Curly's Corner Shop, the blog!

Could this be a pivotal moment for Labour?

Gordon Brown’s epic election fail yesterday continues to captivate the political commentators and this morning’s headlines naturally are pretty uncomfortable for Labour, as Brown expected. Even his most ardent friends, including South Shields born Mirror man Kevin Maguire have been fairly critical:

A Labour candidate rang to say the only positive he could see is it happened today and not yesterday or the day before. Most of the postal votes, he said with a grim laugh, have already been cast. The words “clutching” and “straws” spring to mind.

He also reveals that a PR firm is already offering a decent sum of cash to Gillian Duffy, presumably to talk about her private meeting with Brown, Maguire says the firm is headed by Lord Bell, whilst actually its chairman is Peter Bingle, who had this to say on his blog:

Today’s episode will bring a wry smile and a shake of the head from those Labour candidates and aides who know the PM. This is why the PM should have continued to be introduced to garden gnomes and Labour Party activists rather than members of the public. The simple truth is that he doesn’t like them and they don’t like him.

The PM who was already dead is now toast. The men in white coats should be called so that they can take him away to somewhere quiet and safe where he can rest and think about September 2007 when he should have gone to the country and didn’t. If only he had had the balls.

So what does Labour do now? Weep is the first thing that comes to mind followed by a stiff drink or two. Then what? I have always believed in the power of prayer but have far too high a regard for St Jude to suggest that Labour candidates pray to him for help. The simple fact is that the Labour Party knew that the PM was a loser and didn’t have the courage to get rid of him. It is hard to feel sorry for any of them.

Meanwhile Paul Waugh at the London Evening Standard reveals that the Prime Minister, in his hurry to lay the blame at someone else for daring to allow a genuine voter to confront him, aimed at the wrong target, his long suffering aide Sue Nye:

Sue Nye is also innocent, it seems. The man who spotted Mrs Duffy yelling at the PM was Labour’s (Rochdale) candidate Simon Danczuk. He apparently thought it would be a good idea to get her to meet Mr Brown and ushered her forward.

Perhaps more grin enhanced apologies are in order!

Long time Labour blogger Dave Semple who writes Though Cowards Flinch said yesterday:

The result is that Gordon Brown’s subsequent words depict him as upset that someone didn’t kowtow by serving up a soft-ball question, of the sort he’s used to fielding at Question Time from Labour MPs. Apart from making it harder to get the few decent Labour MPs re-elected, it also plays into the right-wing narrative that any discussion of immigration gets shouted down by the Left as racism, or bigotry.

Fuck Gordon Brown and the horse he rode in on. And if you want to talk about real bigotry, talk about Yarl’s Wood immigrant detention facility, happening under Labour’s watch.

Well, I certainly agree on the Yarls Wood story!

Despite yesterday’s events eventually resulting in Gordan Brown (sic) “trending” on Twitter, Labour’s “Twitter Tsarina” Kerry McCarthy strangely cannot find time or space to mention it on her blog.

The left’s favourite magazine The New Statesman has admitted that Labour’s campaign has been severely damaged by the Prime Minister’s gaffe, and former Deputy Prime Minister, John (two jags and two shags) Prescott, bizarrely claims that the whole affair is a “Murdoch plot” despite the fact that it was Labour’s campaign team that specifically asked Sky News to attach a radio mic to Brown’s lapel.

South Shields MP and Foreign Secretary David Miliband said of the affair:

“No one will be more mortified than the prime minister by this and he has obviously expressed his profound apologies to her.”

I wonder if he had a wry smile on his face as he uttered those words, or if his mind was already calculating where his future might lie after 6th. May?

The biggest question which remains amid this fallout is whether or not the “bigotgate affair” will prove to be a pivotal point in a Labour campaign which so far has failed to hit any high notes, with the party struggling to get out of third place in the polls. The unmasking of Brown’s character in such a public manner, serves only to confirm what many political commentators have been saying for a long time about his dark moods and inability to accept any criticisms, the alleged bullying of his staff, and a determination to have things his own way, Tony Blair is probably relaxing in the sun today laughing his head off.

Brown’s remarks about Mrs. Duffy may well have served to alienate the very type of voters that Labour desperately needs to hang on to – white, working class, low waged or unwaged, northern, and female! If “Rochdale woman” deserts Labour, votes Conservative or Liberal Democrat or God forbid BNP, the Labour Party could see itself doomed to third place opposition for many years ahead. Brown’s ill judged remarks could possibly heap  much damage upon his party, although not quite in the Ramsey MacDonald proportions.

