Nick Griffin: wary of the issues and scared of the LibDems
It’s not like Nick Griffin to shy away from publicity. His reaction to any possibility of a flicker of spotlight is to run towards it, maximising the impact of his message of hate. But it seems that the BNP leader is now revealing a reticent side to his personality.
Today’s London edition of the BBC’s Politics Show will be covering the constituency of Barking, the one which Griffin hopes to win and become the BNP’s first MP. The programme will feature a discussion between the main parties’ candidates for the seat – and in the case of Barking, the BNP are sadly one of the contenders. But Griffin won’t be appearing, despite an invitation from the BBC. Why?
It appears that Griffin is running scared not just of the BBC, but also of LibDem candidate Dominic Carman. Griffin derides the proposed discussion as ‘another Question Time lynch mob set-up’ and Carman as ‘a failed journalist and plastic candidate in Barking whose sole intention it is to lie about me instead’.
So why this hatred of the LibDem candidate in particular? Because, as announced last week Dominic Carman is not only the son of the late George Carman QC, but also Griffin’s very unofficial biographer. The Times stated that Carman, ‘intends to use information from his research into the biography to attack his opponent. It was never released because publishers were unwilling to associate their brand with the BNP leader’.
“I will put it to good use in exposing Griffin beyond what’s already been in the public domain,” he said. “It’s very important to fight a strong campaign and it will be critical to challenge Nick Griffin every step of the way. I want to make people think long and hard about voting for him in Barking. It’s very, very important.”
So what is Griffin’s excuse for chickening out? He accuses independent producers Juniper of conspiring with the Labour Party, the BBC and the Conservatives and LibDems to ‘shut out’ Griffin’s party and ‘gang up against the BNP in a four-to-one attack’.
Griffin’s second argument is even more bizarre. He takes issue with the BBC for ‘setting up a debate between parliamentary candidates … where the agenda has been preset to only discuss local issues’. Apparently the Labour councillors who currently run the council in Barking and Dagenham have fed inside information to the other participants in today’s programme, in order to leave the BNP looking stupid. I didn’t realise they needed any help.
The secret of Nick Griffin’s successes over the past few years has been to present himself and the BNP as political outsiders, just as much the victims of the establishment as the white working classes he seeks to represent. But shouldn’t someone who represents himself as the leader of a legitimate political party be willing and able to make a case for himself and his party’s politics whenever the opportunity presents itself? Has Nick Griffin realised that his party and politics have no justification in today’s Britain and that their game is up? And have the media learned their lesson – that sunlight is the best disinfectant? Play ‘no-platform’ with the BNP and they become martyrs. Give them the same opportunities as the other parties and they run away in fright.
As The Guardian’s Dave Hill states on his blog, ‘Carman’s candidacy only become known a week ago. Is it already having the desired effect?’
A Major chance for Gordon?
So the Tories haven’t sealed the deal yet. There seems to be a great deal of puzzlement as to why HM Official Opposition isn’t gliding gracefully into the role of HM Government, most of all from the Conservatives themselves. Even Labour seem confused.
Some believe that the Conservatives have been only too ready to sit back and let Labour lose the election, for instance feeding the media frenzy over the Brown bullying allegations last week, rather than just pressing on with the Conservatives’ own agenda. This gave Cameron the double blow of looking opportunist and also losing a chance to push forward Conservative policies whilst Brown was temporarily on the back foot. Much as Cameron wants to paint Brown as the school bully, he is now making himself look like Billy No-mates at the back, shouting out comments that he thinks make him look big and clever.
It appears that Andy Coulson has brought a tabloid mentality to the Tories’ communications. Don’t worry about the policy details, just get the screaming headline. But when Labour were on the ropes, one big punch every now and again was enough to keep them there. Now they have been allowed to struggle back to their feet, Cameron and his party are short on the fancy footwork.
But to me the real problem for the Tories is their timidity. If they have any big ideas, it seems that they are too nervous to propose them. It’s no good going on about change, as if that were in itself a good thing. Change to what? There isn’t even a clear policy on the economy and the need for cuts. Having first talked of large cuts, private polling warned the Tories that there message was not popular. So the ‘cuts’ became ‘modest reductions in public spending’, at least for the first year. So voters are left not knowing what the Conservatives would do on probably the most important issue facing the country at the moment, nor with any idea what a Cameron government would do to the public services they and their families rely on.
