In two days, thousands of Conservative councillors around the country will face the wrath of an electorate not quite sure what they stand for, but for whom protest, in the form of a vote for Labour, will come incredibly easily.

The peculiar thing is that most people stuffing their protests into boxes will be essentially unclear what theyre protesting.

I’ll try to put some of these in perspective here. It is obvious that Jeremy Hunt was predisposed to be supportive of the Murdoch takeover of BSkyB before he was given the brief to manage the proposal. Indeed, he was appointed to the role because the Lib Dem in charge at the time, Vince Cable, was predisposed to the destruction of the Murdoch empire.

The actually important things in the case are lost utterly in the dogged attack by Labour – Jeremy Hunt referred the case to the competition authority and sought independent advice – and as a result, the proposed takeover was dropped before it was blocked.

In essence, Jeremy Hunt is being hunted by Labour because he put his personal views on the case and acted properly, the way a minister should. We havent communicated that properly. We need to do so right now. /ppAllied to the issue of miscommunication, we now very clearly have a partisan speaker. John Bercow shows all the style and grace of Michael Martin aligned with the skill for brevity of Neil Kinnock. He is not fit for the job and surely he cannot enjoy the confidence of the whole house for much longer.

The budget didnt need to drop 5% off the top rate of tax, and the opportunity it gave to Labour to paint us as the party of the rich was disheartening, probably most so in the context of Iain Duncan Smiths largely unnoticed dogged battle to retain social welfare rates and not allow the recession to unfairly impact the poorest.

The pasty tax was a good policy unless you are Tesco. The Granny Tax isnt a tax at all. Neither of these issues was on its own a problem, but chucked into the wash, it provided a heavy enough wort to ferment nicely for the Labour Party.

Add to this the recent obvious annoyance and fractiousness of the Prime Minister at PMQs. Dennis Skinner is a disgrace, but hes clearly not keeping well. Cameron should simply answer his questions earnestly and move on. That a PM of his skill and intelligence is fazed by the predations of someone so utterly past his best is almost unforgivable.

Now on to Nadine Dorries. In general, I find the least said the better about most encumbrances on the spirit, but I make an exception for the Member for Mid Beds. She is a thundering disgrace in her rampant disloyalty, a damaging presence in the party and has absolutely no place in the party. It would be best if she simply switched to the UKIP, and I suspect she will give it serious consideration after the local election results. Whether the UKIP has been chastened by Joan Collins, Robert Kilroy Silk and others remains to be seen.

An enormous spin operation now begins in CCHQ to make sure the focus for the next two days is on London, where Boris is on course to win reelection as Mayor. An opportunity lies here, however, along with an opportunity to get back onto the front foot – smear campaigns among Muslims in London painting Boris in a very unfavourable light are aligning with serious allegations of voting irregularity, vote theft and fraud in some boroughs. Labour was always dirty in London, now we may be able to prove it.

For some reason closely associated with the boring nature of the first half of any government, a novel I’m trying to write. SaveEd.org and the release of Battlefield 3 (a violent computer game) I have not been blogging.

Happily, David Cameron has finally done something silly, I have broken the back of the book, been promoted to Colonel (Service Star 4) and am now returning to the art of the blog.  Of course, this means time for a redesign and a rethink on content.  I hope those of you who still bother reading this will keep coming back.

Everybody seems to be wondering why the UK response to rioting has been so slow.  There are also plenty of people asking why Boris doesn’t do something.

The answer is pretty simple; the civil disturbance is now so serious that the only reasonable response to it is an invocation of the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 – an act which can only be invoked by an Order in Council or by a senior Minister of the Crown.  The Mayor of London has absolutely no role in this legislation, cannot invoke it, and cannot intervene in the operational business of the Metropolitan Police.

Provisions pursuant the Act can only be invoked where the Minister is satisfied that other laws are incapable of handling the situation, that the situation is urgent and that there is a risk of continued serious damage.  As the Cabinet Office puts it:

• an emergency that threatens serious damage to human welfare, the environment or security has occurred, is occurring or is about to occur;
• it is necessary to make provision urgently in order to resolve the emergency as existing powers are insufficient and it is not possible to bring forward a Bill in the usual way because of the need to act urgently; and
• emergency regulations must be proportionate to the aspect or effect of the emergency they are directed at.

