I'm sorry, what??

Sometimes, it's the little things in big stories that make you stop:

Bimlenbra Jha, chief executive of Tata Steel UK, told the Business select committee that the UK had "structural weaknesses" that made the UK steel industry uncompetitive.

Business rates and high energy costs were top of the list.

On energy, he said that if Tata was operating in Germany, its energy bill would be £40m a year lower. The Tata chief defended the company's decision to put the business up for sale saying that the company and its shareholders could not continue to bleed. The business is estimated to be losing £1m a day.

OK, let's break this down. The civil service think man-made climate change is a big thing, therefore the government has instituted massive energy taxes to discourage people from making stuff that needs a lot of energy. Making steel takes a fucktonne of energy. Closing down Port Talbot will be a non-trivial step towards meeting our civil service approved emission reduction targets.

In other words, whether or not you agree with climate change being a thing, and our fault, and something that we can fix, and are fixing in the right way, the fact of the matter is that saying "tata to Tata" is exactly the the kind of outcome you would expect and want from our climate change policies.

However, despite the fact that it's only Morlocks losing their jobs, of course, there are votes to be had here, so now everyone has to panic and pretend to care. It's the usual fiasco of a planned economy.

Hidden away further down, though, was this little nugget:

Mr Javid said steps had already been taken to help on energy costs with £130m paid out since 2013 to compensate high energy users who incur environmental surcharges.

Just think about that: the glorious state has decided that we need saving from ourselves, so let's make energy more expensive. We start to get saved from ourselves, but suddenly we need to compensate businesses who have to pay the environmental surcharge.

What the actual fucking fuck is that all about? Make someone pay a tax and then give them a fucking handout to say sorry? I'm really dying to know which fucking retarded spastic cunt thought this was a remotely sensible fucking idea.

A Ramble through Beastleigh

So, there we have hit: modern social democracy in one easy-to-digest bite!

Despite losing 14% of their previous vote, despite an actual majority (53%) of people wanting a centre-right party, they got whatever it is the LibDems are this week. That's democracy based on party politics in action, right there.

But it's OK, because there's at least a 30% chance that the Lib Dems will be a centre-right party on any given day of the week. And still the yellow drones flock to them.

One thing, however, has been entirely misinterpreted by the Twitterati: "A lurch to the right is not a good idea for the Tories as their candidate was virtually a UKIPper" - nope, people weren't voting for the candidates, they were voting according to tribal loyalty or, in the best case, for what they saw as the parties' direction. The only thing a candidate can really do is fuck up their chances, like, say, wishing that a former Prime Minister had actually died in a bomb blast.

Effectively, Cameron's vacuous social democratic politics do not appeal to enough people, they only "won over" people who would vote for a Blue-ribboned dog turd.

People don't understand this "core vote" thing at all. The core vote will always vote for the party, it doesn't matter whether you lurch to the left or the right.

(I recently spent a weekend with some Labour activists and some of the stories they told me made even my hair stand on end. And yet, despite their very clear understanding that the people that they're supporting are bullies, sexual predators, backstabbers and people that they intensely dislike, THEY STILL VOTE FOR THEM AND WORK THEIR ARSES OFF TO SUPPORT THEM.)

As we say in Topeka, Kansas: "Da FUQUE??"

Having said that, everybody (even the tribal faithful) can see the yawning chasm of amoral, unprincipled emptiness at the heart of modern politics. People don't vote for Cameron in droves despite Gordon Brown's disastrous incompetence because he stands for absolutely nothing. He is the heir to Blair in that regard, but he lacks Blair's media control.

People yearn for politics where there are principles, where they vote for some thing. Politicians since Blair have set expectations that the "thing" they're voting for is all about throwing money from the magic money tree, and recipients of their "largesse" are quite understandably upset that this can't happen indefinitely.

Ultimately, nobody is happy with the way things are being run. It's much easier to accept austerity if there's a clear goal at the end of it. But since there isn't a clear goal other than "clearing up Labour's mess" and there is no apparent sign of the chosen path to austerity working, as raising taxes leaves people with less money in their pockets to restart the economy, everybody is unhappy with the Tory government.