Maybe the Tories have overestimated how badly people feel about the current economic situation, a point not lost on Michael Portillo. The former Treasury minister said on BBC’s ‘This Week’: ”This has been a phoney recession for people who have kept their jobs. They have seen their mortgage interest go down, inflation was much lower than they thought it would be when their wages were awarded last year. Lots of people have done quite well.”
So if the Conservatives cannot rely on scaring voters into going blue, what can they do to gain a majority in May? I believe that they still have a lot of work to do on detoxifying the Conservative brand. This morning’s revelations concerning Lord Ashcroft will not have helped them rid themselves of the image that the Tories are still the nasty party, of and for rich people, just like them. They cannot continue to act as if they just need to wait for the ripe majority to fall from the election tree.
Finally, I cannot help but feel that there are strange echoes of 1992. Then most people were just waiting for a Labour majority. But somehow people took fright at the Labour Party, however much Kinnock tried to assure us that he and the party had changed their spots. And the arrogance of the Labour hierarchy, well before the infamous Sheffield rally, was a real turn off.
But the greatest similarity between 2010 and 1992 is the economic situation. And the truth is that voters don’t want to jump ships during stormy weather. Brown may be inept, but he feels safer than the unknown. As Hillaire Belloc put it:
And always keep a-hold of Nurse
For fear of finding something worse.
Does the Manchester Labour Party believe Gordon Brown is fit to be in Parliament?
I wonder if the Manchester Labour Party are going to call for action against Gordon Brown?
Whose life is it anyway?
In the last few years, I have seen three people close to me die after fighting cancer. Two of those people died in their own time, one after a short illness, the other after a much longer fight of several years. The third fought for over 18 months in one of the bravest and least self-pitying manners I have ever seen, against an inoperable tumour that eventually overpowered her. One of those people asked others near the end to help them die sooner and without pain; the other two did not want that.
I also know three people with chronic life-limiting and severely debilitating disabilities. All three are cheerful and get on with their lives. One has expressed an opinion that if thisngs became too bad, they would like the power to be able to safely and quietly end their life at a time of their choosing.
Today the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, is publishing his guidelines as to when someone may be prosecuted for helping a loved one to die. He is exoected to draw a clear distiction between what he calls ‘assisted suicide’, where someone helps another who does not have the ability to do so to kill themselves, and ‘mercy killing’ where the active wish comes from the person carrying out the killing. This distinguishes between the cases of Frances Inglis, who injected her brain-damaged son with heroin, and Kay Gilderdale, who helped her severely disabled daughter to die.
The guidelines would mean that where the victim had a “clear, settled, informed wish” to commit suicide and was physically unable to undertake the act him or herself, then a spouse, partner, close relative or friend could assist them. However if there was no such clear wish and the victim was physically able to undertake the act him or herself, or the suspect was employed by a care home, then prosecution would be likely.
It has always seemed clear to me that, however tragic and regrettable it may be, a person who is in their right mind should always have the right to take their own life. I do not subscribe to the view that everyone who wishes to take their own life must automatically be of unsound mind. Whilst many people become suicidal through mental illness and should be given every help to become well, others with terminal or severely disabling illnesses are quite clearly thinking through the situation that they are in and the way that they want to live their life.
One such person is Debbie Purdy, whose legal fight has forced the DPP to bring forward these guidelines. Debbie, who has multiple sclerosis, wants her husband to be free from the threat of prosecution should he help her end her life at a time of her choosing. Earlier this week, Ms Purdy criticised Gordon Brown for his opposition to allowing her and others the comfort of knowing that they could take the biggest decision of their lives, safe in the knowledge that there would be no criminal comeback on their loved ones. This caused the Telegraph’s Religion Editor, Revd George Pitcher, to launch an astonishing attack on her.
“Miss Purdy. It’s you that has shown huge disrespect to all Multiple Sclerosis sufferers by suggesting, whether you wanted to or not, that MS is a terminal disease from which sufferers can be expected to want to escape by killing themselves. It is you who have been manipulated by the pro-suicide lobby to make the sick, the disabled and the elderly even more vulnerable to the despair of suicide, at the end of lives whose infinite variety and value need affirming, not terminating.
“You will have supposed, Miss Purdy, that this exercise was simply about your choice of death. But it will affect the deaths of countless others, whose deaths will be cheapened and hastened by what the DPP offers tomorrow. And you, like the rest of us, will have to live with that.”
