People banned from being naked near children - IT'S HEALTH AND SAFETY GONE MAD

Right, I haven't plumbed the depths of idiocy contained within the Daily Mail website for weeks now, so I have a double dose of rubbish from the last couple of days for you to enjoy... starting with a familiar case of double standards.

This story of the local pool where people were asked not to shower naked is full of the usual Mail hypocrisy. The headline is:

"Swimming pool users banned from showering naked in case children are offended"

This seems to suggest that it was a pre-emptive PC gone mad type of banning, done 'in case' people who may or not be offended are. However in the second paragraph it goes on to say that...

"Bathers have been told to keep their swimming costumes on while using the showers following complaints from local schools that pupils were offended by 'open nudity' and needed 'a certain amount of privacy.'

Which clearly states that the ban was enforced AFTER complaints not IN CASE OF complaints.

Still the Mail continues with its dog whistle journalism, even managing to stick in this gem.

Swimmers who regularly use the Torridge Pool in Northam, Devon, described the rule as 'health and safety gone mad.'

Surely it's PC gone mad, you've got your 'gone mad's' mixed up there because I can't see any way this is a health and safety issue.

"Local councillor Hugh Bone said the decision was 'ridiculous' and vowed to fight the ban by continuining to showering in the nude.

Grandfather-of-four Hugh said: 'This surely is ridiculous. People should not believe that we are all perverts.

'Boys and men as well as girls and women have always changed in front of each other and this is part of the growing up experience."

Apply this quote to another Mail article, say this one... and we have a paedophile, ready to be vilified for exposing himself to children. You see, the Daily Mail are brilliant at taking quotes out of context.

Nadine Dorries is wrong (again)

It's with little surprise that I read Nadine Dorries latest blog postand concluded that she is stupid and wrong.

It's all about the Tories confused and frankly pointless marriage tax credits policy and this time she really out does herself, defending Cameron's botch job of a policy.

She starts by saying...

It is a statistical and evidence based fact that couples who are married try harder at keeping a family together

No it isn't, what is statistical and evidence based is the fact that less people who are married break up. That's a totally different thing. She's got the causal relationship the wrong way round, people who are married break up less not because they've made the commitment, but because they are in more stable relationships regardless of the commitment. You could argue that Dorries point is correct, but it isn't based on evidence and statistics.

Only 1:11 married couples split before their child’s fifth birthday whereas that figure is 1:3 for co-habiting couples.

Again a case of 'lies, damn lies, and statistics.' The age of five seems to have been plucked from the air, and what follows is even worse...

Sadly, when marriage or relationship breakdown occurs, it is often the children who are caught in the middle. Would any child, when asked the question ‘would you prefer it if your mum and dad stayed together rather than split up’, answer ‘no’? 

What she says in the second part seems to directly contradict the first. In many cases the parents divorcing may be the best thing for the kids, if the parents are creating a bad environment with the bad feeling towards each other. A quite pointless over generalisation based on spurious evidence.

Even those children in dysfunctional families still love both parents and the fact that the "togetherness" of two parents provides them with double the security and parenting.

In most cases the parents don't care or parent any less when they have got divorced. In fact many make more of an effort to try to overcome the barriers of divorce.

We are all aware of the problems we face in the society within which we live today.

Yes, there are some bad things going on in society. I'm sure you won't over-generalise or scaremonger though.

Having spent a week on a council estate, where marriage is not even a part of the vocabulary, where literally thousands of single mums fail to control teenage boys and where stabbings, shootings, drugs and all level of general crime are a part of the fabric of council estate life, I am even more resolved in my own commitment to the fact that we absolutely have to return to the values which we know once kept our society stable and law abiding.

Was I being too hopeful? I think so. 'Marriage isn't even part of the vocabulary!' Now that's just plain bollocks. This is starting to read like an article from the Daily Mail. Especially with the harking back to the golden era where everything was fine and nothing bad ever happened to anyone.

If not least because it’s those who struggle to bring up a family and do the decent thing that pick up the bill for the rest.

Oh, 'doing the decent thing' again. What are single mothers whose husbands have left them supposed to do? Struggle along on their own as not to burden everyone else?

That bill may be financial, as we all have to pay extra taxes to fund the benefit system, the police, social services, security within schools, and the entire public service cost of a society in meltdown, or for some people the cost is more personal and real.

'Society in meltdown!!!' Stop being so fucking melodramatic Nadine.

My law abiding hard working constituent, who was attacked in London on New Years Eve by a youth who had no father he knew of and had been released from a young offenders institute just before Christmas, has some very strong opinions on this.

'law abiding hard working'... God this is starting to sound like a Littlejohn column, Not all people on benefits commit crime.

The values which we know provide the framework for a decent and law abiding society have to be championed once again. I’m delighted that David Cameron has picked up the gauntlet and I know that if he becomes Prime Minister we will at the end of his first five years be able to look at the family and say, ‘yes, it’s in a much stronger place than it was five years ago’, and that has to be a good thing for us all.