The rise of UKIP is not entirely down to the innate bigotry of British people, it's mostly down to the fact that they appear to stand for something and they're not one of the current lot, all of whom are regarded as massive failures.

But for politics to have principle does not require a "lurch to the right", a "lurch to the left" or a "lurch to the middle". British politicians are fighting over a tiny patch of centre-right, authoritarian ground. Even the ostensibly less authoritarian, more left-wing Greens are just eco-fascists, who want to inflict their own particular brand of bullshit on the rest of us.

Why can't politicians take a stand based on less authoritarianism? It's clear since Blair what the economic sweet spot is, but when it comes to letting people live their lives, every government seems to be more and more authoritarian. How much further can they actually go before we start getting curfews and shit like that?

Why can't we get a party that says: "You know what? As a thank you for voting for us, we're going to get out of your face. We're going to stop micromanaging your life. We're going to trust you to do the right thing like you're trusting us to do the right thing"?

Plus ça change, etc.

Good Lord, it's not the first time I've used that as a blog post title, is it?

Well, here's some good stuff from the Tories:

Diabetes remains one of the largest challenges to our healthcare system, with around 3.7 million sufferers in the UK and almost a million more estimated to have the condition but who do not know it. This is likely to get worse. Unhealthy lifestyles in the UK put a further 7 million people at risk of developing type 2 diabetes and in ten years’ time we may see the number of patients pass the 5 million mark.

All this places a significant burden on the NHS, with an estimated spend of £10 billion per year on diabetes related treatments. A great deal of this spend is unnecessary. Diabetics far too often suffer from late diagnosis, preventable complications and variations in care. They are often overlooked for specialist care when being treated for other conditions, particularly in hospitals, and they can be prevented from accessing treatment by the short term financial ethos embedded in far too many Care Trusts across the country.

Some studies have found that around 80 per cent of the spend on diabetes is avoidable so the main focus the Government needs to take is how to deploy resources effectively to help people manage their diabetes and even more importantly, prevent people from developing type 2 diabetes-the type related to lifestyle-in the first place.

This is being made more challenging by the NHS reforms, which, even if they were perfect, would cause disruption, and the fear that the new commissioners will take something of a short term approach to managing budgets in light of the priority for deficit reduction.

Wow, this is all good stuff, isn't it? Stuff we've been saying all along: you can get the same or better results without spending as much money, too much is wasted. And why is it wasted? Because of insane bureaucratic procedures which explain all too well why visiting a GP in this cuntry feels like you're interacting with a call centre operator in a foreign land who'd like nothing more than to tell you to switch it off, wait five minutes and then switch it on again.

But given that the problem is a massive surfeit of bad guidance that causes people to waste money in a bureaucratic, checkbox manner, guess what the solution proposed to this is?

Go on, guess.

The problem is too much bureaucratic guidance, what solution could you propose that would guaranteed to make me want to strangle myself with my own testicles?

Yes:

The Government can rectify some of these problems through national leadership. The National Service Framework, which has guided diabetes care since 2001 is due for renewal and it is a very appropriate time for Ministers to look at how to spend wisely now, and disseminate best practice across the NHS to reduce long term costs. Achieving this would have the happy coincidence of better patient outcomes; arguably what the priority should always be for Ministers and officials.

Kill me now.

Feeling troubled?

Just why, pray tell, can fucking politicians and civil servants never refrain from calling a spade a metallic professionally formed hole digging device?

I see that the man with the massive forehead has come out with some fucking bollocks about sorting out "troubled families". These were previously known as "problem families", i.e. the feral cunts that no sane person wants to live near. You know, the cunts who play bangin' choons till 4 AM, puke in your garden, shit in your fishpond, beat your kids up for the hell of it and collect ASBOs for fun. And the whole clan joins in the fun, making the lives of everyone around them a fucking misery.

And what, pray tell, you fucking incompetent socialist fuckwit, is wrong with calling these utter shitstains "problem families"?

They are a fucking problem for the entire community that they live in. They make everyone's lives less pleasant. They are families that are a problem. They are not troubled. They are a fucking problem.

