THAT'S not what you said in the Jeffries' Tube

... am I missing something, or is it really just the tories going "we've cut council budgets so much they can't afford street sweepers any more, so we're hoping that telling you it's the queen's birthday will make you saps do it for free"?

I mean, I'm all for moar pictures of Boris looking a total twat:



... and the Gove picture is just a gift:



... but do they really expect us to fall for this?

... I think we've just done the worst.

I remain to be convinced that airstrikes will help to defeat Daesh, because you can't blow up an idea. I remain to be convinced that NOT blowing up bit of Syria would help either. I'm in a paralysis of indecision about the whole thing. One thing I am sure of, though, is that from the point of view of gaining an electoral advantage we've just done the worst possible thing.

- Our glorious leader announces, after much handwringing, that we're going to whip our 8 MPs to support airstrikes, pissing off a good 40% of our activists just before a by election;
- Cameron, intentionally or not, pisses of half his Labour sycophants by talking about terrorist sympathisers so he now has much weaker support from the red team;
- The foreign affairs select committee, despite the best efforts of Uncle Crispin, announce that they think airstrikes are a really bad idea;
- we now look like the rump that's left of us is still supporting the tories even though we don't have to, and even though nobody else thinks it's a good idea.

Still, on the plus side it's taken a good five and a half months for our new leader to make such a monumental tactical fuckup, and further on the plus side so few people are paying attention to us these days nobody is going to notice or care, and if they do they'll just shrug because supporting the tories needlessly is what we're for, right?

I think the time has come for me to see if I can find Dave Page's Patented Desk made of human hands so that I can headdesk and facepalm at the same time.

UPDATE: quote from my twitter feed: "sad but unsurprising to see the rump lib dems being lickspittles"

*headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk*

UPDATE 2: and another, as pointed out by Andrew in the comments below: "It's easier to have contempt for the Lib Dems than Tories in the same way it's easier to have contempt for Grima Wormtongue than Saruman."

Several people I really respect are considering their party membership this morning, including one who has been a member for 20+ years and served on a lot of Federal committees. I am just really really depressed.

In a comment in Another Place I have been accused of being anonymous by someone who misspells my name, not only in the same comment, but in the same sentence. I have also been accused of defamation.

On the subject in question, those who are on the opposite side to me tend to throw around words like slander, libel and defamation a lot.



Defamation and it's various subcategories are triggered when someone deliberately says something in public which is untrue, AND which causes someone to either lose money or standing.

Accurately reporting other people's views on a person? Not defamatory, especially when those views are entirely factually based. Even given the reversed burden of proof for defamation, it's unlikely that suing me for saying "lots of people think x" would succeed when I can produce a list of screencaps and what they say AND it's admitted as fact by the person who is the subject of the allegations in any case. I would also seek to argue that the person in question cannot have had his standing reduced by me reporting what other people think of him since his standing is demonstrated by my report of what other people think of him.

Still, I am aware that legal costs these days are quite extortionate, so if anyone wants to spud me a few quid towards possible legal expenses...

;)

UPDATE: so I've got an anonymouse who is incapable of adhering to my comments policy. Again. He she they or it are up to their third comment of splain, so I have clarified a couple of sentences for their benefit.

They've apparently "proved" that tax credits are not a subsidy to employers to pay crap wages in this piece here, but I think I've spotted a tiny flawette in the entire premise of their argument. The premise of their argument is that "employers generally pay people according to the productivity of their work". Errr no. Really, really, no.

Employers pay people as little as they can get away with on the basis of how easy the person would be to replace if they walked out tomorrow, how much training and hassle it would take to get a replacement, and so on. People who get paid £100,000 a year for signing a few forms are not more productive than people who actually make things for minimum wage, that's utter bullshit. People who get paid £100,000 a year for signing a few forms are just harder to replace, because they have to have the right lines on their CV and to know which forms are worth signing and which are not etc.

Now, I'm not saying the £100,000 a year person isn't worth it to the employer. Society has decided that knowing which forms to sign is more difficult and important than actually making things, and so that person gets paid more. I accept that is the way of the world. But to pretend it's because that person is more productive?

No, absolutely not. The productive people are always, always at the bottom rung of the ladder, and the further up the ladder you go the more actually productive people it's needed to sustain the leeches - and I say this as someone who has recently joined the leech class.

