Love and Liberty

Tomorrow evening at seven, Doctor Who takes us back to 1926 for The Unicorn and the Wasp and a meeting with Agatha Christie. What makes odd goings-on in history so uniquely Doctor Who? Why has the new series made linking adventures in history with famous figures so much its own? Will the dads sigh at Felicity Kendal, and the kids shriek at the giant wasp? How will this new story compare with the series’ last attempt at ‘Agatha Christie pastiche’, Peter Davison’s 1925-set Black Orchid? What is the secret of Ms Christie’s missing days, and of Black Orchid’s well-furnished cell? Excitingly, as yet I only know the answer to one of those last two.

The Unicorn and the Wasp (and the anticipation)

I have to admit, there are many reasons I’m really looking forward to The Unicorn and the Wasp. It’s Doctor Who – so by definition I’m excited. There’ll be a fortnight’s gap before the next one to make way for Eurovision, so we’ll all have to enjoy this one doubly. I glanced at next week’s Radio Times yesterday and whooped with delight: never mind Felicity Kendal – who surely wasn’t accidentally the subject of a round in last night’s edition of Heresy – it also guest-stars Henry Gordon Jago (actor Christopher Benjamin, from fabulously flamboyant Doctor Who Victoriana The Talons of Weng-Chiang, which brilliantly pastiched not Agatha Christie but Sherlock Holmes and everything else in sight). It’s by Gareth Roberts, a hugely talented writer whose intelligent, funny, endearing books made him stand out in the much-missed Virgin Doctor Who novels of the 1990s. Last year, he was the writer on four pieces of Doctor Who (ish) for the telly, too: will this be like the squarely, magnificently entertaining Invasion of the Bane and Revenge of the Slitheen for The Sarah Jane Adventures? Will it have the emotional depth and vivid characters of The Sarah Jane Adventures’ finest hour, Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane? Will it perhaps have that story’s multi-layered and rewarding Doctor Who homages and in-jokes, from the Guardians to a certain radio programme in which one of the Doctor’s companions was replaced seamlessly by Jane Asher? Or… Will it have the nice visuals and witty dialogue but flatly disappointing story and characters of his Doctor Who story The Shakespeare Code? I’m on edge with hope that he’ll deliver to his best. But most of all, what makes me more excited than with most Doctor Who stories is that the Doctor’s adventures in history always have a special extra something for me.

Adventures In History

I’ve always been fascinated by history, but what makes Doctor Who’s approach so vivid is that it’s not pedagogic and certain but eclectic and imaginative. I’ve said before that if you asked me to pick the perfect sort of Doctor Who story, it’d be the ones set in real history but wilfully challenging what we know, whether through showing a different side to the people there or, of course, juxtaposing images from the history books with some futuristic alien menace. There’s something uniquely Who-ish in the historical anachronisms of meeting aliens or time meddlers in our past, and there are few set-ups closer to my heart than when the Doctor travels back to a well-known period of Earth’s history, meets both exactly the sort of people we’d expect him to and some outer space people we really wouldn’t, and they all have larks together. I’ve always loved reading (and now seeing on DVD) the stories from the ’60s that educated me about real events and tried their best to get them right, but putting the real details alongside something so ostentatiously fictional makes perfect Doctor Who for so many reasons: it broadens what could be a niche historical interest to a more mass appeal; it makes things more unpredictable, rather than separating ‘space’ and ‘history’ into safe little boxes; it’s something at the heart of no other series; and that mixed-up, what’s real / what’s imagined approach even furthers Doctor Who’s underlying liberalism by positively encouraging you to ask questions – what budding historian, or politician, or scientist, or journalist, or human being could be given a better message than that you should think about things for yourself, find things out for yourself and decide things for yourself, rather than just believing everything you’re told?

That’s why among my all-too-sporadic Doctor Who reviews I’ve picked stories like The Time Meddler or Horror of Fang Rock (EXCLUSIVE! For any of you who read my review of the latter and wondered whether the script really did write Adelaide as Lord Palmerdale’s mistress, despite none of the actors playing it that way, I met Terrance Dicks a couple of months ago and asked him: “Oh, yes,” he replied, “I think she is his mistress. But they’re all keeping up their Victorian façade, you see”), or even an alien-planet-that-still-feels-like-Earth’s-history story like The Ribos Operation.

Doctor Who’s always had a wider mix of styles and influences than any other series could – a traveller in time and space, who can go anywhere, do anything – and part of that is that it’s always had a shifting balance between past, present and future, between the old world, our world and alien worlds. And every different period of the show has given different weight to each of those elements, usually downplaying one of them. So when the new series is criticised for not having enough alien worlds (and even though I’d like us to see more alien worlds too, and have them feel more alien when we do), it shows a lack of grasp on the series’ own history, which is of an ever-changing set of settings. I love Tom Baker and Patrick Troughton’s space adventures and alien worlds, for example, not least the way that often led to stories with smaller stakes but greater tension – paradoxically, space and claustrophobia mix – but if I watch a full season from the late ’60s or the late ’70s I often find myself wishing for more time travel into the past to turn up in the mix.

Something Doctor Who has got very right since it returned in 2005 is that, whatever the balance of places and periods once a season gets going, each season has started with what’s pretty much a Doctor Who manifesto: ever year, new viewers have been given three opening stories that say, ‘This is a programme that goes to past, present and future’, with one for each to firmly state what the programme’s about. It’s surprising how few seasons opened the same way in the old series, though some of the best have that in common – Tom Baker’s second and third seasons as the Doctor, for example (the series’ thirteenth and fourteenth years), but if you think about it, what could be a better introduction for the show? A story I’d place close to the best of the lot, 1967’s epic The Evil of the Daleks, appeals in part to me because it has the sheer breadth to start in the present, go back to the past and then take an alien world for its climax, all following a seamless plot rather than feeling like (as it could have done without a sufficiently strong story) it’s hopping between different levels of a computer game. And if Doctor Who has spent a bit too much time on roughly modern-day Earth at the expense of strange worlds for some tastes, here’s something that startles and delights me about the new series: David Tennant’s Doctor has seen more stories travelling into Earth’s history than any other Doctor since William Hartnell. And hooray for that.

Dawn of the ‘Celebrity Historical’

Russell T Davies’ idea to grab viewers’ attention for the historical stories is one that, in its fourth year tomorrow night, is now instantly recognisable. He calls it the ‘Celebrity Historical’. The hook to pull you in is not ‘this is something you might remember being bored by at school’ – or excited by in a spectacular historical movie, I’ve always thought, though carry on – but someone you’ve heard of and might be interested in. Though there have been other historical stories, usually set in the Twentieth Century when increased familiarity needs less of the ‘booster rocket’ of an individual famous name, many of the ones with the firmest sense of history have ‘starred’ Charles Dickens, Queen Victoria, William Shakespeare and, now, Agatha Christie.

You might spot a few things about this ‘Celebrity Historical’ approach. It’s a very modern form of TV storytelling that starts with an individual human story rather than pages of ‘great events’. It’s conversely what’s now a very old-fashioned use of the word “celebrity” – yes! Imagine! You’d almost forgotten that the word used to signify ‘a person that absolutely everyone knows about and will hear about wherever they are and throughout their lives,’ rather than ‘a person who’ll be in Heat Magazine for a fortnight and will then disappear forever,’ hadn’t you? Most of them have been writers – not ‘great deeds’ by ‘great generals’ echoing down the ages, but great ideas and great stories. And, if you’ve been watching Doctor Who for more than the last few years, you’ll notice something else about the ‘Dawn of the Celebrity Historical’, too; dawns don’t just happen once, but again and again.

Way back in 1964, Doctor Who had already become such a hit by its fourth story that the series was put on the cover of the Radio Times. And who was on it? Marco Polo. Doctor Who’s first Radio Times cover promoted the programme on the basis of an historical celebrity author – and Agatha Christie’s had one, too, though (confusingly) it was six weeks ago. Richard I, the Emperor Nero and Helen of Troy were among the other ostentatious historical ‘celebrities’ to feature in William Hartnell’s stories as the Doctor, showing that as well as writers, royals – like Queen Victoria – are a good bet for a name people recognise (plus the gunfighters of the OK Corral who, like Helen, Nero and the Lionheart were all familiar to audiences of the time from films, no history books required). Others appeared with more minor roles in a given story, such as cameos from Shakespeare (yes, 42 years earlier) and Robespierre, much as Elizabeth I appeared last year; then there were a scattering of major figures who’d be less well-known to the audience and so might not be termed as much of a crowd-pulling ‘celebrity’, such as Catherine de Medici (with her famous war-of-God-cry “Catholics conquer and destroy”), echoed in 2006 with a story about Madame de Pompadour. So this new innovation might be a little less new to 1960s viewers, but is no less effective for it.

