Johann Hari: The worst thing about Ashcroft is that his behaviour is legal.

It's a new day and a new report of scandal with Ashcroft in the headline.

That's to be expected. It's pretty much open season just now.

But what outraged me yesterday was a line in a column by Johan Hari.

Much has been made of the fact that Ashcroft is a non-dom, although it has been highlighted that this means he pays tax on his earnings in this country. But Hari says this:

The second group are non-British citizens who come here and refuse to pay taxes on their global fortunes. Under New Labour, this group has been so cravenly courted that the IMF actually classified the British Isles as a tax haven for foreigners until 2008. Now, they pay a paltry £30,000 a year to count as a non-dom – and then nothing. For people so rich, it's the equivalent of handing us the small change down the back of their settees.

Can this possibly be true? That there are people who pay, not a percentage of their income as the rest of us do, but a simple one-off yearly payment? I am by no manner or means an expert on taxation but I found what Hari was stating to be utterly shocking.

Is there really a rich over class who are allowed to get away with such shenanigans?

Hari implies that there are and that many of our ills could be solved if we started to tackle tax evasion amongst the richest people in our society.

We are constantly being told by a chorus of conservatives that the financial crisis caused by their market fundamentalism can only be solved by slashing back spending. But this is unnecessary if only the overclass start to pay their taxes. Look at the country we are told is the exemplar of over-spending, Greece. In fact, it suffers the worst tax collection rate in the democratic world. According to a study by Professor Friedrich Schneider, some 25 per cent of taxes are not paid, making up $20.5bn a year. If Greece ended this culture, its financial situation would look very different. Why don't we hear this story, instead of the nonsense that they pay their teachers and nurses too much?

The vast majority of Britain's citizens pay our taxes, and we pay them on time because we fear the fines which late payments incur. The notion that there are a group of super rich citizens driving on the roads which our taxes have built, lit by the lights which we are paying for, kept safe by the police which our hard earned income has provided; who are, rather arrogantly, stating that their money is theirs and we have no right to expect them to pay a percentage of their income in taxation is, to put it frankly, sickening.

That's the real scandal behind the Ashcroft affair. Someone, somewhere; some faceless civil servant - or, worse, one of our elected politicians, elected to look out for our interests - actually came to this deal with Ashcroft and thought that what they were agreeing to was reasonable.

Whilst ready to fine the rest of us or, worse, throw us in jail should we attempt to evade taxation, they agreed that one of the richest men in the world could pay a one-off £30,000 a year fee and live as if his obligations to our society had been met. Even worse, that he could sit in the House of Lords and pass laws, including laws on taxation, that the rest of us would have to live by.

Nor is Ashcroft the only offender here:

The invaluable Tax Justice Network has calculated that rich individuals "avoid" £13bn a year and rich corporations £12bn. (Indeed, a third of Britain's top 700 companies haven't paid any tax at all.) That's enough to double the education budget – or to pay off Britain's entire deficit in seven years without a single dent in public spending.

If the rich don't want to pay taxes in order to live here then the answer is simple. Let them leave. But if they want to buy huge swathes of Mayfair and enjoy the pleasures of one of the finest capitals in the world, then there has to be a price for that. You don't pay, you don't play. Simple.

And Hari warns us that there is a terrible lesson for all of us here about the real character of David Cameron:

The Conservative Party has been engaged in a 10-year cover-up that tells us a lot about how they would govern the country. Since he became leader of the Party and accepted more than £10m from Ashcroft, David Cameron has had a clear choice. He could have done the patriotic thing and revealed publicly that Ashcroft was avoiding paying £127m in taxes – the sum that would have accrued to the British people if he had kept his send-me-to-the-Lords pledge. Instead, Cameron chose to protect Ashcroft and his private interests with a wall of obfuscation. It's an extraordinary insight into the man who wants to be our next prime minister. Made to pick between the national interests of the British people and the sectional interests of the super-rich, he choose the over-class – and we should assume he would do the same in Downing Street.

Cameron and his mostly Etonian cabinet have refused to do anything as rude as to even ask Lord Ashcroft what his tax status was, despite the assurances he gave when maneuvering for his lifetime peerage.

They, instead, chose to look the other way. To assume that he had kept his word whilst, in actuality, he had refused to abide by the promises made by the Tory leader on his behalf.

Should the Tories get elected, we have just had a valuable glimpse into whose interests they will actually be serving. And they are not ours. When the super rich are involved, they will always, always, avert their gaze and look the other way.

Click here for Hari's article.

Tags: Lord Ashcroft, Cameron, Hague, Tories, tax evasion

Wolf Blitzer Gives Credence to Cheney and Kristol's Smears.

The recent campaign by Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol to question the loyalty of lawyers who have defended persons accused of terrorism is about as repulsive a smear campaign as it is possible to imagine.

When it was revealed yesterday that the Bush administration had also hired lawyers who had formerly defended persons accused of such crimes one would have thought that this might bring an end to this kind of foul McCarthyism.

But, as Glenn Greenwald amply illustrates, these unfounded accusations are simply being parroted by the mainstream media.

The last thing I would ordinarily do is watch a Wolf Blitzer broadcast, but I knew that this was going to be a heinously illustrative episode in modern political journalism -- at best the vile McCarthyite campaign was going to be presented in the standard "each-side-says" format which defines modern journalistic "objectivity" -- but it was far worse than even I expected. Blitzer first teased the segment as this on-screen logo appeared, taken directly from the Cheney/Kristol ad: "HAPPENING NOW: DEPT. OF JIHAD?"

The next time he teased the story, CNN flashed this logo -- "Al Qaeda 7?" -- also taken directly from the Cheney/Kristol ad, as Blitzer explained that numerous Justice Department lawyers have been -- as he put it -- "accused of disloyalty" by a national security organization headed by Liz Cheney. The final Blitzer tease came as these words were flashed on the screen: "Are Justice Dept. lawyers disloyal?"

The story itself began when Blitzer posed this question: "Should there be a loyalty test over at the Justice Department?" He then introduced CNN Homeland Security Correspondent Jeanne Meserve, who -- echoing Liz Cheney -- introduced her segment by asking about the Obama DOJ: "Should it really be called the Department of Jihad"?

It's beyond disgraceful that these disgusting smears should be treated in this way by the MSM.

As Atrios put it: "right wing lunatics can still push anything into the puke funnel."

Not only can they push it in, but they can rely on "journalists" like Wolf Blitzer to treat this rubbish as an "intense debate" and then discuss it as if it has genuine merit.

