Funny how the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail didn’t make much of this story and commentators at those papers don’t keep reminding us of it…

Conservative councillor Danny Mayzes was temporarily relieved of his responsibilities at the council last year after posting a controversial comment on Twitter on October 8. He was also suspended from the Conservative Association in Clacton.

While watching the film Machete, in which vigilante gangs battle illegal immigrants on the Mexican border, Mr Mayzes wrote: “Am watching Machete – now that’s how you DEAL with immigration issues lol”.

Oh, wait a minute, I see what happened….he’s not UKIP but a Tory so it’s OK for him to “apologise” and “move on”

Update: The Daily Mail has belatedly put up a piece on Mr Mayzes but notice there is no “storm of protest” or demands for David Cameron to “get a grip” on his party – and no refererences to a shamefaced Tory HQ trying to deal with yet another Tory scandal…I wonder why?

Peter Foster, The Daily Telegraph’s hack-in-residence across the pond, pens a hymn of praise for Michelle Obama’s 50^th birthday that would be the envy of every ambitious scribbler in Pyongyang. In his determination to ferret out the truth he fearlessly tracks down a cross section of everyday ordinary American folks who just happen to part of the Obama circle, fixes them with a steely eye and throws them the killer question.

On a scale of ten to ten just how wonderful a person is Michelle Obama?

I used to think Mark Mardell at the BBC had cornered the market in this type of sycophantic drivel but Foster has played a blinder here. Both of the Obamas are political hacks spawned by the corrupt Daley Chicago machine. Both have an invented back story which covers up the fact that they were eased along the political food chain by patronage and influence rather than achievement. But then what can one expect from “journalists” who merely regurgitate the wishful thinking mythology of the US media/cultural elite?

But brace yourselves, folks – Mr Foster is only using this as dry run for his forthcoming puff pieces on Hillary Clinton so make certain you stock up with sick bags…

Regular Daily Telegraph pundit Peter Oborne pens a worrrying piece about the impact on the social fabric of Britain after January 1^st when Romanians and Bulgarians, as citizens of the EU, will have unrestricted access to the UK.

The new migrants will be hungry for jobs, and are bound to price some British workers out of the market. They will have the right to use our schools and NHS, which are already creaking. They will need housing, and welfare benefits.

Business leaders will love that for lowering labour costs. The middle classes will also welcome the prospect of even cheaper servants

But there is a cost to the social fabric, and it is always the poor and powerless who pay the highest price.

Precisely

Oborne talks about how Cameron, Miliband and other leading politicians need to have the courage to stand up to the EU and develop a strategy to make access far more difficult.

The moral case for such drastic action is very strong. Despite tentative signs of recovery, Britain still faces an economic emergency. Nearly one million young people, almost 20 per cent of the labour force under 25, are out of work. Some of their jobs would surely go to the new Eastern European migrants. Mr Cameron should argue that this is a situation no civilised government can tolerate.

“What’s that noise?” I hear you say.

Don’t you know? It’s cultural icon Bonnie Greer crying “Xenophobia”. It’s Tory minister Anna Soubry yelling “scaremonger”

Only Greer called the X word out to Diane James. Soubry used the S word to Nigel Farage. Both did it on BBC Question Time. But not to a highly “respected” media pundit like Oborne but to James and  Farage because they belonged to UKIP.

Oddly enough Oborne doesn’t mention UKIP at all in his piece (quelle surprise) which is strange because there is nothing original in his article….UKIP has been saying exactly the same for several years.

So, Mr Oborne repeat after me……

UKIP HAS BEEN SAYING EXACTLY THE SAME FOR SEVERAL YEARS…..

Oh dear Peter….you’d rather choke than say that wouldn’t you!!!

