| |
Former Labour minister Clare Short has hinted that she may rejoin the party in Parliament as new Prime Minister Gordon Brown ushers in a "new beginning". ...As Churchill once smugly opined, it takes a certain ingenuity to re-rat.
"Who knows, I might take the whip back before I leave Parliament," she said.
Is Another Tory MP About to Jump ShipAt which point the dykes broke. The following were named in added comments as possible defectors:
Miserable journey to and from Heathrow. Overcast and distinctly unsummery day. No lightening of the prevailing gloom, when ....
...when bandwagons roll, but here comes an exception.I will not be taking the blog posts down.This is my first takedown notice. I’m framing it and replacing my framed copy of Joan Burton in her pink suit with that on the shrine. Sorry Joan, the fickle tastes of bloggers. It was nice though. Really.
It seems Sky Handling Partners have called the Gardai too. They also chastised me on my use of bad language. Yes, really! How many people have ever seen a solicitor’s letter than contains the word cunt at least three times?And it's been 35 long years since Arkell v. Pressdram.
the nameless source of the quote in the [original] piece "He makes junior staff sit separately in a dingy bunker with no natural daylight. Lunch breaks are militarily monitored. Morale's miserable."Her Facebook page (since changed) was describing her as
spending her birthday with her solicitor (Thomas Mansfield employment solicitors).
A popular view (part two)Foden continues by asking:King Solomon's Mines is currently being edited for Penguin Classics by Robert Hampson in its first full scholarly edition, and She is one of six "boy's own books" being reissued by the same publisher.
what is Penguin doing, bringing it out now along with five other "epic tales of adventure and bravery", namely Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda, Erskine Childers's The Riddle of the Sands, John Buchan's The 39 Steps and GK Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday? And why is Headline Review bringing out its own set of boy's tales next month, including The Lost World and The Man Who Was Thursday.He suggests:
The simple answer is that they hope to capitalise on the success of The Dangerous Book for Boys, Conn and Hal Iggulden's guide to scrapes and derring-do. This is obvious from the deep-dyed, embossed covers of the Penguin books, whose livery imitates the Igguldens', which itself owes much to the way boy's own titles by the master of the game, GA Henty, were marketed in the late 1880s and after.He adds, quite properly:
the imperialist ethos is certainly there, more or less explicitly, in the books Penguin has chosen to remarket in this way. But their continuing appeal cannot simply be explained away as retro-imperialismHis critique then trails off into observations on Henty, Conrad and Madame Bovary. En passant, what is it about the Guardian and Bovary? A google of the two terms shows over 54,000 hits. And then there's the delicious Gemma Bovary over and above! Foden's conclusion was what particularly linked to Malcolm's own thoughts:
It must be better that boys take a risk with literary adventure than numb their minds with screens and headphones. The mind-befogging potentiality of electronic media is the real doom now. That's what must be escaped from, not into.Malcolm would demur from that only in so far as "screens and headphones" do not always, necessarily get in the way of involvement in literature, as Sony, Microsoft and Palm seem to agree. What odds that an electronic hand-held toy would do more to up the reading quotient of school-boys than any class library? It's the "golf-bag" effect: the steeper the entry fee, the more desirable, the glitzier the activity. Essentially, though, the conclusion holds.
TURNCOATS I HAVE KNOWN - PART 1Of this item, the grimmerupnorth blogspot now evidences nary a trace.
In my very much younger days I was ( for a brief time) a member of Beckenham Labour Party. Not the most leftie of areas. But the Labour Party had some nice people. One of whom was NOT the London Labour MP Reg Race. Known as a firebrand left-winger, he served as MP for the north London cons...
criticised Conservative MPs for profiting by the sell-off of the state-owned energy company Amersham International, alleging that one Tory had made a "killing" from the deal.Now, however,
he has amassed a fortune working as a private contractor for the National Health Service...Ah, yes, perhaps so. So here's one for the hymn-sheet: Matthew 7, 15-18—
Mr Race's company, Quality Health, is one of a select band of "approved contractors" that health trusts must hire to conduct patient and staff surveys...
Quality Health, which Mr Race owns with his wife, Amanda Moore, has won contracts with 320 of the 487 NHS trusts across the UK. The company charges about £4,200 to complete each annual survey.
... the success of Quality Health has allowed Mr Race to establish a palatial home at Sutton Manor in the Derbyshire village of Sutton Scarsdale, near Chesterfield.
Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.Sphere: Related Content
Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?
Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.
A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.
