The Walking Clegg

In Liverpool, the Lib Dem conference has today voted to rule out going into any future Coalition with itself.

The baffling but meaningless decision came as local police cordoned off the meeting following reports of zombies on the Mersey waterfront. On closer inspection it turned out that it was just a group of Lib Dem canvassers wandering aimlessly, clutching faded yellow leaflets mysteriously depicting two jockeys in a race. Although many appeared fairly docile, a number were seen to be behaving aggressively, threatening passers by with benefits reassessments and forcing them to accept invoices for their education.

An expert said, "It is a tragedy, but possibly self-inflicted. The evidence suggests some of them used to be mildly nice. But they appear to have come into contact with something nasty, perhaps from people they were mixing with. Whatever it was, it has left them devoid of both empathy and judgement."

Although the scenes, which were being filmed for the final installments of the horror series The Walking Clegg, were faintly upsetting to the point of being vaguely perplexing, the authorities concluded the lost group is likely to be officially harmless within a matter of weeks.

Secrecy surrounds how it will all end but there is speculation that the horde leader is likely to face a dreadful showdown somewhere in South Yorkshire, after which the remnants are expected to quietly fade away.

Three Men in a Debate

As I stared in the shaving mirror this morning, Radio 4 announced that Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg AND Nigel Farage had written to David Cameron urging him to take part in the Leaders' TV debates without the Greens' participation, otherwise they would go ahead on their own without him. Aping Have I Got News For You's "tub of lard" wheeze some years ago on Roy Hattersley's non-appearance, they threatened him with asking the broadcasters to set up an "empty podium" to highlight the Prime Minister's absence.

Momentarily, I paused from assaulting my hirsuteness (just as Cleggie apparently did 5 years ago when he secretly converted to austerity during his morning shave after apparently confusing the UK with Greece). How coincidental, I naively thought, that these three rivals would write to Cameron on the same day.

But my naivete was short-lived. Was the write-to-Dave stunt co-ordinated? Well, yes. In fact, it was so co-ordinated that they all sent the same letter. Yep; "Red" Ed, whom Labour supporters keep claiming has put Blairite Nu-Labour behind him shacked up with that betrayer of progressive politics, Nick Clegg. And then they got new best mate to join in. Yes, former stockbroker and doyen of the populist right, Nigel Farage.

So, finally, all the claims from Labour and Lib dems over the months that their leaders had not refused to involve the Greens now stand naked and clear - these self-interested, anti-democratic trough-swillers are prepared to actively work with UKIP to exclude the fourth party of British politics, the Greens, in order to shore up their crumbling grasp on the political stage. All on the same day that the Greens' total paid up membership figures overtook those of UKIP and on current trends are likely to overtake the Lib Dems' by early next week - over 2,000 people joined the Greens today alone.

They may be right when they claim Cameron's stance on the Greens is rooted in his own self-interest; but what is even more evident is that their own stance is so completely self-centred and exclusivist that Miliband and Clegg are prepared to debate with Nigel Farage but not with Natalie Bennett, let alone Nicola Sturgeon of the SNP or Leanne Wood of Plaid Cymru.

The only cold comfort in this most cynical of moves is that our electorate is somewhat more intelligent than these machine manipulators realise. And with 300,000 signatories to a petition calling for the Greens to be given a platform and 80% support for a Green speaker in opinion polls, the voters are infinitely fairer and more inclusive that the three men who audaciously refer to themselves are the "leaders" of the people.

Shame on them, then. And may they face a full reckoning on 7 May.

Nick's letter. And Ed's...And Nigel's.

Scotland - Trust the Bankers?

The men who forgot Scotland

“All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.” 

- Noam Chomsky

Over a year ago in Weimar Britain and again in April this year in On The Eve, this author, like many other progressives, previewed the momentous times we are living through now. As our world and the societies within it continue to convulse and shatter in the face of the growing crises of an economic system in terminal decline, we have seen the panic of the banking collapse, the wars for oil, and the demolition of human rights to ensure control not only over terrorists but over peaceful domestic opponents as well - in particular opponents of corporate interests.

It was indeed all going as well as the Establishment could have hoped - better in fact, as the electorate continues, on balance, to be convinced by the espoused case for austerity and denigration of the public enemies of migrants, disabled people and the unemployed. With political revolt gingerly contained, even if only transiently, in the even more neoliberal Aunt Sally of  UKIP, the private island-owning, off-shoring elite has gleefully seen its wealth grow to become larger and more obscenely skewed than at any other time in British history. The "free trade" TTIP treaty is set to seal it all for good. Divide and rule indeed.

