“Labour’s hopes of avoiding a general election rout at the hands of David Cameron’s Tories will be boosted today as a new poll shows a sharp fall in the Conservative's lead, raising the possibility of a hung parliament”

reports The Observer  today.  The figures show Conservative support slipping to 37% - only six per cent ahead of Labour.  However, the field work for this “new poll” conducted by Ipsos MORI was undertaken between 13^th and 15^th November 2009, the same period as The Guardian’s ICM poll published six days earlier.  The Guardian/ICM poll disclosed the Conservatives as being thirteen points ahead of Labour.

One of these polls looks like a rogue.  Now let me think…which one?

Yesterday, discussing why it would be suicidal electorally for either of the main party leaders to holiday abroad in a hot clime this Christmas Steve Richards of the Independent explained,

“The case of Cameron is more revealing. Unlike Blair he would be taking a big risk if he headed for somewhere hot this winter, and the reasons highlight better than any opinion poll why he has not “sealed the deal”, to apply the accurate cliché.”

Four days earlier Julian Glover of the The Guardian reported the result of the latest Guardian/ICM poll under the heading, “Cameron closing deal despite Labour boost – Guardian/ICM poll”. According to the poll, as well as indicating that Labour had lost its crown as the champion of the poor,

“Cameron appears to be cementing his reputation with voters on key issues of character – suggesting that voting Tory isn't just about being fed up with Labour, but is now being seen as a positive move.”

If the facts don’t fit your argument, ignore them.

Enough of this nonsense about David Cameron not having “sealed the deal”

So Labour held Glasgow North East in yesterday’s by-election.  This was hardly a surprise, particularly as the Labour Party was likely to throw everything into the fight to retain the seat.  As reports The Times today,

“So desperate was Labour to hang on to this seat that the party flooded the constituency yesterday with hundreds of activists from all over Britain.”

Now, they are not going to be able to repeat that concentration of their remaining activists at every vulnerable seat during a General Election, are they?

In The Sunday Times on 1^st November 2009, Andrew Sullivan wrote,

 “And my bet is that in a decade’s time, the banning of cannabis will seem as strange as the banning of alcohol.”

This is not the first time I’ve heard that sentiment expressed.  Indeed, it was a common view at my school.  In 1971.

“…Mr Cameron and his close allies are proper, robust Eurosceptics. The Tory split on Europe at the beginning of the last decade was always misunderstood. The party was not split down the middle. The vast majority were on the Eurosceptic side. The row came because a relatively small, senior and ageing group at the top of the party was intent on resisting the stance that everyone else wanted to take. So in Mr Cameron’s generation almost everyone is a Eurosceptic. His position was, and remains, standard on the British centre Right.”

 

Daniel Finkelstein

And while you’re at it you should read this, too.

Addressing The Sun newspaper on 26th September 2007, David Cameron announced,

 “Today, I will give this cast-iron guarantee: If I become PM a Conservative government will hold a referendum on any EU treaty that emerges from these negotiations.

 

No treaty should be ratified without consulting the British people in a referendum.”

To highlight the obvious, Gordon Brown signed the Treaty of Lisbon on 13^th December 2007 thereby completing, in effect, the ratification process on behalf of the United Kingdom.  Today, the last outstanding signatory, President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic, signed the Treaty. Ratification by all member states of the European Union is now complete.  It is all over bar the shouting.

The referendum pledge by the Conservatives envisaged that the Treaty had not been ratified – “No treaty should be ratified without consulting the British people in a referendum”. We now know that the ratification process was accelerated (and according to some conspiracy theorists, a General Election delayed) to avoid the prospect of a Conservative Government throwing a spanner in the works. The Conservatives have little choice but to give up on the Lisbon Treaty referendum.  It has been overtaken by events.

Labour and its Media fellow travellers will now no doubt present the Conservatives as having reneged on their promise.  That would be worse than disingenuous.

“We have seen from alcohol and tobacco exactly what legalising certain substances can do to health, so why on earth add others?”

Ann Widdicombe

“All peoples possess a culture, but this does not mean all cultures are equally valid and commendable.  Some values and ideas are better than others.”

Peter Tatchell

“Policy-based evidence making”

It’s what Labour do.

