This yellow cake uranium is proof itself that Iraq was the right decision, Hattie, you treacherous hagwitch

Dave was backed by the big money Illuminati. Ed won because the big unions decided that genug was genug in the face of overwhelming evidence, if any more were needed, that New Labour meant old Conservative, with the added ingredient of unquestioning Atlanticism – hence The Economist’s ringing endorsement – unthinking globalisation – ditto the FT’s Martin Wolf’s enthusiasm – lickspittle obeisance to Big Usury. The shrieks of protest from the Guardianistas at the very idea that ANYONE could think that ANYTHING associated with THE UNIONS had any merit whatsoever underlines just how far English politics have drifted to the centre right.

Ed Miliband and his brother, Schnorbits, in happier times

I’m not convinced about Ed, who looks too much like Bernie Winters and sounds too adenoidal to be taken seriously. Though his speech to Conference was workmanlike and it was brave to admit that the murderous and incompetent invasion of  Iraq was ‘a mistake’, he is still an uninspiring figure who went to the same primary school as Boris Johnson, Oxford and, after all, comes from the same gene pool as Banana Boy. He is a devoted environmentalist, however, who seems genuinely committed to repositioning Labour as an alternative to the muddy centre-right – perfect for attracting disillusioned Lib-Dems and securing at least a coalition when the current government implodes as the (partly necessary) cuts cause widespread misery and introduce the possibility, if not the actuality, of civil unrest.

Still, it’s not all bad news. Banana Boy has taken his bat home, after having been caught on camera castigating the awful Harriet Harman for applauding brother Ed’s apology over Iraq (‘why are you clapping? You voted to go to war’). David Milliband’s wife was apparently ‘furious’ that David didn’t get the job (why should we care?) and we shouldn’t forget that he waged a snide and, at times, decidedly unfraternal campaign against Ed, whom, by contrast, kept his dignity.

So, the verdict of Thus, for what it’s worth, is good riddance to Banana Boy and good luck to Ed, who will need it. None of the candidates were up to much, but then again, the government itself isn’t exactly stellar. Ed needs to distance himself from the Blairites, the Brownites, especially Ed Balls, and learn to be constructively confrontational. The middle classes aren’t the only game in town, and though Ed is one of them, his best chance is to concede the need for deficit reduction but ruthlessly expose ideologically-motivated policies which the Tories are finding it increasingly difficult to resist putting into play.

John J Kelly

David Miliband/Ed Balls/Ed Milliband/David Balls - the new face of New Labour

Responding to a question from Peter Allen on BBC Radio 5 Live , Balls claimed that the £6 billion UK emergency budget cuts announced today would cost ‘hundreds of thousands of jobs.’ When asked to clarify, he repeated that the £6 billion cuts – many of which are earmarked to cull quangos, civil servants’ travel expenses and the like, would result in many hundreds of hundreds of thousands of  job cuts.

In perspective, UK unemployment increased by 53,000 over the past quarter alone to reach 2.51 million, the highest figure since the three months to December 1994 (three years before the New Labour project). By this reckoning, the Balls boys could have fixed the economy and romped home at the election for less than the price of an RBS bailout.

But they didn’t.

Oxbridge taught me the value of a banana. Let me lead you.

Balls had the further audacity to claim that the Lib Dem/Tory Coalition was bent on doing ‘what the Germans have told Greece to do’ – as if this was some sort of madness on the part of those whacky spendthrift Krauts. He furthermore blamed the UK recession on global economic conditions but claimed we were better off than most because we entered with lower levels of debt – oblivious to the fact that New Labour inherited a budget surplus from the Tories but have left the UK in its most indebted state since the Second World War.

As most people in the real world know, the £6 billion cuts announced today are a prelude to very scary and probably destructive slash and burn measures later this year, as the world’s credit markets, under pressure from Euro defaulters and other scallywags, take an increasingly dim view of Britain’s Stalinist-inspired cardboard economy and question our ability to repay burgeoning debts with exports of talent shows, sweary celebrity chefs and private equity Ponzi schemes.