But then, last weekend, a YouGov poll put the pro-Independence camp in Scotland narrowly in the lead for next week's referendum. Of Scottish voters expressing a preference, 51% said they will vote in favour, while two thirds of those still to make up their minds were tending towards the independence option. It was just one poll, though it confirmed a trend of some weeks of rise in the Yes vote. But it slammed a Panic Button among the Establishment in Westminster and ever since, as Alex Salmond has put it, everything including the kitchen sink and the whole lounge has been lobbed frantically at the Yes Scotland campaign.

First we had the faux homage of the three Westminster leaders - Cameron, Miliband and Clegg - to Scotland on Wednesday, dramatically cancelling PM's Question Time to make apparently passionate pleas for the Union to be preserved.  

Cameron nearly wept as he begged Scots not to use the vote to "kick the 'effing Tories"; Miliband said he might even stay the whole week; while Clegg dashed just inside the Borders to promise, with the others, the exciting prospect of a timetable for proposals to give Scotland's devolved parliament additional powers, although none of them could quite explain what these would be. Labour's Gordon Brown was also wheeled out to remind people that he is Scottish too, although at least unlike John Prescott  he didn't need to remind himself that he was supporting the "No" campaign, Better Together by writing its name in biro on the back of his hand.

But much, much more has since been deployed to stop secession. The Governor of the Bank of England, a Government appointee, has warned of financial chaos for Scotland after reiterating that there will be no common currency; while Lloyd's Bank and RBS (bankers to the Tory Party) have said they will move their headquarters south if there is independence. Next, at Cameron's prompting, Asda has said its milk prices might go up in a separate country. Morrisons and John Lewis made somewhat more ambiguous statements about divergence rather than disadvantage, but the increasingly shrilly pro-Union BBC reported these as warnings of higher prices.

And yet, and yet... wasn't this entirely foreseeable? A combination of bribes and threats spawned the Union in 1707, so it seems appropriate and unsurprising that the descendants of the elite that pushed through the creation of the UK would use the same methods to prolong its existence. Even more so, in fact - there is a commonly held misconception that neoliberal capitalism seeks to minimise the state and its powers. In truth it minimises the state only in terms of its responsiveness to the masses and their needs and wishes. It maximises the deployment of coercive state power to ensure the continued dominance of the Establishment - and this has never been as nakedly in evidence in British politics as in the last few days over Scotland.

Bankers, politicians, city traders, journalists and multinational companies have come together to warn of everything from economic apocalypse to "difficulties" for Scottish viewers wishing to watch Celebrity Come Dancing on the TV. 

The bankers and traders whose sociopathic greed and lawlessness created the crash of 2008 and nearly busted the world economy; the politicians who deregulated finance so completely that the crash happened, and who then spent tens of billions of tax money and loans to bail the banks out before billing the rest of us for it; the industrialists who rage against any form of consumer or employee protection and who have plundered our society via PFI arrangements, outsourcing and tax evasion; and the journalists who, when they are not hacking celebrities' telephone messages are busy telling us all that there is no alternative to what we have got.

Yes, all the people who obviously have the best interests of the rest of us engraved on their cold, cold hearts and foremost in their absent consciences. These people are stepping forward to tell Scottish voters that they are too crap, too lazy, too...Scottish...to hope to govern themselves. And if they don't listen to their friendly warnings, there will be a less friendly price to pay. The bankers, traders, and industrialists will make sure their political puppets send the bill personally.

The message, of course, is not just for the Scottish voters. Indeed, if Scotland could be got rid off, perhaps tugged out into the mid-Atlantic and quietly sunk, many of the people currently hoarsley calling for the Union to be preserved would be first in the queue to pull the plug. However, as geography dictates otherwise, the last thing the Establishment want the rest of the UK to see is part of it defying our Masters' wishes and giving us ideas above our station. Even a mildly social democratic Scotland would not just be an annoying neighbour - it could become an existential threat to the neoliberal consensus. Hence, it must be strangled at birth - or preferrably before.

