These bottles are a little small

Amusing tale from the Young Britains Foundation drinks reception. Apparently during the planning phase they found some competitively priced wine. Having ordered 60 bottles they arrived and the box was, shall we say, small. Turned out the reason it was so cheap was that it as miniture bottles.

EXCLUSIVE: Dale to leave politics to become Blackpool hotelier?

Currently they have a shortage of the letter "I" in the sign shops in Lancashire. Could this development be an indication that we're all coming back to Blackpool next year too?

'Fast track' accreditation that is slow

I am slightly apoplectic now as I finally have a pass. I also heard a shocking tale of a woman who arrived at 8.30 this morning, paid £105 for 'fast track' accreditation and got the pass at 12:00. Lord knows how long you have to wait if you pay the standard rate.

I will update with other stuff later.

Abolishing stamp duty

Now I have to say that the idea of raising the stamp duty threshold to £250K is going to appeal to a lot of voters, especially in the south. The question is will it appeal north of Watford where the average house prices are significantly lower and we need votes? The raising of the threshold will effectively abolish the tax for the vast majority of people which is always appealing when you're buying the single biggest purchase of your life.

I'm wondering though what the Labour response to this will be though. The duty on house purchases cannot be a stable figure as it moves with the market so it won't be that easy to find a figure and then imply a cut to health serives, for example, as a result. Actually, in this 'new politics' world we keep being told we're in Brown will probably just nick the idea if it looks like it is hugely popular. That will of course be after he has rubbished it first though, because that is how it works now.

Brown really does want to listen

As I am writing this using my phone you can't have links, but the front page of this morning's Mail on Sunday doesn't make pleasant reading from an information surveillance point of view. Apparently the Government is about to authorise powers to inspect all land and mobile phone records right down to local authority level. How liberal! Now we know what Brown meant when he said he wanted to listen to the British people.

No pass yet

Isn't Blackpool wonderful? Well not if the people issuing passes lose your photo and also lose the spare you sent in case they lost the first (which you happened to send them two months ago). Add to this the 'We just issue the passes, write to the party chairman to complain' attitude and Dizzy becomes angry. So much so that as I left the church I sounded like the Devil's Kitchen. Time for a Stella now.

Update: Someone suggested in the comments that I do a 'don't you know who I am' moment........ tomorrow. I will sit down in the church and blog it and then take Communion to beg forgiveness.

Saturday Observation

Gordon Brown praises Margaret Thatcher and invites her to Downing Street. No comments from Labour ministers.

George Osbourne praises Thatcher in the Spectator, and Labour minister John Hutton says it shows a "retreat to the right" and that the Tories remain "unchanged".

How does that work then?

To all those who voted for me

Well what can I say but thanks to all the people who voted for me in what became the Top 500 political blogs. Yes, at the end of the day it's just a list, but to come third behind Iain and Guido is pretty amazing.

Thanks.

Oh look another couple of polls

There are two polls out this morning in the Telegraph and Times that look horrible for the Conservative Party and brilliant for Labour. As I said earlier in the week, this is the conference bounce, obviously compounded slightly with a Brown bounce.

I would be extremely surprised if the gap doesn't narrow significantly after next Wednesday, much as I would have been extremely surprised if the gap had not widened this week. It's pointless doing polling in conference season really. You're average ordinary doesn't really do politics, so they're far more likely to answer based on the last person they can remember seeing that they didn't feel the urge to vomit at instantly.

In my view the next election will be a funny one. There is no doubt Brown has energised the Labour base. In some respects though I think this will mean that the Labour vote will go up in the places where it is going to win anyway.

The boundary changes and marginals will not follow quite such uniformity and I imagine that we may see a reversal of the last election in the sense that Labour's share of the total vote increases whilst their share of the seats decreases. I could be wrong of course.

BBC TV journalist has Naughtie moment?

The following video from the Labour Conference by the BBC has been posted on YouTube because the person being interviewed in it called Margaret Thatcher a "bitch". Personally I thought the words of the interviewer at the end were more interesting.

