Why won't he go?

I said yesterday that Labour were looking shakier and shakier, and low and behold the next day (actually it was the same day, if you live in GMT) they lose an opposition day debate on the Gurkhas

How wonderful, and if you don't know what this means - well the last time a government was defeated was 1978, under Callaghan (there's that parallel again) and to Jim's credit he at least didn't have a working majority

Furthermore this is a rather massive blow as it would appear the public never agreed with the government - the Daily Politics did not receive a single message against today's motion, obviously it's not a fair sample but it is unprecedented for everyone to agree like that - it shows how deeply out of touch the government are

And this comes in the wake of the expenses fiasco, the climbdown on the database, oh and a certain little petition that is now No.1 on the PM's own website, so I don't even need the address, just head to petitions.number10 and it's on the front page under 'most popular' - not bad for less than a week (I can't wait for the government response)

Also while you're there numbers 4 and 5 also piqued my interest - the national speed limit change is clearly deeply opposed and there's one against the proposed changes to tuition fees, two issues I feel pretty strongly about, and they're worthwhile petitions now they're so large

I don't really want to talk at length about the Gurkha situation, I've always believed they have a right to live here, and as every blogger and newspaper journo in the land is saying the same thing I see little point in adding my tiny voice

What I will say is that the government have not only been foolish, but callous

Why did they feel that it was appropriate to use the rule of 20 years service when Gurkhas are forced to retire after 15? That's pretty clearly a stitch-up

And why exactly did the government suddenly bring up a brick wall against immigration when this government (rightly or wrongly) are well known for having a lax attitude towards it? Personally I think they saw it as a soft target in an attempt to look tough, unfortunately for them the public don't actually mind soldiers who fight for this country being allowed in

Allowing pre-1997 Gurkhas in would allow approximately 36,000 in, the government said this could equate to just over 100,000 people, accounting for dependants

Big number isn't it? Well not really, that's the worst case scenario, or in government language: their strongest argument - it's a bit like saying we could expect over 300 million coming in from the EU

And 100,000 is not particularly large, it might be a logistical problem should they all descend within one year, but that's unlikely - as an example net foreign immigration was 333,000 in 2007 - and we've received over half a million Poles since 2004 (same source), if the government could handle all the 'opening the floodgates' headlines from the Mail over that then I see little reason they should have a problem with up to 100,000 people who have a pretty strong claim

Other arguments include, 'it'll cost too much and we're trying to cut costs' - well unfortunately Labour were happy to spend massively until about 2 weeks ago, so they had a good eleven years to throw more money away - and their estimates of it costing over a billion pounds are worthy of the tabloids, including potential healthcare costs for a bunch of elderly soldiers, the government neglect to mention that Gurkhas paid tax and National Insurance and so are therefore paid in

And seriously, a billion is nothing - pointless and unpopular I.D cards will be over five billion, the Olympics are set at 5.3billion, and will probably be nearer ten billion, and exactly how much did the bailout cost?

Then of course the Tories are 'do-nothings' and Labour were the ones who gave Gurkhas right of settlement in the first place...yes, because what else happened in 1997? That's right we gave back Hong Kong and so had to change the rules

Incidentally, the idea of calling the Tories 'do-nothings' is now ridiculous as they just voted for a much bigger measure than the government, seriously I'm not a Tory but when all Labour can produce is negative campaigning at the opposition it grates at me

I think all you have to remember is the government's 20-year regulation: Gurkhas only serve 15 years, and that's just brazen

*I also have some quick mentions:

Nick Clegg performed very well (even if Cameron did muscle in) - I think he did a great job on this, well done to him

Andrew Neil for simply revelling in Brown's misery, what with hundreds of thousands laughing at him on the net (I haven't the heart to tell Andrew we've been doing that for nearly two years anyway)

Nick Robinson says that Gordon is constantly misjudging issues

So how's that for BBC bias? There is of course a simpering analysis by Gary O'Donoghue to prop up the dear leader, just kidding - he thinks he's lost his authority

Callaghan was defeated in late January 1978, but didn't lose confidence til March 1979, and the election was in May 79, a year and three months later - Gordon only has a year and one month left - pity

I'm meltingggggg......