Keep that banana away from me. I know it's not Fair Trade.

There is no question that we cannot continue to run a balance of trade deficit and public sector debt on anything like existing levels, but the question facing the Coalition is how to stimulate export trade in what increasingly looks like another downturn while enacting necessary cuts without choking off the domestic economy. By anyone’s definition, the UK is in crisis. Anyone but Balls, that is.

Andy Burnham: turned out nice again? No, it hasn't

The Rocky Horror Show

New Labour, meanwhile, is staging a talent show of its own. Ed Balls, running on the Gordon Brown’s posterior ticket is jostling with Banana Boy David Milliband, running on the Blair Duke Nuke ‘em ticket, Ed Milliband, running on the Eco-by-gum Worzel Gummidge ticket and Andy Burnham, running on the George Formby Blackpool tram ticket. Diane Abbott, running on the black, proud-to-be-working-class and never mind about sending my kid to public school ticket and other, yet-to-be-revealed whack-jobs may yet emerge to remind us that our politicians are a reflection of the economy – weak, preening, deluded, second-rate.

The one thing they all have in common is that they all went to Oxbridge, as did 18 members of the Coalition Cabinet. What does this tell us? This is Britain, where every middle class white person (and the occasional VERY CLEVER and VERY PUSHY black person) has the right to become elitist, useless and destroy the economy. All you need to do is blag your way into Oxbridge.

I have very little confidence that the Coalition will do the right thing and enact genuine efficiency initiatives, sensitively protecting the jobs and services provided by front line workers while cutting the cadres of overpaid middle managers who have mismanaged the public sector to its present parlous state. I know this because they are incapable of listening to the people who know how to get the work done, and cannot possibly empathise with the people for whom the work needs to be done. That’s because they were educated in dreaming spires from which they never saw the need to emerge. How do I know this? because I went to Oxford. I left after a term, though that’s no excuse.

Oxbridge is the problem, not the solution. Maybe the cuts should start there. But they won’t.

The Dearing Report, commissioned in 1996 under Tory PM ‘Sir’ John Major (who achieved only 3 O levels, didn’t go to university but won an election with the greatest margin in electoral history, published in 1997, recommended charging students 25% of their tuition costs. Newly-elected Labour ‘reluctantly’ introduced means-tested fees, claiming it as a Tory initiative. In 2003, a Labour-commissioned White Paper proposed that universities could charge students top-up tuition fees capped at £3000. In November of the same year, Tony Blair (educated free at St John’s College, Oxford) pontificated in the Queen’s Speech:

“A bill will be introduced to enable more young people to benefit from higher education. Up-front tuition fees will be abolished for all full-time students and a new Office For Fair Access will assist those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Universities will be placed on a sound financial footing.”

Professor Jugears, Chairman of the I'm Alright Jack Club

On the very same day, Norwich North MP Ian Gibson (yes, him Thus passim) tabled a motion on ‘top up fees’ signed by 185 MPs. Earlier that year, Tory Leader Iain Duncan Smith (Sandhurst, no university) pledged that Tories would abolish fees, to Labour claims (audacious even by the standards of spin at that time) that this would ‘disadvantage’ poorer students and cost 6500 academic jobs. On January 27, 2004, Education Secretary Charles Clarke (coincidentally MP for Norwich South  - educated free at King’s College, Cambridge) introduced the Higher Education Bill on the very same day as the Hutton Inquiry into circumstances surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly. Amid the muck and bullets, having bought off Labour rebels with last-minute concessions and support from right wing Tories, the bill was passed with a majority of only 5, the closest Blair came to defeat thus far. At a stroke, Professor Jugears and his cronies undermined the 1944 Butler Education Act, which had safeguarded the rights to a free education at primary, secondary and tertiary levels for 60 years. If they had tried the same trick on the NHS, another (rightful) sacred cow, there would have been bloodshed, but the bill was enacted on the premise that “Universities exist to enable the British economy and society to deal with the challenges posed by the increasingly rapid process of global change” (Charles Clarke).