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That is all.

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What on earth is £6bn in the bigger scheme?

Picture from Guido Fawkes

I’ve just responded to another thread using this example so thought it was worth sharing with everyone who feels they may be affected by Gordon Brown’s scare tactics. The Labour Party’s announced spending plans total £704 bn, the Conservatives total £698 bn, a difference of a mere £6 bn! Bearing in mind that £163 bn of this spending is borrowed, the additional £6 bn worth of cuts hardly touches the interest payments!

But the Tories will still be portrayed as heartless and evil, it really is desperate stuff.

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The Americanisation of our politics is now complete!

This piece of work is the most disgraceful scaremongering that I have ever witnessed, its style is redolent of the TV campaigns of the American religious right and confirms the impression that consultants, analysts,marketing experts, and spin doctors have taken over the campaign management of our politicians.

There isn’t a shred of evidence in the Conservative Party manifesto to support this nonsense, nor the printed matter which just about every household in the country has received, the propagandists at the heart of Brown’s machine must have received approval at the highest level for this work, a sign that Brown always intended to fight dirty, and no doubt the same forces are at work in CCHQ as bit of “tit for tat” comes into play.

Perhaps we can now look forward to the full horrors of a Tory nightmare in the coming days as first born children are killed at birth and eaten for breakfast, the unemployed are manacled and forced to work in chain gangs employed in the private sector and subsidised by the state, pensioners will be marched to the doctor as soon as they reach seventy and given a cocktail of death inducing drugs, remember folks Vote Conservative and the cancer will kill you!

(Btw, the “modest and middle incomes” talked about in here are £50000 pa, so the evil Tories will be taking money from the rich – I guess Labour just want to protect those who matter most to them!)

Could it be possible to drag our politics even further into the Yankee gutter?

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Is Nick Clegg driving the news agenda?

The Angel of the North cost £1m to construct, that is the amount of cash that Gordon Brown’s Labour government borrows on our behalf every 3 minutes 12 seconds, within 5 hours and 12 minutes you could build an Angel of solid silver at a cost of £97m! In one year you could build 1680 solid silver Angels and run out of major roads to site them next to, that’s because this government’s borrowing requirements amount to an eye watering £163 billion per annum, and that’s before we even begin to think about the accumulation of interest payments. Our national debt, with interest payments, is rising at a rate of £5,169 per second, £310,212 per minute, £18,607,306 per hour, £446,575,342 per day!

Yet for some odd reason, the fact that this government has been responsible for introducing 111 tax rises since 1997 and gathers in an additional £1 trillion of revenues, we are still left with a budget deficit of the same size as Greece, where the rest of the EU (us included) are having to bail them out and having to impose cuts in their public spending whether they like it or not! There is a good reason for that, Greece is in the Euro zone and their incapacity to run a sensible balanced economy will drag down the rest of the party unless they are brought to heel. The same would happen to Britain, I have no doubt, if we too had our currency in the Euro zone as Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats want.

Oh yes, back to that odd reason, why is it that this catastrophic mismanagement of our economy is not dominating the front pages of the newspapers or the lead stories on TV and radio news? Could it be that news and politics have become so dumbed down that they don’t think we would understand the story? Is that the reason why the only story with legs right now is about a hung Parliament, a situation which even Alex Salmond dumbs down to “balanced”?

Despite the fact that Labour appear to be stuck in third place in the polls I believe that Gordon Brown has been morally right to stick to his guns and talk about the economy over the past ten days, unfortunately because he created half of the mess he just doesn’t carry the credence or authority when it comes to asking for our permission to try and clean it up! David Cameron and the Conservatives have been right to to initially go on the attack on economic matters and to play their hands by declaring that it’s time to cut the spending NOW, and not wait until the debt spirals completely out of control, however he has allowed the Tory battle bus to wander off course in dealing with the rise of Nick Clegg!

Yes, the first and second Prime Ministerial debates have allowed Clegg and the Lib-Dems to dominate the news and the polls and yet, as we have seen, their economic policies are far from ideal and are very poorly thought through, low voltage Cable is really not the wise old sage that he would have us believe. The health of our national economy is in a critical condition, even with a change of government we face many many years of paying down the debt, reducing the size of public spending and the size of the state, reducing and removing waste and the quangocracy, we need to get to a position of a balanced budget not a “balanced Parliament”. i.e. Where tax receipts are the same as, or larger than, government spending. Only then can we feel positive about the conditions for growth and prosperity.