Hat Tip to Obnoxio

According to The Sunday Times today,

“Gordon Brown is planning a final public spending spree to help pull the economy out of recession and put pressure on the Conservatives over their plans for deep cuts….

....Brown also hopes the stimulus package will open a new dividing line between Labour and Conservative plans over the public finance.  “At the next election we need a clear story to tell about how Labour will support the economy through investment while the Tories would choke off the recovery with draconian cuts,” said a cabinet source.”

The report continues,

“However, the proposals have caused alarm among Treasury officials who fear any increased spending could upset the financial markets, making it harder to service the growing national debt.”

Just how much long term damage is the Labour Government prepared to inflict upon the British economy in return for a small amount of political gain against the Conservatives?

The problem with pointing out that Polish MEP Michal Kaminski has a splinter in his eye when he doesn’t is that as well as damaging Foreign Secretary David Miliband’s credibility; it also causes attention to be drawn to the plank in Labour’s own.

This is yet more proof that Labour cannot even run an effective smear campaign anymore.

Accusing Euro-sceptics of anti-Semitism is the most shameful tactic yet

As should be expected, the “progressive” Media has roundly condemned the removal of Professor David Nutt from his position at the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs.  In essence, the pro legalisation of “recreational drugs” lobby approve of what Professor Nutt has to say, so it is outraged by his treatment by Home Secretary Alan Johnson.

As an adviser who has suffered the rejection of sound advice, I can commiserate to a small degree with the Professor but at the end of the day he is paid to give an opinion and his “client” is entitled to accept or reject it, notwithstanding that he is a high and mighty academic.  It is the Professor’s paroxysm at the rejection of his advice and reaction that shows, to my mind, that the Home Secretary was right to ask for his resignation.

Sacked drugs adviser accuses Gordon Brown of meddling in cannabis decision

Sacked – for telling the truth about drugs

Sacked adviser criticises Brown

Do you really want to help Labour divide and conquer?

“David Cameron could find old regime partisans sniping at him from the hills; the people who sit on boards and commissions, hold chairs and run reviews: the whole well-intentioned infrastructure of progressive society that, almost like royalty, remains in place from one government to the next.”

Julian Glover

Labour’s fifth columnists

The Conservatives winning the next General Election is not the half of it

So, Gordon Brown says that the British economy will be growing again by the turn of the year, according to his podcast yesterday.  Taking into account that the next quarter will include the Christmas trading period and the figures for the most recent quarter showed a slowing contraction of the British economy, I suppose he might be proved right, technically.  In any event, one “good” quarter would not make a recovery, especially if it is followed by indifferent figures, let alone figures showing further albeit small, contractions of the economy. A weak recovery is little better than no recovery at all, except for the purpose of temporarily boosting moral, unless prolonged.  In fact, the prospects for real sustainable growth in 2010 are not good.  A stall of “the recovery” in the first quarter of 2010 is more likely than not, notwithstanding the Labour Government’s attempts to engineer a phoney uplift in the economy during the months preceding the next General Election.

This recession is unfortunately, another struggle that will not “be over by Christmas”.

This is the crux of the issue, isn’t it?

“They feel [uncontrolled immigration] diminishes their chances in life.

 

It threatens their jobs, they believe. Ten years ago, a self-employed painter and decorator in, say, Barking might have earned £120 a day, enough to get a reasonable mortgage and sustain a modestly secure family life. Today, after the Government underestimated the number of Eastern Europeans likely to come here by almost 20 times, he would get £70 or £80. If his ailing father pays regular visits to hospital, he may be denied a bed because so many foreign women are giving birth. If his child has special needs, he may find the local school neglects them because it is desperately trying to teach English to children who do not speak it at home. If his brother is a soldier, he may return from risking his life to be insulted on the streets of his country by people who hate it.

 

…If they complain, they are told they are racist. It is not surprising that they say things like “My country is being taken away from me”. They are not completely mistaken.”

 

Charles Moore

 

“It should have been laughably straightforward for the panellists to debate with and destroy Griffin’s arguments. Instead, inflated by their outrage, the other speakers repeatedly interrupted, spoke over and cut short the BNP leader. They could have given him all the rope he needed to hang himself. By treating him as a pariah not even granted the liberty of finishing many of his sentences, never mind a particular proposition he was beginning to elaborate, they showed precisely the disregard for others and their views that they condemn in Griffin’s party.

