New Blog

It's time for a revamp and time to get a better system of updates.
The Campaign for Better Politics is going to change over the weekend with more news and comment and better interactivity.
This old design is erm, old, and in dire need of change.
In the meantime, please keep me posted with malpractice in politics and I will highlight it to all!
Remember tweet with me at www.twitter.com/betterpolitics or Facebook me at www.facebook.com/campaignforbetterpolitics

US Eyeopener

Apologies for my lack of blogging recently but I have been away to the USA where I must admit shock in finding much anti-Obama feeling.
With the big 'O' wanting to create a fairer healthcare system there will be a cost to the taxpayer which is bringing much fear.
Unlike their British cousins, the Americans have long-shunned a free-for-all at the point of service NHS (though I admit the British system is not totally free).
One family man was at pains to "Obama-bash" angry at such an idea while another was fuming at the Obama's administration having more of a say in Government donations.
But I was amazed at such pessimism when the administration is trying to change a system so badly neglected and rotten under Bush.
It is time for Americans to get behind Obama and his plans.

End of Brown 2

Michael Fabricant's Facebook status is intriguing:
"I was told by a prominent back-bench Labour MP immediately after Prime Minister's Questions: "Gordon will be gone this time next week". I think a Labour groundswell is growing. Unlike Tony Blair, Brown is neither believed nor liked."
Let me know who this was!

End of Brown?

SO Hazel Blears and Jacqui Smith have got the hint and left.
But by leaving days before a reshuffle and potential massacre at the elections, this leaves Brown completely open for criticism.
With the expenses row still raging and anger over British politics, will the ultimate fall guy be the Prime Minister?
The Guardian has finally come out and made noises about it.
But from what I hear, Brown could be out this time next week with Alan Johnson waiting in the wings.

Next Prime Minister?

WITH Harriet Harman throwing her hat in the ring (or not?), it 's time to check out the latest odds for who will take over Gordon Brown as Labour Party leader?
The odds are (thanks to Paddy Power):

Harriet Harman 3/1
Alan Johnson 6/1
David Miliband 7/1
Jack Straw 8/1
James Purnell 8/1
Jon Cruddas 8/1
E Miliband 10/1
Ed Balls 14/1
Hilary Benn 16/1
Douglas Alexander 20/1
John Denham 25/1
John Hutton 25/1
A Burnham 25/1
Alan Milburn 33/1
Yvette Cooper 40/1
Jacqui Smith 66/1
Charles Clarke 66/1
C Flint 66/1
Liam Byrne 66/1
John McDonnell 66/1
Dianne Abbot 80/1
Hazel Blears 80/1
Tony Blair 100/1

Ed Balls' 'Balls-Up'

BALLS is back in the news for the wrong reasons!
And it just so happens I am supposed to be meeting the Schools Secretary already under fire for the Sats exams and expenses this week. Tweet me @betterpolitics www.twitter.com/betterpolitics with your questions.
Now it seems he has been slagging off his colleagues behind their backs as part of a bid to become party leader. For more see here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1171892/Schools-Secretary-Ed-Balls-used-Damian-McBride-undermine-ministerial-rivals.html And poor Mandy might have been in the firing line.
He, of course, denies it and Tessa Jowell has been wheeled out to back him up. But surely this is just another balls-up for a hapless minister.
Maybe it's time for him to say goodbye.
*By the way, what the hell is Richard Branson doing?

The Dawn Bin Raiders - What a Waste of Resources

IMAGINE being woken up at half-five in the morning by strange men sifting through your wheelie bin before gathering all of your rubbish and pouring it into a white van.
You are likely to feel slightly afraid wondering what the hell is going on! You might even call the police for fear you are being robbed!
But this scenario is being played out in Lancashire where the county council is sending out agency workers in the early hours of the morning to look through people's bins! It recently happened in a surburban part of Chorley where one woman said she was about to call the police and another man approached them to ask why they were snooping at such a ridiculous time.
Why? Apparently, to find out what we are throwing away as it helps them launch campaigns to minimise the wrong things going to landfill! And the county council say they are justified in doing this.
An article is set to go into a local newspaper about this scandalous activity which one councillor thought was a wind-up! And so did I when I first heard of it.
Not only that, it costs £30,000 of taxpayers' money per "waste audit" and a team of up to nine people are needed for this. They sign confidentiality agreements apparently so we can all be safe they won't be nicking our identities any time soon with the information they find!!! I'm not convinced.
In this era of constant privacy breaches, this really takes the biscuit and I urge anyone who reads this to write to the county council to vent their frustrations!
I will post the news article here when it finally goes up online.