But as ever, the heir to Blair is hugging hoodies, and preparing to spunk out more of our hard-earned on some "eye-catching initiative" to show us how much he cares.

Look, Dickface, it's fucking simple: mealy-mouthed, wishy-washy language does nothing to solve the problem. It's clear that unwinding the mendacious bullshit of Labour is beyond you, but do you really fucking have to add to it?

@LouiseMensch is a fucking idiot

I had an argument with a fellow twatterer about his MP. He said she was one of the good guys and wouldn't hear a bad word about her.

I, on the other hand, explicitly distrust anyone who goes into politics as being someone who thinks they know better than anyone else how we should live our lives. And if you climb the greasy pole far enough to actually become an MP, then you must be a mendacious, bullying cunt of the highest order.

And so it came to pass. First we had:

Northamptonshire Police advise me that much of their time and resources were wasted answering false alarms due to soc media rumours.

Then:

Twitter regularly down for maintenance, and if in a major national emergency police think Twitter and FB should take an hour off? So be it

(Firstly, Twitter doesn't fucking regularly go down for maintenance, you daft bint, it's a 24x7 operation that isn't supposed to go down AT ALL. Likewise Facebook.

Secondly, the only way you can stop access to Facebook and Twitter is to completely disable access to all websites. I'm not even sure this is technically possible. It would certainly destroy every online business in the UK.

Still think it's a good idea?)

Then:

I don't have a problem with a brief temporary shutdown of social media just as I don't have a problem with a brief road or rail closure.

See above.

Then:

If short, necessary and only used in an emergency, so what. We'd all survive if Twitter shut down for a short while during major riots.

How often are you expecting major riots, Louise? Are you privy to some information that us plebs aren't entitled to?

Anyway, there more stupid tweets about maintenance and stuff, and then we get this gem:

And really, stop w/ all the dramatics. Nobody is talking about "shutting down Twitter". It's about listening to police & a couple hours off.

So here we have it: one of the "good guys" in politics thinks it's absolutely fine that the police (the fucking POLICE!) should have the power to shut down everybody in the UK's access to social networking because of a few miscreants that they can't handle. Never mind that in doing so they'd have to cut everybody in the UK off from the web completely. Never mind that it would lay waste to every online business in the UK at the same time.

If that's what a "good" politician thinks, can you imagine what the rest of them think?

It's so true, scratch a politician, any politician and you'll find a closet fascist.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

I like Eric Pickles, I really do. He is making life uncomfortable for hundreds of thousands of useless cunty parasites who live off of our wages. But as ever, we see the behaviour of politicians in full flow: do as I say, not as I do.

The Communities Secretary angered green campaigners by upgrading to a gas-guzzling £70,000 Jag from the £20,000 hybrid Toyota Prius used by his Labour predecessor John Hutton.

Official figures show his department blew £277,690 of taxpayers’ cash on chauffeur-driven limos in 10 months.

That is the second highest total in Whitehall, with only Lib Dem Vince Cable’s vast Department for ­Business spending more.

The figures come after it was revealed that Mr Pickles has overseen a £150,000 spending spree by civil servants.

Officials used Visa cards funded by the taxpayer to buy everything from luxury hotel stays and meals to wine and sandwiches.

The sum will embarrass the Cabinet ­heavyweight, who regularly accuses town halls of wasting public money.

Yes, folks, those cost-cutting Tories are not cutting costs that affect the people ordering the cuts. And you just know that if Labour were in charge and having to cut, les grande fromages at the top would be equally immune to any kind of suffering.

We're all in this together. Just some of us are more than others.

Fucking cunts.

No, no, no!

Meet the new cunts, indistinguishable from the old cunts (emphasis mine):

The Identity Card Scheme and other biometrics work has already cost the taxpayer £292 million. The Act has saved £835 million in planned future investment.

No, you fucking cunts. An investment is spending you make in the hope of future benefits. Here is the definition, for any cunting civil servant who may want to learn that English words already have meanings, so stop fucking destroying our language with bureaucratic bollocks-speak!

There are no fucking benefits to pissing our money away on ID cards. This is more fucking civil servant distortion of the English language to provide cover of useless, inept, wasteful government profligacy.