"Agreement on an issue, housing, something that is certainly coming through on the focus groups, something Gordon Brown is promising to do and the more we can do... the more we can hear on that the better."

Was that an expression of personal opinion there by a BBC journalist who quickly recovered from a Jim Naughtie "when we win" moment? Surely not?

The power of Internet fundraising?

No one really cares about Ron Paul in the Republican nomination race. When I say they don't care, in the UK at least he is a non-entity and unlikely to win the nomination so often gets ignored. That said, earlier this week he said on his website that he wanted to raise $500,000 by the end of the month.

In three days of online donations the target was hit and he has currently raised $648,000 and has now changed his target to $1 million. Whether you agree with his small government politics or not, that is an absolutely amazing amount of money to have raised in less the an week online.
Hat Tip: Crossed Pond

The Little Chipmunk's secret forums?

Remember my posts about Hazel Blears' Department of Communities and Local Government website having relaunched with forums and blogs? It should come as no surprise that the place is Tumbleweed Central.

It boasts that it has 3,771 users who have contributed to 47 threads and 79 posts, which suggests it has a serious lurker membership. Mind you, if you look a little closer it becomes apparent that (at the time of writing) it actually only has 17 threads, with 39 posts.

So where are the other 8 threads and 50 posts. They couldn't be in the secret forums here and here could they? Sneaky huh? I bet they're either full of civil servants wondering why no one wants to discuss "New-look Local Government Pension Schemes", or Government employed webdevs laughing about what a pointless exercise it all was.

Government screws Thames Water customers for £12.5m

The BBC has just published an interesting bit of "Breaking News" saying "Ofwat to fine Thames Water £12m". The report says

Thames Water is facing a fine of more than £12m for "inadequate" reporting and customer service. Water services watchdog Ofwat said it was fining the firm £11.1m for failing to provide "robust information". A further £1.4m penalty is being imposed as poor processes and systems meant users received poor service and missed payments they were entitled to. Thames has pledged to challenge the fine saying it will divert money from repairs, meaning customers lose out.

Why would Thames Water say such a thing you may wonder? Well that would be, as Croydonian has pointed out and the BBC hasn't, the Notes to Editor in the press release from Ofwat states,

"Penalties are paid into the Consolidated Fund and are not returned to customers".

That would be this Consolidated Fund which is basically the Government's bank account and can be spent on whatever it wants. As Croydonian points out,

"Having been wronged by Thames Water, instead of compensation being made to the users, the entire tax payer base gets a minor benefit by way of the State having 12.5 very large to play around with which it will not have to find elsewhere."

Can't say I disagree. Basically we the customers of Thames Water have just been screwed by the Government as the company that has given us poor service has had a massive sum of money taken away from it that it could have spent on improving service, and we're all supposed to be happy about this?

Update: Just to be clear, I'm not saying Thames Water don't deserve to be chastised. But any fine should be paid back into improving service, not swallowed up to fill the Government's financial black holes.

Free the Wookie!

Friday is here!

Is the 'vast right-wing conspiracy' back?

What an hilarious over-reaction there has been by the Labour Party to the research by Danny Finkelstein at the Times about the Bob Shrum similarities in Gordon Brown's speech. Initially they just rubbished it, and then Andy Burnham decided it was actually part of an 'insidious smear' campaign by the Times which has apparently become an arm of the Tory Party.

The last point stems from The Fink's previous job as scriptwriter for William Hague, which apparently invalidates his analysis. You have to love the way supposedly intelligent people roll out these weak play the man and not the ball arguments don't you? It's a bit like me saying that if the Fink criticises Cameron it's nonsense because he used to be in the SDP. As Blair once said in Opposition. 'Weak, weak, weak'.

The fact is Brown's speech was littered with lifted phrases from past clients of Shrum. It's a mild embarassment, that is all. Reacting like a cornered animal and lashing out a paper that has been largely supportive of you for ten years saying it's involved in some sort of anti-Brown conspiracy tells us far more about the personal insecurities of Brown than the amusing, but largely meaningless plageurism ever could.

