Lies, damned lies and opinion polls

The one thing that's certain in British politics right now is that nothing's certain. Ever since the expenses scandal, everything is up in the air. No one knows what's going to happen next.

We keep hearing that Labour faces meltdown in the event of a general election, but we also hear that David Cameron is far from popular. We hear from several political commentators that Alan Johnson can stop the Tories, yet no-one in Labour wants to risk testing the theory. Labour have been wiped out in the local and European elections, but the Tories relatively low share of the European vote by no means guarantees them a parliamentary majority in a general election.

Of course none of these statistics mean anything. Labour did spectacularly badly in the 2004 European elections, yet they won the general election the following year. And remember the Tories who scored the highest vote in the 1999 European elections and who then went on to fail miserably in the 2001 general election?

We should by now have learnt our lesson from the 1992 election, that you can never rely on the opinion polls. The other lesson we should learn is that history doesn't necessarily repeat itself. When the Tories changed their leader from Margaret Thatcher to John Major, it helped them win the 1992 election. But no one knows whether Labour changing their leader would bring the same result (remember how highly everyone thought of Gordon Brown?). Besides, most of the electorate are unfamiliar with Alan Johnson.

It is probably safe to assume that Labour are unlikely to win the next general election, but will the Tories have a working majority? We may have to wait another 11 months to find out. One thing's for sure - with the current 'anti-politician' mood around the country, the era of landslide majorities is over. That may not be a bad thing. Despite two massive election victories, Tony Blair's achievements were relatively modest. But with a narrow majority, the Tories will be under a lot more pressure to turn things around. They might just deliver.

Fewer traffic lights make safer roads, the same is true with speed cameras

It has been reported in the Times:

For six months, lights at up to seven junctions in Ealing will be concealed by bags and drivers will be left to negotiate their way across by establishing eye contact with pedestrians and other motorists.

Ealing Council believes that, far from improving the flow of traffic, lights cause delays and may even increase road danger. Drivers race towards green lights to make it across before they turn red. Confidence that they have right of way lulls them into a false sense of security, meaning that they fail to anticipate hazards coming from the side. The council hopes that drivers will learn to co-operate, crossing junctions on a first-come first-served basis rather than obeying robotic signals that have no sense of where people are waiting.

The move follows other successful experiments with removing traffic lights in continental Europe. In the Dutch town of Drachten, for example, the removal of traffic lights at one big junction resulted in crashes falling from 36 in the four years before the scheme was introduced to two in the next two years. The average time for each vehicle to cross the junction fell from 50 seconds to 30 seconds despite a rise in the volume of traffic.

Maybe it's time we also took a similar approach with speed cameras. Despite their trebling in number during Labour's tenure in Government, their contribution to road safety has been negligible. During the same period other European countries have seen large drops in deaths and serious injuries on the roads, but without the presence of speed cameras. Maybe it's time Labour stopped treating us like five year olds?

Compulsory sex education won't reduce teenage pregnancy

Sex education campaigners remind me of Marxists around the time of the fall of the Berlin wall. As one communist regime after another collapsed towards the end of 1989, they told us that communism hadn't failed, it simply hadn't been implemented properly. But sometimes you have to ask yourself, if something has failed so miserably, maybe there is something inherently wrong with it.

Over the last 20 years, sex education has become ever more explicit, and is taught to an ever larger number of schoolchildren, yet the rates of teenage pregnancy have skyrocketed. And what's the response of sexual health campaigners? Even more explicit sex education, and make it compulsory (currently only one in 2,500 parents withdraws children from sex education classes).

The Times reports that sexual health charities have warned that allowing parents to opt out, even if it involved only a small number, was an infringement of young people’s rights - in other words, your children do not belong to you, but belong to the State.

Sex education isn't necessarily a bad thing as long as there is some emphasis on abstinence, but heaven forbid we "prevent young people from making informed choices". To quote Simon Blake, national director of the sexual health charity Brook: “Young people need to understand the law – that you can get contraception, that you can have an abortion – and understand the health benefits of practising safer sex. It would not be right for anyone to tell them that this is wrong, but it is OK for them to be told that some people believe it is wrong.”- So let's follow the logic of his argument - Maybe I shouldn't tell my children that child abuse and child exploitation is wrong. After all, it's just that I believe it's wrong and they need to make their own mind up on the subject.

