The Tangible Whiff Of Desperation Permeates The 'Guardian'...

And the arguments get even more bizarre and narrowly-focussed:

There's a glimmer of hope:

But it seems no-one's listening. Oh, well... *orders more popcorn*

Envy Politics...

In a clip of the exchange, Cathy said: “Theresa, are you going to help people with learning difficulties? I’m being serious, I want you to do something for us.”

What do you want her to do for you? You've managed to get to a market town to question the PM on live TV, I'd say you weren't doing so bad...

...I’ve got mild learning disabilities and I haven’t got a carer at the moment and I’m angry and I would like somebody to help me because I can’t do everything I want to do.

Like what? We never quite find out. All Chatty Cathy can manage is boilerplate Labour rhetoric, as you'd expect from someone with learning difficulties:

“I’m talking about everybody, not just me, for everybody who’s got mental health and anybody who’s got learning disabilities. I want them not to have their money taken away from them and being crippled. The fat cats keep the money and us lot get nothing.”

'Their' money, 'taken away from them' and given to 'fat cats'. That sounds familiar! And of course, the usual suspects cheer on their stooge.

She went on to tell Mrs May that she wanted disability living allowance to be reinstated as the personal independence payment had left her worse off and said: “I can’t live off £100 a month.”

You won't be, because PiP is a top up - it's applied to whatever other sources of income you have, either from work or Jobseeker's Allowance. So you aren't expected to 'live off it'.

As the Prime Minister stopped off at a pet food stall, she was questioned by pensioner Duncan Macarthey 83, who lives in Abingdon, on why high earners were able to take advantage of Government schemes to buy new homes.

He said: "Rich people jumped on the bandwagon of that and got houses that they shouldn't have got."

Good luck designing a system that allowed only the targeted audience from benefiting, Mr McCarthy. And just who do you think should get the task of determining what sort of property people 'should get'? You?

Dictionary For Anne Perkins, STAT!

So, yesterday's announcement by the PM seems to have set off the snowflakes extra early:

Errr, hang on....

Back to the drawing board, Anne. Still, at least you aren't member of the Shadow Cabinet Liz McInnes:

That level of self-absorption is quite some achievement.

H/T: Longrider & half of Twitter

Don't Mention The War Truth!

Zac Goldsmith’s mayoral campaign team is investigating a claim that one of their canvassers made an Islamophobic remark about the Labour candidate, Sadiq Khan.

Gosh! What did he say?

That Muslims are behind most of the wars in the world today? That their system of government is vile and misogynistic? That they increase tensions in communities with their incessant demands for capitulation to their (alien) culture?

The unidentified man was said to have been distributing leaflets for the Conservative candidate when he allegedly referred to Khan as “the Muslim” in a doorstep exchange with Perry Pontac, of Streatham, south London.

Ummm, so....isn't he a Muslim, then?

Are we supposed to not notice?!?

Pontac told the Guardian that the exchange occurred at lunchtime on 22 December. He said that as he returned home from shopping, he saw a white, middle-aged man standing in the front garden who indicated he was distributing leaflets.

Pontac said he opened the door and picked up the “Back Zac” flyers before offering to hand them back to the canvasser. “I told him: ‘You can have these back because I’m not voting for him, I’m voting for the MP for Tooting [Khan],’” he said.

He claimed the man replied in a disdainful tone: “You’re voting for the Muslim?”

So, it was his tone he objected to? Did he really expect any other response, when he mounted his high horse, strapped on his buckler of Righteousness and sallied forth?

Pontac, who was born in the US but is now a naturalised UK citizen having lived in Britain for 45 years, said he had never met Khan and lived just outside of his constituency.

He said he was a Labour voter and was once a party member but dropped out when Tony Blair took the UK into the Iraq war.

As a writer, he said, he was careful with words and was sure that he did not mishear the canvasser. “I am very careful about what I say because I don’t want any holes to be picked in what I say ,” he said.

