Blah Blah Flowers

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to resign.

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to declassify scientology as a reglion. I think ze possibly means religion.

Labels: Gordon Brown, Labour, petitions, Scientology

Is Team Blonde Buffoon dialling back expectations on the return of the Routemaster?

The Mayor's plans for a new generation Routemaster may not happen, his new transport boss admitted today. Kulveer Ranger, Boris Johnson's director of transport policy, said that a design competition would be launched - but if no bid was good enough they would look again at the pledge.

This will be good news, the last thing we need is the huge unnecessary expense of replacing a fleet of perfectly adequate buses with much less accessible designs in the name of conservative (rather than Conservative) nostalgia. However, seeing as he insisted on making such a big point of this policy during this campaign that we can have some justifiable giggles that New Conservatism has overtaken New Labour for breaking campaign promises once in power.

Though hopefully it's impossible to mistake me for a supporter of the Blair/Brown party I have been feeling lately how I assume Tories felt in those last few months before May the 1st 1997. Baring some massive disaster that gives him the chance to look commanding and reassuring Gordon Brown now looks like a dead Prime Minister walking, certainly all the friends of Blair lining up to put the boot in aren't helping.

I'm of the generation that grew up knowing no different than a Conservative government and the likelihood of that returning strikes more cold dread into my heart than the liberty-cancelling, ID Card supporting Labour party. At the moment David Cameron doesn't quite have that air of Blair in 1996 of just waiting to assume the Premiership that everyone knew would soon be his but it can't be much longer in coming. The tragedy for the country is that Boris becoming mayor proves that no-one who voted for him were concerned with his policies, I've yet to speak to or here from anyone that voted for what he said he would do, they either voted Ken out or because they thought the mayorship could be run by a part-time gameshow host. The lesson Cameron is free to draw for this is that he doesn't need to make pretences of creeping leftwards, he's likely to be voted in if the Conservative party manifesto was 'compulsory euthanasia of all Conservative party members and Daily Mail readers' and the prospect of Oliver Letwin getting gay with Michael Gove televised nightly. It'll also mean that they'll have a manifesto promise to scrap ID Cards then keep them when they get in, much as the Labour Party felt that a Freedom of Information act was a necessity right up until the point they had the power to bring it in.

Some of my friends hope that Prime Minister 'Dave' will inspire a fresh wave of activism, such as those against Clause 28. I'm less hopeful, though I take comfort in the fact it'll better to have my face ground into the dirt by the boot of a Conservative that calls themselves a Conservative rather than a Tory that calls themself Labour.

Labels: Boris 'Buffoon' Johnson, Conservatives, David Cameron, Gordon Brown, Labour, London, London Mayor

Gordon Brown wants yer vitals! While making organ donation opt-out rather than opt-in is a good idea, last time I checked the Government supported the National Blood Service's prejudice against men who have oral or anal sex. So, either this proposal of Brown's will be quietly dropped, or the Blood Service will be made to see sense, or gay mens organs will be taken but only if they're scrubbed clean after death.

Labels: gay, Gordon Brown, Government, health, homophobia

Obviously I'm no friend of the Labour Party but some of the headlines over Gordon Brown's decision not to call an unnecessary General Election now seem rather harsh. We can ignore News International, who's policy of claiming that every full stop of government policy is dictated by a NotW poll rather than what Murdoch wants to do today went past ridiculous some time ago and is now over the cliff with the legs still moving, Wil. E. Coyote style. Even the Sindy is going for the jugular, with numerous cartoons of Gordo spilling or not drinking from the bottle marked Courage. But all the news organisations seem to be engaged in a pretense that it was the Government, not they, that were driving the story of whether there was going to be a snap election.

I expect that in a day or two, once the election non-story has died down, there will be a return to the 'Is Ming too old to be a political leader?' story, because Cameron has done enough to put down some of the stories about his leadership for a while (until anyone else in the party says anything else about Tory policy and exposes that they are secretely glad not to fight an election when they don't have a clue what to stand on). I don't know who can take the blame for this, but it does seem that in the last few years, there's been at least one main political story rumbling on and on at any one time, Charlie Kennedy and the whisky bottle, Why have the Lib Dems chosen Ming Campbell, Cameron takes over the Tories, the Cameron bounce, When will Tony Blair leave, why did he announce a date so far in advance, counting down Blair's last three months/two months/six weeks/one week/one day/one hour in office, wasn't Tony Blair a great PM? The Brown bounce, the Cameron stumble, the unnecesary election...

Labels: Conservatives, David Cameron, Gordon Brown, Labour, politics

Gah, stuff to do, stuff to do, thank Crickey I'm on leave this week as I'm just so tired right now.

Anyway, just time to dump a few links in your laps for your edufictation...

Iraqi interpreters and other key support staff who have risked their lives to work for Britain are to be allowed to settle in the United Kingdom.

And done just in time to avoid the meeting that was being organised in one of the rooms in the Palace of Westminster about this. Bollocks to it being 'a Times campaign', everyone played their part.

Meanwhile, the Home Secretary is urged to respond to allegations that failed asylum seekers have the shit kicked out of them as they are deported. The Indy had a big report on this yesterday, shocking if true but not surprising.

This ban will not stop us. There's going to be a Stop the War demo on Monday, but the police have decided it's illegal and dusted down legislation centuries old to justify their reasoning (which is interesting because although Gordon Brown promised to repeal SOCPA when he finally took to the thrown I believe it's still in force right now). More info here.