Herein endeth the history lesson. As a product of the Butler Act – a poor kid lucky enough to get a great free education leading to Oxford, Manchester (and the school of hard knocks) – I despise the foul cant about ‘engineering social mobility’ belching from the arse of ‘five jobs’ Alan Milburn (Lancaster University), and the rest of his Blairite bastard squad, shameless elitist social climbers who have burnt the ladder behind them. It is an obscene insult to the intelligence to claim that career success in the professions is a direct result of the networks created at elite schools and universities. Of course it is, and always was. Blair’s clique was notoriously stacked with fellow lawyers, Oxbridge room mates, Scottish Public School kiltlifters, Trotskyite student union bores and a fat bloke who used to be a ship’s shop steward to appease the unions. Cameron’s Notting Hill Haw Haws reek of Eton, Oxbridge, Bristol. It’s debatable whether you could ever stop the tendency of elites to form, or whether it is ethical or even sensible to do so, but you certainly don’t go about it by erecting financial barriers to entry to higher education for ‘the less well-off.’ During Labour’s tenure, the percentage of middle class students has risen, as has the number of debt-burdened graduates.

The crisis in education funding is as much a product of the overweaning burden of administration, the 1992 (Tory) elevation of polytechnics to university status and the bewildering number of ‘new’ universities that nobody has heard of, whose qualifications are commensurately worthless but which increased the intake and number of academic posts. Bothering kids at primary and secondary level with endless tests, grade inflation, league tables burying teachers under mountains of target-inspired assessment programmes and whipping parents into a frenzy of fear that their kids will be ‘left behind’ are unforgivable and premeditated crimes of social engineering. Give us back our Butler Act, you lying hypocrites. And stop sniggering, Cameron. We hear you’re thinking of privatising state secondary schools. Have you learned nothing? What kind of education did you have, boy? Oh, Eton and Oxbridge.

John J Kelly

Former Labour Party Leader Michael Foot's heart was in the right place. Unfortunately, the rest of him was assembled at random

UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown is the most unpopular leader of the Labour Party ever, a singular achievement given the horrorbags who preceded him. His 21% approval rating beats the previous liability incarnate, Michael Foot, who scored 24% in 1982. Foot was a principled Fabian, idealist socialist toff in the Orwell mould but his donkey jacket, mad stare, scary hair and CND badges earned him the nickname ‘Worzel Gummidge’ and made him unelectable in the Brave New World of image and soundbite. Brown, a charisma-free zone, has not acquired a popular soubriquet, though Private Eye style him as ‘Supreme Leader’ in a nod to the stagnation, authoritarianism, denial and corruption of the Brezhnev era, which preceded the collapse of the Soviet system.

Little man on a big stage. 'Good Evening Sheffield. I'm a tosser. Alright?'

Foot’s Old Labour image was the catalyst for ‘reforms’ which saw him replaced in 1983 by ‘Welsh Windbag’ Neil Kinnock, who never used one word where 20 would do. Kinnock, a former Tribune left winger, redhaired, freckly, pointy-featured, with a deep grating voice and tweedy demeanour, projected an uneasy persona which vacillated between pint-drinking man of the Welsh valleys and hopelessly aspirational metrocentric hipster. The latter was the invention of his Director of Communications, Lord of the Flies, Peter Mandelson, who rebranded Labour as a European-style social democrat party, ironic, since Kinnock and Labour had hitherto violently opposed European integration. Trounced twice by Thatcher, Kinnock was nevertheless odds-on to defeat ‘Grey Man’ John Major in 1992, who, (like Brown) was an unelected stand-in following Thatcher’s ousting. However, he snatched defeat from the jaws of victory with the toe-curlingly hubristic 1992 ‘Good Evening Sheffield’ rally and speech. This inauspicious beginning was nevertheless the New Labour Nuremberg. Unprecedented spin, media manipulation, luvvies for Labour, pop anthems and feelgood bourgeois materialism would follow in an epidemic suspension of disbelief. Blair would realise the illuminati dream of a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie fuelled by media manipulation, sustained by fear and fuelled by financial chimaera.