No, I bet. I hope getting your name in the Guardian for this provides you with the warm glow of (self)satisfaction you're clearly searching desperately for, Mr Pontac.

Post Title Of The Month: Special Election Edition

MacHeath in possibly one of the best bits of election news:

Quote Of The Month: Special Election Edition

David Duff makes some predictions for Cameron:

As to the rest, Dave needs to reinforce the efforts Alan Duncan-Smith and his team as they press home their changes to our corrupting welfare system. It was their efforts which, I suspect, brought in a lot of non-Tory sympathisers inside the privacy of the voting booths. He needs to get rid of that silly woman who took over from the excellent Michael Gove at Education. She is half-hearted at best and seems incapable of taking on the educational 'blob' made up of unions and bureaucrats. I would like to see Said Javid moved in there. He, I believe, or at least I hope, will be a future leader of the Tory party. Immigration will also require a tough operator capable of ramming things down the civil servants' throats and with a team beneath him who can ensure that orders are actually carried out!

Post Of The Month: Special Election Edition

Anna Raccoon on splendid form.

Leftism – It’s A Mental Disorder

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett outlines this perfectly:

This weekend has, for me, been like the most savage of hangovers. Waves of despair, punctuated by panic, anxiety, paranoia, and fear. A profound weltschmerz and a curious lack of appetite, not to mention a high-pitched monotone in my left ear that sadly, this time, cannot be put down to our decrepit fridge.

Good lord!

I keep remembering and then forgetting; a welcome pleasant thought will be interrupted by the terrifying reminder of what they are going to do to the Human Rights Act. As my father said, “It’s all too awful.”

I can see where you get it from, Rhiannon…

I wonder how many of you, up and down the country, have been trying to hold it together too. I retained my composure for most of Friday, despite no sleep, despite returning home with the birdsong to tell my boyfriend, a public sector worker, the bad news, which he met by rolling over, saying sleepily but with cold certainty, “Well that’s my job gone, then.”

Oh, really? What, the first act of the new government would be to personally sack your boyfriend, would it?

I held it together on College Green during a BBC World Service segment and, later, as I jokingly discussed with friends which sunny, socialist paradise we would decamp to before they shut the borders. I finally broke down properly at around 6pm on Friday, when I allowed myself, finally, to think about my little brother, who is severely disabled, and what might happen to him. Whether I should grab him and run for the hills so that we could camp down together under warm, soft blankets and not come down again until the bad people have gone.

‘The bad people’...? Christ, how old is she?

There’s something vaguely embarrassing about crying about the government. It buys into a stereotype of left-leaning people as overly emotional and childlike in their naive idealism and belief that there is a better way to run the country than cutting services to the bone. But those of us who cried over the election result should not feel embarrassed.

No, no, you should. You really, really should!

There are some who are saying that Labour was too left-wing, yet unlike the SNP, it failed to challenge austerity in any meaningful way, failed to encourage the passionate pride we should be taking in our welfare state. It failed to tell the stories of those who suffered most. It failed to listen.

I think it was the voters who decided not to listen. And I can’t blame them.

The deliciousness of this article is only increased by this footnote:

• This article was amended on 11 May 2015 to remove an incorrect statement that in 2014, government figures showed that 10,600 people had died within six months of being found fit for work by Atos.

ROFL!

Fallout…

Some people are getting it:

The Conservative victory came as a surprise only to those who focused too much on the deluge of numbers and data, the TV knockabout of he-said-she-said arguments, and the manufactured campaign moments – and not on the real reactions of people in their actual communities, far from the Westminster village.

Ah, those bigoted men and women, you mean? Yes, I can see why the political class did their level best to steer clear of them…

This election has weakened my faith in opinion polls and news packages, and affirmed my belief in the power of the humble vox pop. Vox populi, “voice of the people” – the phrase has become a bit of a dirty word in journalism, the job you send the junior reporter to go and do. But we need to reclaim it, and rediscover the art of speaking to the public – this applies to both our politicians and our media. Politics is, after all, a social science. It cannot rely on quantitative findings, but needs meaningful, direct encounters with people to understand what is going on.

