After axe-murderer and state-leech John Hirst was destroyed by Andrew Neil on the Daily Politics at lunchtime regarding votes for prisoners, Guido put the boot in on Jeremy Vine Show earlier this afternoon:

It’s not everyday you hear someone call for the return of hanging on the main-stream media, but after John Hirst’s gloating it’s the least he deserves…

Via : LiarPoliticians

In a rare move for the belligerent and hyperactive columnist, Polly Toynbee this morning apologised for the inflammatory language that Guido highlighted the other day, when she compared a slight tweak in government benefits policy to the slaughter of six million Jews. On her “final solution” comment she said:

“Yes, it was over the top, a slip of the pen, made worse by the fact that it was put in the headline. I regret it.”

Savour the moment, Guido doesn’t imagine we will get another half-apology any time soon…

Labour MP Emma Reynolds sparked outrage last night at an Oxford Union debate. The YBF sponsored event discussing whether the channel was wider than the Atlantic gave the Shadow Junior Foreign Office Minister a chance to share some of her more extreme views on China.

Facing Dan Hannan at the dispatch box, Reynolds said “China’s control and command approach is something to be admired”. UKIP’s Lord Monckton, also taking party in the debate, nearly had a coronary and the speaker had to quell the audible outrage of room. Does her boss Yvette agree with her stance?

Andrew Mitchell was David Davis’ leadership campaign manager, a gut right-winger he was grateful to survive in the shadow cabinet when the Cameroons took over.

Of late he has tried to get with the new normal, filming tear-jerker videos of himself in disaster zones, giving touchy feely speeches that would bring a warm feeling to Steve Hilton.

All very well but the world’s poor would benefit from the ex-banker bringing them a little capitalist prosperity. At DfID he has a Herculean task clearing out the right-on stables.

On the evidence of this poster for a seminar in his office, DfID is still run along the lines of a student union staffed by wild-eyed kids back from their gap year. Guido doesn’t think the mitigation of the effects of the climate is a wimmins issue, nor is it gender-sensitive. Rains, floods and drought don’t care if you are a boy or girl.

Polly Toynbee is taking the end of welfare-for-life badly, it has clearly pushed her over the edge, she spitefully told a fellow Guardian journalist recently that her breast cancer was exacerbated, deservedly, because she had worked for the Murdoch press.

Yesterday she claimed “the Tories have a final solution for the poor”. Yes, Polly thinks capping benefits at £26,000 a year is comparable to the genocide of 6 million Jews.

Polly has finally lost it.

The Honourable Tristram Julian William Hunt, son of Lord Hunt of Chesterton, was educated at Hampstead’s finest public school*, followed by Trinity College Cambridge and the University of Chicago and King’s College Cambridge. In today’s Mirror he has taken up his quill to slam his fellow toff Dave for going to Eton and employed some spectacular hyperbole, suggesting that “Tory spending cuts send us back to the misery of the Victorian workhouse”:

“Not far from where young David Cameron went to school at Eton, there used to stand a workhouse for the poor of Victorian England. Husbands were separated from wives; mothers from children. The Victorians disliked the poor.

We have civilized ourselves since the 19th century. There is no need for David Cameron to take us back to the ethos of the Eton workhouse.”

For someone who claims to be a historian, Hunt’s grasp of the past and the modern-day seems some what jaded. Just as Guido was typing up this piece and thinking of a suitable logo for a hyperbole award, he noticed that ConservativeHome have given Hunt the “Order of the OTT” for his piece. As he couldn’t put it better himself he borrowed the logo.

*The UCS, where Hunt was a pupil is a member of the Eton Group, an elite grouping of the twelve best schools in the country. But that didn’t quit fit the narrative.

The looney left is never really, really mad until it has formed a boycott of something. True to form any company supporting the coalition cuts its going to be made to really suffer. As the plan gets a nod from the CBI, comrades from across the land have signed up to boycott the evil corporations that provide millions of jobs. Viva!

However just like their objection to Osborne’s sums, looking at just a handful of the companies backing them such as Next, ASDA, Microsoft, Mothercare, Carphone Warehouse, TalkTalk, Boots, Marks & Spencer, Ocado et al, the maths really isn’t in their favour:

The High Street names that cater for almost the entire population must be shaking in their boots…

During the detoxification phase of the Cameron Project to get the Conservative Party re-elected they re-branded themselves as “progressive”, which is the opposite of conservative. It disarmed critics at the cost of ideological coherence.

All parties now say they are committed to welfare reform, even Red Ed says he agrees with IDS that it should always pay more to work rather than stay at home on welfare. Yet whenever a practical reform to this end is advanced a chorus goes up from the left-wing think tanks, Labour politicians, the Guardian and the BBC that it is not “progressive”. Guido does not seriously dispute the methodology or accuracy of the IFS analysis of the Spending Review, no doubt the bottom decile will be marginally worse off in proportion to other population deciles as a result of the Spending Review. Guido questions how we can move forward without, in aggregate, the lowest decile losing out.

The lowest income decile in this country is comprised largely of welfare transfer recipients, these people receive money largely from the working poor and the squeezed middle, quite simply that decile’s welfare payments come from the taxes of the rest of us. The only way that reforms can be made to fit the “progressive” template that would please the progressive choir would be to pay the unemployed more money taken from the working poor and the squeezed middle. That might be “progressive” but it won’t lead to progress.

It is in no one’s interest to increase the poverty trap by increasing the payments to those who aren’t working at the expense of those who are working. It isn’t progressive, it is divisive.

One example of a reform which struck Guido as common sense yet raised the hackles of “progressive” lefties; Osborne announced in the Spending Review that single claimants aged under 35 will be limited to claiming housing benefit for the equivalent of a room in a shared home, rather than for a one-bedroom flat.  Almost everyone working in the private sector who is single is unable to afford their own home in London, sharing is the norm. Is it fair that young single welfare-claimants are paid enough for a flat of their own which their working peers can’t afford? “Progressives” are campaigning against this fair reform.

Osborne’s “progressive” phase was a tactical necessity during the detoxification phase, it is a hindrance to real progress now. Attempting to solve the problems we face using policies that pass an arbitrary “progressive” bar will fail. It is time the Liberal-Conservative government abandoned the pretence to “progressivism” to move the country forward.

See also : Don’t Fight on a Battlefield of Your Enemy’s Choosing

The Director of BBC News, Helen Boaden, has just sent out this chatty email to all her staff today:

Dear All,

We have had some occasions recently of BBC News staff using social networking sites to share with the world their somewhat controversial opinions on matters of public policy and the future of the BBC. Unsurprisingly, these have been picked up by the wider web and used to discredit the BBC and its impartiality. We have Editorial Guidelines which cover the personal use of the internet …which everyone should observe. We also have brains and judgement which I suggest people fully engage before rushing to communicate. Hx

What she appears to be saying to Beeboids is “keep your opinions to yourself” lest the truth gets out. Yesterday Guido drew attention to the Thatcher-hating, Green-loving, Tory-bashing, anti-Israeli BBC News Editor Rachel Kennedy’s rather candid Twitter-stream of left-wing consciousness. Guido is watching, and the BBC bosses are reading…

UPDATE : The info-graphic below is taken from the www.order-order.com server logs for yesterday. It shows the top ten sources of visitors, notice that the BBC is, after parliament, the second biggest source of visitors, making up the rest is the usual mix; politicos, media hacks, bankers, Oxbridge wannabee politicos and media hacks. Associated Newspapers probably scores higher than News International because the Daily Mail’s Andrew Pierce keeps hitting the “refresh” button. There were some sixty odd thousand visitors yesterday…