African leader insists on third inquest into election, while arresting everyone he thinks could help in his enquiries but killing all of them accidentally before they can give evidence.

Other African leaders still confident that wisdom will prevail while insisting that UN intervene having spent last thirty years telling whitey to keep his nose out of African business and praising Mugabe as father of his people.

DOHERTY SPEAKS OUT

No doubt that'll be forward movement going forward, but c'mon here guys, let's have some new cover stories shall we? And can we please stop calling a shower of shit 'prudence'? Everyone's awake now, OK? Let's trail back a few weeks to 15th May and the excellent Thisismoney website report as follows:

'Mortgage lender B&B was forced to deny that it plans an emergency rights issue to prop up its balance sheet'

Well stripe me pink offisher, that was a whopper an' no mistake. At the time, Nby guffawed loudly -as did several other commentators.

Far more disturbing (while at the same time hysterically funny) was BBC business balloon Declan O'Balti's craven adoption of the 'very smart bit of restructuring' bollocks Monday morning as the fairy tale broke. And in an unrelated move, Mr Gorbachev announced a careful perestroika of the Soviet Union. Dear oh dear oh dear Auntie, get real.

Here's the full strength dear Reader:

When Crawshaw the Lionheart fessed up to Gotaspare Farthing late last Thursday that the hooves he'd mistaken for escaping directors were in fact four blokes dressed in black waving scythes about, the Scottish financial giant (who has lately matured beyond his first Northern Crock question to staff, 'What do you normally do in these circumstances?') pooped so loudly that even Merv the Swerve over at Threadneedle Street was forced to cancel yet another weekend and get involved.

David Bonderman's Texas Pacific (already sniffing around) were fast-tracked and (equally strongly sniffing smoke among the cries of F-f-f-f-f-IRRRYEEERRR!) casually offered a mere 180 million quid for a quarter of the Bank. As Darling slavered all over dashing David's outstretched cheque, the King of Swing breathed a sigh of relief before rushing back to the BoE in order to work out how the Benanke Blazes to sell the idea of buying deeper into a money pit to UK Shareholder plc.

Said the Telegraph yesterday,'The firm's £179m investment in Bradford & Bingley - for a 23pc stake in the UK lender - marks an unprecedented intervention by a buyout firm to help bolster a UK bank's finances.' Well lawk's a mercy Mr Dixon, izzat all it was?'

Superman...friend of the Rolling Stones

'Help bolster their finances' my arse: Mr Bonderman is the smart Cookie who bought the knackered Continental Airlines and then sold it on later for ten times the price. I'll wager that this time he'll do at least as well: his total risk is £580 million on an asset which the UK Government remains unwilling to see suffer a grisly demise....at least, not in public. Be sure that there are 'private' clauses in the deal. And be very sure that Bonderman will run rings round Gotafarthing and McDoom. (Nby yesterday - Page One Stuff)

THE MILIBAND WAGON ROLES ON

Rightist Tories were beside themselves with mirth over the weekend at the news of Big Prezza smothering Miliband to death by backing his candidature for Life after Death in the New Labour thing.

They are being both premature and immature: the world's only Bulimic Elephantiasis sufferer may well be the unique Montgolfier Buffoon to real people, but for many in what used to be the Labour Party he represents the Unions and what they'd like to see happen.

Those close to the Haverstock Hill Tendency insist that Rubberband is simply going through the 'he's still my Boss' motions, and believes only he can save the Party from electoral punishment at the hands of a howling mob.

Smart folks of all other Parties should give the old Gordian Knot the odd lifeline and pray that he limps on - for Labour Dave versus Tory Dave is not a contest many compassionate Conservatives would relish.

Allegedly, Tony Blair referred to Miliband when much younger as 'my Wayne Rooney'. Setting aside the obvious facial resemblance, one is left wondering whether Crony was referring to David's intellectual prowess or his well-hidden capacity for kicking people in the balls.

However, those watching the Miliband of Merry Men closely should take note of cheeky young Jimmy 'Riddle' Purnell's carefully released defiance of The Trouser Snake in Jane Merrick's Indie piece yesterday. (Labour in disarray as attacks on Brown continue)

Purnell....Merry Man

The ambitious Miliband member is an enthusiastic supporter of his leader in The Greenwood, seeing himself as the next in line.

You'll never guess what.....Tony Blair has learned to use a computer and send emails and texts since he left office. Sadly,he hasn't learned the difference between shit and putty - hence his assertion that the poo we're all in has nothing to do with the Trouser Snake. Selling gold at the wrong time? Chucking £120billion at an empty bank? Chucking £27billion at Frank Field? Doing bugger-all about cheap credit being offeredto sub-prime prospects?

(2.6.08)

the longest wait in the nhs is forthe truth

Last week, the March statistics on NHS waiting time reduction emerged - and what a transformation they were. Not only had a major leap been made, but (said The Independent):

'The March figures showed a more than 10 per cent improvement on February, suggesting the final target is likely to be hit well ahead of the end of year deadline'.