The Blair witch project. Now he's trying to become President of Europe, helped by his lovely friends Berlusconi and Sarkozy

But not for a couple of years. Sensible John Smith replaced Kinnock, who fled to Europe on the EU gravy train with his wife, Glenys and is now a ‘Baron’ for services to irrelevancy. Smith, although worryingly Scottish and a lawyer – a harbinger of the plague of Jocks to come – was a grounded, humorous, intelligent leader, who was not physically repugnant. Unfortunately he died of a heart attack in 1994, leaving the door open to the dreaded double act of Brown and Blair, stage-managed by Mandelson and his Iago, Alastair Campbell. Blair served ten years, set the tone for institutional kleptocracy by enriching himself in the housing boom and memoirs market, sucked up to George Bush then skipped town leaving a legacy of three wars (two of which are illegal) untramelled immigration, Islamophobia, madcap expansion of public spending with little to show apart from the Millennium Dome, crippling tuition fees for students, an undeserving, tax-avoiding oligarch class, widened gap between rich and poor, the worst recession for sixty years, national debt at its highest ever levels, ubiquitous state surveillance, abuse of police powers for political ends, a cowed media, widespread corruption and unemployment set to exceed 3 million. Brown was his ‘prudent’ Chancellor. When he assumed the mantle of Prime Minister, he declined to legitimise the post with an election. 

It was obvious after the first term that the New Labour project was a get rich quick scheme for a grotesque politburo of social-climbing chancers and mountebanks. Had the Tories put up a half-decent opposition as opposed to fielding gargoyles such as William Hague, Michael Howard and Iain Duncan-Smith, the free ride might have ended earlier. We would not have avoided the global recession, but we might have halved our exposure to its worst effects. Corruption amongst MPs would not have been any less, but the democratic deficit might have been less pronounced. In truth, it’s hard to tell, since both parties now occupy the soggy centre and their policies are largely indistinguishable. 

Now, as New Labour faces the final curtain, Gordon Brown, saviour of the wurreld and its banks and a major player on the global stage (Widow Twanky?) may be forced out of office by cohorts of his own larcenous claque. Alan Johnson, Health Secretary, is tipped to take over as leader, presumably on the basis that it would be a waste of time to bother to find anyone good ahead of the election, which Labour will lose by a country mile. Labour are thus proposing to run the country with yet another unelected Prime Minister, completing the shredding of any semblance of democratic principle and practice. When Brown goes, which will be very soon, there should be a General Election, and whoever gets in should enact a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. Further urgent reform is needed to reverse the undemocratic ‘reforms’ to the House of Lords, which have replaced a crowd of unelected hereditary peers and a few life peers, many of whom were geriatric, drunkards, mad or a combination thereof, and thus as difficult to control as a herd of cats, with a stacked deck of unelected politically-appointed gurning lickspittles. Then there is the small matter of getting the country out of the mire and back to work. For this to happen, Cameron will need to find a proper Chancellor as opposed to George Osborne, and some policies, as opposed to soundbites. He’ll be wearing the Brown trousers, god help him, an odorous proposition. Serves him right for being a Conservative, like most of New Labour.

