I’m voting for Dianne Abbott

The circus came to town today. Murdoch’s Media Circus, along with the five Labour leadership hopefuls. My ballot papers arrived the other day and I’d sort of made up my mind how I was going to vote but I went along to today’s performance with a relatively open mind. Well as open as it could be given my political leanings. The extravaganza was being held at a venue in Norwich called Open 247; a rather grand hall that was previously a Barclay’s Bank but is now a youth centre. Being in the audience of a television programme is a little tedious. There’s a lot of waiting around and when you’re finally allowed to take a seat you have to listen to some non-entity of a presenter (no idea who he is) go over his lines several times whilst your bum gradually starts to go numb and any political fire you might have in your body evaporates ceiling-ward. Does anyone actually watch Sky News?

The audience was made up of roughly fifty percent Labour members and a fifty percent mix of non-aligned voters and a token ‘youth contingent. At the ‘standing around with a coffee and losing the will to live’ stage before going into the hall I had a brief conversation with a ‘non-aligned’ gent of around my age. He was apparently a Labour voter but not a member. He was persuaded to come along by a market research company who phoned him up on behalf of Sky. Obviously he was interested to hear the candidates speak, but they also offered him twenty quid. He said that as he could cycle there he thought ‘why not?’Labour party members did not get the twenty oncers. I’m not sure why Sky insisted that members of the general public needed to be there as ‘balance’ shouldn’t really come into it. This nonsense meant that less party members could attend. I feel so lucky to be one of the few who got a ticket.

The presentation, for that’s what it was, was an interesting show. It wasn’t a debate as there was no cut and thrust of argument and challenge. But that doesn’t make it a bad thing. It doesn’t always have to be adversarial. All five candidates presented themselves very well. If fact the only one that was not as slick as I thought he’d be was Ed Miliband. His older brother David was perfect in terms of delivery and apparent ease with which he answered questions. Shame he’s a bit too Blairish for my liking. Before today the one candidate that left me cold was Andy Burnham, but after seeing him in the flesh, so to speak, I warmed to him a bit more than I would have imagined. He’s another Blairite so he doesn’t really float my boat but I was impressed with his passion for ‘care’. I’m not totally sure I know what Ed Miliband stands for apart from whatever it is it is to the left of David, and he mentions ‘change’ a lot. He no doubt feels that if it worked for Obama and it worked for Cameron he might as well give it a go. Ed Balls is a star. You can’t greatly fault the man. He talks such sense. He’s the only one that has been seriously challenging the Con-Dems on their vindictive Tory policies. His arguments are credible. His economic policies are sensible, right and fair. If he doesn’t make party leader and Labour do get re-elected at the next election he would make a fantastic chancellor. He makes no apologies for being part of the last government, whilst at the same time pointing some of the things he was unhappy with and argued against; the joys of cabinet collective responsibility hey Ed? He also quite rightly points out that 13 years of Labour actually delivered some really good stuff. Stuff to be proud of. And in fairness all five of the candidates took this positive stance just that Ed Balls was the most robust, credible, eloquent and convincing on the matter. Ed Balls was my number one choice for leader until Dianne Abbott joined the race. Dianne Abbott just ticks all of the boxes for me. You can’t not approve of anyone that was against the war in Iraq. A thorn in Labour’s side that many in the party I’m sure don’t realise how many votes it cost us. But she’s not a one issue woman. For me she offers the policies closest to my beliefs of any of them. And, more importantly I think she is the most ‘in touch’ with real people out of the candidates. With Dianne Abbott as Prime Minister we could just well get the fair and just society that so many of us crave.

If I had any doubts before the presentation they were put to rest when all the candidates were asked which one of their policies was key. Dianne Abbott mentioned the magic words of building many more council houses. That sealed it for me. Dianne Abbott really gets it. She’s my number one choice.

Belonging to a cause

Education, Equality and Environment

I’d like to challenge the notion that the two sacred cows of schools and hospitals should always be the most important when it comes to government spending. Yes, they are very important but they are not always the most important.

If we are to create Jerusalem, the equal and fair society that those of us on the left hope and strive for we are not going to create it just through education and the NHS. Economic equality will not be achieved by throwing large wads of cash at education and health. You can’t build robustly if the foundations are made of sand. In my opinion there is an area that qualifies for just as much priority on spending as education and health if not more. That area is environment.

It must be some strange middle-class fetish, which I clearly don’t understand, that demands that ‘Education’ should triumph over nearly all else in the government priority spending stakes. If you are middle-class then education is important. If you are middle-class, spending on education pays dividends. If you are working-class it’s a bit more hit and miss.

As I’ve said before my approach to politics and my political beliefs are influenced by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Maslow’s fundamental ‘Biological and Physiological needs of air, food, drink, shelter, warmth, sex, sleep, etc.’ need to be adequately met before a person can then be concerned with moving on to the next level. Economic equality for all won’t be attained until everybody has passed up through all of the levels.

If people are consigned to live in poverty and inadequate housing then their environment will never be conducive to learning and good health. If you have the misfortune to be born into a poverty-stricken, dysfunctional family then your chances of becoming a brain surgeon or a captain of industry are extremely remote.

I was brought up on a council estate in the fifties through to the beginning of the seventies. The only heat in our council house was a fire in the living room plus the odd electric fire when we could afford it. I was lucky. I came from a loving family and we were slightly more prosperous than many of my contemporaries, but it was still a struggle financially for my parents, who both worked full-time. In winter it was damned near impossible to do homework at home. It either had to be completed in the living room in the warm with the telly blaring or in the arctic temperatures of my bedroom. Concentration was an issue. Personally I think I did well to ingest and attain the level of education that I did. Going to university or getting a degree just didn’t feature on my radar. So when people harp on about ‘social mobility’ and how education is somehow going to single handedly increase it they are talking out of their arses.