Again, Glenn Greenwald:

Edward R. Murrow led the media attack on the McCarthyism of the 1950s. Wolf Blitzer plays mindless, amiable, neutral, amplifying host to identical smear campaigns of today. That collapse says all one needs to know about much of modern establishment political journalism in the United States.

It really is shocking that no matter how disgracefully Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol seek to question the loyalty of lawyers who were simply doing their jobs, there will still be people in the media who, rather than remind Cheney and Kristol that John Adams famously represented the British soldiers who took part in the Boston massacre, instead choose to repeat their foul accusations as if they have merit.

So much for the infamous "Liberal media" that we keep hearing about...

UPDATE:



On this radio show Liz Cheney claims that the ad "doesn't question anybody's loyalty."

However, the advert actually asks of the lawyers, "whose values do they share?" and labels them the "al Qaeda 7" whilst referring to Eric Holder's office as "The department of Jihad".

If that's not questioning their loyalty then I don't really know what the point of the advert is, or why it is so important that the names of these people be revealed.

And, from the questions which the ad prompted from Wolf Blitzer - "Are Justice Dept. lawyers disloyal?" - it would appear that this was certainly the reading that he took from the ad.

My disappointment with Blitzer was that he repeated these smears rather than challenge them, but he was quite right in his reading of what the ad was implying.

Click here for Greenwald's full article.

Tags: Liz Cheney, Bill Kristol, loyalty, McCarthyism

New blow for Tories as lead slips in marginals.

It is well known that David Cameron's big plan to win the next election is being engineered around winning several key marginal seats which he hopes he can wrestle from Labour, and that the funding of his campaign in these marginal seats is being funded and run by Lord Ashcroft.

It also now appears as if the scandal brewing around Lord Ashcroft's tax status is starting to have a detrimental effect in those marginal seats which the Tories are pinning so much of their hopes on.

The Conservative lead is crumbling in the crucial marginal seats that David Cameron is relying on to deliver general election victory for the party, a poll last night disclosed.

The result was a fresh setback for the Tory leader after a torrid day in which he was drawn deeper into the row over the billionaire peer Lord Ashcroft, when it emerged that he had known for less than a month that Lord Ashcroft had maintained his non-dom tax status for 10 years.

The chances of the party drawing a line under the controversy were also wrecked by the announcement that Lord Ashcroft will be summoned to the Commons to explain why he negotiated a secret deal to enter the House of Lords without paying tax in this country on his overseas fortune.

The YouGov poll for Channel 4 News found the Tory lead in 60 Labour-held marginals had shrunk from seven to just two points over the past year.

I would personally regard it as beautifully ironic were the Ashcroft affair to cost the Tories the election in the marginals.

They are engaging in what Ashcroft used to refer to as "sharp practices" and there are many in Britain who will find themselves feeling that there is something not quite right about someone who doesn't pay tax here attempting to influence who the country next elects to govern us.

The Tories, however, are claiming that any continued questions around Lord Ashcroft's tax status and place in the House of Lords were "part of a politically motivated campaign orchestrated by the Labour Party in advance of the general election in order to distract attention from the real issues facing this country".

The drop in support for the Tories in key marginals would appear to suggest that this line is not holding water.

Click here for full article.

Tags: Lord Ashcroft, Cameron, Tories, UK election 2010

Lord Ashcroft faces new claims of tax avoidance.

The Ashcroft "non-dom" affair rumbles on as it has now been revealed that he paid for polling for the Tory party - polling which he boasted was the biggest political polling exercise ever conducted in Britain, in order to aid the Tories as they targeted marginal seats - but that he paid for this polling through one of his companies in Belize, meaning that he did not pay VAT.

It was bad enough when he was donating money to the Conservatives on which he had paid no UK taxation, but we now have him paying for polling and doing so in a way which allows him to skip paying VAT.

This has led to the charge that he is engaging in "systematic tax avoidance".

Tonight, the Liberal Democrats' Treasury spokesman, Vince Cable, said: "This is quite serious. We are now not talking just about Ashcroft's non-dom status, but about systematic tax avoidance in funding Conservative party activities such as polling. How far were the Conservatives aware that Ashcroft did not pay VAT, as would have been incurred by any normal polling activity?"

Cable might very well ask those questions, but we have already seen the lengths the Conservatives went to to avoid asking Ashcroft those questions.

It really does appear as if the Conservatives were operating a quite deliberate, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy when it came to Ashcroft's tax status so it's almost meaningless to ask whether they were aware that he was avoiding paying VAT, as they had so obviously decided - whether through fear or God knows what - that he was never to be put on the spot and asked the kind of questions that one would normally ask anyone else involved in a political campaign.

That is how Hague could defend him on national television arguing that he had "no reason to think that he (Ashcroft) has not complied to the commitments that he gave" whilst admitting that he never even asked Ashcroft that question.

Discussing the Guardian's VAT revelations, polling company sources said a single poll of a sample of 2,000 people typically cost £20,000 to £25,000. Ashcroft not only commissioned a series of tracking polls day-by-day in the run-up to the 2005 election, but used enormous samples of up to 10,000. One pollster said: "Such polling projects in the commercial sector frequently cost more than £250,000." This means that VAT in excess of £40,000 could have been avoided.

At the time, Ashcroft was resident in Britain and depicted himself as having paid for the polling personally.

One source said instructions had been sent by Ashcroft to the polling companies to send invoices on the basis they were "export" orders from outside the EU, and thus not to charge VAT. "It was invoiced to Belize and therefore didn't attract VAT," the source said.

And the Tories, who are unarguably benefited from this polling, are now seeking to distance themselves from it.

Tonight a Conservative spokesman disavowed responsibility for Ashcroft's tactics, saying: "We do not recognise this as Conservative party polling."

Cameron has worked hard to rebuild the image of the Conservatives from "the nasty party" voted out of office more than a decade ago, but, with this affair, his party are beginning to look guilty of the kind of sleaze which brought down the government of John Major.

But he [Ashcroft] explained his business approach in his own memoirs called "Dirty Politics, Dirty Times" when he describes selling doughnuts to fellow schoolboys at an undisclosed profit: "There were probably people then as now who – if they discovered exactly what I was doing – might have found my practice a little sharp.

"I looked upon it as simply working to find an edge, the sort of advantage I would search for time and again."

Once again there are many of us who find his practices "a little sharp", and Cameron must be very careful that, through his association with this man, he doesn't undo all of the cosmetic change he has manufactured around his party.

