Flashman Cameron calls Dennis Skinner a dinosaur

Oh look, Cameron gets asked a question which irks him and straight away resorts to nasty jibes and insults. It does seem to me that Cameron sees the House of Commons as a bothersome inconvenience distracting him from gala lunches and cosy meetings at Chequers.

The London Riots & David Cameron's Big Society

So what have we all learnt, well judging by the twitter, facebook and phone-ins we can certainly agree that people are very, very angry & shocked over what happened in the London, Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, Salford, Bristol and West Brom. It is always a shame to see the surge of "Hang them high, birch them low" Daily Mail style knee-jerking but after what we've seen over the last week who am I to argue with them?

People took the opportunity to run amok, simple as that. This isn't a protest...it's simple scumbag criminality. The very second they new that police in Tottenham were confined to barrack they went out and started stealing. Then the rest of country's scumbags decided they wanted in too. We all know this...I say it to give a background of how I see it because ultimately we HAVE to look for the reasons behind this otherwise we'll be here again sometime soon. Given the background of cuts to police and fire services it is irresponsible of the coalition to pretend that frontline services can cope with emergencies like this with a massively reduced budget and much less manpower. The young police officers and fire crews who put themselves in harms way this week deserve to have this looked at because they always have our backing if we expect them to go out and bring order to anarchy.

The problem at the moment I see is that to give a reason for these riots seems to be viewed as making excuses...let's be clear (Politician speak!), these little rats where looting and torching local family run businesses with people living in the flats above. See it unfold in our own neighbourhoods or live on our tv screen was appalling. So what factors meant that given the chance to going a rampage people took the opportunity so readily and so widely? There will also be economic factors at play, these are difficult times...jobs are scarce, benefits and services are being cut, families are broken. There is a just a void in these places and gangs and the opportunity to riot fill that. When violent crime takes place the rest of the country doesn't care as long it is is contained & away from the rest of us.

With all this there is no shame in the criminal behaviour because it's seen as taking a bit back from a society that wants to ignore you. There is also a lack of family and community pier groups to re-enforce the pride in being honest. It's an ever-decreasing circle then. Operation Trident was an attempt to police this in a more measured way but we will definitely have to look at where we are with that. My point is that going with the easy, instand reaction of coming down on these people like a tonne of bricks then doing nothing else is only a temporary solution. My thought is that David Cameron will finally get support for his oft-relaunched, oft-rejected Big Society but it will only work if this time he finally puts some funds and resources behind it. Things like SureStart centres are the Big Society but *gasp, shock, horror* they are coming from local government...if you can explain what's wrong with this let me know. Cameron's bizarre obsession with localism and federalisation is a postcode lottery writ large and it's not what we need because these communities where action is needed most have already lost that lottery.

One other thing we can be re-assured that the ordinary people of this country will always rise to challenges like this. Armies of clean-up volunteers have been spontaneously coming together to help restore high-streets to order and helping shop-owners get back on their feet...if there is a Big Society this is it, it is restorative rather than preventative though and it's effectively running on adrenalin...if we are to take this and apply it to the communities in question we need cash and resources. Liverpool jumped aboard The Big Society with gusto but quickly backed off when people realised it was little more than a fig leaf for government cuts, if Big Society relaunch #18 (I think that's what we are up to now) is to work when it's needed most then it has to be more than a bumper-sticker.

David Cameron seems to look massively annoyed whenever the job of PM involves something other than gala lunches and meeting famour people...he is a classic captain-of-industry figurehead chairman, well hopefully this week proves you can't do the job from the golf-course (or in this case Tuscany). He needs to work at establishing things that will make improvements to our inner cities and then people will engage...at the moment all he's done is to create a void (through cuts) and created a name for what he hopes will spontaneously fill it. If the Big Society is as important to him as he makes out then he's now got to put up or shut up.

David Cameron playing to the galleries AGAIN

Good old David Mitchell for laying bare the bonkersness of David Cameron's pathetic showboating over public services

That's precisely what David Cameron thinks about government. He simply can't understand what all the guys in headsets – the civil service – are up to. And he says it's not just him they're annoying – they're pushing past or obstructing the whole private sector. In an extraordinary speech to the Conservatives' spring conference last weekend, he called them the "enemies of enterprise". To him, they're the Klingons.

He said he was "taking on… the bureaucrats in government departments who concoct those ridiculous rules and regulations that make life impossible for small firms". On the face of it, this is simple crowd-pleasing stuff. It's easy to slag off the faceless bureaucrats, who supposedly waste our time and money with all their stupid rules. It's convenient to forget that bureaucrats, or civil servants as they're called when they're not being victimised, don't actually make rules, they just enforce them. Maybe, sometimes, they enforce them officiously. Maybe, sometimes, the processes they "concoct" for enforcing them are unnecessarily time-consuming. Maybe fewer of them could enforce the rules just as effectively. But they don't make the rules, Parliament does.

In seeking to blame the civil service for the rules as well as their enforcement, I think this speech is more sinister than Cameron's usual second-rate demagogy and I'm surprised it didn't attract greater attention. To me, these remarks are just as damaging as the prime minister's disparagement of multiculturalism, which rightly drew criticism, and a truer reflection of his political standpoint. Here he's breaking new ground for his evidence-averse Thatcherite ideological crusade.

The whole premise of this government, of its NHS policy, of the "big society", of the "free schools" initiative is that the public sector sucks. The private sector, according to the Tories, beats it for efficiency every time, can be just as compassionate and, at the top, "rewards enterprise". Meanwhile the top of the public sector merely "pays people more than the prime minister".

