The Absinthe Drinker

Ever willing to try, Angels stepped into an absinthe den. Head full of 19th century images, Gymnopedie playing in the mind, admiring the translucent green, the glass neared the angelic nose. If Florence Nightingale had been swabbing the floor of the entire Crimea it couldn't have been worse. How could anyone drink absinthe?

A retreat to a courtyard cafe and a small pilsner to take away even the smell was needed.

Cabinets Belong in the Capital and Local Governance in the Town Halls

Communities Secretary Hazel Blears' suggestion that to revive interest in politics and enable cabinet ministers to remain what she called 'grounded' and in touch with the real world, the cabinet should meet in local halls and community centres up and down the country is more than silly, it is quite frightening. It is frightening because it displays the complete abandonment of any accepted idea of the range and function of local government by this Labour regime.

We have town halls in every local government authority area, purpose built for local realities and local politics. We have a democratic electoral system to choose our local representatives. What has been removed from us, and from democratic local governance, is both political power and responsibility, and funding.

Give it back, give it all back. Disband the quangoes, the regional appointed administrations, the centralised meddling in local affairs that comes from London. We neither need nor want ministries to run our local schools, hospitals, housing, sport, parks and leisure facilities, etc. They are nothing to do with cabinet government.

Do your own jobs, make policy that is of national scope, deliver it, according to your Party manifesto, a good start would be a referendum you committed to on the Lisbon Treaty. Foreign policy is what cabinet does, and we have thousands of troops sitting at Basra airport taking missiles and not coming home, also a commitment by your liar of a Leader. Sort the disastrous tax structure out and recover the desperate mess made of pensions. There is a long list of national-level undertakings you are failing in.

Hazel Blears needs to ensure that power is devolved to its lowest level of competent use, and wielded by elected councillors. The rest of the cabinet needs to remember what they are for, which is not micro-managing our lives.

Daft by Name Daft by Nature

Imagining that I had arrived, an angelic visitor to Crewe, sent to vote with only command of the English language and its infinite connexions to guide me. Who would I vote for:

Edward Timpson - or Tamsin Dunwoody.

A no-brainer. Wherever did she get that ridiculous name?

Be Popular, Call a General Election

Ministers admit that the measures Brown is putting forward to raise his popularity have been already proposed and even timetabled-in.

There are two complete, not-getting-it failures here: your popularity, Brown, isn't of the slightest interest to your country, our country, or even your own Party; and most of the people in our country will be parents, are parents, or have been parents of young children, and we all know that it's a hard time (made harder if you only do it when your over 50) but transitory.

Most of the population is struggling with too much tax, too high prices, debt overburdens, shame at Labour's foreign policies, and fear of ignorance, sickness, and old age. As you caused all these problems and have embedded them over the years you were in charge of, but not in touch with, the financial and economic role that government plays in our lives, you will know, or possibly not with your difficulties, how intransigent, nigh on irreversible, they are for a numpty who cannot understand other people. So let us help you with your cognitive response.

Call a general election.

We can hope that someone with a fully functioning brain and normal levels of awareness can be placed in government to help us, not order us about.

It's About England, not Scotland

The Labour Leader is lying again. Accusing the SNP of a "transparent attempt to manipulate the political system for purely partisan political purposes" would be breath taking from any one other than the politician most responsible for Scotland's enthusiastic departure from the United Kingdom government's miserable control.

It is the Labour party that is being destroyed by Scotland's realisation that none of the horrors of Labour rule apply to Scotland any more. And it is the Labour party that is desperate to oppose the reconvening of the English Parliament. Labour would be consigned not just to permanent Opposition but to oblivion in the English Parliament. Another centre left party would form, there is no lack of centre left views among the English electorate, but the statist, authoritarian, confrontational trade union, high tax, redistribute within the poor party, would disappear into its 20th century grave.

While the reconvening of the English Parliament would require the redrawing of federal relationships with Scotland, and with Wales and Ireland (north and, in a different order, south), it is the removal of that Labour party road block to a proper, progressive, pluralist and democratic party of the centre left that is the prize.

It would bring to an end the vulgar, sub-marxian mind set that expresses itself politically as the Conservatives being the party of Capital and Labour being the party of, well, labour; and bring to an end the patronising, meddling interference in the lives of others practised by the failed intelligentsia that subscribe to and nourish it for their profit.

