What else would one expect of a near-Communist trade union?

As for this voting business, I was all set to make my mark for UKIP. Then I heard Roger Knapman, the party's leader, on BBC R4, on the one hand describing its policies as 'libertarian' while, more or less in the same breath, saying how UKIP would have come to the financial rescue of Rover.

God rot them all!

The statist mindset is absolute. Nothing other than state action can possibly help in any conceivable situation where a problem can be found or created.

I think the phrase is "one trick pony."

Not as much as spending £70 billion less.

Of course, neither is an option in this Election. If the Conservatives got in, and everything went according to plan, their spending would end up at around 40% of GDP, versus 42% under NuLab. It's not something to get excited about, which is why Howard is trying to stir things up by calling blair a liar. Hello Michael, tell us something we don't know mate.

"If I thought the Tories would cut £35bn, I might even vote for them".

Quite.

I am trying to persuade myself to vote Labour on the old Marxist basis that Labour is objectively FOR anti-statism: I would sooner they were re-elected and get us to the utter point of statist ruin quickly, so that we can then rebuild, than see the Tories elected, get us there more slowly, in the process discrediting whatever notions of small government they find the balls to advocate, and postpone even further the process of post-statist reconstruction.

It's a bit like Winnie Mandela supporting sanctions against south Africa on the grounds that, since the black majority suffered most under sanctions, they would revolt more quickly against apartheid.

All that militates against this analysis is a) the sheer brass neck with which statists picked themselves up and brushed themselves off after the collapse of the USSR, and b) the success with which, in doing so, they have maintained their dominance of acceptable parameters of debate and their purported monopoly on virtue.

Ultimately, whatever blame should accrue to statists for the moral turpitude and financial disasters they brew for us proles, they have proven they are capable of sweeping it aside and moving on.

God, how I hate them.

When I first saw that hoarding, I thought of Christine Keeler & Mandy Rice-Davies...

"... well they would say that, wouldn't they!"

The brilliance of this is that when the Tories lose, their parliamentary party will concluded that their radical tax-cutting agenda put the voters off.

Leftthinker?

Isn't that an oxymoron?

I saw this hoarding on the Unison headquarters building, near Euston Station, last week, and had an almost irresistible urge to climb up with a couple of spray cans and replace the word less with more.

Alas, my innate sense of property rights prevented me. Dammit. Sometimes I wish I was a Leftist anarchist, rather than a Rightist one.

The Left always seem to have more fun! :-)