Guido in the Process of Delivering Some Ownage.

The insidious and State-funded dirt-diggers Damien McBride and his pet fringe Derek Draper are about to get pwned by Guido and it looks like it will be a good one...

McBride! Look up!!!!...here it comes!

That'll teach you for dirtying the hood.

The Mask slips still futher

At times the Government puts up a little effort to pretend to be our elected representatives.

I now hear that the UK Police will be asked/allowed/enabled/directed to enter your property, vis your computer hard drive without your permission, without notification, nor with a warrant. They will do so if the active agent is a "foreign" Police force, i.e. another EU force.

Therefore, "our"* Government is happy to see our Police be a proxy for an EU Member State force, bypassing our Courts and English Common Law.

The EU is not one for Rule of Law and the EU is the source of this outrage. I doubt the EU will see it as an outrage, for it probably makes it "easier" for them to perform their activities -NEVER a sufficient justification for reducing the rights of the individual.

This Labour Administration has shown it is now no more than an EU Gaulieter. The UK Police is clearly considered no more superior with regards to our liberties than any other EU force. We have seen how foreign courts can demand the UK Police jump and arrest someone, but again, I do believe that the UK Government no longer considers them "foreign", just as they do not appear to consider other EU forces as "foreign".

This is how it now appears - that the Labour Administration does not consider EU Member States as "foreign", nor the EU Parliament, nor the EU Commission, but views the UK as just a collection of Regions with no more or less sovereignty over us as any other EU Region.

Come on, you bunch of Fabian Fifth Columnist lickspittles. Admit it. Have the stones. Then we can begin your trial for Treason.

BTW, forget the Tory Administration, they are Centrists who are part of the problem. The LibDems are a nest of Fabians for sure. Any Libertarians therein have got to realise this now, especially after the horsetrading that is going on over some so-called "National Unity" Government. Anyone who thinks this will do anything other than swallow up and spit out the Lib Dems is naive. Not forgetting that UKIP has an historic membership of albatrosses who are united by one thing only - a hatred of all things EU, so the true Libertarians therein are also up the swanee.

Nope, the one party that stands for Rule of Law, yet sees the EU and a bloated State as a threat to it, is the Libertarian Party. The Libertarian Party is the one party that will not stand in the way** of you to live your own private life as Tory or as Socialist as you want to be, as long as you do not try and coerce others to be also, or make them pay for it against their will. Set up your voluntary workers collective or go it alone and set yourself moral standards...for yourself, we will not stop you. Try and impose your dogma on others and you have another thing coming, mind.

* "our" as in a cockroach found in one's kitchen could be considered "one's cockroach".

** note the term "not stand in the way", as opposed to the language of the others, which talks of "allowing". Allow - who do they think they are!

"Social Justice" addling the mind of IDS

Oh dear, we see the idea of "social justice" infesting the Tory Party. Well meaning people begin to pave the road to hell while Collectivists look on and smile at the "good work" of their "useful idiots".

Ian Duncan Smith has begun to push the idea by saying on the Today programme today that Council tenants be given equity as a "reward" for good behaviour and paying their rent on time...

Before I continue, let us refresh ourselves about the idea of "social justice".

Social Justice is an odious term. It is built upon the concept of "social rights" upon which I would not need to improve upon the words of J.S. Mill:

So monstrous a principle is far more dangerous than any single interference with liberty; there is no violation of liberty which it would not justify.

Wrongheaded.

The "reward" for behaving and paying your rent is, surely, to continue to be provided with subsidised housing! Once you begin to get a "right" - and you can bet your bottom dollar (if you still have it) that these people will make it "law" - to equity just for upholding a contract, then it will become the obligation of the State to PROVE that people are not able to gain their "entitlements". It will be a ratchet, as is anything that has the ghastly phrase "social justice" pinned to it.

Guido seems to like it. I cannot see why. Anyone thinking this through without rose tints will see where this will lead us. 

If you translate IDS's words it can be said thus:

Taxpayers are forced to subsidise housing that people could end up gaining equity in for free just because those people have paid a subsidised rent on time and not misbehaved.

Apart from the fact that it is another example of "prizes for all" and heaping praise on people for just behaving like a civilised human being, it is, in effect, a forced equity transfer from the taxpayer to those in "social housing". 

It is, in a word, extortion.

Keynes

Keynes famously said "When the facts change, I change my mind".