John J Kelly

Up for it. 'Left unchecked, we have a more violent crowd in uniform than the crowd who are demonstrating.' Former Asst. Met Commissioner Andy Hayman

Paul Hilder of Avaaz.org believes peaceful protests can change the world. My heart says he’s right but how would Gandhi have fared in Britain today? 2 million protested in the UK alone against the Iraq war in 2003 and Britain still participated in an illegal war. Tibetan human rights protesters were kettled and cudgelled when the Chinese Premier came to pick up a few tips on human rights from Blair and when Brown slavered over the Olympic flame. On the other hand, a few hundred berserkers trashed buildings in central London in the infamous 1990 Poll Tax riots and defeated Margaret Thatcher. More recently Thai protesters demanding the resignation of the current Prime minister succeeded in disrupting the Summit of South East Asian nations in Pattaya. Without in any way condoning their actions or motives – whether or not the current Thai Prime Minister is democratically elected (like the UK Prime Minister he isn’t) anyone who wants to see the return of the clearly corrupt former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra needs some sort of re-education – but they wrecked nine months of careful preparation and gave the Chinese premier, amongst others, a glimpse of unfettered people power in action. Clearly that’s what the Powers That Be fear most. The British police and security services demonstrably would not have let this happen. The question is, how far are we prepared to sacrifice democratic principles and practices in the name of preserving a status quo which is taking on a very unpleasant shape? It is undeniable that the UK in particular has seen a totalitarian drift towards the banning, stifling and disruption of peaceful protests, ironically during the period of ‘New’ Labour ‘liberal’ democracy, which is now looking like New Stalinism, complete with its very own NKVD.

The London G20 summit saw non-violent pressure by hundreds of thousands of citizens on a number of topics. The City of London protests immediately before the summit were rowdy, but still overwhelmingly peaceful despite media hysteria, aggressive policing and a handful of troublemakers. Bystander and father of nine Ian Tomlinson died that day (Thus passim). Video footage shows that he was struck down by a masked, baton-wielding policeman. Many police wore balaclavas or took off their identification numbers. By telling the media before the protests that they were ‘up for it’ if violence ensued, commanding officers whipped up dangerous hysteria. The police denied responsibility, and although they have now identified and suspended the officer who struck the blows, none of the group in the video footage came forward voluntarily, and police statements contained patent falsehoods which were ironically only revealed on camera. As well as constraining rights of assembly, new laws now supposedly prohibit taking the very photos and videos of police officers which have begun to reveal the truth of these events.

The ramifications of the Tomlinson affair, along with the patent disarray of the Met Police on a number of other matters, are echoing across the world. Apart from the fact that he was neither an agitator nor a demonstrator, comparisons can be drawn with the case of Blair Peach, a New Zealander who died in a London demonstration as a result of police brutality in the 1970s. Tellingly, nobody was held accountable at that time. No officer was convicted or even lost their job as a result of the Menezes shooting at Stockwell station, and the security services are currently under a growing cloud for their part in rendition and torture of terrorist suspects. If this incompetent and crude suppression of centuries-old liberties continues, the entire British population is in danger of kettling. That’s why the Avaaz.org petition is important.

Follow this link to watch the video and sign the emergency petition to fix British policing of demonstrations. “Avaaz will deliver it directly to the Home Secretary, Parliament and the Metropolitan Police” - provided they don’t meet with an ‘accident’ along the way . . .

http://www.avaaz.org/en/fix_british_protest_policing

For thirty years I have been travelling to unfree places, from East Germany to Burma, and writing about them in the belief that I was coming from one of the freest countries in the world: Britain. I wanted people in those places to enjoy more of what we had. In the last few years, I have woken up – late in the day, but better late than never – to the way in which individual liberty, privacy and human rights have been sliced away in Britain, like salami, under New Labour governments that profess to find in liberty the central theme of British history.

I know I've used this before, but 1100 riot police were deployed on the occasion of Sarkozy's visit with Gordon Brown to Arsenal football stadium, allegedly and coincidentally as part of a never-repeated exercise to find 'mobile phone thieves'. Here you can see them marching in formation towards Finsbury Park Mosque. 20 stolen mobiles were found. John Kelly

‘Oh, these powers will almost never be used,’ they say every time. ‘Ordinary people have nothing to fear. It affects just 0.1 per cent.’ But a hundred times 0.1 per cent is 10 per cent. The East Germans are now more free than we British are, at least in terms of law and administrative practice in such areas as surveillance and data collection. Thirty years ago, they had the Stasi. Today, Britain has such broadly drawn and elastic surveillance laws that the local council of a small town called Poole could exploit them to spend two weeks spying on a family wrongly accused of lying on a school application form. The official spies reportedly made copious notes on the movements of the mother and her three children, whom they referred to as ‘targets’, and watched the family home at night to establish where they were sleeping. And this is supposed to be England?