This looks sleazy. And we all know what sleaze did to the government of John Major.

Click here for full article.

Tags: Lord Ashcroft, David Cameron, tax evasion, Tories, UK election 2010

Kristol and Cheney Hunt "The Al Qaeda 7".

This advert is truly revolting.

The ad brands Eric Holder's DOJ the "Department of Jihad" because it employs 9 lawyers who previously represented Guantanamo detainees (including Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal, who successfully represented the Guantanamo-plaintiffs in the 2006 Hamdan case before the U.S. Supreme Court). The ad darkly asks of these lawyers: "whose values do they share?," and labels 7 of those unidentified DOJ lawyers "The Al Qaeda 7."

The premise of the ad is as clear as it insidious: any lawyers representing accused Terrorists are of suspect loyalties and allegiances, are devoted to "jihad," and are sympathetic to, if not part of, Al Qaeda (this profoundly ugly smear campaign began with the always-unhinged Andrew McCarthy in National Review, who branded

• Continue Reading

such lawyers "terrorist sympathizers").

This slander encompasses scores of American military lawyers, who have vigorously, passionately and often successfully defended numerous Guantanamo detainees, including those accused of being Al Qaeda operatives.

It's been produced by a group run by Dick Cheney's daughter and Bill Kristol.

The use of the phrase "The al-Qaeda 7" is clearly intended to imply that there is something criminal or suspicious about what these military lawyers have been doing.

The truth, of course, is that these lawyers have simply been doing their jobs and ensuring, as is supposed to be the American way, that the men they represented got as fair a trial as was possible during the days of the Bush administration. And the men they represented were not "terrorist detainees" as this scurrilous ad claims, they were suspected terrorists. And we all know that the vast majority of these detainees were released due to the lack of evidence against them.

And yet, Kristol and Cheney are now launching this attack on these people, implying that these men and women might possibly share values with al Qaeda.

It's about as irresponsible and reprehensible as any advert could possibly be.

John Adams famously represented the British soldiers who took part in the Boston massacre. Would Cheney and Kristol impugn his loyalty and wonder whose values he shared?

UPDATE:

The seven have now been named by a Justice Department spokesman, who said "politics has overtaken facts and reality" in a tug-of-war over the lawyers' identities.

Although the Fox News article contains some interesting facts:

The Obama Administration is not the first to hire lawyers who represented or advocated for terror suspects.

Pratik Shah, an assistant to the Solicitor General hired by the Bush Administration, was part of the WilmerHale team that put together arguments for the Boumediene v. Bush case.

Trisha Anderson, an adviser in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel who was also hired by the Bush Administration, was previously an attorney at Attorney General Eric Holder's former firm, Covington & Burling, where she helped represent 13 Yemeni detainees.

Varda Hussain, an attorney hired in 2008 with the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, was an associate with the Washington-based firm Venable when she helped represent three Egyptians being held at Guantanamo Bay.

Cheney and Kristol were strangely quiet when George Bush and Cheney's father were hiring people who possibly shared al Qaeda's values....

UPDATE II:



Here this reprehensible woman is interviewed by O'Reilly, and I note that O'Reilly utterly skips over the fact that Liz Cheney's father was also part of an administration which hired people who had previously defended suspected terrorists. O'Reilly decides that the Obama administration must be "clearly worried about this issue" rather than acknowledge that Cheney's claims have been exposed as the partisan rubbish which they are.

She goes on here to state that these 9 people have "previously voluntarily represented terrorists". Again, as I have said before, they were suspected terrorists, a distinction which this awful person finds impossible to make. And she is clearly implying that the voluntary status of their work makes them somehow suspicious, or why would she even bring that up?

Nor does she step back from demanding that the American people have the right to know whether or not lawyers who "used to represent and advocate on behalf of terrorists" are working inside the Justice department.

She is clearly continuing to imply that there is reason to suspect such people.

And she gets away with doing all of this without even being asked by O'Reilly about the Bush administration also hiring people who had previously worked to try to get justice for Guantanamo detainees.

Tags: Liz Cheney, Bill Kristol, al Qaeada 7, Republicans

RNC To Play on Voters "Fear" of Obama.

What started as the rantings of the more extreme right wing blogs appears to have become the official campaign policy of the Republican party.

The Republican National Committee plans to raise money this election cycle through an aggressive campaign capitalizing on “fear” of President Barack Obama and a promise to "save the country from trending toward socialism."

Normally, political parties shy away from the extremists, in this instance the Republicans appear ready to play into those fears and arguments which have been brewing amongst the outer fringes of political debate.

The presentation explains the Republican fundraising in simple terms.

"What can you sell when you do not have the White House, the House, or the Senate...?" it asks.

The answer: "Save the country from trending toward Socialism!”

It's also an illustration of just how little, especially since the recent financial collapse, the Republicans have to run on. Could they seriously argue for deregulation at the moment? It would be hard to do that with a straight face.

So, they are left promoting themes, "America slides towards socialism", rather than rely on the "cut tax, deregulate the banks" which have been their stock and trade campaign themes for years.

The truth is that the language they normally employ during elections would simply seem hopelessly out of tune with the world which we now occupy since the near financial collapse of the world's banking system.

So, they are left with this almost cartoonish approach to politics.

Click here for full article.

Tags: Republicans, Democrats, Obama, Socialism, fund raising

Palin: ‘I joined Fox’ because there’s too much ‘opinion interjected in hard news’ in the mainstream media.

This is demonstrably laughable.

PALIN: I studied journalism, my college degree there in communications. And now I am back there wanting to build some trust back in our media. I think the mainstream media is quite broken and I think there needs to be the fairness, the balance in there — that’s why I joined Fox. Fair and balanced, yes. You know because, Jay, those years a go that I studied journalism it was all about the who, what, when, where, and why, it was not so much the opinion interjected in hard news stories. … As long as there is not the opinion under the guise of hard news stories — I think there needs to be clear differentiation.

Yeah, 'cos Fox never ever include opinion under the guise of news in their stories. They simply found the Tea Party movement more interesting and vital than any other news organisation did.

Fox News is making a mockery of its famous slogan, the progressive media watchdog says:

Despite its repeated insistence that its coverage is "fair and balanced" and its invitation to viewers to "say 'no' to biased media," Fox News has frequently aired segments encouraging viewers to get involved with "tea party" protests across the country, which the channel has described as primarily a response to President Obama's fiscal policies.