After Billy’s time, the Doctor’s historical adventures tended to be based more around historical fiction than historical figures, taking a setting in the past to construct a thrilling adventure in the style of Kidnapped or gradually building up Doctor Who’s own special style of history colliding with anachronism. Though there were a few faint flutterings of throwing historical celebrities into that mix for Colin Baker’s Doctor – George Stevenson, and making a right mess of HG Wells (goodness, another writer) – it’s the new series that’s really run with the combination of the approach to history perfected in William Hartnell’s time and that perfected for Tom Baker. And it works magnificently. So who next for a famous historical figure juxtaposed with outer space robot people? I can’t quite picture Jane Austen with aliens, but though Tom Baker’s Doctor didn’t meet any historical ‘celebrities’, he kept missing Leonardo da Vinci – so he might be irresistible, despite the Dan Brownness of it to many audiences. Winston Churchill is worth putting money on. And how about explorers, Richard suggested to me the other night? An ideal match for the Doctor in many ways, and he was only slightly put out when I recalled his suggestion of a galleon on a voyage of exploration being attacked by Sea Devils had already been thought of in a long-ago strip for Doctor Who Weekly. Raleigh, perhaps, after being name-dropped insufferably by the Third Doctor? When Doctor Who becomes a huge success for the fifth time in 2086, I won’t be around to watch it any more, but I like to imagine that the Doctor’ll have an adventure with Douglas Adams.

Indiana Jones and Other Stories

Before I move on to review Peter Davison in an exciting adventure in flapper fiction, I suppose with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull out next Thursday I should note that there are plenty of other historical blockbusters available, though mostly lacking Doctor Who’s distinctive taste for anachronism and bizarre juxtapositions. There’s thrilling pulp adventure like the Indy movies (not just set in the past but with an archaeologist hero), or endless romantic adaptations of Pride, Prejudice and all that crowd, or the historical epic that’s been a mainstay of the cinema since the likes of DW Griffith’s Intolerance, still one of the greatest movies ever made (just look at Babylon! No CGI there) or DW Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, still one of the most brilliantly assembled works of repellent propaganda ever made, right up until movies like Troy and Alexander suggest they’ve rather forgotten how to do it. No, that’s unfair; their problem was that they were trying to be the next Gladiator rather than tell their own story, and for all that its historical details may have been iffy, Gladiator had a grand sweep of historical passion that I can imagine capturing kids today as I was enthralled when I was a boy. I can’t put it better than Alix Mortimer’s piece last year on how the historical soul was missing from Elizabeth, but how Gladiator radiated it, just as I, Claudius did – and I, Claudius was another of the reasons I had to fall in love with history, just as (to jump from one Doctor Who time period to another) I can rarely resist the never-real-but-vivid Victorian era that’s one of the reasons people still make Sherlock Holmes adaptations to this day.

The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones have been released on DVD recently too, of course, but they’re more of a lesson in how not to do it than successors to the spectacular populism of the movies. Have you seen them? One of the biggest tumbles from huge ratings to tumbleweeds and cancellation in TV history, they sound before you see them like a perfect match for the Doctor Who ‘Celebrity Historical’. Young Henry Junior, before and after he acquired the dog’s name, dashes all over the early Twentieth Century world and meets every famous person going. And made by George Lucas on a budget of millions. What could possibly go wrong? Well, Doctor Who viewers might suggest that a few aliens might help, preferably by exterminating the irritating kid incarnation of Indy, and that while the Doctor has a TARDIS that can take him to meet anyone he wants it’s just a little unlikely that someone with no foreknowledge and travelling through time at the more mundane rate of a day each day would just happen to meet so many people who are going to be so famous. But the biggest problem is that the stories… Lack stories. They expect the viewer to be so impressed by a famous person in a famous situation that they forget that drama and fun rather need something to happen, rather than audiences to marvel, ‘Gosh, this is so worthy! I must watch it and be ready to answer questions at the end.’ Even before you get on to the DVD extra features, documentaries about the ‘Historical Celebrity’ of the week so hagiographic that it’s a race to see whether your brain or your teeth fall out first, there’s one utterly deadly thing about these stories. They’re exactly like BBC history programmes for schools used to be, just on several thousand times the budget. And even schools’ programmes draw kids in with more fun these days. I’ll still watch the one that has Emperor Palpatine and President Servalan in the same episode, though.

Black Orchid

“Thank you, Lady Cranleigh, for a delightfully unexpected afternoon.”

The closest Doctor Who’s previously attempted to a traditional Agatha Christie ‘feel’ was when Peter Davison’s Doctor travelled to 1925 for a comedy of manners crossed with Gothic Jane Eyre, all set at a country house. Though this was shown back in 1982, before the Doctor’s daughter last week was a twinkle in this Doctor’s eye, it’s just been released on DVD and is well-worth picking up – it’s a short but very diverting story and has some great extras, despite being one of the cheaper ‘standard’ range (other Doctor Who DVDs simply have an immense amount of extras). It’s the only historical Doctor Who story since the 1960s not to feature any anachronistic alien strangeness other than our heroes, though it keeps wrong-footing you into thinking there’ll be some and the Doctor’s TARDIS plays an improbably significant role. Oddly for a story widely regarded as Agatha Christie pastiche, however, the ‘whodunnit’ is the least satisfying aspect; there’s really only one suspect, and it’s much more of a ‘whydunnit’ and ‘what’s he doing there?’ The first episode of charming people playing cricket and dancing the Charleston is gorgeous, though when watching the DVD recently, Richard identified the problem with the second and final episode: it has to bring in all the complications as the Doctor gets into deeper and deeper water, accused of murder, with more murders discovered, the TARDIS vanished, he and his friends locked up… But as it’s only got 25 minutes to do all of that and reveal the real killer and resolve the whole story, no sooner are they in trouble than they leap out of it. Two other unwieldy elements are when the host stops Adric and Nyssa drinking because they’re “children” – they patently aren’t, and as one of them’s the spitting image of his fiancée, it suggests a rather unhealthy relationship – and the rather ‘exotic’ secret of the disfigured man, which is much more Victorian than 1920s in feel, given that just after the First World War there were many terrible injuries around (mental and physical), making the need for concealment rather more improbable. Though it’s not a ‘celebrity historical’, incidentally, the character whose concealment is most crucial to the plot is a (fictional) celebrity.

Neither the Doctor achieving rather little nor the skimpiness of the ‘mystery’ plot matter much, however. The Doctor’s role has much in common with Peter’s outstanding final story, The Caves of Androzani, where an ostensibly passive Doctor is so caught up in events that he sets off a chain reaction among doppelgängers and disfigured ‘villains’. As for the plot… For me, the really appealing thing about the story is that it looks very shallow with all the swish upper-class partying, but is actually very clever. The centrepiece of the social whirl is a masked ball, and the story’s theme is all about keeping up appearances and masks, literal and metaphorical: all those secrets; all those double identities; an old-fashioned Gothic Romance disguised as Agatha Christie; and it even keeps fooling us into thinking it’s a traditional Doctor Who mystery. The Doctor proving he’s not a murderer by revealing the TARDIS seems naïve to the point of barking… But in a story where everyone is concealing the truth about themselves, the Doctor being the character who demonstrates he’s ‘true’ makes thematic sense.

The DVD is a miniature masterpiece, too. The picture restoration is outstanding, with details sharp and colours vibrant – though, like the recent release of The Five Doctors, the reds are distinctly orange, appearing (for example) to give Lady Cranleigh glowing lipstick. The commentary is very enjoyable, despite the actors criticising the story pretty much from start to finish, disliking the script and, as usual, ganging up on poor Matthew Waterhouse (who, told his pirate fancy dress outfit here is “no Johnny Depp,” eventually admits it’s more “jailbait cabin boy”). Restoration and commentary complement each other perfectly when you can now clearly see the difference between the two days over which the masked ball was shot: the sunny first day, and the hilarious second where it was dark, pouring with rain and so windy that wigs are in constant danger of flying away and Janet Fielding’s beautifully relaxed flirting has changed to “I’m freezing my bazongas off!” The sharper picture also reveals that the Cranleigh XI is supposedly playing Guy’s Hospital, which if you’re as clever as Richard you’ll spot means the props manager really got the wrong end of the script. A handful of deleted scenes are charmingly presented, and though you can see why the first sequence was cut – too many giveaways – the second has some rather nice business with guests at the ball. The same scene crops up in a Blue Peter feature about the costumes for this and many other productions, in which if you can stand Simon Groom’s nasty blue nylon underpants he has a surprisingly nice chest…

The best of the special features isn’t directly related to the story – though it also features the Fifth Doctor playing cricket – as it casts a great little overview across the Doctor Who comic strips of the time, with Gary Russell and Dave Gibbons especially good value and quite a bit on The Tides of Time (still, for me, the greatest of all Doctor Who comic strip adventures). The worst of the special features are the text notes, for which it’s astounding new writer Karen Davies was actually paid. Martin Wiggins’ notes on DVDs are informative, well-written, interesting and witty; Richard Molesworth’s are much stodgier but have a lot of information; but this latest lot are just lazy. There are great long gaps between pop-ups, such skimpy research that not just the BBC’s Written Archives appear neglected but so do, say, ten seconds’ search on Wikipedia or IMDB (being unable to tell us what a Tom Collins is, for example, or offer more than a couple of snippets from Moray Watson’s long career). Repeatedly, the text opens up a subject and then drops it as if it can’t be bothered: saying there are lots of black orchids in legend and literature then, er, not identifying any; citing the Peter Cushing film The Ghoul as a source, but not bothering to say why… There’s nothing about the book, or what was cut from the script, or Terence Dudley’s outline “The Beast”; the unfunny comedy asides after long stretches of doing no work at all come across as the would-be class joker trying to divert attention from missing homework (I should know – I was doing that sort of thing back when Black Orchid was transmitted, and my flip comments weren’t funny either); and there are shoddy little mistakes like alleged Doctor Who story “The Space Wheel” (a load of Moroks) or scoffing at a character’s credit as “The Unknown” – even when a murder mystery’s not entirely complex, saying you should name “whodunnit” in the end credits to the first episode’s a bit dumb, surely? Still, all told the rest of the DVD is very enjoyable, and for once even the menus are pretty good, offering a charming cricket montage rather than the usual spoilers for the climax.