Finally, the regulations must be approved by Parliament within seven days of their laying.  So no more holidays for anyone.

The previously discarded coffee he drank through his disgustingly unkempt moustache on the filthy mattress under the railway bridge was not Lavazza, but some inferior brand which, in between his tormented visions of vomiting clowns, he fancied could do with a spoonful of splenda and possibly a shot of his beloved Tia Maria.

To read this entry, please ensure that:

• you appreciate literally hundreds of mixed metaphors
• you know who made your shoes
• you aren’t currently interested in giving me a job
  

  George Osborne, yesterday

In 2009, during what was a worldwide recession (Gordon was right about that), the UK had six successive quarters of contraction.  The economy slowed so badly that there were fears of a ‘double-dip’ recession, where a second round of contraction would occur as an aftershock to the first.

This was introduced forcibly as a possibility by the Labour Party, who argued that the cuts the Conservatives sought to make if elected into government would lead to under-stimulation in the whole economy and a wholesale reduction in growth across multiple sectors.  As a political gamble it was excellent – but it would require big cuts to bring about.

The reality is that the big cuts the Labour party argues George Osborne is making simply are not occurring.  And even if they did, they would have to be fucking enormous to bring about, on their own, the sorts of fluctuations the UK economy is seeing at the moment.  There must be some other explanation to what is happening in the economy.  And there is.  It’s called the market, and it made your shoes.

First and foremost, what Conservatives argued in 2009 and 2010 was not that the recession was not a global phenomenon (although we did have good fun making fun or ‘it started in America’) – but that the approach to handling its impact on the UK by Gordon Brown was fundamentally flawed, and that approach began with bad decisions during the boom.

Gordon Brown did not abolish boom and bust – nobody ever could, especially in the most globalised economy on Earth.  What he essentially did was preside over the installation of a systematic overspend throughout government.  With credit and liquidity abounding in the boom years of the late 1990s and early-mid 2000s, he did what comes naturally to the Labour party- as the coffers filled with taxpayers’ money, he redistributed the wealth, developed infrastructure, and enhanced the power and capacity of the state.  In what will be remembered in Economics Textbooks as the ‘Brown Bottom’, Gordon Brown sold 395 tons of UK reserve gold at its lowest value in 20 years, after having given notice of his intention to do so (further reducing the price by 10%), at $275 per ounce.  The sale yielded $3.5bn.  The same gold today has a value of $1610 per ounce, or roughly $20bn.

Despite the fact they now couldn’t gold-plate everything, most people were very contented with their newly invigorated state services.  And if Gordon Brown had ever been capable of abolishing boom and bust, that would have been essentially fine – if the world had suddenly become stable, that level of spending would have become sustainable.  The world economy, however, is never stable.  It is a dynamic, flowing system, understood only by Sam Bowman at the Adam Smith Institute.  And he isn’t telling anyone how it works.

Then along came the recession, partially based on a property bubble, partially based on a collapse in trust in the big powerhouse financial players, including the banks. It would be harsh on the thousands affected to describe it as a necessary adjustment, but in economic terms, that’s exactly what it was.  Through devices and errors, the values of big businesses, particularly the banks, were massively overstated.  The market can only tolerate so much bullshit and as a result the facade of stability and growth began to collapse.  When it did, the speed of the collapse took everybody by surprise.

The UK response to that, fatally, was to spend even more.  Using the flawed language of pop economics, hot liquidity was forced into the cooling economy to warm it up.  More money was printed.  More money was borrowed, and more money was spent, all during a time when it was entirely unclear on what time scales it would be possible to pay down the debt, and how abyssal the recession would turn out to be. Brown and Balls called for more spending.  Brown was challenged repeatedly by people who wanted to spend more.  Across the floor of the House of Commons, Conservatives argued for a slow-down in state spending, but did it sheepishly, knowing that calls for cuts in a recession are as welcome as a cup of cold sick.

What Brown’s fiscal and monetary stimulus did was to fill in the cracks in the economy with hundred-pound notes.  And with the UK economy appearing to be essentially stable, he briefly prevented the market from carrying out its adjustment function.  With credit and liquidity pumped into the system, people kept up their spending, piling on the debt, behaving like little was going on around them. Brown’s bubble of artificial liquidity was making the inevitable collapse inevitably worse.