Though the Stasi headline is irresistible, such Stasi-nark methods do not yet make a Stasi state. The political context is very different. We British don’t live in a one-party dictatorship. But nor is this just ‘an isolated case’, as ministers always protest. Almost every week brings some new revelation of the way in which our government has taken a further small slice of our liberty, always in the name of another real or alleged good: national security, safety from crime, community cohesion, efficiency (ha ha), or our ‘special relationship’ with the United States.

Liberty comes last. As the conservative author Dominic Raab writes in his excellent book The Assault on Liberty, this government ‘has hyperactively produced more Home Office legislation than all the other governments in our history combined, accumulating a vast arsenal of new legal powers and creating more than three thousand additional criminal offences’.

Other free countries, including the United States, have over-reacted to the threat of terrorism, violating their own basic constitutional principles and legal standards. The peculiarity of Britain is that we have nibbled away individual liberty on so many different fronts. We have been complicit in American-led torture of our own people; at the same time we have eroded free speech in ways unthinkable in the United States; and we have become what Privacy International calls ‘an endemic surveillance society’.

Yes, fighting terrorism requires some restrictions. Yes, you can make a crime-reduction case for some CCTV. But we have more CCTV and a larger DNA database, a more ambitious, and unworkable, National Identity Register scheme, more police powers and more email snooping than any comparable liberal democracy. Added to which we have a bureaucracy so centralised and incompetent in managing this mass of data that it lost a computer disc with the child benefit details of 25 million people.

What’s more, the certain loss of liberty will often not result in the alleged gain in security or efficiency. So, for example, PM Gordon Brown and other ministers continued to press for 42 days detention without trial, despite the fact that two former heads of the Security Service, the Director of Public Prosecutions, the former Lord Chancellor, Attorney General and Lord Chief Justice – in short, almost everyone in a position to know – said it was wrong, unnecessary and counter-productive. How can a government of intelligent and often personally liberal-minded persons behave so illiberally, arrogantly and stupidly? What screw have they got loose? What nerve is missing?

The fightback has begun, led by three groups: judges and lawyers; unelected peers (witness, most recently, an outstanding House of Lords report on surveillance); and a rainbow coalition of journalists, academics, writers, artists, think tankers, civil society activists and simply citizens, of left and right, young and old, some of whom have now joined together to launch next week, in several British cities, a Convention on Modern Liberty (http://www.modernliberty.net/. See the following Modern Liberty video, which argues that the UK was complicit in torture, rendition and secret prisons.

Notably absent from this list is the one group who should be in the front line when it comes to the defence of British liberties: our elected representatives. This is not just a New Labour failing. With a few notable exceptions, such as the former Conservative home affairs spokesman David Davis, most MPs have been complaisant and pusillanimous beyond belief. For example, last week the Home Secretary (Britain’s interior minister) idiotically banned Dutch MP Geert Wilders from entering Britain to show his noxious and offensive anti-Islam film at the invitation of members of the House of Lords. Result: a curtailment of free speech that gave Wilders more free publicity than he could otherwise have dreamed of. ‘Liberal’ Democrat Home Affairs spokesman Chris Huhne agreed with the decision on the grounds that the film is really offensive. I shall need some convincing that the Conservative front bench are going to be any better.

