Posts Tagged ‘Cameron’
Born to Rule? Computer Says “No”!
One of the more interesting follies on display in Westminster these days is the government’s absolute conviction that they are “right”, manifested most vividly in Cameron’s impotent fury at being brought to heel in the Commons by John Bercow. That sense of entitlement is gaining an increasingly brittle tone as they are dragged ever closer to an electoral precipice beyond which there is surely no recovery.
The sheer ‘wrongness’ of this conviction is seen again in Rebekah Brooks asserting her “complete bafflement” as to why she has been charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, and in Jeremy Hunt’s shrill insistance that he has behaved with the utmost probity in his handling of the BSkyB takeover. David Cameron meanwhile can be presumed to be sticking both fingers in his ears, rocking back and forth emitting a high pitched keening noise to block out the unwelcome prospect of cross examination by the Leveson Enquiry proving to be inconveniently thorough.
One would almost feel sorry for these wretched idealogues if the policies they were hell bent on introducing weren’t so palpably self serving. Their problem is, that in their mad minds, the cosying up to Murdoch’s News International is just part of “Rolling up our sleeves” and “Getting the job done”. As David Cameron never tires of telling us “I spent many years working in the media” (as some kind of PR stooge for a television company) and here one would have to say that many years working in the media has turned better people than David Cameron into power crazed sociopaths obsessed with the advancement of self.
I digress. The real point here is one that anyone who has had any exposure to corporate politics will recognise. The reality of what has happened in the Murdoch empire. There is enough of a chasm between the world of influence and power represented by the Tories and their media cronies and the world of semantics and law required by the Leveson prosecutors for the phrase “I have no recollection…” to be assumed to be a reasonable defence. In the fifth form this would roughly translate as “…I never!…”.
The fact is that big business is a world of sophistication away from the shopping mall. In this context, Cameron taking a posse of arms dealers with him on his tour of the far east seems entirely natural. The game is about influence and connections, it is no longer about superb products, that’s just the PR machine. Cameron witters about our world class security products (by which he is presumably referring to the instruments of torture that proved such a hit in the middle east) as if they were a gift we are about to bestow on the hapless countries we’ve singled out as “growth markets”.
In Cameron, Osborne and the rest of this bungling crew we have a government so firmly in thrall to the methods and madness of big business that they genuinely can’t see anything wrong. To many of us, the arms trade is tainted, a thing we wish the world could do without. To a businessman it’s just another way of turning a fast buck. Who cares if we’re enabling some tin pot despot, so long as it allows us into the market.
The Cameron family fortune was made by exploiting loopholes in the tax laws to establish some of the first offshore funds, siphoning millions out of the UK economy in order to maximise the returns for the very wealthy. It’s in his DNA. George Osborne inherited his multi million pound fortune on his 21st birthday. This government don’t know any other way to do things, pursuit of the pound without any guiding principles turns ugly very quickly. Meanwhile, big business does what it always has done, weave webs of influence into which these hapless inheritants have willingly hurled themselves. We can revile Murdoch and his ilk, but we can’t blame them for behaving like businessmen. As somebody astutely observed, in business, when you push on an open door, you generally go in. The blame then rests squarely on the shoulders of the politicians that have embraced this poisonous ideology.
Cameron is a wannabe Tony Blair, but what differentiates these Tories from the Blair government they would so dearly like to emulate is that Blair, for all his many faults was driven by a vision that was about more than the mere accumulation of wealth. The New Labour project was a revolution in society and politics, a revolution that delivered on many of its promises to the electorate and crucially, got re-elected with crushing majorities, time and time again. And ironically, a generation grew up for better or worse, in a climate of unprecedented wealth and enjoyed what now look suspiciously like the best years of their lives under that Labour government. I say ironically, because the generation that will grow up underneath these Tories should we be so ignorant as to reelect them, will experience nothing of the kind.
The Tories’ worst crime is that of arrogance. Against a government as unpopular as Gordon Brown’s they could not muster a majority. The smoking gun, if there is one, lies in the fact that chief spin doctor and News International shareholder Andy Coulson was able to work without high level security clearance in a job where he had access to material that any fool can see should be classed as confidential. If rumour is correct, Cameron’s main concern in the hiring of Coulson was that he sign an agreement not to write a memoir about “the Cameron Years”. It seems as though Cameron was so convinced of his entitlement to power that when he finally got it, he acted as though he thought none of the checks and balances applied to him. He saw no reason not to socialise with the Wades and the Murdochs, because their interests he naively assumed were his interests and therefore the country’s interests. It may very well be that there was no secret contract, but for a PR man, Cameron is exceptionally naive – in these days of the internet and wall to wall news, we see the whole story unfold and as the saying goes, if it looks like a crock and smells like a crock then it very probably is a crock.