And finally, for some 'light relief', Celebrity racist Danielle Lloyd says she "felt like a man" after being forced to venture out in public with hairy armpits as part of a TV documentary. More TV fakery as it was prosthetic underarm hair, she wasn't even asked to just not shave for a while.

Labels: beauty, Daily Mail, demonstrations, Gordon Brown, immigration, Iraq, Parliament, The War Against Terror, United Kingdom, women

David Cameron in big time freakout. We're a few months into the Gordon Brown premiership and not only has the country not ground to a halt but he's also managed to come out of crises looking pretty good. Which probably explains why Cameron has decided that the new Tory policy is to ditch all the Green, Youtube, Blairite stuff and headback to old school Tory values, you know, the things that helped them to those three General Election defeats. So John Redwood is let out of the cupboard under the stairs where they keep the crazy unpopular members of the party and now we have more of that stuff that always feels like it should be prefaced with the words "I'm not a racist but..."

The whistling sound you can hear is from Gordon Brown's advisors as they exhale in relief, realising that David Cameron has handed them the next election, whenever Brown decides to call it. The grinding noise is Tony Blair's teeth when he realises that his old enemy is going to win a general election, based on his own negligable popularity and not dragged down by the memory of Blair, whom he followed into every unpopular policy. At least David can stop riding that bicycle to work now, his 'green' credentials aren't going to whitewash the brown slurry coming from Tory Central Office (do you see what I did there?).

Related: How did David Cameron lose his nerve and his bearings in just one month? Martin Bright looks at the disarray that has engulfed the Conservatives since Gordon Brown became Prime Minister.

Labels: Conservatives, David Cameron, Gordon Brown, Labour, politics, Tony Blair

At least someone is upset by Tony Blair's departure...

Labels: Gordon Brown, Labour, Tony Blair, YouTube

Tory MP Quentin Davies defects to Labour, though as his letter seems to be entirely about how much he dislikes David Cameron and the direction he's taking the Conservative party in I'm not sure if it's good political sense for Gordon Brown to welcome Mr Davies aboard, does New New Labour really want to be associated with Old Toryism?

Labels: Conservatives, David Cameron, Gordon Brown, Labour

It amuses me that, while glancing at wikipedia, the page on Gordon Brown has had to have anonymous editing disabled while Tony Blair's page hasn't. I don't know whether this means that Brownites should be considered more trustworthy or whether that means that they're too busy to engage in tit-for-tat while Blairites now have time on their hands waiting for tomorrow.

Labels: Gordon Brown, Government, Tony Blair, United Kingdom

Much as there are various levels to how terrified the Government would like us to be*, ranging from flacid to ejaculating with terror! should there not be some similar scale to Tony Blair's sanity, if not for us, then for the benefit of his MPs? Perhaps it could range from Clause 4 was outdated to I can tell which children are going to be troublemakers before they're born using my brane! What exactly is the Labour party up to? I've seen lemmings who've just been fired from their jobs as kamikaze pilots with better self-preservation skills than this shower of muppets. By encouraging a cult of personality Labour can confidently blame their current poor opinion poll figures on one man, Tony Blair. But presumably it's the memory of those dismal 1980s that's stopping them from kicking him off the throne before he takes to carrying a handbag and announcing "we are a grandmother", they're worried that if Blair leaves at any time other than of his own choosing then they are dooming themselves to another generation in Opposition. However, the harsh truth of politics is that Labour are now in a position where they could announce they've discovered a cure for eternal life and everyone will just moan "great, all that money I wasted on a pension scheme" while reading a four page colour supplement on the Leader of the Opposition drowning kittens.

But I'm torn as to why exactly Tony is hanging on, and I suspect Blair is too. He's now given up on any Earthly authority agreeing with him that invading Iraq was a good idea (I've heard that when he dies he wants his ashes blown into space as, considering the universe is infinite there'll be something out there with the power to bring him back to life and say "you were right") so he's now concentrating on what's really important: Fucking up Gordon Brown. He seems to have two options for doing this which are, unfortunately, fairly exclusive. However, Tony is not one for avoiding a decision when he can just take two paths. The first plan is to find a protege who could fight Brown and win. They've come and gone (Steven Byers) but generally it's whoever is wearing the number three jersey. He'll be very happy with how John Reid saved us all from terror over the summer* and the fact that people were more interested in the idea of John Prescott in a cowboy hat and very little else in June rather than the Chancellor's second son. And someone from John Reid's team was on Newsnight on Thursday to deny her boss had any ambitions for the top chair so that's about as clear as you can get: John Reid knows how to kill a man without leaving a mark, Gordon Brown should watch which alleyways he walks down.

Tony Blair's second plan is scorched earth, when he leaves Number 10 he'll also be leaving British politics, so with the Labour party having outlived it's usefulness to his ambitions he's quite happy to have it in such a parlous state that should Gordon Brown be leader he'll be so busy fighting fires in his own backyard that it'll make the Major years look like a model in how to run a tight ship. If Blair cannot prevent Brown becoming Prime Minister he certainly doesn't want him winning elections as well.

Blair stopped (even the pretense of) running this country for the benefit of the British people some time ago, 11th of September 2001 as memory serves. But now he's not doing it for the Americans or even Newscorp any more**, now he's doing it purely out of spite*.


* And how confident do you feel that, at the time of writing, the crisis level has not changed since the 14th of August?

** Both Blair and Reid have made recent pilgrimages to kiss the ring of Rupert Murdoch. Does anyone know the last time Gordon Brown made the necessary genuflections?

Labels: 11/09/01, Gordon Brown, Labour, The War Against Terror, Tony Blair