheque finally arrives. How many more pay dates are there before the rent is due? And of course, the classic which will raise a groan from every economic liberal - is it worth my taking that work, or will I lose more in housing benefit than I gain from the extra pay? You expend so much energy just thinking through how you’re going to survive.

I used to regard people on benefits with low incomes with extreme compassion but no real empathy. Like most thoughtless young sprigs, I thought they (it’s always “they”, isn’t it) had either been unreasonably unlucky or made bad choices and, poor things, didn’t have the psychological werewithal to leverage themselves out of trouble. It’s a far less sympathetic and extreme version of this philosophy that prompts Tories to bark “Well, what’s stopping them from working?”. Left-liberal answers usually reference lack of skills and low self-esteem, but I would add to these sad truths a bus fare, an interview suit (or equivalent), no familial obligations and a decent meal in the belly, and the time it takes to figure out how to acquire the money to assemble all that - things even the most empathetic lefty or liberal finds hard to conceive f unless they’ve been there. These days I don’t just empathise - I salute every last one of Britain’s benefit claimants for carrying on at all. How the hell they do it is beyond me.

Withal, Tory-chap-who-took-Cicero-with-me hadn’t so much as crossed my mind in over half a decade when suddenly, hanging around the blogs one day, as is my wont, I come across a name on Lib Dem Voice that rings a bell, and a few clicks later I am looking at  said chap peeping out of a photoshopped Tory mock-up! Yes, my erstwhile co-classicist is Robin Walker, Tory PPC for Worcester, his father’s old constituency. Good grief! thinks I. I wonder what he’s been up to? Hm, he left university and started his own business. Ve-ry nice. Then after that went into press communications in the finance and industrial sectors. Thence to the PPC candidature. There are those who would use phrases like “well-worn groove” to describe this particular path of progress.

Now, to be plain, I am not for one moment denigrating the achievements of someone I don’t know much about. And the whole game of trying to quantify the advantages of a PPC who has a former MP for a father is so beset with complexities and caveats as to be basically unplayable. But the observation remains that at a time when the academically bright lower-middly class kid had to go and get a boring job, the academically bright moneyed upper-middly class kid was able to “start his own business”. And by all means shoot me down in flames if you’re out there, Robin, but I’d be extremely surprised if you had to temp to support your burgeoning career (and two weeks’ paid work experience at the Adam Smith Insitute secured by a family friend doesn’t count).

Whenever we talk about poverty of ambition, we generally mean kids whose parents have my financial situation, but not my education or basic advantages. If it was unthinkable for someone like me to leave university and start their own business, it’s unthinkable for some kids to do what I consider my fallback position - go and get a middlingly decent job. Unlucky them. Lucky me. Luckier Robin Walker. Occasionally someone from a truly impoverished background does break out - gets the university education, gets the good job. I’ve made a much smaller, but still upward progression - I’ve (belatedly) done something that normally only rich kids do, because they have a fallback position that I don’t have - financial support to a decent standard of living.

They seem to get very upset about this, by the way. I’ve known moneyed people complain vociferously when I put this theory to them, and protest that they “never take any money” from their parents. That’s not the point, I explain patiently (assuming I believe them; often it seems to turn out that actually they live in daddy’s town flat rent-free but don’t consider that to be money changing hands). It’s the mindset that coming from money gives you. That anything is possible. That there will always be a second chance. That you can take a risk. That you can leave university and not instantly be panicking about how your CV looks at the expense of all else. Essentially, as the Cleggster pointed out in his conference speech, it’s freedom. No point in, as the libertarians have it, owning yourself unless you can feed, clothe and otherwise take care of what you own.

