Politics gets interesting once again

Well, it's been a while. How have you all been keeping?

Mainstream politicians everywhere continue to display all round incompetence, and people everywhere are growing ever more weary of leadership by the out-of-touch and their phalanxes of "civil servants" with agendas for social engineering.

The fundamental flaw of democracy - government by barely moral and thoroughly manipulative folks who live in a bubble - and buy your votes using your money - continues to undermine most so-called democratic societies, as indeed the Greeks themselves observed, 4000 years ago,.

UKIP's recent UK success has clearly woken up the posh boys who have been trying hard to rubbish UKIP, but have ended up simply annoying the core Tory voters even more. And now we know Nigel Farage is not UKIP's only star turn. The UKIP chancellor hits an aggressive Andrew Neil out of the park.

The UK people are plainly ready for core change. Attitudes towards "reality" in benefits and immigration seem to be ahead of the incumbent politicians' ability to respond, and there is much evidence that those bubble-dwellers who simply have no resonance with ordinary people - like Milliband - are being caught off balance, and being forced to make up policy on the hoof.

The Leveson consequences are also becoming better understood, and belief that Leveson has been manipulated by the usual suspects from the various New World Order think tanks may become irresistible before a huge mistake is made.  Although can all the laws in the world keep the "information genii" in the bottle these days?

Overall, it looks like politics are becoming interesting again. I might resume a more regular blogging habit.
 

The Guardian BBC - more out of control than ever?

Where to start? The Andrew Marr show at the start of the week of local elections kicks off with Dame Helena Kennedy (Lab) Mr Jackie Ashley (Lab), and yet another Graun (Lab) hack - "youthful" Nicholas Watt (who despite having been a career hack straight from uni in 1990, working on papers that have rarely if ever done anything as unpleasant as make a profit) is apparently such a nonentity that he doesn't rate his own Wikipedia page, so TMP cannot easily look up and find out that he the grandson of some Labour peer) the BBC wants to continue to prep for full-blown punditry glory on the sofa. The Guardian-BBC clearly believes it is beyond reach, and on the home stretch.


Poort old Dave Cameron turns up looking for a bit of pre-election puff, and instead has to give an uncomfortable account after his worst week so far, and crashes straight into Marr's "inappropriate Murdoch" ambush. He is of course forced to "believe in a strong BBC with the licence fee funding it"...  Although he actually ended up making a half decent fist of it - possibly the best possible outcome in the trickiest of circumstances. Which suggests he is still surrounded and advised by the wrong people; especially the LDs who are continually undermining, sniping and briefing, and a civil service that remains seriously compromised by 13 years of careful infiltration and indoctrination by the likes of Common Purpose.

David Cameron trying his best

TMP has tried many times to warn the government that propaganda wing of the Labour Party was out of control, and suggested that re-purposing the BBC "back to Reith" was a priority, and instead a clumsy and apparently poorly advised DC managed to fumble his way, and pretty much destroy the Tory swing-vote kingmaker! Nevertheless, Murdoch still had a grenade left for Brown and the at least equally culpable Labour party, but Brown is already deep in history, and the public do not care. Maybe the transparent naivety of the charming posh boy will win a few hearts; we shall see.

Harriet Harman

Within a few minutes, an even more rabid than usual Harriet Harperson, Harridan of the Left and leading challenger for most hypocritical person at Westminster, was on the BBC yet again, this time haranguing Andrew Neil with the proposition that Jeremy Hunt rhymed with himself, and should have gone at the first glimpse of innuendo.

 


Andrew Neil did manage to proposition  tedious Hattie with the point that Lord Sugar was sufficiently disgusted by Ken Livingstone that he handed David Cameron his one moment of light relief in an otherwise dire week.

Three more yawn-filled years of the unpopular and charismatically challenged combo Balls/Milliband should be enough to put it all  straight, but everyone in the coalition REALLY needs to wake up and start doing the right things where the future of the BBC is concerned.

Without even touching on political bias, there is a rich enough list of "ultra vires" adventures (the £40m iPlayer, the >£200m website, BBC Vectra, the Salford Palace of Follies etc), to enable a decent roll of heads after a brief enquiry on value for money. The damage done to the UK independent and commercial sector in all those many areas that are stifled by the BBC is incalculable. All the way back to the original BBC micro!

As for "The Voice" - well shameful doesn't begin to describe the whole story of how this piece of prime tat has been manipulated onto our screen for the aggrandisement of the "celebs" and their record companies.

Nigel Farage on Thursday's BBC1 Question Time (last one before the election) won a lot of Romford support for his common sense remarks - see video alongside. Romford was once Toryland personified, but is plainly not impressed right now. So Nigel, use that 11% opinion poll rating, please change the party name to something more acceptably progressive (how about TMP? Maybe even "the real conservative party"?) and get some of those practical points and commonsense policies at least as well understood as your passion to stick two fingers up at the Euro superstate, while we still can.

 ... although the BBC tried its best to infiltrate  even a Romford QT audience with government hostile sceptics, and also impose Polly (high priestesses of Graun lefties) Toynbee and the very media savvy Labour MP and doyenne of BBC sofas Diane (what about those privately educated kids?) Abbott on them.