More evidence of why the Internet is great

If you havn't seen the mental student shouting about conspiracy theories to John Kerry and then getting tasered don't bother. It's boring. This version of the incident is funnier.

Hat Tip: Play Political

What an inspirational leader!

I bet if you were a Lib Dem this video would really make you think "YEAH! LET'S DO IT!"

Is he on valium?

Could it be Mercer and/or Bercow?

There have been rumours circulating from Blackpool that there may in fact be two defectors coming this weekend designed to overshadow the start of the Tory Conference. Well I did ponder if it could happen again. We already know that Patrick Mercer is not going to Blackpool (or at least his office said he wasn't). Now Adam Boulton's blog has revealed that John Bercow, the MP for Buckingham, isn't attending the seaside resort either. One shouldn't draw conclusions from ether of these things of course. But it's interesting that two MPs that have taken Brown's 30 pieces of silver are both not attending their own party's conference.

The question for me is this though. If anyone were to defect what could they have been offered? After all, there is no way in the world that someone could hold a seat in, for example, Buckingham given the majority. So if they jumped ship this weekend, and Brown did call an election next week, they would basically be kissing goodbye to the Commons. I guess they could, if it happened, be offered the House of Lords maybe? But is that likely?

Anyway, this is all wild speculation of course. But it occurs to me that if you're going to defect then you're probably going to be mindful about your seat and whether you can hold it, and this would apply either way. If someone in the Labour Party with a 18,000 majority jumped ship to the Tories they're not likely to overturn that majority unless they're Jesus himself with the local electorate - and even then I wouldn't bet on it.

Update: An anonymous commenter has said that this post is rubbish. I did actually concede that one shouldn't draw conclusions. But I have been wondering this morning what sort of thinking one would have if one did choose to defect. It seems to me that you're only likely to do it if (a) you have some guarantees for your political career, or (b) you're in a marginal where the chance of holding the seat when representing the other side is not out of the realm of possibility.

Illegal immigrants in lorries

We all know the tales about how illegal immigrants sneak into the UK in the back of a lorry. How novel it is therefore that Liam Byrne has announced the following:

The fight against illegal immigration took another step forward today with the launch of a purpose-built lorry to detain illegal immigrants in Poole.

Errrr.... I'm a bit lost for words. It's beyond satire, it really it is. Actually, it's not just beyond it, it's run up the road, around the corner, and is pelting away up the M1 like a Porsche doing 177mph. There must surely have been chuckling amongst wonks when they came up withthe idea, no?

Coffee House redesign!

Thanks to [insert chosen deity here], the Spectator Coffee House blog has had a makeover. The very best thing about is that they're moved that irritating expanding flash advert for Mercedes to the top of the pager instead of along the side.


This may not bother some people, but that ad, and this happens at Ben brogan's too, really does not behave well in Firefox for Linux. Whilst it doesn't expand, the space in which it expanded into has a layered white space anyway. This meant that I couldn't read some of the text in posts without loading a different browser.

It's the little things that please geeks like me. Having said this, should you decides to buy the 2007 Guide to Political Blogging you will find an article in there by me that praises the Coffee House blog and suggests that it has the potential to become as big a hit online as Salon and The Corner have no become in the US.

Geography lessons may be needed methinks

How bizarre, the Labour blogger Mike Ion appears to agree with the assertion that, "At their best, the Tories were a party for the Home Counties. Now they can't even properly claim that constituency".

Shurely shome mishtake?

Note: In fairness to Mike he is (a) a northerner, and (b) a Manchester United fan (I think) and the total letter was really making a clever football Chelsea metaphor. Of course the latter team won last night, whilst the former lost...... to Coventry, hahahahahaha.

Tory Radio redesign

I meant to post about this yesterday, but forgot. Jonathan Shepard's Tory Radio has had a total makeover and has come rocketing forward in the multimedia stakes from it's original style of "click and download" podcasting.