Little use you trying to ‘understand’ if you then simply ignore?

But it seems even Suzanne Moore, of all people, has seen the writing on the Facebook wall:

In the echo chambers some of us inhabit online, everyone not only votes Labour but crows about it in 140 characters. I love social media and think it is brilliant in all kinds of ways for connecting us, but its limitations have been clearly shown in this election. Declaring one’s allegiances is fine if you understand who you are declaring them to. No one really does. Hope soon changed on election night into disbelieving, angry tweets. Is there an emoji for howling? All of this happened in self-selecting universes.

*chuckles*

Many of us got things wrong, not just the pollsters. The ones who got it a bit right are those who stepped out of the bubbles. A lot of media reported the debate going on within the media, or on TV. All meta-meta, but when I watched the filmed reports of my colleagues, John Harris and John Domokos, going round the country – talking to people instead of tweeting at them – the sense of doom and uncertainty was apparent.

*chuckles harder*

The England that was not keen on Labour was there in those shopping-centre car parks, those emptied-out Ballardian landscapes. This feeling I recognised from talking to Ukip supporters during happy hour in a theme pub in Ramsgate. The gap between what people were saying, and how this was reflected so little on social media, is something we need to understand. Or we literally are talking to ourselves.

And the ‘Guardian’ and ‘Indy’ circulation figures will tell you that that’s a very small audience.

The 'Guardian' Hits Peak Derangement...

Seriously, 'Guardian'? A politician you don't like kisses his wife and this is 'sickening'..?

Such A (Qualified) Relief...

Still early here at time of drafting (5:30 am), but the 'Guardian' seems to be calling it:

The biggest shock so far? Labour losing Gower! I guess even sheep can finally wake up to what the shepherd is really up to....

Prediction? Miliband gone by lunchtime. That's mine. How about you?

Decision Day

Well, it's here. And I know most of my readers won't be voting Labour.

But....on the offchance that someone you know is voting Labour, please remind them that this will be what they are voting for:

Gender politics being thrown under the bus when there's a medieval death cult to pander to -

Harriet Harman has given a partial justification of a gender-segregated Labour election rally, saying it was “better than a men-only meeting” and it would have been “rude” to boycott it.

'Islamaphobia' to become a crime -

...if it becomes an offence in English law to experience and express fear of Islam, many more of us may be unable to tell the truth without becoming criminals.

And as a result of that, this sort of behaviour to become commonplace in the UK -

“It would take me much longer than I’ve got to explain biraderi politics in Bradford, clan-based politics, and people actually do deliver 20, 30, 50 votes. Through their extended families, what tends to happen is, the kind of head of the household, or the kind of head of the clan, makes a decision how they’ll vote. So if somebody, in I don’t know, Penge (South London) said I could deliver you 50 votes you would laugh. But here . . . it’s true. They deliver bundles of votes.”

And if they are OK with that as a consequence of what they no doubt see as Labour rewarding them with someone else's money, then that's fine. But they can't say they've not been warned.

Do I think Call Me Dave will necessarily be better placed to stem the tide? No, frankly. I'm with DumbJon on that score. It seems we have an unenviable task of deciding between a quick capitulation to the forces of progressivism, or a slower, longer drawn out one.

So I'm casting my vote accordingly. Good luck, everyone. I think this might well turn out to be one of the most important elections of the 21st century.

Look, It’s Quite Simple: Don’t Put Your Hand Into The Letterbox!

The mother of an East Lancashire MP is recovering in hospital after a dog bit off the tip of her finger while she was delivering election leaflets.

No, she didn’t stop in the street to stroke it and it went for her – the dozy mare was posting stuff through the letterbox and pushed her hand through. I mean, it’s not a totally unknown occurrence, is it?

Now the MP is supporting calls for a major reform to dangerous dogs legislation and greater protection for postal workers, paper boys and girls and all kinds of leafletters.

Oh? Why?