Even normally critical sources described the achievement of hitting the interim March targets as 'amazing' and 'an astonishing achievement'. Said John Appleby, the chief economist at health policy think-tank the King's Fund, "This is a fantastic achievement....it is quite staggering".

Which is, I'm bound to say, what I felt: staggered and amazed. Because whenever government statistics show something working, my amazement usually turns to scepticism. Especially when that something seems to have suddenly started working.

As late as January this year, the ever-punchy Civitas dismissed the waiting-time reduction targets as 'an impossibility', adding with ill-disguised glee that Ben Bradshaw's 10% 'buffer zone' on the aims was a naked attempt to lower the bar and manage expectations downwards.

On May 15th, the Financial Times reported that February 2008 data on waiting times progress showed the Government at 75% achievement of treatment within 18 weeks - 5% behind its 85% number on the way (in theory) to 90% at the next stage. The paper reported:

'If the milestone is to be met, a 10 percentage points improvement in a month will be required. That suggests the target will be missed, though possibly only narrowly, and chiefly in orthopaedics.'

Further, in what seemed like a mild form of Mugabeism, there was concern in some quarters that the reporting was a month behind schedule.

Other observers, however, chose to buy the figures at face value, but carp all the same. On 3rd June, the Pharmatimes website was quick to point out that

'Friday’s figures come with two important qualifiers. They measure how long patients still waiting have waited – not how long patients will have waited by the time they are treated'.

This is a fair point, in that the figures are open-ended - or put another way, a snapshot of averages, rather than case studies from start to finish. But there'd been an improvement - hadn't there? Yes there had, one anonymous senior NHS manager told the FT: because the NHS is ‘spot purchasing’ large numbers of operations from the private sector at the last minute to achieve these reductions. The Mole went on to add:

“I know of examples where the NHS has recently paid the private sector 140 per cent, and even 160 per cent, of the NHS price to try to hit the waiting time target.”

While generally enthusiastic about the new statistics, The Independent pointed out another cost of reduced waiting times:

'The British Medical Association said the figures clearly demonstrated the "hard work" of NHS staff in the "ongoing transformation" of the health service - but warned that it was also delaying the treatment of emergency patients.'

However, the overall media comment was favourable. So you'd think, would you not, that a DfH victory as big as this one would be the first flashing panel to be seen on its website - but like the two Ministers Bradshaw and Johnson, civil servants seem almost modest about what's been achieved. Indeed, I had to go through quite a bit of navigation before a pdf containing the all-important tables popped up. (On the newly created UK Statistics Authority site, I couldn't find them at all)

One of the great all-time cliches is the thing about 'lies, damned lies and statistics' but like many such things it misses the point: statistics never lie - but those presenting the columns and rows of figures will arrange the beginnings and ends of things such that, by the time they've finished, the numbers can be made to mean everything between two polar opposites.

There are two forms of waiting being measured by the ONS monitor of Government progress. One is the time between being told one needs hospital care, and actually getting it; the other how long it takes from GP referral to seeing a consultant as an outpatient.

The time slots used to break up the total periods are fairly random, and the total periods monitored equally so. As the final sections are open-ended (26+ and 13+ weeks respectively) there will always be a degree of uncertainty about what has actually been achieved - although the numbers in these extra-long delay quartiles are now so small, this seems unlikely to be very significant.

The problems start for me when one realises that (a) the quartiles themselves - especially for inpatient care waiting times - cover thirteen weeks each and (b) a '0-13' patient can be created relatively easily from a '13-26' patient. If the name of the game (and for those being set silly targets, trust me - it's always a game) is to shift patients from a long-wait quartile to a shorter one, it isn't as tough a job as one might at first think.

Let's say we want to get 30,000 patients into the 0-13 slot who were previously in the 13-26 slot. We simply grab everyone in the 0-4 weeks sub-slot and allow them to jump the queue. This automatically pulls everyone who would've been at 16 weeks by the end of the audit period back to 12 - and as this group isn't separated out, nobody will notice.

Far-fetched? Absolutely not. Says Jonathan Fielden of the BMA:

"All that has happened is that the government has put an end to the really long waits and the really short waits."

One can pull this stunt in every slot but only for so long: more to the point, what one can do is pull the stunt in a major way once - ie, whenever the targets are slipping and you badly need a good result. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

There is also the issue of success breeding success. Nothing wrong with success: but it's apparent from the new ONS statistics that between 2005 and 2008, the total universe of patients waiting fell quite markedly. Thus if one takes the total numbers waiting for inpatient care in 2005, it was 815,881. By March this year, it was 533,195. If one does the same for those awaiting a consultation, by 2008 the huge 2005 figure of 1,337,330 had become a considerably more manageable 781,279.

When I rang the DfH press office and asked why the figures had dropped so markedly, they predictably answered with the success story. Fair enough: but when I said that - on fixed staff levels - the job was getting easier and easier (and thus less of an achievement) they had a complete breakdown of understanding. They didn't see it that way, they said.