... cop this: “Up close by the Kansas border in the panhandle of Oklahoma there’s a place where the terrain flattens out, it’s almost like you could take a level and put it on the highway and the bubble would sit there dead centre. And it goes on that way for about 50 miles, and in the summer, through the heat shimmer, the telephone poles gradually materialise out of the distance and they seem to to rush past you and I looked up and there was a man on top of one of them.”Thus did Jimmy Webb describe the inspiration for Wichita Lineman in a new series of Classic Singles (Radio 2, Wednesdays, 11pm). He also revealed why the song has only two verses: it was never finished. Glen Campbell asked him for a song, he sent that one as a work in progress – “and the next time I heard it was on the record”.
What first got to Malcolm about the programme was a throw-away comment about Glen Campbell's previous hit, Galveston. The second stanza fades up and down behind:
Galveston, oh Galveston,
I still hear your sea waves crashing,
While I watch the cannon flashing;
And I clean my gun
And I dream of Galveston
while the commentary goes like this:
Galveston was really more about someone caught up in the Vietnamese war ... Galveston, that was the whole war, right there.____________________________
Not bad, eh?
Malcolm has a long-term itch to look closely at subtexts and contexts of song lyrics. This originated many, many years ago when he reacted to a Cole Porter lyric:
Apart from smart vocabulary and semi-rhymes, this seems totally inappropriate to urban, urbane Porter. Wikipedia makes just that point:Just turn me loose, let me straddle my old saddle
Underneath the western skies.
On my Cayuse, let me wander over yonder
Till I see the mountains rise.I want to ride to the ridge where the west commences,
And gaze at the moon till I lose my senses,
And I can't look at hovels and I can't stand fences:
Don't fence me in.
It was Porter's least favorite song and does not have his usual signature. Originally written for an unproduced 20th Century Fox film musical, Adios Argentina, in 1934...
Ten years later, in 1944, Warner Bros. resurrected "Don't Fence Me In" for Roy Rogers to sing in the movie, Hollywood Canteen. Many people heard the song for the first time when Kate Smith introduced it on her 1944-10-08 radio broadcast. "Don't Fence Me In" was also recorded by Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters in 1944. Crosby entered the studio on July 25,1944, without having seen or heard the song. Within 30 minutes he and the Andrews Sisters had made the recording, which later sold over a million copies and topped the Billboard charts for 8 weeks in 1944-45.Put that alongside the other popular hits: say, Crosby in 1944 doing Bruce Jenkins:
Oh, I'm packing my gripThe question is latent: why in 1944-5 did these achieve such resonance? The answer, for anyone not smart enough to be ahead of Malcolm, is the date. It is safe to assume that the GIs yomping across northern Europe, or surviving the suicide of Pacific island hopping, formed one common resolution: not to return to industrial jobs in grim northern cities or to labouring on country farms. They had seen the bright lights and big cities and knew what they wanted, and where they were headed. That also is the significance of Bobby Troup's iconic (Get Your kicks on) Route 66 in 1946:
And I'm leaving today
'Cause I'm taking a trip
California way.
I'm going to settle down and never more roam
And make the San Fernando Valley my home.
Now you go through St. Louis; Joplin, Missouri;With free publicity like that, it's not surprising how fast the Los Angeles region expanded.
Oklahoma City looks mighty pretty.
You'll see Amarillo; Gallup, New Mexico;
Flagstaff, Arizona —don't forget Winona—;
Kingman; Barstow; San Bernadino.
Won't you get hip to this kindly tip
When you make that California trip?
Get your kicks on Route Sixty-six.
Malcolm repays a small debtIrish post-war asylum:Nazi sympathy, pan-Celticism or raisons d'etat?
Daniel Leach takes issue with some of the conclusions of Ireland’s Nazis, the two-part documentary broadcast on RTÉ 1 in January 2007 and reviewed in the March/April issue of History Ireland.
Sex romp in crane cab halted by cop
PUNTA GORDA --(AP) -- A police officer interrupted a couple's weekend sex romp on top of a 100-foot construction crane, but let them go with a warning, authorities said.Police went to the construction site to investigate Saturday night after bystanders spotted the couple climbing into the cab of the crane. An officer's command to come down was followed by a naked foot popping over the railing, police said.
The officer noted the couple then got dressed and climbed down.
The man, who worked at the site and had keys to the crane, told police officers he was photographing the city skyline.
Thanks to the Miami Herald (home base of the marvellously-inventive Carl Hiaasen) for that, and for suggesting that, even amid the lunacy that is southern Florida, truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. Sphere: Related Content
At last the people in a body
To the town hall came flocking:
"'Tis clear," cried they, "our Mayor's a noddy;
And as for our Corporation—shocking
To think we buy gowns lined with ermine
For dolts that can't or won't determine
What's best to rid us of our vermin! ...
