So despite being completely spoilt for choice for ‘who said the stupidest thing yesterday?’ nominations, Steve Ladyman MP is probably the winner. Paraphrasing, he suggested that without additional media coverage of televised Leader debates, Gordon would win hands down. It’s only because the TV and the Papers will say Gordon was rubbish that people will think Gordon was rubbish. In reality, he would be awesome.

In fairness, Ladyman had a lot of competition for his award from other contributors to the same programme. This spectacular piece of critical thinking from some Labour activist comes a close second:

“I think, you know, in a General Election, and people see Gordon Brown and David Cameron, then… well gosh! It’s no competition at all!”

But here we go again, you see – this idea that the media’s out to get you so there’s nothing you can do, that it’s the media’s fault that people are against Labour. That’s absurd. If Gordon had done nothing but apologised and acknowledged everything that’s gone wrong, then announced plans to put things right then the media’s reaction would have been completely different. Everyone would have been surprised and genuinely uncertain about how the country will react to it, and that uncertainty would have been the window through which speculation about a possible Labour recovery could have taken hold.

What we got instead was the clunking fist battering us over and over, telling us how fantastic things are and how the answer is to have a lot more of the same. The clunking fist beats us into submission, telling us to withdraw our criticisms, that we’re wrong, that the fault is ours and ours alone. They’re refusing to change, and it’s pretty safe for journalists and editors to predict how that’s going to go down with the voters…. like every piano in every cartoon you’ve ever seen.

That the media has condemned this last, sad, desperate attempt to motivate the Core Labour Vote shouldn’t come across as a vengeful media out to get Labour, but fairly accurate reporting of what’s happened.

Outside of the Labour Party it’s easy to see that it’s not the media’s fault, that Labour deserve most of the press they get and that actually they benefited for at least 10 years from a mostly uncritical and positive press and didn’t complain once about the ‘problem’ of a media that liked them. “The press are bored with us” another MP said yesterday (another candidate) -somehow, with the material this Government generates for excitable sketch writers and op-ed authors, I doubt that very much.

In the Lib Dems there’s that same belief, that it’s all the media’s fault and if they were nice to us things would be different. The media hate us, and we hate them back, it seems. The media’s job is to scrutinise and give their opinion. They’re a free press, we have to accept that if they say we stink of BO and we don’t shower, they’re going to keep saying we stink of BO.

Your snap-shot of what the political blogosphere is talking about (or, what the most people are linking to.)

2 – Dave Osler

Dave’s piece yesterday got opinion pieces from me, Stuart Sharpe, Dick Puddlecote and Obnoxio the Clown… some being more charitable than others, considering how honest and straight the post was.

1 – TV Leader’s Debate/”We’re Not Done Yet”

This fluff piece about Gordon on the BBC attracts commentary from Jennie Rigg, Mark Easton, Stuart Sharpe, Stephen P Glenn and UK Polling report.

Just outside these two stories, my own piece about Labour’s Poorhouses seems to be doing well, but it’s the Sun that, I think, will be the big story of the Politics Blogosphere today.

Well, the Sun has withdrawn their support for Labour. Not a huge surprise, considering the epic turd of a speech Brown pooed onto the country’s head yesterday. Brown wants a fight – the Sun’s going to give him one.

Still, at least the Daily Mail still loves our puritanical fuhrer (for now).

UPDATE: They’ve officially switched to the Conservatives. Scottish editions will be advocating “Anyone But Labour.”

It’s worth noting that the Sun tends to follow the prevailing mood of its readers. Did the Sun want grovelling apologies and promises of a completely different direction (like everyone else)? Has Brown’s determination to bolster his own position amongst the party faithful at the expense of… well, everyone else… signed, sealed and delivered the end of the Labour Party?

Well, well, well. The electoral genius has struck gold this time, hasn’t he? Not satisfied with demonstrating his toughness on immigrants, he’s turning his attention to those other menaces to society: Teen Mums.

Oh yes.

It’s been decreed that should you find yourself with child you’ve got four choices. Make sure you, your boyfriend or your parents are financially able to deal with a baby, have an abortion, give the baby up for adoption or if none of those three options suit you can now go into supervised communal housing for other menaces to society. They’re not Poorhouses, though. They’re New Poorhouses, which will be clean and basically like a giant live-in Sure start centre providing valuable employment opportunities for social workers and lots of other people with ‘outreach’ in their job title.

