The rats desert the sinking ship Blair

Blink and you might miss it. The subtle, off the cuff change in tone coming from some senior Labour MPs and long time Blairites, as they shift to cosy up to Gordon Brown like a teenager in the back row of the movies, is plain for all to see, if you're looking.

The latest is Tom Watson, who has launched something of a broadside (if you read between the lines) on Stephen Byers, who is Blair's primary "outrider", for want of a less used word.

This comes hot on the heels of the Honorable Geoff Hoon MP suggesting that the Conservatives are looking like a serious alternative to Labour (which sets him at odds with most Conservatives, judging by some recent debate on Conservative Home) and Kitty Usher saying (and I quote):

“(the) only conclusion any right-minded person can draw is that the Prime Minister thought it was OK for Muslims to keep dying”

Ok, so that last one wasn't very subtle, but you see the point.

These three have always been, to a lesser or greater extent, Blairites, and never any great friend of Gordon Brown. They are now all engaged in a farsical game of arse-licking, desperate to prove to the boss-to-be Gordon Brown that they knew he ways right all along.

And we wonder why the public despair of politicicans?

Are the Tories about to get £15m in foreign funding?

A very smelly story is brewing under the feet of David Cameron. As reported by The Observer, the Conservatives are set to make a profit of over £15m from the sale of their old headquarters, with the money coming from a foreign source (now illegal under party funding rules).

The building in question, on Smith Square, was previously leased by the Conservatives for £1 per year, until 2003 when they moved to other leased premises. However, they still own a long term lease on the property (and some adjoining offices) and bought the freehold in March this year for £15.56m after obtaining a “normal” secured loan.

Now, given the huge increase in value that comes from selling both the freehold and leasehold on the property as a “job-lot”, they are set to make £30m from a sale to a group of “Middle Eastern” businessmen.

So, the end result? The Tories gain £15m from outside the UK. Is this illegal? You decide. Has Guido Fawkes reported this one yet? Guess.

It's a crap sandwich, and we all have to take a bite.

To many people with any sort of inside track on Lib Dem politics today's “revelation” that senior party officials knew about Charles Kennedy's drink problem long before it became public won't seem like news. Rumours has circulated for years, and the coverage we're getting at the moment is a much due to a slow news month than the presence of anything really juicy.

However, we shouldn't adopt a bunker mentality, and learning from these mistakes is crucial. Charles Kennedy committed a fundamental political error when we made a decision, allegedly at some point in 2003, to not “go public” about a problem that was apparently common knowledge to many close aides and MPs. One must presume that he understood by that point that his personal problems were having an effect on his ability to do the job, and by persisting with that situation it can be argued that he deceived his own Party from that day until his admission finally came, as well as opening a debate on his ability to properly scrutinise the Government.

I am always hugely impressed with CK and a large chunk of me thinks he'll be leader again, but he (and the rest of us) simply have to learn from this rather stupid episode, or we won't be taken seriously.

Labour receive loans of £28m!

The latest electoral commision report is out, and it shows that Labour currently has loans (on "commercial terms" totaling over £28m.

• Labour - £28,200,693.85
• Conservatives - £2,812,000.00
• Lib Dems - £584,239.08

It should be noted that the Conservatives declined to include previous loans in their figure, only allowing those received in the period covered by the report, which was the 2nd quarter of this year.

Labour rig ballot.

It appears that electoral fairness does not trouble the Labour Party, even in cyberspace. The vote to select of an official Labour conference blogger lists one Guido Fawkes Esq, well know right wing commentator and former Tory activist, who applied for the post, and yet excludes the website you are reading now which applied at the same time.

Fix!

Cameron can't work against his party forever

The revised A-List rules released today were more or less as all us political geeks expected. The rules have been tightened, and the local parties now have less direct control over who their PPC is. The aim of the A-List is an admirable one, and the Liberal Democrats, being the only major party with precisely no MPs from ethnic minorities have no right to mock them. They do however miss the point somewhat.

There is an important difference here between the selection of women and the selection of people from ethnic minorities. The population is more or less an even 50/50 split between man and women, and this split is more or less consistent nation wide. The question for us all is why we don't have 300 female MPs? The A-List doesn't seek to actually address this question. Instead it simply attempts to rig the selection process to such an extent that "enough" women will be selected. Knowing Tories as I do (and the response on ConservativeHome backs this up) I suspect that in reality local associations might well kick back against such centralised control, selecting who they "bloody well want to".