On the whole, then, a Good Year. It has shown me that poverty of ambition is a graduated thing, and the magic circle of those who are totally untouched by it is actually vanishingly small. It has been the making of me as a liberal, and of my social conscience as a sophisticated instrument of analysis, as opposed to a great big wobbly cuddle for the disadvantaged. Most of all it’s made me less fucking complacent about where my next meal is coming from, and accordingly I recommend it as a lifestyle to anyone who has ever thought of people on benefits and/or low incomes as a great big unwashed lump of “them”.

 

Ye Olde Style Polle

Wiche hande dostow employe? Sinistre or dextre?

Spurred by this post from Pink Dog and the subsequent comment about the proportion of left-handed people in the population at large (11%), and the possible over-representation of left-handers in the Lib Dem support base, I decided to run a poll. Unfortunately, WordPress blogs, or the idiot-proof ready-hosted ones I use, do not allow polls without lots of tedious Mucking About.

But, I sez to meself, Mortimer, I sez, stating whether you’re right- or left-handed is hardly sensitive information is it? Why not have a deeply literal Olde Worlde Polle whereby people - novel idea coming up - just write down their choice and at the end a little man in a toga comes and empties the amphora and counts them all up?

So I invite you, if you are or think you might be a Lib Dem voter/supporter/member, to state your paw of preference in the comments (yes, that includes you, Pink Dog), and we’ll see how it pans out. Of course, if you are worried by the distinct possibility that Jacqui Smith might be scanning my blog for information on cack-handed miscreants so that she can better enact policies against them, you can always anonymise and I won’t breathe a word.

 

Exclusive: Greens were Labour’s second choice

The Very Orange (and currently, it seems, Amusingly Pink) Julian H was first off the blocks this morning with That Letter from the Greens, to the which alarming turn of events - wot, a Lib Dem can’t even trust their fellow eco-weirdies not to dump on their head any more? - I can now add my own snippet.

The fact that Siân Berry is now in alliance with a Labour party that has just used green tax revenue to concrete over its deficit problems and wants the whole of the South East to be made into a sustainable network of jumbo jet runways is bad enough. In fact it makes a change because the London mayoral contest has so far proved disappointing for seekers of dramatic political narrative. Notwithstanding the bendy bus bollocks, and allowing for the vagaries of different agencies, the poll figures show a fair degree of cohesion if you overlook the initial jump in Brian Paddick’s ratings. It’s newspaper columnists’ adam’s apples (invariably) that have been bobbing up and down.

The only relief has come from Martin Kettle, who is under the weather with Batshit Crazy Talk Syndrome at the moment, as evidenced by his bizarre contention that in order to be “taken seriously” in the London mayoral race, what the Liberal Democrats really need to do is, er, replace their candidate a month before polling day. His reasoning here is that Vince Cable is an indispensible asset to the party and needs to be put into a position of prominence. What, you mean like, make him deputy leader and shadow chancellor? Hey, interesting thought, Martin! We’ll have lunch.

One trend only is discernible - over the last two polls alone, Ken’s support has dipped slightly and Boris has picked up the slack. No wonder Labour is worried. So worried that we learn from the People’s Republican Intelligence Service that they have been on the phone to the Cleggster twice in recent weeks, asking if Our Brian could possibly see his way maybe to recommending that his supporters give Ken second preference pretty please?

Now, I’ve seen it suggested in public forums that Brian Paddick has some sort of obligation to side with Ken on the grounds that we must keep Boris out at all costs, and I don’t know whether any peddlars of this horrid noisome fallacy are reading, but if you are I have implanted an intelligent virus into my blog which will strike you down with a slightly unpleasant cold. Why the hell should Brian back Ken? I mean, apart from the fact that Labour policy in London on, er, housing, crime and the environment is largely repellant to Lib Dem principles? Brian is backing Brian, for goodness’ sake.

“No,” said the Cleggster, and put the phone down. The rest is public record - Labour went for the second best option and hooked up with the pathetically eager Greens instead, for whom Labour’s dismal record on pretty much everything they hold dear was apparently just so much organic sunflower seed.

