False flag?

There has been much heat, and very little light, resulting from John Key's casual suggestion it might be time for New Zealand to get a new flag.

While most political parties nodded in agreement with key, the suggestion prompted a sadly predictable response in the leftish bloglands, with comment-mongers on The Standard decrying it as a clumsy attempt to distract people from Nationals apparent electoral woes (though it's rich for a party Labouring (pun intentional) at 33% to be pointing out anyone else's polling problems).

But I think the frothing is misplaced.  Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.  And sometimes a politician wondering about whether we should have a look at changing the flag is just that.

I honestly can't see how this could be a diversionary tactic.  I credit John Key with more intelligence than that.  After all, he's wiped the floor with us twice now.  Or are you suggesting that's so easy even an idiot who thinks the public will be completely befuddled by a ploy so obvious can do that?

I think Key has been so effective in colonising the middle ground (and some on the left so quick to abandon it in favour of a small-but-ideologically-pure corner of the debate) that he has driven many on the left quite mad.  Everything has to be part of a Grand Conspiracy (possibly featuring a Needlessly Large Weather Machine and a Secret Base inside an underwater volcano).  Which tells you a lot about how desperate he has made us.  Every action and utterance by John Key is analysed and deconstructed to find the true motive, the real dark seedy manipulative purpose because, you know, it is impossible Key might just genuinely be wondering about whether we should have a look at changing the flag.  It's got to be something else.  There has to be an ulterior motive!  And we have to be the first to spot it or at least the ones braying most loudly about it.

If Key had a motive beyond just wondering about whether we should have a look at changing the flag, I suspect it probably would be causing mischief on the left.  Because - like it or not - he's got our number.  And the paranoid ramblings and aghast wailing emanating from the blogatariat prove it.  An casual comment from Key, and the left is veritably turning itself inside out in an effort to show how caddish - and yet stupid - Key is, lobbing this debate into the middle of an election year.  An so a lot of time and energy is wasted in Exposing John Key's True Motive in wondering whether we should have a look at changing the flag.

A less demoralised and desperate left would have said, "Yeah, we've been saying that for years, welcome to the party, John."  After all, mos of us would probably support replacing the flag , or at least talking about it.  Gnashing our teeth at how duplicitous Key is just makes us look sad and hopeless.

In this case, I think he genuinely believes it is a debate worth having; and election year would be the obvious time to do it, as you'll get a better response than with a stand-alone referendum.  As most of us would largely agree with the end, and the means, I don't really see what all the fuss is about.

Osborne grinds the faces of the poor in the dirt

That's probably a metaphor, but might be an actual headline describing literal events, the way things are going.

More than 270,000 of the poorest households in England face council tax hikes of £80 a year as the government's safety net is withdrawn, a survey of local authorities has revealed.

Using freedom of information requests, research for the Joseph Rowntree Trust has found that from April another 48 local authorities are reducing protection for vulnerable residents. 

Ministers cut funding for the means-tested benefit by £500m, around 10% of the total, last April and instructed local authorities to decide how the reduced benefit should be distributed. 

However, to cushion the blow ministers offered £100m in subsidies to councils that designed schemes that would offer some protection to the poor. This scheme has not been renewed, with the result that this year will be the first that the government will no longer provide a dedicated stream of cash to take the poorest out of council tax. 

The result of this – and further cuts to local authority budgets – is that more than a quarter of a million working-age households will see bills rise by an average of £78 a year, taking the amount of yearly council tax that they will have to pay to £176.

The true nastiness of this government is becoming clear, as 'safety nets' are taken away and who will be most affected by Osborne's bloodthirst becomes clear - the poorest and most vulnerable.  Afterall, they would never vote Tory, would they?  I think the scorecard needs to be updated ... that'll teach him!!

-1 ... Local government cuts, ordered by central government, hitting the poor. 

-1 ... Taking 500 Syrian refugees, which acknowledges there is a catastrophe, but only doing enough to generate a positive headline in the Daily Mail.  Was even Tony Blair this disgustingly cynical?