The big question is whether enough Scottish voters will be browbeaten or scared into voting against independence to stop it happening. The trend over the last fortnight has been a clear and big upswing for separation - one based on seeking a more inclusive, fairer society than the one emerging in the UK as a whole. It remains to be seen if the crisis response from Westminster and its paymasters will stem the flow, or be seen through as the insincere, last gasp blandishments of panicking machine men.

A frequent refrain from the Better Together camp is that an independent country would be moving into uncertainty; taking risks, and be a journey rather than a destination. But isn't that just life? Life for all of us. Salmond (who is no socialist but is equally no neoliberal either) has ackowledged that independence is the start of something, not the finish. Meanwhile the Radical Independence Campaign of leftwing parties like the Greens and Scottish Socialists as well as cultural groups like the National Collective positively embrace the nascent potential of such a future. 

Besides, if there are no guarantees for a free Scotland, what is guaranteed about Britain as it is? A harsh, low wage, "flexible" economy increasingly unkind to the poor and vulnerable, suspicious of strangers, and selling off what little remains of its public services? A State whose main functions involve spying on its own citizens and vying with the USA for the number one spot as the most unequal developed society on the face of the Earth?

Better together? For who?

Seeing Through The Illusion of Choice

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”

 

Isn't this Britain now? An oligarchy centred on acceptance of a full-blown market system where all decisions, in all aspects of life public and private, are ultimately commodified, priced and sold. The health service, even now the jewel in the crown of the nation, is subject to not just creeping but full-on tendering out of its services to Virgin Clinics and other profit-seeking privateers; public buildings are in hoc to construction firms for tens of billions for decades to come; Serco, Capita, Balfour Beatty and other mega-corporations run our benefits system, our education authorities, our passport offices. A food company executive scripted the Government's policy on public health, a brazen act of corporate power imposed on the Body Politic.

 

Everything is up for sale, often to the same companies that fund our political parties - even Labour Party conferences have been sponsored by supermarket chains.

 

What then is left? US linguist and activist Noam Chomsky characterised such a world thus:

 

“Neoliberal democracy. Instead of citizens, it produces consumers. Instead of communities, it produces shopping malls. The net result is an atomized society of disengaged individuals who feel demoralized and socially powerless. In sum, neoliberalism is the immediate and foremost enemy of genuine participatory democracy, not just in the United States but across the planet, and will be for the foreseeable future.”

 

Today, the Murdochs' News International company's mass circulation rag, The Sun, is seeking to boost its circulation by having a special World Cup "This Is England" copy delivered by the privatised Royal Mail to every house in the country - some postal staff are reportedly threatening strike action. This paper, after all, is the one that demonised the victims of Hillsborough, that publishes wildly inaccurate stories about migrants, scapegoats benefits claimants and even gleefully over-reported on an internet countdown-to-legal-sex-with-Charlotte-Church clock as the child singer approached her 16th birthday - one of many lurid stories it has published with no regard to the impact on the people covered.   

 

In so many, many ways, The Sun epitomises the neoliberal system described by Chomsky, reinforcing the status quo, trivialising society into a succession of scandals, celebrities and celebrity scandals. Its owners, who also control the equally sensationalist and right-wing Fox News in the USA, have grown rich on its sales and, needless to say, the last thing they want to challenge is the way the world works.

 

But - look who wants you to buy this large piece of toilet paper? I wonder why.

 

You know what to do. Membership applications can be found here: https://my.greenparty.org.uk/civicrm/membership/joining

CAUTION: This man (below) is just as neoliberal as the rest of them. Former stockbroker, he is keen to increase your taxes and cut them for millionaires, cut regulations on the banks and roll back support for mums and dads in the workplace. He also voted against action to stop female genital mutilation. Neoliberal Nigel is not the friend of ordinary people. He is just the Authorised Opposition by Appointment to the Establishment.

  

A Reminder for SCOTTISH READERS - It's on 18th September...

Neither Nigel Nor Nick, for the Common Good

As I write, we face another couple of hours of the yawn-athon that is the debate between Nigel Clegg and Nick Farage, two neoliberal con men devoted to preserving a system that works for the richest people and the largest corporations on the planet.

Sounds odd? After all, aren't these two meant to be polar opposites. Well, let's see:

- both support free trade areas, either with Europe and/or the USA (or in UKIP's case, Russia) which sounds great except that in practice it means more profits for big business and fewer services for citizens from Governments no longer able to raise money from border tariffs. Their only real difference is which free trade areas they want to be part of - indeed, Farage even wants to have one with the EU, which would mean in practice we would continue to have to follow all the things he complains about, but with absolutely no say in how they would work. So the real difference between them is simply volume and rhetoric, nothing more.