Unifying the Ministry of Defence and the Scottish Office

The Leader's decision to make Des Browne both Defence and Scotland minister has turned out to have been prescient. It does seem to be taking a toll on the unfortunate minister though - the Afghanistan Front in full fight, the Iraq front hunkered down at the airport (how many months is it now?) but taking a lot of incoming and who can guess their levels of rage at being prevented from fighting by their orders from Messrs Brown and Browne; and the Scottish Front, as yet political and diplomatic but so are the other two, with only the addition of the third ingredient of international dispute, open warfare.

Abnormality

It is not normal to have a society surveilled and registered and hectored like ours.

It is not normal to have a society in devastating indebtedness for assets rapidly declining in value.

It is not normal to have 6 million people of working age on various kinds of benefit.

It is not normal for hospital patients to die of dirt.

It is not normal for 40% of primary school leavers to be unable to read and write or perform simple calculation.

It is not normal for more than a million people to arrive yet make no provision for their reception.

It is not normal for financial monitoring and good practice to be wilfully incompetent or wholly ignored.

It is not normal to attack other countries and kill thousands of their citizens.

It is not normal for policemen to shoot people or for children to kill one another.

It is not normal to drug the old, abort the unborn 5-6 months from conception, to create cross-species half human embryos.

It is not normal to tax the poor and enable the rich.

It is not normal to do what is wrong and not what is right.

A National Conversation on Reconvening the English Parliament

When Andrew Mackinlay, MP for the Essex seat of Thurrock , complains that the constitutional debate is not including England and English MPs and dresses his complaint in the words "It's my UK," he exemplifies the difficulty in there being no forum in which the reconvening of the English Parliament is being argued.

The Irish Parliament could well invite an Ulster representation of Ulster's people, for just as Ulster's MPs sit in the House of Commons as part of the United Kingdom, they might like a representation to sit in the Irish Parliament too, as part of Ireland; as well as having their own Assembly. The Scottish representation sits in the UK Parliament as part of the United Kingdom, as well as having their own Parliament.

The English sit only in the UK Parliament, their own Parliament submerged and voiceless, worse off than the Faroes or the Isle of Man, as England is divided into supranational regions, its reality denied by the United Kingdom Government and the European Union - a lost country that is close to being flooded ever more deeply inside the European Union.

It isn't your UK, Mr Mackinlay. The United Kingdom is a flawed, and lately severely damaged, constitutional reality that is sustained by other countries with other plans and interests, as well as some concern in common advantage.

It is your England, Mr Mackinlay, and you need a Parliament in which to represent it and more specifically, the electors of Thurrock.

What is Brown For?

First Labour loses Scotland to the SNP. Then Labour loses London to the Conservatives. So the UK's main natural resources area is no longer under Labour control and the UK's main wealth producing area is no longer under Labour control. In Scotland the Scottish government is preparing for a referendum on extending devolution and planning for independence. In London forensic accountants have just been appointed to investigate London Government's expenditures back to 2004.

Just what is the unelected Prime Minister Leader of and prime minister of, any longer?

We Need a Scorpio Murtlock for our Widmerpool

Concentrating executive power in the hands of the prime minister has the enormous drawback of requiring a greater concentration on an individual than modern political and historical analytic best practice might prefer. It's also rather dull, particularly when the inappropriate object is Gordon Brown.

This idiot savant, impervious among his spreadsheets and statistics, his Party deals and rule-governed micro managing, presents further and personalised difficulties in the resistance to his removal than do most prime ministers who often prefer a little longer in office. In Brown's case we have lost half the leverage to apply to his removal - there is nowhere for him to go.

International institutions that might have been pressed into service have turned him down already - the World Bank specifically, others by various exclusions that in Brown's case would be vigorously applied: the IMF - he's not American; the European Union - he's kept the UK out of the euro and been grossly ill-mannered and hectoring to more EU power brokers than he (or regrettably the United Kingdom) can afford; the financial world - draw a veil over their reaction to the introduction of the ultimately unclubbable into their company; the United Nations - disrespecting the President of the United States who, regardless of party is identified with the American people by the American people, is not a parole-able offence; and so the no noes go on.

It's so much harder to winkle them out without a pin of enticement.