Return From Hiatus

Two years. It really doesn’t seem all that long since I gave up posting on this website. At the time I had planned to just give blogging a rest for a week or so, but without quite realising, the weeks turned to months, and the months turned to years.

Never mind though. It’s not as though I’ve missed all that much, since very little on the British political scene has changed in that time. Yes, we may have had a General Election last year, but the Government’s policies have remained largely identical.

And so it came to past that the electorate were duped into believing that voting out New Labour and voting in Blue Labour – sorry, the Conservatives – would constitute a real and perceivable change in the way the country was run. Sadly though, they were wrong.

No longer does the ‘terrible’ and ‘awful’ Mr Gordon Brown head up our Westminster administration, but instead that nice young man, Mr ‘Dave’ Cameron, who in contrast to the great clunking fist seems unable to do wrong in the eyes of much of the liberal media. Such was the negative media frenzy at the time, people blamed Mr Brown if their train was late, or they dropped their coffee on the floor, or their shoelaces snapped while they were tying them, or if it rained.

Quite why Mr Brown was apparently so ‘terrible’ and ‘awful’ very few people remember or care. They’re just glad that he’s gone, and anyway, isn’t the new Prime Minister so much better looking than the last? He just looks the part doesn’t he? And hasn’t he got such a lovely, well dressed wife? She has such nice hats. And doesn’t he make such good speeches (though one can never quite remember what they were about)? And so on and so on.

In the meantime the steady process of our MPs giving away yet more of our sovereignty to the EU has quietly continued without opposition. State expenditure and borrowing has continued to rise at an even faster rate than under Labour, despite boasts of ‘putting the finances in order’ and talk of those nasty, evil and increasingly non-existent cuts. Crime has gone up. So has immigration. And our taxes too. Yet some people just fail to notice, so distracted are they by the bread and circuses of modern British politics and media.

A great storm is approaching though, one that even those caught up in the usual media circuses of the moment won’t be able to ignore forever. The crisis in Greece is likely only the beginning of it, and quite where we will all be in another two years time is anyone’s guess – but I think we can safely predict that it’s not sunlit uplands which lie ahead. It’s going to be downhill from here on in.

Nobody Cares

A Labour official attempts to smear leading Tories. Conservatives angrily deny remarks and bitterly complain. Damian McBride resigns and leaves his job. Cameron calls for a public apology.

Labour backbencher, John McDonnell, and Shadow Foreign Secretary, William Hague, call for a swift inquiry into the email leaks and those responsible for the digital comments. The end of the world as we know it beckons.

Who actually cares? Certainly not me, though it seems that the usual suspects in the media and in the blogosphere have worked themselves up into a mad feeding frenzy over what amounts to be nothing more than a complete non-issue.

Nobody living outside the Westminster bubble actually cares at all either. Real people with real jobs and families are either too busy dealing with their own financial problems, as our economy falls into the worst recession for decades, or worrying about more important issues from health to immigration. Perhaps this is why the British National party are rapidly gaining traction in local elections at the expense of all the main parties?

In fact, this whole rather sad episode played out in Westminster just goes to further highlight how completely out of touch our political class have become. They’ve made more fuss over a few pathetic emails than they have over many, many other issues which are actually important to the electorate. This will only serve to drive yet more voters into the arms of the racist BNP.

Illusions Dispelled

Any illusion that ConservativeHome still spoke up for conservative values has been dispelled today with the introduction of a new front page banner on the website which reads ‘comprehensive coverage of Britain’s Conservative Party’.

Even before Samuel Coates had left the ConHome fold to work for David Cameron’s bland speechwriting team, the website had become almost entirely sycophantic towards the Conservative party leadership and the site’s front page often resembled little more than an MPs press release area.

In changing the text of the banner I suppose Tim Montgomerie has at least now had the decency to publicly admit that the true purpose of ConservativeHome is to pursue the interests of the Conservative party and that he will use his site to focus almost entirely on the David Cameron project which has itself very little in the way of conservatism behind it.

In recent months ConservativeHome’s pages seem to have been increasingly filled with the strange and often absurd witterings of those like Louise Bagshawe on CentreRight (a woman who is for some peculiar reason taken rather seriously by some few Conservative party members and MPs) and almost entirely devoid of critical comment and opinion. As such it is neither independent in content or comment and therefore, I would have thought, no longer a website that merits more than a cursory glance.

Top Ten Blogs

I have been relatively busy recently so here is a post which doesn’t really require too much thinking (by me anyway).

It is also a rare occasion when I will not in some way directly involve mention of the European Union (oh no, I did it again!) or what I would deem similarly serious political matters or events.

So, as it happens, I noticed that a few of the self obsessed egos who involved themselves in 18 Vanity Street (which amusingly collapsed last year) but chose not to move sideways onto Stephan Shakespeare’s PoliticsHome project have reappeared in the team behind a new magazine called TotalPolitics.

Rather unsurprisingly the TotalPolitics magazine (much like its staff) will really only be interested in the soap opera of the Westminster Village rather than anything that could be even considered vaguely serious. I am not the only one of this opinion.

Yet, despite the magazine being funded in part by Lord Ashcroft and released to much fan fare on some few blogs, I think it may now well be a good time to place your bets on how long it will be before it goes the way of Doughty Street down the pan.

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