- they both support "flexible" (i.e., low wage & insecure) workforces: Clegg has stripped all of us of significant employment rights while in Government; Farage wants to do away with the rest of them completely.

- they both want to subsidise foreign companies to come and build nuclear power stations in Britain.

- they both support fracking in our countryside to produce yet more carbon emissions into our smog-filled atmosphere.

- both of them know and patronise the finest restaurants in Brussels, courtesy of the rest of us.

They are a prime example of what Noam Chomsky calls "the illusion of choice". In this, we are allowed a semblance of democracy with rows and angry debates over a small range of issues - but anyone wanting to debate the fundamentals, such as how our wealth is created and used and who owns it, how it is shared, is excluded. Just as the Green Party was excluded from the debates between the two men in suits.

So, if you are bored by the prospect of another evening of these two self-regarding poseurs on the airwaves and would prefer something different, here it is. The Greens' punchy and amusing response to the "debate" on Europe. Take a look - it's for the Common Good.

When Only The Wellies Are Green...

The flooding in recent weeks in the south west and Wales has now spread eastwards, perplexing our carbon-addicted political class more and more, and even posing a dilemma for climate change deniers in UKIP. Insufficient sea walls, lack of dredging and absence of enough pumping equipment are all routinely denounced as the causes of the devastation, with angry fingers jabbed at the cash-strapped Environment Agency and it's hapless Chair, Chris Smith.

So what to do for our political leaders? Reverse the cuts in energy conservation schemes so we can begin to tackle our emissions? Or ban fracking, which is set to exponentially increase CO2 release into our atmosphere?

No. Instead, much better than that, Cameron, Clegg, Miliband and Farage all reached a consensus on their response to the crisis.

They put on some green wellies and went and looked at the water and muttered things like "We'll do everything it takes!", "never again", "we spent more than them", "we are spending more than them" or "that water looks like it came from abroad."

Yes, as our country is gripped by just the precursor of the climate change to come, our future is in the hands of the Wallies in Wellies. But sadly, frighteningly, the only thing genuinely green about them is their designer footwear.

Time to flush the lot of them through the floodgates of history and down into the drain of just-a-vague-memory.

Nigel Farage was available for comment in the pub...

(with thanks to the anonymous web person who created this pic. Please send a link and will add!)

The Only Green is Mould - the Planet Strangling Coalition of the Damned

Three years ago, the Cleggeron regime pledged itself to become the greenest government in history. Heading this mission was the criminal liar Chris Huhne, then the Energy Secretary.

Well, a bit like Mrs Huhne, few believed them then and even fewer do now. After a litany of half-hearted greenwash window dressing to try to disguise the bankruptcy of their environmental commitment (remember that the majority of Tory MPs don't even believe climate change is happening), the Coalition has now delivered the final blow to its tattered credibility on tackling the global warming crisis according to newly released Government figures.

In 2011 to 2012, a surge in use of cheap coal has increased UK carbon emissions by a staggering 4.5%, a rise of over 19 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (and overall with five other "greenhouse gases" the rise in total emissions is 3.5%), which thicken the atmosphere, trap the sun's heat and warms the planet.

In spite of claiming even now to be delivering the greenest government ever, the Coalition has stripped schemes such as the community owned renewable energy feed-in tariff of any genuine support and undertaken a programme of roadbuilding which will significantly increase emissions once completed by encouraging greater use of cars.

The recession has been touted by some, especially the Chancellor George Osborne, as a good chance to stop investing in renewable energy. In spite of the issue being a global emergency, the Government seem to think action can wait - a sharp contrast to Scotland, where the SNP Government is on target to meet a 100% renewables target for electricity generation nationwide by 2020. Likewise, as posted a few days ago, Germany continues to lead the field (and investment) in renewables at a staggering pace.

With global warming continuing apace, and even the current freezing British weather attributable to the impact of rising temperatures on sea ice melt, the need for action has never been so urgent. However, the only green in this regime is the mould encrusting their ideas and the gangrenous stench emitted by their puffed up claims of supposed concern and action.

Time is passing too quickly to delay any longer. And the Coalition, in this area as well as many others, is simply not fit for purpose.