It now has embedded players which will be good news to many people who would prefer not to have download large files. They also have a new longer list of columnnists and have some interviewed lined up for the conference.

Labour triangulate on law and order

Spin is dead, remember? Funny therefore that this morning's Indy carries a fall trailing of Jack Straw's speech today that claims he will propose a 'Tony Martin Bill' to protect 'have a go heroes'. I'm willing to bet such changes in the self-defence laws will not come about. It's all part of a triangulation stratgey for an election whenever that may be.

Would you defect to be a spy?

What with all this further talk of Tory defections to Brown I got wondering last night about whether anyone has ever 'defected', but really been a sleeper agent for the side they left with a handler and all that jazz?

It seems to me that if you were willing to do it you'd have to accept losing friends and the lik, but let's say you were old, were planning to step down, and no longer happy with life on the back benches. Power, especially secret power, is a strong aphrodisiac aftert all.

The idea of being a spy, and a double agent at that, would surely be appealing in the twilight of a political career wouldn't it? Would you do it?

The Hand of Shrum

BIt late off the mark with this one, I see Guido and Ben Brogan have already linked to it, I've been playing with my new phone all evening though you see. If you get a chance though you should really read this posting by Danny Finkelstein.

He has spotted some remarkable similarities between Gordon Brown's speech and many others that have been penned by the American Democrat favourite, Bob Shrum. Basically Brown's speech was textbook Shrum from start to finish, and echoes so many previous speeches penned by the man himself.

Is it racial profiling?

Ethnic breakdown of the little over 32,000 anti-terrorism stop and searches in London in the past 12 months.

17,348 - White (54%)
6,755 - Asian (21%)
4,287 - Black (13%)
1,806 - Other (5.5%)
2,199 - Not recorded (6.5%)

The current population of London is approximately 7,500,000 and the Asian community represents somewhere around 13-14% of the total population. It's also growing quite rapidly whilst the white community is decreasing according to Hindu Council.

When you allow for statistical anomolies, population growth, random stop and searches compared to specific reasonable suspicion based one, the idea that this is all about racial profiling seems to me to be a little out of perspective. No?

Descoping the Manifesto

Whenever an election comes, there will be a manifesto required. Of course, normal people don't read manifestos, and if you ever hear a politician tell you otherwise they're lying. The only people manifesto's get read by are, either political undergraduate when doing an essay, political obsessive, political blogger (now) and political journalists. In a world of pithy PR it must short, snappy, and express ideas in simply ways.

I shall never forget comparing the Tory and Labour manifestos in 1997. The former was dense whilst the latter was slick and simple. Whilst your average geezer on the street won’t have batted an eyelid at them, the Labour one's singular advantage over the Tory one was that it didn't need much translation in the media. The media class wrote it for the media, and in many cases it could be easily reproduced verbatim as newspaper copy.

We've been told that Ed Miliband is involved with writing the Labour one this time round, whilst Oliver Letwin is writing the Tory one. Both wonks of course, so both could be highly dangerous moves, especially when you consider Letwin's last outing went a bit overboard on the academic rhetoric with his "shift from an econocentric paradigm to a sociocentric paradigm." We can only hope he doesn’t go that way again.

Add into that mix the older head bangers on the Tory Right (can someone tell me when they will die please?) and you have the potential recipe for disaster when it comes to the Tory manifesto. If it isn't "purist" enough they'll all start choking on their Ovaltine and might forget to take their pre-bedtime meds (this could be a good thing actually). Perceived to be too "purist" and we'll have "cave in to the nasty party", it's all so predictable really.

So what to do? Well if I were advising Cameron or Letwin (which of course would never happen) I'd be making the case for using some project management principles when drawing up the manifesto. Separate out your policies into four groups: must haves; should haves; could haves; and would haves. Then descope everything accept the first one and half groups.