OVERALL: -6/10 Their heartless and wrong-headed domestic agenda and their humanitarianism-as-PR gives a truly nasty edge to the coalition.

Seth Avett sings 'Fish and Bird' by Tom Waits

Seth from the Avett Brothers singing a Tom Waits song, which is a combination of two very good things.

Covers of Tom Waits songs are  dangerous. It's generally a bad idea to try to imitate the great man's unique delivery; it just sound like Tom Waits diluted (Are you listening, Rod?).  But Seth Avett has a sweet melancholy voice so this one works.

 And yeah, I know, a whale isn't a fish. But 'Giant Aquatic Mammal and Bird' would just sound stupid.

Peter Oborne

... is fantastic. I've always said so. Repeatedly. You all remember me saying so, don't you? Top bloke. Wonderful. Even more wonderful than Vince "Wrong Sort Of Recovery" Cable.  And writing this sort of stuff in The Telegraph, would you believe?  Don't be surprised if we are told Mr Oborne has taken 'Stress Leave,' with immediate effect.

As someone who voted Conservative at the last election, I therefore found it profoundly shaming and offensive when George Osborne lowered the top rate of tax from 50p to 45p two years ago. 

The Coalition government has devoted a great deal of effort to lowering the living standards of the poor. I support this project because I believe that Gordon Brown’s welfare state forced some people into a life of dependency, thus taking away their human dignity. 

There have been many people on welfare who need much more of an incentive to return to work. But to make the rich richer at the same time as making the poor poorer – what George Osborne has been doing – is simply squalid, immoral and disgusting. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is leading the fight inside the cabinet to strip a further £10 billion of welfare payments for the very poorest. Any decent human being must surely feel sick in the stomach that he is taking this action at the same time as cutting the amount of tax paid by people earning more than £150,000. 

... 

A Conservative Party with decent values should not reward these people. It should support hard-working, honest people. If the Chancellor understood this point, he would have taken middle earners out of the top rate of tax, not given a bonus to people who are already affluent. 

So well done Ed Balls, who has had a hard time lately. He has given ordinary, decent people a serious reason for voting Labour at the coming election.

Pistol Pete should say more of this sort of thing. If he learns the correct method of addressing Osborne - his name should always be prefaced with "that revolting, loathsome and repulsive imbecile" or similar - I may make him an honorary leftie.

Seriously, there is a difference between a Conservative, and the sort of neo-liberal Friedmanite loons who have colonised the right-wing parties since the 1980s.  People who think like Oborne - who are conservative for essentially moral reasons, rather than (how can I say this politely?) economic imperatives - need to make themselves more.  I won't agree with them on everything much but at least a conservative and a democratic socialist are approaching problems from the same direction.  If the British Conservatives could expunge the Freidmanite Supply Side Maniacs (tm) it would bring the Conservative Party back into alignment with the people that actually vote for it.

After all, Labour had to go through a similar process in the late 70s and 80s, to produce the attenuated, somewhat rightwing social-capitalist party of the 90s.  And at least the prospect of a Conservative government would fill all right thinking people with horror.

Of course, the Freidmanites would resist it, utterly, and Oborne will probably catch a lot of flack from their shills in the press.  Supply-siders are parasitic - economically and politically.  Their creed repels 99% of the population - look at ACT's polling for proof of this.  They can not survive on their own, so they have to inhabit the larger body of a moderately right-wing, conservative party.  In doing so, they sap its vitality and sicken it, or - and here the metaphor may be slightly stretched, if one is not familiar with Gonchongs - possess it and supplant its personality utterly, turning it into a hideous facsimile of a Conservative party, mouthing conservative shibboleths to please the increasingly perplexed and embittered voters, and scapegoating the weak and marginalised to redirect that frustration away from where it belongs.  This is particularly true of Britain, where First Past the Post forces fringe pursuits like neo-liberalism to inveigle itself into larger, more moderate parties.  Even in New Zealand, however, where MMP theoretically allows the rightwing economic 'purists' to survive in their own party, the truth is they have to infiltrate National, as described in The Hollow Men, if they are to get their hand decisively on the levers of power.