But Are Historicals ‘Popular’?

Here’s a funny thing. When I write articles, I stick on music in the background, and it tends to be music without words – usually film or TV scores (it’s a shame the Black Orchid DVD doesn’t have an isolated music score). Today, unusually, the CD in the background isn’t the Doctor but the Who, and as Another Tricky Day pumped out behind me I couldn’t help notice the line “getting burned by the Sun”. It probably wasn’t a pointed attack on Mr Murdoch at the time, but it reminded me of one of the less savoury things I’ve been inspired to do through Doctor Who: buying the Sun a couple of months ago for coupons to collect Sun-minted editions of Doctor Who DVDs and a Sarah Jane CD. Well, I posted them two months ago and my cheque was cashed, it turns out, exactly a month ago today. It’s bad enough giving money to the Empire of Evil; they might at least send me what I paid for! And remembering the DVDs they’ve not sent me reminds me of something odd about their selection of Doctor Who stories, both this time and when they last offered some, a couple of years ago. Despite this meaning you lose a large part of what gives the series its identity, if you look at the Sun’s DVDs there are no historical stories. I wonder why?

My suspicion is that the Sun’s selection was influenced by the often-repeated urban legend in TV circles that the Doctor’s adventures in history are just put in as some sort of weird nod to the formula, and not because anyone really likes them – that people watch a traveller in space and time mainly for his adventures on modern-day Earth, because those are obviously what makes it different to any other TV show. And because nobody ever watched Indiana Jones, Pride and Prejudice or Gladiator, obviously. This strange idea’s been around a long time, but it’s still not true. Former Doctor Who Producer Barry Letts, for example, who ran the series during the early ’70s when Jon Pertwee was the Doctor (one of its most popular periods in the ratings) repeats the old canard about historicals on the DVD of The Time Warrior, the story that introduced Sarah Jane Smith (long regarded as the most popular companion), introduced the Sontarans (long regarded as one of the most popular monsters) and was, of course, Barry’s only ‘historical’ story. Barry announces that stories set in history were “always having very low audience figures” such as in the case of the Doctor “meeting historical characters like Nero” (The Romans, with, er, between 10 and 13 million viewers) and the eponymous “Marco Polo” (8.4-10.4 million) that he explicitly mentions and explicitly gets it wrong on. Barry produced 24 Doctor Who stories, totalling 129 episodes: unfortunately for his argument, of the two “very low audience figures” he cites, The Romans’ audience ratings peaked higher than any of Barry’s episodes, and Marco Polo’s higher than all but 9 of his 129 (one of those episodes being found in The Time Warrior. Which was another historical).

Take that right up to modern Doctor Who, which is regularly getting the highest chart ratings the series has ever won; in 2006 Tooth and Claw, set in 1879, was the most popular story of the season, with a million more viewers than the return of (popular) Sarah Jane Smith to the series a week later. So far this year there’s been one historical story, set in 79 AD, last month’s The Fires of Pompeii – absolutely terrific, and the best of the new season so far for me – which scored two to two and a half million more viewers than the return of the (popular) Sontarans in an attack on (popular) modern-day Earth. Yes, the Doctor’s trip to Pompeii was watched by over 9 million viewers, putting it in the top ten most watched programmes for the week across every channel (beating an episode of Eastenders), with an ‘Appreciation Index’ of 87% - which means a rating of ‘excellent’ and made it the most liked show with its viewers among all BBC1 and ITV1’s shows that day. So let’s hope a lot of people tune in for Agatha Christie tomorrow, too: on past evidence, I suspect they will.

And Finally… The Avengers Tonight

Oh, and if you like murder mysteries in a highly stylised traditional English countryside… Why not turn on BBC4 tonight at 11.30pm and twenty past midnight for a double bill of highly entertaining Avengers episodes? They’re the series’ inspired take on Batman – The Winged Avenger – and The Living Dead, each of which are well worth watching, and I even have a couple of reviews for them that I’ve prepared earlier. The Winged Avenger, in particular, I described last year as “teetering on the edge of genius”. Go on, tune in tonight!

Labels: Alex’s In-Depth Doctor Who, David Tennant, Doctor Who, History, Peter Davison, William Hartnell

Paul Walter brings today’s stunning Tory story: stunning both because they have an actual policy – yes, a policy, that’s two and counting – and because it’s to (nice Tories, inclusive Tories, pant, nice Tories, inclusive Tories, strain, nice Tories, inclusive Tories, grrr, no, can’t keep it up, knee-jerk bigotry nastiness EXPLODE! Ahhhhh… That’s better) it’s to use the law to discriminate against lesbians. So, the nice, modern, inclusive Tories’ only two confirmed policies: tax cuts for millionaires; bash lesbians! Why is anyone surprised? Without greed and bigotry, what’s the point of the Tories? And there are two more questions.

Have the Tories reached for their core vote’s g-spot because they’re way ahead in the opinion polls and think they can get away with it, or because they’re afraid the lead is surprisingly soft and think their base needs hardening?

Is this policy to deny lesbians IVF treatment unless one of them’s a man (I paraphrase, but not by much) just inspired by old-fashioned Tory bigotry? The sort that spouts homophobia like ‘of course you have equal rights – you can get married to the opposite sex, just like everyone else, and we normal people can’t get married to someone of the same sex either, uurrgghh, how horrid’ now just spouting ‘of course you have equal rights – you can get IVF treatment if you’re in a relationship with a man, and us normal couples have to have a mother and a father involved too’? Or is it inspired by new, modern Tories who aren’t motivated by hate-filled revulsion towards lesbians but by thinking, ‘Ooh, gosh, lesbians, mmmm, with a man, are there pictures, rubs sweaty hands’?

That second one’s a trick question, of course. Obviously, it’s both.

Those Labour Principles In Full

In the interests of political balance, I should point out that the Labour Party is also happy to stir up bigotry, and that one of their key campaigns is ‘Oooh, foreigners, terrorists, scary, foreigners, terrorists, scary, all foreigners might be terrorists, be scared enough that you’ll say yes to the police picking you up for not carrying your ID card at all times and then let the police lock you up for a month and a half without telling you why’. Some of us find the Labour Government’s obsessive desire to have complete control over all our lives much scarier than their rhetoric, but apparently a lot of people have been successfully scared by Labour’s anti-foreigner poison. On an edition of PM last week (I forget which day, but I jotted down the quote) a Labour Minister – confronted with many reasons why detention without charge for 42 days was useless, dangerous and evil – came back, smugly, with what he thought was the one unanswerable reason of principle for doing anything: the opinion polls were in favour, so no sane person could oppose them.

Eddie Mair shot back:

“Are we now getting government by opinion poll? So will Gordon Brown be resigning tonight?”

The Labour Minister’s principles, astoundingly, didn’t equip him with an answer to that one.

Labels: Bigotry, British Politics, Conservatives, Gay, Labour, Meddling In Things That Are Nobody's Business But Your Own, Radio

Have you seen Labour’s disgusting leaflets for the Crewe and Nantwich by-election? You might have been glad that the poisonous British National Party aren’t fielding a candidate, but you have to wonder if it’s just because the BNP are satisfied the Labour candidate shares their ‘principles’. Populist class-based personal attacks on other candidates? Check. Whipping up fear about crime? Check. Prejudice against immigrants and special laws to victimise them? Check. To pose as ‘caring’, finish by saying it’s all ‘for the children’? Check. With Labour and BNP campaigns now indistinguishable, did the BNP pull out after signing an electoral pact?

This sort of poisonous excrement has no place in British politics. Even for the Labour Party, with its record of immigrant-bashing, fear-stoking and personal attacks in by-elections, this disgustingly negative leaflet marks a new low. No doubt they’re terrified they’re going to lose and want BNP-inclined voters on side – but in what morally hopeless universe is that an excuse? And as for the hypocrisy of attacking a “Tory toff” when the Labour candidate was only selected because she’s the daughter of the former MP and Labour ‘toffs’ want to make the House of Commons a palace of privilege to which you gain entry by being in the right families…

“Making Foreign Nationals Carry An ID Card”

No doubt they’ve noticed how unpopular their bossy, cock-up-ridden, appallingly expensive ID cards idea has become, but the Labour Government is so addicted to being able to control every aspect of our lives and tell us what to do that they can’t bear to let go of it… So now they say it’s all to attack “foreign nationals”. Well, Labour’s own legislation says every British citizen will have to have one, at a cost of a hundred quid each, fines of thousands if we don’t do as we’re told, and will cost about twenty billion pounds to run. I’d rather have the money spent on police tackling actual crime, but Labour wants it wasted on being able to keep control of us – because they’ve forgotten that they work for all of us, and not the other way round. And they’ve not forgotten but just ignore the fact that they’ve already caused the biggest data disaster in the history of the world, yet are still obsessed with throwing more untold billions of taxpayers’ money down the drain to make it easier for crooks to get their hands on all our personal data in one handy leaky Labour Government database. That all makes it even more cowardly and deceitful that now they’re trying to imply these cards will just be compulsory for immigrants.