The questions we should all be asking are.

• Why do women, (proportionally) not want to be MPs?
• If they do want to do it, why are they not being selected?
• What can we do to make the process of selection, campaigning and winning less expensive and therefore open to more people?

The A-List following the same logic and the Fire Service recruitment policies, which balance the standard required of entrants so that the "right" proportion of ethnic minority candidates are recruited, rather than asking why people from those groups are less likely to want to join the Fire Service, and actually tackling the root of the problem. This is exactly to the sort of lefty pandering that is attacked so vigorously by the famous ConservativeHome.

The issue of ethnic minority MPs needs to be tackled differently. I believe that around 9% of the population is "non-white", so the logic follows that the Lib Dems should have half a dozen or so non-white MPs, and there should be around 60 in total, across all parties. However, that logic breaks down when you realise that the magic 9% varies wildly from area to area. There are plenty of northern cities where the figure is much higher, and those areas tend to be Labour strongholds, meaning that it is much more difficult for the Lib Dems and the Tories to match the magic 9% (which, it should be noted, the Tories have done with their A-List selection so far, and that is an achievement). This makes it folly to suggest that any party is fundamentally "failing" to attract ethnic minority candidates, as it all must be in the context of the areas they actually have a chance of winning.

As Ann Widdecombe once wisely said (this doesn't happen often, so pay attention), a woman elected to the commons must look at any man, from the Prime Minister down, and know that she got there on the same merit he did. Any sort of rigged system, from any party, denies female MPs that right.

A glorious start for the Blues

The weekend just gone brought the start of the Premiership, which is always my favorite time of year. As an Evertonian, you can't beat the sense of raw optimism the start of the season brings, which I suppose everyone has (even Watford fans, probably).

So, Dad, two of my three brothers and I set off from Nottingham for our 2 hour pilgrimage to Goodison Park. The place always feels like a second home to me. I've lived in so many houses in the 24 years that I've been kicking around that Goodison Park is really the only constant that spans that time, I shall miss the place when we move.

The game was a little grinding. Watford remind me of Wimbledon, and I don't mean that as a total negative. They are physically very, very big and play a "direct" style. They certainly play to their strengths, and if they have enough luck they could stay up. Luck, however was the one thing they didn't have, with a quite shocking penalty decision giving us the game. Having said that, the incident happened right in front of where I sit and at the time I swore blind it was a penalty. It just shows what a tough job the referees have, although this one was particularly rubbish.

So, on now to Blackburn and Spurs, before we're back to face the Kopites in 3 weeks.

Charles Kennedy to speak at Conference

Now, this might not be news to anyone else (I do sometimes miss these things) but I was surprised to get an email earlier this week detailing the "highlights" of the September Lib Dem conference, including a speech by Charles Kennedy.

We now find ourselves sat anticipating the answer to a key question. He either backs Ming to the hilt, or doesn't, and either way what he says will speak volumes about who our next leader will be.

The Idiots in the MPAC

I'm sure you've all read about Indigo Wilson and what he posted on Conservative Home's “leftie lexicon”. I'll leave you to read the comments he made, I thought they were funny if very stupid.

The Muslim Public Affairs Committee have gone ape about it, and an interview given by their Chief Executive to the BBC (click here to listen again, skip forward to 65 minutes on the Thursday episode) reveal an awful lot about the weakness and arguable the stupidity of the arguments. The guy from MPAC just could not grasp the idea that someone is allowed to say something they disagree with, or that offends them. For example:

Presenter -  “But being pro-Israeli is a legitimate position, even if you disagree with it?”

MPAC - “Not from where I'm standing it's not”

What utter nonsense.

I suspect that a lot of Muslims don't agree with MPAC's approach, but if they do, that is their right to say so. See how easy that was?

I live in a country where Muslims can protest against our foreign policy, where Christians can picket Jerry Springer The Opera (and where the theatre can stage it!) and I can write freely on this blog. I'm damn proud of that, and MPAC will get no support from me whilst they continue to insist otherwise.

Leabonese "green helmet man" exposed as a fake

I'm sure many of you saw the footage after the Qana bombings of the "man in the green helmet" carrying a dead child. Well, rumours flew around that the footage was "staged", i.e. the bombing too place, but that the film shown was effectivly Hizbullah propoganda.

Well, Iain Dale just posted this, from a German TV station, that more or less proves that it was. It makes me a bit sick to know that we can trust the media so little, and Iain (and the Germans) deserve a huge amount of credit for digging deeper than our mainstream media seem bothered to.