Labour's success in 1997 was not merely the Tory collapse. They realised that much of what they could or would want to do was "out of scope" and when something is out of scope you don't even think about it. You remain fixed on what's in scope and don't let yourself be distracted from that roadmap.

It’s a cliché to say that you under-promise and over-deliver but it’s true. Sadly the head bangers of old don’t seem to get that anymore.

"You're being stabbed? Please hold whilst I check the manual"

Yesterday, Alan Johnson announced that there was going to be £97m funding to help tackle violence and abuse against NHS staff. Apparently "lone NHS workers" will be given devices that "will help locate users and link to a trained individual, who can summon help if needed." There will also be money spent on "training in personal safety, conflict resolution and dealing with verbal abuse for all NHS staff who need it."

Clearly this is an emotive subject, someone who is physically attacked - whether an NHS worker or not - should clearly be protected by the law. But I find myself wondering about the practicalities of this specific spending for some reason, although I readily admit I'm probably being shamelessly cynical.

For a start, what is a "lone NHS worker"? My guess is this is probably going to be a health visitor, a district nurse looking after the elderly, maybe a lone paramedic? What use is a special alarm presumably with GPS going to be for one of these people if they are in the middle of the Cumbrian pikes or the middle of the countryside in general?

Even if they're in a city the response time for an emergency is likely to be so long it's too late. This is especially the case if you first have to raise the alarm, go through to a call centre, which then decides whether you're being beaten up enough to warrant attention. And then there's this "abuse" angle.

What constitutes abuse that deserves to have attention? Will there be a list of swear words that define whether or not the abuse is strong enough? "Oh I'm sorry, she only called you a cow. If you could perhaps provoke her into calling you a twat then we can send SO19 around straight away to take the granny down." You get my drift.

Obviously that won't happen though because they're going to be taught "personal safety", which I guess will be either "run like you're being chased by a tiger" or "Welcome to to the DoJO". Having said that, wouldn't both those things go against the training in "conflict resolution", which, rumour has it, will be carried out by Liverpuddlian's with perms telling people to "calm down".

Yes, yes, such large sums of money being spent on protecting NHS staff from violence and naughty words sounds laudable, but I simply can't see how it will stop it happening. Most of the lone NHS staff will have a mobile phone anyway, or maybe even a radio. If they press the "alarm" it's going to be for a serious emergency that will be dealt with after the fact in most cases anyway.

It's a terribly morbid thing to say, but I always remember a graphic novel by Raymond Briggs about nuclear war called "When the Wind Blows". The elderly couple in it follow the Government's advice and climb into two poatato sacks each (bottom and top half) not realising they're actually make-shift body bags. Spending money on a trackable alarm won't stop the violence, it will just tell them where to find the body - assuming they press it in time.

The Listening Prime Minister?

Abuse of political power?
Image hotlinked from Guido

The impact of television expsure should not under-estimated

Now some people might read this post and say "well you would agree with it, you're a Tory" but Danny Finkelstein over at Comment Central has done an excellent commentary piece on the election fever that is sweeping the political obssessives of the nations.

It's the second to last paragraph, and the last sentence in particular that caught my eye though.

Of course, the Tories present a tempting target. It’s very hard to see them winning a majority in an autumn. But is it so hard to see them depriving Labour of its majority? There are serious contradictions in the Tory strategy. Perhaps even insoluble ones. A short dash to the polls might allow Mr Cameron to go to the country without even trying to resolve them. Anyone who can’t conceive of Mr Cameron appealing to undecided voters in a burst of television exposure is demonstrating a failure of imagination.

He's spot on here I think. Sure, if there was a an election within minutes of announcing it Brown would have the upper-hand. But it would be dangerous for anyone to under-estimate the power that a campaign, with its blanket coverage, can gain any politician.

Brown attends a "gay disco"

Apparently, Gordon Brown attended a "gay disco" last night hosted by Stonewall at the Labour Conference. Now, personally, as someone who dislikes identity politics with a passion, I just call it a "disco" because what the attendees choose to do with their genitalia really has got bugger all to do with who they are if you excuse the pun.