Alas, he was wrong from the outset, so as that fact did not change, neither did he change is mind.

He also said "In the long run we are all dead", which might give us a hint at why he was happy to mortgage the future.

Keynes is so utterly wrong, yet now at the very point when we should reject his dysfunctional, bankrupt ideology the more, Gordon Brown and Darling are embracing him.

Today's borrowing is taxation...with interest. Borrowing today reduces the spending power of every pound in every pocket, so it is an insidious, indirect and unavoidable taxation upon us all. It is taxation for the future, too, as that debt plus interest needs to be repaid. As WSC said, taxing your way to prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket trying to lift himself up by the handle.

The only possible reason I can see for all this is that the Government wishes to conduct a scorched earth policy so that the next Tory government will be a short one. Ladder-kickers, the lot of 'em.

If you want to stimulate the economy, make it run faster, reduce the friction. Reduce government spending. 

It is an absurd notion to think that by taking money away from individuals, handing it to a bunch of the Government's pet friends, mainly in the construction industry, to then spend and employ people, that somehow those people employed and suppliers supplied will magically create demand across all the economy. How about just not doing anything so that everyone keeps their money and can spend it directly in the first place? How about REDUCING taxation so people feel more confident, can pay off their loans and then resume spending? Oh no, that alternative does not require the State to be involved. Its mates cannot get largesse. It is then not the arbiter, the director of resources. It will not be able to delude itself that it knows best.

Government Debt and Hazel Blears

I place economy among the first and most important virtues, and public debt as the greatest of dangers to be feared. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. If we run into such debts, we must be taxed in our meat and drink, in our necessities and in our comforts, in our labor and in our amusements. If we can prevent the government from wasting the labor of the people, under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy. - Thomas Jefferson.

We have approaching £700bln in government debt and yet that moron, mad Hazel Blears, thinks the government has money in hand to blow on subsidising an already over-inflated property market.

Firstly, Hazel, the government never HAS anything. All it does is hold what was ours, supposedly on our behalf.

Secondly, when you owe £700bln, there is no such thing as spare change to spend. 

Thirdly, your schemes will result in getting your dirty fingernails further into people's lives. Admittedly, your administration is so bankrupt that you can only interfere in 5000 here or 10,000 there. It will be little action at a cost of £1bln, like buying a golden bucket to fend off a flood, but £1bln that would be better spent elsewhere. It will entrench the concept that "The State" will step in, that that State actually has a role at such a level. What next? Well, indeed - this opens the door to even more meddling. It opens the door to keeping this crackpot scheme going. 

House prices need to readjust. Government spending MUST fall. Government debt MUST fall. Taxation has to fall, has to be simplified and must not dampen economic activity.

Polly: Carbon Cretin.

I am going to break with my normal approach of pressing the "track changes" button, for in this case, I don't think Polly is being disingenuous or hypocritical. She is just barking mad.

Energy use has to be cut soon, so it's odd that this techno-savvy cabinet still shies away from a simple credit system.

What is with the "has to be cut"? No. Energy use will increase around the world. It is not the use of energy, but how, what and where. As for the government being "techno-savvy", one only needs to look at the dismal failures in IT and other areas to know the Government is incompetent at this. Why break a habit?

Awful August, the weather forecasters call this unseasonably cold, wet month, as holiday-makers huddle against intermittent monsoon downpours, reminded that global warming doesn't necessarily mean a Mediterranean Britain.

Post Hoc fallacy. By the way, Polly, environazis are now hiding behind the more general and weedle-worthy term "climate change".

Every month, reports from climatologists deliver worse predictions of the speed and tipping points for irreversible climate change.

They are paid to, dear.

A 4C temperature rise is the latest warning: it would bring unimaginable horror in its wake.

Would, if it were true. Is it? No proof.

The time to act gets shorter, but the political will to act lags ever further behind the science that tells politicians they must do so.

The time to act does not get shorter, it is just that the dire warnings are getting shriller and for good reason - the AGW game is nearly up.

Latest figures, including air travel, shipping and energy used in our goods manufactured abroad, show no cut in Britain but an 18% growth in emissions.

Goods manufactured abroad, eh? Like in China, perhaps. Go there and ask them to cut their output if you believe it is the case. No? Thought not.

If the market is the answer, soaring energy prices should drive down emissions. Road traffic figures showed a 2% drop in car use, with demand for petrol briefly 20% down - but already it is rising again as the price falls.

