Arnold Drive's street party

Royal Wedding Day went very well from just about all angles.

The TV coverage of the event was excellent. The weather was fine and even sunny at times. Our neighbours had a street party immediately after the wedding. Thanks to the unofficial committee that organised it! And all with minimal interference from the Council!!

How sadly typical of the BBC it was, however, to give airtime some some self-important lefty journalist who wanted to carp and criticise. They might say it was in the interest of ‘balance’, yet their idea of ‘balance’ is to give equal airtime to detractors of the country and its institutions(who speak for, perhaps, 10% of the population) to that afforded to upholders thereof. It’s time to take this seriously and demand that the publicly funded broadcaster more accurately represents the vast majority of the citizenry, who do not read The Guardian or sympathise with its views.

While we’re on that subject, I wonder if people realise just how dependent on public money that newspaper has become, having been for years the journal de choix for the advertising of the public sector non-jobs with which New Labour created its vast client state. Time to stop that too!

They were all advising me to vote for AV. I bet you two years ago they didn’t know what AV was and, if they did, they didn’t like it! Now they’re all for it, it seems. It’s the best thing since sliced bread! We should all like AV because some of our best liked actors and actresses and ‘slebs’ do.

Well I like Ab Fab and Mr. Darcy and Baldrick too… Seeing him in the lineup I am reminded of a wise saying of Edmund Blackadder in an episode of Blackadder 3: “I like chops and sauce but I don’t ask their opinion!”

Seems appropriate somehow!

So why are we alone apparently determined to adopt iconography in sport which pretends that the UK does not exist and which creates the strong impression that it is only a matter of time before its dissolution?

Next year it seems we are to have the ultimate farce. We stage the Olympics in which local particularisms are blissfully not indulged in this way. Football is an Olympic sport and Britain gave the game to the world – yet no British team will compete for a medal in our own country because the officials who promote and perpetuate the pernicious practice of having four separate ‘national’ teams will not agree to a single national team to play in British colours under the British flag. Who knows, if they did, it might even win the Gold! And then a British team might get further than the quarter finals in the World Cup. Now wouldn’t that be something?

1. Why did a man of his undoubted intelligence get himself into such a pickle in the first place?
2. Did he not realise that, to the press/public mind the details would look like one of the more lurid tales to emerge from the Expenses scandal?
3. Why did the Telegraph apparently sit on the information until now when much of it must have been known weeks if not months ago?

Laws says that he wanted to keep his sexuality a private matter. No-one surely would deny his right to do that. To avoid the possibility of the ‘scandal’ that has engulfed him, however, he would have been wiser not to live with his partner, pretending that the relationship between them was purely landlord-tenant. Alternatively he could have acknowledged that he was living with his partner and that he had, with him, a second home in London. He could have claimed ACA on the mortgage, depending on which he designated as his second home but he wouldn’t be able to tell the electors of Yeovil recently that his only home was in Yeovil; a point he made much of in the General Election campaign. It is probable that, if he had been open about it from the start, the electors of Yeovil would have voted for him just the same and he wouldn’t have been vulnerable to lurid revelations such as those on yesterdy’s Telegraph front page.

Of course, a few weeks ago he probably didn’t expect to be a Cabinet Minister quite so soon. Certainly for most of the years in question the possibility simply didn’t arise, unless he were to defect to either the Tories or Labour. And, by comparison with Labour and the Tories, the Lib Dems had come out of the Telegraph’s Expenses Scandal of last year looking rather snowy white. Lib Dem MPs and candidates made much of this at the GE – among them David Laws, who boasted of not having been required to pay back anything after the enquiry, unlike Tory Oliver Letwin in a nearby constituency, who had to pay back over £3000.  We shall see what the Commissioner for Standards concludes in this case.

One can only guess at the Telegraph’s motives in making these revelations now and not before the Election or last year. It’s possible they only just found out, though their relentless pursuit of so many over minor issues about duck houses and moats suggests  they may have had a lot of this material on file for some time. They certainly seem to know a great deal about the financial side of Mr. Laws relationship stretching back to 2001. Sadly I think the Telegraph has gone into something of a decline since the Barclay Brothers took it over.  I do not suggest they should have suppressed this story, but I do wonder at the timing of its release.

‘LibDem Immigration Policy Unravels

Iain Dale 2:40 PM

At the best of times, Ed Davey is a politician who I find intensely irritating. He looks and sounds so holier than thou. I console myself that whenever he appears on TV it loses the LibDems votes. And his appearance on the Politics Show today was no exception. He made Pinocchio look truthful. He made so many spurious claims about immigration that it was difficult to know where to start to refute them……………

• Davey repeated Nick Clegg’s claim in the final Leaders’ Debate that 80 per cent of immigration comes from the EU and therefore can’t be controlled. The real figure is less than a third.