This surprised me, because we are not comparing like with like. With completely different patient universes at every stage, we are not comparing identical efficiency improvements - and in some ways, we cannot be sure for certain what happened. Did the results of the six months before this simply mean that without anyone doing anything more than normal, the waiting times were bound to go down? Did NHS administrators work all their days and weekends during March 2008 to achieve a result to get them back on track? Did the NHS simply hire a thousand more consultants? Or did the consultants decide to work 20-hour days until the numbers were back on target - and if so, why? The bottom line is that, after a certain point in the process of backlog reduction, it is not just difficult to assert for sure that greater efficiency is behind the result - it's almost impossible.

I asked the DfH for their 'line' on that, and this is what they emailed back:

'Reducing the backlog of patients waiting for NHS treatment required was the result of better organisation.'

There is more than a hint of the disingenuous in that - the response makes the success sound like a structural improvement that we can expect to continue. But this isn't the first time the backlog has been dramatically reduced: as the BBC's Panorama programme noted in 2004, the then total of 856,647 had been reduced from 1,287,543 in 1998 - a decrease of 33%. And the DfH's own response had told me that the numbers waiting when Labour came to power a year earlier were actually less - 1,058,00 t0 be exact. So, um....let's get this straight: in the first year after wicked Toryism, the list grew by 200,000. It then fell by a third in six years, and then went up by more than that in following year.

So, I said to the Minsitry, this patient universe thing isn't what you'd call a constant is it? The point earned me a harrumph from the Ministry as follows:

'People forget that ten years ago, it was not uncommon to wait more than 18 months and people died waiting for vital operations'

True Mr DfH, but then they also did more recently under New Labour. In 1997-98 the average waiting time was 99 days. That fell to 90 days in 1999-2000, but then climbed again to 95 days in 2004. But let's not have a heated debate: the Tories were quite happy to watch long-waiters die before they got a vital operation, and on the whole New Labour has tried to eradicate that - with commendable success.

It's just that - call me a picky terrier here - I was still wondering about the broader possibilities in relation to how the patient universe was cut this time around.

There are some clues available. Systemic changes in the NHS as a whole will produce fewer people coming into the referral system per se. Compared to 2005, most GP group practices are doing far more procedures at their level by upping the expertise they have - expertise that previously only existed in hospitals. This must have reduced the number of day-patients in the queue: but then, that is both better organisation and a better result for the patient. Problems arise when those desperate for a result start to abuse the new system. Fielden again:

"Doctors have been stopped from using their clinical judgement and pushing people through the system."

It's at this point that I have to return to the original point made at the outset: given the pressure on Brown in general and the NHS wait reduction project as a whole, did some ball-tampering take place to boost this latest set of figures? I wouldn't be making such a meal of this if it hadn't been apparent just before this last reporting period that leaks, expectations and careful Bradshaw gerrymandering were all leading our media to the conclusion that yet another New Labour target was going to be missed.

I can't reach a categoric conclusion here - and I doubt if anyone can. What I hope this piece has shown is that it wouldn't have been that hard to do it. (And I must add that numbers-fibbing has been done before in the Health arena - most notably by Johnson's predecssor Patricia Hewitt).

There is also a final - and key - observation I'd make. The DfH press release does, I think, give away what's really been going on during the last six weeks or so. Read the tone of this bit and see what you think:

'The NHS has met its commitment that by 31 March 2008, 85% of patients who require admission to hospital and 90% of patients not needing admission started treatment within 18 weeks of referral from their GP. This demonstrates that the NHS is firmly on track to meet the target that by the end of this year, no-one in England will have to wait more than 18 weeks from referral to treatment'.

Equally, there are some broader ramifications here. As one might expect him to, Jonathan Fielden, the chairman of the BMA's consultants committee, called for the number of consultants to be increased. "Now we need to move further and ensure that the driver for reform is genuine quality – not crude measures of progress," he added. Except Jonty that, er, if there's less to do, why do we need more of your chaps? Once again we must remember that proper interpretation of statistics can make the difference between right and wrong policies in the long term.

We must also keep things in perspective: even if the new ONS data really do point to genuine progress, twenty-six weeks is still half a year. Average waiting times haven't moved since 1997. Here in France, that would be totally unacceptable. The UK still lags behind other leading countries for death rates from cancer and for five-year survival from the most common cancers. It also has much higher death rates than a range of leading countries – France, Germany, Australia and Canada, for example – for people aged under 75 with conditions greatly influenced by healthcare.

Do I think the figures mean much? Not really: targets breed cheating, take eyes off the ball, and are often the wrong targets in the first place. Progress is quite possibly being made, but after the constant stream of lies under Hewitt, it'll be a long time before I believe anything emanating from NHS sources - even if the monitor is independent. The historical evidence strongly suggests that the Johnson/Bradshaw team haven't started an NHS reform in any real sense here: they have simply delivered New Labour a win when it badly needed one.