And? Your point is? The market is functioning correctly - you sound as if you WANT to see high energy prices.

On household energy - responsible for 27% of emissions - it's too early to know the effect of 30% price increases. But as one hour of an old-fashioned lightbulb still only costs 0.8p, energy prices may not be noticed by those who already consume most.

Now, Polly, you are joking right? If one hour of an old-fashioned light bulb only costs 0.8p, then surely the energy consumed is very small also. The reall issue is HEATING. Inside the above is a subconcious nagging to buy low energy, high mercury, flicker-on, shimmer while on "low energy" bulbs. Lead by example. I bet Chez Toynbee is not bedecked with such bulbs, or would remain so for long. Even Polly's dim-bulb brain can detect the hesitation caused by CFLs.

Those who will make serious cuts are the poorest and debt-averse pensioners. Official fuel poverty figures are expected to rise to 5 million people this winter: more deaths are expected among the old and cold. Back in Labour's optimistic can-do days in 2000, the Warm Homes and Energy Conservation Act created a legal obligation to eliminate fuel poverty among the vulnerable by 2010, a target missed by so many light years that Friends of the Earth is seeking a judicial review to get the act enforced. Gordon Brown's plan to buy off the problem with £100 vouchers for the poor is no answer.

An unenforceable Act does not mean we spend more time trying to enforce it. It means it should be scrapped.

What does the public think the answer should be? The Institute for Public Policy Research has just conducted the most extensive consultation so far, with focus groups in Newcastle, Camden, Southwark, Bristol and rural Suffolk across all social groups, as well as a nationwide opinion poll and interviews with energy companies, climate change NGOs and consumer organisations. The results pointed in one clear direction.

Seventy-four per cent said they are "very concerned" or "fairly concerned" about climate change - so politicians can ignore the shrinking, unconcerned minority.

Climate change is not the same as AGW, Polly. I am concerned about climate change, but I do not buy into the man-made back-to-the-caves mentality of the "enviro" lobby.

Seventy-one per cent thought action was necessary to curb people's energy use.

Then where is your problem? 71% will then curb their energy use, so energy use will be down. Or do you consider them like yourself - hypocritical?

But there was pessimism about the public changing its behaviour: only one in 10 thought people would drive less or take fewer flights.

Oh, ok, so "other people" need to cut back.

Naturally, favourite choices were the painless ones - the cheaper, environmentally friendly options. Least popular was any system that taxed energy use.

Common sense at last.

They were offered three possible government actions.

A false trichotomy.

First, a carbon tax could be added to all energy not generated from renewables. Second, a cap on the amount of carbon that companies could emit in selling their energy to consumers would force them to generate more from renewables: they would pass on the extra cost to consumers. But both of these were regarded as too unfair, with the impact felt least by the wealthy who burn most energy.

Very free with your use of percentages, eh? The rich are a small number in the scheme of things. Tax will either not affect them or they will move away and THEN it will not affect them. People get rich and are determined to stay rich so people like you cannot dictate how they live.

Personal carbon trading was the most popular option: it was the fairest and it wasn't seen as a new tax.

Most popular or the least worst of an appalling shortlist? In a way it is not a tax, but a form of privatised rent-seeking, as we shall see.

Here's how it works: each year everyone gets equal carbon credits to spend on petrol, home heating or air travel. People exceeding their quota can buy more credits. People who use less can sell credits. It encourages home insulation, energy saving and less driving or flying. Since low earners use less - 20% have no car, 50% don't fly - they can profit by selling to those with big houses, foreign holidays and gas-guzzling cars. It would be a powerful but voluntary agent for redistribution.

Firstly, you gloss over a massive factor in all of this - the State will need to track EVERY purchase we make in the areas so deemed by the State to have an impact. Very soon it will cover food, clothing, technology, everything. Secondly, it is NOT "voluntary" as people are not free to step outside the scheme. It will demand that all such purchases are paid electronically, so getting more information into the hands of the State (which it can, of course, sell without our permission to marketing organisations).

Failure to pursue personal carbon trading (or any other method) joined the long list of good causes killed by Labour cowardice.

I am not disputing that there is a long list of good causes killed by Labour cowardice, but this load of old crock is certainly not amongst them.

At Defra, David Miliband took it up with enthusiasm and commissioned a feasibility study, but after he made a strong speech advocating it, Gordon Brown at the Treasury banned any further mention.

