Author Archives: Mark Pack

So, Gordon Brown proudly announces that 1,000 troops are to be withdrawn from Iraq.

The BBC headlines the story “UK troops in Basra cut by 1,000”.

Job done? Well, one small problem. You see, Brown might say “1,000” and the BBC might report “1,000” but you know what? 500 of those troops were already coming home anyway. So it’d more be a matter of “Brown announces withdrawal of 500 troops and then adds in 500 more in the hope that no-one would remember that was already happening anyway”.

As Ming Campbell says:

“Any troop withdrawal from Iraq is welcome, but this is a cynical …

The 2005 general election and 2007 local elections in Eastbourne were Conservative-Liberal Democrat fights (score so far: 1 Conservative MP, 1 Lib Dem run council). So anyone care to speculate where this barchart, which graces the latest Conservative leaflet comes from?

I await with eager anticipation the usual cries of outrage from the Conservative / Labour (delete as appropriate) hacks who of course believe 100% that they are perfect and it’s absolutely outrageous for anyone to criticise them and anyway, don’t you know that David Lloyd George …

Over the last six weeks there have been twenty council by-elections in the key Westminster constituencies* for the next general election. Looking at these twenty results provides a much more useful story of what is happening in the areas which really matter to each party than overall council by-election results.

What story do they tell?

Good news for the Liberal Democrats in the Lib Dem – Tory battleground seats: an average swing of 7.1% swing from Tory to Lib Dem with a net gain of one for the Lib Dems in the four contests.

Good news for the Liberal Democrats in the Lib …

At their party conference, Labour were distributing various nationally produced full colour leaflets for local use. One of them – about crime – includes a bar chart.

“Ah,” I hear some of you say, “but how can a national leaflet contain an accurate and reasonable bar chart for use locally?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” I hear some of  you say, “it’d be a national bar chart, won’t it? Perhaps the number of MPs in Parliament? That would be same wherever the leaflet goes out.”

Well – that would be a decent excuse. Except that here’s the bar chart which the leaflet contains: 

…

Nine out of the last ten opinion polls have shown the Liberal Democrats support to be either the same or higher than the previous poll by that polling company.

Does this mean:

a. That the Liberal Democrats are on the slide into total oblivion with every single member of the party taking every waking moment to talk about the leadership, or

b. Something else.

If you think (a), congratulations. Award yourself a job on a newspaper or news show of your choice. If (b), sorry – try again next time.

PS If you’re a Guardian reader you may be confused by this claim as they …

Please, please, could you just make this the last time you use the wrong logo for the Liberal Democrats?

In case you are in any doubt – the logo you keep on using is WRONG. As in, it is NOT THE RIGHT ONE. I mean, even manages to get it right whilst the Guardian gets it WRONG. Again and again – even though you’ve managed to switch to using the new Labour and Tory logos.

PS Could you use the right one next time? Please?

Labour’s Rochdale candidate – Simon Danczuk – has just done a leaflet opposing the idea of fortnightly weekly rubbish collections. He thinks it is a “crazy idea”.

Only one slight problem. Can you guess the connection between the man who is his election agent and the man who was leader of the council when the decision to introduce fortnightly collections was made?

Yup, there are one and the same. So he’s campaigning against something his very own agent introduced. Oops.

You’d have thought that by now that someone in the Conservative Party might have learnt to check their policy review documents carefully before printing them. I mean, how embarrassing is it to publish a document that points four different contradictory ways on the same policy, be caught out using ten years old data or propose a new law that is, er…, already about to come into force anyway?

Well, they’ve done it again. And again. Not one but two more blunders.

Blunder one – following from their triumphant success of proposing a change in the legal age of smoking which is …

Reading Conservative policy documents seems to be getting a bit of a hobby of mine. It certainly has its highlights (such as the bit calling for a policy that, er…, is already happening, the spectacularly ill-timed mortgage policy, the lopsided priorities for tax cuts, the policy that ends up requiring MPs to be opted out of the Freedom of Information Act after all, the ten years out of date figures and the impressive ability to point four different ways on the same policy point).

And now I can unveil … the strange case of page three.

You’d have thought managing to flip flop between four different positions on the same policy point in one document, or perhaps using data ten years out of date, would be hard to top, but the Conservative Party’s policy review process has now managed to top even its previous incompetence.

As Gavin Whenman has spotted:

Michael Ancram’s swipe at David Cameron has kind of buried today’s publication of the Tory’s Public Services Improvement Policy Group’s report, but it is worth our attention:

“Proposal 20 – We propose that the next Conservative government should consult on raising

…

What the Conservatives said in Guildford before the local elections:

Guildford Conservatives have pledged to keep weekly refuse collection.

And I think you can guess what they’ve decided to do now the elections are over, can’t you? Yup, here it is in all its glory:

Fortnightly waste collections waiting in the wings

AROUND 1,800 Guildford households having all recyclable rubbish – including leftover food – collected weekly from their doorsteps will have the rest of their waste picked up fortnightly.

Johan Eliasch doesn’t like the recent Conservative lurch to the right and is quitting.

Hat tip: Benedict Brogan.

UPDATE: The Times now has more on the story:

After a week in which Mr Cameron took fresh hardline positions on crime and immigration, sources close to Mr Eliasch told The Times that he was upset that Mr Cameron was taking his party to the Right at a time when it should be focusing on capturing the centre ground … “Changing direction in mid-course is a mistake,” a source close to Mr Eliasch said. An added headache for the Tory leadership is that

…

That’s the ambitious plan proposal launched by Ming Campbell today and set to be debated at the party’s autumn conference next month.

Full details of the plan, along with the document to be debated at conference, are over on the Liberal Democrat website.

… you see worldwide financial and economic problems triggered by a poorly regulated sector of the US economy?

a) Propose to scrap all the regulations in the same sector of the UK economy?
b) Do something else?

If your answer was (a), congratulations – you too are John Redwood.

Yes, I’ve been reading once more the Conservative Party policy proposals he and his group came up with.

This time, please turn to page 60:

Mortgage Regulation. We see no need to continue to regulate the provision of mortgage finance, as it is the lending institutions rather than the client taking the risk.

10 …

Nick Clegg and Simon Hughes had an article in Liberator magazine recently outlining the policy proposals they will be putting to the party’s autumn conference. That article is online, and there is also a flavour of the plans in today’s Independent:

Up to 600,000 illegal immigrants should be given the right to “earn” full citizenship, the Liberal Democrats said yesterday. It is the first major party to lean towards advocating an amnesty for such migrants.

Nick Clegg, the party’s home affairs spokesman, said a route to citizenship was the only way to deal with people who may have been in

…

Back to my favourite Conservative Party policy document, the one from John Redwood and co. Having covered its impressive ability to squeeze four different, contradictory proposals on data protection into the same document, not to mention its use of figures that are a decade out of date, it’s on to taxation this time.

Chapter 10, section 6, pages 82-3 is the list of proposals. And what do we find?