We have no problem telling people that it's wrong to drive fast, that they should abstain from smoking, and that they should drink less, so why are we so squemish about telling people to abstain from sex?

It hasn't yet dawned on Labour that the era of big government is over

When you see how rapidly the New Labour project is disintegrating, you start to realise what a house of cards the whole thing was. In their heart of hearts, how many Labour MPs truly believed in Blairism? Sure, there were enough of them who were happy to go along with Blair because they were hungry for power, but after 12 years in office, they seem to have forgotten why they were returned to power in the first place.

Labour MPs were never great fans of the free market, but as long as the city was booming and the tax receipts were flowing in, they were prepared to tolerate it. Then came the financial crisis and money dried up. Now Labour are biting the hand that has fed it for the last 12 years.

Whilst there is widespread revulsion about the greed of bankers, there is no evidence that the electorate has lurched to the left. The financial crisis of the last eighteen months has not closed the chapter of Reaganism/Thatcherism, but on the contrary is likely to reopen it - Millions of voters have seen their tax bills rise and corresponding rises in public spending without any tangible results. Now to cap it all, they are saddled with decades of debt that their children and grandchildren will inherit. We may not see a return to the Thatcherite policies of deregulating the financial markets, but sooner or later, we will have to address, as Thatcher did, the public sector spending that has spiralled out of control.

The 2009 budget was a golden opportunity for Gordon Brown to seize the agenda and salvage his (and New Labour's) reputation for prudence. He could accept (to quote Tony Blair) "that the rules of the game have changed" - that the money has run out and the State needs to live within its means like the rest of us. But instead of asking himself why the Tories are leading in the polls, he and his fellow MPs he have drawn all the wrong conclusions: Namely, that capitalism has failed and that the rich are responsible for our debt. That the state can keep on growing and the rich can pay for it.

Reputations take years to build but only months to unravel. After Thatcher became Prime Minister, it took nearly two decades for Labour to become electable. Gordon Brown seems determined to undo all that progress in a mere matter of weeks and drag Labour back to where it was in the early 80s. Labour is beginning to look and sound more and more like it was in the days of Michael Foot - Controlling, statist, anti-business and anti-aspiration. Tony Blair once said of John Major's government: "I lead my party, he follows his" - the same could be said about Gordon Brown.

Labour, like the Tories before them, have forgotten that power corrupts

I long ago concluded that the present Government was worm-eaten, exhausted, dishonest, incompetent, lazy, mendacious, ignorant, rotten, false, disreputable, deceitful, unsavoury, squalid, abominable, soiled, piratical, shifty, discreditable, infamous, improper, obscene, hateful, impure, degraded, dilapidated, shabby, grovelling, discredited, renownless, tarnished, disgraced, shameless, creeping, abject, two-faced, unscrupulous, villainous, treacherous, untrustworthy, prevaricating, sinister, crawling, insincere, fishy, spurious, unclean, felonious, infamous, venal, base, vile, bribable, rancid, disloyal, scheming, unsavoury, sickening, fetid, nauseating, putrid, defaulting, mouldering, evil, vicious, damnable, maleficent, wrong, ineffectual, mean, inferior, contemptible, superficial, irrelevant, expendable, powerless, pathetic, nugatory, impotent, jumped-up, cheap, insalubrious, flea-ridden, unsound, nasty, baneful, foul-tonged, cursed, unwarranted, execrable, damned, abnormal, unreasonable, virtueless, peccant, sinful, unworthy, hopeless, incorrigible, tergiversating, brutalised, nefarious, culpable, scandalous, worthless, flagitious, gross, indefensible and unpardonable to say the least.

This was Bernard Levin's analysis of the Tory Government following Tony Blair's election as Labour leader back in 1994. 15 years later, the same could be said about the current Labour government.