But assume for an instant that that was the truth: how would it work, then? Tell every foreign tourist they’ve got to have their fingerprints taken and their eyes zapped by lasers, then pay an extra £100? Great way to destroy the tourist trade and push more of the economy into meltdown. And how do the police enforce every immigrant having to carry an ID card? The only answer can be that the Labour Government wants to waste countless hours of police time by having them harry anyone who doesn’t ‘look British’. Sounds like pure BNP policymaking to me (meaning racially ‘pure’, according to bigoted Labour / BNP thought processes, of course).

Labour Members Ashamed of Their “Abhorrent” Campaign

No doubt any Labour members reading will want to call me shocking and over the top. I suggest they do three things first.

• First, look up what Dr Freud called “projection”.

• Second, read that Labour / BNP attack and see if there’s any way they can defend it.

• And third? Well, I saw this on John’s blog last night and immediately decided to attack Labour’s disgusting BNP tactics – but to do it more calmly in the morning, rather than straight after I’d seen it and spitting tacks. This morning, I glanced at my e-mails and found a message drawing my attention to some more people who are “horrified” by Labour’s tactics and draw exactly the same explicit Labour-BNP connection about this “inflammatory,” “offensive” and “abhorrent” leaflet. But rather than Liberal Democrats, these are members of the Labour Party.

Presumably the reason Labour called the by-election before Gwyneth Dunwoody had even been buried was to minimise the amount of time for people to spot her turning in her grave?

Labels: Bigotry, British Politics, Labour, Meddling In Things That Are Nobody's Business But Your Own

Opinion has been divided on Wendy Alexander’s performance as Scottish Labour Leader – is it worse that her funding scandals brought politics into disrepute, or that her hopelessly ineffective leadership of the opposition (regularly outshone at First Minister’s Questions by Nicol Stephen) means she’s just terrible at her job? Struggling today to claw back the initiative for the first time in a year, she’s adopted the tone of a bellicose pub drunk to say ‘Referendum? Go on then! Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough.’ But there’s more to this than mere desperation for a headline.

I’ve just been listening to her on PM, and like other interviewers Eddie Mair decided that the main issue of interest to listeners concerning whether their country was about to be split apart was… Getting the gossip on whether and when she’d talked to Gordon Brown. Sigh. Of course Mr Brown doesn’t like the idea of holding a referendum on Scottish independence, and of course that’s why his spin doctors have been giving ‘hostile briefings’ about Ms Alexander all day. And, yes, there’s some interest in any Labour figure breaking free at last from Mr Brown’s sulky centralisation, even if in theory devolution means they make their own decisions (not while the big clunking fist’s Leader, they don’t). But if an interviewer can’t be bothered to talk about the issue of whether Scotland splitting off from the rest of the UK, they could at least think a bit more intelligently than ‘Ooh! You’re going to cop it from the boss!’

Surely the timing of this and Mr Brown’s multi-leaked fury has a simple explanation. When the Conservatives – the blue Conservatives, oh, you must remember, they centralised power and took away civil liberties and cosied up to absurdly right-wing warmongering US Republican Presidents and taxed the poor more to fund income tax cuts… No, it is difficult to remember the difference, isn’t it – when the other Conservatives were in power, they punished Scotland for not voting for Mrs Thatcher by turning it into a giant lab for the most barking mad Thatcherite policies, most famously the poll tax. And the political results of this included near-annihilation for the (blue) Conservatives north of the border and growing support for the SNP, which Labour thought until last year they’d defused through devolution.

The legacy of the ’80s and ’90s, coupled with last year’s election putting the SNP ahead, is that Scottish Labour are petrified that if the Tories ever get back in at Westminster, the Scottish public will be so disgusted that the SNP will have all their Christmases come at once.

So what could cause Wendy Alexander – who’s spent a year being a glove puppet that would be a ventriloquist’s dummy for Mr Brown if she ever actually said anything – to finally discover her own voice? It’s simple. The Leader of the Scottish Labour Party has taken one look at the London elections and the local elections across England and Wales and thought what Labour Members of the Westminster Parliament daren’t say: the Tories are going to win the next General Election. And she’s petrified herself into a U-turn.

The Scottish Labour Party are scared stiff of a referendum on independence at any time – just as Labour are always petrified of letting go the tiniest sniff of power – but they’ve discovered something that they’re even more scared of than a referendum in theory. They’ve discovered that they think the Tories are going to get back in at the next UK General Election, and that as the SNP are bound to try and fix any referendum date for their maximum political advantage, the one thing that would be worse for them than an independence referendum under an unpopular Labour Government that’s virtually indistinguishable from the Tories would be an independence referendum under the actual Tories.

Wendy Alexander wants the referendum now, because scared as she is she knows that most Scots are sick of the Labour Party but have no fervour for cutting the rest of the country off to spite Gordon’s face. But a referendum in 2010, after several years of getting used to the SNP not frightening the horses – even though that’s mainly because they don’t have the power to – and with the Labour Party at Westminster and Holyrood almost certainly still looking tired, fractious and unpleasant, and most of all on the back of another Conservative Government at Westminster that Alex Salmond can say ‘Look, you didn’t vote for them and Labour failed to protect you from them…’ That’s the nightmare going through Ms Alexander’s head, with the thought that under those circumstances the Scottish public might just decide to tell the rest of Britain to sod off.

And that’s why Ms Alexander’s declared finally independence of her own, and why Mr Brown’s so shocked: after last week, she thinks he’s a loser, and she’s cut him adrift.

Labels: British Politics, Devolution, Labour, Scotland

When Harriet Harman showed she’s as brilliant at running her website as she was at following election law, who’d have thought that BBC coverage would focus not on her being an idiot but being a “victim”? And who could have imagined that the BBC would then go on to refer to well-known Conservative comic figure Grant Shapps in a way that’s more flattering to him even than his own laughably improbable claims… And that’s provably untrue?

This uncritical embellishment on Tory spin is even more irritating than John-Spray-On-Testosterone-Humphrys’ typically dumb line of questioning to Nick Clegg on Today this morning. And at least there, rather than being presented as po-faced fact, Nick got to answer back – and it’s well-worth listening to the second half of his interview in particular, as when he gets cross, by golly he’s good.

But, anyway – the Prologue.

Last year, as I’m sure you’ll all remember – but you can read my bumper compilation if you don’t – a ‘Liberal Democrat member’ confessed that he thought we had no chance of winning the Ealing Southall by-election, and talking up the Tories instead. There were two things worth noting about this post: in retrospect, that “David Cameron’s Conservatives” were left becalmed in third place while the Liberal Democrat candidate finished second with a significant increase in his vote share; and right at the time, when the ‘Liberal Democrat member’ was posting under the name “Grant Shapps”, from the YouTube account held by the Tory MP of that name. Whoops!

There were, of course, two possible explanations. One was that a Tory campaigns dirty tricks ‘expert’ had made an embarrassing cock-up and forgot to sign out of his own account and into his sock-puppeting fake ‘Liberal Democrat member’ one; the other, put forward by Mr Shapps and believed by a whole one other person on Earth, was that his account had been hacked in some intricate conspiracy where some opponent had impersonated Mr Shapps impersonating a Liberal Democrat talking up the chances of the Conservatives in a by-election Mr Shapps was assisting in the campaign for, in precisely the same terms in which the real Mr Shapps himself had been briefing the media about the parties’ chances. Hmm. Which, dear reader, do you think is the more probable?

Thanks to Will and Jonathan, then, for spotting that the BBC not only took Mr Shapps’ side of the story – unlikely enough – but then claimed entirely fictitiously that Mr Shapps had been embarrassed by a hacker claiming the Conservatives had no chance of winning. Yes, Auntie Beeb have somehow managed to make up a story so pro-Conservative that it’s factually inaccurate even by Mr Shapps’ own self-serving and highly improbable account. Perhaps they looked up alleged examples of hacking and, on seeing a note that ‘Tory MP Grant Shapps claimed that his account was hacked to post a deceitful attack on the Liberal Democrats in which the alleged hacker coincidentally used exactly the same spin Mr Shapps himself was using’, which is his actual claim, they just thought ‘No, we must have got that wrong’ and ‘corrected’ reality to something less manifestly improbable rather than thinking ‘Hmm, should we consider the faintest scintilla of a possibility that a Conservative MP wasn’t being entirely truthful rather than accepting his story so uncritically that we make up a new bit to make it more believable?’ Or perhaps Mr Shapps has always been at war with Eastasia?

