Labour and marginals

A letter in today's Telegraph reads "I cannot help thinking that the problem with rural post offices is that they are not in marginal Labour seats. ".

Over the weekend, the Telegraph reported that hospitals in Tory seats were twice as likely to be closed as Labour ones.

John Prescott wanted to do massive building programs in parts of Essex and the South East that were as Blue as the sky.

Is there a pattern here?

New Brentwood Blog

Councillor Brandon Lewis, Leader of Brentwood Council and Tory A-Lister, has set up his own blog. It could do with a decent spell/grammar checker though.

Tax cuts

One issue that dominated the recent Tory conference was that of tax cuts. Namely, David Cameron and George Osborne's refusal to commit to tax cuts while at the same time spouting out a line about "economic stability". But what I didn't hear them say was that a future Conservative government wouldn't introduce tax cuts (apologies for the double negative there).

For me, this appears to be more an issue of presentation and policy. There is a perception out there amongst the floating voter that Conservatives would introduce tax cuts to benefit their rich friends regardless of the impact that would have on the ordinary voter. This perception needs to be challenged - not by dropping a commitment to tax cuts, but by emphasising that it's not the only issue that concerns the country.

I was pleased to see Norman Tebbit argue that tax cuts should be introduced at the bottom of the range to benefit those on lower incomes. Labour may have been more right than they intended with Dave the Chameleon - "Underneath he's still true blue" - the issue is not that people object to Conservative policies, they object to the Conservatives. And the only way to get Conservative policies is to change the image of the Conservatives.

Nappies

I remarked at choir tonight that we were using cloth nappies for the boy. A fellow choir member over heard this and said "ah, you must be a Cameron type."

Is this how we're recognising the Cameroons now?

Moving.....

So the move went as well as you'd expect. Removal men were still loading the lorry when we got the call saying we could go and get the keys. Unfortunately, of all the days in what has generally been a good summer, I had to pick the one where it was bucketing down.

One thing I didn't properly appreciate was the impact of losing the fitted furniture - our clothes are all still in boxes, and the only fix appears to be spending a lot time purchasing stuff from Ikea and assembling it. So that's most of my weekends between now and Christmas sorted then!

Sky Nightmares

I am frustrated and angry.

Two weeks ago I called Sky Television to arrange a transfer of our service to our new house. The best appointment date available was today (we're moving Friday). I pointed out to Sky that this would mean no phone line and no decoder in the house (BT aren't due to install the phone line until Friday, and being BT they'll probably mess it up anyway, and funnily enough the decoder is in our house decoding). They assured me that wouldn't be a problem, and that the engineer could talk to the developers who are on site.

Last night the engineer called me and insisted that either the wife or myself be there. Not a biggie I thought, though slightly irritating. I proceed to text my wifes number to him, and thought nothing of it. I also repeated the bit about phone line and decoder.

At 4pm I get a call from my wife saying a) she'd spent the afternoon waiting for the engineer as agreed b) the engineer, who insisted he couldn't talk to the developers, had been with the developers and decided he couldn't install the dish because of no line and no decoder.

I#ve since spent about 90 minutes trying to get Sky to sort it out - the best they can offer is Monday, which would probably be tolerable if we hadn't just spent 60 pounds on a PremPlus season ticket so we could watch Manchester United matches. Guess who is on PremPlus this weekend - United. At Reading. On pretty much the tenth anniversary of my first meeting with the wife when we went to watch a match at Reading. At the end of the 90 minutes (which involved a lot of time on hold listening to classical CDs which skipped and getting cut off twice to start the process again) I got told by "Customer Services" that they couldn't deal with my complaint as the system was down.

I'm so infuriated that despite Sky's ideal target for the service (no cable service available in Ingatestone and a major football/sports fan) I'm giving serious consideration to cancelling.

See how those Muslims love one another

Hat tip to the Darling Wife for this one: IBNlive is reporting that two groups of Muslims on an anti Pope Benedict demo started fighting each other.

Talking of which, the Pope has issued a sort of apology. The key passage is "The Holy Father thus sincerely regrets that certain passages of his address could have sounded offensive to the sensitivities of the Muslim faithful, and should have been interpreted in a manner that in no way corresponds to his intentions." Am I being nasty in suggesting that possibly this is a slight side swipe at the sort of Madrassahs that only teach their students how to learn the Koran by heart, and not understanding and comprehension of others?