Panic in the Streets of Whitehall
I’ve put off writing this post in the aftermath of the rioting, partly because I’m keenly aware that ranting about politics is not what this blog was originally set up to do, partly because I suspected in my cynical and road weary fashion that we’d get a bunch of soundbytes from Prime Minister Cameron asserting qualities such as ‘leadership’, blaming riots on the previous administration, followed by well, no coherent action. I wanted to see, if I was right.
Well frankly, in my wildest and most paranoid dreams I could not have predicted what a complete hash Cameron would make of it.
Firstly we got the soundbytes, exactly as expected. There was a lot of confrontational language on display. Words such as “fightback”, phrases like “zero tolerance” – not the words I would have chosen when dealing with a situation as potentially combustible as this, but exactly the sort of old fashioned Tory tripe I had expected to hear from Cameron.
And it got worse. Cameron enthusiastically blamed the Labour Party, the Police, the absent fathers – everyone and everything except the cuts, the joblessness and the despair his policies have visited upon the poorer sections of society. He proposed that not just the criminals, but their entire families be evicted from social housing. A suggestion immediately acted upon by Westminster council. A suggestion that flies in the face of fairness, human rights and common sense. And possibly the law.
Next, after a consultative process that must have lasted oh, at least five minutes, Cameron proposed to shut down Twitter, Blackberry messaging and damn it, if necessary the entire internet to stop these rioters communicating. I expect the telephone service and the royal mail to swiftly follow. Apart from the implausibility of the coalition actually doing this, isn’t this exactly what he so vociferously condemned the Egyptian government for attempting six months ago?
And then it got hilariously, stupidly, downright incompetently even worse. Without consultation with the police forces, Cameron appointed one Bill Bratton, ex chief of police for LA, a district so ridden with gang violence that it makes Tottenham look like Camberwick Green, to advise the government on how to deal with the societal issues that caused the riots. As offensive as this idea must have seemed to our own police forces, it was about to get even worse.
Bill Bratton is chairman of the private detective agency Kroll. (You can see where this is heading, right?) In June this year, Kroll were accused very publicly and in formal court papers by Dr Martin Coward, a city investment manager, of illegally planting covert surveillance equipment in his house and car. Evidence submitted to the court included the surveillance equipment and hilariously, a video of the goon squad going about their business. But of course as we well know, Cameron is a man who believes in second chances, so obviously he got his people to carry out background checks? Well, with crushing inevitability, it seems no background checks were carried out. So for the sake of a soundbyte, Cameron has done exactly the same thing he did with Andy Coulson. Arrogant? Ignorant? Incompetent? all of these?
There is just one good thing about this government. It is impossible to countenance the electorate ever again falling for a politician who combines poor leadership, empty promises and an empty headed view of people based solely on class, connections and money? Well, isn’t it?
One of Those Days in England
It’s hard after three days of the worst and most pointless rioting the UK has ever suffered, to put words together that don’t sound like cliches. I guess in part its because I used to live in London, only a few hundred yards away from where the violence erupted in Enfield and I know people who still live in London, in Tottenham and Wood Green where the worst of the violence was experienced. I feel guilty that I was powerless to help and ashamed that they had to suffer this awful ordeal. It must have been terrifying. I am only glad that my friends have come through unscathed.
Let’s not fool ourselves, these riots were not, unlike the student riots earlier this year, motivated by politics. They were not race riots, They were not the riots of protest in any sense whatsoever. This was society turning on itself. Looters robbing local stores, putting local people out of business. Wrecking lives, destroying confidence, ushering in a lawlessness and a new age of stupidity, selfishness, greed and cowardice. Let David Cameron talk about the “Big Society”.
The violence we have seen was, and continues to be perpetrated by a section of society that the government has made pay, in terms of jobs, cuts to services, cuts to immigration, for the disaster that was visited upon the west by the institutionalised greed of the financial sector. We have seen corporate greed in the shape of the News of the World obfuscate, avoid and misdirect a government enquiry, knowing that they would not be recalled. It sends a message. James Murdoch, immaculately groomed, fluent in corporatese, giving evidence that so far two of the sacked NoTW employees have denounced as ‘mistaken’ sends an unmistakeable message. And that message, received on the streets of Tottenham is “Fuck You”.
We read about the mysterious workings of the Chipping Norton set that apparently control the government, creeping in by the back door to Downing Street and know that their lifestyles, of shopping in Venice, Hunting, Polo and Governing small European countries, is not for us. The message again, received on the streets of Tottenham is “Fuck You”.
We have suffered in Cameron and Osborne, leaders so utterly lacking in empathy that Cameron considers it more important to massage his ego by having his photograph taken, tipping an Italian waitress this weekend instead of cancelling his holiday and flying back to London to witness first hand the destruction his “Big Society” has visited upon the country he aspires to govern.