In 1971, Ted Heath powered through the area health authority reform. An attempt to decentralise, it succeeded only in creating thousands more civil service jobsin the NHS.

Heath....more pen-pushers

Margaret Thatcher tried to drag the NHS into her free-market asylum, but achieved only an absurdly cash-starved organisation competing with itself.

Thatcher....bonkers internal marketeer

Patricia Hewitt didn't seem to know what she was doing beyond telling nurses they should work for nothing, and patients that they should be grateful for her supreme intelligence. She achieved little beyond the world record for lying to the House of Commons.

Hewitt....arrogant, serial liar

Squeaky-clean Ben Bradshaw is the acceptable face of homosexuality, 'married' to his partner Neal Dalgleish. He is a Christian Socialist, and is passionate about preserving marine life. He used to be a Beeb journalist before entering Parliament in 1997 and being fast-tracked by the Blairites. That's it: he is an uncontroversial and unquestioning suppporter of the New Labour hierarchy. No ideology in sight, as such. Probably a very nice bloke, but unlikely to be amusing at table.

Bradshaw...er, um.....

Alan Johnson hails from the Not Very Bright but the TUC Like Him wing of the Party. The degree of Alan's thick-skin can be judged by his wonderful award of the work-homelife balance idea to New Labour in a recent speech. "Ten years ago, we started the debate on work-life balance" he lied, adding shortly afterwards in relation to disabilities, "Disabled people are increasingly breaking down the prejudice and ignorance that confined them to unemployment or menial work. As a boy, David Blunkett was told that the best future he could hope for was to become a braille typist or a piano tuner." The muse that such a conclusion to Flunkit's life would have been better for all concerned seems to have passed Big Al by. My dog Foxie's tail has a better chance of coming up with an original health reform idea than Alan Johnson.

Johnson...card, pack, not the brightest etc etc

the sacred camel: time to slaughter it?

For nearly twenty years now, there hasn't been an influential politician in Parliament (or a think tank nearer to home than the lunatic fringe) with a single thought about health reform which goes beyond something called 'the NHS'.

Socio-economic changes have been so myriad and massive since 1947 (the year of its foundation) there are times when I can barely believe we still have the same basic framework as that devised by our last true reformer, Aneurin Bevan. The service has become a kind of Crossbench Clause IV: 'it shall not pass'.

Imagine if you will an alternative 2008 in which no British citizen was allowed to take more than £500 abroad. Where there were Party Line telephones issued on a strictly rationed basis by a Government monopoly. Where every schoolchild still had free full-cream milk every day at school. Where cigarettes were free in the Armed Forces, and men who drove drunk were jus' good ol' boys.

Because a heavily centralised, non-means tested, monopolistic, Whitehall-run sacred cow NHS would be entirely at home in that environment.

Fine, say the pundits - but we don't have that. And it's true, we don't.

We have a centrally answerable, randomly and fractionally means-tested, GP-practice devolved, internally privatised, nationally measured, Area-Trust run, largely monopolistic, Opposition-blackmailed sacred camel NHS instead.

It is as if the GPO of 1950 still existed, the mail competing with its own internet service. To hit targets, the GPO is buying services off TNT. It is sticking stamps on every email, using Post Offices as signal-receptors for mobile phones - and offering free surface mail until the budget runs out - at which point all the post boxes are blocked up, and a laudable surplus declared.

The latest round of 'NHS in rude health joy' leaves one (or rather, it does me) feeling yet again that the Health Service many decades ago became one of those Soviet institutions of which Solzhenytsin used to write so superbly in books like We Never Make Mistakes and Cancer Ward.

That's to say, a combination of time, size and cynicism have turned a miracle into a sacred camel - and then an icon which must not be desecrated, or the sky will surely fall in. 'Hands off our NHS which is safe in our hands and the good old NHS is Sixty this week' is the sort of sentimentalist clap-trap that would've had Nye Bevan falling down upon the perpetrator in a fit of bucolic Welsh anger. (Within five years of creating the Service, Bevan was to remark on several occasions that a time must come - dictated by the condition of the population and cost - when universally free health care would no longer be either possible or wise.)

This is not to say I want to abandon widespread free health care. Having worked with (and suffered at the hands of) both private and State medicine, I know only too well how much more honest the NHS is as a form of medical help - and how quickly private care would rise beyond the means of all but a tiny minority were no form of free service to be available.

But as ever, I regard money as the crucial factor - both as a criterion for means testing, as something that has grown to come before efficacy, and as the Devil to be avoided at all cost among the professionals delivering the service. The current fiasco of GP hours and remuneration is a classic example of what I mean, the cost of health insurance for anyone over fifty in 2008 is another, the use of hopelessly outdated medications another still.

The NHS today is just too damn big. So huge and complex, in fact, that several generations of politicians, management wonks, Lords, Knights and former medics have tried to superimpose their own agendas upon it - and succeeded only in adding humps to the already overladen camel.