When an economy’s income falls, the sensible thing to do is reduce the economy’s outgoings. Chunks of infrastructure the government doesn’t strategically need should be sold off.  Austerity measures should be spread proportionately across the economy.  This reduces the need for borrowing, which may still be necessary, if spending has risen to unsustainable levels during the boom.

That, however, is the perfect economy in its simplest form.  Economies are anything but simple – they’re the product of trillions of individual decisions which sometimes in aggregate form patterns.  The UK economy in the boom years was characterised by government spending, some of it sustainable, some of it not.  In the recession and recovery years, the UK economy must be characterised by a conscious effort to halt the growth in state spending as a proportion of the GDP – in other words, the approach of the government must be to promote real growth.

The idea of a Plan B – to do again what Brown and Balls tried in 2009, printing money and spending more, is utterly redundant, partially because we know it has never worked in any real economy, and partially because the rest of the world is in incredible flux – the US is pondering the possibility of its first ever default, the Greek Government has been allowed to essentially default already, and we’re all supposed to pretend the Italian economy actually exists.  We are so connected to these economies, as the most globalised economy on Earth, that any level of unnecessary activity George Osborne undertakes will be eventually dwarfed by the tremors of market functions.

Growth has returned to the UK under a Conservative led government.  The current approach to pay down the deficit (too slowly) and reduce unsustainable government spending over the medium term is the best method to ensure that it stays far into the future.

The Serjeant at Arms has banned all pies from Westminster’s precincts with immediate effect, in an effort to avoid a repeat of yesterday’s attempted attack on mild mannered media tycoon Rupert Murdoch.  The move has sent shockwaves through the subsidised restaurants at the mother of parliaments, particularly in the Portcullis House cafe, where a much anticipated  Boeuf en Croute has been summarily struck from the menu, prompting calls to recall parliament and debate whether Boeuf en Croute is a pie.

Ms Jill Pay, working with the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod, has issued a writ whereby even pies given as gifts to Eric Pickles MP will be prevented from entering the House of Commons, House of Lords, Speaker’s Apartment, Portcullis House and Westminster Hall.   In keeping with precedents already set by Ms Pay, it is understood that anything the Metropolitan Police wants to do will simply be waved through, whether they have the authority to do it or not.

In a related development, Metropolitan Police Commander Cressida Dick has given strict instructions to shoot anyone ‘likely to have come into contact with someone who looks like they may have once worked with pastry’.  In a characteristic fashion, however, anyone with a paper plate and shaving foam in a plastic bag will not be treated as suspicious at all.

The Leader of Argentina, Ms De Kirchner, has attacked the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, David Cameron for his dismissal of Argentinian requests to negotiate over the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands. A brief check on the economic situation of Argentina shows that this was likely to happen this year, some 29 years after the UK defeated an Argentinian expedition to capture the islands.

Cameron took the only logical and consistent principled response to a query over the sovereignty of the islands this week when he said that while the people of the Falklands wished to remain British, they would – full stop.

Ms De Kirchner described the remarks of the Prime Minister as ‘an expression of mediocrity’ and roundly cursed the Prime Minister for ‘arrogance’ in failing to agree to negotiate with Argentina.

The United Nations position on the dismantlement of colonies, with what continues to be a State Department in the US hostile to the UK at every conceivable turn, seem to be gearing up, again, to support the Argentinians. How tedious.

The obvious contradictions of UN anti-colonial policy are quite fantastic. The idea that the UK should decolonize the islands in order to allow Argentina to recolonize it itself is wonderful comedy, and if that was the only stupid argument process in this saga, we’d all still get a good belly laugh out of it. But wait, there’s more.

Either the principle of national self-determination applies universally or it doesn’t apply at all. The right of the islanders to determine their status is not diminished by Argentina’s economic situation or the proximity of oil to the wind-blasted outcrops, nor is it diminished by the capability of Argentina to wage aggressive war against the UK.

If the people of the islands seek a referendum on their status, the UK should facilitate it. The UK government should and must not seek to negotiate terms with the people who sought to capture the territory and subjugate its people in 1982. If the people seek no such referendum, then Ms De Kirchner should rail instead against the free-willed and hardy people of those South Atlantic islands, and must accept those decisions.