Of course Debbie Purdy has not suggested that all MS sufferers should or do want to kill themselves. She is not looking to force her ’solution’ onto others; rather she is looking for choice to be available. But George Pitcher is suggesting that she, and others in her situation, should be forced to live – and die - by his rules, to make him feel better about the society we live in and to support the religion in which he ministers.
I can barely conceive of a situation in which I would want to prematurely end my life, still less have the courage to do it. I cannot contemplate my husband, mother or daughter being in such a situation, nor my helping them fulfil their wish. But I know that if my loved ones wanted to ease their way peacefully from their life, however much I would try to dissuade them, to spend just another hour, day or week with them, it should be their choice. Not mine, and certainly not the state’s.
No sport please, I’m a socialist
On the whole, I’ve tried to stay clear of all the class war rhetoric. It seems clear to me that most Tories were not educated at Eton and that very few Labour voters are sons of coal miners. So it’s irritating and amusing in equal measures when supporters of either party play their stereotyped role.
Today it’s the turn of the Labour Party. I suspect I was one of the vast majority of the UK population who were gladdened by the news that Briton Amy Williams had won a gold medal in the skeleton bob at the Winter Olympics. Not so the embittered Labour members of Twitter.
I’ve never voted Tory …
This is my first attempt at one of the mydavidcameron.com posters, inspired by my earlier posting.
Don’t want to live with the common people? Don’t seek to represent them then!
I knew that it was going to be a bad interview for Sir Nicholas Winterton, when he asserted ‘The public are wrong, yes, the public are wrong’. His comments were a reaction to public disquiet about MPs expenses, and in particular a ban on MPs travelling first class. The ensuing interview, which lasted almost an hour, was one of the best pieces of daytime radio entertainment I have ever heard, beautifully facilitated by an informed Stephen Nolan. If this doesn’t earn Stephen a permanent promotion to a regular daytime slot, nothing will.
Winterton’s comments included the following:
“Members of Parliament deserve to be treated in a proper manner and that includes being paid to travel First Class”.
“People in standard class are a totally different type of people … and include those not in executive jobs. They have a different outlook on life. Of course they do, because they are involved in a totally different activity. “
“It’s for Parliament to decide [what MPs’ expenses are] not the public.”
and
“Members of Parliament just can’t get a fair hearing”.
Winterton also continued to press his belief that local councillors travel First Class. Well as a local councillor, I can only travel Standard Class and so can the officers of our council. And that should be good enough for MPs too.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing and tweeted through the interview. Oh the audible distaste by Sir Nicholas Winterton when was suggested that he talk to people in standard class. The thought that he might have to talk to people who were of a different class in both uses of the word was obviously too much. He obviously thinks that he is better than the majority of his electorate and doesn’t want to be forced to mix with them for too long. He attempted to shout down Stephen Nolan (something he should have known that he couldn’t do!) and was extremely rude to two very polite members of the public who rang in, confusing disagreement with abuse.
I accept that travelling standard class is not always the greatest fun. It is often overcrowded, noisy, and if you haven’t prebooked, you may find yourself without a seat. But that is life for most of us. Why should MPs rely on us to buy them a ticket out of there? Why not spend a little of their time working to improve our railways instead?
At the end of the interview, Stephen Nolan said that it had been ‘a delight’ talking to Sir Nicholas. And a delight for those of us listening too. That’s put the classless Conservatives back several years. CCHQ were very quick to slap Winterton down as ‘an out of touch backbencher’. The problem is Sir Nick has just reminded the electorate that there are many of them out there – and most of them sit on the Conservative benches. The Tories have spent so long working to destroy Labour’s ‘class war attack, but in just one hour, all that work may have been undone. As LibDem MP Norman Baker put it, “Sir Nicholas Winterton betrays the underbelly of the Conservative Party”. Certainly the sense of entitlement that Sir Nick displayed is often heard from Conservatives, particularly in their need for duck houses and moat clearances.
I assume that later today, you will be able to hear the whole interview again from the 5Live web site.
Jan Moir? The Daily Mail’s got plenty more where she came from
What is is with the Daily Mail and the death of gay men? First it was the outrageous bigotry of Jan Moir on the death of Stephen Gately; today Mail journalist Geoffrey Levy turns the paper’s moral fire onto Ray Gosling.
With the headline ‘Brilliant, eccentric BBC film-maker Ray Gosling says he killed his dying gay lover. But is his story all it seems?’, Levy accuses Gosling of a huge publicity stunt, asserting ‘moral superiority and of not caring very much about the suffering of his long-term partner, whilst getting in a few side-swipes about Gosling’s sex life.