Bollocks.

If everyone else is doing them...

... I suppose I should do some predictions for the year ahead. Some in the world of politics, some in the media and a bit of sport to add to the mix. Let's go:

1) The Conservative party will win a small majority at the general election and tear themselves apart over Europe.
2) After losing the general election, Labour will elect David Milliband as their new leader.
3) My football team Leyton Orient will get relegated from League 1
4) England will get to the semi-finals of the World Cup and lose to Germany
5) Peter Mandleson will be parachuted into a safe Labour seat at the General Election
6) Jan Moir will leave the Mail after another huge twitterstorrm against another poisonous article.
7) The Lib Dems will get a new leader at some point during the year
8) I will get 50 comments on my two blogs combined.
9) England will draw the Ashes series in Australia 1-1
10) Lewis Hamilton will win the Formula 1 world championship by less than 5 points from Jenson Button

Prescott v Taxpayers Alliance

Earlier today, Guido Fawkes blogged 'Prezza Loses BBC Battle' in relation to John Prescott's letter to the BBC's Helen Boaden in which he asked:

I would therefore be keen to hear your views on the Guardian’s revelations and whethertheTaxPayers’ Alliance’s should now be referred to on air as “a group with close links to the Conservative Party” or some similar on-air clarification.

Boaden replied with:

"..whilst it is clear to me that the TPA is a conservative (small "c") organisation I do not think it would be accurate or fair to describe it on air, as you suggest, as "a group with close links to the Conservative Party.

I do accept that the TPA's publicatons and policies come from a distinctive political position and think we should try to avoid our output giving the impression that it is an impartial body."

Now I don't know about you but this seems rather a tame battle, Guido ended with:

Prezza is Twittering that this means “we’ve had some real success”. How?

Well, he asked if there could be an on air clarification about the TPA, and he has got one, not the one he wanted but this was 'real success' because it is another step on the road to the TPA being exposed as what they are. Once there is enough evidence I'd hope

One of the reasons that the BBC may have been reluctant to call the TPA "“a group with close links to the Conservative Party” may be the amount of anti-BBCfeeling within the right wing, and this is the sort of story about BBC 'bias' that would be jumped straight on by right wing rags like the Mail. The fact that they are right wing is pretty incontrovertible and is a logical if not entirely satisfactory compromise by the corporation.

The Taxpayers Alliance - A funny kind of independence

The most annoying campaign group/Tory front will be facing a quite considerable dilemma after the general election if everything goes as it looks likely to. If the Tories form a government, the Taxpayers Alliance will have to decide whether they continue to keep up the façade of being an independent campaign group that will campaign against anything the government of the time does, or admit to being a Tory front and not actually take the new government to task at all.

The signs look ominous, looking at the TPA's last set of press stories which they have whored themselves out to,  three of them are the same story, based on councils not picking up rubbish over the Christmas period. All of these stories are in right wing rags, and attacking Northampton, Walsall, and Oxford councils. A quick bit of research reveals that Oxford is run by a Labour council, Northampton by a Lib Dem council, and Walsall by a Tory council. Yet why does the TPA never seem to mention in its blogs or press releases the sort of stuff that Jon Cruddas and Chuka Umunna are now flagging up on Tory Stories is done by the Conservative party. There are very few if any negative mentions of the Conservative party across the TPA’s blogs.

This all comes back to one simple issue, the TPA don't want to admit that they are a Tory front organisation, even though it is painfully obvious, from the right wing rags they appear in (Daily Mail, Express, Telegraph) to the way that they never mention anything that the Tories are doing wrong in local government, to the fact that they are run by the likes of Andrew Allum who "led the student Conservative groups both in Imperial College and across London and sat on the national committee of the student wing of the party." and  “From 1998 to 2002 Andrew served as a Conservative member of Westminster City Council.” “He left the party in 2003” but hasn’t been too critical of it since. Matthew Elliott’s profile on their site shows their obvious connections with the Tories: 

“In 2006, the TPA won the ConservativeHome “One to Watch” award and in 2007 the Bumper Book of Government Waste was awarded the Sir Antony Fisher Memorial Award. In November 2007, Matthew was presented with the Conservative Way Forward ‘One of Us’ award by William Hague and in December the TPA won the Stockholm Network's prestigious Golden Umbrella award for Innovation. In 2008, the TPA was named 'Pressure Group of the Year' by the readers of Iain Dale's Diary”

With all of this evidence, how can they not admit that they may be independent in name, their whole existence is to highlight what Labour have done wrong, while ignoring all the Tories are doing wrong in local government and taking all the plaudits they can from the Conservative party. That’s a funny kind of independence.

Is a Labour-Tory coalition unthinkable? Of course it is you fool

Martin Kettle seems to have lost it, as today in Comment is Free he decides that - contrary to all previous thinking - a Labour-Tory coalition is possible in the next general election. Where to start?