Given the usual delight in ‘teaching granny to suck eggs’ guidance that the state employees so love, why aren’t you recommending a course on H&S for all leafletters that instructs them in how to put post through a door without falling prey to a dog (or cat)?

After all, even the Greens have worked this out!

Her husband Dr Maclennan, 54, who is standing in the Bursledon ward, was also attacked by another dog days earlier.

He says he has resorted to putting leaflets through doors with salad tongs to avoid being bitten.

See? Once bitten, twice shy! Usually, anyway...

Mrs Stephenson, who comes from Cheshire, said: “There was no warning notice on the gate or the house – it was quite a shock.”

Well, the reason for the ‘no signage’ is because those ubiquitous ‘beware of the dog’ signs were regarded by lawyers as admitting liability.

And since most leafletters don’t bother to read (or heed) the ‘no junk mail’ signs, given the amount of useless bumf I get through my door, what makes you think any signage would have any effect anyway?

Particularly on the political class and their supporters, who would believe they weren't delivering 'junk mail' since they believe in their 'right' to do as they please regardless?

MP Mr Stephenson said the attack, which happened around 12.30pm on Tuesday, was reported to Lancashire Police, but will not lead to a criminal investigation .

Mr Stephenson said: “I have been critical of the law relating to dangerous dogs a number of times before, which I believe fails to protect the public.

“Indeed I called for changes in the law in February after meeting the Police Federation, the National Dog Warden Association and the RSPCA.

“Something must be done to protect the postal workers, volunteers and the public from dangerous dogs and remind owners of their responsibilities.”

This ties in somewhat with Longrider’s recent post at 'Orphans' – the dog is secured on the owner's property, where it's entitled to be, not running loose in a public place.

You have encroached on his territory - if you are intent on shoving unsolicited mail through the door, then it’s incumbent on you to find another way to do it that doesn’t result in you putting your hand through the door.

No sympathy.

"Dave Hill! Dave Hill! Can you hear me, Dave Hill? Your boy took a hell of a beating!"

Awwww, look at his ickle glum face!

Oh, dear, oh dear, oh dear....

Boris Johnson's narrow re-election as London's executive mayor is a shiny consolation for a Conservative party battered in elections elsewhere, but a glum result for London and for the institution of London mayor itself.

Yes, the sight of toys leaving prams at maximum velocity is sweet, isn't it? Not everywhere, though, despite the few bitter clingers in the comments.

I leave the last word to one who knows well the sweet taste of victory:

Mongol General: Hao! Dai ye! We won again! This is good, but what is best in life?
Mongol: The open steppe, fleet horse, falcons at your wrist, and the wind in your hair.
Mongol General: Wrong! Conan! What is best in life? 
Conan: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women socialist backers.

The Choice Is Simple - #neveragainKen

There are myriad reasons not to be all that happy with Boris, but they pale in comparison to the reasons to be fearful of the prospect of another dose of the disaster that is Ken, who even the Labour Party had to hold its nose to select as candidate, despite many members misgivings.

And one of the chief reasons is this:

Police officers are to be stationed at every polling station in Tower Hamlets after the Met launched an official investigation into allegations of electoral fraud.

Officers will man all 70 polling locations in the borough on Thursday alongside borough enforcement officers to prevent voter intimidation.

Did anyone ever expect to see this in their lifetime?

Police sources today admitted the measures were unusual.

They forgot to add ‘for this country’…

The Met said it would investigate claims the poll in the Banglatown and Spitalfields ward had been rigged — giving victory to Gulam Robbani, an independent candidate backed by the borough’s mayor Lutfur Rahman. He won by just 43 votes.

One-in-seven of the postal votes cast in the by-election was rejected.

It’s no comfort that this – like the recent upset in Bradford - is mainly affecting Labour, either.

It’s tempting to chuckle at their discomfiture, to give in to unseemly glee as they are hoist on a petard of their own making. But it would be wrong.

This isn’t an attack on Labour, it’s an attack on the way our country is run and on how our electoral system works. It’s an attempt to subvert ‘one person, one vote’ to the communalist and corrupt systems preferred in the Third World. It must not stand.