Now whether tax credits are a subsidy to the employer for paying crap wages to the actually productive people, or a subsidy to a stupid economic system that doesn't value actually productive people is a different argument. But the idea that employers use productivity to decide how much they are going to pay someone is utter bollocks. Sorry, IEA.

The guardian website/tomorrow's print observer has a somewhat hysterical article about how we could face long coalition negotiations after the election. I'm not going to pick holes in their prediction for the most likely outcome of the election, although it doesn't chime with mine*, I'm just going to pick out one paragraph to pick holes in:

While the Lib Dem rule book gives the party’s MPs the main say on whether to approve a new coalition, there will be a special conference of senior party officials that will vote on the deal. Although the decision of the conference is not binding, according to the rules, senior figures say if the conference votes the deal down, Clegg will have to accept defeat.

To take the wrong bits in order:

1, "While the Lib Dem rule book gives the party’s MPs the main say on whether to approve a new coalition" - errr, no. Caron wrote a very good article about this a week ago. The MPs get the first vote after the negotiating team has negotiated in consultation with the reference group. The MAIN say, the decision as to whether it goes ahead or not, is taken by special conference.

2, "there will be a special conference of senior party officials that will vote on the deal" - voting reps are not in the sense of the words most people will understand "senior party officials" - not unless you think the vast majority of the active membership are senior. There's THOUSANDS of us. Most local parties don't even fill their quota of voting reps because there aren't enough people who want to go vote on things at conferences, and the only reason special conference is not one member one vote is the almighty cock up FE made of trying to introduce OMOV at Glasgow.

3, "Although the decision of the conference is not binding, according to the rules" - yes it is. This is just a plain factual error. It wasn't binding in 2010, but we changed the rules in 2012.

4, "senior figures say if the conference votes the deal down, Clegg will have to accept defeat." - well yes he will, because the decision is binding. And not only is the decision binding but to agree to a coalition (OR confidence and supply) special conference has to vote in favour by a 2/3 majority or more.

It really is going to be quite difficult to persuade 2/3 of lib dem members to vote in favour of ANY coalition deal with ANY party after the amount of stuff that was in the agreement this time around that the tories reneged on. We voted in favour of an agreement which gave us a good chance of electoral reform and supposedly guaranteed lords reform; neither of those things happened. Without cast iron guarantees of those things, and no shilly-shallying about referendums or anything, there's no way on earth you'd get a bare majority, never mind a 2/3 majority.

Similarly, the idea that any coalition involving UKIP or the DUP would get a 2/3 majority of members voting for it is just laughable in the extreme. I'd be amazed if you could herd the cats long enough to get a 2/3 majority for either of the Labservative parties on their own, to be honest.

I'm reasonably certain that this is why our Cleggy is drawing so many red lines this time around, by the way. He knows he'll not get an agreement past special conference, so he's scuppering it before it gets to that point, then he can spread his hands wide and say "well we TRIED to form a stable coalition but the other parties just wouldn't budge enough".

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* I still say we're going to get a minority Labour government that'll collapse in acrimony and infighting within 6 months, and then we'll get another election.

This one being my partner, magister, who used to work in immigration and was so incensed by Nick's speech last week that he resigned from the party. He posted about his reasons for doing so here, and he has just texted me to tell me that he has received confirmation of cancellation.

After Shirley Williams on the NHS, after Julian Huppert drank the home office kool aid on DRIP, after secret courts, after this, I really am genuinely wondering if Clegg is systematically going for properly pissing off what remaining pockets of support we have left in a perverse attempt to see how low we can go.

Still waiting for Greg Mullholland to tell me pubcos aren't all that bad, or Lynne to go all patriarchal, mind. If either of those happen, it'll be ME sending my card back in pieces.

I wasn't going to blog about the whole leadership thing, because what good would it do? I am desperately, desperately sad that the party's response to our disastrous showing in the recent elections has been to turn inwards and fight each other, but it's not like I can't recognise the symptoms of self-harm, and I realise that trying to tell a self-harmer to stop doesn't make a lick of difference if you can't do something to stop the pain that self-harm is a response to.

So why did I decide to blog about it after all? Because Matthew Oakeshott has fallen on his sword, and the mainstream media* have leapt to the conclusion that the leadership crisis is now over.