Nearly one million people voted for the BNP in the Euro-elections. Whatever one thinks of their party’s platform, they have a right to be heard. Some parties cannot be more “legal” than others. That is a consequence of living in a democracy and it is part of cherishing the right to free speech. You persuade such people that they are wrong by discussion of what they say; and that means exactly what they say, not what it can be distorted into sounding like...”

Sholto Byrnes

________________

“Was there nobody to restate, with the relaxed confidence that philosophical certitude should bring, the only available position for a modern British liberal: that this is a free country in which a range of highly diverse opinions may be held and, if held, published, subject to the law? Full stop. Yes, full stop; for heaven’s sake, full stop.”

Matthew Parris

“The Foreign Secretary accused the public yesterday of lacking a sense of urgency in the face of the potentially devastating consequences of climate change.”

We don’t pay much attention to religious cults when they tell us the world is going to end next week, either.

Foreign Secretary David Miliband accuses public of climate change apathy

 “Economists today cast doubt on official data showing that British gross domestic product (GDP) contracted by 0.4 per cent between July and September, claiming the surprise fall is far worse than economic reality.

The shock figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) revealed that the country remained mired in recession during the third quarter — the sixth consecutive quarter of contraction, signalling the country’s longest downturn since records began in 1955.

Economists had widely expected that the country had emerged from recession between July and September.”

Oh dear.

Economists revolt over surprise recession data

This morning The Daily Telegraph's  Benedict Brogan provides another reason why the Conservatives are not as far ahead in the opinion polls as certain (Labour supporting) media commentators believe they should be at this stage of the game.

“From the beginning, when [David Cameron’s] leadership campaign struggled to attract the support of commentators, he learnt to do without…

 

....He is more at ease in the media salons of London than Mr Brown. But he has so far managed to resist the pressure to trade policies for headlines. That may explain why he has yet to secure the kind of fawning coverage from the press that Tony Blair enjoyed in 1996.”

 

And you can cut the bunkum about “Tony Blair having had a more substantial opinion poll lead than David Cameron at the same point in the electoral cycle”, too

Enough of this nonsense about David Cameron not having “sealed the deal”

They're at it again

“[Sarah Brown] calls [Gordon Brown] a hero but she is considered a heroine for conquering her nerves and standing up publicly for her beleaguered husband. Actually she is an incredibly astute PR woman. She has exploited Twitter more effectively than any British politician or celebrity, overtaking Stephen Fry as the country’s foremost Twitterer. She wanders round Glastonbury with Naomi Campbell, organises photo shoots of the G8 wives for Vogue and is seen squeezing President Obama’s hand, just as the special relationship comes under scrutiny….

.....This is no meek housewife, it’s a woman who is enjoying the limelight more than her husband.”

Alice Thomson

Of the Labour Party Max Hastings remarks today,

“This is a Party in such dire straits that Peter Mandelson, a man with the moral compass of Dr Faustus, is perceived as its most plausible saviour.”

 

I have a problem with all this nonsense involving the Attorney General, Baroness Scotland.  Her mitigation is being spun currently on the basis that her “technical breach” of the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006 was merely an oversight by way of her not photocopying her housekeeper Loloahi Tapui’s documentation. Thus it is argued that she did not knowingly employ a person who did not have the right to live and work in this country.  Might I ask what documentation it was that Baroness Scotland omitted to copy?  It has been established that Ms Tapui had no right to remain in this country, so she could not have possessed any relevant papers to copy.  The Attorney General failed to read the documentation she was purportedly shown, or failed to read it properly before failing to copy it as the law required.

All this from someone who is the chief legal adviser to the Government and responsible for all Crown litigation, yet she does not resign nor is she dismissed.  Incredible.

Baroness Scotland must now stand down

In The Times yesterday Carol Midgley, a High Priestess of Vegetarianism and self confessed proselytiser for the Cause, was remarking upon the story of Marcus, a lamb that was raised and finally slaughtered as part of a school project. It was her view that,

 “many of those weeping for this sheep across the country are carnivores who seldom give serious thought to animal welfare standards as they throw another bacon vacuum pack in the trolley”.