Rouse up, sirs! Give your brains a racking
To find the remedy we're lacking,
Or, sure as fate, we'll send you packing!" Little hands clapping, and little tongues chattering,So Malcolm now ticks off those broken Green pledges. Others, whose mileage may vary, might prefer to undertake a similar exercise: the Green manifesto is still on line. Here's the Irish Times (as ireland.com) doing a run-down of the FF-Green corcordat for government:
And, like fowls in a farm-yard when barley is scattering.
The guarantee that existing road plans will be pursued is a double blow. First there is the Green manifesto commitment straight into the bin:
- end the use of Shannon Airport by US military forces involved in the war in Iraq;
- insist that any aircraft suspected of involvement in illegal movements of prisoners must be searched.
The Green Party will ... respect existing road contracts but, where there is concern about potential damage to communities, environment or heritage, will investigate how this can be minimised within the scope of the contract or through renegotiation.Second, the road programme notoriously provides a conveyor belt of contracts to the commercial supporters of Fianna Fáil. This was, after all, the unspoken rationale behind the Greens' "ethics" pledge:
Action is badly needed to restore public confidence in a political system that is widely seen to be operating on the basis of “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”.Add in the curious case of the bitch that barked in the night. Mary Harney ought to have been the ultimate stumbling block, for the Greens had made her an explicit target:
The Green Party will ... ban corporate, institutional or foreign-based donations.
In government, the Green Party will ensure that Mary Harney's plans for the building of private hospitals on public land are scrapped. By halting the slow privatisation of our health service and through targeted investment in our public health system, we will deliver a health system which is more efficient, more equitable, and with better outcomes for patients.
Bertie Ahern needed those two PD votes, and because he has power, he has magic powers of attraction:He advanced to the council-table:The charm he offered Harney was a move to the foreign affairs brief. She stood firm. She kept her health post "to complete unpopular, unfinished business" (as today's Irish Times leader puts it). Ms Harney/Mrs Geoghegan is some tough cookie. The Greens, with less backbone, simply folded.
And, "Please your honours,'' said he, "I'm able,
By means of a secret charm, to draw
All creatures living beneath the sun,
That creep or swim or fly or run,
After me so as you never saw!"
Invest €1 billion in additional current and capital funding for education for the first year of the next Government’s term of office, to front-load educational priorities.Now let's check that: no, not €1B: come, sir, let's call it €50M:
Provide 2,400 extra teachers at primary and secondary levels.
Not so much half-a-loaf, more a pathetic crumb.Beside, our losses have made us thrifty.
A thousand guilders! Come, take fifty!
And what happened?Great was the joy in every breast.
"He never can cross that mighty top!
He's forced to let the piping drop
And we shall see our children stop!
When, lo, as they reached the mountain-side,
A wondrous portal opened wide,
As if a cavern was suddenly hollowed;
And the Piper advanced and the children followed...
When, lo, as they reached the mountain-side,The fate of the Greens is in the pattern established by the elimination of the PDs. FF, under the present piper or the coming-man, Brian Cowan, have the Greens muzzled, and on a short leash: or is it a choke-chain?
A wondrous portal opened wide,
As if a cavern was suddenly hollowed;
And the Piper advanced and the children followed,
And when all were in to the very last,
The door in the mountain-side shut fast.
"Go," cried the Mayor, "and get long poles!Sphere: Related Content
Poke out the nests and block up the holes!
Consult with carpenters and builders
And leave in our town not even a trace
Of the rats!"
Public appearancesHow do you devise a health-care plan that is sensible and centrist, yet also stands out from the rest? That is the question faced by all the Democratic candidates for the presidency. Health care is second only to the war in Iraq among voters' concerns, so everyone with an eye on the White House wants a winning answer.
The three front-runners—Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards—have all promised to control costs and provide coverage for the 47m Americans without health insurance. All three have eschewed radical change. Instead, they are jostling over the centre ground: how to tweak America's predominantly private health-care system.
The Economist evaluation seems to put
Not unlike reforms already under way in Massachusetts and California, Mr Edwards's scheme promises an overhaul of insurance markets, subsidies to help poorer people pay their premiums and a legal requirement that everyone should buy health insurance.
Mrs Clinton offers a litany of well-known, but sensible, savings, such as shifting to electronic records, concentrating more on preventive medicine, improving the management of chronic diseases, and creating a “best practices institute” to set guidelines for optimal care. In all, she claims, $120 billion a year could be wrung out of the health system, money that could be used to pay for broader coverage.