Yes, I recall that "carbon credit card" idea. It was barking mad authoritarian moonbattery then, and it is still authoritarian moonbattery today.

Miliband was moved away and what was called a "pre-feasibility study", limped out with the judgment that this idea was "ahead of its time".

Yes, the Police State is not quite in place yet. Wait a few years when the EU is fully in control, then it will be a doddle.

They guessed it would cost £2bn a year to run, threw up sundry obstacles, and the report disappeared.

Only £2bln? From government IT? I wonder if those "sundry obstacles" were things like "impractical", "too expensive", "massive invasion of privacy", "AGW unproven".

Odd that a government with computers thinks it can't introduce a simple credit system, when a Nectar or Oyster card shows how easily home and car fuel bills and airline tickets could be deducted.

"A government with computers"? - Jesus wept! You forget, polly that oyster and nectar are OPTIONAL. One can still pay by cash. It is not a "simple credit system", but yes, we see the plan. I have long thought Gordon Brown has lusted after the idea of eliminating cash as a means of payment and this would move further in that direction. You also gloss over the "idea" of inter-personal trading of "carbon credits". People don't trade Nectar points on the open market, do they? Even if it did work what do you think would happen, numbnuts? The "rich" would buy up points and live as before. The poor, due to, erm, poverty, will sell points to pay for the energy that they can afford. The ONLY result is that the Government invades our life and a bunch of useless, non-productive parasites and IT supplies who cannot hack it in the private sector cream off huge wedges of taxpayers cash, some of it sticking to the governments ever-outstretched hands.

By supporting a carbon credit system, you, Polly, show yet again that you have absolutely NO IDEA how a market works and cannot get your Socialism-addled noggin to think beyond the immediate and self-serving.

Historian Mark Roodhouse of York University draws comparisons with his work on wartime rationing. Back then the state provided ration books for all, covering not just fuel but coupons valuing virtually every individual item in the shops from clothes to food.

We were under siege and supply was limited, UNLIKE NOW. Even then, the black market thrived.

Have we become more administratively incompetent since then?

Absolutely, for we now have a Government chock-full of morons, product of the dumbed-down "show-and-tell" coursework generation.

Roodhouse records the wartime internal debates about whether to cut national consumption by raising prices. "They concluded rationing was the only way to achieve dramatic cuts without feeding inflation or causing social unrest," he reports. They, too, considered making ration coupons tradable but decided equality of sacrifice was essential. But Roodhouse considers tradable carbon rations "would improve on the system, preventing black markets in unused coupons".

But this does not "improve on the system" for one is comparing apples with oranges, with actual hard scarcity and one trying to be synthesized by Authoritarian Government Fiat.

The trading element makes carbon rationing feel more voluntary and less oppressive.

Only to a moron, perhaps. "Feel" is not the same as "is". This IS involuntary and it IS oppressive.

In distribution of wealth, Britain is now back to 1937 levels of inequality, regressing backwards every year:

Yes, war followed by 60 years of the Welfare State. Well done. Thanks, you spiteful creatures!

that's what makes any kind of carbon tax or reliance on high prices impossible, the burden falling too unfairly.

Ah, so if the Socialist dream of a lumpen clay was actually achieved, higher prices could have been used. Oh what joy!

Doling out ad hoc energy vouchers to the poor at the taxpayers' expense is the wrong answer, and it only adds to the poverty trap by making the step up harder to climb.

Polly, I want to you to remember that statement and when you come up with any more ideas about redistribution and welfare, replace "ad hoc energy vouchers" with the current madcap idea that is rattling around your bonce.

Will Brown at least pay for it with a windfall tax on profiteering energy companies?

No, not even if he implemented such a windfall tax, for Brown pays for NOTHING. We, the taxpayers, pay for EVERYTHING in varying degrees. It is a zero-sum game (bit like your IQ) - energy companies will sandbag again or just not bother to build infrastructure, for how could they if Grabber Gordon keeps shoving his clunking fist into their savings and stealing all the notes?

But if personal carbon trading is "ahead of its time", that is exactly where we need to be.

It is not "ahead of its time" (unless...see above re EU), but is "a head up its arse".

Cowardly political leaders dare not tell voters the plain truth that we need to cut energy use.

It is not about telling here, Polly, you are proposing that people are FORCED. Big difference. Anyhow, since when have they got all honest?