The Media Matters item goes on to beat up Fox for dozens of recent on-air statements it views as too favorable of the tea party movement, such as Glenn Beck's exhortation to "celebrate with Fox News" on tax day.

There are many reasons that Palin could have given for wanting to join Fox News, but to argue that she is doing so because she objects to opinion being interjected into hard news stories is simply laughable.

Tags: Palin, Fox News

Limbaugh says Obama's message is: "Shut up, debate over. Bend over."

I expected that the right wing were going to go apeshit over Obama's recent announcement that he intends to push through healthcare reform, but one can always rely on Limbaugh to go too far.

He now defines Obama's position as, "Shut up, debate over. Bend over."

That's a lovely image.

Tags: Limbaugh, Obama, universal healthcare

Jon Swift RIP.

He was my favourite blogger, and since March of last year I - like many others - have been visiting his site and wondering when he would start posting again. The longer his silence continued, the more we all wondered what had happened to him and started to fear the worst.

It now transpires that Jon Swift passed away on February 27th this year. His mother has posted this:

I don't know how else to tell you all who love this blog. I am Jon Swift's Mom and I guess I'm going to OUT him. He was Al Weisel, my beloved son. Al was on his way to his father's funeral in VA when he suffered 2 aortic aneurysms, a leaky aortic valve and an aortic artery dissection from his heart to his pelvis. He had 3 major surgeries within 24 hours and sometime during those surgeries also suffered a severe stroke. We, his 2 sisters, his brother, his partner and his best friend since he was 9 years old were with him as he took his last breath. We have all lost a shining start who warmed our hearts, tormented us and made us laugh as he giggled at our pulling something over on us. He passed away on February 27, 2010. My beloved child will live on in so many hearts. I miss him more than I can say. If you are on Facebook, go to organizations and join "Friends of Al Weisel, Unite!" It will give you just a taste of how special he was. Farewell, Jon (Al)

That makes me sad. Jon was the greatest satirist on the net and his posts regularly made me laugh out loud.

He will be genuinely missed for the unique contribution he made to political blogging.

Tags: Jon Swift

Hopes rise for resumption of Middle East peace negotiations.

The Arab League have given qualified support to a US proposal for indirect talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

The decision by Arab League foreign ministers meeting in Cairo yesterday gives the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas political cover to enter "proximity" talks – in which the US would shuttle between the two sides – despite Palestinian and wider Arab scepticism over Israel's willingness to advance a genuine peace process.

The move was welcomed yesterday by Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who told the Knesset: "It seems that the conditions are ripening for the renewal of negotiations between us and the Palestinians."

There has been so little sign of any positive advancement in talks between the two sides that this minuscule piece of news is being greeted as a great step forward.

The US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Washington was "very pleased" by the decision and hoped talks would begin "soon".

A statement endorsed at the meeting of 14 Arab states – with Syria's the main dissenting voice – backed the proximity talks as a "last ditch" effort to "facilitate" the US role in seeking to broker a peace deal. But it warned that they should be limited to four months in duration and should not automatically lead to direct talks.

Mr Abbas has refused to enter direct negotiations with Mr Netanyahu without the total settlement freeze originally demanded by Washington. Mr Netanyahu eventually agreed to halt new construction in the settlements for 10 months but not to stop work on building already deemed to be under way or to apply a freeze to East Jerusalem.

The US has since been pressing an at least initially reluctant Mr Abbas to agree to the indirect talks – in which President Obama's Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, is expected to act as the mediator – as a means of breaking the deadlock.

But although Mr Abbas has also been under pressure from Egypt to enter the talks, he has made it clear he would not take sole responsibility for doing so. He is thought to have sought the Arab League's support as a precondition for yielding to the pressure to begin the "proximity" process.

Abbas now has the political cover he needs to proceed, cover which he would not have needed had only Obama stuck by his guns and insisted that Israel stop all settlement building. When Obama caved to Israeli intransigence on this subject he placed Abbas in a dreadful position.

Abbas has now, finally, found a way to dig himself out of the hole which Obama placed him in.

But the Israelis will have learned from all of this that Obama folds when they place too much pressure on him.

That doesn't bode well for what it still to come. Obama needs to get the Israelis to move, and so far he has not shown us that he has the stomach for that particular fight.

Click here for full article.

Tags: Obama, Israel, Palestine, Abbas, Netanyahu

William Hague hid Lord Ashcroft's tax status for months.

The problems for the Tories over Lord Ashcroft's non-dom status don't appear to be going anywhere soon as each day seems to bring a fresh batch of questions and revelations.

Yesterday, William Hague revealed that he has known that Ashcroft had renegotiated the terms under which he took his place in the House of Lords "for a few months".

Lord Ashcroft admitted on Monday that he was a "non-dom" – only paying tax on his British income. After refusing to answer any questions about what he knew and when, Hague finally elaborated in an interview on Radio 4's The World Tonight. The former Conservative leader revealed he had only recently discovered the terms of the arrangement that allowed Ashcroft to remain a non-dom. He was asked whether the "first he had known" of the arrangement was when Ashcroft revealed it at the start of the week. Hague replied: "Well, I knew in advance of that."

Hague was pressed on exactly when he had found out. He said: "Over the last few months I knew about that; and of course I was keen to support him then in making his position public."

Hague made assurances to Tony Blair, stating that giving Ashcroft a life peerage would ensure that Ashcroft paid "tens of millions" to the British treasury in taxation and that Ashcroft thought this "worthwhile". Indeed, Ashcroft wrote to Hague, giving him this assurance:

I hereby give you my clear and unequivocal assurance that I have decided to take up permanent residence in the UK again before the end of this calendar year.

Ashcroft knew what Hague imagined that this term meant and yet he renegotiated with someone to avoid the tax implications which Hague had expressly promised.

David Miliband, the foreign secretary, said last night: "Lord Ashcroft has failed to come clean with the leaders of the Conservative party, and the leaders of the Conservative party have failed to come clean over the last few months with the rest of the country."

"These are promises made in respect of a peerage that was given. And now tax has not been paid, and instead it has been given to the Conservative party for the general election fund."

Labour's general election co-ordinator, Douglas Alexander, added: "Lord Ashcroft's position is now completely untenable. David Cameron must now act and fire him. He surely cannot tolerate a position where the most senior member of his shadow cabinet has been kept in the dark for so long by his most senior funder and deputy chairman."

