It’s got lovely production values, but honestly, I think Tom Harris’s status as Labour’s number one bloogger doesn’t deserve this level of adulation…

.. but then I’m just bitter.

If you live in London, you may have noticed it was pouring down yesterday. According to Thames water, the rain has meant that we’ve been dicharging lots of sewage directly into the Thames. Nice.

On top of that, there’s a lot more sewage to come as the city gets bigger. It’s the one inevitable consequence of population growth.

Thankfully, there’s a solution – a big tunnel under the Thames to take the sewage away from the river. I’ve talked before about the government’s schemes to improve sewage facilities in London, which is both a magnificent engineering proposal and a good thing generally.

Yet Tory Hammersmith and Fulham Council and Tory Candidate Shaun Bailey aren’t supporting these plans.   Even Boris Johnson disagrees with them.

Actually, watching Shaun Bailey’s blustering performance onthe Daily Politics I suspect what the Hammersmith and Fulham campaign is about is trying to generate false outrage for political advantage.

It’s got all the hallmarks. Misleading claims (that local green space would be lost), complaints that residents would not have flooding concerns addressed (when flooding is a seperate problem entirely, and being funded seperately), claims to simply be speaking up for “concerned residents” who magically share their views, strenous denials of actual opposition (so you don’t have to debate the merits). It’s a well worn trick.

What they’re trying to do is make enough of a splash out of sewage to  cover their opponents with ordure, without commiting themselves either way. In a way, that double talk is even worse than outright opposing the plans. At least that would have the virtue of leaving them actually responsible for the sewage discharges.

Sometimes during the long dark equinoxal nights, I wonder whether it is wrong to be so relentlessly partisan.

I know Conservatives are good people, I know they care passionately for our country, so why should I devote so much time to making mock of them and their party. Does perhaps the fault lie not with the Tory stars but with me?

But then I read about Zac Goldsmith’s tax dodging financially irrelevant residential status while preaching to the rest of us about sustainable lifestyles, or William Rees-Mogg’s election leaflet for his kids fascinating article about Somerset marginals and Mr Cameron’s clunking efforts to rebrand the Rees-Moggs (Jake Mogg, anyone?), and most of all when I read Michael Spencer’s corporate fundraising letter interview on Business taxes with the FT, and I realise that I was right after all.

It’s not Nancy Mogg that’s the problem with the Tories, it’s what they would do, given half a chance, and how crashingly obvious their efforts to hide it are.

I have no idea why various policy people get so excited by Philip Blond. Everything he says sends my inner bullshit detector into sirens blaring overload.   Even the title of his new thinktank make’s me think of Johnson from Peepshow.   ResPublico/ResPublicus, anyone?

Anyway, whenever someone perfectly sensible tries to get their head arounds this stuff, they end up writing a thousand words on the complex inner contradictions and fuzzyness on specifics inherent in the “Red Tory” project, which is a polite Thinktank way of saying it’s a load of old toss.

I have a simpler version. It’s toss,  with the sole interesting feature being that it is fashionable toss.  Why it is fashionable is a far more interesting a question than what Philip Blond is actually saying.*

I mean read this stuff:

“A new power of association could be delivered to all citizens so that if they are indeed in an area that receives public services in a form that can be identified both by sector and by type and if area specific budgetary transparency is delivered such that each place knows what is being spent on it, then if those services are less than they should be in terms of quality, design or applicability, then there should be a new civil power of pre-emptory budgetary challenge that is given to any associative group that claims to represent those in its area”

Why is it such waffle? Because if it wasn’t, if it was clear and you knew anything about housing, you’d probably say something like, “ah, like a Tenant management organisation you mean?  But hold on, arent’ they part of the state that’s destroying society a paragraph ago…”  and then you’d go, “ah, this is all toss”.

Which it is. So don’t bother yourselves with it.

(BTW, If the transcript of the launch is to be believed, the one thing that can be said about red Toryism is that it is resolutely, indefatigably opposed to commas. This is not good.)

As someone once said to me – Many things that are provocative are not worth arguing with. Red Toryism is one such.