Is it just me or are actually seeing Labour crumble before our very eyes?

I know we've been saying things like 'death knell' every week but the past week has seen some pretty big shifts

Like the mooted U-turn on the totalitarian database and the expenses farce, which I think is perfectly described by Nick Robinson:

Remember that first of all, he said that this wasn't a matter for him. Then he said that it was a matter for an enquiry, after the next election. Next, he said that the enquiry should be quicker, before going on to pre-empt it with a proposal for a daily attendance allowance which was broadcast on YouTube and therefore not open to questioning either by MPs or by the media.

Finally, last night, he effectively abandoned that idea in a letter carefully released after a news conference in Islamabad and once he was protected from questioning on a flight to Warsaw.

That's about four U-turns and no solution on the horizon - our 'PM' has gone from being too slow, to being too rash, to dropping the issue

Now that's good government - 'I'll say lots, then drop it' would at least be a reasonable political manoeuvre

Unfortunately Gordon is not blessed with the political grace that his predecessor had, he initially cocked up the response and was foolish for thinking he can get away with dropping the issue

There is a very clear image in my head now, of a battered old juggernaut who has somehow found himself on a cliff top road, following the curves and bends on the cliff, with a sheer drop of 100 metres at the side of the road

Old Gordon careers forward, putting the truck in the wrong gear, turning too late and smashing his back end through the barrier, but he chugs along, swaying wildly as he constantly slides on and off the edge of the cliff, how he has got this far no one knows

It would be quite impressive to watch really, if we were watching on the telly, rather than being in the back of said trailer

I mean what else is there, Gordon? The Home Office look set to backtrack on the database, even ID cards seem to be under increasing pressure (they may be citing costs, but as if it makes a difference, it's a climb-down) and Eco-towns are doomed

Seriously I can't think of any other legislation, so why exactly are we prepared to put up with this for another year? While I welcome a decrease in legislation numbers that had rocketed under Labour, we're talking big, useful things here - most of those 3,000+ laws were just EU fodder - but now there are no big plans, just Gordon trying to stay in power and Straw and Harman's pet projects - that's surely not right

I worry that all this collapse will do is justify Jacqui Smith's removal, not the government's

All this is an indication of how much we are abused by the parties - no policies, no ideas - just power, that Labour want to keep hold of and the Tories are happy to take by default

I could also go on about how the situation is what makes these climbdowns so powerful - you can't be seen to be weak so you have to stick to a failed policy until it is beaten to a bloody pulp, and that's no good for anyone

Politics really is broken

(P.S. Why exactly is Gordon off on another world tour, a week after his Easter holidays?)

Equality's back, baby

Don't you just love Harriet's pic on the BBC? Really flattering, not surprising from a pro-Labour broadcaster, eh?

But anyway, the Equalities bill is back - I have no idea when the actual vote is, nobody seems to mention that - the ideas just keep popping up when somebody feels it's a 'fresh' news story

It seems a little feebler this time round, targeting certain health services at deprived areas as part of a 'social economic duty' sounds like pure waffle to me

While the most well-known positive discrimination plans have been watered down slightly, in the Mail she says:

'If you have got two equally qualified candidates, you might actually want to have the woman because she is a woman.

'Now at the moment, if you choose her because she is a woman, you could face a sex discrimination case.

'So this says to employers, if you want to, and want to be able to diversify your workforce, then actually you can choose, if you have got equally-qualified candidates, you can choose the one from the group that is under-represented.'

Positive discrimination, where a lesser-qualified candidate is awarded a job just because he or she is from a minority, will remain illegal.