Since Labour came to power, we have seen a staggering nine actual or attempted reorganisations on a grand scale - including one that was introduced just three months after Chancellor Brown's famed injection of £60billion into what had been there before.

The culmination of waste and flash ideas was, it goes without saying, the Connecting for Health IT project. Currently running at a cost of £12.7billion (another lie unchallenged by a lazy Opposition unable to prove that the figure is nearer £23billion) the system is not as such running at all.

Its two main 'suppliers' Accenture and Fujitsu have fallen grievously wounded by the wayside, and the Lorenzo patient administration system, which is earmarked for hospital trusts across the midlands, east and north of England, is no longer expected to meet its already much-delayed release date of October 2008. The southern version (Millennium) has been installed in eight out of 41 acute hospital trusts in the region, but the feedback has been awful. Medics, IT staff and even local MPs have labelled installations "not fit for purpose".

Earlier this year the NAO stated that the system would not be finished until 2014. Lately the DfH has been letting slip the odd release suggesting that there are (as the obscene old saying has it) two chances of that date being met.

Yet at no point in this huge financial and political disaster has it seriously occurred to anyone that scaling down and devolving the administration of a newly-designed and newly funded State health service might obviate the need for such a ludicrously complex IT system in the first place.

The NHS website is headed with 'NHS - Your Health, Your choices'. Oh do fuck off marketing people and strapline writers: people who are ill want to be treated quickly and expertly and like human beings. There's no choice about being ill: the only choices facing sick people in today's UK Health Service are either getting better - or living with chronic illness/dying. If they can't get an NHS cure, they have no choice but to go private. And if they can't afford that, then they have no choice at all.

Sadly, we are still in the era of 'what can we get away with?' And it's the end of this that everyone desirous of a proper state health service is waiting for.

Problem with mixed wards? There aren't any. Gone over budget? Close some hospitals. Accused of being wasteful? Make a surplus. No money for Aricept? Aricept won't do you any good. Feeling depressed? Try this one - it's out of copyright: useless, but cheap.

Returning to the Russian genius for observing bureaucracy gone mad, all these 'solutions' are straight out of something Dostoyevsky might have written about government inspectorates - that is, a yawning fantasmagorical chasm between what they were interested in, and what the average citizen wants, needs or worries about. Because they are political solutions, not health solutions.

The hobbling, spare-part surgery aided nine-humped three-legged camel we see today is, more than anything, the product of a hugely missed opportunity in 1997. For if ever there was a chance for the Party which invented it to launch a new model, that was it. But Blair and his Spin-suits were too busy courting the media and its celebrity creations to bother dirtying their manicured hands with such tedium.

Now, sadly, the New Labour modernising tradition is in such disgusting odour, it dare not attempt such a thing; and naturally, no Tory Party (not even Thatcher's) would ever have the balls to take on this thankless, uphill task - least of all the guilty Old Etonians around the Macaroon.

Regrettably therefore, the most likely outcome is that over the years, the NHS will morph slowly into a sort of reverse Northern Rock, sliding gently into 'temporary private ownership' before disappearing forever - and leaving our Sceptred Isle to the tender mercies of private GPs steeped in marketing, consultants steeped in overcharging, surgeons steeped in the art of rubbishing physicians, and physicians steeped in vice versa.

Yet there is no need for this to happen. There are three fundamental nettles which must be firmly grasped by all involved in a genuine plan to make survival from illness not a question of one's financial means.

1. The existing NHS is neither fish nor fowl, but rather a vast collection of previous layers and ideologies half in and half out of Whitehall. In short, it is a genetically created Thing incapable of independent life. We need to retain the assets, and start again.

2. The first and most important starting point is a radical, practical and fair approach to funding.

3. The second and almost equally important beginning would be the acceptance of a means-tested service.

Anything other than this will be either unaffordable, or obvious prey to future carpetbaggers keen to reassure everyone about just how nice they're going to be really.

The requirement before any of this got off the ground would be a serious national debate about the options. But that's not going to happen, because none of our legislators have the bottle.

Sad, but almost certainly true.

12.6.08

David & Goliath

In the short time since David Davis resigned as an MP, all the drones and robots in the Establishment have moved predictably into position and given their verdict on what the bloke has decided to do. The grubby hack who helped create the unreal, half-witted distractions and tabloid circuses of the last thirty years has equally predictably chosen (he boasts) to remove as much dignity from the situation as possible. And - encouragingly - an eclectic coalition of Real People have come forward to show they, at least, understand what Davis is on about.

Gordon Brown's 'farce' jibe does little to disguise that (as always) he lacks the courage to inform his seconds, the gauntlet having been thrown in his face. David Cameron (described by the Daily Mail of all people as 'cool under fire') is doing his best to emit admiration from a safe distance, although it is about as believable as the DUP's claim not to have been bribed into supporting the 2008 version of Lettres de Cachet.