And it wasn't this government that "invested" the money. So it's perfectly ok to describe it as "spending" or even "pissing away taxpayers' hard-earned on corporatist crap".

Unless, of course, the people who rule us, who's reputation needs salving, are not the useless motherfuckers we elect.

Sack the fucker!

Back in the heady days of the expenses scandal, I made an abortive attempt at examining the expenses of random MPs. I managed exactly, er, one. (OK, I also had a minor probe of Tom Harris, but I just don't have the staying power that I had when I was a teenager.)

However, I'm thrilled to see that the one fucking thieving trougher I did manage to scrape around has clearly been a very naughty boy:

Private detectives paid more than £5,000 by the justice minister tricked his aides into talking to them by claiming that they were journalists. His election agent and the honorary treasurer of Huntingdon Conservatives were among those questioned.

Quite apart from the questions he will face in Parliament over his behaviour, Mr Djanogly has some serious explaining to do to the constituency workers who were, until now, unaware that they had been the subjects of a covert investigation.

What a really nice bloke, eh? It's far too much to hope that the useless sack of shit will resign from his spot at the trough, but it's a fucking delight to watch the cunt squirm. I can't wait to see what his constituency make of this.

But of course, since it's one of the safest Tory seats, it's too much to hope that they'll kick the fucker out next time. Isn't democracy wonderful?

#mehgate (for @jackofkent )

Well known campaigner Jerk Off Cunt has once again got his panties in a wedge. This time it's about possible collusion between the Met Police and the News of the Screws.

I'm baffled as to how someone who is actually in the legal profession can be surprised to hear of potential collusion by the police and the media, especially the fucking Screws, for fuck's sake. I'm sure there's been mutual back scratching going on there since forever.

And I also have no doubt at all that the Screws has had dirt on senior people in all walks of life (including rozzers) since forever as well.

As much as I have called for the police to be disbanded and started up again on Peelian principles (if we must have a state-controlled police force at all, obviously), I find it hard to get excited by new evidence or potential evidence of police corruption. The police have strayed so far from the idea of consensual policing that they are almost entirely unfit for purpose.

Why was Jerk Off Cunt not incensed and calling for heads to roll when the police was blatantly colluding with the government in the (Ian) Blair years? Why was he not hosting smug attack posts from blatantly biased Tory attack dogs then? Could it possibly be because he believes that government is good and it's not a problem that a politicised police force colludes with the government of the day?

Why is he not moaning about the fact that a private company called ACPO has increasing influence in our political process, a private company that is completely opaque and unaccountable?

Really, when faced with accusations that there would be collusion between powerful individuals in the media and other powerful individuals in the police, or collusions between power individuals in the government or powerful individuals in the police, my only surprise is that you're surprised. Large, powerful, largely unaccountable organisations performing shady deals in dark, non-smoking rooms is hardly a bloody surprise, now is it?

And let's face it, you are doing Labour a huge favour in hosting sanctimonious blog posts from political attack dogs who have a huge interest in attacking the people alleged to be involved. The Graun is obviously delighted to have a means to self-righteously attack their competition and they don't really care if it's true. In reality, they were probably just as happy to "share a narrative" with a lefty tosser like Ian Blair, even assuming they weren't actively colluding.

I'm not defending Coulson, when the allegations surfaced last time around, I thought that if Cameron didn't sack him there and then, he would turn into a major liability. But then iDave is clearly blessed with the same amount of nous as his predecessor, which is why I'll be shedding exactly no tears at all if this takes down the coalition.

So yeah, I'd be astonished if the allegations weren't true and if this hadn't been going on since before I was born. What I can't understand is why you're getting all uppity about this now and why you can't see the obvious self-interest of the people you have arrayed on your side in this case.

I have a Peroni here with your name on it if this doesn't wind up with, at best, a couple of low-ranking heads rolling, maybe a whitewash inquiry. And Tom Watson and the piemuncher forgetting your name as soon as the next attack vehicle comes along. Unless they can use you as a platform for that, of course.

A more honest liberal would be calling for major reform of the police because of their increasing influence in the political process, which is far more worrying than the fact that the papers know where some of the bodies are buried.