Yes keep building schools and hospitals* but more importantly build social housing and lots of it. And, let’s spend some serious money so that we enable all children to be brought up in a stable and disciplined** family style environment. Only that way will you start to help break the cycle of poverty and facilitate true social mobility.

* fat chance of this with the ConDems in power of course

** discipline as in ‘structure, rules and responsibilities’ rather than some Victorian notion of ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’

Yellow peril

If a law is deemed to be generally acceptable by society and a person breaks that law it would seem equally acceptable, if caught, for that person to be dealt with by the justice system. I have no desire at this juncture to go further on the outcome of being dealt with by the justice system as it is irrelevant to my argument and I have blogged on it here. Suffice to say that if you break the law and get caught there will usually be something referred to as punishment. As a procedure or process this doesn’t seem unreasonable to me and I suspect most people feel the same.

Are burglar alarms an affront to people’s individual liberty?
Are they evidence of the ‘big brother’ society?
To a burglar the answers are probably ‘yes’ and ‘yes’, unless of course you are Norman Stanley Fletcher, in which case it could be ‘yes’ and ‘no’. But to most of us they would seem to be a useful, if not occasionally annoying when they go off in the early hours near where we live, piece of crime prevention equipment.

Road safety experts say that “speed kills”. We have laws that say speeding is an offence. In general most people accept these arguments. So what is it about speed cameras?

Why are they seen as an instrument of oppression by the BMW driving, Daily Mail reading hang ‘em and flog ‘em brigade?

They encourage people not to break the law and they catch them when they do. Agreed they are more effective than your bog-standard burglar alarm, although the more sophisticated burglar/surveillance equipment is pretty good at ‘catching’ people. They are electronic witnesses to law breaking. What is wrong with that?

Now I know that some people object to speed cameras because they see them as an easy tax revenue raising facility, and I have some sympathy with this viewpoint. But I do think the use of the camera and the penalty need to be kept separate in the argument. Personally I’d like to see the emphasis put well and truly on rehabilitation. If people are caught driving dangerously then perhaps the answer should be re-training and education in the consequences of bad driving rather than a fine.

Public service announcement

It’s a shit time if you are working for the civil service or local government. And, it’s going to get shittier by all accounts. The Tory propaganda machine seems hell bent on rubbishing the work of public servants, whilst the Con-Dem collaboration plans to make as many as possible unemployed. This government is biting the hand that wipes its arse.

As if that is enough to contend with our much battered public servants have to deal with members of the public!

Everybody must get stoned!

There are a couple of lines in Moving On by the Oysterband that go:

“We asked the man for justice

Well, he handed us a stone”

Last week’s stoning by the Taliban was rightly condemned for the barbaric act that it was (although it raises so many other questions and comparisons) but we in ‘the west’ don’t really have grounds to criticise when we are guilty of acts of collective barbarism ourselves. I am appalled by the posturing, whining and intolerant belligerence (is that partial tautology?) on the part of the lynch mob that is the voice of the American Establishment. Their continued howls for the head of Abdelbasset Ali al-Megrahi are quite sickening. If ‘the west’ wants to criticise the behaviour of the rest of the world then we need to put our own house in order first. If we are to prove to the rest of the world that ‘our values’ are the best then they need to be so in reality. The Lockerbie bombing was a cowardly and evil act and we may never know if it was committed by al-Megrahi or not, but in many ways the issue of his guilt is irrelevant. We are also not to know at the moment if there were murky dealings regarding his release, and again in many ways this is not the issue. If we take what the Scottish executive and the doctor concerned are telling us at face value then what they have done in releasing al-Megrahi on compassionate grounds was the right, honourable and compassionate thing to do. Compassion should be always be one of the USPs of any civilised society. If we are to place ourselves on the moral high ground we need to act according to those morals. Something the loud-mouthed pseudo-Christian American establishment right-wingers should adopt. ‘Tit for tat’/’eye for an eye’ actions just perpetuate the downward spiral of the retribution cycle.

The white American Christian establishment right (WACERs) need to answer the following questions honestly:

• In the case of al-Megrahi what would have been the Christian response to him being diagnosed with terminal cancer?
• Why do they think Lockerbie and for that matter 11/9 happened?
• When are they going to stop supporting injustice?

As an atheist I accept that everyone has a right to follow the religion of their choosing but I despise anyone who hollowly wears a religion as a badge and uses it to oppress others.

Ziggy Stardust Came from Isleworth

There was a great little programme on Radio 4 today about Vince Taylor. I knew of Vince Taylor and his fantastic Brand New Cadillac but very little else.

I was weaned on Rock-a-boogie. Six Five Special and Oh Boy were required viewing by my parents when I was a toddler. I don’t remember too much about the acts on these programmes but I absorbed the music. I don’t remember anything of Vince Taylor from that time though. My first alert to his existence was a song on the B side of a Golden Earring single entitled Just like Vince Taylor. Next up came the Clash with their version of Brand New Cadillac (equally as good as Vince’s version), sheer brilliance! Now I’ve been a fan of David Bowie since Jean Genie but until today I had not realised that Vince Taylor had been the major inspiration for David’s erstwhile alter ego Ziggy Stardust. The Radio 4 programme explains all. Give it a listen, but hurry you only have 7 days to do so.

Be there or be square.