• Davey said that the Conservatives supported ‘an amnesty called the 14 year rule.’ This is not true. Conservatives do not support the 14 year rule, which is in any case for exceptional cases, unlike the Lib Dems’ blanket amnesty.
• Davey said that his party’s amnesty was ‘a one-off’ that ‘would have no impact’ on immigration. Evidence from other countries that have tried amnesties shows that they lead to more illegal immigration and more amnesties as they encourage more illegal immigrants to try their luck.
• Davey claimed that the Conservatives removed exit checks when they were last in Government. This is not true – it was Labour who removed them in 1998 and the Conservatives support their reintroduction.

And to add insult to injury, Davey finished his comments on immigration by saying that ‘People dislike politicians because they don’t tell the truth’. Pot, Kettle, Black.’

Again we have the usual childish blather about ‘Labour cannot win’ and suggesting (a) that Helen Whately is unknown ( after living and campaigning here for 3 years!), but (b) they know her well enough to know for whom she works. The Daily Telegraph dubbed Ed a ‘saint’ for not having a second home (at 16 minutes by fast train from Waterloo I should think not, but there we are!) so they make much of that.

Ed scratches around to find all the things that have happened locally in the past 13 years for which he can claim some credit. He, of course, claims all the credit even if he had rather little to do with them and wasn’t on his own in things he did play a part in – like Surbiton Hospital. He also claims credit for working with Joanna Lumley to get a fair deal for Gurkhas. I hope he had their permission to use their pictures and names for political purposes!

All the above is par for the course, though it’s depressingly familiar and intensely partisan – which readers thinking a ‘hung’ Parliament would be a good thing would do well to bear in mind. The reaction on the doorstep is that people are getting rather fed up with this approach, which insults their intelligence.

What concerns me more, though, is Ed’s predilection for being photographed with serving Police officers, face to camera. When you’re the MP that’s OK because it goes with your public office. But when you’re not (and Ed is right now no more than the Lib Dem parliamentary candidate) then you’re using the images of serving officers for party political purposes and that, surely, compromises the impartiality of the Police. When I stood for Parliament in 1983 and 1987, I was told very clearly that this must not be done unless the permission of the Police has first been obtained – and yet this isn’t the first time Mr. Davey has done it. Perhaps he’s cleared it with the Borough Commander, but he hasn’t done so in the past. He didn’t in 2005 – I know this because I asked!

Also causing concern is a big photo showing Ed with children in lessons at what I take to be an Infants’ School. Again, I was always told that this was taboo unless you had the permission of their parents  to photograph their children (or, better still,  the parents were there with their children)AND subsequently to use their images for political purposes. At the very least the images should be smudged – but they aren’t. I do hope Mr Davey and his agent have cleared all these points.

Interestingly the BBC hardly reported 20 economists supporting the Conservative contention that the £178billion deficit run up by Labour needs to be tackled sooner rather than later. When 60 other economists supported Brown’s line that we can spend our way out of recession (which is what his policy amounts to) it was headline news on the BBC. To add to its fairness and objectivity the news item referred to the 60 as ‘leading’ economists. There was no qualification of the adjective of course – other than their agreement with Brown (and the BBC?), one presumes.

Locally our papers seem anxious to give credibility to the ‘story’ put about by our two Lib Dem MPs about the impending closure of A&E and maternity services at Kingston Hospital. This is in spite of a very explicit letter from NHS SW London setting out the facts in the matter and a clear statement from the Health Minister in the Adjournment Debate last Monday.  One might have thought it in the public interest that this letter be published in its entirety. However, it was written on 27th January and I haven’t seen it in the local papers yet.

One wonders if Mr. Falchikov’s kitchen table isn’t groaning under new confections the media might swallow. Time will tell. Watch this space!

Sir,

It is a pity that your headline of yesterday (3^rd. November) accused David Cameron of ‘reneging’ on his commitment to a referendum on Lisbon, when in fact he had no choice in the matter.

The pledge he gave in 2007 was sincere and would have been implemented if it lawfully could have been. Very sadly, now, it can’t. If this broken Parliament had been dissolved after four years like the previous two we would have a new government by now and the referendum would almost certainly have occurred. The Irish changed their mind in their referendum, encouraged no doubt by the intervention of Nigel Farage of Ukip in the Republic’s domestic affairs. The Czech President has attached his signature to it. And Gordon Brown continues to cling on for dear life as the Parliament Act permits him to, more’s the pity. So the ghastly treaty has become Law, but David Cameron is not responsible at all for any of this.

The ‘reneging’ was done by Blair and Brown – and their Liberal Democrat fellow travellers – not by Cameron. However some of your correspondents want to punish the innocent Conservatives by voting for Ukip or some such. When will they ever learn that fragmentation on the right in politics merely lets in the left? If they want another five years of Gordon Brown and his Lib Dem Europhile allies, let them vote Ukip by all means. But let them be aware of the consequences and not expect to find much left of the Britain they have known and loved at the end of them.