In essence, all I can say to this hullabaloo is: "Meh."

Unlike some (for @jackofkent )

I am, unlike Iain Dale, not ashamed to be a fucking political blogger today.

Guido is a muckraker, that's what he does. He has poked the lefty community in the eye today by muckraking a Tory, something that they all said he wouldn't do when the Tories were in power.

Frankly, I don't care what a fucking politician does, as long as I'm not fucking paying for it. And what has been burning my arse about this is that the actual employment of whatever his name is does sound a bit suspect, because a poisonous muckraker claims:

The appointment of Hague’s former driver to his private office is controversial because 25-year old Myers has no expertise for the job, no relevant experience and his only qualification for the position is his closeness to the Foreign Secretary.

And that, my dear reader, is what fucks me off. In a manner that is completely indistinguishable from those fucking Labour cunts, this minister has basically given a mate a fucking job. Whether it's a mate as in beer-drinking-buddy or mate as in anal fisting when you're away from the missus, the thing that makes me steam is that I'M FUCKING FUNDING SOME CUNT'S WHIM!

Frankly, I think Hague should fucking resign and go kill himself in a fucking field somewhere. Not for any potential sexual misdemeanour, but for pissing away my money.

And if you can't understand the difference between someone's private life and misuse of public money, then you're as much of a cunt as he is.

The new politics ...

Tom Harris has been running a series of how the new politics does things the same way that Labour used to. No opprobrium for Labour having done such a thing, of course.

But it really is an endless display of rehashed tired "initiatives" showing the poverty of Tory ideas:

Anyone remember the special telephone line 101? It was a little idea to have a non-emergency phone line that people could use instead of 999 to report crimes that didn't require SO19 to pile in with their H&K MP5s.

It was, naturally a complete waste of time and money, being piloted then slowly dropped having cost the taxpayer £1.8 million

Calls to the line, designed to ease pressure on 999, included such requests as, "can you tell me the times of trains to Brighton?", "I'd like someone to test my smoke alarm." and "Do you know when the next bus leaves for Southampton?"

You'll be glad to hear therefore that our Coalition Government would not be so stupid as to introduce a similar sort of scheme ever again, less face the embarrassment of throwing more of our money away at a service that would be used and abused... oh wait, no... what am I talking about, they are introducing such a scheme.

For those wondering, this is the point at which you put your head in your hands and scream "Oh God no! Not again!".

Oh God no! Not again!

Still, I'm sure some Tory lickspittle and apologist will be along shortly to tell me how different it is because the Tories are doing it this time. And how much better the Tories are than Labour.

The problem is that our elected representatives are unable to do anything effective to the civil service and wedded to statist thinking. Every one of the things that they have done, even Eric Pickles's alleged cuts have just transferred the pointless activity to the private sector, rather than doing away with the pointless activity altogether.

I suppose it's too much to ask for politicians to ask whether everything that government currently does needs to be done by the government or done at all?

Very funny!

I can't possibly do it justice. Just go read it.

Carswell is miffed

Poor lamb:

Leon Brittan has been appointed as a trade adviser to the government. Not that the UK government has any real say over UK trade policy. As an ex-Eurocrat, I’m sure Lord Brittan knows that already.

But still, why not appoint as a trade adviser a man whose career saw him help lock UK trade ever more tightly into the sclerotic, high tax / high regulation Eurozone? It could be just the thing to stimulate trade with India and China.

The fact Lord L happens to have been explicitly hostile to the Tory cause in the run up to the last set of Euro elections even gives his elevation an uber moderniser, welcome-to-the-Big-Tent twist.

Moan, moan, moan.

Enough about technocratic appointments. How are those Coalition proposals to make government more accountable to Parliament coming along?

This, ladies and gentlemen, is an elected MP. One with connections, a decent, coherent plan to sort things out, one that has been thought through well in advance and not "on the hoof", someone whose plans and opinions get a reasonable amount of airtime and yet, HE can't change the social democrat juggernaut's direction.