If Miliband makes his run for the leadership, plain speaking about the climate will be one of his pitches - and bravery on personal carbon trading will be a test of candidates' seriousness about both climate and social justice.

Both "climate" and "social justice" are concepts for the subjugation of people and the removal of freedoms. I think Miliband is too smart to lash carbon credits to his leadership mast. Oh no, if he is still for it, he will bring it in once he has counted all his chickens after his premiership is hatched.

Obama to meet Blair before Brown

In a word: Delicious.

Uxbridge English Dictionary Pt.94: Urchin.

Urchin: where to hit Hazel Blears.


Hat tip: "I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue", R4.

Policy by Screw-up?

At the same press conference attended by Jon Snow and in the same subject over the funding scandal, the resignation (why not sacking?) of Peter Watts over the David Abrahams donations, I saw the Daily Mirror hack ask if this underhand and likely illegal behaviour is justification for enforced public State funding of Political Parties.

Are we now seeing a series of dramatic failures being used to entrench the problems? This is a manifestation of both the "I screwed up so I am best placed to fix it" meme that has been wormed into popular consciousness during this government and the "intentionally break to 'fix' it" idea so beloved of Socialists. Bastards.


UPDATE: How come the Labour Party wants to return the £400,000, yet UKIP's admin blunder, innocent in comparison, was set to have the donation snaffled by the State. One Rule for the Corrupt Leaders, in their Halls of Shame...

Heather Mills is Upset

Not one to bother with this side of things normally, but I really had to say that after seeing news reports of Heather Mills getting upset, the first thing that came into my mind is that she could have avoided it all by just accepting the £50m in the first place and getting on with her life.

I think £50m is outrageous even. It is no good having the brass neck to ask for more and then bleat about your sensitivity and working "for your daughter" and - this really irritate me - mentioning "charidee werg" later, as if a single penny more than £50m is going to make the SLIGHTEST difference to her or that volunteer work excuses a grab at unearnt cash. Fighting over money, on the other hand, is likely to cause her harm.

This "something for nothing" mindset coupled with "I do no wrong and all you are to blame" attitude is reflected in the government and how it treats people.

Polly: Inaction on Pay Profligacy - Track Changes (ON)

Boy, Polly kicks off here with an article chock full of absolutes: "only", "failure", "fatally", "any". For sure, she is a stranger to reason...

Inaction on pay profligacy of inane scribblers only embeds child poverty

Labour's failure to face down the forces driving market-driven, skills based absurd mega-earning fatally undermines any effort to embed tackle inequality

Polly Toynbee
Tuesday October 30, 2007
The Guardian

When the history of New Labour comes to be written, a great mystery to idiots like me will be why they did nothing about the unprecedented explosion of top pay that happened on their watch. The findings of yesterday's Income Data Services' annual report on chief executive pay are simply bewildering to idiots like me . Labour's silence on the subject mystifies idiots like me its supporters, most of its venal, self serving and equally idiotic backbenchers and not a few of its similarly "special" ministers.

In the nervous early days, shedding "tax them till the pips squeak" memories, Peter Mandelson was deliberately counter-intuitive for idiots like me with his louche remark about being "intensely relaxed about my people getting filthy rich". But why has the breathtaking acceleration of top pay been met with the same studied indifference ever since? It took the Tories saying it first for Labour to dare to take utterly token action on non-domiciles, taxing them a nominal £30,000 flat rate.

Here are the latest figures: chief executives in the FTSE 100 have doubled their earnings in the last five years, to average £3.17m - up 16.1% in the last year. In the next rank of companies, FTSE 350 directors' salaries rose by an average of 9.3% last year. Add in bonuses and average pay rose by 20%. Chief executives' pay in the mid-250 FTSE companies rose by 27.2% to average £1.43m. The TUC's communist leveller Brendan Barber says of these figures: "Top directors have no shame. It beggars belief that they are somehow working twice as hard as five years ago."

Guardian readers, familiar with our financial pages' excrement excellent annual survey of boardroom pay, are not the only ones to be regularly envious shocked. A Financial Times Harris poll found 60% of the public think the government should cap the earnings of senior executives. A poll of parasitical scumbags human resources managers conducted by Incomes Data Services last month found more than half of them thought executive directors were paid more than they were overpaid and that differentials are too wide between execs and HR Managers . These are the parasitical interfering do-nothings professionals who always fail to see the knock-on effects at first hand.