I’m in the process of uninstalling iOS 5 on my iPad 2.  Not because it’s poor, but because it’s still Beta software and I reckon Apple deserves to be judged on finished software.  But just by way of information, here are the things you’re going to love about iOS5:

Background Sync

The fact that a sync to the iDevice can now be done in the background without the ‘Sync in Progress’ screen rendering the device utterly useless is fantastic.  This is one of those little ‘quality of life’ issues it’s really hard to live without having experienced it.  It’s great.

Unobtrusive notifications

The fact iOS has taken so long to get background notifications sorted out was laughable.  The omission is as irritating and much less useful than User Account Control on desktop OS’ and has been the cause of enormous irritation for me over the past couple of years.  I won’t be sad to see the blue box banished to history, and I suspect you won’t either.  The implementation is good, I am happy to report

Graphics tweaks

Animations are tweaked and tightened in another of those little ‘quality of life’ examples of how Apple seems to have pretty much rebooted the iOS look and feel.  Don’t misconstrue my message here:  it’s still very much the iOS layout, and the changes are evolutionary rather than revolutionary,  but the way in which the UI has been fixed up is really excellent.

Over-the-air sync and Cloud Apps management

Being able to find long-lost and apparently long-forgotten apps I paid good money for was useful; the fact that you’ll now get a notification in the App Store that you already possess apps to install in all your iDevices is simply good logic.  I can’t be certain that it’ll be the same with iTunes songs, but I hope it is.  Sometimes I forget which albums I’ve bought, if I’m buying a few at once. Apple might yet save me from my profligacy.

The leader of the Labour Party, Ed Miliband MP, has moved on from the development of policy and begun to concentrate on messages which alliterate or rhyme.

The shake up in the leadership messaging campaign, which will roll out to the entire party by the end of June, will abandon from policy any idea which cannot be explained in a couplet, and will build into a sonnet of key ideas by conference season.

The policy, developed by message management expert and Miliband advisor Kat Arrowsmith will ensure that ideas shared by the party will be easy to remember and more impactful. A source at Westminster explained:

“Kat Arrowsmith, Ed’s key adviser, introduced the idea at a meeting of the Labour Planning Group, explaining that the best hope of keeping the mouthbreathing morons who somehow managed to cling on to seats in 2010 on message was to make sure they had something that rhymes.”

As a result, Ed Miliband began to apply the policy today, expressing concerns about a ‘free market free-for-all’ in the NHS, and worrying about ‘Liberal lies’ and ‘Tory treachery’.

Over the next month, an entire research unit will be established within the Labour Party to find words which can be bent to rhyme with ‘liberal’ and ‘Tory’ and ‘runt’. Rumours that David Cameron would seek to counter with a similar unit run by Louise Bagshawe MP have been denied, since she mostly writes filth.

The Labour Party’s Ed Balls has been arguing consistently since before the last election that the Conservative plan to cut the UK public sector deficit is wrong-headed and likely to lead to economic disaster. When he peddles his intellectually vacant argument that spending more on public services is needed to keep the UK economy ticking over, he always seems to possess that sneering grin apparently issued as standard clobber by Gordon Brown – the ‘I know better than all of you’ grin.

The fact is, Labour and Ed Balls in particular know an enormous amount about spending money, and increasing national expenditure could be his specialist subject on Mastermind. The proceeds of growth under Labour were mostly to be shared with the civil servants, overheated public sector and the social sector – and on spin merchants, special advisers and newly founded agencies designed to spend even more. What they were incapable of understanding or processing was what to do when growth is outgrown by spending – and when growth collapses. How should we share the results of contraction of the national economy?

To Ed, the clients of Labour – the people who government could very effectively buy off with increased spending- must not be forced to suffer from cuts in public sector spending. In Labour’s economic alternative universe, you simply borrow more to spend more in a recession, and yet expect the deficit to fall as if by magic.

At its heart, Labour still thinks the deficit it built up doesn’t really exist. As long as they keep ignoring the disaster they have visited on the UK, it’ll be simple and logical to ignore the disaster Ed Balls and Ed Miliband are visiting on the Labour Party.