Kelvin Mackenzie, meanwhile, continues on his One Man Mission to spit on everything decent, thoughtful and cautious about the Small Englishman - the up until now silent middle-of-the-roaders who never wanted any of Thatcher's vulgarity, Blair's cool flash, Murdoch's soft porn - or indeed any of the reptilian hordes of bankers, globalists, spinners, snoopers, health & safety pc goons and brain-dead celebrities who have demonstrated but one thing in common: a lack of proportion alongside obscene self-absorption.

Mackenzie is that most despicable of all hyenas, the intelligent oaf: the man of quick wit and fine brain who chooses to sell his genetic gift from God to the Devil. I fancy he sees a famous victory ahead: and I pray he will be given the drubbing he so richly deserves.

Those outside the Establishment have responded to the decision very differently. Fellow Tories Julie Kirkbride and Nigel Evans openly admitted they were stunned, applauded the action and stated (with some fervour) that men of principle like Davis should not wind up sidelined. Nick Clegg immediately averred that the Libdems would not field a candidate - as, intriguingly, did leading figures in the UKIP and the BNP. All made statements supportive of the Shadow Home Secretary's stance - some of them more welcome than others. 'Silvers' websites and older commentators also struck a note entirely at variance with the overwhelming tone of either ridicule or indifference.

In that context, I sound but one note of caution for all who see a glimmer of light in this astonishing turn of events. After 24 hours on the mid-market press websites, hardly anyone had made blogging comments about any of it. Ten times as many expressed their intense dislike of all things Brussels, while at the same time giving five cheers for the Irish - all of them richly deserved. If Davis has a fault, it is a tendency at times to be complacent and low-energy. He has to overcome that now and show that he can barnstorm with the best of them - and not be overshadowed by Europe in crisis or outmanoeuvred by slick Red-Top spin. In entering the fray, Kelvin the Krass has gifted the renegade Tory a spectacular own-goal, and we should thank him for doing it. What delicious irony there would be in the foul Murdoch giving David Davis the much-needed oxygen of publicity.

So: what is it really all about? Like everyone else, I am not in DD's head; but I think his stand will chime at four levels of public consciousness.

The first is as a stand against Cameron's Cads - the PR Blair-clones currently calling the shots on Tory policy. As much as anything, Davis is the heir of one important thing about the Mad Handbag: her entirely justified mistrust of the patrician class, and preference for those who are self-made. To be honest, few if any voters are going to grasp this.

The second is a stand against the creeping cancer of cheats, liars and dissemblers in public life: the corrupters in the whipping and bribing cock-den that is the House of Commons these days. This, I think, is an excellent populist theme and should be repeated as often as possible.

The third is a snook at what nby continues to call The Establishment - that is, those from the Brussels troughers via the social wishful thinkers to the greedy merchants of free market capitalism and global media. They think themselves exceptional - and thus entitled to silence those who would question their right to always and forever be the exception. Like nby, Davis sees the individual's right to dissent and privacy as under serious threat from technology, media moguls and political sociopaths. For this alone he will get 120% of our support. But he needs to have (dare I say it) a slogan to encapsulate what he wants: fair play? Respect for the People? Time for the Little Man?

Above all, while there is often a naive, slightly Cub-Scoutish air to David Davis, I think he has had a very shrewd insight during the last week, and it is this: that the Age of the Dodgy Dinosaurs is drawing to a close, and that a new one - in which principle, content and talent make a late return to centre stage - may well be about to dawn. He should shy away from this theme, because it is too dense for the hustings and smacks of egotism. If he is privately playing the long game, he'd do well to keep it that way.

At worst, if he keeps up the energy level, he is not heading for any wilderness. At least, he will surely end up where I strongly suspect he wants to be: somebody who can state with pride what he was doing while the lunatics were running the asylum. At best, he may be a magnet drawing all folks of the compassionate Right to his standard. But he must hit the ground running - and articulate the arguments clearly.

This has been a great week for the anti-corporatists, and a terrible one for the dysfunctional technocrats whose tedious yet dangerous railway-line thinking is exactly that which led to Auschwitz. The Irish, the Spaniards, the truck drivers and Middle England's most unlikely champion have all stuck two ever-so-polite fingers up to the Mandelsons, the Brownshirts, the Cameroons and the supra-nationalists. There is hope for us yet.

Births, Marriages and Deaths

Davis, David. Quietly at 2.15 pm Thursday 12th June 2008. Possibly premature and not at first expected to survive, the baby is in rude health. A brother at last for Boadicea, John Wilkes, John Stuart Mill and Jo Grimond.

Rooney, Wayne & Colleen. Brashly at 3.00 pm, Thursday 12th June 2008, in Portofino Italy and afterwards at the Russian Gin Palace Berni Inn & Bar. Dress: rather ordinary. Dancing later to The Scallies. Jets at 2.00 am.