But it gets worse because Ken is having his revenge on the Lib Dems for spurning his generous offer to allow us to support his continuing bid for amphibious world domination. The Greens have suddenly unaccountably learned how to be nasty and proactive, and today are delivering their open letter to Nick Clegg suggesting that Lib Dems should be voting for Berry. You can tell they’re being nasty because their main charge appears to be that Brian Paddick, a serving police officer of thirty years’ standing, is a “celebrity candidate”, as opposed presumably to Berry who has long been slogging away in the public interest by dint of appearing on Richard & Judy.

Much of their reasoning, such as it is, is easily dealt with:

Mr Paddick has pledged to scrap the Low Emissions Zone… He would cancel the higher-rate Congestion Charge for gas-guzzling Band G vehicles

The current congestion charge policy is holding the number of cars in London steady, not decreasing it. And small wonder, because £25 is fairly traded Brazil nuts to a Chelsea Tractor driver, and some categories of vehicle currently escape the charge altogether. Why should exceptions or allowances be made for ANY kind of vehicle? Is this a Congestion Charge or not? The aim should be to get cars OUT of Central London, not give away little treats to those who drive slightly less polluting cars. And the whole place should be a Low Emissions Zone, for god’s sake! The logical thing to do if you’re serious about getting cars out of London is to replace the current staggered and time-limited system with a uniform 24/7 charge, whether you’ve got a Chelsea tractor or a biscuit tin on wheels. 

The Greens naturally make no mention of the Lib Dem suggestion of a £10 charge on the whole of Greater London for people coming in from outside, which would have a fundamental effect on commuting patterns. And in response to the insinuation that Paddick is chasing Conservative votes, I can personally assure you, Greeny-Browny people, that this one ain’t playing well in the affluent Tory suburbs at all. Transport habits in London need to be changed, not validated with the odd bit of belt-tightening. Pissing about with this or that exception just isn’t getting us anywhere and that’s clear in the figures.

And he plans to privatise the Tube network to place management entirely in the hands of a single firm.

Yeah, because PPP has really worked out. Three-quarters of the Tube network is currently in administration or hadn’t you noticed? The London taxpayer is about to pick up the bill for the failings and inefficiencies of a private company - I’d say that’s pretty much a done deal on privatisation, wouldn’t you? Public-private partnership was a Labour decision made in 1999, Labour being - oh! - the party you’ve just got into bed with. The Lib Dem plan is simply to apply the same concessionary model that works much more successfully on the DLR to the tube network. Whether newspaper headline-writers like it or not, the issue is no longer private v. public, it’s shit private v. decent private. So let’s go with the model that has been proved to work, non? It’s sheer insanity to have one company managing the trains on a given line, another company doing the track maintenance, a third company staffing the stations, a fourth doing the signals and a fifth employed to generally sweep up and occasionally scrape depressed Green voters off the tracks.

So much for the arguments. It’s the soul-revolting back story I object to. Not only have the Greens sold out their principles to a pretty lowly sort of bidder, they’re now doing his ”public relations” work in an attempt to split the anti-Labour vote, and target Number One is the man who refused to countenance any such deal.

I daresay if such a letter had been sent prior to the Green-Labour hook-up things would look different. They’d still have been wrong, and oddly personal in their choice of terms. But honour would have been intact. This just stinks. Going Brown really doesn’t suit you people.

 

New treaty signed by People’s Republic

Recently, we opened our first overseas embassy on Liberal Conspiracy, and we humbly recommend you, sirs, madams, to this piece on a subject dearer to our heart than is healthy or natural: tax.

I don’t normally cross-reference myself like this, on the grounds that if a thing is worth saying, it’s probably worth saying twice, and with different jokes. But I am getting increasingly het up about the misrepresentations of NuLabCon on this subject and am making it my personal mission to spread the word wherever possible, although mostly by hanging out on Comment is Free disguised as a small cerulean spiny rodent. Cunning, eh?