Strike, By Gove!

Education Secretary Michael Gove has today launched into a scathing attack on the beleaguered public sector workers who are due to go on strike on Wednesday across the UK. The strikes are to highlight plans to cut the pensions benefits and increase pension contributions of workers in schools, local authorities, and other public sector services. While the media and the Deputy Prime Minister have played up to myths about supposed "gold-plated" pensions in the public sector, the fact remains that the average pension paid out is around a paltry £5,600 p.a. - this is actually over £200 p.a. lower than the average private sector pension. The accrual rate is slightly better than the private sector, but it has long been a feature that lower pay in the public sector is compensated for by a slightly better set of pension arrangements than most private employers offer.

There is plenty of evidence the public sector pension pot is perfectly viable in the long run and stands to decline as a proportion of public spending. The Government however is determined to cut it and while claiming to still be negotiating, has essentially adopted a "take it or leave it" approach for some weeks now.

And so on Wednesday there will be a one day strike. It is likely to cause significant disruption around the country, although the nation will not be paralysed - but aside from anything else, the inconvenience caused might highlight to people just how much of the work carried out by public sector workers is not noticed - until it isn't there, when its vital role becomes very apparent.

Mr Gove however has lambasted strike leaders: "I am deeply opposed to this action, and the damage it generates," he has said, claiming the leaders of Unite and other unions are simply spoiling for a fight and keen for confrontation.


Mr Gove hasn't always felt like this. Like many Tories, it always a different matter when its his own wallet he is worried about.


Here he is on strike, trying to shut down his employer when he was a journalist back in 1989.


Sauce for the goose...

A kick up the 80s: Striking Gove - kneeling, on the left! (1989)

The News of our World

Barely an hour goes by without another revelation in the phone hacking scandal that has engulfed the British media, police and political classes over the last week or so. Triggered initially by the unlikely scenario of actor Hugh Grant turning the tables on a former tabloid journalist who had bugged his calls, a rolling stone of gargantuan proportions seems to have crushed the vested interests that control huge swathes of our media. Tonight, headlines proclaiming the end of News International and the destruction of Rupert Murdoch's empire are emblazoned across several media sites.

And yet is it so? Or is the media simply playing its own game, for once at home rather than away?

While the scandal is certainly a tour de force of the incestuous relationship between our Masters, it is yet to reach any game changing watershed where the system is so broken that we finally break it down and replace it with something transparent and genuinely democratic.

It was perplexing today to listen to ex-Metropolitan Police Commissioner Andy Hayman giving his testimony to a Parliamentary Select Committee. As well as accepting a job with News International after investigating it for hacking, this was his response to Chairman Keith Vaz's suggestion that accepting dinner invitations from people under investigation might be seen as inappropriate:

"Not having dinner [with NI chiefs] would have been more suspicious than having it", says Hayman. The committee laughs. "We're astonished at how you're answering these questions", says Vaz, when Hayman asks why they're laughing. 

From the voicemail of murder victim Millie Dowler, through the grieving families of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan to today's revelations that even Prime Minister Gordon Brown's family medical information and bank accounts were being hacked into by the gutter press - the media's dark soul has been exposed in a huge cloud of sulphur. Suddenly, after all manner of hesitation, the politicians who previously courted Murdoch are out baying for blood. Tomorrow, the three main parties will combine to demand that Murdoch withdraws his proposed takeover of BSkyB television, prompting the hyperbolic headlines of his media rivals.

And yet...do we honestly believe that only News International have hacked people's telephones? That only the NI stable have intruded inappropriately on people's privacy, peddling papers on stories of misfortune and grief? Do we really think for a moment that, once two or three hacks have been sent to jail, a cop or two has resigned on grounds of ill health and Murdoch has contented himself with his current position as largest stakeholder of BSkyB, anything of any substance will change?

Of course not. Because this is the media's expenses-scandal moment. Just as MPs are now back to claiming more than they did before their supposed damascene conversion to paragons of thrift, so we would be deluding ourselves if we think for a second that somehow we will emerge from this cesspool with a responsible press governed by effective privacy laws and respect for the individual.