Tim Wigmore is one of those bright young chaps at the Telegraph who have been tasked with bringing errant Tory voters back into the Cameron fold and away from UKIP. One prong of the strategy is the Vote UKIP get Miliband mantra being pimped by Toby Young’s Unite The Right crusade. The key message of UTR is for UKIP to stand down in key marginals and not rock the boat in safer Conservative constituencies. The result? Cameron stays at No !0 and can then renege on another “cast iron guarantee” after producing some sort of fudged, face saving “agreement “ full of vague rhetoric and short on hard detail.

But young Tim is pushing forward on the other flank by saying all the great unwashed outside the metro media/cultural bubble are just being fed a false narrative of scare stories about issues like Immigration and the EU and, because they are outside the bubble they really aren’t sophisticated enough to grasp the real “facts”

Take immigration…

As you may have read today, migrants are more likely to pay taxes and less likely to take benefits than Brits.

There you are, says Tim. These are “facts” fresh from the “experts” so quit all this nonsense about immigrants being a burden on the state – it’s the Brits who are sucking at the teat.

But hang on a minute Tim. From whence do those figures come? Could they be, as Douglas Carswell suggests, a tad questionable?

The “experts” who make such claims have failed to look at all the evidence. Those who insist that migrants are less likely to claim benefits tend to draw their data from the Labour Force Survey, which relies on respondents reporting claims to benefits, rather than actual data on claims made.

Working from other sources, however, such as HMRC and ONS, quite a different picture emerges

There are nearly half a million migrants claiming working tax credit in the UK.

 Migrants are at least 20% more likely to be claiming working tax credit than the rest of the population.

More migrants claim working tax credit than claim all of the main out-of-work benefits together.

 Migrants form a much higher proportion of those claiming working tax credits than of those claiming any out-of work benefit

So maybe those UKIP “scare stories” are not just stories, Tim….just saying..

In fact it’s Tim who spreads the scare story.

A ban on immigration would mean higher taxes, lower spending and a higher deficit.

Now that is over egging the pudding, Tim. UKIP has never said ban all immigration. We just believe in Controlled Immigration where the main drivers are the skills sets required by the economy and the ability of our social infrastructure – housing stock, schools, healthcare etc – to absorb those numbers efficiently and effectively.

Now, Tim, just scribble about something else until the DT gets the next missive from Tory HQ

Benedict Brogan, one of the best informed political commentators in the Westminster village, penned a piece in The Daily Telegraph on Cameron’s forthcoming cabinet reshuffle. One respondent , peter63, though admiring Brogan, wondered just how detached he and his colleagues across the media from the world outside the village…

for a certain kind of Titanic-watcher, I suppose there is some interest in seeing which way the deckchairs are rearranged before ship up-ends and goes down.

Nobody at the Telegraph seems to have an inkling of the watershed change in the public mood (at least, as that mood is outside London).

There is a new mindset in so much of the nation.   What IS fascinating is to observe how little this is perceived among the DT journalists – all of them highly talented and well educated persons.

It explains to me how the courts of France or Russia could in the last months of their ancien régimes have really no proper idea of what was to overtake them.

Worth a thought….

Young Somerset UKIP candidate Alex Wood did not make those “racist” Facebook comments

You can read about the result of the police investigation here, here and here

Police investigating the incident have said that they are satisfied that comments originally attributed to Alex Wood, 22, had never appeared on his Facebook account and may have been photoshopped or doctored to appear as if from Wood.

Unfortunately this latest news appears not to have been reported yet in the Daily Mail or the Telegraph who both bigged up the original  “story”….

Nothing either from Tory Party HQ who “helpfully” passed the “information” on to those papers.

Doubtless there will be a big spread at the weekend….

The Telegraph goes all BBC and pimps up a “survey” about small businesses opposing a UK exit from the EU without saying much about the source

“Almost two thirds of the 1,600 companies surveyed by SME networking business BNI said staying in the EU would be better for business”

Fortunately, if you look at the comments you will see that readers expended a little more shoeleather on BNI than the DT

BNI is a networking company (http://www.bni.eu) with just under 6300 members.  The survey had 1600 responses, almost two thirds of whom believed Britain would be better off in the EU.  So, under 1100 (less than a fifth of BNI’s UK membership) people thought that Britain should stay in the EU.   It’s not exactly representative, is it?