Anyway, should you too wish to let the BBC know just how wrong they are to be making up further lies to make an obvious liar seem more credible, click here.


Update: Despite the header details still claiming the story was last updated on Friday at 10.15am – naughty Auntie Beeb, that’s a lie – sometime around 3pm today all mention of Grant Shapps was removed. No apology to those of us who complained, no clarification, no correction to ‘of course, some MPs have a less cut and dried record with hackers…’ No, rather than change the ‘poor MPs are all just victims of these terrible hackers!’ line of their story or admit a mistake, the BBC have stuffed their made-up story into a memory hole and pretended it never happened. For the record, from Friday until this afternoon their site fictitiously proclaimed:

“Last year, Conservative housing spokesman Grant Shapps was targeted by hackers who broke into his YouTube account to post a message under his name saying the party could not win the Ealing Southall by-election.”

This isn’t just sour grapes for the BBC not accepting ‘my’ side of the story. The problem with a respected news organisation making something up, then just removing rather than correcting it, is that people who read the original story (such as, first from a quick search, Leaders We Deserve) will still believe it’s true. And that’s just not what the BBC should be about.

Labels: British Politics, Comedy, Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, Radio, The Golden Dozen, The Today Programme

Today I’m mostly feeling very ill, though managed to get out with Richard and Millennium for a secret mission; curled up on the sofa for the TV equivalent of comfort food, though (well, for me that’s really Doctor Who, but hey), with the results programme for I’d Do Anything. We’ve been watching it intermittently, in part for John Barrowman, in part because it’s a good musical (I was once a terrible undertaker at school), and in part for that reality TV buzz of extermination. Tonight I’m typing those unusual words: I agree with Andrew Lloyd-Webber. Bah. Keisha was brilliant throughout.

Back more than a month to the initial ‘auditions’ programme, and big lass from Blackpool Jodie instantly stood out for me as the perfect Nancy – thankfully, she’s still in. The single mum who made the hairs go up on the back of my neck felt the fatal touch of John Barrowman as angel of death in the second week, but the other who really impressed me was always Keisha. They’ve all repeated the cliché that she sounds like a young Shirley Bassey: well, she does, and I hope she goes on to greater things now she’s been dropped from the programme. Admittedly, in the ‘about the Nancies’ clips she came across as an egomaniac – but that’s what we expect of a leading lady, surely? It just feels wrong that a woman with such a fantastic voice and great presence keeps getting no votes when several of the survivors can boast neither. So best wishes to her, surprising side tip on Ashley, who’s suddenly improving and acting quite intriguingly (just as last year I gradually warmed to vampire boy), but mainly, go Jodie!

In the meantime, though, aside from the BBC doing a great big months-long advert for a commercial operation – we’ve got used to that – isn’t Oliver! a weird choice? Aside from the regular hilarity of John Barrowman, Graham Norton and a load of Nancies, aside from the completely doomed idea of choosing a bunch of Olivers (who have to be protected from votes or scrutiny, so you can’t get interested in their fates or life stories, and who are all just a bit bland anyway, save the one who looks scarily like Boris Johnson)… Is it just me who’s familiar with the story at all, and the archetypal ‘tart with a heart’? Because every time one of the panel points at a young woman and declares “You could be Nancy!” I contextualise it and hear ‘You could be a prostitute!’

Mind you, that makes it appropriately very funny if you notice how everyone now titters when every comment Barry Humphries makes about the young ladies is so blatantly informed by his, ah, lower brain.

In tonight’s more exciting viewing, once again we tuned to channels 301 and 302 and have just been disappointed. Oh, joy. People want to watch Doctor Who, the BBC’s second-highest-rated programme, and the BBC promises red-button commentaries. What do they actually show? Snooker. Last Friday? Snooker. On both spare channels. There’s been not a sausage since the commentary for The Fires of Pompeii (though if I had to choose an episode for extras, a fantastic historical and best story since Human Nature would have been the one. It’d just be nice to have the lot). So we’re watching yesterday’s surprisingly Sarah Jane Adventures-but-without-the-light-touch-feel episode on BBC 3, without people nattering over it, and are going to have to try and play it in synch with a podcast. Sigh. Still, Bernard Cribbins is being delightful as I type, Donna and Martha are great and I was pleasantly wrong-footed by thinking Gloopy Martha would be a Rutan; let’s wait until next week and see if that outweighs the irritating young genius and we get an explanation for the Sontarans plotting like late-’60s Cybermen… Cough, choke, rasp, ill-tempered and ill-bodied complaints, et cetera.

Labels: David Tennant, Doctor Who

The sad deaths have been reported of two rather marvellous octogenarians who’ve often brought joy to my ears (though not in the way Samantha might).

Tristram Cary

Tristram Cary was a ground-breaking composer, scoring films such as The Ladykillers and Quatermass and the Pit and pioneering electronic music. In Doctor Who’s early days, his inspired contributions ranged from comedy ballads to the eerie musique concrète which accompanied the first appearance of the Daleks (appropriately, repeated a couple of weeks ago in commemoration of Verity Lambert).

Humphrey Lyttelton

And now Richard has just woken me in need of a cuddle at news of Humphrey Lyttelton, patron saint of young people who are a bit clever and want to mystify people with the rules of a strange game they’re apparently playing while simultaneously indulging in terrible double entendres. Well, that’s one of the reasons I loved him when I was at college, anyway. That, and the letter sometime in the ’80s – before I understood what most of the innuendos meant – from an irate listener to the Radio Times about how these shocking old lechers mistreated ‘score-girl’ Samantha. I understood what the problem was there, anyway. And just last year I was at Tenth Planet while gravel-voiced Paul Darrow – of the once and future Blake’s 7, confirmed to me on Thursday by Zen – was warming up for a signing by reciting some of the filthiest Lionel Blair jokes imaginable from Humph the previous week. As shocked parents steered their children away from him, I cackled and realised that, tragically, my days of not understanding them are long gone. Now, tragically, there won’t be any more.

My parents playing Humph’s jazz programme on a Sunday never really caught on with me, but I haven’t a clue about any memory before his antidote to panel games. I’m sorry. I’ll miss him, as will any other listener to Radio 4. And I hope someone from the Office of Government Commerce is there to comfort Samantha.

And Now the Radiophonic Workshop and Dick Mills on TV

Onto a happier note for fans of strange noises. If you’re not taking a Saturday lie-in and want cheering up, by the way, turn on BBC Breakfast News in a few hours and you’ll see young whipper-snapper seventy-something Dick Mills – whose first contributions to Doctor Who sound were alongside and even before those of Tristram Cary, and who is still going strong – explaining how to make peculiar sounds and marking fifty years since the foundation of the BBC’s legendary BBC Radiophonic Workshop. I met him just a couple of weeks ago, and a nicer chap you couldn’t hope for, inspiring to hear talk about the Workshop (complete with PowerPoint presentation) and lovely to chat to. I spent most of yesterday curled inside a duvet on the sofa coughing in pleasure at Genesis of the Daleks, many of Dick’s evocative special sounds for which I’ve known by heart for three decades. And, in memory of Humph, when I was next to Dick sorting out a few shiny silver discs for him to autograph the other week, a friend whose name coincidentally is Robert Dick asked if I’d seen everyone I wanted. “Not yet,” I piped up, distracted and rather too loudly, “I’ve just got to grab Dick.”

Now back to bed, and my distraught beloved.

Labels: Blake’s 7, Comedy, Daleks, Doctor Who, Fandom, Obituary, Radio

Congratulations to Gavin Whenman for having exposed a small (well, really quite generously proportioned) problem with the Labour Government’s latest piece of self-gratification in creating another new logo for Members to ogle. I wonder how much was expended on the Office of Government Commerce’s exciting new branding? I imagine there must have been stiff competition.

Warning: this Government logo may not be considered work-safe.

This may beat “Bird’s Eye Frozen Cod Pieces” as one of the most memorable – and perhaps short-lived – marketing devices in history. I choked on my Lemsip.

Labels: Blogs, British Politics, Labour, Stupid Ideas

When Gordon Brown’s made such an almightily stupid mess of his tax ‘triumph’, it doesn’t say much for the nous of his backbenchers that even he can hoodwink them. Again. Last year they cheered him when he announced a middle-income tax cut that was going to win them the Election That Never Was. The Liberal Democrats immediately noticed this was paid for by doubling tax on the lowest earners, but Labour MPs took 379 days to spot the problem and mount a very late rebellion when it became obvious it would lose them the Election That Actually Is Next Week. Yesterday ‘rebel leader’ Frank Field, who the likes of the Daily Hate Mail and the Tories always tell us is a genius – bit of a clue there – dropped his rebellion when he was promised compensation for those who’ve lost out… And, to the surprise of brilliant Mr Field and his Labour fellows, it turns out this stupid, spineless shower cheered yesterday without reading the small print. How completely unlike last year, when they, er, cheered without reading the small print.

I thought they were stupid beyond belief for falling for it once. How mind-bogglingly useless do Labour MPs have to be to fall for the same trick all over again?