See, if you’re a teen mum who insists on having a baby AND raising it yourself? Well, you’re basically evil, and the state needs to take a more active role in making sure your children don’t turn out like you. Sorry. You’re on the Government’s shit list and there’s sod all you can do about it.

Now, don’t get me wrong – I’m hardly a fan of the legal right to a house if you’re pregnant, and I’m well aware that the children of teen mums are extremely lucky if they escape what is a dismal fate for any human being. Yet what I do know is that there’s no evidence that teenagers get pregnant to claim benefits. It’s often said, and it sounds true, but.. sorry, no actual evidence.

These are serious, important issues (despite my flippant tone), but even a mad libertarian like me doesn’t think the solution is to return to the bad old days of making charity as unpleasant as possible to put people off it – there’s no degree of degradation and humiliation people aren’t prepared to suffer if they’re hungry and desperate enough.

Now I’m sure these modern Poorhouses will be bastions of quality childcare, parental advice, wonderful diet and model behaviour of everyone involved, but then that’s exactly how the last ones started. They were too damn popular, and that’s when things turned nasty. The Daily Mail will, eventually, run a story where an entire class ends up leaving school together and moving into the same unit, and then…. well you can imagine the rest.

Labour claims to help the poor and the weak, yet they exclude the poor and weak that ‘the people’ hate, or who they think might actually cost them votes to support. I think, really, if you’re a Labour voter and your head isn’t screaming at you that something is very very very very wrong here then the ’something wrong’ is you.

… says Dave Osler as he signs off his latest blog post. He’s just witnessed young people screaming, “Labour Labour Labour, Out Out Out!” outside their conference hall and had, it seems, a startling moment of clarity.

Labour returned to power in 1997 based on a promise not to be typical old Tax and Spend Labour (fail), that they would remain firmly in control of the trade unions (fail) and they’d keep the support of the Working Classes by taking a tough new stance on Law and Order (fail).

They reasoned, correctly, that so long as they didn’t do anything mad and fed the Sun and Mail lots of socially conservative stuff they’d be able to get away with epic redistribution and a huge increase in power and security for the people they like.

Combine that with a charismatic and popular leader, one that looked, smelt and sounded much more like a Tory than a genuine Labour politicians, they had a winning combination – a Labour Party that was vaguely more tolerable to the British People than the Tories.

Except, really, when you think about it, massively increasing the power of the state, combined with a massive clamp down on civil liberties whilst punishing their unfavoured groups to reward the favoured is… well…. it’s all a bit fascist, isn’t it? I have extreme reservations about this tendency towards segregating muslim children, and the reprehensible and disgusting abuse of illegal immigrants for party political purposes is sickening.

But it doesn’t stop there: In caring for us, Labour have gone from Nanny State to the Bully State (Dick Puddlecote covers this in a brilliant post here). Call me old fashioned, but the state trying to dictate to me how I should live my life – what I should eat, whether or not I’m allowed to smoke, or drink, what I can say, what I can think…. well I resent that. Again, it’s just a wee bit fascist for my tastes. Authoritarian doesn’t really seem to capture that sense of outrage and frustration people feel when a Government behaves like it’s got it in for you. They’ve created a hostile, malicious, suspicious country full of jealousy, envy, anger and hatred, winners and losers at each other’s throats because they know the only difference is that one’s got the Government on their side and the other’s got the Government actively working against them.

If one good thing has come out of Labour’s 12 years in power it’s what Dave’s original post was all about. It’s the fact that actions speak louder than words, and kids who’ve grown up under Labour don’t see them as a party of the poor, or even of the working class. They’re exactly what they always were: The party of the trade unions and the special interest pressure groups, and a pretty meritless, calculating, authoritarian one at that.

The trick is to ask yourself, who are the big winners under Labour, and who are the big losers? The winners, in my opinion, are the heavily unionised public sector workers. The losers are the private sector and pretty much everyone else.

It feels like… well, you’ve invited a friend to stay with you, and at first it’s fine – they’re helping with the washing up, they do shopping and you’re thinking, hey – this isn’t bad. Then 10 years later they’re still here, except now they’re holding all the things they do for you over your head in order to boss everyone around – they get to decide what to watch on telly, they decide when you’re allowed to use the internet, they decide what films you can and can’t watch, they decide what food and drink you can bring into your house and you start thinking… you know what? Wish I hadn’t let that little prick do the shopping all those years.

That’s what it’s like.