Major technical problem with biometric passports

I'm sure you are aware that we're all going to have biometric passports in the near future. One of the favoured (i.e. very likely to be used) methods of storing the data on the passports is an RFID chip.

For the uninitiated, these are very small microchips that can hold reasonable amounts of data and can be "read" from a distance without line of sight, as opposed to a barcode for example which has to be "seen" by a reader. They are currently used by some supermarkets to do stock checks etc (each product has a unique chip, a reader can then tell what is on the shelf just by being held near it). I can say with some confidence that you're wearing at least one RFID chip right now.

Anyway, at the recent DEFCON conference in America, some clever souls demonstrated that these chips  can be easily cloned from a distance, without the user ever knowing (they used a demonstration German passport, complete with it's "shielding" cover). This directly contradicts what Governments will tell you, and is very, very serious.

Imagine a hacker/terrorist/fraudster, sat in the check in area of Heathrow, casually sipping a coffee playing with a laptop. On an average day, he could gather the passport details (including, for example, your home address, photo, signature and whatever else we'll be forced to store) of around 180,000 people. Every day.

This would be identity fraud on a level never before imagined, and would render the whole scheme useless. Terrorists could use any ID they wanted, picking an individual they resembled and using the internet to do enough research on them to answer the right questions. They then produce a passport which has a completely valid RFID chip, and the inevitable occurs.

This is a huge problem, so why am I not surprised that the mainstream media haven't covered it?

Unfolding events at UK Airports

A few brief thoughts spring to mind about today's unfolding events:-

• We must, both morally and politically, support everything the security services do. Given Forest Gate etc there will be analysis of Today's events, but now is not the time.
• The Conservatives continue to become a parody of a cartoon liberal, thinking that Liberal = Police Basher, with their absurd suggestion that the public should have been told of the threat earlier.
• Where is Ming Campbell? I'm sat here listening to 5 Live drag out anyone with a pulse who has an opinion on this to fill their 24 hour new cycle, why isn't Ming's office on the phone?
• Say what you like about John Reid, but his news conferences so far have been excellent.
• George Galloway is an idiot. End of.

Simon Hughes on Five Live

Simon Hughes was just on Radio 5 talking about the current terror alert. He was clear, confident and assured, backing the government where appropriate, yet sounding important notes of caution.

Most importantly he didn't take the bait from the presenter (Victoria Derbyshire) and fall into a "bash the government at any cost" stereotype. This contrasts with the Conservatives, who quite amazingly have suggested that the public should have been told about this threat earlier. What, before the suspects were arrested? That'd work.

Simon did exactly what we should be doing every day, presenting ourselves as the clear, mature and level headed opposition, rather than the Conservative's increasingly shrill shouting.

Update: Even Iain Dale was impressed!

Another poor showing from Ming

Anyone who heard Ming Campbell on Radio 1 this morning will have either cringed or giggled, depending upon their political persuasion. How can this man who has in the past always been confident, assured and authoritative suddenly have lost his political sense of balance.

As I said yesterday, Ming should be our strongest card at the moment, contrasting superbly with Blair's ignorance and Cameron's chameleon. However, we keep him locked up for a week, and when he is wheeled out, he talks about issues he clearly has little interest in, all whilst the Middle East faces it's biggest crisis for 10 years.

I was the first to tell everyone who would listen that Ming's poor performance at Prime Minister's Questions didn't matter, as no one watches it anyway except us lot. However, a lot of people listen to Chris Moyles in the morning.

Someone at Cowley Street needs to start thinking much harder about how we present ourselves, and Ming, in public, or do we wait for a dismal General Election result before we realise that "the strategy" (presuming there is one) isn't working?

A response from New Labour!

A response has been received to my earlier entry to be Labour's official blogger.

From: LP-1%LABOUR@new.labour.org.uk
To: austin@liberalaction.co.uk

Thank you for entering Labour's conference blog competition.

Your entry has being received. Due to the number of entries we are unable
to reply to emails individually.

The winner will be announced on labour.org.uk on 8 September 2006. Please
check the site to find out if you will be blogging @ Labour Party
conference!

Yours sincerely,

Blog @ conference competition team

Let's not get lost in nonsense. There are only about 6 serious Labour blogs, and half of them are run by Recess Monkey, so I'd be amazed if they'd had a dozen entries. Still, it shouldn't come as a surprise that it takes New Labour 3 full paragraphs to say "no".