However, what I thought was interesting was the comment on LabourHome which asked the question "Another attempt to blur out his poor voting record?". They were of course referring to this Pink News investigation which noted that Brown has never attened Parliament for votes on gay rights since Labour was in power.

Something tells me that this probably won't really be a problem for Brown. What might be a problem though is this rather 1980s assumption by many on the Left that it is the somehow the natural home for gay people.

Cruddas fears becoming the chipmunk

"Quote of the Day" contender I think from Jon Cruddas on his Spectator Conference Diary. Commenting on being pn a panel at a fringer meeting he says,

In the end I sounded like a GB cheerleader, at one stage I think I even said ‘another year of outstanding achievement’. I fear I am turning into Hazel Blears.

What a horrible thought!

Indy snobbery shines through

I've not had a pop at the Independent for a while so I was rather pleased when I read this on the bus. Apparently a draft of George Bush's speech was accidentally sent out and it had phonetic aides on pronouncing foreign names in it. I know, it's a scandal isn't it? The man is so thick he can't pronounce Aung San Suu Kyi without an aide! And yes I'm being sarcastic.

Seriously though, of course this a funny story because of the cock-up. And yes, it's sort of diary story'ish and made all the better by the fact that Bush's pronunciation of words, what with his Texan accent, help feed into the meme that he is somehow not actually very bright.

But really what got me mildly annoyed was the way the whole thing is portrayed as a serious news story, but is actually a "lets all laugh at the funny sounding yank who can't read like us clever people" story. It's utter snobbery of the highest order, and it's made all the more irritating by this bit.

While prompts were provided for Kyrgyzstan [KEY-geez-stan] and Mauritania [moor-EH-tain-ee-a], he was offered no such help with Sierra Leone or with Aung San Suu Kyi, the opposition leader in Burma. He made two runs at the latter and mangled the former, seemingly renaming it Syria Leone. (A member of his axis of evil, surely.)

See the bit in brackets at the end? And Simon Kelner wonders why Blair called his publication a viewspaper not a newspaper? Jesus wept. It's like a sarky Ed comment in Private Eye added into the text of a full page story in the International News section. It's utterly pathetic and not serious paper of record journalism.

Also just think about this for a second. Put a Texan accent in your head, and then say "Sierra" to yourself with it. It's actually perfectly reasonable that spoken at pace it could come out sounding like "Syria". I'm willing to bet as well that early drafts of speeches by many world leaders have phonetic aides in them as well - of coruse, in those cases it would probably be perefctly alright, but if you're Bush it's proof that you're a bit of dummy.

Can they get to 15 or 22?

Well I did say on Monday that the election speculation calender was sliding about didn't I? A quick glance in this morning's Times and we learn from Peter Riddell that it could be the 8th November now. How many more weeks can be added before it becomes too much?

Opinion on YouGov Poll

So Labour have an 11 point lead in today YouGov poll. YOu can read my opinion on this here and here.

Prezza in second jabbing incident?

Conference is always full of gossip, and the hacks will always be looking for a scoop of course. They were doing it last week, they're doing it this week, and no doubt they will be doing it next week too.As it happens I've just heard a rather amusing bit myself.

Apparently Cathy Newman from Channel 4 News learned that Johns' Prescott and Reid might have been paid to do BBC interviews in contravention of BBC guidelines - serious stuff if true given the Blue Peter cat incident and other assorted scandals the corporation have faced recently.

When she went to ask Prescott about it, he's said to have jabbed his finger at her (not fist), called her a silly girl, and then put his hand over the camera that was with her. I guess that John is still John?

A quick note of thanks...

Thanks to the judges who scored me highly enough to make me second in Iain's "Guide to Blogging 2007: Top 100 Right of Centre Blogs". I was judge in the category and I'm pretty sure I ignored myself, or I gave myself ten out ten for everything.

