Liberal Burblings

Archive for August, 2007

Photo 1 was of Cordelia Gummer who, aged four, was fed a burger (above) by her dad during the CJD scare. She is now 21 years old.

Photo 2 was of Carole Hersee who was photographed when she was eight by her father, a designer, to feature in the BBC 2 testcard, which he designed. She is now 48 years old:

Photo 1

Photo 2

A bit of a quiz. Answers in two hours.

Photos 1 and 2 above are of two women whose dads thrust them into public limelight when they small girls.

Clue: The saparate images of these women as girls are extremely well known.

Don’t forget that today is your last chance to nominate blogs and blog postings for the LibDem Blog of year awards.

The details and a link to where to send nominations are here.

I have nominate half a dozen blogs for the various awards.

I will spare the blushes of those I have nominated except to say that I nominated "Daddy Alex" for "Best posting" for:

David Cameron on Today: How I Long For Yesterday

Whoops. With everything going wrong for David Cameron in recent weeks, this morning he dropped three different messes of his own making all over the Today Programme. Reaching for another Tory core vote issue to shore up his fragile position, he chose the wrong one: what idiot prattles about school discipline whilst his own party are rioting? Then he fell flat on his pitiful by-election failures, describing the Conservatives without qualification as the third party. Finally, unable to answer multiple Tory attacks on him, he chose to attack each of them in turn, sounding like just another feuding, useless Tory.

…A great post by a great blogger. I just wish he would hurry up and finish that mug of tea.

It really is madness that there are perfectly good vaccines for typhoid and measles but we are seeing increases in UK incidences of both those diseases.

It is timely that the UK Vaccines industry group have issued a series of documents called “Valuing Vaccines”, linked to a publicity campaign involving Tony “Baldrick” Robinson.

My son died aged sixteen months old in 1993 of a type of Meningitis called pneumococall meningitis. At the time, a vaccine for that disease was not even dreamt of. Fortunately, as of last October, such a vaccine is available on the NHS. That was thirteen years too late for my son.

So I have extra reason to be very concerned that available vaccines are not being taken up, leading to an increase in disease.

Photo above: Edward Jenner, who discovered the smallpox vaccine

David Cameron is still unable to get the support of his party for anything other than traditional core Tory policies.

Despite his best husky-hugging efforts, only 34% of Tory members would be “happy to pay green taxes if other taxes fall by the same amount”.

That is according to the latest Conservative members’ survey by Conservative Home.

The Independent reports that Cameron has re-ignited claims that he is lurching to the right after his comments on immigration last night.

Seumas Milne in the Guardian writes an excellent commentary on this lurching to the right business, entitled: “Now we see what the return of Tory Britain would be like”:

Now, after two months of the Brown bounce, a series of public rows over policy and two humiliating byelection performances, the real Conservative party is reasserting itself – and giving us a flavour of what the return of Tory Britain would feel like. Start with the prospect of rightwing libertarian Boris Johnson, a man who thinks it’s amusing to refer to Africans as “piccaninnies”, regrets the end of colonialism and denounced the Lawrence inquiry into the racist killing of a black teenager as “Orwellian” – as Tory mayor of Britain’s multiracial capital.

…on the crucial economic, social and class issues, Cameron’s Tories stand where they always have done: if anything, they are moving on to even more extreme neoliberal territory.

Cameron’s interview on Newsnight last night can be seen here.

The Newsnight interview with David Cameron last night showed the BBC at its best. Four senior journalists interrogated Cameron, with interesting results.

It was an unusual format. I suspect the deal was – “OK – make sure Paxo is two thousand miles away but we’ll let four of your finest have a go instead”.

The result was productive – some light produced rather than the heat radiated by a “Paxo stuffing”.

David Cameron was showing his gift of the gab at its most elegant. However, each of the four journalists hit home with individual points which, although Cameron gave a smooth line of defence in each case, actually exposed serious weaknesses in his position.

On Iraq, Mark Durban clearly drove home the point that Cameron had a neo-Con stance on Iraq, but now two years later, has become a liberal dove on the matter. Although Cameron waffled his way out of this one, his hypocrisy was clearly exposed.

Stephanie Flanders beautifully exposed the uselessness of the £20 a week proposal for married couples. Cameron virtually admitted (or at least implied) that the proposal would have no impact but said that it was, more or less, a needed gesture. So, in summary, Cameron is proposing to spend millions of scarce taxpayers’ resources on what he as much as admits is a “gesture”. Ridiculous.

On Immigration, Cameron seemed to mix up asylum and immigration. He was saying that asylum admissions have been too high. The natural action which flows from that statement is a limit on asylum admissions, which the Tories proposed at the last election, and was quite rightly condemned as a breach of civilised behaviour. To give Cameron his due (never thought I’d write that!) he did make a genuine attempt to carefully calibrate his language on immigration.

But it was Michael Crick who, for me, scored the winning goal against the Camster. He raised the issue of the Shadow cabinets’ 115 jobs outside parliament. He exposed the ridiculousness of a part-time shadow cabinet which is trying to present themselves as potential ministers in a few months time. In particular he focused on William Hague’s many outside jobs which bring him hundreds of thousands of pounds every year. How can we take the Tories seriously as a potential government when they are off earning vast amounts outside their shadow cabinet and parliamentary jobs?

Our friendly neighbourhood Fluffy Elephant obviously had a spiral topped notepad under his trunk during this programme as written a brilliant and comprehensive debunking of “Mr Balloon”.