The term “carnivorous” is applied to  animals who naturally prey on other animals, the carnivora most readily coming to mind being cats, dogs and bears. Humans are not carnivores, they are omnivores. Omnivores feed on all kinds of food.  The average meat-eating individual will consume more fruit and vegetables than meat.   It is as wrong to call meat-eating humans carnivore, as it would be for vegetarians to be described as herbivore.  Perhaps the vegetarian lobby should consider choosing their nomenclature for the rest of humanity a little more carefully.

I have had little time for George Monbiot ever since I read his vituperative correspondence in an exchange with Dr David Bellamy in The Guardian some years ago, concerning the issue of alleged man-made climate change.  Mr Monbiot’s recent spat with The Spectator regarding his participation in a debate about the same subject has reinforced my opinion. A writer’s equivalent of the stiletto blade not doing justice to this case, I endorse Rod Liddle’s baseball bat retort in response to the spat,

“You pompous, monomaniacal, jackass. The unchallengeable certitude with which Monbiot treats his second favourite subject, and the viciousness with which he denounces anyone who disagrees, reminds me a little of the hard-line creationists you find jabbering in the backwoods of the Appalachian Mountains: there is no argument, we are not qualified to argue, man-made climate change simply IS, and let there be an end to the debate. It is this very certitude, and the response to critics, which makes me doubtful.”

 

“The [ContactPoint] databases are a darkness at the heart of state; a belief that if we could just know everything about everybody, everything would work.”

Jenni Russell - Another invasion of liberty. And only the Tories are alert

“On Friday a BBC journalist announced on breakfast television that “a million children are being abused”.

Where do these figures come from? How do we know? Are we feeding the paranoia that stops a grandfather taking a picture of his nine-year-old grandson playing football? Surely this cannot continue. Someone needs to put things back on an even keel.”

Former Detective Chief Superintendent Chris Stevenson

Earlier in his article for The Times Mr Stevenson, the officer in charge of the Soham murder investigation, remarked,

“As a result of poor intelligence, [Ian] Huntley was appointed a school caretaker in Soham. Did that give him access to children? Yes, hundreds. Did he abuse them? No. In fact he reported to the head teacher that several teenage girls had made inappropriate comments. What Huntley did to Holly and Jessica was as bad as it gets, but did he come into contact with them through being a caretaker? Not exactly — he was caretaker of Soham Village College, a school for the over-11s. The two girls attended St Andrew’s Junior School. Different building, different caretaker. Huntley had contact with them because [his partner Maxine] Carr was employed at St Andrew’s as a classroom assistant. She worked in a class with Holly and Jessica, who both liked her. Holly’s mother sent Carr a box of chocolates on the last day of term to say thank you for helping her daughter.”

He concludes,

“How do we prevent such chance encounters happening? We can’t. No amount of legislation, record keeping or checking could prevent this type of crime completely. Thankfully it is extremely rare. Children are far more likely to be killed by a family member or on the roads.”

 Well now, we cannot have that sort of talk.  Something had to be done. Anything.

Of the latest dire opinion poll ratings for Gordon Brown and Labour published in The Times today, Peter Riddell and Philip Webster comment,

“The Tories are, however, doing less well than Labour in opposition in 1996 (on 50 per cent) or the Tories in 1978 (48 per cent).”

I have already touched briefly upon the importance of comparing like for like.  Selective use of opinion poll results is also unhelpful.  It should be recalled that 1978 is the year the myth spinners would have us believe Jim Callaghan would have defeated Margaret Thatcher had he possessed the judgement to call a General Election.  In the summer of 1978, the Conservatives were marginally ahead of Labour in the opinion polls, but five per cent behind by the following October/November.

It follows that at this stage of the game, it is not significant that David Cameron has failed to poll Tony Blair’s fifty per cent or Margaret Thatcher’s forty-eight per cent, particularly as the Conservatives have maintained a healthy overall lead in the opinion polls since October 2007.

“[David Cameron] will also find, as Mrs Thatcher did, that Labour has used appointments to senior quango jobs both as patronage and to spread its ideas of what is politically correct.”