Cameron, of course, cannot fire Ashcroft; after all he appears to be shit scared of him. But we are now left with a man who promised - through Hague - to pay "tens of millions" to the UK treasury in taxes in order to facilitate a life peerage, instead using this foreign money - on which he has paid no UK taxation - in an attempt to influence a British election.

It is utterly scandalous. And even some Tories appear to see the problem which seems to be eluding David Cameron:

Barry Legg, a former Tory MP and chief executive under Iain Duncan Smith, said the Ashcroft affair had damaged the party. "It is damaging you have somebody contribute so much money to the Conservative party who basically doesn't want to pay taxes in this country," he said. "It questions the commitment of that donor to the country. It looks as if those people in a position to ask those questions have decided for whatever reason not to press the matter. It probably reflects poor judgment on the part of people that are in charge of the party."

Tensions among senior Tories also surfaced privately. One Cameron ally said: "We should have confronted Michael Ashcroft. But [Cameron] has been saying everything is OK … that was the assurance given to Hague. David Cameron has not had time to confront him … He does not see a great deal of Michael Ashcroft anyway. But, yes, it is a fuck-up."

Cameron is hoping that this problem will simply go away and is insisting that the press are "flogging a dead horse".

He is showing a remarkable lack of judgement if he honestly can't see the principles which are at stake here.

UPDATE:



Here is Hague in 2009 assuring Jeremy Paxman that he has "no reason to think that he (Ashcroft) has not complied to the commitments that he gave."

Paxman goes on to expose the shocking lack of curiosity the Conservatives displayed on this matter.

UPDATE II:

The more I think about this, the more impossible it is to imagine Ashcroft being able to stay in his position as Deputy Chairman of the Tories. Cameron is making much about the new transparency which the Conservatives will bring to politics and, if Hague is telling the truth in this interview with Paxman, and I have no reason to believe that he is not, then it is quite clear that Ashcroft allowed Hague to believe that he was in compliance with the commitments he gave, when he (Ashcroft) knew fine well he was not.

Ashcroft has allowed Hague to believe this for the best part of ten years. And to go on TV arguing that he believed this. And yet, at no point did Ashcroft feel the need to give Hague a call and straighten this all out?

The Tories look as if they weren't asking the question because they didn't want to know the answer.

This makes Cameron look weak. And the Tories appear more interested in getting their hands on Ashcroft's millions than asking him if he had complied with the assurances that the then leader of the Conservatives gave to enable him to receive his life peerage.

When the leader of a political party gives assurances, it is right that we take them at their word. In this instance that word has been deliberately misconstrued by Ashcroft for financial gain.

And Cameron doesn't seem remotely bothered that the position he currently holds - and the assurances given by a former holder of that position - was treated with so little respect by Ashcroft.

He's played them all for fools, and they are too busy trying to get their hands on his lucre to even get angry about it.

UPDATE III:

Stephen Tall over at Liberal Democratic Voice makes a great point about how the Tories are puzzled that the rest of us find this a big deal:

The over-riding impression I get from this Ashcroft episode (and I’ve talked to a handful of senior Tories about it) is bafflement that it’s an issue at all. Most Tories seem to see nothing wrong in Lord Ashcroft minimising his tax bill through whatever legal means available, and nothing wrong with him occupying a seat in the House of Lords while doing so. The idea of fairness – that those who legislate how much the rest of us should get taxed, and how that money should be spent, should pay the same tax as the rest of us – is seen as the pedantry of liberal-leftys.

If there’s one thing bound to unite Lib Dem, Labour and floating voters, it’s irritation with the sense of entitlement too many Tories exude, and which Lord Ashcroft’s tax affairs exemplify.

Quite how they have convinced themselves of this, at a time when the nation is up in arms about the expenses scandal simply baffles me.

UPDATE IV:

Here is what Cameron has previously said on the subject of non-doms:

"I think it time to pass a law that says that if you want to be in the Houses of Parliament, if you want to be a legislator, you need to be or be treated as a full UK taxpayer."

"There are members of the House of Lords whose tax status is unclear. If you want to sit in the House of Lords or Commons you have to be a fully resident UK taxpayer.

"We would pass that law if we get elected. We would pass it straight away, we would bring it into force as rapidly as we could. I think that would put the situation beyond doubt."

And here's what he said about Ashcroft specifically:

2 December 2007 "I am satisfied that the undertakings [Lord Ashcroft] gave are being met and I've reassurances.....that he is resident in the UK and pays taxes in the UK."

5 February 2008 "[Lord Ashcroft] gave assurances, I've sought assurances about them. I've been given them and I'm happy to leave it at that."

It really does appear untenable that the present situation can continue.

Click here for full article.

Tags: Lord Ashcroft, Cameron, William Hague, tax status, life peerage

He's Going to Go For It.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

He is going to push for reconciliation, and this is the nearest he can be expected to come to promising that.

Reform has already passed the House with a majority. It has already passed the Senate with a supermajority of sixty votes. And now it deserves the same kind of up-or-down vote that was cast on welfare reform, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, COBRA health coverage for the unemployed, and both Bush tax cuts – all of which had to pass Congress with nothing more than a simple majority.

He's going to go for it.

It's not perfect, and I wish he had included a public option, but it's a huge step forward.

Tags: Obama, universal healthcare, Republicans, Democrats

Rage on the Right.

Whenever a Democrat is elected in the US the lunatics always seem to come out of the woodwork.

The radical right caught fire last year, as broad-based populist anger at political, demographic and economic changes in America ignited an explosion of new extremist groups and activism across the nation.

[...]

Hate groups stayed at record levels — almost 1,000 — despite the total collapse of the second largest neo-Nazi group in America. Furious anti-immigrant vigilante groups soared by nearly 80%, adding some 136 new groups during 2009. And, most remarkably of all, so-called "Patriot" groups — militias and other organizations that see the federal government as part of a plot to impose “one-world government” on liberty-loving Americans — came roaring back after years out of the limelight.

[...]

“We are in the midst of one of the most significant right-wing populist rebellions in United States history,” Chip Berlet, a veteran analyst of the American radical right, wrote earlier this year. "We see around us a series of overlapping social and political movements populated by people [who are] angry, resentful, and full of anxiety. They are raging against the machinery of the federal bureaucracy and liberal government programs and policies including health care, reform of immigration and labor laws, abortion, and gay marriage."

[...]

[L]ast year ... a dramatic resurgence in the Patriot movement and its paramilitary wing, the militias, began. Now, the latest SPLC count finds that an astonishing 363 new Patriot groups appeared in 2009, with the totals going from 149 groups (including 42 militias) to 512 (127 of them militias) — a 244% jump.