The Obama path to universal coverage is a paler version of Mr Edwards's. It promises insurance-market reform, including the creation of a National Health Insurance Exchange...
Like Mr Edwards's, the Obama plan would levy a tax on firms that do not provide health cover. It would also demand an infusion of federal cash, to be paid for, yes, by rolling back some of the Bush tax cuts for the rich. Mr Obama's aides claim the price tag would be around $65 billion a year, though other health experts think it would be higher.
The big difference is that Mr Obama, unlike Mr Edwards, would not force people to buy health insurance. Only children would have to be covered. That soft-pedalling may please the unions, some of which dislike the idea of compelling workers to buy insurance. But it makes his plan both less efficient and less effective.
Beyond assuring decent health-care for its citizens (surely a baseline requirement of any democratic government), it ought to be a major campaign issue to clean up government. Which is why Malcolm is wondering whether such a change can come from the Democrats. The main item in this week's Economist American coverage is an appraisal of John McCain. It is, in the main, a negation of McCain's chances of being nominated, but it provides this provocative thought:
Mr McCain's last big problem is his long-standing record as a reformer. The only thing that this pugnacious man likes attacking more than Democratic vested interests is Republican vested interests. Mr McCain has used his prominent position, as a perpetual presidential candidate and chairman of three Senate committees, to savage big chunks of the Republican establishment: conservative influence-peddlers such as the televangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson (whom he has labelled evil); Republican interest-groups such as big defence companies; and a campaign-finance system skewed to benefit incumbents, many of them Republicans.The article points out that McCain was instrumental in the deserved humiliation of Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay.
It was Yates who pinpointed Breakfast Roll Man as the election winner, the one who turned to Fianna Fáil when the chips were down. Breakfast Roll Man, according to Yates, is aged 20-45, a blue-collar worker in a factory or a building site, "a self-employed electrician or Del Boy ... and the one thing he has learned is to look after himself. He likes Sky Sports, likes to drink — and now drinks pints and wine at home, likes that his wife/mot/partner can go shopping and not wreck his head if she spends too much. And he wants the kids to do better than him."The bush has been well and truly beaten about before Sheridan gets to the point, based in part on the Times own exit poll:
Health was by far the dominant issue at 45 per cent, crime next at 25 per cent, and managing the economy at 23 per cent. Bush-fire issues such as the cost-of-living (18 per cent), education (15 per cent), environment (13 per cent) and housing (10 per cent) played second fiddle.If that's the major premise in this syllogism, the minor is lurking unease, with a surprising synthesis:
Nearly 300,000 people work in the construction sector, about 12 per cent of the workforce. About eight days before polling, says Yates, an independent construction consultant, Jerome Casey, forecast a house price drop of 5 per cent this year and 10 per cent in 2008. Breakfast Roll Man saw it coming with his own eyes...Reinforcement comes from the (non-subscription) front page's lead:
For the record, Yates is predicting a "landslide" for Fine Gael in 2011 or 2012.
Leading bank says growth will drop to 3%Redundancies are up by 8%, year on year: more are due as Dell (the second largest employer in the Republic, and representing 4% of all exports) slims down, as does Eircom and the food sector.
Rising interest rates and debt cited as factors.
When it came to economics and fiscal matters, the electorate was sold a pup.It was ever thus.
senior Conservatives warned that the row was making the party look chaotic and potentially elitist and was damaging relations with activists. Even Mr Cameron's staunchest supporters are baffled by the way an apparently uncontroversial speech on a long-standing Tory policy could spark a 17-day row, infighting and a frontbench resignation.And now there's a new director of communications (or some similar big-sounding title).
Andy Coulson, the former editor of the News of the World, ... was an appointment which took both Westminster and Fleet Street by surprise. And it was quickly hailed as being an inspired move, or a high-risk appointment, in almost equal measure.Max Clifford, who has not spoken to Coulson since a much-publicised spat several years ago, said that he would find the move from newspaper journalism to public relations to be an enormous challenge, requiring skills which even the best tabloid editors may not possess. "Winning friends and influencing people is going to be harder than he thinks," predicted Clifford. "Especially as he will be working for Cameron, who is a PR man desperately trying to re-invent himself as a politician."
Lest we forget: Coulson left the News of the World in the wake of the royal-bugger [mobile phone messages, dearie, not what you're thinking] business, in which one journalist was jugged for four months, and all the rest knew nuffin'.