But in this speech Cameron takes the argument further. By labelling civil servants as enemies of business, he's trying to make them responsible, not just for the failings of the public sector, but also those of the private: "Every regulator, every official, every bureaucrat in government has got to understand that we cannot afford to keep loading costs on to business," he says. "If I have to pull these people into my office to argue this out myself and get them off the backs of business then believe me, I will do it."

He's always said that, when the state wastes money, it's because of the bureaucrats. Now he's also saying that, if private enterprise fails to grow, prosper or fill the gap that shrinking government creates, that's not a flaw in George Osborne's economic policy, that, too, is because of the bureaucrats. In short, whatever goes wrong is the bureaucrats' fault.

If he can get this to stick, it's a masterstroke. It's what Mao was doing when he declared war on sparrows or intellectuals. In difficult times, deft powermongers deliver up whipping boys for the disgruntled. By picking on civil servants, Cameron has made an excellent choice: they work for him, so it's hard for them to complain; they enforce government policies so if policies fail, he can blame the enforcement; yet if they succeed, he can keep the credit.

As a policy, however, it's meaningless. He can't act separately from bureaucrats, he has to act through them. Everything he does – every transparency initiative, every "big society" clarification document, every restructuring of the NHS or the welfare system, creates work for bureaucrats. He also said in the speech: "There's only one strategy for growth we can have now and that is rolling up our sleeves and doing everything possible to make it easier for businesses to grow", without acknowledging that it's the bureaucrats' sleeves he's talking about, not his own or those of his party faithful.

Cameron also doesn't realise, or is wilfully ignoring, how important our large and basically effective bureaucracy is to our place in the front rank of free nations. Without the civil service, acts of Parliament are only words and elections just millions of little slips of paper, like they are in Afghanistan. Civil servants don't merely oil the wheels, they're the axles that join them. Without them David Cameron and his policies would be no more a government than Ian Hislop sitting in a field being sarcastic would be an episode of Have I Got News For You.

Quote on Cameron

Brilliant quote from an article in The Guardian that needs preserving and repeating :

"I don't have a phobia about Tories. That would suggest an irrational response. I hate them for a reason. For lots of reasons, actually. For the miners, apartheid, Bobby Sands, Greenham Common, selling council houses, Section 28, lining the pockets of the rich and hammering the poor – to name but a few. I hate them because they hate people I care about. As a young man Cameron looked out on the social carnage of pit closures and mass unemployment, looked at Margaret Thatcher's government and thought, these are my people. When all the debating is done, that is really all I need to know."

Tories change wikipedia to fit with Cameron's jibe at Gordon Brown

Another under-reported Tory gaff

The Tories have admitted a member of staff altered a Wikipedia entry on the artist Titian after a row between Gordon Brown and David Cameron.

During exchanges at prime minister's questions, the Tory leader mocked Mr Brown for talking of Titian at 90, when he said in fact he had died age 86.

Shortly afterwards a Wikipedia user registered at Tory HQ moved Titian's birth date forward by four years.

The party admitted an "over-eager" member of staff had been responsible.

Wikipedia is an online encyclopaedia founded in 2001 and based on wikis - open source software which lets anyone alter an entry.

The issue of Titian was raised during prime minister's questions when David Cameron referred to comments made by Mr Brown last month at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Mr Brown had said: "I'm reminded of the story of Titian, who's the great painter who reached the age of 90, finished the last of his nearly 100 brilliant paintings, and he said at the end of it, 'I'm finally beginning to learn how to paint,' and that is where we are."

He was speaking in the context of people learning how to deal with the current economic crisis.

'Incorrect entry'

In the House of Commons Mr Cameron said, to laughter from Conservative MPs: "You told us the other day you were like Titian aged 90. The fact is Titian died at 86."

Shortly afterwards several people emailed the BBC taking issue with this claim, saying there was no certainty about the age at which Titian died. BBC 2's Daily Politics also reported that his Wikipedia entry suggested he had lived to 91.

At 1234 GMT, shortly after PMQs ended, the page was changed by someone registered as being at the Conservative Party's HQ in London.

The artist's date of death was altered from 27 August 1576 to 27 August 1572.

A Conservative spokesman said: "This was an over-eager member of staff putting right an incorrect entry on Wikipedia."

At 1229 GMT, another user - registered as being in Sutton, Surrey - altered Titian's date of birth from c.1485 to c.1490.

This, when combined with the intervention by the Conservative HQ user's intervention, would have made his lifespan 81 or 82 years.

The page has since been changed a number of times and there has been a heated debate taking place citing different authorities' views on Titian's most likely birth and death dates.

Perhaps it's some sort of disgrace and someone should carry the can and resign for some reason?

BBC NEWS | Politics | Cameron student photo is banned

BBC NEWS | Politics | Cameron student photo is banned

How very, very sinister...A photo of Dave Cameron posing with his aristocracy chums in their exclusive university society turns up. Then mysteriously the company holding the copyright make a "policy decision" not to allow it to be published.


what £1000 got you at your local tailors back then

The Bullingdon Club sounds proper old school debauched upper-class so you can see why the Conservatives wouldn't want people getting an image of their great white hope as a priveliged, arrogant public school boy (which unfortunately for them his is). The BBC obviously think it's worth seeing as they got an artist to copy it (see it here).

It can't be nearly as embaressing as Tony Blair's barnet in this piccie.

The main thing about this whole thing is that the photography company have shown the Tories how easy it is to come to a "policy decision".