As long as there is a Republican in the White House these people seem to feel safe. Because the Republicans talk their language.

But the election of a black president, and the fact that Fox News appears to be perpetually telling them that the world is coming to an end, drives these lunatics into the open to fight against "big government".

It's just so painfully predictable. We saw all of this insanity during Clinton's time in office and now, sadly, we are going to have to go through it all over again for as long as the Democrats control the White House.

Click here for full article.

Tags: Republicans, right wingers, militias

Rachel Maddow Hits Republicans and Fox for Conflating the Reconciliation Process With the Nuclear Option.

Rachel Maddow takes apart the Republican hypocrisy when it comes to reconciliation. McCain and others are shown to be outraged at something which they themselves have used many, many times to get their policies passed.

She also highlights the way Fox News pretend that reconciliation is the "nuclear option".

Tags: Rachel Maddow, reconciliation, universal healthcare

Hague on Ashcroft: "This decision will cost him (and benefit the Treasury) tens of millions a year in tax, yet he considers this worthwhile."

When William Hague, then leader of the Tory Party, wrote to Tony Blair to complain that Michael Ashcroft had been refused a life peerage - partly on the grounds that he was a tax exile - he stated:

He is, however, committed to becoming resident by the next financial year in order properly to fulfill his responsibilities in the House of Lords. This decision will cost him (and benefit the Treasury) tens of millions a year in tax yet he considers this worthwhile.

Which only makes his recently revealed non-dom status all the more troubling. According to Hague's letter Ashcroft thought it "worthwhile" to pay "tens of millions" in taxation in order to enter the House of Lords, so his decision to avoid paying UK taxation on much of his income is at odds with what Hague argued in order to obtain him his lifetime peerage.

Furthermore, and you can read the letters by clicking on the link in the first paragraph, it was made very clear that he was being denied a life peerage because of doubts about "his status as a UK taxpayer".

So, it seems unquestionable that Hague understood that Ashcroft's status as a tax exile was one of the main reasons for refusing him a life peerage, and that Hague gave repeated assurances to both Blair and to Lord Thomson, chair of the peerages scrutiny committee, that Ashcroft would end his status as a UK tax exile.

But yet Ashcroft now claims he entered the House of Lords as a "non-dom". How did this come about?

Last night the peer Lord Oakeshott wrote to Gordon Brown and the cabinet secretary, Gus O'Donnell, to demand the immediate release of all documents to substantiate Ashcroft's claims – specifically that the government agreed to downgrade the undertaking he made when he was ennobled to become a UK resident to allow him to retain his non-dom status.

The Cabinet Office, which holds all the documents relating to Ashcroft's ennoblement, confirmed that it agreed with him that an undertaking to become a "permanent resident", under which he would pay full tax, could be replaced with a commitment that he would "live indefinitely and would therefore be a long-term resident", to ensure he lived in the UK and attended the Lords. That change was made in June 2000 – weeks after his conditional nomination was announced.

However, the Cabinet Office would not clarify whether this affected his tax status, or how Ashcroft subsequently used a loophole in the law introduced eight years later which allowed "long-term residents" to remain non-doms.

The problem with this is that it stinks.

Whatever loophole Ashcroft may have subsequently found to slink out of paying UK taxation on all of his earnings, there can be no doubting that everyone understood before the peerage was announced that this was the very matter which made him unsuitable for such an award.

Indeed, Hague understood it enough to promise that giving him a peerage would result in the Treasury being better off by "tens of millions a year" and that Ashcroft thought this "worthwhile".

And yet, despite Hague's assurances, Ashcroft has entered the House of Lords whilst not paying UK taxation on a substantial part of his income.

In other words, he gets to take part in deciding which laws the rest of us will abide by - including laws on taxation - whilst not paying taxation on all of his earnings.

David Cameron has been running scared of this story for years, refusing to comment on Ashcroft's tax status and insisting that this was a matter of privacy between Ashcroft and the Inland Revenue. And he has been doing this whilst Ashcroft was funding his election campaign with especial focus on marginal seats.

Now that Ashcroft's status as a "non-dom" has been revealed, Cameron is insisting that there is nothing further to be discussed and that press interest in this story is simply "flogging a dead horse".

"We're not going to comment any further," a spokesman for the party said. "We're not going to be very helpful, I'm afraid."

I'm not sure that Cameron is going to get away with this. We are talking about avoidance of a tax bill of approximately £127 million over the last ten years. On LBC, even right wing shock jocks like James Whale are saying that they find this appalling.

Cameron can stick his head in the sand and hope that this goes away, but his refusal to discuss it only heightens the impression that he has something to hide.

Cameron is pretending that he doesn't want to discuss this because there is some great principle at the heart of this concerning privacy, but that is an almost painfully weak argument.

He is avoiding this, in truth, because it is embarrassing to him.

William Hague's letters, and the assurances he gave in them, are not going to simply go away, no matter how much Cameron wishes this.

The cabinet minister Ed Balls said Labour regarded the issue as a question of "the integrity of our politics" and would not let it rest. "This has actually moved into a real judgment issue about both William Hague and David Cameron. David Cameron wants to be prime minister, he's got to answer the questions. What did he know and William Hague know and when did they know that Lord Ashcroft was not paying tax and using foreign money to pay for Conservative electioneering?

Those are valid questions, and Cameron needs to answer them. Has Ashcroft been using foreign money to influence the UK election? That's not a matter of privacy, that's a matter of electoral process. And Cameron can't be allowed to duck it.

Click here for full article.

Tags: Lord Ashcroft, tax, taxation, non-dom status, David Cameron, Tories, UK election 2010

Nigel Farage fined for verbal attack on EU president.

I've previously covered Nigel Farage's rude outburst at the European parliament. Well, he was given a chance to apologise to Belgium for his disparaging remarks and has refused to do so, so he has been fined for breaching the rules of the European parliament. Typically, he has decided that his right to free speech has been curtailed.

Farage used his Twitter page to declare: "Sentence passed, letter from parliament. President: Maximum allowable fine 2,980 euros. Free speech is expensive in Brussels." He said he would appeal against the fine.

"I have been called a great many things in my time – that's politics," he said.

"I am not going to apologise to Mr Van Rompuy, and I am not going to apologise to the people of Belgium.

"Surely I am entitled to have a dig at a man representing 500 million people, who is paid more than the US president and who has not been elected by us?