Labour have enjoyed an unprecedented three terms in office, but the downside of being re-elected again and again is that you tend to forget that it was the voters who put you there. Complacency sets in and you start to believe that you are entitled to remain perpetually in power.

After 12 years in office, Labour have become sleazy, dishonest and like the Tories before them, downright nasty. Some have commented that Labour's sin is worse as it aspires to the high minded ideals of social justice and equality. How naive!

There is an old saying, "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely". Labour are suffering from the same old malaise that affects all parties that have been in power too long. I think we have now reached the point where an economic recovery will make little difference to Labour's re-election prospects. Once you have the lost the trust of electorate, there is no gratitude from them.

Is the Damian McBride affair Gordon Brown's "Black Wednesday"

In April 1992, in the midst of a deep recession, the British electorate gave the Conservatives the benefit of the doubt and narrowly re-elected them to a fourth term in office. But just five months later, their reputation for competent handling of the economy was shattered by Black Wednesday. It has taken 15 years for their reputation to recover.

As Gordon Brown emerged triumphantly from "saving the world" towards the end of 2008, there were many who may have likewise concluded "better the devil you know than the devil you don't". But after the latest revelations emerging from the Damian McBride affair, it's clear that the current administration is more interested in smearing political opponents (including those in its own party) than saving the economy. After all this, can anyone honestly say they trust these guys to run the country?

The private - public sector divide replaces the north south divide -

Interesting article about the north - south divide in today's Times. During the 80s and 90s, you heard constant reports in the press about how there was a growing wealth gap between the north and south of England. Now this has been replaced by the public - private sector divide.

So whilst the recession has forced the private sector to cut pay and make redundancies, the public sector carries on as though nothing has changed. How is this possible? Very simple. Labour have created over a million new public sector jobs (and a million loyal voters) in the past 12 years. With a general election just 14 months away, Gordon Brown will want to keep his voters happy and if he has to bankrupt the rest of us in the process, so be it.

Should the Tories win the next election, public sector reform will prove to be as divisive an issue as curbing the Unions was in the 80s. Make no mistake, David Cameron has an unenviable task ahead of him.

Europeans talk the talk about Gitmo but they can't walk the walk

The Times has revealed that a Taleban commander responsible for increasingly sophisticated bomb attacks on British soldiers in Afghanistan is a former detainee of Guantánamo Bay.

You can understand why EU countries are in no hurry to offer hospitality to former Guantánamo inmates (but hold on a minute, weren't they all calling for Gitmo to be closed down?).

Maybe it's time Britain stopped preaching to the world about what a wonderful success Northern Ireland is

The recent murders that have taken place in Northern Ireland should serve as a wake up call to the British and Irish government about what has happened in Northern Ireland.

There have been demonstrations and candle lit vigils (as if the dissident republicans care), the Pope has added his voice to the chorus of condemnation, and politicians have promised that the perpetrators will be brought to justice (yeah right, remember Robert McCartney?). And even if the perpetrators are caught, you can be sure they will be freed within a year or two as a gesture towards peace and reconciliation.

I have said it all before. As a result of the "peace at all costs" mentality of the British and Irish governments, Northern Ireland has become a basket case economy (70% of expenditure is by the State), a Mafia state governed by thugs (Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley) and policed by armed loyalist and republican thugs, who carry on with their racketeering, protection rackets, drug dealing and beatings unchallenged.

The first stage of a peace process is to stop the bombings and shootings, but it doesn't stop there. Unless all parties agree to the rule of law, we are back where we started.

What future does a country have that tolerates this kind of thuggery?

Welcome to Britain, 2009

My Father came to the safety of these shores in 1937. Had he remained in his country of birth just a few months later, he would have perished at the hands of the Nazis.

Now, seventy years later, we allow those who hate this country to openly vent their hatred towards us and our armed forces. For how long will our deluded establishment that continue to tolerate this thuggery? How long will they continue to preach that you can counter extremism by turning the other cheek?

It makes me worried for the future of my children.