I can't remember as I have a memory like a sieve. Let's hope it was the former, but if it was the latter then it may be how I managed to beat Guido (and to think they say cheats never prosper! :-D )
N.B. I genuinely cannot remember if I scored myself or not.

Update: I have been reliably informed by someone (not Iain) that I may indeed have judged myself and scored myself as outstandingly brilliant. It was of course a fair reflection of myself.

Fastest Government U-Turn in History?

Alan Johnson is speaking to the Labour Conference as I type and has been talking about, following on from Gordon Brown's speech, the need to solve issue of uncleanliness. At the same time his department has issued a press release with the title:

Johnson crack down on cleanliness and infections

So err... a few minutes ago they were going to punish those that failed to clean hospitals adequately. Now they're going to "crack down" down on the cleaners for errr... cleaning well?

Surely this is a candidate for the "Fastest Government U-Turn in History"? Or perhaps the Dumb Press Officer of the Year award for not using 'UNcleanliness'? Amusing that a department which deals with the body has a problem where the arse appears not to know what the elbow is doing I think.

CampaignTV launched....

Am having toruble getting the video to screen capture, but basically it is currently showing documentaries about how great the Labour party is. Which I guess shouldn't be a surprise given it's tag line about progressive politics.

The page renders really slowly, the buffering of video takes forever, and the plugins they are using appear to primarily support Internet Explorer and if you're lucky Firefox under Windows.

Giuliani milks 9/11 a little bit more

Have just read this via this. The Yahoo! headline says it all really:

Giuliani party seeks $9.11 per person

Makes the auctioning of a signed copy of the Hutton Report look almost mild in the "milking it" stakes, huh?

Some soldiers' tax bills are worth more than others?

As revealed by Iain last night, the MoD has today announced that it considers some soldiers work more worthy of Council tax rebates than others. Defence Secretary Des Browne said,

"I am delighted to announce a further enhancement to the operational welfare package. Armed Forces personnel who pay Council tax and who deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan will be entitled to a tax free payment of 140. This payment is designed to offset around 25 per cent of their Council Tax payments whilst they are on operations. It underlines the Government's commitment to support our Armed Forces and their families.

How exactly giving only some actively deployed soldiers a rebate on their Council tax but others not shows the "Government's commitment to support our Armed Forces and their families" is beyond me.

Not the front page he would've wanted I imagine

The Sun

The New Messiah has spoken and will lay his hands on us all

Should anyone be wondering about the tune that the Lord Protector came in to the conference hall too, and exited too as well. It was Reef and called "Place Your Hands On". Not that he is at all messianic in his belief or anything like that. Here are the lyrics:

Oh place your hands, on my hope,
Run your fingers through my soul,
And the way that I feel right now,
Oh Lord it may go.
Put your hands on, put your hands on. (x4)
You know you cannot hide, from whats inside,
You know you cannot hide, from whats inside.
So I ask of you to help me through,
I ask of you this thing to do.
Put your hands on, put your hands on. (x2)
So lay me down, for a while,
Join my body with my mind,
And I cried at the common one,
For weeks aft he died.
Put your hands on, put your hands on. (x4)
And the way that we feel right now,
Oh Lord it may go.

Gordon is here to save us all you know. TESTIFY!

Britain, Britain, Britain, Britain, Britain

I've lost count of the number of Brtiain's in Brown's speech. Got to 26, and as Guido notes, only one mention of Scotland.

Update: Coppers are to get thousands of PDAs so they can log crimes online. Wonder how long it will be before someone cracks into that 3G stream - assuming they can get it too work first.

Update II: Triangulation from the Right which can be summed up as. "Tough on crime. Tough on the immigrant bastards that cause crime"

Update III: Apparently we're going to have super-powerful Matrons back in hospital to tackle MRSA. That soounds familar doesn't it? Almost sopunds like a 2005 Tory manifesto commitment.

Update IV: Just in case the Labour faithful didn't know when to stand up and clap he closes with thw words "I will always stand up for you" . Cue lots of people standing up, cheering, screaming like children, and Gordon looking shifty.