Our elected representatives are completely powerless to make things better or even different. All the visible power is concentrated in the hands of those ministers who have El Presidenté's ear and all the real power is in the hands of unelected quangocrats and bureaucrats. It just goes to show what a pathetic charade the so-called democracy we are run by, is.

Still, it's nice to know that people can still delude themselves by telling us all how a few words in the right ear will make it all better.

Change from the inside!

Yeah, right.

It comes as quite a shock, I tell you!

Dizzy examines the proposed graduate tax scheme:

The fact is, when you actually look at the graduate tax proposal it's clear who will really gain from it. The Political Class.

It will be the bag carrier greasy pole types, the policy wonks, the NUS presidents and the assortment of other "never done a proper job" politicos on crap money with great quality degrees who'll be subsidised by the graduates from crappy ex-polys with a Desmond, who then work their balls off to earn as much as they can in an area with no relevance to their education.

Well, bugger me! Who would have thought it, eh?

But no, it's all fine, because the increasingly libertarian Tories and hugely "liberal" Democrats are in charge, so they will definitely not be doing anything to buttfuck the ordinary man.

So, not only frightened to death of repealing shit Labour legislation, but also quite happy to introduce new cuntishness for the benefit of the political class. Oh yes, I can definitely see how the new lot are completely different from the old lot.

That campaign to modify the Tory party from the inside is clearly paying benefits.

Oh, how I laughed

Something for Kingbingo.

Oh, and while I'm at it.

More proof ...

... if it were needed:

The government's first attempt at crowdsourcing its coalition programme has ended without a single government department expressing a willingness to alter any policy.

Meet the new boss. Completely different from the last boss.

Oh yes.

Kingbingo.

Impressive

They haven't even tried this shit out with smokers:

A tough new approach to tackling drunken yobs involving twice-a-day alcohol breathalyser testing could be rolled out across London.

Deputy mayor for policing, Kit Malthouse, said subjecting repeat offenders to testing, and locking them up for 24 hours if they failed, would also save money.

Look, really, I don't like struggling through vomit-drenched streets any more than the next guy, but isn't this taking things just a little bit too far? I mean, really, for fuck's sake, this is just trying it on, surely?

Notice that this is the deputy mayor of Tory London trying this shit on. Exactly the kind of daft idea that we'd associated with Labour at the very peak of their cuntishness, once again proving that there is no fucking difference between Labour and Conservative when it comes to making our lives miserable, nor is there any fucking difference between the two when it comes to telling us how to live our fucking lives (Kingbingo!)

BoJo has already banned drinking in the tube, now they're cracking down on drinking overall. And of course, if, somehow, BoJo can claim success for this horrendous policy, you just know it will be followed up.

It's just another example of fucking politicians knowing better than the miserable proles and going way past their election manifesto to fuck up our lives.

Kit Malthouse: Le Hoon de Jour.

And cunt.

You just KNOW this is going to end well

Home secretary Theresa May has announced plans to review the use of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders as she pledged a “coherent and comprehensive” strategy to deal with anti-social behaviour. Ms May criticised the last government’s approach as “top down, bureaucratic and gimmick laden.”

Oh yeah? And as we've already seen over and fucking over, this government is completely different to the last one, eh?

Cunts.

*Sigh*

So there's this, very funny, ha! ha! Gurnadia lives up to its name, etc., etc.

But what is the actual story? The Regional Development Agencies got shitcanned for being a total fucking waste of taxpayer dosh. Instead of an unelected, unaccountable bunch of timeserving tossers sitting there pissing our money away on the ideals of the Labour government, we're going to get ... an unelected, unaccountable bunch of timeserving tossers sitting there pissing our money away on the ideals of the LibDem/Tory coalition.

What the fuck is wrong with British politicians? Why is the answer to every problem yet another quango?

And I can't wait for Kingbingo to wander along and tell me how different and how much better this is all going to be from Labour's idea of a quango.

How unspeakably depressing

Cameron has staked his reputation on the Big Society and Labour will gun for it on any pretext (a fig-leaf for cuts being the current refrain). Cameron cannot afford to fail twice.

I hope to God that analysis is wrong. The Big Society is a monumental clusterfuck waiting to happen, the last thing that can happen is for it to succeed.