Levy’s direction is clear from the start:
“Where this new fame will lead only time will tell, but Mr Gosling, who is 70 and lives in sheltered accommodation, clearly believes he has everything to gain and nothing to lose by telling the world that he killed a gay lover terminally ill with Aids. More than that, there was even a discernible note of moral superiority in his confident, almost chirpy voice, as he described the circumstances to listeners of Radio 4’s Today programme yesterday morning.”
So Gosling has said what he has for all the wrong reasons? Moral superiority – maybe it was the ‘confident’ voice of a man who had nothing to hide?
“To add insult to killing, Mr Gosling, who made his name in the Seventies and Eighties chronicling the difficult lives and foibles of the working classes, explained that the other man ‘wasn’t my partner, he was my bit on the side’. How very odd, you may think, that a man should kill a mere ‘bit on the side’ as an act of mercy, especially when he did no such thing for the enduring love of his life, his longtime partner.”
Anyone who heard Gosling’s interview will know that this man wasn’t ‘a mere bit on the side’. He was obviously someone who was much-loved, being spoken about in an affectionate manner. The pair had their own private relationship and it’s nobody’s business but their own. But of course the Mail has to get in its usual dig at the alleged promiscuity of gay men.
“Indeed he carefully nursed his partner, a man called Bryn Allsop who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, until the moment of his death in 1999. No question of snuffing out his suffering, as he did the other man.”
So Gosling is a man who cares and is compassionate. Who knows why he didn’t help his partner to die. Maybe Bryn didn’t suffer as much; maybe he didn’t want his life to end that way and Gosling respected that decision, just as he had for his lover? Again, whose business is it of the Daily Mail and its prying bigots?
“But then, an act of genuine mercy with his long-term partner was never going to resurrect the name of Ray Gosling, who was so short of work in the decade up to 2002 that he went bankrupt and lost his house. And yet his story of tender killing, disclosed just as talk of legalised euthanasia and mercy killing is becoming worryingly fashionable, has resurrected his name in an instant.”
Ah, he’s obviously in it for the money …
” … he talks of making a pact with the other man, each to kill the other if they were suffering. Subsequently, the other man was infected with Aids in another country, though when he came back to Britain they carried on having ’some sort of sex - we worked it out. It was full of laughter and love’.”
So there was an agreement and the lover had asked Ray to help him die. QED, you would think. But it’s time for another dig at the sort of sex gay men have.
But Levy turns particularly hasty as he tries to pick holes in the veracity of Gosling’s comments:
Version 1: ‘I said to the doctor, “Leave me . . . just for a bit” and he went away. The doctor came back and I said, “He’s gone”. Nothing more was ever said.’
Version 2: ‘There was this moment and the doctor said to me something like, “I’ll pop out for a fag or I’ll go to the local canteen or I’ll go round another ward. Will you still be here in half an hour, Ray?”. I said, “Ay, I’ll still be here”. It was an invitation.’
Maybe there was a truth that went: ‘I said to the doctor, “Leave me . . . just for a bit”. The doctor said to me something like, “I’ll pop out for a fag or I’ll go to the local canteen or I’ll go round another ward. Will you still be here in half an hour, Ray?”. I said, “Ay, I’ll still be here”. And the doctor went away . He came back and I said, “He’s gone”. Nothing more was ever said.’ There, seems highly likely.
But Levy hasn’t finished with the character assassination.
“… the sometime Northampton Teddy boy and Leicester University dropout identified totally with his subjects, or so he said, and even agreed to be chairman of a council housing tenants’ association in Nottingham.But then it emerged that this outspoken champion of the working classes, who was at that time said to be earning a prodigious £50,000 a year, was a closet Tory who voted for Margaret Thatcher in 1979. ”
So was Gosling a middle-class man who took up with the feckless poor, or a working-class man who had ideas above his station? Either way, he shouldn’t have been allowed to earn a lot of money or vote Tory (did you see how we sneaked the word ‘closet’ in there?).
I don’t intend to continue further. The whole piece is sneering, nasty, bigoted and mean-spirited – in other words a typical Daily Mail article. Read it if you want – but you won’t learn anything new about Ray Gosling or the Daily Mail.
Watch out Alexander McQueen – I expect you’ll be next.
Rape, responsibility, blame and feminism
If you go out and leave your front door open, are you asking to be burgled? If you leave your laptop on the passenger seat of a parked car, is it your fault if the computer is stolen? If you get into bed naked with a man who fancies you and encourage him to have sex with you, are you in any way responsible if he rapes you?