I’m not sure I fully understand all the reasons for this cravenness, but here’s one. A couple of years ago, I asked a very senior New Labour politician if his government had not got the balance between security and liberty wrong. ‘Well’, he replied, ‘one thing I can tell you is that if you ask the British people they will always choose more security’. And this is where the ball comes back to us. Since our leaders are now mainly followers – following the latest opinion poll, focus group or newspaper campaign – it’s up to us, the British people, to change their view of what ‘the people’ want.

Timothy Garton Ash is Professor of European Studies at Oxford University, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of Free World. A longer version of Tim’s piece appeared in the Guardian.

Mum's not the word

By Julia Margo, Demos

I expect that my fascination with Karen Matthews is predictably middle class. Her crime may be heinous, but she has captured our imagination in her role as working class anti-hero: a reminder of how some people (the ‘other half’) live in today’s Britain. The weekend coverage of sink estates – the ‘bubble communities’ in which the working class associates of Matthews and other greasy-haired and withered welfare-dependent mothers supposedly live and breed, governed by social norms unrecognisable to you or me – reveals our need to intellectualise from above the divides that shape our society. Not to make sense of them but to shiver in smug confidence that this is not our world.

Clear your plate, Emily, or mummy will patronise you

In middle class suburbs children skip to school with nutritious lunch boxes and lacrosse sticks. In Matthews-land they walk barefoot with mud for shoes and lice in their hair. Or so our narrative goes. Poverty is linked to poorer child well being, but lots of poor parents are brilliant and norms of behaviour in many small working class communities are often better enforced than in some looser middle class hubs.Somewhere in the reporting of this horrible story cruelty and bad parenting became a class issue and being poor or out of work became synonymous with child abuse and neglect.

Take the Conservative party’s new plans to intervene in low income homes where parents do not work. In these homes, parenting style and effectiveness will be examined by trained staff as well as parental attitudes to work. The assumption is that parents who do not work or work sporadically are worse parents. An army of trained welfare to work officers will therefore help parents into work and thus magically solve their parenting deficits. An earlier idea from the Conservatives was to use the tax and benefit system to promote marriage, the assumption being that married parents are better parents. Matthews, who is neither married nor employed, would presumably have been targeted by both interventions. (For balance, let’s not ignore the incumbent Labour government’s ‘Welfare to Work’ plans to force disability claimants and other cadres of the long-term unemployed to seek work or lose benefits in an economic downturn with the prospect of 3 million unemployed amongst the able-bodied portion of the population? JK)

Why would they not work?

The statistics do suggest that children are more at risk if they come from single parent or unemployed families. A wealth of econometric analysis shows there is a small association between being very poor and being a bad parent and being a single parent and neglecting your children. But this is merely freakonomics, it tells us nothing about why this may be the case, and since the vast majority of single parents and unemployed parents are absolutely fine, it appears to be a red herring.

It is quite simply more difficult to parent alone and without money; we should not ignore the need to tackle structural disadvantage in society if we are to genuinely protect children. But being poor does not make parents cruel or neglectful. The link between bad parenting and poverty or unemployment is there because the skills required for good parenting are similar to those required for successful employment and holding down a relationship. Quite simply nice, friendly people, who would make nicer, friendlier parents, keep their partners more often than moody, difficult people and tend to find it easier to get and keep work. And following this through, people with personality disorders and extreme interpersonal difficulties find it next to impossible to work or hold down a relationship and parent in a Karen Matthews-esq style.

Identifying and treating antisocial traits in childhood will definitely help

The solution to genuinely bad parenting (as opposed to the average struggling parents) cannot be to either redistribute money, or to force parents into work and incentivise marriage. These address merely the symptoms not the cause. And at the extreme end, would not address the interpersonal difficulties that explain why a mother would abuse her child. In the long-term we need to develop interventions that address the roots of cruel parenting: interpersonal development. Indications of anti-social personality disorder and other psychological and social problems are often apparent in children and teenagers. The way to protect the next generation of children from cruel parenting is therefore to invest in interventions that would address developmental problems in early childhood and end the cycle of cruelty.

