How the Conservative party abandoned conviction

This is a must read from George Bridges on how the Blairite moral lobotomy has hollowed out the Conservative party.

I recommend a reading, though I think the time for conviction politics is soon to return.

The only problem is ambitious people like #RedEd Miliband are picking this up on the focus groups and trying to impersonate them.

The new silver bullets

I have long thought that eventually the establishment will clamp down on the internet and that public panic over some issue like child abuse will be used as the excuse. The last few days have perhaps shown how it will be done.

What the phone voice-mail default password scandal shows is that some stories just don't move until the heart strings of the public are plucked in a certain way.

John Prescott ( he of the affair with a civil servant and cheating on his wife ) has his voicemail listened to - we all think its funny.

Celebrities ? Well if anyone cared about them then certain newspapers wouldn't sell and they'd be no Heat magazine.

The last Labour cabinet decided not to inquire any further about people listening into other people's voice-mail, less its upset newspapers who's support they were still courting. ( A Gordon Brown side kick one #RedEd is most likely to have been in the cabinet meeting that took that calculation ).

So what's the silver bullet in this affair been ? Public sympathy for a murdered school girls, and dead servicemen.

The ground of public opinion has opened below News International with that magic ingredient. The new silver bullets of public debate and political combat have been found, and you can be sure they will be used again. ( In some ways this was the lesson of Bigotgate. )

So what will the political world have learnt ?

To phrase its arguments in these terms.

Expect the bonfire of the vanities to be built up with harrowing stories and the cult of victim hood as each side tries to trump the other with the story that generates the most outrage to allow it to defeat its opponents in the cage fight of public opinion.

Welcome to America.

Annoucing what you are going to say before you say it is damaging out democracy

But only because the media reports it.

A new trick was invented in the days of New Labour. To ensure that no opposition spokesperson should get a look in on an announcement they pre-announced speeches.

Those who wanted to react had nothing to react against. They needed to wait for the text to be read out to be sure nothing would get changed at the last moment. By that time the key message was out unchallenged in the media and the story was old hat.

A great move for all those spin doctors, but its destroyed debate.

Today we have Ed Miliband pre-announcing an attack on the future of the English NHS ( delivered perversely from the Welsh Labour conference - the Welsh NHS thanks to its more socialism model kills far more of its victims than event the English one does ).

Its all designed to sent out unchallenged sound-bites into the media. No wonder politics is in such an awful mess these days. ( And lets be clear all sides now do this ).

The dark matter in UK politics

Man in a Shed used to be a seasoned observer of company politics - since I'm in a one man company these days it no longer really applies.

I used to reckon that any major decision could be explained or at least understood in terms of the forces acting on management. If you had an action that seemed odd, it generally meant you didn't have as good an understanding of the forces in play as you thought you did, and it was usually a good excuse for some further investigation.

In a similar astronomers and cosmologists believe they can see the impact on the universe of far more matter than they can see, inferring its existence by the gravitational pull they infer.

The same sort of dark matter exists in our politics, that can be inferred by its effect, but can't be directly seen.

It is clear that the Man Made Global Warming hypothesis (aka ManBearPig ) is in deep deep trouble. Ministers must receive this advice privately, in this country and in others, yet they play along. Indeed they appear to be using the excuse to achieve other objectives, such as world regulation and control. The one thing they don't do is order the sort of reviews and systematic professional exposition of the evidence and theories that are based on it that might create confidence, or disprove the hypothesis. Instead they demand blind faith, run campaigns to influence us ( which when tax payer funded in the light of a clearly unproven and debatable hypothesis is a direct subversion of our democracy ). Clearly they aren't motivated by a search for the truth - they already have their agenda, which they aren't sharing but using AGW as a fig leaf for.

Even the Queen has been known to warn against "dark forces".

Supposed democratic states sign up to the sort of behind the scenes negotiation of the citizen's interests that is very anti-democratic and with some highly undemocratic partners. Indeed these partners almost wield more influence than our over promoted student politicians do.

Why was Tony Blair flying into Copenhagen in a private jet anyway. Who benefits, indeed who paid ?

Suddenly we see a European state set up - in direct opposition to referendums on the subject and with promises from Labour being shamelessly broken. The BBC starts using the term EU citizen in places in reports.

Apparently between 70-90% of our laws come from Brussels and yet this is never acknowledged by our main political parties.

We see the effects of things in our politics that are hard to explain just in terms of our official political parties, their statements and pronouncements and their memberships. This is the evidence for dark, and as yet unexplained, force in our politics.

Its a matter of fact that certain movements on the left have always had a hidden agenda, but perhaps this is more wide spread.

In the world of the narrative, focus group tested sound bite and triangulation - combined with restricted access to the MSM ( only currently bypassed by the internet - but for how much longer ? ) can an informed democracy really exist ?

In my darker moments these things worry me.