Coalition MPs Are Occasionally Okay

A new campaign has been launched called ‘Feel Free To Insult Me’. Two of its main proponents are gay rights activist Peter Tatchell and Conservative MP David Davis. It simply promotes freedom of speech, even when insulting a person or group. Recently there have been a couple of disconcerting arrests: although common sense finally allowed them to be released without charge, a teenage boy was nonetheless arrested merely for holding a placard that read “Scientology is a dangerous cult”, and a student was arrested for a joke about a police officer’s horse being gay! If scientologists and homosexuals are offended by these statements, they need to grow up and chill out. So Tatchell and Davis have put their usual ideological differences aside in the hope that a law banning public insults will be repealed. Therefore, well done David Davis for resisting the traditional control freakery of the Tories. Also in the news this week, a report has been released by a ‘Conservative-supporting venture capitalist’ (now there are four words that should send chills down anybody’s spine!), encouraging reform of employment law so that ‘no-fault dismissal’ would become a great deal easier. In layman’s terms, this means employers will be able to sack an employee without having to provide a reason, thereby avoiding tribunal expenses. Thankfully, Business Secretary and Liberal Democrat MP Vince Cable has stated his opinion that there is no place in British society for this type of removal of workers’ rights. This will hopefully prevent such a draconian policy from ever reaching fruition. So also a big well done to Vince for realising that the economy is not the be all and end all of politics. But of course, Davis and Cable are exceptions; don’t ever forget that the majority of the ConDem coalition government are still very uncool.

Financial Responsibility

In a week where Labour have quite rightly trounced the Tories in elections (with the exception of mad Mayor Boris!), I have actually found myself agreeing with a Conservative MP. Defence Secretary Philip Hammond has said that consumers and home-owners who took out loans, spent on credit cards and accepted large mortgages were "consenting adults … Households were spending more than they earned. That's why household debt rose … there were two consenting adults in all these transactions, a borrower and a lender, and they may both have made wrong calls. Some people are unwilling to accept responsibility for the consequences of their own choices." I wholeheartedly concur with this opinion. People who borrow money without considering their financial situation are reckless and should understand that their actions contributed to the financial crisis just like the banks’ actions did. A person should only spend what they can afford; it’s that simple. Monetary speculation is economic naivety. So in future, I strongly suggest that everyone only buys what they are able to purchase. It really isn’t difficult.

BNP Accountability Failure

The hysteria this week has surrounded the BNP. First, there was the issue of whether Nick Griffin should even be allowed on Question Time. Well, of course he should. If his party's values (regardless of how abhorrent most of us find them) appeal to enough members of the British public to get them seats in the European Parliament, then they have earned their right to be on political talk shows. That's called democracy. One of the main reasons that Hitler was able to gain so much support from his entire nation is because Germany felt so severely repressed by the Treaty of Versailles that they would support anyone who was able to take them out of their economic and social depression, even if that person turned out to be the most evil man that's ever lived. To repress Mr Griffin by refusing him a QT seat would only have given him a louder voice to the tone of 'I stick up for the ignored Brits'.
However, after the sensible decision had been taken by the BBC to allow him on Thursday's show, it seemed there was a backup plan to appease all those who thought that public service broadcasting had begun to condone fascism. The plan was to subject Griffin to a partisan verbal massacre. Almost every question was about the BNP, the audience was as politically one-sided as it is possible to achieve, and even David Dimbleby seemed to forego his due impartiality commitment by having deleterious quotes at his beck and call. Eloquence was simply replaced by a mob mentality.
Now let's state for the record that I hate the BNP; I am in fact very left wing. I particularly loathe the BNP's use of World War II iconography and its suggestion that Winston Churchill would have joined their party; that statement doesn't take into account the old, blindingly obvious concept: times change. Churchill fitted into the Conservative Party of the 1940s and was able to fight fascism accordingly; there is no doubt in my mind that if he were alive today he would have the intelligence and the integrity to adapt his political viewpoints to modern times and changing moralities so that he could fit into the Conservative Party today and fight fascists like the BNP today. And it's that kind of considered retort which should be thrown at Nick Griffin, not just shouting and whooping from the crowd while spin doctor politicians from other parties do all they can to coerce the mob into granting them the dubious moral high ground. Griffin needs to be held to account by intellectual debate, not bully-boy humiliation which will only add more fuel to their apparently persecuted fire. Appearing on Question Time should have shown any disillusioned British voters that the BNP was not a suitable electoral alternative by calmly scrutinising and assessing that party's beliefs; an objective which should have been easily achieved considering how corrupt those beliefs are! Unfortunately, I believe that objective failed.

Negotiation And Manipulation

Difficult Issues

The postal strikes are continuing unabated with no end currently in sight. The sides are now even becoming petty as the Royal Mail accuses the Communication Workers' Union of talking "cobblers"! The ability to compromise is apparently impossible on both sides. But surely this is not the way to behave. As much as I loathe the way in which competition in capitalist business structures cause the workers to lose out to unsocial working hours, insulting wage increases and a domineering attitude from managers, strike action will never be the solution. If an organisation were to give in to the strikers' demands then a precedent would be set which would be extremely difficult to reverse: every time the workers had a grievance they would simply strike, get their demands granted and the business would quickly sink without trace for being uncompetitive causing everyone to lose their jobs. I also don't believe that the postal workers are gaining a great deal of sympathy with the general public as more and more post gets delayed in a backlog which will inevitably cause some of that post to go astray; it's certainly not a situation that I'm happy with! Surely a more intelligent line of attack would be to exploit the fact that Trade Unions are a major source of funding for the Labour Party. If the CWU made a pledge that all of its members were immediately switching their allegiance and their money to the Liberal Democrats, the government would go into a panic-stricken frenzy in order to solve the conflict. Just a suggestion, I really wouldn't expect anybody else to come up with anything that bright. However, I'm not trying to make these issues sound simple and I certainly don't support the fat-cat bigwigs and their typical coercive tactics, but in the current climate of people getting increasingly irritated at not receiving their post, it will only take one cheap and efficient competitor to close in on the domestic postal-service market for Royal Mail to vanish from people's minds like an old memory.












Patronising Politics

Gordon Brown has recently indulged in (or at least failed to damp down) profligate speculation on whether a General Election was going to be called. After seeing the Conservative Party do so well at their conference and the subsequent polls, the Prime Minister elected to restrain himself, lying to the general public by telling them that this was the decision he would have made anyway. But it gets even worse from the Labour spin doctors. During the Tory conference, Shadow Chancellor George Osborne had been forced to unveil a policy (due to the possible looming election!) of increasing the threshold of inheritance tax. Now that the election is not happening, Chancellor Alistair Darling has released his plan in his pre-Budget speech today to - surprise, surprise! - increase the threshold for inheritance tax, apparently something he had planned on doing all along. What a coincidence! Exactly how stupid are British people meant to be nowadays? This sort of political manipulation is abhorrent and is something I was hoping Labour would get away from now that Tony Blair had cleared off to Europe. Seemingly this is not to be, and for the time being politics will continue in its condescending lunacy.