It is time for New Zealand's own Obornes to speak up and reject the swivel eyed advocates of Freidmanite madness, who still exert a toxic influence on the National Party.

Recovery?

The provisional estimates of growth for 2013 show that the Tories - after 4 years of trying, almost doing as well as Labour!

However, manufacturing output and construction are both down in the last quarter. Dunno if that is seasonal variation (can't be much fun building things in the rain) but it rather undercuts the 'rebalanced economy' claptrap Osborne is peddling. Its more unbalanced and service dependent that ever.

As for 'Plan B,' a sensible economic policy would have delivered this sort of growth years ago. We're still poorer than we were in 2007 and other economies - which weren't madly flaying themselves with austerity - have recovered more swiftly.

And it did not have to be this way.  Britain had a perfectly good recovery underway in 2010.  From that bastion of rightwing thought and freemarket ideology, the New Statesman:

In 2010, a genuine recovery was underway, with the economy growing 2.4 per cent in the 12 months to Q3 2010, but premature austerity, in the form of the VAT rise and the dramatic cut in infrastructure spending, ensured that growth was snuffed out. To meet the OBR's original 2010 forecasts, the economy would need to grow by 1.6 per cent each quarter between now and the election. But Osborne has been the beneficiary of low expectations. Before the post-2010 downturn, below-trend growth of 1.9 per cent would have been viewed as a dismal failure.

Is Osborne some sort of political genius?  Perform so poorly that the robust growth of 2010 becomes some sort of folk myth, like King Arthur and the Loch Ness monster, and thus even the most mediocre performance is hailed as the works of an economic colossus?

RIP Pete Seeger

Died yesterday.

The Horrors of Climate change Made Clear

This is awful:

An underweight hedgehog found wandering around a garden during the daytime is a sign that the animals are being lured out of hibernation too early, says a wildlife charity. Care for the Wild, in Brighton Road, Horsham, have taken in the little hog after he was found in a Crawley garden, then taken to Harvest Vets in Maidenbower. Care for the Wild’s wildlife carer Tarnya Knight said: “This little fella is just 300 grams so he definitely wouldn’t have made it through the winter, and if a cold snap comes that would have finished him off. But we’ll feed him up and he should be okay to be released in the spring. “The mild weather we’ve had is leading to hedgehogs coming out of hibernation too early. Most of them will be the right weight, but there isn’t much natural food for them around at the moment. So if you get hedgehogs in your garden please leave out some food and water to see if they’re around. And of course, if you see one during the daytime, please either contact us or take it to the vet.”

Increasing warming, decreasing hedgehogs. Will Britain be Britain without the humble hedgepig snuffling about? One is vaguely - very vaguely - reminded of George Orwell's Some Thoughts On The Common Toad:

At any rate, spring is here, even in London N.1, and they can't stop you enjoying it. This is a satisfying reflection. How many a time have I stood watching the toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who as you are not actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or a holiday camp, spring is still spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.

Having failed to control the simple delights of watching little figments of nature going about their business, and not being able to tax it efficiently, the dictator and bureaucrats, it seems, have decided to drive everything endearing and untamed to extinction.

Or maybe not.  But there is a smidgeon of a serious point here - climate change is not The Day After Tommorrow dramatic nonsense.  Climate change is British hedgehogs dying out because the conditions that let them thrive no longer apply.  And if the loveable hedgehog is being challenged by climate change, what else will struggle to adapt?

 Doubtless this is one of the benefits Owen Paterson discerns in a warming world.  He has pointed out that human beings are great adaptors - failing to add that adaption is usually accompanied by significant unpleasantness (the Saxons adapted to climate change 1500 years ago by sailing to Britain and killing lots of people).  Hedgehogs, probably, are less capable of adapting to a changing world.