Rat Flees Sinking Ship

The BBC are reporting that Ruth Kelly is to stand down as MP for Bolton West and will not be seeking re-election. Ms Kelly is claiming that she made the decision because she wants to spend more time with her family and children.

Could it be that the old left-wing fanatic is afraid of losing her seat at the next election, which she currently holds with only a slim majority of around two thousand votes?

Whatever the true reason for her departure, good riddance I say. Unfortunately however, the damage she helped cause in her time as Education Secretary under Tony Blair’s premiership will not be undone by her political demise.

Ruth Kelly, like so many of her Ministerial predecessors across the decades, presided over the imposition of increasingly pitiful state education on the poorest in Britain while, as emerged earlier this year, allowing her own children to escape the system by sending them to good public schools. Of course, afraid of the public backlash that her hypocrisy would have sparked, she desperately attempted to suppress the truth before the story broke.

Unsurprisingly, Ms Kelly’s arrogant and hypocritical stance is not unique within the Labour party. Diane Abbott famously described her own decision to send her child to a public school despite being against them and for the hopeless state educational system in this country as, ‘indefensible’.

Quaking In His Boots

With Morgan Tsvangirai out of the running for the Zimbabwean Presidency, our utterly incompetent Foreign Secretary, David Miliband along with the Queen have said that the soon to be ‘re-elected’ Robert Mugabe will be stripped of his Knighthood.

Such a strong, decisive and well thought out act on the part of our Monarch, Ministers and Government will no doubt leave Mugabe quaking in his boots when he hears he’s lost his title as Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath. Not.

If this rather pathetic and purely symbolic act is the best our Government can muster then Mr Mugabe has little to worry about, while the people of Zimbabwe still have much to fear.

Gordon Brown talks of wanting to see an end to violence in Zimbabwe and a peaceful transition to democracy – but this will not happen unless Mugabe is forced in some way to listen. Since African leaders have failed to strongly condemn President Mugabe’s terrible and oppressive regime; unless a western nation chooses to step in and take action then the suffering of the Zimbabwean people is only set to continue.

A Four Class Society

Back in 1997, John Prescott (the greedy fat pig who now claims to have bulimia) told us that ‘we are all middle-class now’. Spoken genuinely or an attempt to curry favour with Tony Blair – who knows or frankly cares, because either way reality tells an entirely different story.

New Labour’s ‘classless’ social concept was and always will be a façade and a lie. In whatever society you choose to consider humanity has and always will organise itself into classes. It is in our tribal nature to do so. No amount of social engineering can or will ever do away with this reality.

British society, like all others, still maintains degrees of class; it’s just that they have been noticeably transformed in more recent times. Largely gone are the days of the working, middle and upper classes. Relative economic affluence and prosperity for all has done away with the need for those terms, as did the destruction of the British manufacturing sector in the 1980s and the current rise of tertiary service industries.

Where once class was based upon economic well-being and means by which the man on the street earned his living, now class and our society revolve around the struggle for power, prestige and the ability to influence others. Thus people in Britain can now be categorised into roughly four different classes: the Elite, the Underclass, the Welfare class and Everyone Else.

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Crewe And Nantwich

With just ten days until polling day, campaigning for the by-election in Crewe and Nantwich is now in full swing with the Conservative party clearly sensing that victory is possible.

An ICM poll of 1,004 people by telephone in Crewe and Nantwich for the Daily Mail put the Conservatives on 43% while Labour on 39% and the Liberal Democrats on 16%. However, once again I am not convinced that this poll will reflect the final result we shall see on the night.

As is the case with most parliamentary by-elections, a diverse range of candidates have chosen to stand including UKIP, the Green party, and the Monster Raving Loony Party. The ICM poll does not appear to take into account ‘other parties’ running. Therefore, even on a reduced turnout I doubt we will see any candidate exceed 40% of the vote.

What’s more, it perhaps goes without saying that the Liberal Democrats will poll better than they would tend to in a general election because at a by-election they are able to pile their national resources and activists into one seat. At the last General Election the Lib Dems took 18.6% of the vote. I expect that they will not only increase their vote but also their overall share by picking up a good few anti-Tory and disgruntled Labour voters.

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