Brown, Gordon. Incredibly slowly after a long drawn out and entirely foreseeable meanness of spirit, 11.00 am Friday 13th June 2008. On the evidence of his claim that no DUP members had been bribed to support his plea for 42 more days, doctors pronounced an absence of life as we know it from his already rigid body. There will be no flowers, tears, memorials or mourners.

burnham in curious mp-nest with kelly

Kelly (left) and Burnham.....Bolton and Leigh

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Disgustingly illiberal Culture Secretary has constituency really jolly near to where very married Catholic hard-liner Ruth Kelly is MP

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Culture Secretary Randy Burncandle's ministerial career was in tatters last night as it was revealed that for some years he has enjoyed a 'close constituencies' relationship with Vatican conservative Struth Nelly.

Mr Burnboats had earlier accused Haltempricerises & Howmuch? hopeful David Rapist of speaking on the telephone with Ms Shameless Chucklebutty, as well as being in favour of hanging people who do very bad things and thus ergo sum QED incapable of having any correct view about not banging people up for 42 days who've done nothing at all, as such.

Confusion reigned for a brief time until it was discovered that Mr Burnwitches had voted as follows in the House of Commons:

* Very strongly to ban smoking

* Very strongly in favour of ID cards

* Very strongly for 42 day detention

* Very strongly against an Iraq war enquiry

A Downing Street liar later told bewildered newsmen that Mr Burnley 0 Davis 3 "had got a little confused on the two entirely unrelated issues of State Murder (not nice) and freedom from a bunch of bent MPs having the yea or nay on whether to throw one in prison without trial (not nice also). Mr Burnham wishes to forget this incident ever happened, as indeed he will once we've finished with him, the dozy pillock".

(18.6.08)

THE 'BESTIAL OBAMA' INDUSTRY GETS OFF THE GROUND

Barack...changeling

As Presidential hopeful Barack Obama tries to derail GOP racial smears by warning folks to ignore them before they've started, the real hate stuff has already started in Middle America's one-horse media.

Here's a belter about Obama's abortion support from Wisconsin's Tomah Journal:

'Barack Obama speaks fervently for equality and fair treatment for all races, classes and sub-groups of individuals. So, why is it that he is in bed with the vile and contemptuous abortion industry? It is an established and sad piece of American history, shunned by those of the liberal persuasion, that the pro-abortion movement began, quite openly, as a social experiment to “control” the population of minorities, the poor, and the “feebleminded” or individuals with disabilities!

Unfortunately, most Americans that have been duped into supporting this form of murder known as abortion probably are completely unaware of the true roots of their “freedom movement.” I understand that most are probably ignorant of the true derivation of the abortion industry. However, now that you are aware, how can you, in good conscience, support such a cause or a man like Barack Obama who seeks to enshrine and propagate the hideous social experiment of abortion and the attempt to eliminate the “undesirables” of our nation?'

It is funny, is it not, that no issue is black and white - even one about blacks and whites trying to say that white is black when in reality it's grey - if you get my drift.

The anti-abortion message in the piece is based on one appalling attempt at clumsy racial engineering seventy years ago - which became a national scandal when revealed.

Nevertheless, Obama gives blanket support to all forms of abortion in all circumstances, which is worrying.

So, regarding an article questioning his racial equality credentials as a black man and support for abortion, what should he say?

Search me - I've no idea what I'd say. But oddly, this kind of rabid dirt misses the point about Obama, and runs the risk of electing a bloke about whom I have only two queries: Who is he really? And what does he mean by 'change' really?

(22.6.08)

how we tried for equality, and lost meritocracy

It may seem to most observers that Hazel Blears and David Cameron have almost nothing in common, but there's more binding them together than you'd think. Let me reassure readers straight away - I'm not trying to do an Andy Burnham here: I assert here and now that, to the best of my knowledge, Cammers and Bleary are not engaged in any form of relationship one might consider improper, or even in any way interesting. But they do share two very important features.

First and most obviously, they are neither of them the shiniest jewels in Westminster's intellectual crown. But second, more important (and closely related to that observation) they are where they are for reasons other than merit. And as such, they are representative of Britain's most insidious contemporary problem.

Somewhere at the start of the Twentieth Century's final quarter, we forgot the most important thing two world wars and a Great Depression taught us: that money and social position were no guarantee of ability to solve serious problems. In fact, on the whole, there appeared to be an inverse relationship between acreage and fivers on the one hand, and creative ideas on the other.

Led by bigoted donkeys for too long, as the Second World War came to an end the electorate made easily the wisest decision possible by voting into power a quiet, unassuming and determined little chap called Attlee. For although he lacked Churchill's charisma and indomitable genius, the Labour leader was equally courageous, and far better equipped to build a fairer Britain. Merit - and only merit - it seemed, would be the criterion for advancement in future.

In that context, Butler's 1944 Education Act gave a new and (by 1953) surprisingly optimistic Britain access to the native ability of its previously squashed lower middle-class and blue-collar children. Chosen by unashamedly meritocratic selection, by the late 1950s they were streaming into a rapidly expanding University estate. As the 1960s closed, this generation had changed everything. On the back of their achievement, their ambition and their kitchen-sink anger, by 1970 many of the social movers leading opinion were products of the 'working class' for the first time.