"As for apologising to the Belgian people – look, I'm not going to do that for what I said about their country, which doesn't have proper political parties."

Asked whether he had been blunt with Buzek during their 15-minute meeting, Farage said: "No, I was very polite."

He is insisting that he was "very polite" when he told the new European president that he had "the charisma of a damp rag" and "the appearance of a low grade bank clerk" and went on to state that Belgium "is pretty much a non country."

This has got bugger all to do with free speech, and everything to do with parliamentary rules.

European parliament's president, Jerzy Buzek, explained why he fined him:

Buzek said he defended "absolutely Mr Farage's right to disagree about the policy or institutions of the union, but not to personally insult our guests in the European parliament or the country from which they may come".

"His behaviour towards Mr Rompuy was inappropriate, unparliamentary and insulting to the dignity of the house," he added.

He said that, as a former member of the Polish Solidarity movement, he had fought for free speech as the "absolute cornerstone" of a democratic society.

However, he added: "With freedom comes responsibility – in this case, to respect the dignity of others and of our institutions.

""I invited him to apologise, but he declined to do so. I have therefore, as an expression of the seriousness of the matter, rescinded his right to 10 days' daily allowance as a member".

Quite why Farage thinks he was merely expressing free speech puzzles me. All institutions have rules and regulations. For example, in the House of Commons one is not allowed to call another member of the House a liar and one must leave the chamber if you do so and refuse to take back such a charge. In the European parliament one is not allowed to resort to personal insults or to make disparaging remarks about the country's which other members come from.

But this is partly Farage's problem. He is a member of the European parliament but he doesn't believe in the European parliament.

He was one of those Tory MP's who stood down when Major signed The Maastricht Treaty. Opposition to the European parliament is in his bones.

Which makes his position as a member of that parliament particularly odd. He is paid by a parliament which he would like to see dismantled. And he is paid very well by that parliament.

Most of us would not express our dissatisfaction with the views of a group or organisation by joining it. So Farage has set himself up for such falls.

And he imagines that his free speech is being curtailed every time the box he has nailed himself into is explained to him.

He might not agree with the European parliament, but, as a member, he is bound by it's rules. That's his dichotomy.

Click here for full article.

Tags: Nigel Farage, European Union, European parliament

Beckel: "Every Republican who's complaining about it now voted for reconciliation on George Bush's tax bills".

I don't know who Beckel is but I like his attitude enormously. He appears to have just the right amount of contempt when dealing with an a##hole like Sean Hannity.

And I love the fact that he points out the Republican hypocrisy when it comes to reconciliation. Republicans had no problem at all with reconciliation when it came to tax cuts.

When it's used to give money to the rich it's a good thing, when it's used to give health cover to all they are appalled by it.

Tags: Beckel, Sean Hannity, universal healthcare, Fox News, reconciliation

Peter Sutcliffe seeks release date as psychiatrist says conviction for murder was wrong.

Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, has started an appeals process demanding a date for his release from prison, with a psychiatrist from Broadmoor speaking in his defence and arguing that, at the time of the murders, he was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and was, therefore, not guilty of murder and should have been found guilty of manslaughter due to “diminished responsibility”.

Dr Murray’s report from 2006 concluded that Sutcliffe may be safe for release within a “low single figures” of years, the court was told.

His treatment has had a “very considerable success” and if he continues with it he poses a low risk of offending, the report added.

I note that this "very considerable success" is dependent on him continuing his treatment and wonder, what would happen if he stopped it?

I am all for the notion that prison is supposed to be as much about rehabilitation as it is about punishment, but it's simply fanciful to imagine that Peter Sutcliffe will ever be allowed to roam Britain's streets again.

It is irrelevant to argue whether or not Sutcliffe suffered from paranoid schizophrenia at the time of the attacks. Those attacks are seared into the nations consciousness, they will never be forgotten. Nor will any psychological condition any psychiatrist comes up with ever allow them to be forgiven.

There have been many cases where people convicted of seriously violent crimes have eventually been released to live productive lives - the case of Jimmy Boyle instantly comes to mind - but it's impossible to imagine that this would ever occur in the case of Sutcliffe.

The fact that his psychiatrists are speaking of his "paranoid schizophrenia" is enough to guarantee that.

No British Home Secretary is going to be the man who released Peter Sutcliffe. That's simply a no brainer...

Click here for full article.

Tags: Peter Sutcliffe, parole

Lord Ashcroft reveals: I am a non-dom.

David Cameron has been having an awful week, but it just got considerably worse.

Lord Ashcroft, the multimillionaire deputy chairman of the Conservative party, has ended ten years of silence - despite constant Labour and Lib Dem probing - to admit that he is a "non-dom" and does not pay tax on earnings he makes outside of the UK.

Ashcroft made a statement on his website (pdf) in anticipation of the release under the Freedom of Information Act today of the promise he made to the government when he was made a peer in 2000 to "take up permanent residence in the UK again".

He said: "In subsequent dialogue with the government, it was officially confirmed that the interpretation in the first undertaking of the words 'permanent residence' was to be that of 'a long-term resident' of the UK. I agreed to this and finally took up my seat in the House of Lords in October 2000. Throughout the last 10 years, I have been declaring all my UK income to HM Revenue.

"My precise tax status therefore is that of a 'non-dom'. Two of Labour's biggest donors – Lord Paul (recently made a privy counsellor by the prime minister) and Sir Ronald Cohen, both long-term residents of the UK – are also 'non-doms'."

I heard one Tory MP today make the claim that Lord Paul gives a larger percentage of his income to the Labour party than Lord Ashcroft gives to the Tories. But that is disingenuous in the extreme. In fact, it says more about Ashcroft's astronomical wealth than it does about anything else.

Ashcroft is bankrolling the Tory campaign against Labour and Lib Dem marginal seats; and he could be said to be doing so with the money that he is choosing not to pay in UK taxation.

During the election campaign in the US, I was often tempted to donate money to Obama's campaign and was always slightly miffed when his website made it clear that only US residents could contribute.

But when I thought about it, it made prefect sense. Although the US presidency affects every person on the planet, I don't pay US taxes, so why the Hell should I be allowed any say in the choosing of the US president?

And that same rule should apply to Ashcroft; and Lord Paul and Sir Ronald Cohen if it comes to that, although I note that neither of them are Deputy Chairman of the Labour party.

If you want to contribute to the political process of this country then you should be resident here and pay all of your taxes here.

And why has it taken the Tories TEN YEARS to come clean on this?