When pressed, ministers pretend what happens up there in the tiny rarefied group of mega-earners doesn't impact on anyone else and they are right, but I don't want to admit that cos otherwise I cannot re-visit this tired, self-serving bankrupt stance YET again . It's the politics of envy to even think about it: I it may be distasteful but I'm it's not important. Yet as parasiticl interfereing do-nothings human resources managers know very well, envy pay is about much more than money. The psychology of envy pay is about a sense of covetousness fairness, about accepting a self-determined and aggrandized fair place in the cockroach midden pecking order above all in relation to others. It becomes a problem if we are not at the top raking in the cash year after year top echelons reward themselves many multiples of the essential and unappreciated Guardian collumnists rest.

The IDS report which I am now conveniently going to use shows FTSE 350 directors' salaries increased by three times their own shop-floor wages. How many years can that continue before my knicker the elastic snaps? Once, all joined the same disasterous, collectivized pension schemes: now it's gold-plated pensions for managers with "unaffordable" closed schemes for staff who have been brainwashed into thinking a pension was "free" .

When boardroom pay leaves planet Earth, the next rank of Guardian scribblers senior managers feel they deserve to overtake catch up. It's not surprising that with CEO bonuses now worth 100% of salary, Guardian scribblers senior managers reckon they did most of the heavy lifting to achieve national prosperity, social justice and equality it, so IDS finds they are demanding "incentive" schemes. And then politicians middle managers ask if they didn't contribute too. The truth is that none of us them may contribute to a company's "success", which I am going to ignorantly assert with my typical lack of financial awareness is measured in share prices that float myseriously to imbeciles like me up and down. Bonuses that hit an epic £14m last year may drop this year, but not because managers or CEOs are doing their job less well. Sub-prime mortgage lending in the US is hardly their fault. This will show that the "performance-related" bonus culture is nonsense. So why doesn't the government interfere where we closet GOSPLAN communists and levellers say so?

The reality we are trying to ignore myth is that executives would flee, but you can count the number of foreigners running UK companies on my IQ your fingers - and the number of Brits running large companies abroad (assert another nonsense ehre) is even fewer: the low productivity of UK Stater sector organs business makes them not in great demand but via taxation we can force pepole to pay for them regardless. But a few mobile high-fliers act as convenient cover for my twisted hatred and envy all. Alas These salaries rise by mutual agreement: every company wants the best people it can afford boardroom pay in the top quartile. This is a pay inflator that will accelerate faster and faster because I, in my naivety think it has no brakes. It accelerates all percieved inequality according to idiots like me , as (insert post hoc fallacy here) the IDS study finds that in 2000 chief executives earned 62 times the pay of their average employees, but now they pay themselves 104 times more.

In that climate, how does the government imagine it's going to nail public pay down to 2% every year until 2010 when I will do all I can to make people agitate for more? That is expected to be half the average pay delete increase as it is less emotive in the private sector while conveniently forgetting the pay inflation and 900,000 extra public sector parasites since 1997 . There will be trouble - and the government should be seen to deserves it if they continue to take such a non-interventionist cavalier attitude towards overall pay structures comrades .

Out of control Guardian scribblers top pay in the private sector should matter to the Treasury because it infects the public sector and we can't have that. Why is the cabinet secretary now paid considerably more (£220,000) than the Town Clerk of Britain prime minister (£187,000) why why o please? It's a plum prestige job that needs no bribery, and leads to rich jobs for the boys afterwards. Does the Town Clerk chief executive of Bradford need more than the PM? Bringing failed private sector people in now infects failed public pay scales, as lower ranking arrivals on an outrageous £300,000 report to permanent secretaries on a no less outrageous £170,000. (However there is plainly a rare genuine market for head of the nuclear decommissioning authority:oh damn, my caps lock is broken... no one applied for this toxic chalice at £80,000 so it's now been advertised at £200,000). But being director general of the BBC is not toxic: just that the BBC IS toxic everyone wants the power and control over minds it, so why pay a total package of more than me £788,000 - let alone cabinet minister rates for scores of middling BBC managers? (And couldn't they take a pay cut in sympathy with those about to lose their jobs? hahah even I don't believe this twaddle, as I would not ) Sir John Bourn's downfall is a classic example of us socialist hypocrites how private excess makes lefty public people lose their financial bearings.