I think I found Condi's problem.

I was listening to the podcast of ABC News' superb weekly politics show "This Week" earlier today, and something quite profound struck me.

Condi Rice, when asked about the possibility of civil war in Iraq, said "we don't think about hypotheticals".

Ladies and Gentlemen, I think we found the problem with our Iraq strategy.

Why I should be Labour's official Blogger. By Me.

So, Labour are after an official blogger for their conference. The words red, rag and bull spring to mind.

Sent today:

From: austin@liberalaction.co.uk
To: blogatconference@new.labour.org.uk

Subject: Labour Blogger

Hi,

I think my blog (www.liberalaction.co.uk) should be the official Labour Conference blog, as judging by some recent by-elections, most Labour supporters vote Lib Dem anyway.

Kindest Regards,

Austin Rathe
LiberalAction.co.uk

I shall post any response here...

Dave the part time eco-warrior

David Cameron's revelation that he only actually cycles to work once a week should come as no surprise to anyone. We have a shallow opposition Leader desperately trying to mimic New Labour's 10 year old trick of being all things to all people. The Conservatives have made a fatal mistake in forgetting that unlike them, most of the country no longer admires Blair's political skill, we're all sick of him.

It is at times like this that Ming Campbell's authoritative, statesman-like presence could do us so much good, yet we seem to have locked him in a cupboard somewhere.

Mel Gibson Launches Rockets at Israel

Dear readers, I point you towards probably the funniest, and least politically correct, look at the Israel situation so far, courtasy of The Onion.

Mel Gibson Launches Rockets at Israel.

I am Sam Seaborn

The idealistic speechwriter is well-liked by just about everyone.  He's known for his excellent writing, sense of humor, and tendency to be clutzy.  Although being younger than the rest of the staff, he's often treated as so, much to his dismay.

:: Which West Wing character are you? ::

A Pro-Israeli Lib Dem?

Iain Dale, a blogger I hugely respect and yet rarely agree with, asked a couple of weeks ago if there were any pro-Israeli Lib Dems.

At the time I thought the question implied an over-simplification of the situation, why must I have to consider myself either pro or presumably anti Israel?

The conflict in the Lebanon is a proxy battle in a bigger war, with Israel and Hizbullah playing the poodles of America and Iran respectively, both their masters wanting to dominate the Middle East. It is also a proxy in this country, with our own versions of the neo-cons hawkishly supporting Israel, and many on the left seeming to show some sympathy (or perhaps empathy) for Hizbullah. Sympathy for the civilians of Lebanon and Israel is the one common factor.

Any sympathy for the terrorists of Hizbullah is completely misplaced, wrong and shows a huge lack of understanding. Hizbullah do the people of Lebanon, whom they claim to represent and protect, no service at all. It was their blatant and deliberate provocation that started this war, and that argument transcends any debate about the proportionality of Israel's response.

The people of Lebanon and Israel have no natural quarrel, no land dispute (beyond the 3 square feet of farmland that Hizbullah spin for their own benefit) and no reason to go to war.  Hizbullah have simply allowed themselves to be used by Iran as part of a bigger struggle.

The basis upon which people empathise with Hizbullah is framed in the context of the Palestinian situation, with Israel's continued inertia to the formation of a free and independent Palestine setting many otherwise balanced minds against them, often to such an extent that they become prepared tolerate terrorism when only the "common enemy" is suffering. The left must avoid this trap at all costs.

As regards Israel's response, is it disproportionate? Perhaps it is, although I'm not sure how many bombs would have been considered fair play. The reality is that due to the IDF's superior equipment and resources, and the fact that they are not fighting another nation state, their response was always going to be disproportionate. Those making that argument must then follow it through to it's logical conclusion and suggest that Israel had no right to defend itself at all, which is nonsense.

Israel are however damning themselves either way. They have alienated a large part of western opinion, and fettered away huge political capital. This will do them great harm when attention turns back to Palestine, which it will.

However, I do not in any way support the continued Israeli action. The strategy of driving Hizbullah out of Lebanon using bombs and bullets is a flawed one which will not work, and it only perpetuates the cycle of violence in a region when politics and diplomacy provide the only effective way forward. It is logically on a par with invading Iraq to tackle Al-Qaida, and it is on these terms that we should call for an immediate cease-fire, not on the basis that Israel isn't playing fair.

So, the original question is an over-simplification of the issue, but given the choice of supporting Israel or Hizbullah, this Lib Dem is only falling on one side.