That sounds like positive discrimination, but with an 'equally-qualified' clause in to appease meritocrats like me - well it doesn't

This effectively is 'positive' discrimination - although you are not obliged to simply pick the simpleton in the corner because she is the only person with ovaries who entered the interview process, you still get the opportunity to 'balance' your workforce without recourse

Sounds OK doesn't it? Well not really, it's just discrimination coated with a layer of pleasantness - let's create an example:

you currently have a workforce of 10 - nine are men, one of whom needs replacing (let's say he's on paternity leave) - you advertise the position and there are several qualified candidates out of a field of 20, however only one woman applied - she is now virtually guaranteed the job, the equally-qualified men (who should have a massive statistical advantage) are left out on the basis of their sex

Now fortunately this is optional, the law as far as I understand means you can behave this way without breaking employment law, you don't have to - but this law pretty clearly benefits women (although the reverse situation is also allowed, we all know what this is targeting) - as a male you now face an extra potential barrier to employment

Fancy turning up to an interview, performing really well and then being told 'we need to balance our workforce, so kindly f*** off' - obviously this is based on the assumption that the employer is using the law but just because it is optional doesn't make it fair - if anything I would force any employer using this law to publish their intent on the job ad, which would, ironically, be a step further into positive discrimination

Balancing workforces is all well and good but the proponents of this fail to notice the plight of the male job-hunter in this - come up against just one woman and you're scuppered - how depressing is that?

This is the fundamental problem at the root of almost all 'equal outcome' law - they treat the majority (usually white and male) as a 'community' - we are all treated as one homogeneous group - of course I am no nearer to being a millionaire head of a failed bank than the next woman/ethnic minority/homosexual and yet I am penalised for unfortunately sharing the same genitalia as said banker

If there was a massive problem in society - such as back in Weimar Germany where women were forced to take less pay, and men were given precedence, then I could support laws that promote equality (such as the Equal Pay Act) - but there isn't - women aren't kept out of academia or certain professions any more, they can't be sexually harassed and they receive the same wages

There is of course still the 'gender pay gap' - but this always relates to the average pay across the whole of society, it doesn't mean that I get more per hour in McDonald's than the woman next to me (hypothetical, I don't actually work in Maccy D's)

Female part-time workers still earned 40% less per hour than their full-time male counterparts, Ms Harman told Today BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

"Do we think she is 40% less intelligent, less committed, less hard-working, less qualified? It's not the case. It's entrenched discrimination. It's allowed to persist because it's all swept under the carpet."

Now, the actual gender pay gap is 23% according to the Beeb - for some reason Harriet chooses to compare the disparity between women who work part-time, and men who work full-time

Why not men who work part-time, or women who work full-time? An odd comparison, principally used to find a higher than average discrepancy - for me the 23% difference would've worked better than a larger, but irrelevant figure

Does she not see the obvious problem with these figures? The glaringly obvious fact that men and women dominate different employment sectors? - in some cases where pay is not disclosed maybe a man will be paid more but I doubt this accounts for the majority of the discrepancy

There are more men in IT, there are more women in Retail - guess which pays more? Harriet somehow sees the gap as women systematically being paid 40% less - it has absolutely nothing to do with their choice of employment does it then?

Maybe she is right about unfairness in some areas, but the reasoning she uses to get the message out is always flawed, and it's annoying

The real answer to the issue she brings up is to pay women in lower paying jobs more than the men in those jobs - that's the reality of the situation, Harriet, that or force an equal percentage of women into every single job (including builders and dustbin-men as well as high flying lawyers) because there will always be a discrepancy between where men and women work

Meanwhile it becomes ever easier to get qualifications and get the best jobs if you're a woman or non-white because the minority is favoured in our society (and of course you could simply start drawing dividing lines around anything, maybe blonde haired people are discriminated against?)

I did like how the BBC ended with this graph, tracking the pay gap from the introduction of the Equal Pay Act:



Pretty nice steady drop of 50% since 1970 - seems that the rise of equal opportunities have been fixing the issue just fine without positive discrimination, but such a kick in the balls to the idea at the end of the article is of course still pro-Labour in some pseudo-clandestine way

Reviews are fun

I just saw this rather silly review in the Times, of the top 50 US shows

The premise is basically that American TV is currently putting British TV to shame, with the advent of shows like House, Lost, Desperate Housewives, The Wire etc..