The cultural liberalism they espoused may have breached the barricades of former snobbery, but it didn't burn any stately homes or guillotine the Ruling Class. What it did do, however, was turn the attention of genuinely compassionate folk to the plight of other disadvantaged groups. And in doing so, the vanguard having sought to abolish one form of privilege, those who followed unwittingly created another.

From here onwards, the guiding principle of progress based on merit was first mislaid and then forgotten. Within a few years, a new craven image of perfection was invented every bit as pernicious as the old Upper-middle class had been. This was the underprivileged minority group - and appealing as they did to the classic British sympathy for the underdog, it wasn't long before such folk were being lined up to take part in possibly the daftest experiment ever conducted by the caring intelligentsia: positive discrimination.

It took almost a decade for the oxymoronic nature of this description to sink in among those who were vocal in its support, but when it finally did, the wishful unthinking tendency switched to affirmative action as an alternative nomenclature. Safely bland and difficult to critique ('What do want - negative action?') it has been hugely successful in its aims - and disastrous for our society.

The irony that goes utterly unnoticed by the inventors of this strategy is its startling resemblance to the old pals' act, the old school tie, the Masonic handshake and the old boy network. For it is promotion and appointment based entirely on membership of a 'club', rather than ability. And while I'd be the first to admit that 'disadvantage' is a club of which few of us would wish to be a member, that is irrelevant: affirmative action is precisely what David Cameron's parents hoped for as, year in and year out, they coughed up the annual fees for Eton. Whether they come from the top or the bottom of society, people filling a senior position via affirmative action are equal in one horrifying respect: the likelihood of their incompetence.

I am not saying that such people are bound to be incompetent - just likely to be. The examples of this are distressing and offensive in the extreme to those of the affirmative persuasion, but they must be faced. Was a blind Home Secretary likely to understand the abstract concept of privacy and freedom from unwarranted interference? Can an Oxbridge-educated middle-class Culture Secretary ever grasp the reality of social alienation? Is a woman apparently happy to sign £6 million mortgage agreements without reading them the right person to be in charge of a £4 billion budget? Will a lawyer who has never been involved in creating and marketing a new product appreciate the need to rid entrepreneurs of red tape? How can any reasonable selector ever imagine a former left-wing bar steward the right man to understand a need for delicate balance between environmental, conservationist, rural dweller and housing shortages? Will flash Etonian PRs ever have the diligence to catch New Labour out in its incessant lies and misquoted statistics? Is a black bloke with a speech impediment really the best weather-presenter BBC News can find?

The first and last of those questions will, I realise, guarantee me a place in perpetual purdah among those who enjoy membership in the contemporary Establishment - the lawyers, old Etonians, former Union brawlers, technocrat politicians, token women, Muslim Council members, Oxbridge graduates, race relations apparatchiks and physically disabled people who think themselves in the mainstream - but who in reality occupy a fetid backwater where no movement of any kind is discernible. I can't help that; all I can do is try and speak for ordinary people who find the whole surreal circus at best a joke and at worst a cause for intense anger. What they ask for, over and over again, is the reestablishment of informed common sense.

Common sense has, for example, departed the Conservative Party. Therein, a ruling elite drawn largely from one school and one University is encouraging all-women lists further down while pushing non-PLU's out at the top. The courageous resignations of Graham Brady over education policy (Grammar School boy) and David Davis over civil liberties (Council Estate product of a single parent) demonstrate where we (and the Party) have gone wrong to perfection. The Mancunian Brady understands only too well the importance of aspiration to the lowly and talented; the street-scrapper Davis in turn grasps the reality of being banged up for something one didn't do. Privileged private schoolboys far removed from either prejudice or crime cannot begin to comprehend these matters: they may see themselves as Young Turks - but really, they are nothing more or less than the same old Old Etonians.

Further down social demography's North Face, common sense dictates that racial prejudice is best beaten by catching and punishing the low-life that engage in it. It suggests that to find a talent, one has to look for it - that examination and observation as the bases for educational selection are more likely to uncover merit than a system which starts from the assumption that everyone is bright, and spotting unique ability is wrong.

In the more ordinary and commercially viable occupations, common sense points with searing accuracy to the near-inevitability that a Cabinet in which lawyers are over-represented by 1500% cannot be truly representative - regardless of the odd ethnic, disabled or female member tossed in to complete the window dressing.

The solution is simple to define, but hard to enact. We need race relations and gender legislation that offers equal advantage rather than vague edicts of which cunning people can take advantage. We need an educational approach that recognises the need to look for ability rather than sponsors. We need a voting system with lower barriers to small Party entry, and more encouragement for those at the bottom to vote. But above all, the crazy assumption to challenge is that IQ and social position are the only ways to choose our leaders.

We saw this after the 1930s and then forgot it again after 1970. The result in 2008 is an Establishment riddled with the very clever, the very dumb, the very lowest and the very highest - many of whom are very unfit for purpose.

(22.6.08)

malice in euroland