One significant option seems perversely unexplored – the big one: a deal between the two largest parties. That's right, between the Conservatives and Labour. Merely to state this possibility is doubtless to invite derision, and worse. For many on both sides a Conservative-Labour deal is in every respect the politically unthinkable.

It's unthinkable because it will never happen, and vice-versa. Can you imagine the reaction of the grass-roots of either party? Despite the fact that they have both moved closer to the centre in recent years, most Labour voters/members/politicians despise the other party.

It is nevertheless worth asking and answering, calmly, one simple question: Why not? The question deserves to be taken seriously for three main reasons. The first is that British elections are becoming increasingly fragmented. Votes and seats are shared between more parties than before. No large party can today count on automatic 40%-plus support as both Labour and the Tories once did. Inter-party deals have become common in the devolved authorities and local government. The trend would become more pronounced under a reformed Westminster electoral system.

The second reason is that some of the ancient differences between the main parties have blurred. This is sometimes misrepresented as "the parties becoming all the same", which is untrue. Nevertheless, some of the extremes of the past have been abandoned and some of the differences of today are more nuanced and pragmatic. Like football fans, British political parties retain a tribal culture, but the parties, like the football clubs, have learned they must adapt or perish.

The third reason is that, on occasion, needs must. There are practical arguments why, in some circumstances, an arrangement between the biggest parties might be the most viable option. A government of this kind might also do a good job, and might even be popular, too. Opinion polls certainly suggest as much.

The question also deserves to dismissed becuse of three main reasons...

1) Labour hate the Tories

2)Tories hate Labour

3) Despite at the top being closer than ever, at grass-roots level they are ideologically as far apart as ever

The idea is just crazy, both parties are closer to the Lib Dems ideologically so they are the perfect coalition partners.

I'd like to state categorically that this will not happen, if it does, I'll eat my face.

The most inspiring left wing leader

Johann Hari recently wrote a piece that interested me entitled “Amid dark times, meet the most inspiring people of 2009” including left wing Bolivian president Evo Morales:

“When Evo Morales was a child, the indigenous peoples of Bolivia weren't even allowed to set foot in the capital's central square, which was reserved for white people. Today, he is the President, and for the first time in his country's history, he is diverting the billions raised from the country's natural resources away from the pockets of US corporations. It is building schools and hospitals for people who had nothing, and poverty is being eradicated in a stunning burst of progress”

Much of this is true, public services investment has increased from 6.3% of GDP in 2005 to 10.5% in 2009 and as the report from CEPR states:

“It is worth nothing that this would not have been possible without the control that the government gained over its natural gas production and reserves”

There also appears to be a reduction in inequality in the years to 2007 with the Gini coefficient falling from 60.2 to 56.3.

Before reading I knew next to nothing about Morales but soon after I came across a blog post by Hersey Corner also about Morales in which he argued:

“That's one way of putting it. Another is that, like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, Morales has embarked upon a programme towards almost unlimited socialist state control. He has already nationalised gas, oil, mining and telecommunications and begun Zimababwe-style land reforms. Other sectors of the economy, including electricity and the banks, are already being lined up. When one opposition leader spoke up against Morales, a mob of the president's supporters ransacked his house.”

The first point is simply an ideological point, and as a right winger the Heresiarch is likely to take this position, one that I strongly disagree with. The nationalisation has been used to combat poverty, reducing the number of Bolivians living in extreme poverty from 37% to 31% The second point is a serious accusation but there seems little evidence to back it up with.

Morales has grown the Bolivian economy:

                                           

“Bolivian President Evo Morales, who nationalized the energy industry and rewrote the constitution, heads for re-election Dec. 6 bolstered by an economy projected to grow faster than any other in the hemisphere this year.”

He won that election with 63% of the vote and his party Movement Towards Socialism won large majorities in both the houses of the Bolivian parliament.

According to this Guardian report opponents of his regime are concerned that:

“The charismatic Aymara leader would become more radical and polarising and usher in an authoritarian personality cult.”

It’s not clear why anyone would think that apart from a western neo-liberal suspicion of socialist countries in the developing world. It’s been seen before in the criticisms of Hugo Chavez’ Venezuelan government and it’s completely unfounded.

There is actually an argument to say that he hasn’t gone far enough, Mike Gonzalez writes in this CiF piece:

“While the past four years have brought great advances in the recognition of indigenous rights and culture, the communities remain poor. The next Morales government has a responsibility to reward their support with a more forceful redistribution of wealth and to continue the progress towards the "21st century Latin American socialism" that he and other Latin American presidents will be attempting to define at next week's conference of Alba, the Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America.”

This “more forceful re-distribution of wealth” seems to be beginning with the new constitution and the redistribution of land that comes with it. This can only be a good thing for reducing inequality, something that has been needed for a long time. I wouldn’t go as over the top as Hari has done in his piece, the job is not yet done, but Morales seems the only man who can do it