The media is the glue that holds the nation in thrall to the ruling class and its kleptocracy. That any of this has leaked out at all is simply testimony to how utterly rotten and corrupt the whole system has become. With their diet of scandal, prejudice and pap, the media is vital to establishing and reinforcing the conformity that, while permitting occasional spurts of defiance to let off pressure, ultimately ensures continuing consensus around our current parliamentary system and socio-economic set up. In the end, the Establishment might wipe away the seeping pus when it inevitably oozes through the cracks, but it will not lance the boil it depends on so very much. The politicians who will vote tomorrow are the same people who last week courted Murdoch and will do so again next week, or month. A few, like Clegg, will claim to have warned about Murdoch, yet effectively did nothing to challenge him, still willingly serving in Government alongside his placemen.

While the papers fill up with the shlock horrors of the phone hack scandal that everyone has suspected for years, the Government has quietly proposed a major act of destruction on our public services with contracting out to private companies to become the virtual default in a whole range of areas. Hospitals, schools, cleansing services and more - everything is up for auctioning off under a veneer of increased choice and community control.

It is not that the hacking scandal should be a non-story. But somehow it is more than ironic that the very exposure of the Establishment's corrupt heart has yet again ensured the obscuring of the sort of issue that should be the lead on every front page. Plus ca change...

When the Porterhouse Blue comes to Westminster

In the excellent Channel 4 TV adaptation of the Tom Sharpe novel, "Porterhouse Blue", the deferential College Porter Scullion, played by David Jason, reveals what in 1982 was seen as the ultimate scandal: a British university was selling university places for money!

How times change, when we hear this week the apparent "news" that nearly every English University has put its  fees at or near the new, trebled maximum of £9,000 per academic year, to the apparent shock of the Con Dem Government. It seems no one mentioned it too them - or, rather, they truly were deaf to the protests of students that were so violently suppressed by the authorities last autumn on the streets of London.

The Government is now clearly panicking on two fronts - there is a wealth of evidence that, contrary to all their platitudinous assertions, the new fees policy is deterring potential students from applying for courses. Nil points for social cohesion and mending "broken Britain".

Secondly, and far more galling to this regime of neo-conservative financial pygmies is the prospect that the Government won't be able to afford its own policy! Sound strange when we've heard so much funding is being slashed from Universities, including public support for the humanities - apparently pointless subjects like History, English, the Arts - being reduced to absolutely nothing, zilch, not a penny?

Well, in the debt-ridden world of contemporary students, the Government is committed to lending them the cost of their fees up front, expecting them to pay it back, with interest, through most of their working lives. But it has to find the money first, and with so many Universities taking the increasingly incompetent Vince Cable at his word and charging the maximum permitted, the Government's bill is soaring. It had banked on Universities charging an average of £7,500 per student - not the 20% higher rate that is emerging.

Hence the panic this week.

Scullion: the Nick Clegg of Porterhouse?

Of course, they were warned, but they ignored their opponents, preferring to cast honest young people as bloodthirsty anarchists and revolutionaries. We face the surreal prospect that British Universities are increasingly enrolling more and more overseas students with the cash to help them survive, while the hysterical rightwing press, who supported the Government's policy changes, carp on about too many foreigners in UK educational establishments. Meanwhile, with India now emerging as a new world superpower, its well-regarded Universities are offering British students degree courses which will cost them 40% less than going to a UK establishment. Even the Mexican President has offered sunnier university options at lower than the UK cost to British students - immediately after talks with Clegg.

So well done to Vince and the Cleggeron. If there is any advertisement more clearly speaking against Coalition Governments, its this hybrid Lie that passes for the British Government. They are dismantling our Welfare State, our NHS and our education system piece by piece allegedly to save us from a non-existent economic catastrophe. The levels of outright dishonesty are beyond belief.

But of course, just as Scullion ends up as the enfeebled puppet of the Establishment in Porterhouse Blue, so the Liberal Democrats have sold their souls out even faster than they have sold the country down the river. As the Dean says in the final scene to the stricken Porter-become-Master, "Master may not have been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but he will certainly die with one in it."

And die they will, starting with the elections on 5 May. And deservedly so.

--------------------------------

On the day Parliament debated the new fees regime for English Universities, thousands of young people and their supporters demonstrated peacefully in London. The only significant casualty of the day was student Alfie Meadows, who was left brain damaged after being assaulted by a police officer who has never been identified. Watch the horsemen cometh on this video, see the fear induced on the faces of British citizens asserting their right to stand and protest. This is Liberal Democrat Britain. I hope they are proud of themselves while they still can be.