Separate Identities

Daveybloke has been toddling around Eastleigh promising to protect its residents from the tsunami of Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants who want to come over here and pinch their legal aid; or whatever is left of legal aid after Chris Graybeing has finished with it. Daveybloke expressed a certain moral indignation about foreigners who decide (sic) to become ill and use the NHS without having paid any taxes, although he seems happy enough about private companies deciding not to pay taxes on their profits. Daveybloke also burbled a bit about the wonders of "going green" which, like the Big Society thingy, appears to be something he expects the proles to do for themselves while the Government gets on with the serious business of privatising, profiteering and fracking.

Meanwhile, without much hope of winning the by-election, Labour have cannily made the Boris Johnson choice, fielding a media-oriented joke candidate who should at least generate a few friendly headlines. John O'Farrell distinguished himself during the 2005 general election campaign with some emails to your correspondent which managed to equal the patronising inanity of Michael Howard's Daveybloke-inspired dog-whistling. Eight years later, here O'Farrell is in Britain's leading liberal newspaper, expressing momentary outrage about the coalition before laying into the real enemy, namely those otherworldly purists who objected to New Labour for being virtually indistinguishable from the Conservatives. Another phrase for that sort of thing, says John O'Farrell channelling Nick Clegg, is "losing elections". O'Farrell shrugs off such peccadilloes as the Iraq catastrophe, the Afghanistan quagmire, the torture flights, the domestic snoopery and the PFI scam as "difficult policy choices and compromises" and appears to think that anyone else would have done much the same; which rather begs the question of what difference it would make to vote for anyone else instead of Labour. Anyway, it seems that the Milibeing has inspired O'Farrell to reinvent himself as a life-long One Nationer, in the glorious, pragmatic centre-left tradition of Harold Macmillan and Thatcher's wets; which is certainly jolly encouraging.

UKIP and the Deputy Conservatives... oh, well.