Cameron will have to fight the quangocracy 

The Conservatives winning the next General Election is not the half of it

Mr Ghulam Rabanni, the General Secretary of the Harrow Central Mosque criticized the anti-racism campaigners from Unite Against Fascism who ignored the mosque's pleas not to hold a counter demonstration against the English Defence League in Harrow today.  Said Mr Rabanni,

“All these people have come from outside the area to start up trouble in an area that has never had any racial tension. It is very sad.”

“But the incontinent expansion of the State’s reach degrades its grip. It undermines legitimacy, lowers confidence and breeds disregard. Twelve years of new Labour’s flabby-minded growth in the public sector, and the bloating of its claims on individuals’ lives, have begun to rot the whole idea of something the Left ought to believe in, and the Right do: society, and the public good.”

Matthew Parris

Says Paul Waugh,

“…Shadow Health Secretary Andrew Lansley got into hot water this year for musing idly that “the recession can be good for us”. He was pointing out that people smoked and drank less and spent more time with their families — but that didn't stop the Prime Minister ridiculing his online gaffe…”

 In a slightly different context Daniel Hannan wrote recently,

“Then, around about 40 years ago, journalists began to develop the idea that if Person X disagreed, on the record, with Person Y, it was a “gaffe” (a word that exists only in newspapers, never in ordinary conversations).”

Can it be right to describe a comment as a gaffe when it resonates with the public as being true or eminently reasonable?  Patently not, I think.

“A 2008 federal-funded survey conducted in New Jersey, where Megan’s Law¹ originated, concluded it had done nothing to deter the repeat offenders it is designed to target. It only made them easier to track down when they had reoffended….But a register is a knee- jerk response to the cry of “something must be done,” and that done, we are all too happy to do nothing more.”

Catherine Philp

___________________________________

¹ A law requiring information to be made public concerning registered sex offenders.

“One in three teenage girls has suffered sexual abuse from a boyfriend and one in four has experienced violence in a relationship, according to an in-depth study published today”

reports The Guardian.

The research was undertaken on behalf of the NSPCC at the Centre for Family Policy and Child Welfare, University of Bristol.  The Centre describes itself as “one of the leading national and international research centres on child welfare and child safety issues.”

The survey of 1,353 teenage girls and boys from across the United Kingdom found that nearly ninety per cent of these teenagers aged 13 to 17 had been in an intimate relationship. A quarter of the girls claimed to have suffered physical violence, including being slapped, punched or beaten by their boyfriends. Ninety-one teenagers were questioned at length and of these, one in six of the girls claimed that they had been pressured into having sex and one in sixteen claimed to have been raped.

A previous report from Bristol University published in late August 2009 concerning domestic violence declared amongst other things that,

“men abuse more than women do but women are three times more likely to be arrested” (my emphasis).

Having been involved in a professional capacity at the sharp end of domestic violence for a sufficient number of years, it was my experience that the overwhelming majority of individuals arrested were male.

It makes you ponder how representative of the general population were the samples relied upon for this latest research.  If sample data is not sound then neither is the conclusion drawn from that data; or as a computer bod would say, garbage in, garbage out.

“It is frankly a scandal that any kind of taxpayer-funded person should be conveyed about London in a taxpayer-funded car, adding to congestion and pollution, and insulating them from the vital need to upgrade the Tube and build Crossrail. It is time for the incoming government to end this outrage, axe the ministerial cars, and if necessary equip ministers with a lovely red ministerial bicycle with EIIR on the saddle.  Or else we will know that nothing has changed.”

Boris Johnson

“Almost exactly a year ago The Guardian carried an interview Alistair Darling in which he warned that the economic cataclysm which was just starting to engulf us would be “arguably the worst in 60 years”. How we jeered, how the accusations of gaffe and blunder were hurled at the poor fellow.  We learned that Gordon Brown was infuriated by the Chancellor’s candour - Mr Brown being a politician who has never done candour - and the air was thick with speculation that Darling’s days were numbered. But of course he was right, bang on the money”

avers David Hughes in The Daily Telegraph today.

That is not how I remember it.  I recall that HM Government was playing down how serious an economic mess it had caused, and the Chancellor’s gaffe was to have let the cat out of the bag, rather than to have told us something that neither the Government nor we then knew.  Whilst Darling was right in his assessment of the state of the economy, so was everyone else who predicted that we were in danger of suffering potentially the most serious recession in fifty years, if not a century.