Judge Dredd is ultimate law

My earlier advice about recruiting Pikey police has clearly fallen on deaf ears. The nation was stunned – not literally, yet – by today’s news from our own Sarah Palin, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, that 10,000 tasers would be issued and 30,000 police trained in their use. Amnesty International report that 300 people have died as a result of tasering since 2001, not entirely surprising given that these playful plastic guns deliver upwards of 50,000 volts via barbs. Since the government has not tired of telling us that crime has dramatically fallen on their watch, I for one am puzzled as to why we need to restyle (un)PC Plod as Judge Dredd. Ms Smith, who incurred general ridicule after confessing herself fearful of walking the streets of South London then issued a sound bite to say that she had bought a kebab in Peckham, might consider carrying one herself, except it would be illegal. Let’s hope against hope that none of these weapons of mass electrocution go astray or are left in Starbucks’ toilets by forgetful officers (Thus passim).

Are you feeling lucky?

Mace, tasers, coshes, whips, canes, tear gas, rubber bullets and other weapons of severe corporal punishment in routine use by police forces conjure up images of a fascist police state, which of course is the opposite of our happy, freedom-loving democracy. It’s a very sad day when escalating violence on either side of the criminal divide is given a shot in the arm – or, in this case, 50,000 volts in the chest – by attention-seeking authoritarian wierdos. And I don’t mean the BNP. Please think again. Don’t give plod these nasty toys, which he’ll start testing out on drug dealers (black people) and suspected terrorists (Asian kids) or gangs (white underclass). It’s crass and desperate. And we don’t think it makes you look hard, Jacqui.

We agreed that Brown would lose the next election whenever he called it, unless the economy miraculously turned round in the next month. The chances are that it won’t do anything like that before 2010, and will almost certainly get worse as the Polonium cocktail of tax cuts, increased borrowing and increased public spending takes hold. Brown might narrowly win a snap election, but he is not a gambler and will have to be pushed off the diving board into the deep end. We agreed that Cameron had finally done the right thing in abandoning a fudgy Middle Way in favour of a straightforward alternative: no tax cuts and a curb on public spending in order to balance the books. It gives the public a straight choice.

The room, by a tiny margin, didn’t agree. They thought that Gordon would call an early election and would probably win on the basis that public perception still held him to have been a sound Chancellor, if not an inspiring leader. Cameron was an untried entity. I disagreed that Brown’s audacious economic strategy was a ‘new paradigm’ but agreed that lowering taxes while increasing public spending and expecting the bond markets to back Britain in a global credit crunch was unusually fruity for a son o’ the Manse.

To survive, Brown needs to convince a battered and cash-strapped electorate that he was responsible for the ‘good’ times but that ‘global economic conditions’ were to blame for the mess that the UK economy finds itself in. He might also tell us why he was obliged to sell our gold reserves and tax pension funds into the Stone Age during these halcyon days. He will also need to explain why and how we intend to pursue and persist with a costly and impossible policy of ‘liberal intervention’ in Afghanistan and Iraq and how we expect to pay for the crazy Private Finance Initiatives and Public Private Partnerships, which will haunt public finances for decades. I’m not a Tory, but I can’t vote Labour under the present lunatic circumstances. We’ve given this gang too many chances. They have widened the wealth gap and given us the highest levels of national debt for 50 years.

Don't sup with Russian sailors, George.

Whether or not I like it, the next election is for the Tories to lose. Labour can’t and shouldn’t win on their record. The Tories may need to redeploy their accident-prone Shadow Chancellor and keep his replacement away from Matthew Freud, oligarchs and yachts. Ken Clarke’s too old. William Hague would be a sound choice: he knows about making money and has a regional accent, even if it’s a bit spooky and, like me, he’s a slaphead.

Postscript: I’m not a Tory – tell me I’m not a Tory – but on the Andrew Marr TV show at 9 am yesterday Cameron said more or less the same thing as my Friday blog about ‘fiscal stimulus’. He said nothing about Europe, though.