So the author finds 50 shows as examples of this

Only I see a problem - why is the author including shows like Sex and the City (39), which ended five years ago? It may have just had a Hollywood film out but it is certainly not a current TV series, by his logic I get to include the original British version of The Office (ended in 2003) in my list of current British shows

The author is pretty clearly at pains to suggest there are 50 programmes better than any British fare currently out there, and he is grasping at straws to prove his point by using shows that are long gone and shows that are also complete shite

Pushing Daisies comes in at 37 - despite being critically acclaimed (purely by critics), the show was axed and never achieved an audience in America or Britain (it was "too sickly for some", as Daniel puts it) - how exactly this makes it better than the successful American Office (49), Desperate Housewives (47) and even Reaper (50) is beyond me

It's not even that he's putting some oddities in as filler - he has the long-finished Six Feet Under at 17, I agree it was a good show but it finished a good few years ago, and The West Wing at 5! In it's heyday in the early 2000s, the show was wrapping up just as shows like House picked up steam, I will leave 24 (4) alone as it is still running, and I never enjoyed it much, so I'm biased, but personally think it was best in the early years and is hardly all that any more

The inclusion of shows like The Simpsons (6), South Park (8) and Scrubs (33) - while all good products in their day, also demonstrates a massive flaw in his argument - none of them produce anything nowadays - Scrubs has suffered for two or three seasons and was only dragged kicking and screaming to a new, final, final series (on a new network) this year, and can anyone seriously say The Simpsons have made anything decent since the turn of the millennium? I know he does, but he's clearly an idiot, especially as he could've put in the far more recent Futurama - the idea that The Simpsons is the 6th best thing you can find from America right now is ludicrous, historically it will probably always be a top ten American show, but none of the recent tripe counts

It's not as if I'm being pedantic here - I'm happy with his inclusions of The Sopranos, The Wire and Battlestar Galactica, which have all recently finished - they are still contemporary - but a lot of his selections bring up the question of why he doesn't bring in 90s shows like Friends, Frasier and Seinfeld, I mean what's the huge difference between their period and the aforementioned show about four elderly shoe-obsessed nymphomaniacs in Manhattan? (for example Sex and the City ran from 1998-2004, Friends from 1994-2004)

I think at the heart of this is a perfectly valid argument that American TV has produced a lot of great shows in the last couple of years, at the forefront of that are House (23), Lost (7) , BSG (2), The Wire (1), The Sopranos (3), Desperate Housewives, Heroes (30) et all - these help give a general opinion that there's masses of quality coming from across the pond right now in my mind - but his list is bulked up by crappy shows that haven't even made it across the Atlantic, are old, are rehashes of the same formula (eg. Bones and The Mentalist) or just plain failures

This is without even questioning his opinions - we can all argue with him whether The Wire or BSG are any good, but this is much worse than pure difference of opinion - the article is based on flawed logic and is poor journalism, based solely on the author's obvious dislike of current British television, which he doesn't attempt to defend for the sake of balance

I could easily throw in The Office, Peep Show, The IT Crowd, Bremner Bird and Fortune, Extras and The Inbetweeners as examples of recent British triumphs straight off the top of my head, even Top Gear would be applicable by his standards

I note that most of my choices are comedies - I don't know whether that's my taste coming through or a natural British inclination towards comedy - but equally you could easily argue that the best American productions are almost solely dramas - on the comedy front they really only have Curb your Enthusiasm (10) and The Colbert Report, against a far greater number of British comedies

It's also fairly unsurprising when you consider that the British are far more famed for their comedy than dramas - simple budgetary concerns mean that shows the size of Lost are impossible as British productions, note the brilliant Rome series - a joint production by BBC and HBO, with a mostly British cast and a British director, but only a 15% share of the costs coming from the Beeb (still a whopping $15 mill)

While I think about it there has also been Life on Mars and Cranford as examples of British drama recently - and when you consider that British shows are generally only a quarter the length of a US season it's unsurprising that US ones outweigh the Brits in exposure