UPDATE: I am joining much wiser minds already aboard the tosh-wagon.

 Paul and Freethinkingecon have the goods.

* I suggest the answer to this conundrum, as both James Crabtree and Sunder Katwala hint, is that it is fashionable because it is a political construct created for the benefit of the leadership of the Conservative party, and the whole thing is comprehensible as a phenomenon only in those terms.  

Both Sunder and James suggest that we will know whether to take these ideas seriously if Cameron commits to them. My view is different: There are no interesting policy ideas here seperate from already existing moderate toryism. That’s why it’s all so appallingly written and vague.   Medieval property relationships butter no tax credits.

So all we will see is the existing policy agenda given a “progressive” coat of paint in order to justify a series of glaring contradictions between Conservative aspirations and the impacts of their policies and budgets.  In “liberal” terms this will be a shonky knock off of the real thing, with the vague hope that communitarian bodging will reduce the need for money in the making of a fairer society.

It won’t.

(Update -Ugh, what a horrible typo in the headline. Sorry. Fixed now.)

In the course of my day job, I spent much of yesterday listening to the debates in the House of Lords on the Queen’s speech. Yesterday, the Lords discussed economics.

Most of the media attention focussed on Lord Sugar’s maiden speech, which is natural, if a little depressing, becasue there was a really excellent speech by Lord Skidelsky which was very cutting about Conservative economic policy.

Skidelsky is worth listening to, both as a biographer of Keynes, and as someone truly non partisan, or perhaps pan-partisan -  he now sits as a crossbencher, having been a member of Labour, the SDP and the Conservatives in the past.

Hey says:

“Since 2008, Governments and central banks all over the world have been implementing stimulus policies. I would argue that in combination these packages have cut off the slide into another great depression and may well have been instrumental in bringing about the first green shoots of recovery.

“However, a lot people who ought to know better are ready to say that the stimulus is no good, it only makes things worse and it ought to be stopped as soon as possible. Some of these benighted souls are to be found among the leaders of the Conservative Party. The shadow Chancellor has dismissed the stimulus as “a failure” and as “ill conceived”. At the CBI on Monday, David Cameron said that recovery depended on cutting the Government’s deficit. By contrast, the Prime Minister said:

“Choking off recovery by turning off the life support prematurely would be … fatal to British jobs, British prosperity and British growth”.

I do not always agree with what the Prime Minister says, but on this occasion he was absolutely right and I support him.”

RTWT.

Dept of things that make you go hmmm:

An eagle eyed reader notices this delicious juxtaposition of Tory priorites and principles on their website. 

Monday: “Andrew Mitchell slams Labour for spending money on projects that contribute to global warming”.

Tuesday:  The Tories say – “The Silverstone circuit is vital to the local economy”.

Ahhh, Motor racing. The greenest sport there is.

So, when exactly are Northants Tories being told that Silverstone can take a running jump if the FIA want state support?

As Andrew Mitchell says, “This will send a message to the rest of the world that we are ready to lead from the front on ending environmentally harmful subsidies”.

I propose the setting up of an elite club for commentators and bloggers who have spent some time telling anyone who will listen that something won’t happen,  not been listened to by their fellows, and then been proved absolutely right.

Last week, John Rentoul became the founder member and President Emeritus of the smug prognosticators – with his prediction that Tony Blair would not become EU President.

On a smaller scale, I established membership rights by being vindicated, proved right and made a seer amongst men by news of the unanimous election of Tony Lloyd as chair of the PLP, and the evaporation of yet another heavily trailed yet insubstantial plot against Gordon Brown.  This is a subject I have bored on about at great length to the indifference of everybody, except perhaps Events, Dear Boy.

But I was right. Yay me. 

Honestly, If I were a lobby correspondent and someone came up to me whispering of another super secret plot to unseat the PM, I’d want to happyslap them, then text the video to my editor as proof that I don’t always swallow the blather I’m fed.

Anyway, onto the foundation of the smug prognosticators.

Entries are welcome – Remember, all entries must be for predictions that were against the conventional media wisdom about a story, completely ignored in the coverage, then proved totally right.

