I still can’t believe it is not a clever piece of satire cooked up by Chris Morris or someone like that.   His argument seems to be that the whole expense claims controversy is the fault of the Labour government because…  they introduced the Freedom of Information act.  If it wasn’t for that everything would be fine because ignorance is bliss.

Also he says the criticism of him is motivated by jealousy about his “vewy vewy large house” that “some people say looks like Balmoral”

The best ever comment on minimum wages came from the comedian Robin Williams, back when minimum wage was an Americanism that we didn’t have over here.  He said that when a company pay minimum wage it is their way of saying we would pay you less if only we were allowed to.

This is not how it is meant to be.  The Tories are supposed to be pretending to be nice until enough people fall for it and vote them in.  As soon as that happens, then they are allowed to drop the mask and start dismantling all the protections for ordinary workers and families that have been created in the last ten years.  They are not supposed to show their true intentions until then, and Christopher Chope is not sticking to their game plan here.

Makes you wonder what other things they have set their sights on.

This Chope has an extra job as a director of a company because he feels that an MP’s salary is insufficient, and yet he can’t see why your average shop worker should be so greedy as to insist on £11,918 a year for working 40-hour weeks…

Incidentally, Chope claims that the TUC support this, which I find hard to believe.    Maybe I should check on Wikipedia: I’m sure there has been enough time for CCHQ to insert the necessary cobblers to back up the claim.

(hat-tip to Mike Ion over at Labourhome)

Gordon, busy man that he is, sent an e-mail tonight¹ with some of the key points of his speech and for me the key section was this:

Never forget that every single blow we have struck for fairness and for the future has been opposed by the Conservatives. At every stage they have opposed a fairer Britain – no paternity leave, no New Deal, no Bank of England independence, no Sure Start, no devolution, no civil partnerships, no minimum wage, no new investment in the NHS, no new nurses, no new police, no new schools – we did mend the roof while the sun was shining.

While we are at it, here is a pre-emptive defence against charges of hypocrisy for making a point of saying his children are people and not props after being introduced by his wife: they are two different things.  Wives choose their husband; children do not choose their parents.  Sarah knew she was marrying somebody in the public eye, knowing that she would be too and accepting that.  She also knew what Gordon thinks and believes in and you have to imagine that he agrees since thatis part of the package.  Children start off too young to know what it is all about and then grow up to not necesarily agree with whattheir parents think.  In a way I hope the right-wing commentators do concentrate on that one thing because it will show that there is no answer to the rest.

As if by magic, Boris Johnson pops up to show us what the attitude is of the Tory old-Etonian tendency towards some of our inequalities by coming out in support of the bankers and the huge bonuses they ‘earned’ for destroying the economy. He says:

“And before you go whingeing to me about house prices boosted by City bonuses, whatever the disasters of the sub-prime sector, these products allowed millions of Americans to own their own homes,”

Um yes.  For a while, anyway.  Not sure how million of Americans owning their houses (until they get foreclosed) makes a difference to the average Brit’s day-to-day life or the average Londoner come to that.  I can’t think of a better illustration of the very real and often ignored fundamental difference between the parties.  While the government look for ways to protect the homes, savings and pension funds of the nation Boris dismisses that as “neo-socialist claptrap”,  No doubt he would prefer everything to be left to ‘the market’.

There is one other thing he said, which would look perfectly at home as the banner slogan above the stage at the Tory party conference:

it is time to enter a note of defence of the banks, the City and the general practice of lending money for profit

What a heart-warming rallying cry that is.  It shows Gordon Brown up for the lightweight, nanny-statist that he is, concentrating on prescription charges for cancer sufferers, childcare costs, and extra tuition for children who are falling behind, but ignoring the plight of bankers suddenly bereft of their bonuses.

Brown doesn’t need to be inspiring when the country’s most powerful elected Tory does his work for him.

1. yes. OK. I know. A PR flunky wrote it.  They always do

I am bound to have mentioned before that my preference is for the randomness of, say, the FA Cup over the seeding and meticulous planning that goes into making Wimbledon so predictable.  How much more fun would it be if the Williams sisters could get drawn against each other in the first round?  If a League One team beats a Premier League team in a knockout game it is called an upset but in tennis you get the feeling that people genuinely are upset if it all fails to go to plan – unless its a Brit doing the upsetting.

As it is the event has less spontaneity than a F1 grand prix.  And I couldn’t believe how many blokes in the crowd were wearing ties. To a sporting event!  Says it all really.

Or rather it doesn’t.  What says it all is a quote that I saw in the paper today.  A (presumably) middle class lady was saying why she doesn’t like Murray and was supporting Nadal:

For a start his language on court is atrocious.  He never looks tidy.  I just think he’s not a nice young man.  And he’s very anti-English.  Doesn’t support the English football team.