The government front man on QT was Chris Grayling, bless him and his good intentions; but Grayling is not known to be a very forceful or impressive presenter in such panel discussions, as he again confirmed. Where's WiIlly Hague hiding these days?

But at the end of the day, in the matter of following up those fateful Guardian "discoveries" that were so nicely timed to settle old scores for Labour with Murdoch for his defection from Labour support, this all seems to be more about keeping a neutered Murdoch & Co. off Guardian-BBC turf than dealing with the fundamental malaise that all the mainstream media - and now especially the BBC - remain far too powerful and influential for the good of the country at any level: social, economic and cultural.

Leveson is just an another costly enquiry about what bears do in the woods, so we despair; and I suspect you may do as well...

Yours, as ever

TMP

PS: We enjoyed this footnote on Nick Watts Linkedin entry:

Abucockup: what a mind boggling shambles this government is turning out to be.

This latest Londonistan fiasco seems all to believable. It seems that the European legal process requires the UK to offer this poisonous preacher "his rights" when this same government has allowed the US to come and grab UK citizens on vastly flimsier pretexts.

However, TMP's man at Westminster insists that the root problem is that the last Labour government gave employment to a diverse and inclusive array of generally barely competent civil servants in national and local government (plus the BBC of course) who were (and remain) unemployable in any situation that has responsibility to proper shareholders – and thus eagerly willing to carry out insane and stupid policies. Furthermore, this dumb but gratefully compliant workforce is lead by carefully indoctrinated and highly political factions within the civil service and unions, who are in effect “sleeper cells” left to carry on the Great Project after Labour’s inevitable removal, and resist all effort to impose a new regime of accountability and competence.

Thus the coalition steadfastly appears to be two ends of a pantomime horse – neither of which has any sentient capability that we have yet been able to discern. In other words, one cheek more than Gorgeous George Gallaway’s proposed fundament.

Words fail us.

Hoorah for George Galloway ..?

Just as there came a moment when the "Big 5" terrestrial TV broadcasters realised their game was up, and the broadcast hegemony was doomed by the arrival of "digital", so British politics changed forever when George Galloway came from nowhere and was swept along on a tide of frustration and despair.

None of the usual parties have anything to offer any of the electors, other than seemingly random imposition of ever more austerity, and ever more sinister, stupid and pointless regulation - and worst of all - yet more politics and politicians, in form of the many further gravy trains of devolution that play to the old ideas of "divide and rule".

So can the Internet do for British politics what digital TV did for broadcasting, and organise an audience that is spread across a thousand channels of opinion into a electable proposition?

We might as well accept now that Cameron is clumsily and hopelessly tainted and has missed a whole fistful of golden opportunities. The cabinet of millionaires and chums - barely any of whom have done a real day's work in their privileged lives - has turned out to be such a disappointment.

Cameron is evidently not the bloke for the job of PM, and George "don't call me Gideon" Osborne is to economic and political strategy, what the BBC is to objective, unbiased and "value for money" public broadcasting.

It seems like time for real change. And we need to be careful that is the right change, and not just change for change's sake - which is likely to be the fate of Ghastly George Galloway's futile proposition.

Do you want to live in the third world or not?

Since we have completely run out of money- tax avoidance has suddenly become the same sort of wickedness as tax evasion in the minds of the same expense-fiddling spendthrift politicians that wasted the entire reserves of the UK, and then another TRILLION quid. And mostly on hare-brained schemes designed to buy votes for their respective parties.

Although the Daily Mail has picked on Amazon and Google - with passing references to Microsoft and Apple, let us not forget those other stateless bucaneers that have very effectively "stuck up" bricks and mortar business that pay taxes and rates - eBay and PayPal.

But to focus on tax avoidance and fat cats is to precariously miss the point.

US - or should we say - Global? - online corporations that don't pay the same taxes as native businesses is just the start; they tend to source the cheapest skilled labour from the cheapest countries.

As to the “fair game” argument, it has consequences. The US would certainly not allow UK companies to have invaded their commercial life in the same way; they have re-written copyright and patent laws to suit themsleves, and now set about imposing them by turfing foreign citizens from their beds in their own countries at 4am to face extradition.

Ultimately customers who buy the products are going to be victims: when you choose an Apple Product, you are voting to accept - in the inevitable long run - the same type of working and living conditions that apply in the countries of manufacture. Use Google and look up “apple manufacture china scandal”.

Moreover, once a big US player is in a market, it is impossible for a UK (or any other) entrepreneur to get any sort of venture funding for a product or idea that it perceived to be even slightly competing in a vaguely similar market, because the venture money assumption is that the behemoth will steamroller the market sooner or later.

This is a crucial and fundamental issue and deserving of a proper Mail crusading effort; our utterly useless governnment and opposition do not have a plan or a clue how to deal with it, and the sight of Dave & Gideon sucking up to Google and rest without a plan, is simply apalling.

So then, consider the consequences of reducing UK corporation tax to 10% - and telling the EU and US to swivel on it? We really don’t have much time left to turn this mess around for the benefit of the UK.