I have noticed how this story of Alistair Darling being an all-seeing prophet concerning the economy has gained ground during the course of the mainstream media’s silly season. Even if the Chancellor had been uniquely prescient as is now (falsely) claimed, he does not deserve any credit in the light of his almost immediate “clarifying” of what he had told The Guardian as reported in the The Daily Telegraph the following day, 31st August 2008.

Not long after assuming power in 1997, the Labour Government changed the method of calculating unemployment such that a significant proportion of unemployed people were hidden from the official figures (designating a large number of individuals as long term sick rather than unemployed, being one device).  By this means, the Labour Government was always able to compare favourably their jobless figures with those of the proceeding Conservative administrations.

Today the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reported that the number of households with no one over the age of sixteen years old working has increased by two hundred and forty thousand over the past year to a total of 3.3 million. Furthermore, the ONS recorded that the number of working-age people in workless households rose to 4.8 million in the year to June 2009.

Put like that, it doesn’t look good, does it?

“The idea that freedom is merely the ability to act upon one’s whims is surely very thin and hardly begins to capture the complexities of human existence; a man whose appetite is his law strikes us not as liberated but enslaved.  And when such a narrowly conceived freedom is made the touchstone of public policy, a dissolution of society is bound to follow.  No culture that makes publicly sanctioned self-indulgence its highest good can long survive: a radical egotism is bound to ensue, in which any limitations upon personal behaviour are experienced as infringements of basic rights. Distinctions between the important and the trivial, between the freedom to criticize received ideas and the freedom to take LSD, are precisely the standards that keep societies from barbarism.”

Theodore Dalrymple

“There are some brave folk who suggest that Britain will experience a sharp V-shaped recovery and the economy will grow buoyantly next year. But this is not credible. This recession is unique in terms of its combination of difficulties. In addition to the prospect of sharp tax increases and/or tough public spending constraints, the continuing impairment of the banking system and the restrictions on bank lending will, at the very minimum, act as a drag on recovery.”

Ruth Lea

Following developments this week, once again there is great wailing and gnashing of teeth concerning the purportedly low conviction rates for rape.  Now it is the turn of Janice Turner to wring her hands in despair and lament the denial of justice to rape victims.

The fundamental point frequently glossed over is that in many trials the entirety of the evidence does not assist the jury in reaching a verdict of guilty. It is this inability or refusal to confront the crux of the issue that prevents progress being made whereby the truly guilty can be convicted and punished appropriately.  In a significant number of cases, too often the prosecution case simple recites facts that would apply to any “courtship” taking place daily, up and down the country but where in the case before the Court, some four-fifths of the way through the ritual that would in almost every other case have led to consensual sexual intercourse, something went awry.  It is not a simple problem of it being one person’s word against another’s.  I have met women who have been raped in a social or “dating” situation.  Having known each woman for some time, I had no doubt in accepting as true what they had told me, but how is a jury to make such a determination of veracity, having met the victim only once upon the occasion of her giving evidence from the witness box? Is it so surprising that jurors err on the side of caution, particularly given the burden of proof borne by the Crown?

The “something must be done” campaigners have rarely had the benefit of sitting through numerous trials where having listened to the Crown’s evidence, it has become impossible to dismiss the thought that “something doesn’t add up here”. You have to be involved in a trial and listen dispassionately to the evidence before you can understand how a doubt about a defendant’s guilt can creep into a juror’s mind.  In those cases where the mating ritual has proceeded to that final stage, the reason for it coming to an abrupt halt must be plausible.   Perhaps fearing the loss of the Court’s sympathy (or more importantly that of the Police) in some such cases for instance, victims omit evidence that explains their behaviour and makes the Crown’s case truly complete.

In reality, a low rape conviction rate is little to do with juries having prejudices about how a woman should or should not behave.  Juries are not packed with individuals who were born before sex was invented in 1963.  Most have “been there, done that” and any curio from a bygone age would be put right, quickly. Tinkering by way of “re-educating” juries must just as surely lead to miscarriages of justice as would rigging the rules of evidence.