Weird Week in Politics

SO, we want to reform the Monarchy so Catholics can get involved, travel around the world while briefing against Alastair Darling and then have a big party in England for the G(insert whatever number sounds impressive) conference. I'm actually more of a fan of G4 from X Factor!
It is all exhausting stuff but a is a lot of it actually needed? Shouldn't we just be getting on with the job instead of farting about?
I was also taken by Fred the Shred getting his posh car and house targeted in Scotland. If you know this mystery group, which says it is "only the beginning" please get in touch.
Also, bloggers Derek Draper and Guido Fawkes had a go at each other on TV - and it was utter drivel. I would post a link to the video but it's not worth it! Oh go on, then here it is:

Finally, as a print journalist, it was terrifying to see something that did not feature in the news at all in print or broadcast involving a Tory MEP slating Gordon Brown getting 1m hits on YouTube. The result, the BBC and friends retreated and ran the story anyway.
You can watch the rant here. But, I must admit, I don't think it's worth the hit rates it is getting.

RANT OF THE WEEK: Sir Fred - This Recession's Scapegoat

OH, how I am fed up of reading about Sir Fred Goodwin and his pension! Another day, and yet another series of stories about it.
Now, he's apparently walked off with another £3m - but hey wait, no he hasn't he has given it back it is reported a couple of hours later. And he's still set to claim £600k or is it £700k a year? I lose track.
To be quite honest, yes it is disgusting and stinks but it's happened and we are all fools for it.
The recession stinks and mistakes have been made so where is the scapegoat? Sir Fred fits that bill as the ex-RBS chief.
And what next?
Oh, we've got local authorities wanting to sue RBS for not revealing details of investments with Cherie Blair leading the arguments as barrister! Unbelievable! What's the point?
The sensible finance chief officer of Lancashire County Council told me he doesn't see the point - it's just lobbing more taxpayers money towards American lawyers and who loses out - we do! And why do we want to do that? This is coming from a man who is overseeing a local government pension pot losing £2.2m a day so he has a right to be angry but he is taking a considered response.
Maybe it's time the rest of us do that - including those trying to find convenient scapegoats for a wider and endemic problem.
It's about time we focused on solving it instead of looking for those to blame.

Blogging Accountability

IT is a bleak time for journalism with job losses and redundancies biting at daily and regional papers across Britain.
With profits down at Johnston Press, the company is looking to shake up its management on newsdesks upwards making painful job losses. The same is true at GMG where the Reading paper is going bi-weekly and there are set to be horrific losses at the MEN and its weeklies.
Soon, we could get to the stage where there are simply no local papers left or all that remains is news run on tight budgets by few people with no resources. The result - a poor product which people will not buy anyway making the situation worse.
The internet has flourished with blogging, Twitter and all the rest. It has been good for papers to embrace this but the problem is - it doesn't make anywhere near the same money that traditional newspapers did (note the word 'did'). This is made worse by an active online community of untrained journalists blogging away rivalling the sources where people once went for their news.
And I must admit, today, I too read blogs instead of going to newspaper websites because the content is often more interesting, free from the constraints of owners or editors and can be exclusive.
With papers going out of business as I write, there will be few quality reads left alongside a growing amount of blogs and tweets or whatever attracting the reader.
My only worry is the lack of journalism training tied to those writing them and the resources they have to gain access to the movers and shakers. The authors also often have little concept of libel so risk being sued.
I think it is time for the Government to look at the issue of the decline of newspapers and the media - especially as it is supposed to be a key part of democracy.
In the meantime, as a trained journalist, I'll hedge my bets by blogging, writing for a newspaper and tweeting (or whatever else I can do right now to get people's attention!).

Worst Political Quotes of All Time

TO celebrate idiocy in British politics, let's celebrate some of the worst quotes, or misquotes, of our time.
Feel free to add your own by tweeting @betterpolitics

1. "Now is not the time for sound bites. I can feel the hand of history on my shoulder." - Tony Blair

2. "I did maths for a year at university. I don't think I was very good at it. And some people would say it shows." - Gordon Brown, who recently told the House of Commons he had "saved the world".

3. "Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3." - Boris Johnson

4. "I don't make predictions. I never have and I never will." - Tony Blair.