Prisoners of Stupidity

In half an hour on ITV4 (again at 3, and you can catch episodes on Wednesday evenings at 8, too) there’s another episode of the spy / political / drug-crazed thriller The Prisoner, all set within a mysterious Village full of absurd rituals, where an appearance of democracy is a sham because it’s all fixed behind the scenes, where you’re never sure whether anyone means what they say, and when just when you think you might have got somewhere, you always find yourself back exactly where you started. Oh, and there’s a near-infinite supply of Number Twos. Similarities to the Westminster Village aren’t difficult to come by.

While today’s episode is one of the weaker ones – The General, a very wide-eyed Sixties attempt at satire with a crushingly obvious ending – this time last week they showed perhaps the best of them, the complex, brilliant, mind-bending attempt at breaking down the Prisoner’s self-image by making him The Schizoid Man. By an uncanny coincidence, at exactly the moment that was showing last week, Angela Smith (one of the lowest numbers in the Labour Government) was resigning over the 10p tax rate, having taken just 393 days to do the adding up (you can see why her abilities haven’t propelled her further than the lowest rung, can’t you?). Then, suddenly – in a twist not unlike The Prisoner in one of its more bleedin’ obvious moments – she didn’t. And that’s the difference between the Village and the Westminster Village: the Prisoner is kept there because he stands firm to his principles and won’t cave in; Angela Smith was merely the precursor of all those Labour MPs yesterday who keep their places in the Westminster Village by giving up their principles and caving in at every opportunity, as interrogators pressed The Schizoid Woman: “Why didn’t you resign?”

Mr Brown’s Lies Exposed

Such few principles as Mr Brown clings to boil down essentially to two messages: that he believes work is the morally upright solution to everything; and that he wants to reduce poverty. His doubling the tax rate on the lowest-earning workers gives the lie to both. People who earn the smallest amount and often have to work the hardest to get it have had money taken off them by Mr Brown to give to people on middle incomes. Remember when he raised pensions by just 75p? Once again, his inherent meanness and control-freakery, means that he can’t stand people getting money, still less keeping their own, if he doesn’t think they ‘deserve’ it – and that, like his insulting 75p, he just doesn’t understand that people on less than a tenth of his generous public salary might be a bit narked when he squeezes them for cash.

If you heard any of his pathetic, mealy-mouthed excuse for an interview yesterday, you’ll have heard him trying – disgustingly – to claim that doubling the lowest rate from 10p to 20p* was morally right because it wasn’t the best way of helping the poor. No, Mr Brown, and giving a tax cut to people on middle incomes that’s bigger the better-off you are under about £40,000 was targeted at poverty, was it? Of course not. This shameful steal from the poorest was purely and simply to try and bribe people with their own money in the run-up to an election Mr Brown hoped was coming. But ducked and then lied that he’d never planned one anyone, just as yesterday he backed down in part and then lied that it was in line with what he’d said all along. When what he’d actually said all along was that there were no losers from his tax hike… Which was a flat-out lie.

*Though, of course, Mr Brown still calls what he did “abolishing the 10p rate” as if it was a tax cut rather than a massive tax hike for the lowest-paid. Sorry, but now that shameful piece of spin’s more than a year old, even Labour MPs have finally spotted it’s a lie.

The other point Mr Brown made yesterday was a claim that this was a historic simplification of the tax structure. Aside from the fact that, as I wrote more than a year ago, he’s “simplified” three income tax brackets into either two or three depending on which income you look at – which, as the more agile-brained among you (look away, Labour Members, it’ll make your heads hurt) will know means it’s technically complicated the tax structure rather than simplified it – most of the people he’s talking about don’t have a “simple” tax structure, but an insanely complicated tangle of tax credits designed by Mr Brown himself. And the fact that not everyone he penalised will get any money back is, of course, hidden within this Byzantine edifice.

While Frank Field and his fellow simpletons think that every loser will be compensated, and the compensation backdated, the truth is that the Labour Government has committed to no such thing. The only backdating that Ministers’ve said out loud is a winter fuel allowance-based one-off sum for younger pensioners; and even that means that the people Mr Brown has coshed for their cash may have to wait months and months to get it back, and there’s no assurance that they’ll get the same next year – because, remember, the 10p rate isn’t coming back, so any one-off sum means a rip-off delayed, not abolished. Then there are the young people who suffered from Mr Brown’s smash and grab raid who Mr Brown wants employers to pay for through the minimum wage; well, of course they shouldn’t have been discriminated against for the minimum wage in the first place, but it’s telling that the Labour Government is correcting this not out of principle but as a shabby cover-up – and employers won’t be backdating the higher pay. And then, of course, there are the tax credits, which everyone already knows can take months to work out, are often miscalculated, and then end up clobbering you again to claw it all back, even if you’ve filled out eight thousand forms correctly to get it in the first place.

Here’s an idea: why not just let people keep their money in the first place, rather than fiddle the system with a myriad bureaucratic fixes?

• Because that way Mr Brown wouldn’t be able to claim it wasn’t a climb-down.

• Because if everyone actually got their money it would cost more, as no-one would be left to fall through those carefully crafted cracks that allow the Labour Government to keep the cash that the low-paid might otherwise get.

• And most of all, because Mr Brown likes to dole out the money himself to make it absolutely clear that we’re all working for him.

I thought it was the other way round?

The Conservatives’ crocodile tears for the poor follow the inspiring pattern of first falling for Mr Brown’s sleight of hand tax cut and welcoming it last year, then abstaining on the doubling of the 10p band when it came to a vote, then only in the last few weeks – a whole year later, when suddenly it’s unpopular – saying that it’s a very bad thing but, er, that they wouldn’t do anything about it. Thankfully, after Ming Campbell made it his main line of attack on last year’s Budget while David Cameron was still panting wetly at the thought of lower income tax (without noticing a doubling of income tax on the poor to pay for it), the Liberal Democrats have kept up our opposition to this for so long that not just the dim Tories but even the unfeasibly stupid Labour MPs have now noticed. And Nick Clegg spiked Mr Brown appropriately at yesterday’s Prime Minister’s Questions – though, as Millennium points out, if he’d had more than two questions Nick would also have been able to expose another shameless whopper from Mr Brown.

In a few days, I’ll post what I think of the Liberal Democrat tax-cutting alternative – and propose another option that has its own problems in ‘selling’, but would benefit lower earners more while still giving tax cuts to people on middle incomes. In the meantime, if you think I’ve been a little harsh in mocking the spineless, stupid Labour wastes of space, you might like to read what Liberal Democrat Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury Jeremy Browne said in the House of Commons the other day. He’s not as gentle as I am.

Finally, an apology. Having exposed many of the ways in which Mr Brown has been deliberately attempting to deceive people, it’s only fair that I come clean and admit that my headline is also a big fat lie. No, while Labour MPs are indeed the stupidest in the world, for that very reason they’ve not yet twigged that they’ve been conned again – I just thought the headline had more impact that way. As to when they’ll actually work out that Mr Brown’s “compensation” won’t reach everybody, won’t be backdated to everyone it reaches, and won’t give the full amount they’ve lost even to everyone for whom it’s backdated… My best advice is to set your calendars for 378 days.

Labels: British Politics, Labour, Tax, The Golden Dozen, The Prisoner

Some people might think that the week before election day is a bit of a daft time for a bunch of bureaucrats to go witch-hunting within their own party, and many might think that it doesn’t sound like the sort of thing Liberal Democrats do. But Stoke Lib Dems appear to have confused themselves with the Labour Party and suspended Liberal Democrat (Libertarian) Councillor Gavin Webb for being – gasp! – a Libertarian Liberal Democrat. Tristan, Alex (happy birthday!) and Julian have beaten me to blogging about it, but today it sounds like Gavin needs character references. Even from me.

I have a heavy cold at the mo and am feeling very grotty, self-medicating heavily with Lemsip and chocolate cake, so I may be woozy and have grasped the wrong end of the stick. But it appears that Gavin has been suspended from the party not for any misconduct, but for shooting his mouth off with views that everyone’s known he’s been espousing for years anyway. Libertarian propositions that seem to have been especial causes of frumpy opprobrium include his support for legalising prostitution, all drugs, firearms, and drink-driving so long as no-one is injured. I’m probably going to be accused of wanting to keep Gavin in the party only to make myself look moderate, as I agree with him on only about, ooh, one and a half of those, but though I disagree with plenty of his views I really can’t see that any of them are offensively illiberal (though possibly impractical). Quite the reverse.