“A comparison of the incomes of public figures between half a century ago and now is instructive. In 1958 the salaries of the prime minister, the lord chief justice and the director general of the BBC were easy to remember as they were all the same, £10,000 a year. Last year the prime minister was paid £189,994, the lord chief justice £236,300 – and the director general £816,000 (plus bonuses).

There are now at least 47 BBC executives paid more than the prime minister. Everyone who works in the media has heard the stories about people retiring early from the BBC with personal pension pots of anything between £4m and £8m, and the their expenses must have impressed even MPs adept at claiming for champagne flutes or "flipping" residences.”

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Much has been made of the BBC practising ageism by dispatching older females from its programmes, only to replace them with “younger models”.  Notwithstanding the glaring clues, the point overlooked is that the BBC’s core objective is to ditch its audience.  In the main, particularly on a Saturday night, the BBC’s light entertainment audience is largely middle aged or older, with conservative tastes.

As reports  The Daily Mail,

 “BBC insiders have revealed that Strictly Come Dancing is undergoing an overhaul before the next series, to give it a ‘sexier’ feel and attract a younger audience” (my italics).

What more needs to be said?

“A publicly funded exhibition is encouraging people to deface the Bible in the name of art — and visitors have responded with abuse and obscenity”

reported The Times on 23rd July 2009.

 The exhibition, Made in God’s Image, at Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art, is part of the Sh(out) project, which we are told, aims to celebrate and raise awareness of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people.  The work Untitled 2009, by the Rev Jane Clarke of the Metropolitan Community Church, a Church that celebrates “racial, cultural, linguistic, sexual, gender and theological diversity”, urged the public to “write themselves in” to the Bible if they felt excluded.  Perhaps predictably considering the target audience of the exhibition, some of the comments written into the Bible were not entirely thought provoking or uplifting.

Rev Clarke made it plain that she regretted the insults that had appeared.  This has not prevented Mark O’Neill, the Director of Art and Museums at Culture and Sport Glasgow, lambasting critics of the Bible exhibit as being motivated by an opposition to homosexuality and “[trying] to divert attention from the issue that the artwork aims to highlight: how religion marginalises homosexuals.”  Adds Mr O’Neill,

“If they want to condemn homosexuals, that’s up to them but using the Gallery of Modern Art as a vehicle for that condemnation, I don’t think is legitimate.”

Or perhaps Christians just don’t like their holy book being so deliberately and provocatively defaced no matter who is the perpetrator, Mr O’Neill.

 The Sunday Times

“The government has promised it will ensure the hacker facing extradition to the US would serve any prison sentence in the UK amid a deepening row over whether it has legal power to stop the transfer”

reports The Times.

How can the Government ensure anything of the sort?  All it can ask of the Americans is “pretty please”.  This is nothing more than a ploy by Labour’s Deputy Leader Harriet Harman to avoid acute political embarrassment of the Government’s own making. This sleight of hand should be seen for what it is, not only an attempt to avoid the heat but, given that Mr McKinnon's matter might not be resolved one way or the other until well into next year, also to ensure that any fall-out occurs on someone else’s watch – the Conservative Government’s.

Notwithstanding Daniel Hannan’s ruthlessly effective debunking of the “progressive” media’s recent attempts to smear Michal Kaminski, the Polish head of the new Eurosceptic Conservative and Reformist (ECR) bloc in the current European Parliament, The Daily Telegraph is seeking to breath life into the proverbial flogged dead horse.

Given that the Conservatives have contributed to the formation of an effective Eurosceptic bloc in the European Parliament, one might have thought that the rabidly Europhobic Telegraph would have been ecstatic but patently not, given sympathetic reports it has published concerning the European Union appreciative, former Conservative MEP, Mr McMillan-Scott’s criticism of the much maligned Mr Kaminski.

The Telegraph's thin veneer of columnists and commentators of moderate conservative persuasion  is insufficient to hide the fact that it has long since given up any pretence of being a newspaper which broadly supports the Conservative Party. For too long, too often the slant of reporting is indistinguishable from that of the BBC or The Guardian.  I have never subscribed to the Telegraph, ironically because in the past I had considered it to be “too Tory”.  Thus I am now denied the considerable delight of cancelling any subscription.