"Right wing" mayors....

Chuka Umunna(via Comment is Free) informs us that

"If those of us who hanker for a fairer, more equal and democratic world fail to draw attention to Johnson's views and re-mobilise London's progressive consensus, we could end up with the most right-wing Mayor of London in living memory."

Any mayor who is less left wing than Ken Livingstone will qualify as the "most right-wing Mayor of London in living memory." The office was only established in 2000.

More Labour dishonesty

The BBC is quoting Public health minister Dawn Primarolo as saying "It's misleading or dishonest to, on Friday, for the Tory party to support £21bn worth of cuts from public services in supporting the Redwood commission proposals and then come back and say suddenly not only are they not going to do that...."

Nearly as misleading and dishonest as trying to suggest a policy proposal is the same thing as a defined party policy. Not that Labour would ever be guilty of such deceit and spin of course.

Incidentally, perhaps the £21 bn of cuts could come from cutting some of the quangos that have expanded under the current government.

Labour spinning figures.

Andy Burnham is the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, and was on Newsnight tonight, blathering nonsense. In particular, he made the claim "we've had 60 consecutive quarters of growth under this government".

I find it rather worrying that the number 2 minister in the Treasury isn't aware there's only been 41 quarters since May 1997. More to the point, if he can't even get that piece of simple arithmetic right, how are we supposed to trust any other figures that he comes out with?

Update: immediately after posting this I found this on Iain Dale's blog where he accuses the Tories of "threating Britain's economic instability". The word I'm now looking for can be found here. But I won't use it on this blog as my wife reads it.

Telegraph and sports comment

Rather disturbingly, the Telegraph's sports columnists seem to have had a rather bad weekend of getting things right.

Sue Mott started off on Saturday by blaming the alleged corruption around a recent tennis match on the practice of allowing "betting on losers in any sport" - which rather ignores the fact that tennis is one of those sports where by betting on one player to win the match, you are effectively betting on the other player to lose the match (as opposed to, say, football where you have the option of a draw). There maybe issues around the fact that Betfair effectively allow you to bet on a horse to lose, but this doesn't have anything to do with the tennis issue.

Patrick Barclay manages the impressive feat of making two factual errors in two successive paragraphs. Firstly he repeats, with approval, Neil Warnock's comment that "Carlos Tevez, football's equivalent of a murderer out on bail, scored the goal that kept West Ham up and sent us down. So much for the integrity of the Premier League.'' If Warnock is referring to the goal Tevez scored at Old Trafford, he's talking rubbish. West Ham went into that game knowing that a point was enough to save them. If you're going to blame the result at Old Trafford, rather than the fact you lost at home to Wigan, then the anger should be directed at Manchester United's forwards for failing to score. Even if Tevez hadn't scored, West Ham would still have stayed up. (Incidentally, United were attacking the Stretford for the second half, and as they kicked off, the Stretford end chanted with one voice "Send them down!")

Barclay then follows that with the statement that all of the clubs in foreign ownership - but Fulham - have been taken over since the Glazers acquired Manchester United. This might come as a shock to Claudio Ranieri, who was sacked by Roman Abramovich a year before.

To be fair, he then makes an excellent point about the row over Thaksin Shinawatra's record, comparing it with the treatment Roman Abramovich received.

The Telegraph on Ali Miraj

George Jones gives a brief overview of the political career of Ali Miraj, who has deservedly been booted off the list of approved candidates for the Conservative Party. He fails though to mention the irony in the whole row over the Witham selection process - at the end of it all, Priti Patel was elected.

If you're going to play the race card when complaining about not being selected, try and make sure the candidate fits the "white, middle class male" stereotype before making a fool of yourself in the national media.

Caroline Hunt: Commitment Matters

Caroline Hunt
sums up my views on the rights for cohabiting couples very well.

Particularly good quotes are:

if a co-habiting couple wants the same rights as a married couple they should get married. There is no need to have a religious ceremony of any type.

Exactly what I was going to blog!

A majority of MPs....

I turned the radio on this morning and heard the second half of an interview involving Lord Winston and an anti animal testing campaigner whose name I didn't catch.

The anti animal testing campaigner lost all credibility with me straight away when she said that "a majority of MPs" and then went onto say something about 250 of them.

Given that Labour won 271 seats in 1992, that presumably means Lord Kinnock is now a former Prime Minister?