There's a few inconvenient facts that fly in the face of that conclusion:

1. Oakeshott going does not stop the various local parties who have already scheduled EGMs under 10.2(f) from having those meetings. I am aware of nine, so far**. That's nine local parties who have actually scheduled EGMs. I have heard rumours of many, many more who might be doing so. This is way more serious than some bloke who nobody took seriously anyway wasting money on some polling.


2. LDs4Change may have views coincidental with Oakeshott's - and they may have gone about things in a similarly half-arsed, stupid, and unconstitutional way to the methods he uses - but that does not mean that they are, or were, run by him; or that because he is gone, they are gone. As Nick Barlow said on twitter: LDs do not need an agent provocateur to be angry with the leadership***.


3. Oakeshott going does not solve the quite legitimate concerns that many have about Clegg's leadership. If anything, it makes Clegg feel vindicated, makes him dig his heels in, and thus makes change from his various problematic positions less likely.

If the party is to survive this without being seriously damaged, this boil needs lancing, and it needs lancing NOW before things get even more pus-filled and manky. And I can only see one way for that to happen. Clegg needs to call a leadership election himself, and then stand in it. Do the John Major option. Tell the party to back him or sack him. If the recent poll for Lib Dem Voice is accurate then the party will back him and all this will go away. If the poll's not accurate then all this, and Clegg, will go away.

Either way, we cannot afford to let this fester for much longer. The poison is seeping into all sorts of places, and I, for one, do not wish to see people I love tearing each other apart any longer.

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* and several of Clegg's more ardent supporters...
** although only Cambridge have announced it publicly.
*** and lets face it, even those who agree with Oakeshott think he's a prize arse who nobody listens to, and who is the kiss of death for any campaign he gets involved in.

As blogged about by Zoe and Caron the latest wheeze to come out of the Cornerstone wing of the Tory party is for the rozzers to be able to put all sorts of restrictions on a person if they are found giving a child anything that relates to sexual activity or contains a reference to such activity. I thought I might come up with a list of examples of perfectly innocent things which a child of my daughter's age (10) might reasonably be given which relates to or contains reference to sexual activity.

1. Pretty much any chart single - even stuff by wholesome boy bands.


2. Books about impending puberty - such as the one Holly has which tells her which bits of her she might reasonably expect to grow and change over the next couple of years, and why this happens.


3. A DVD of the children's movie "Hotel Transylvania", which I took Holly to see at the cinema. It has several references to sexual activity, and one character who finds it amusing to systematically sexually assault other characters.


4. Anything explaining what child abuse is, or what to do if it happens to you.


5. DVDs of any of the last several series of Doctor Who. Many many references to sexual activity, including the conception of one recurring character.

I could go on but I'm sure you get the picture. And all this is without even going into the fact that Holly is a big fan of Old Harry's Game (lots of references to sexual activity, albeit mostly in the "eewww humans do icky things" vein) and ancient horror movies from Hammer and Amicus (yeah, that's inherited).

The thing is, I'm probably not going to be subject to a sexual control order. I'm a reasonably respectable white person with a job (for a given definition of respectable, anyway), so I'm not on the list of usual suspects that the rozzers like to target with these sorts of things. But if you're lower down the pecking order than me, and the sort of person the police like to stop for, for example, bag checks anyway...

I do NOT like the police being given powers which are so open to abuse. Sure, most of the force are great guys and gals who are just doing their jobs. But enough of them are powermad little Constable Savages who like to exercise the power they have unfairly that this new power would cause untold misery to those who are already under the bootheel of oppression.

Down with this sort of thing.

So Sarah Teather announced, via an article in the Observer, that she will not be standing again for her seat in Brent. Various people expressed various emotions on receipt of this news. The Lib Dem Voice comment thread, at time of typing, is approaching 200 comments. Despite the attempts of various people to inject notes of sanity there has been a massive proliferation of straw men in that comment thread, which can basically be divided into two camps: the Sarah Is a Great Loss and the Sarah is Not Such a Great Loss camps.

I fall into the latter camp. My stated position is that because of her vote on same sex marriage, after many years of cheerfully using lots of LGBT activists to work for her, I feel that I would rather spend my limited leaflet delivery time on another MP/candidate at election time. I agree with a lot of her OTHER positions, but because there are MPs/candidates who share those positions AND voted the way I would have liked on same sex marriage I would prefer to donate my time to those people.

