New Marriage Vows

Last week began with David Cameron and Nick Clegg renewing their Coalition marriage vows in a Basildon tractor factory. Gone were the heady days of the June 2010 Rose Garden marriage. The same fate awaited their original vow of “we are all in it together”. Surrounded by tractors, they unceremoniously downgraded the Rose Garden declaration to singular reference to an “us two” perspective. i.e., Dave and Nick, who now look more like the “last two standing” in this coalition. Cameron’s drubbing and Nick Clegg’s annihilation in the UK wide Council elections resulted in a hurried rewrite of …

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Glasgow

“Glasgow belongs to me” was the SNP humming tune going into last week’s Scottish Council elections. Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon were so cock sure of a SNP victory in Glasgow, they had pre-ordained to launch their Referendum Campaign from Glasgow three weeks after the election.   What they planned as a “rocket launch” will now be more akin to a damp squib. The immortal words of Robert Burns in his ode to a Mouse, “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men, gang aft agley” will now be resonating amongst the SNP faithful, particularly Nicola Sturgeon who thought she had …

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Petrol Panic

The panic caused by a conservative Cabinet member telling motorist to fill their tanks and jerry-cans was not a mistake of an imbecilic lone minister. It was a deliberate Coalition ploy to shift the debate away from the Granny Tax, hot pasties, fuel tax increases etc that saw the conservative support drop 10% in the three days following the Budget. Then just when they thought it couldn’t get worse a Conservative Party fundraiser was caught on camera in a newspaper sting spilling the beans on “£250,000 donor dinners with Dave”.

Sacking offence

The fall guy of this sting just happened to …

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Budget

When Gordon Brown was Chancellor there was always an air of expectancy of the unknown and unleaked, in the run-up to his Budgets. MP’s gathered with cautious expectations, some with trepidation but very few had an inkling of its content. Brown was the master at teasing the Press hacks with titbits of misinformation in the run-up but always kept the big announcements for the House of Commons. Prime Minister Blair often complained that Gordon didn’t tell him the full contents of his Budgets until it was ready for presentation to Parliament. We are told that this year’s Budget was agreed …

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Afghanistan

The six young soldiers who were killed by a Taliban bomb in the Afghan desert last week took the total fatal casualties of our Armed Forces to over 400. The Government and NATO seek continually to reassure us that the Taliban are being defeated when all the evidence indicates the opposite. The truth is that, the NATO forces are at best holding the Taliban at bay, pushing them into the mountains whilst the Afghan government which is overwhelmingly corrupt and incompetent is manifestly failing in the task of getting its own forces prepared to secure and protect their country when …

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