This…

would like to know, before giving any credence whatsoever to this ‘survey’:
1) Were any of the sample actual exporters to the EU, if so what percentage
2) What EXACTLY was the question
3) How was the data treated in coming to the ‘results’
4) What do the surveyed firms think the situation will be, as far as exporting and trade is concerned, AFTER a negotiated EU exit.

And This..

I always thought that SMEs in this country were represented by the BCC, whose attitude to the EU and its reams of regulation is markedly less enthusiastic.  And of course, there are far more SMEs in the UK (like mine) which do not belong to any trade organisation at all because we consider them to be a waste of money and representative of vested interests that run entirely counter to our own business interests
That this ‘survey’ has beenn presented without reference to such essential background information about the participants makes one conclude that standards at The Telegraph have really slipped, particularly with regard to the misleading headline, since it cannot possibly claim to speak for a majority of UK SMEs

 

Standards slipping at the Telegraph? Surely not….

Interviewer: So, Rowena, as the Daily Telegraph’s highly trained ace political journalist, tell us how you got the UKIP story?

Rowena Mason: Someone from Conservative Party HQ sent me an e mail which I cut and pasted…….ermmmm, that’s it…

Interviewer: Thank you, Rowena Mason, the Daily Telegraph’s highly trained ace political journalist…

Good analysis of Osborne’s 2013 Budget by Benedict Brogan and Jeremy Warner of the Telegraph. No histrionics, none of the “look at me, I’m the real star of the show” BBC Newsnight gotcha dramatics from the guy chairing the discussion.

Political TV for grown ups…..

It’s handbags at dawn as Peter Oborne gives Tim Montgomerie and his Ashcroft funded Conservativehome website a bitchslap in the dark alleyway behind DT HQ. Ashcroft is using Montgomerie as a sock puppet to shift Cameron & Co to the right, wails a distraught Oborne and it’s not fair because Peter wants David all to himself.

Others can dissect the root causes of this catfight better than myself but there are some observations that need to be made –the most obvious being that it’s a bit rich Oborne screeching about Ashcroft using his wealth to bankroll a media outlet in order to channel his own views. After all, he himself is obviously trousering a few sovs from the reclusive Barclay brothers who not only own the DT but also fiercely resist all attempts at invading their privacy. They say they run a hands off operation but articles about Sark politics and sycophantic features about Catholicism tend to open that claim to question.

Then this complaint about hectoring Cameron from the DT seems rather strange when one recalls the vicious guerrilla warfare waged by the paper against John Major in the 90s on behalf of….(don’t laugh)…Michael Portillo…”man of destiny” etc…

Oborne, of course, assumes, like most pundits, that we ordinary folk are incapable of drawing up our own opinions and need guidance from the pundit priesthood to make the right decisions. Hence we Tories supposedly pore over the Telegraph or Conservativehome to find out what we should be thinking today, rather like earnest Bolsheviks leafing through Pravda in the 1930s.

Cobblers

Many Tory voters don’t even read the DT – and probably a large number of those who do would not bother with Oborne. Even fewer visit ConHome (and when you read some of the comments there they seem to be mostly wearing tinfoil hats)

Peter and Tim are obviously big in the Westminster village – and that is their limit. Both of them shrink down to size when on TV…..Montgomerie is like a fairly unsuccessful insurance salesman and Oborne brilliantly fills the role of the pompous, opinionated Latin teacher at some third rate prep school.

Give me Nigel Farage or Dan Hannan any day…

And as for one person being able to influence conservatives with a tweet or a few words on Facebook there is only one person in the western world who can do that – Sarah Palin in the USA. Both Oborne and Montgomerie would view her with disdain. But then they need to ask themselves why her words have so much power.

Maybe it has to do with honesty and fearlessness – and not giving a tinker’s cuss what anyone else thinks…