About fifteen years ago, the first time I was ever in a minority of one on the Federal Policy Committee was when I wanted to pass unamended the party’s very libertarian policy paper on prostitution, which so appalled the rest of the FPC that it was called back to three successive meetings for watering-down before it was allowed near conference. Despite that, you might like to consider that while Gavin may be in a minority of active politicians on that issue, he’s in line with what the expert opinion said would be most effective – and that, the only time the party voted on the issue, even the watered-down paper could still be roughly described as legalising prostitution. So it may be an old policy, but it’s still the people who disagree with Gavin who are out of step with the Liberal Democrats. As far as drugs go, half a dozen years ago we voted to legalise cannabis – eventually – and I spoke in favour of that (after a hum-dinger of a row on FPC, though not quite as much as we used to have under Paddy), though like Lib Dem policy I’m more on the fence over hard drugs, for all sorts of reasons. And there’s certainly room for a wide range of views in the Liberal Democrats there. On firearms and drink-driving, I can see Gavin’s point but I think it’s daft in practice – my rule of thumb is that if a crime’s victimless, it shouldn’t be a crime… But I think Gavin and I have different ideas of ‘victimless’. I’d say that a ‘crime’ that wouldn’t normally injure someone else and that’s with informed consent shouldn’t be a crime at all, just because other people disapprove of it; but if someone’s reckless and very likely to do someone actual harm and they don’t have any option to consent to it, I’d still be dubious about it if by chance injury was avoided. I suppose my dividing line for saying something shouldn’t be a crime would be something like ‘victimless by definition’, then, rather than ‘victimless by luck’.

The good side of this is that it’s stirring up debate about what we stand for, and about the limits of law; the bad side is that I’d have assumed we all stand for free speech, and that people can say what they like quite comfortably in the party as long as they don’t oppose the party’s fundamental principles. Well, Gavin’s fundamental principle appears to be ‘not banning things’ – something with which I have a great deal of sympathy – and taking responsibility for yourself. I’ve scoured through the Preamble to the Liberal Democrat Constitution, and he doesn’t appear to be contradicting it at all. Is it perhaps that he’s a bit embarrassing to his fellow councillors who want to just sound safely like everyone else in the run-up to election times? Because I can understand that feeling, it’s only human, but if so then they’re the ones that the party’s principles would frown at. Is it because he’s called a BNP councillor a fascist? I’ve looked at that pesky Preamble again, and I’ve missed the bit that says being truthful but uncouth is A Bad Thing.

Gavin’s ‘crime’ appears to be ‘Being A Bit Gobby’ (perhaps, your honour, he might protest at that and enter a plea of ‘A Lot Gobby’). It may not win him friends, but it sounds like a Liberal. What’s his accusers’ excuse?

Now let’s get past all this silliness and remember that, with the odd hiccup, Liberal Democrats tend to encourage people to make up their own minds, Labour order people what to do, and Tories… Well, under the current regime, Tories dither for a few days and then do whatever the newspapers tell them will be most popular. We’re better than that, so why not stop holding up shocked mittens at a Liberal being Liberal and go out and beat the other two?


Update: if I wasn’t feeling so knurdly, I’d have realised that the perfect punning title for this post would be “Webb of Sin”. So count yourself lucky that I missed that!

Labels: Drugs, FPC, Ideas, Liberal Democrats, Liberalism, Meddling In Things That Are Nobody's Business But Your Own, Stupid Ideas, The Golden Dozen

Cocaine-abuser and Conservative candidate Boris Johnson got himself into a stupor on drugs this week on the BBC Asian Network. Mr Johnson, who I assume is no longer a cocaine binger or aiding and abetting fraudsters to commit GBH, was spin-doctoring that he was the best person to stand up for law and order in London when he was asked whether a former police officer might be a better choice than a former criminal. So he attacked Brian Paddick’s record but, er, instantly had to admit he was completely wrong. You can listen to him lying and then backtracking here.



Mr Johnson would probably be safer if he left crime alone as an issue, given that he’s the most prominent of the wealthy Tory cocaine generation in boasting about his exploits, but he might have had more credibility if he’d at least used the old cliché ‘Set a thief to catch a thief’ rather than just saying any old rubbish and hoping no-one knew about his record. Hoping no-one remembered what he’d been up to when saying anyone who isn’t a rich Conservative should have the law come down on them like a ton of bricks was stupid enough; attacking a hugely successful former police officer was stupider still; but making things up about Brian Paddick’s record while Brian was sitting in the studio next to him and could instantly get him bang to rights takes a really special level of idiocy. If you weren’t sure that a leading Conservative politician couldn’t possibly be breaking the law while saying people should be locked up for doing what he’s doing, you’d think the most likely explanation was that Mr Johnson was just off his face on drugs again, wouldn’t you?

Now, here’s an issue where I disagree with Brian Paddick. The Liberal Democrat London Mayoral candidate is quite a lot less liberal about drug use than I am, and I’ve disagreed with him about it to his face. But there’s common ground – which is that both of us want to get the gangsters who push drugs off the streets. My own view and that of most scientific professionals is that cannabis is not harmless, but is a similar level of risk to alcohol and tobacco. Because of that, I would legalise cannabis, which is the only way to regulate its quality and stop criminals making their money out of it. Brian is at the other end of the sensible spectrum on this – he didn’t support changing the law on cannabis, but still recognised that the problem was the dealers, not the users, and rather than wasting police time on people going after small amounts went after the dealers. It worked. What both my preferred policy and the one that Brian put into practice have in common is that they’re common-sense ways of tackling the gangsters.

Mr Johnson, on the other hand, talks tough about drugs, calls for people who did what he did to be locked up (but doesn’t volunteer for it himself), and attacks people like Brian who know – and have delivered – what they’re talking about. He just wants to waste police time on going after the very large minority of the population who’ve taken illegal drugs but aren’t wealthy enough to get away with it, rather than being interested in common-sense solutions that actually tackle the drugs trade.

Just to refresh your memory, Brian Paddick and Boris Johnson are both famous for stories about their drug-taking that have been printed in newspapers.

• In Brian’s case, the story was that he’d taken a soft drug, cannabis, and the story was completely made up. Which means Brian’s name was completely cleared and he received a hefty libel settlement.

• In Mr Johnson’s case, the story was that he’d taken a hard drug, cocaine (oh, and cannabis as well), and he admitted the story was completely true. Which means he’s an enormous hypocrite who thinks the law should crack down on people who do what he does… But just not on him and his mates. Because what’s the point of being privileged if you can’t exercise your privileges and get away with things ordinary people can’t?

Still, you shouldn’t be surprised when Mr Johnson breaks the law himself then spins and poses as talking tough about the very laws he breaks. As a copper would put it, he’s got a record as long as your arm.

In other old news, while Brian Paddick was pounding the streets in the 1990s as a highly effective police officer making London safer for people, Boris Johnson was, er, busy giving the address of a journalist who’d exposed an insurance fraudster to, er, that very insurance fraudster so that he could have the journalist beaten up.

Boris Johnson: tough on crimes by ordinary people; tough on people who investigate crime…
…But all in favour of get-of-jail-free cards for rich Tories.

Labels: Conservatives, Corruption, Drugs, London, The Golden Dozen

London viewers watching straight through the BBC London News to the London Decides Mayoral Debate on Tuesday night saw Tory candidate Boris Johnson’s spending plans not double, not triple, but multiply by twelve. Planning to throw away every penny spent on bendy buses and charge Londoners to replace them on his own personal whim, such is Mr Johnson’s economic competence that when the debate was recorded he priced his vanity project with:

“I stick by our figure of eight million pounds.”

But by the time it went out the next day:

“It would cost, you know, about a hundred million.”

Great person to have in charge of our council tax precepts, eh!

Everyone knows Mr Johnson’s eye-twitching hate for bendy buses means his only policy is to throw all the money spent on them away and fork out extra London taxes to indulge his own personal preferences. But even so, the costs going up 1150% in one day is a bit steep, particularly when figures Andrew Neil quoted at him during the debate – which is when Mr Johnson stuck to his eight million daydream – were even higher, at £114 million. Not that Mr Neil did a good job chairing the debate, though: as usual more interested in hearing his own voice than either members of the public or any answers, he invited questions from the audience… Then ignored the questions and asked his own, most shamefully when – rather than letting Brian Paddick answer what he’d do to tackle teenage street violence – he kept pressing for Hello-style gossip on Ian Blair. There’s a word for some who only thinks of his own self-gratification, but I can’t quite bring it to mind…

Still, that’s better than Mr Johnson. At least there’s only one thing I can’t bring to mind. I was chatting to a Tory friend on Sunday who mocked me good-naturedly for my “I’m coming out for Brian Paddick” badge, then admitted that “At least your candidate can string a sentence together without going –” and here we both burst into an identical chorus of the familiar “I – I – I – I…” which makes Mr Johnson seem such an egotistical gentleman. And it isn’t just adding up that has Mr Johnson scratching his famous blond locks in the hope of finding a functional brain cell.

Ken Livingstone is a monstrously arrogant egomaniac with a contempt for democracy, who will do anything to get out of having himself and all his moneygrubbing cronies opened up to scrutiny. So Mr Johnson had a golden opportunity to appeal to people like me who wouldn’t trust our current lying, hypocritical, self-serving, promise-breaking, gay-killer-buddying Mayor as far as we could throw him. What did he do on Tuesday night, after Mr Livingstone had been criticised yet again covering up for his crooked cronies? Mr Johnson was unable to give Londoners a single name for the string of Deputy Mayors he wants to have, presumably, as Mr Neil said, “to run things that you won’t be running.” “Thank goodness for that!” put in Brian. Pressed again and again, first Mr Johnson seemed unable to think of the names of any of the cronies he wants Londoners’ money to pay for, and then eventually said it was none of our business. They’ll be working for free, then, will they? No. Of course not. Incompetent, or wanting his own cronies in the trough? You decide.