What?  How dare this Hibs-supporting Scotsman not support the English football team!  Doesn’t everybody in Scotland support England?   The lady does not say whether she is fluent in Spanish and thus qualified to say that Nadal’s language is not atrocious

Surely Wimbledon is really a social event with some tennis as a sideshow?  Its part of the scene along with Royal Ascot and the Henley Regatta – an excuse for a picnic – with the difference being that the BBC are willing to reschdule their entire output at the drop of a hat.  Its a bit of a relief that there is no further British involvement though.  Less chance of me getting home Saturday evening to watch the recording of the last episode of Doctor Who only to find an hour of tennis with a message at the bottom saying the Daleks have been shifted to BBC Two.

What caught my attention was where Osborne was trying to show his man-of-the-people credentials, and failing miserably:

Osborne thinks his fee-paying, selective boys’ school, St Paul’s, was “incredibly liberal. It didn’t matter who your parents were. Your mother could be the head of a giant corporation – or a solicitor in Kew” as if this encompassed the full imaginable spectrum of socioeconomic status.

If he looks down on ‘a solicitor in Kew’ as an example of the bottom of the pile, what on earth must he think of a teacher in Crawley, a shop assistant in Basildon, a bus driver in Doncaster or any of the other 90% (or more?) of the country who can only dream of the standard of living a solicitor in Kew probably enjoys? But he continues…

At the party conference last year, someone pointed out that he had no working experience of the real world outside Westminster. “Well, it depends what you mean by the real world,” he retorted – and, to demonstrate his intimacy with it, offered: “I have plenty of friends who work in law, in the City, in government agencies.”

The same applies here I think. Its hardly a representative sample of the UK population is it? Very representative of the population of Parliament, but not of the general population. Reading it you can imagine that this is someone who believes that there is a ruling class which I and, I guess, all my readers do not belong to.

As it happens I do not want to be ruled by anyone. Governed by my peers, yes, but not ruled. Thank you to Decca Aitkenhead for reminding me why I ever got involved in the Labour party in the first place.

The scary thing is that Osborne is not even one of the Eton set in the shadow cabinet – plenty of them have far less contact with the real world.

Your guestbook is example of middle-class guestbooks. Congratulation! I�ll show your site and guestbook to my friends.

Hmm.

From a distance it looked just like one of those ‘Home Sweet Home’ embroidery things, but when you got closer you could see that it actually said “Class Warfare” at the top, and at the bottom it said “a return to traditional values.”

Our landlord had made a rather nasty enclosure for the water heater in the kitchen, clad in pine-effect veneer, and I fixed the tea towel to this, using some wooden beading I had knocking around. It just looked so right there that when I moved up to Brockley I left it behind. I really wish I still had it because it always made me smile whenever I looked at it.

I also had a postcard of the same design, probably by Leeds Postcards but that has been lost over the years too. I can’t even find a picture of it on the Internet now.

Not that I have ever really considered myself a class warrior, even in Thatcher’s Britain – I always found the middle classes too great a source of amusement to want to see them removed – it was just a great design.

After that we headed out to Kent. Yesterday I promised Jayne a cream tea and , in my opinion, the best cream tea to be had is in Quaintways tea shop in Penshurst, Kent, so thats where we headed.

After negotiating the dangerously tiny roads we reached Penshurst, and the first thing we saw was that the tea shop was closed! Apparently they are closed on Mondays, but for bank holidays they stay open and close on the Tuesday instead.

How was I to know?

We had a look around the village, including the church, churchyard, and a group of ancient buildings called Leicester Square, then went on to Penshurst Place. It is a long time since I visited Penshurst Place – at least ten years – and it has changed a lot.

Not the house itself which doesn’t even appear to have been dusted since my last visit, but the ‘visitor facilities’. You used to enter via a gate in the garden wall, paying at a small sentry box sort of affair, but now there is a large gift shop and ticket office a lot further along.

It seems like all the investment has been going into that, and upgrading the tea shop, and building a ‘venture playground’, rather than do anything to the building and its contents. The public areas of the house are distinctly shabby and threadbare, with huge cobwebs and dust everywhere.

There are some paintings which may be quite good, but they are very poorly hung – high up on the walls with lighting arranged to reflect on them so you can’t see them properly. Some looked suspiciously dark, as if they needed a good dose of restoration.

If anything, Penshurst Place suffers in the same way Arundel Castle does, from still being a family home in part. Only a part of the house is open to the public and the rest is still occupied by the Viscount De L’Isle or someone like that. As a result all the guide books over-emphasise the importance of the family and are written with the sort of toadying reverence you would expect. All of the guides are pensioners who are probably in awe of the local nobility.

Personally if I visit these places I am a lot more interested in the building itself than in whichever chinless wonders have lived in it over the years. With each new room I could feel the call to arms in the class war getting louder. The gardens are nice though.

But before going back through the gardens we had a cream tea in the tea rooms. It was nowhere near as good as the Quaintways tea shop! A proper English cream tea is a bit ritualistic. Maybe not as formal as the Japanese tea rituals, but even so the experience is not enhanced by self-service, pushing a tray along a counter and carrying it over to pick up all the sachets of sugar, cutlery etc. The journey home deserves a post all of its own…