In a survey of over 1,000 Londoners published yesterday, 71% of the women questioned said if a victim got into bed with the assailant before an attack they should accept some responsibility for being raped, compared to 51% of men. For those of us brought up to have some belief in feminism and to believe that ‘no means no’ these figures make uncomfortable reading.
I know that none of us have a problem with calling rape when a woman walking home is dragged into bushes, raped and assaulted. The problem is that, like the tiny minority of stranger danger cases of child murders, that’s not how rape usually happens. Raped women have often met their attacker first, whether a casual acquaintance in a public place, such as a pub, or having gone out for a date or round to a friend’s house. Note that I am describing these women as ‘raped’ , because that’s exactly what they are. No amount of low-cut clothing, flirty behaviour or drunkenness can excuse someone having sex with another who has not consented.
Is the person who leaves their door open responsible in any way for a burglary? Of course they are. Should the burglar be prosecuted and convicted? Yes, certainly. Should they be able to claim that they thought the householder was ‘inviting them to take their goods’ or was ‘asking for it’? No of course they shouldn’t. Who is to blame for the burglary? The burglar.
In the same way, is a woman who gets drunk and gets into bed with a man to blame for being raped? No. Was she ’asking for it’? Certainly not. Was she putting herself at risk because of the amount she had to drink? Of course she was. Does she therefore have some personal responsibility for what happened? Yes. Should her rapist be convicted? Yes, absolutely. If the woman did not consent to sex, she has been raped, whatever her previous behaviour.
Women today want to have it all – and why shouldn’t we? We can work on the same terms as men, be paid the same, own our own homes and succeed on an equal basis with men in almost every sphere. We no longer have to be demure and deferential. Ladettes can get drunk and act badly just the same as lads do. Women have been empowered to be what we want to be. But with empowerment comes responsibility. We cannot compete with men when it suits us, yet choose to play the little woman when it doesn’t. We have the responsibility to look after ourselves, rather than expect men to do it for us. Women are not children.
Personal responsibility is a private, rather than legal, issue. All women have a responsibility not to make it easy for them to become victims of crime, if only to themselves. So don’t leave your house unlocked, don’t leave your purse or handbag lying around and when you are going out take steps to make sure you will get home safely. But if someone forces you to have sex against your will, it’s still rape. And you’re not to blame.
Thought-provoking credit to Iain Roberts.
It’s garbage in, garbage out for the Conservatives
So the Tories mislaid a decimal point? So what, you might say. Mistakes happen. It’s embarrassing that the error wasn’t picked up, but no-one’s perfect – certainly not the Tories. So whilst this headline gives some temporary amusement, it isn’t in itself proof that the Tories are unfit to run the country or are generally innumerate.
I don’t believe for a minute that the Conservatives decided to spice the report up a bit by changing the figures, unlike the game played last week by Chris Grayling. But let’s look at the quote in more detail. In ‘Labour’s Two Nations’ it stated:
“Teenage girls are almost three times more likely to become pregnant. Young women under 18 are three times more likely to fall pregnant in the most deprived areas compared to the least deprived areas. In the most deprived areas, 54 per cent are likely to fall pregnant before the age of 18, compared to just 19 per cent in the least deprived areas.”
Did no-one ever think about the sense of these figures before they were published? I understand that Conservatives don’t like to make too many forays into local council estates,but surely someone had noticed that there wasn’t a pregnancy rate of over 50% amongst the teenagers. Maybe more worryingly, the Conservatives really believed that there was a teenage pregnancy rate of 1 in 5 in the most affluent areas of the country. Do they not get out much, or do they mix with the ‘wrong sort’? Do CCHQ’s researchers not realise that a calculator only gives the right answer if the correct information is entered? Has ‘garbage in, garbage out’ ever been a more appropriate phrase?
Sadly, but probably unsurprisingly, Children’s Secretary Ed Balls decided to turn the whole saga into a conspiracy, saying:
”David Cameron’s latest deception and airbrushed statistics cannot conceal the fact that the Tories haven’t changed.”
Whilst of course the Conservatives seek to minimise the whole thing, with a party spokesman telling us:
“A decimal point was left out in a calculation. It makes no difference at all to the conclusions of a wide-ranging report which shows that Labour have consistently let down the poorest in Britain.”
Which in some ways is right. But it also goes to show that the truth has become a casualty of the message – and that the Tories have no idea what is really going on across most of the UK.