We have also seen the incredible amplification that social media can achieve. Sadly, initially by facilitating the carnage, but latterly by providing a channel to organise the clean up Hackney campaign.
I’m through writing about this. Others will do it much better and more eloquently. I’m ashamed to be english today and that I think is a feeling a lot of english people share.
The Big Society Swindle
“On the very day that the chancellor raised another £800m in tax from bankers – having already introduced the toughest rules on bankers’ pay anywhere in the developed world – it beggars belief that anyone could claim that donors to the Conservative Party are influencing policy…” – A Conservative Party Spokesman.
Cobblers. No, actually a blatant lie. Let’s look at the facts.
In 2005, the year that David Cameron became Tory leader, donations to the Conservatives from the City amounted to 25% of total funding. In 2010, firms and individuals in the city donated £11.4 million – exactly 50.8% of the party’s funding.
Those that give more than £50,000, no less than 57 individuals, are invited to join David Cameron and other senior figures at dinners, lunches, drinks receptions and important campaign launches. The majority of this privileged elite are hedge fund managers and brokers.
In return, the government, behind closed doors are proposing amendments to the tax acts of 1998 and 2009 which will effectively legitimise the shady offshore activities of these individuals, allowing them to avoid paying tax, at all, on any monies which have come from anywhere else at all, other than Britain. Only one other country in the world allows this state of affairs – Switzerland.
Adding insult to injury, the cost of funding these overseas offices will be an allowable expense against UK Tax. We already know that Corporation tax is being reduced to 24%, the lowest rate of any Western economy.
David Cameron said on Sunday, “What I want is tax revenue from the banks into the Exchequer, so we can help rebuild this economy.” This is what he wants the electorate to believe. In actual fact, he is doing just the opposite. These tax breaks will accelerate the movement of jobs and cash out of the country. The scale of the deception is massive.
Let’s have a look at Conservative party process. Almost all the members of the seven committees the government set up “to provide strategic oversight of the development of corporate tax policy” are corporate executives. Among them are representatives of Vodafone, Tesco, BP, British American Tobacco and several of the major banks: HSBC, Santander, Standard Chartered, Citigroup, Schroders, RBS and Barclays. So, no influence there then.
Meanwhile, back in the Big Society, a homeless man in St. Albans had an asbo served on him, banning him from St. Albans, his hometown. It’s a caring, sharing society allright.
Armchair Assassins pt II
I am moved to take issue with the machinations of the Adam Smith Institute, which you will remember is the right wing think tank advising on government policy.
The latest proposal underpinning the ‘Big Society’ is that legal aid for civil compensation cases should be removed. The premise of legal aid is that anyone, no matter how badly funded, is able to instigate legal proceedings if they feel they have suffered an injustice. This is one of the checks and balances that help to keep our society just and fair.
The removal of this right would risk endangering that balance. The UK may have one of the highest legal aid bills in the world, standing at £2.2 billion in 2007, however not all of that figure would be covered by civil cases, a proportion is also made available for defending criminal prosecutions.
In a loosely connected event, the deputy prime minister, Clegg, has said that the IFS report demonstrating that the emergency budget is regressive in that the working classes and the jobless will be hit proportionately harder than the middle classes and the rich, is “partial”. This is rubbish of the kind that the coalition are particularly fond of spouting, presumably because having fooled the electorate with authoritative pronouncements, they assume the tactic will continue to work. The report was partly funded by the Campaign against Child Poverty, precisely the kind of organisation that will go out of business as a result of the cuts. That doesn’t make the report partial.
The Conservative mantra that the national deficit must be paid for by reducing state supplied services (largely to the poor and the arts) is demonstrably false. Against a government deficit of £157 billion, tax evasion (of the criminal variety alone) costs the treasury £15 billion per year. Conservative action on this point – nil, as in zero, nada.
When I see the issue of banker’s bonuses being addressed, when the banks actually pay back the massive loans that the previous government made to bail them out, then I might believe that the coalition government is something other than a return to old Tory values. Of course with both Cameron and Clegg coming from families with banking in their blood, it’s no surprise to see that this issue is not being addressed.
I do not like what is happening in this country. It is easy to forget that under a socialist government, society became more inclusive, more tolerant, more civilised. When we see funding to the Film Council removed, without a fall back plan, we hear the rhetoric of divide and rule (Contrary to the nonsense put about by Jeremy Hunt, the heads of the Film Council are not in fact particularly highly paid, both by the standards of the film industry or indeed by the standards of government).
I hope, though I doubt it, that some of the people who voted conservative or liberal democrat in the last election are now hanging their heads in shame. The voters have been sold a lie, duped in other words. Cameron and Clegg are ideologically identical. United in government, with each passing reform, they are raising the drawbridge. Welcome to the ‘Big Society’, it’s every man for himself.
