Where To Start?

Labour are in a right royal mess. Ironically, the one thing Brown seems to have done right lately is to announce daily attendance allowances in place of second home allowances, but now even that is going to backfire on him because he isn't brave enough to confront his MPs about the only thing they seem to care about anymore - their expenses. Cameron is being totally disingenuous on this as usual and the press are spinning it as "brussels gravytrain' allowances.

The truth is that virtually every MP claims a second home allowance and moving to an attendance allowance of say £150 a day (similar to Lords) would save taxpayers money and have the useful side effect of making MPs actually turn up to work (so the people that actually need the allowance get it and those that don't do not). So Cameron has gone all high and mighty defending the position that MPs shouldn't have to turn up to work to get paid (if only that applied to all of us) - If only we had a press that was overwhelmingly left-wing instead of to the right, they would have a field day with that defence. But I suppose coming from someone who enjoyed his jollies in apartheid South Africa, this comes as little surprise (if this nugget of info had been about Brown it would have led the news bulletins for weeks, instead people will forget it and look at Cameron's big smile in his nice suit and he will get away scot free just as Boris did with his racist writings).

Oh well. What a disastrous week - just got to prepare ourselves for the inevitable Tory shambles in 2010 - we really do need PR so we could have a proper choice - not just tired Labour and fresh faced but shifty Tories. Same old, same old. How long do we have to wait for real change. I still hope beyond any real chance of it happening that Labour MPs will get rid of Brown before we end up with a massive Tory majority government inflicting real damage to public services, but I realise I am dreaming. They have already left it too late to get anything better than a hung parliament at best under maybe Alan Johnson or better still John Denham or Jon Cruddas. Both Compass, Progress and even the Fabians recognise the urgent need for fair votes, maybe these guys would deliver it and save us from the horrible Tories governing over us in the cities with just the suburbs and rural areas supporting them and egging on their little Englander Tory MPs to create even more welfare dependency than Thatcher did in the 80s. The 'evil poor' as one orwell winning police blog calls them will multiply under the Tories, they always do.