For Labour to refuse to give any leadership on this is an incomprehensible lacuna to envy-driven harridans like me : the national psychology of pay affects me everyone. Yesterday the government set up a new child poverty unit: Ed Balls and ...oh dear god... Peter Hain, the two bumbling ministers involved, know their 2010 half-way mark to abolishing child poverty will be missed by miles on its present trajectory so no change there then, otherwise I would not have reams to write and armies of interfering social workers would be out of casework . Barnardo's are joining in - but their director, Martin Narey, wonders what they can do with no extra money like a good socialist. Only 48p a week extra was taken from taxpayers was pissed down the drain that is went to child tax credits this year, distorting the market for subsidising low-paid jobs. The bigger question is this: how can I delude everyone into thinking that Labour could ever abolish child poverty if they dare not (insert my disingenuous, fraudulent, irrational and self serving meme here) face down the underlying forces fracturing pay scales all the way through and accelerating the country into ever greater inequality?

Andrew Neil Mauls New Labour

Some well aimed punches at New Labour by Andrew Neil on the Daily Politics. He managed to expose their racism in shortlists, their theft of Conservative initiatives that they had at the time rubbished and Mad Hazel Blears was (as usual) trying to justify her poisonous hate-filled and frankly class war nonsense about Boris Johnson.

All the Labour throats were spouting a stream of non-sequiturs. I really do think they have lied enough to themselves to believe it, and think we will to.

Have the BBC sold an hour...

...of Sunday Morning to some daytime television production company?

First it was the hijacking of "Heaven and Earth" by that self-important daytime incompetent and egotist Gloria Hunniford. A programme about spirituality and religion becomes a vehicle for her personal aggrandizement and nobody seems to see it and nobody does much about it.

"Heaven & Earth" becomes "Gloria Hunniford's Heaven & Earth". Q: WHY? A: Ego. Rant from Roger and others I suspect means it ended its days as "Heaven & Earth with Gloria Hunniford" but the intro credits were remained a vomit-inducing parade of self-centred, smug, sanctimonious, patronising posturing with one aim: "Look at MEEEEEEEE".

So, finally Gloria Hunniford in Gloria Hunniford's Heaven and Earth with Gloria Hunniford presented by Gloria Hunniford Gloria Hunniford (I swear this is almost how it was introduced each day to the sound of used fivers being stuffed in the sweaty mit of the announcer) is now replaced by some Kilroy-Silk wannabe doing a Kilroy format "discussion" about vaguely faith-related issues. Daytime seems to have established a bridgehead on Sunday mornings at 10am, meaning there is an hour break between the Politics slot and Countryfile (harmless enough - a sort of rural adult Newsround) then the Politics Show where Jeremy Vine tries to Paxo people and fails - I wish he would get stuffed most of the time.

This gap is annoying, as it sometimes coincides with my having a piping hot, fresh cup of tea and some bacon sarnies. I want to have something reasonable to look over my Times at now and again and not to choke on my hard-won bacon. If you are going to do a discussion on religious and faith-related issues, get a decent format and get a decent presenter, like Jeremy Clarkson...

John Reid keeping his powder dry?

For some reason I feel John Reid is making a very smart move. I feel this is an indication that he strongly suspects Brown will crash and burn, so he wishes to be outside that failure, untainted by the fall-out. Wise mutterings of not being a bitching back bench bore, too, for that could alienate future comrades from the train-wreck that will be the inevitable result when the Gordon Thunderbolt hits the buffers. It might also be that he knows he will not have the same free hand under the control-freak Brown that he has enjoyed under Blair, but I think that is secondary from the greater reason.

Though Reid is not my favourite person, as with Miliband I do not take him for a fool in matters of political chess-play.

However, I still think Hazel Blears is Totally MAD. Her utterances are returning to that more normal utterly bonkers, wild-eyed slave to Sociofascist authority after a brief period during her push for the Deputy Leadership.

Hazel Blears - Totally MAD

I know I am not one for fence-sitting in regard to old Haze, but I can restrain myself no longer. Hazel Blears has the utter conceit to run for Deputy. Why should this poisonous creature ever consider herself fit to run a whelk stall let alone be DPM.

Hazel appears unable to separate truth from fiction, spin from fact. Questions are ignored and instead of an answer this rancid monster spews forth a torrent of disingenuous, sanctimonious political clap-trap. Totally at ease in delivering such nonsense with a straight face, Hazel is either utterly corrupt and contemptuous of the Public or is a deluded and deranged mental case.

We need to know who votes for her in the election so we can make our views plain.