For this I have been accused of being a single issue politician (because I am talking about this right now means it is the only thing I have ever cared about), sexism (because Sarah is a woman and I don't want to deliver leaflets for her, despite the fact that I have also publicly condemned Gordon Birtwhistle, John Pugh, and all of the other MPs who voted against), racism (because Sarah has been an anti-racism campaigner therefore if I don't want to deliver leaflets for her I must be racist), obsessed with sex (because equal rights for LGBT people is only ever concerned with sex and not human rights or anything) and of WANTING DISABLED PEOPLE TO DIE (no, I don't get that one either). And pretty much everyone who has said these things has ALSO gone on at great length about the "vitriol" being flung at Sarah.

To make that clear: saying you'd rather deliver leaflets for someone else = flinging vitriol. Accusing someone of being sexist, racist, and a eugenicist? Fair comment. As for the single issue politician thing... If I was FORCED to be a single issue politician I would be the most vocal (and probably the only) campaigner for Colin Baker to be permanently recognised as the best Doctor Who. If only because that's SUCH a minority campaign that it needs all the help it can get.

Anyone who doubted the importance of leaflet delivery in the Lib Dem psyche? I think today has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that it's more important than pretty much anything else. It's just a shame that we're all spending valuable leaflet delivery time arguing about something that's not going to be changed by any amount of invective on any side.

Andrew Hickey on twitter has predicted the following:

[I] expect Clegg will announce 'moderate' 'centrist' (i.e. horribly illiberal) 'compromise':
"There are those who think we need to ban the internet entirely. Others want to force you to watch porn. But Liberal Democrats in the positive centre just want to tattoo the foreheads of porn-watchers with 'I am a perv': a sensible compromise that, we feel, properly reflects the mainstream, centrist, liberal consensus"

Let's see how right he is, shall we?

My prediction is that while Andrew's tattoo suggestion is probably a bit unlikely, Clegg is clueless enough about the internet to think that there might be a workable compromise, when in reality the proposed filters will not do what they say they will, will block lots of things they say they won't (examples of things currently blocked by existing porn blocks: The open rights group; the guardian; anything LGBT+, including support sites for teenagers; text based fan fiction; and this blog), and will cause huge headaches for all concerned for years to come.

There is no easy off switch for harmful content. The only way to deal with harmful content is education: teach people what is and isn't harmful and how to cope with it; teach parents how to teach their children. But of course we can't trust people to do that, can we?

I'm composing this on my phone so it's going to be quick and dirty, but I have the following things to say:

1, asking someone to consider what impact their words will have is not censoring them or banning anything
2; being told you have hurt someone is not fun; but it's better than hurting people
3, people with privilege are used to not considering other people's feelings and get upset when they are asked to consider other people. On one level this is understandable because considering other people is work. But it's nowhere near as much work as living with total lack of consideration all the time.
4, if you use a word that upsets people without knowing it will upset people that is qualitatively different from knowing it will upset people and using it anyway.
5, you are perfectly free to say whatever you like BUT THAT IS NOT THE END OF IT. Once you have said what you like other people are free to react how they like and judge you how they like in consequence of what you have said.
6; there is NO point 6
7, All words cause reactions. If you don't like the reaction your words cause it might behove you to consider your words more carefully in future, especially if you're getting paid for writing them; rather than railing at people you have upset for reacting in am entirely predictable way.

This post brought to you by today's twitter storm. Further reading:

http://www.sarahlizzy.com/blog/?p=150

Colin Baker is going to be on I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here. I hate that bloody show. I watched it when lovely Brian Paddick and lovely George Takei were on it, and I hated the show, I hated Ant and/or Dec and I hated the concept, even though those two guys were great.

This year Colin is going to be on it, so I thought "Oh bugger, I'm going to have to watch it again". But there's a complicating factor. Also appearing? Nadine Dorries. One of the very few people on this earth I cannot think of a civil thing to say about. If I watch it, I know I'm going to get the stressed Eric vein and homicidal urges. But there's Colin. Lovely, lovely Colin.

So, I turn to you, oh wise and all-knowing internets:

Today, everything is frustrating. There are THINGS and STUFF that are IMPORTANT and everybody else seems to be concentrating on things that are not important* and it's WRONG and people are making stupid facile blog posts** and even Alan Rickman can't make tea properly*** and we're still living in a shitey unfair world and I want to blow things up.

I blame hearing lots of news stories about that tosser Assange after having watched an explodey film yesterday.

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* like putative cabinet reshuffles and other Westminster Bubble bollocks
** like this one
*** see tomorrow's linkspam