I am sure that only the Conservative Party offers the hope of tackling the debt mountain immediately after the general election, but they must put their position strongly and positively in the final eight days of the campaign. David Cameron must not allow himself to be diverted with any more talk about Calamity Clegg, the Lib-Dems, confusing coalitions, and murky back room deals, he needs to stick to his own agenda, show more anger about the past thirteen years, and more passion about the task ahead. He has  a week to sway people with families who face their own struggles, a week to relate the family budget to the problems of the nation, no family in their right minds would continue piling up huge debts and spending beyond their means when the bailiffs are at the end of the street! One week to capture the votes that he needs most, and they are the current Labour seats of middle England and the north, it was not the wavering soft liberal vote that swept Margaret Thatcher and John Major into No. 10, it was the masses of hard working people who were let down by Labour who brought about those landslides.

Come this Thursday’s debate and I expect and hope that the Conservative leader will be let off the leash, unmanaged, and allowed to be himself, he is far better when he is unscripted and free flowing without notes, he needs the performance of his life (we know that he is capable he has done it often enough at the Despatch Box), his only change in tactic should be to train his guns only on Brown, he is the man who was responsible for getting us where we are, he is the one who should be answerable, not Clegg.

It’s the economy stupid, it always is, so why isn’t it at centre stage?

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Independent candidate offers election address on website

You may recall that a few days ago I posed a few questions to Mr. Victor Thompson, the South Shields’ man who is standing as a candidate in the general election, having sent them off by email I got a reply from the man with no description pointing me in the direction of his new website. You will note that whilst he says that he is leaving South Tyneside Council to concentrate on his business, his address goes no further towards answering any of the other questions.

Mr. Thompson’s election address is mostly an anti-political protest which rambles and meanders in various directions, but being anti-political yet wanting to partake in the democratic political process to be elected to the “Mother of all Parliaments”, seems to me a very odd contradiction! There are more words in his election address than I can find in total on The Shields Gazette’s website about Vic’s contributions to debate in South Shields’ Town Hall, was it the attack on the Branleys that led to this verbosity?

I’m sure many of us would still like to know about his relationship with the South Tyneside Independent Alliance, his thoughts on their decision to change their minds about fighting the general election, and his thoughts on the processes that they use to find candidates for the local elections. I’m sure we’d like to know why he thinks he would make a good constituency MP in preference to the other eight candidates who are also offering themselves for the South Shields seat.

I have asked Vic once again to try and answer those questions, I think he ought to be given the chance to put his case.

If you would like to ask him yourself he has a new email address cuvictorthompson@hotmail.co.uk

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……In Brown’s bunker!

I mean, just how cookie can Labour’s spin doctors get, have Mandy and “bad Al” Campbell been popping on the wrong medicine or something? To use an Elvis impersonator looks almost as embarrassing as asking the unelected Scottish Prime Minister to gurn smile for the cameras.

From “things can only get better” to “when everything I do is wrong”,  – they’ll have us believe that he “don’t have a wooden heart” next!

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You’d think that David Miliband might want to get along with Clegg

Instead of accusing him of “anti-politics”, you know – apparently Clegg is in no mood to prop up a Gordon Brown led Labour Party and might insist on him being replaced by someone like Miliband (this is just a scenario you understand). The South Shields MP had this wonderful quote as a put down to Clegg:

‘If you look at the transformation of the country in the last 65 years it is because of the energy, drive, determination and sacrifice in the Labour party to take on the forces of inertia,”

Oh, hang on a minute, hasn’t the Labour Party only governed for 29 of those 65 years David? So the bulk of that transformation that you talked about must have happened under Conservative administrations – no? Your maths must be as good as Cable’s economics!

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……so do Labour of course.

Here is an old video illustrating in nice simple easy terms what a budget deficit looks like and what the scale of the problem of budget cuts is for President Obama’s US administration. Why should we be interested in South Shields you ask? Because the Labour Party want to scare you with lies about evil Tory cuts to schools, the NHS, pensioners bus passes, winter heating allowances, etc. etc. etc. This is all despite the fact that if Labour is returned to power Alistair Darling has already indicated that Labour’s cuts will be more severe and run deeper than those executed by Maggie Thatcher.

The Conservatives want to get going on reducing the budget deficit and the borrowing problem straight away, Labour reckon we can wait a bit, the size of the cuts talked about so far by the Conservatives are only £7bn more than those talked about by Labour, but at the end of the day our problem is very much the same as Obama’s, we just have a smaller table.

Found at Iain Dale’s Diary

Here’s a cut that could be made without hurting anyone much, next time you see South Shields MP David Miliband tell him to STOP wasting our money!

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