Gordon Prentice, the Labour MP who put the FoI request in to the Cabinet Office, said: "This is absolutely explosive. He says that he has been declaring all his UK income to HM Revenue; he's not declaring his worldwide income; he's worth £850m. He should resign from House of Lords immediately."

Lord Oakeshott, the Liberal Democrat peer who has campaigned for a change in the law to prevent non-doms sitting in parliament, said: "Ashcroft has been sitting for the last 10 years in the British parliament, he has been voting on British laws and British public spending when he has not been paying full British tax like the other 60 million of us. That's a democratic disgrace."

"He has been pouring millions into Conservative campaigning when he is not paying full British tax. So you have someone who keeps his assets offshore out of the British tax system and trying to buy a British election.

"This makes it essential there is no further delay in the ruling from the Electoral Commission. Now that we know Lord Ashcroft is a non-dom the Electoral Commission must rule on whether his donations are impermissible."

Cameron was at his most spectacularly weak when he attempted to fend this one off.

"He's a non-dom. Those are people who live in the UK and pay tax in the UK but have that non-dom status, like, for instance, Lord Paul, one of Labour's biggest donors, who the prime minister recently made a privy counsellor, one of the highest offices in the land. I'm glad it's cleared up. Now we can get on with the election campaign.

Yeah, that's going to be enough. Why didn't he just come out and say, "Nothing to see here folks, just keep moving."

"I think you have to respect people's privacy and you have to respect the view that someone's tax status is a matter between them and the Revenue, but I'm delighted Lord Ashcroft has come out and said, 'You want to know the undertakings I gave; here they are. You want to know my tax status; here is is.'

Except it took ten years and a Freedom of Information Act ruling for this to become public.

The long-demanded disclosure comes after a freedom of information watchdog ruled there was a "legitimate interest" for the public to know Lord Ashcroft's tax status.

Cameron is stating that Ashcroft's attitude - and that of the Tory party - is best summed up with, "You want to know my tax status; here is is."

After TEN YEARS of Tory obfuscation on this subject, that's simply not credible.

Related Articles:

Tory party has been bought like a 'banana republic', says Huhne.

When he was awarded a peerage, 10 years ago, Lord Ashcroft gave a "clear and unequivocal assurance" that he would become a permanent UK resident. William Hague, the former Tory leader who nominated Lord Ashcroft for a peerage, hailed that assurance as being worth "tens of millions" to the British Treasury, as the peer started paying UK taxes on his vast wealth.

But Lord Ashcroft has now disclosed that under a deal he brokered with the tax authorities he became a "long-term resident" of the UK, without being "domiciled" here. The distinction meant that he did not need to pay tax on the bulk of his fortune, which was made abroad, provided that he did not bring it into the country.

Click here for full article.

Tags: Lord Ashcroft, non-dom, Tories, Labour, UK election 2010, Cameron

Kristol: I didn't watch it, but I can still comment as if I did.

This is a unique skill.

KRISTOL: No, but I didn’t watch it, so — (laughter). I have a life. (laughter) You compared it at the beginning of the hour to a dog-and-pony show, and I thought to myself, that’s really an insult to dog-and-pony shows. I like the dog shows there on the Animal Planet. … Many people were impressive. The President showed his usual professorial ability to sort of say certain things and highlight certain facts, or alleged facts.

He admits that he didn't watch it and then goes on to comment as if he did. Only on Fox News....

Tags: Bill Kristol, Fox News, Obama, Healthcare

Voters are still unsure about the Tories, admits Cameron.

He really is beginning to look desperate.

In his last speech to a Tory conference before the election, Cameron said elections are never handed out on a plate as he responded to concerns that the party's campaign is faltering.

"We all know that the British people have still got some big questions that they want to ask us, and that we've got to answer," Cameron told the spring forum in Brighton in a 40-minute speech delivered without notes.

"Are you really up to it? Are you really going to make that difference?"

He attempted to address the concerns by claiming that the party had modernised and would rebuild "broken" Britain by reforming public services and tackling the record £178bn fiscal deficit at a faster rate than Labour.

Voters, he insisted, would embrace change because they would not want another five years of Gordon Brown, a man engaged in a "dangerous dance of death that is dragging this country down".

I don't know anyone who believes that Gordon Brown is engaged in a "dangerous dance of death that is dragging this country down". Perhaps in Tory circles that is how it feels living in today's Britain, but it's an experience that most of us don't share.

And, much as Cameron says that we have questions over whether or not he's the man for the job, I note that he offers no answers and continues in his relentless - and utterly unfair - attacks on Brown.

In a highly personalised attack on the prime minister, Cameron said: "What sort of genius is it that doubles the national debt?

That's a bit like attacking Barack Obama for bailing out the American banks. Nobody wanted to do it, and nobody did it without a heavy heart, but the choice was either do it or watch the entire financial system collapse.

So Cameron is, somewhere along the line, playing on an assumption that most people are too stupid to understand this. I don't think he's right in that assumption.

I think most people understand that, given a choice, no-one would have willingly bailed out the banks. The horrible truth is that we didn't have a choice.

Cameron has set out his tent on the same piece of ground which the Tea Party movement in American currently occupy, where one can feign opposition to the bailout and pretend that this was a simple matter of choice.

Indeed, Cameron has gone further, by pretending that the economic crisis which swept the world was somehow not an international crisis brought about by the US sub prime mortgage fiasco, but that it was a failing of Gordon Brown personally.

Such opportunism makes it hard to take the man seriously. Because he is demanding that we discuss current events through a prism which only his most fervent supporters can agree with.

To the rest of us, there is much fault that one can find in Brown's premiership, but to pretend that he caused the collapse of the world's financial system is simply ludicrous.

And that's my problem with Cameron. He keeps begging the rest of us to take him seriously, but we can't possibly do that until he starts treating us like adults.

For the first time in many months, I am beginning to doubt that this guy is actually going to win the next election. I have always said that he was going to walk in. That Britain was, somehow, sleep walking to the next Tory government.

But Cameron isn't even doing the minimum amount necessary to bring that about. It should be a walk in. It should be a done deal.

But Cameron isn't closing that deal. And, in his most recent speech, he sounds like he's begging to be given a chance.

And, whilst begging, he's resorting to hyperbole to denigrate his opponent.

I mean, seriously: Gordon Brown is engaged in a "dangerous dance of death that is dragging this country down"?

People who talk that way are not serious and should not be treated as if they are.

Click here for full article.

Tags: Cameron, Brown, Labour, Tories, UK election 2010