Our motto? “Ita ut heri tibi narravi ” Latin for “As I told you yesterday…”. The coat of arms will be a potrait of  Cassandra, rampant, above a crushed Rees-Mogg and Toynbee.

It’ll probably the most exclusive (and misanthropic) club in politics.

If the Tories are elected, we’ll get an emergency Budget. Out of this political hat, the Tories need to pull an enormous rabbit. But what could it possibly be?

This question is raised by the Financial Times leader today. Their leader brings out the essential tension between what the Tories say they want to achieve and what they propose to do.  We see the hat – but rabbit is being carefully hidden. 

Now, I’m an odd Labour partisan in that I welcome the language the Tories are using, but am deeply, deeply sceptical of their policy commitment to delivering anything like what they talk about.

So whenever the Tories announce some new insight into what they’d do if elected, I’m interested  in whether it undermines or re-inforces that scepticism.

Cameron’s “We’ll have an emergency budget” announcement and speech to the CBI today suggests we need a budget that reduces the deficit and encourages short term growth. 

Well, yes. That sounds good.  I’d also like a magic carpet scrappage scheme, if you’re offering.

Usually, policies that encourage short run growth come at a price – lower tax receipts or higher state spending. For example, American conservatives love to talk about the success of the Reagan tax cuts in reviving the US economy, but are less eager to discuss the soaring deficits those tax cuts led to.

On the other hand, if a government wants to reduce the deficit immediately it needs to reduce spending or increase taxes, or some combination thereof.  My guess is that the Venn diagram of  ”Budget items that encourage short term economic growth” and “Budget items that reduce the deficit” can be drawn on sperate pieces of paper*  

In our situation we need some kind of stimulus to demand to make up for low private sector investment in the short term- and that requires tax cuts or state spending.

In the medium term, when the economy returns to growth and private sector investment and borrowing are up, then the state, enjoying higher tax receipts and lower costs of recession, should be paying down debt. But we’re not at the medium term yet.

In the meantime, If  David Cameron is to do what he says he wants to do – encourage immediate growth, reduce the deficit, while still spending on social projects like Welfare and Swedish schools - then he needs some equivalent of North Sea Oil or the 90s tech boom to give him a supply of funds that would allow him to encourage growth via lower taxes, be socially reformist and reduce deficits.

For the life of me, I can’t think what that particular Rabbit might look like.

But then I’m stuck in the bureaucratic age and am limited by my statist outlook.

So I leave the comments box open for suggestions.

* It’s very possible to pay down debt and have a strong growing economy – Clinton managed it, after all, though Eisenhower failed - but those times tend to be associated with periods of  fast rising private sector demand – booms.  The state is much better at paying off debt in those times, rather than crowding out private investment.

Sometimes these nutty libertarian types make me proper laugh they do.

Here’s Paul Staines trying to claim that spending money on railway stations is merely a tool for cynical Labour propaganda designed to save Labour seats. (H/tip Constantly Furious)

Wow. Big train stations are in cities and industrial towns. Cities and industrial towns tend to elect Labour MPs. Ergo – It’s all a plot!

Too right. But it doesn’t stop there, Paul, oh no.

Our nefarious intent spreads far beyond merely making a Train station less of a miserable place to spend an hour or so.

You know what other major infrastucture tends concentrate in population heavy Labour seats?

Complex water and sewage systems.

You guessed it. We’re  spending a fortune on renewing urban water mains.

Yup, that’s  Labour buying off our voters that is, spending taxpayers money, just so our rivers don’t stink of effluvia and toilet waste and the toilets of the proles don’t back up with… well, you know. 

What’s more we’re not going to build a single major water main outside a big city filled with Labour seats. How’d'you like them apples?

We’re swines. Despicable, Brilliant swines.

When I come into work each day, I wolk past a poster advertising Britney Spears’s greatest hits album. As is the norm, it contains a prominent refereece to her website.

Every time I see it, I think the pop minstrel has developed a second career as a specialist fruiterer.

www.britneyspears.com

 If only you could have apostrophes in URLs, the problem would be solved. It would also send an entire generation of pedants completely barmy, which would be no bad thing.