This is a poor article that reflects the author's own view of declining British TV more than an objective appraisal of American TV (his obvious dislike of Desperate Housewives and its begrudging place of 47th, despite being one of the biggest hits, is testament to that)

My Opinions (See, I haven't even got on to that yet) - top 10 US shows

I would include
The Wire, despite not being a fan, as I respect it and its fans, it's just not my cup of tea
Lost has to be in there
House is sheer brilliance
BSG just makes it, mainly for being the best sci-fi I've seen, even if it did drag for about three years
Prison Break - I don't know how this missed out on the list when it's first two seasons were brilliant and it only started in 2005, the subsequent series have been pants - but just forget about those, they are like Enterprise to the original Star Trek
The Sopranos, one of the best dramas out there
Desperate Housewives, for the fact that everyone seems to watch it
So that's seven really good shows, and I'm out of proper ideas
So I have to now include Heroes, even if it did lose the plot after one season and was over-hyped
24 just gets a mention, personally I think it is too old (was really big in what...2001-04?) but it's still being watched by an army of fans
and really what else? I can think of many more great shows, but none that are 'current' - so I leave my last slot blank as everyone has their opinion

Round the Bend

I was a bit steamed when I first the resurgence of Labour's plans to cut speed limits

These popped up late last year and I assumed they were just filler, but the idea to reduce the national speed limit to 50mph still lingers

Although my anger has somewhat subsided as I can find little that notes the drop in the national speed limit, only this brief mention in the Mail

The BBC focused on the urban areas and schools, the Guardian put up a ridiculous survey and are only interested in the 20mph bit, so I'm not sure any more

I personally find the 50mph on rural roads idea ridiculous - the assumption that speed is somehow the primary factor in accidents is nonsense

Now I am going to use anecdotal evidence, because frankly that's all this needs unless someone proves to me that all those rural crashes happen as a result of people travelling between 50 and 60mph, and because I live within a vast array of rural roads

Long and windy, deserted, stretches of road where crashes are infrequent (on a road by road basis, rather than the thousands of miles nationally) - the sort of road where you can put your foot down and blast along at 80, or that can force you to go round tight, blind corners at 30

This is true of the roads that I drive along every day - you cannot travel down these roads at 60 the whole way, on certain stretches I 'could' go faster because I know the road and have good visibility, while at certain points if I was going at 60 I would fly off into a fen

And this is the idiotic part - neither can you travel round these tight bends at 50mph - you would still come off the road, I can think of one particular stretch near my pub where there are those black and white arrows to warn you, I always slow down to 40 to go round there, and that's at the limit of what you should be doing - at 50 you would career onto the wrong side of the road and probably hit those useful signs

Now I'm pretty sure that most drivers know to slow down (it also says 'SLOW' on the road), without being forced to watch the speed limit - they are, on the whole, good at avoiding crashing, the last fatality on that bend was over ten years ago, and were you to be at 50mph and crash you still probably be done for dangerous driving

So what exactly would a 50mph speed limit on such roads achieve? - I have sat behind many weekend drivers who drive at 40 and 50mph on those roads, waiting for a chance to overtake and drive properly - it is simply too slow (assuming conditions are fine) for any normal driver to handle - 60 is an ideal speed for much of the road, at points it isn't but is it worth changing it all to 50, especially when even that isn't appropriate for those parts? By the same logic we may as well make the whole road system 20mph to be on the safe side

Or how about dropping the limit to 30mph at the bend I described - would it be worth it? Would it even save a life? And how would you enforce it over a stretch of about 100 metres on a road that probably only gets 30 cars an hour at best? Personally I'd be worrying about 'speeding' rather than focusing on driving appropriately for the conditions

A degree of common sense is required here - by all means target the black spots, but I'd love to know how they intend to police the bulk of rural roads - the usage is low, and there's no way the police or speed cameras could adequately cover the huge stretches of empty road across our countryside and so if they did it would be grossly inefficient compared to policing our motorways and major A-roads

But I will hold fire for now, until I get a whiff of the national speed limit actually changing to 50mph