So I’ll be voting for Boris today, with UKIP as second preference.

Labour Councillors Forget That Old People Vote…

…the young and the underclass, however, not so much:

Labour last night pledged to axe a council tax discount for “well-off” pensioners in Southampton to avert proposed hikes in the cost of care and services for the disabled.

And how do they plan to identify ‘well off’ pensioners?

Of course, it doesn’t really matter, since they haven’t got a hope in hell of getting in to implement it.

Opposition councillors urged ruling Tories to scrap the ten per cent discount, worth £1m, as Conservative council leaders agreed budget plans to axe 200 jobs to help save £14m.

It fell on deaf ears, as you might expect.

Labour, which aims to seize power at the Civic Centre in May elections, warned that proposed Tory cuts will fall disproportionately on the elderly and vulnerable.

So, taking away a rebate for those same ‘elderly’ (unless it was means tested) wouldn’t help, would it?

Group leader Councillor Richard Williams said: “In tough times like these, the better off should shoulder more of the challenges, not those with the least. That’s why we want to reallocate the £1m rich pensioners’ council tax discount to services that help many more elderly and vulnerable people.”

It’s just sound bites, isn’t it? You’ve no idea how many are actually ‘rich’ and it’d cost far more to identify them and administer this cut than you’d save.

And just what would you spend any savings on anyway?

Labour would also save the Mount Pleasant community language service, protect the street-cleaning budget and overturn a £90,000 cut in support to people suffering domestic violence, Cllr Williams said.

Great! I’m sure Great Auntie Doris will happily forgo her council tax rebate knowing it’s going to immigrants, the underclass and services that the council should never be cutting in the first place.

And I’m sure she’ll vote for you as a result.

Insanity!

Oh, you have to be kidding...

What an utter shambles!

What A Night!

Well, it looks on course to be a tiny, tiny Con majority, which is all that iDave deserves, frankly...

Some welcome news (Vera Baird loses her seat, as does Jackboots Jacqui!) and some unwelcome news (Balls retains his). Good to see Esther Rantzen humiliated, even though she did allow Labour to retain the seat.

Update: As Angry Exile points out, Charles Clarke was also herded off to the Safety Elephant's Graveyard...

/cheer

The SAS Lieutenant-Colonel on the ground, believing that ‘politically motivated’ commanders in the UK were ‘unable to make rational and effective decisions’, sent in a rescue team anyway – fearful that within hours the captured men could have been spirited away or executed.

The rescuers blasted their way into the police station in Basra where the two soldiers were being held and saved them.

Something to think about when you stroll to the voting booth today..?

Election Day Looms...

Well, tomorrow will be the Big Day.

I'm all set. For the first time in my life I'm going to either stay up or (more likely!) wake up at 3:00am, when they expect the first results to come in.

I've got Friday off, I've got the web (assuming my occasionally glitchy router holds up - can these things wear out? I've been rebooting it a lot lately...), I've got Stuart Sharpe's gorgeous little election app on my iPhone, and I've got whatever fellow bloggers and Tweeters will also be up at that unusually early hour to keep me company.

And it strikes me that - with the exception of the Leader's Debates on TV - it's been blogging that has taught me more about the differences, personalities and proposed policies of the main and minor parties than the MSM has done.

Whether it's been semi-serious political comparisions of the main parties with breakfast cereals at LfaT's blog, or motorbikes at Hogsday's blog, or hard-hitting finncial analysis of just what sort of mess we are really in at Burning Our Money, or incisive analysis of just why some events of this election cycle encapsulate our nation at Anna Raccoon's blog and Counting Cats..., or in-depth looks at just what we are likely letting ourselves in for at Dumb Jon's, I've been far, far more impressed with the quality of bloggers and blogging than with any number of talking heads on TV or well-paid pundits in the dead tree press.

So, here's to blogging. And here's to our political system. May it serve us all well tomorrow.

Or if we make the wrong choices, serve us right!