So, we have a Labour Mayor who gives jobs to his cronies and uses all his undoubted political skills to stop anyone scrutinising them.

We have a Tory who wants to be Mayor who attacks the Mayor for giving jobs to his cronies and refusing to open them up to public scrutiny… Not because he disagrees with any of that in principle, but because he wants those to be his perks.

And what did Liberal Democrat Brian Paddick say about who he’d employ? That jobs in his administration would be openly advertised by public criteria:

“So we get the best people for London – not his mates [gestures], and not his mates [gestures], and not my mates.”

I know who I’d rather have spending our taxes.

Of course, there will be many more questions that Mr Johnson will be unable or unwilling to answer, and there have been plenty of others already. On Newsnight last week, Mr Johnson was completely unable to come up with any figure for his personal bus fleet at all. So far this week, it’s been eight million, then a hundred million a day later. By tomorrow, he’ll presumably be telling Mr Paxman that:

‘Well, Julian, it’ll cost around a million billion pounds, and money well spent if you, ah, ah, ah, ah, ask any Londoner, because nothing on Earth is as important as getting rid of the bendy bus. Bring back Routemasters, Justin, and London’s economy will boom, crime will vanish from our streets and I, I, I, I’ll be able to cut council tax to nothing, all for just a billion squillion pounds on the council tax. And just to make sure those bendy buses which are the source of all the evil in the world don’t come back, Jeroboam, my first act as Mayor will be to order every one of them piled into a giant wicker bendy bus and set alight. Which is a brilliant wheeze, because it means they’ll jolly well have to build more Routemasters for me, and because wicker’s organic, so the smoke from the burning bendy buses will be entirely carbon-neutral, and carbon-neutral means that it actively helps the environment to get better. Er, er, er, er, that’s right, isn’t it?’

In days when Labour’s handling of the economy and the environment are constantly revealed to be so utterly hopeless, they must be throwing up their arms in thanks that however rubbish they are, the Tories still want to tender a lower bid to be absolutely clueless in every way.

Labels: Conservatives, Corruption, London, Tax

What do the following highly numerate and on-the-ball people have in common?

• William Hague, at yesterday’s Prime Minister’s Question Time?

• Labour MPs suddenly complaining, signing motions and claiming Mr Brown is “living on another planet”?

• According to this morning’s Today Programme, an unnamed but “leading” thinktank (may not contain actual thoughts)?

All of them have suddenly worked out that Gordon Brown’s final Budget as (named) Chancellor clobbered the poor to pay for middle-rate tax cuts. This was impossible to know until this week – unless you were Ming Campbell, Vince Cable or several Lib Dem bloggers, a whole 379 days ago. On the day of last year’s Budget, rather than a couple of weeks after this year’s Budget, we spotted that Mr Brown had funded his “tax cut” by raising taxes on the poorest two million so they have to pay more.

Prepare yourself: next week, I expect these Tory, Labour and other mathematical prodigies to take up cudgels on behalf of their middle-income constituents, who suddenly find that because their generous-sounding 2p tax cut is funded by doubling their lowest tax band, it’s – gasp – actually a much smaller tax cut than they’d been led to expect.

Our leading political and economic thinkers are evidently suckers for special offers, but not so hot on reading the small print. They’re probably not used to going into a supermarket or a bank without their mums to give them advice, and I bet their online activities involve ordering a lot of bargain ‘V1agra’ (may contain worming pills).

Still, at least they’re just very, very slow rather than as plain deceitful as Junior Minister For Setting Her Undergarments Alight Jane Kennedy, who said it was a way to redirect help to low-earning families. Riiiigghht.

So, doubling income tax rates on the lowest-paid – quite literally doubling, from 10p to 20p in the pound – is actually to ‘help’ them? Perhaps by encouraging them to work harder?

So, shuffling tax rates around so that you have little in the way of changes if you earn over about £18,500 a year but you lose money steeply if you earn under that is Mr Brown’s idea of assistance to low earners?

But, Labour argues, everyone will be better off because of tax credits.

OK, so let’s that that argument a little further.

Getting your own wages is fairly straightforward. But getting tax credits mean you have to fill out all the right forms in order to persuade the Labour Government that it should grant you some of its great bounty through its immense goodness. There are several problems with that argument. It means that, instead of straightforwardly keeping their own money, people must jump through the bureaucratic hoops of a system proven to be riddled with errors and delays – and that Mr Brown would rather pay the extra costs of bureaucracy and intrude into everyone’s lives to decide by his arcane whim what money they ‘deserve’, rather than let them simply keep the money they earn, because he wants to be in control, boss around everyone’s lives, and make his serfs grateful for the pittance he deigns to dole out to them.

Mr Brown has two aims for this tax policy. One is to get a good headline for the middle-income earners he’s terrified are drifting to the Tories; well, that’s been and gone. The other is the Victorian notion that the ‘feckless, undeserving poor’ need to be bossed around ‘for their own good’ and that the Labour Government knows better than they do how to run their lives. So tax credits are designed to get money to ‘deserving’ cases and deny it to others.

And we know that tax credits can’t fill all the shortfall; there simply isn’t the money to do it. As the 2p cut to the standard rate is paid for by doubling the income tax rate for the lowest-paid, that leaves no extra money for tax credits, does it? That’s spending the money twice. I thought it was George Osborne who financed all his commitments by magic money from the pixie tree?

AND THAT’S NOT ALL (as the Labour Government’s going for the language of misleading special offers)!

Labour MPs, as quoted by William Hague – and when you hear that combination, you know that economic literacy isn’t going to be the main event here, even allowing them a whole year to try and work out the hard sums – have been worrying that five million lower-paid families would be worse off after Budget changes to income tax. It’s that worry that Jane Kennedy’s platitudes about the how-do-you-calculate-it, how-do-you-afford-it, how-do-you-justify-bossing-people-about tax credits have been trying to soothe. However, it’s not just lower-paid families that you have to worry about; unless I’ve blinked and moralising Victorian bully Mr Brown has repealed the child labour laws, it’s tends not to be ‘families’ that work as a unit, but individuals.

If you’re a hard-working single person earning under £18,500 a year, there’s not a shred of comfort even if – and it’s a big if – the Labour Government’s sums really do add up. So if you’re younger, or don’t have a family, or can’t have a family, or are anyone who’s perhaps hoping to have kids or get a house in the future and are worrying that under Mr Brown’s brilliant economic stewardship you may not be able to get a mortgage… Bad news. Now you’re having more money taken from you to give to people with more money than you.

Anyone still think Labour is the party that sticks up for low earners?


Update: more on those extremely quick-on-the-uptake Labour MPs on Lib Dem Voice.

Labels: British Politics, Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Tax, The Golden Dozen

The Today Programme’s prestigious (and often preposterous) ten past eight slot this morning was unusual in two ways: I thought the interviewee made a lot of sense; and I was agreeing with Nicolas Sarkozy. I don’t know which way I’d have voted in last year’s French Presidential run-off – the Socialist seemed a fluffy but ineffectual voice for the status quo, while Monsieur Sarkozy made more economic sense but on issues like immigration was a grotesquely illiberal git. Still, at least it was a more palatable (if less easy) choice than the previous election’s alternatives of the crook or the fascist. Some might say this morning’s interview was unusual in that the interviewee was speaking French, too, but as we largely heard his translator talking over him instead, the main vocal style of note was the amusing way in which Mr Naughtie’s usual terrier-like style gave way to fawning over a head of state.

The BBC news site’s coverage of the interview focuses on President Sarkozy’s warm words about a new Franco-British entente amicale and proposed closer co-operation in advance of his address to both Houses of Parliament – oddly enough, it’s on issues like nuclear energy that I’m more wary of him – but it was his words about the European Union that I found more stirring. In essence, he said that a Europe without Britain was unimaginable, but Britain needs others, too, explaining so many of the issues in the world that we can only really affect by working together. And Britain can only build a different Europe by getting involved – if we don’t have “both feet in Europe,” we’ll never be able to change it.

“Now, we’re not asking you to join Europe by giving up what you hold dear, but by bringing in everything that you have achieved. And that is a lot.”

Both more practical and more passionate than any interview on Europe that Today’s broadcast for a long while, it’s well worth a ‘Listen Again’ (later today, I imagine the interview will be part of their daily ‘Best of Today’ podcast assortment, too).

On the other hand, grumpy old Mr Brown may be less delighted by President Sarkozy, not only because he’s threatening to boycott the country illegally invading, occupying and oppressing Tibet for the last half-century – whose murderous dictator Mr Brown has been expending so much effort in sucking up to – but also because in his Today interview Nicolas Sarkozy talked about how impressed he was by the UK’s exciting young leaders. To paraphrase him in the style of Sideshow Bob: ‘The following UK leaders are youthful and vibrant: Monsieur Blair (once); Monsieur Cameron; Monsieur Clegg; that is all.’

Labels: European Politics, Radio, The