5. "Only in Britain could it be thought a defect to be too clever by half. The probability is that too many people are too stupid by three-quarters." - John Major.

6. Lady Astor to Churchill: "Winston, if you were my husband I would flavour your coffee with poison"
Churchill: "Madam, if I were your husband, I should drink it"

7. "Do not underestimate the determination of a quiet man." - Iain Duncan Smith, shortly before resigning Conservative Party leadership.

8. "We're not saying, 'We're politicians, trust us.' We know you don't trust us." - Michael Howard.

9. "Go back to your constituencies and prepare for Government." - Former SDP leader David Steel before his party came third in the 1983 election.

Phil Woolas - It's Time to Knight Him

STEP forward Mr Phil Woolas, our favourite Home Office minister.
And isn't it about time we knighted this man especially as he goes on a new crusade of slagging off the Office for National Statistics.
He claims it is playing politics by releasing data to the general public!
Heaven forbid should a statistics body release statistics - what were they thinking?
Oh, wait up, it seems the immigration minister is not happy they are releasing information about immigration figures specifically about the number of British residents born abroad. It is "naive" and "sinister", he says.
But let's get real here, isn't the real politics taking place by the minister himself by making an issue of this so publicly.
And in an era of "open Government", it should not matter if the public knows such information - we are legitimately allowed to have it. We don't live in a former Communist dictatorship, and we quite frankly find the minister arrogant and he has shown appalling judgement here himself.
This is bully-boy tactics of the first kind and I now welcome the Manchester student who recently and successfully threw a custard pie in Mr Woolas' face.
See http://tinyurl.com/afsexv for BBC story.
Relive the classic cream pie moment:

Right Said Fred

A CONTRACT is a contract and as sickening as this sounds it is allowing Sir Fred Goodwin, former RBS chief, to walk away with a disgusting £650,000-a-year pension.
RBS has posted massive losses - the worst in history though this is still less than predicted.
But Sir Fred was bred under a system which rewarded failure as much as gain.
Now, it is all good and well to moan and point to him and use Sir Fred as the scapegoat for banking's failure.
But he is merely cashing in on what was promised.
It is sickening, it is wrong, but it is too late and Government ministers should quit moaning about it and make sure this NEVER happens again.
See Sir Fred in action:

A Funny - Draper v Dale

Here at Better Politics we like to stay out of online spats such as the on-going tit-for-tat stuff involving Labour's Derek Draper and the Conservatives' Iain Dale.
But this video spoof of Downfall is sure good value.

Supermassive Black Holes

IT'S time that we as tax payers stop forking out millions and millions to the pension pots of local government schemes.
Better Politics knows of one local government scheme in England which has a growing deficit of £25 A SECOND - that equates to over £2m a day. Yes, the stock market has gone down but even the scheme's own financial expert does not think it can come back to parity - it is currently £2.1bn in debt. He says there's only a 35% chance of this happening in the next 20 years!
And who pays for this in trying to plug a dying pension system? Well, surprise surprise, it's us - the tax payer. We are the mugs - again.
One pension expert thinks that one day there will be nothing in the pot left to pay out pensions. This, though, will never happen while the Government guarantees these dying gold-plated systems based on final salaries.
No one in the private sector these days can retire on final salaries yet council officers can.
We pay around £35 a year from our council tax bills to go towards other people's pensions - it's not on and it needs changing now.

Bankers v Politicians

Darling knows how he does it but the next in line for vitriol are the bankers (again!). This time, quite rightly, RBS.
Yes, it is disgusting that bankers, who are failing spectacularly, want to continue paying themselves big bonuses in such an economic climate.
But what on earth can Darling do? He's clearly angry that we've just bailed out RBS for £20bn abd £1bn will be paid out in bonuses. This is bloody annoying.
But we need to be serious when tackling this and start to bring back teeth into government before making empty threats.
RBS should be ashamed of themselves, of course, but let's see action before we go into rant mode on Sunday morning television.
My answer would be to threaten to withdraw our hard-earned tax pounds in any bailout.

£172k Bill for Police Bridge Crossing

POLICE are paying a massive £172k each year to go over the Humber Bridge each day.
Humberside Police have spent £863,928 over the past five years on the bridge toll – known as "home to work passes" – for staff working on one side of the bridge and living on the other.
In 2007/8, £208k was spent, following revelations made by the Hull Daily Mail.
Ian Watson, assistant chief officer for Humberside Police, defended the expenditure as "good value for money".