A little bird whispers in my ear that congratulations are due to Shadow Transport Secretary Theresa Villiers. It was apparently her idea for David Cameron to ask Gordon Brown whether he would encourage BA workers to break a picket line and keep the airline flying. The question caused him - as well as the Labour benches - great discomfort. She doesn't normally attend PMQs prep with David Cameron, but after today she might well get a repeat invitation.
A job well done.
28 comments:
Would it be safe to assume Richard Balfe didn't make that meeting?
Whatever happened to him?
Iain you may be amused by Whelan's attempt to defend himself over on the union-funded Left Foot Forward site :
http://www.leftfootforward.org/2010/03/charlie-whelan-i-wont-hide-from-pickles-trade-union-witch-hunt/
Good work by Villiers.
Let's hope that BA and its pension scheme is never taken over by popular Labour donor Lord Paul.
jimmy....I really don't know how to deal with you. As many as one in ten of your one liners are worth reading.
What about the rest?
Difficult. I suspect that unlike Despairing Drivel you are of at least of middling intelligence.
Tricky tricky tricky....
Jimmy - much more to the point is what will happen to BA and the many thousands of jobs it provides.
That is the issue on hand. There is no earthly use the unions prating on about their imaginary working condition problems with BA if they drive the business into liquidation.
This is a bit like some poster who very recently wrote that one of his ideals was that employers should be prohibited from making workers redundant on pain of having to pay them until they found another job. That was some silly socialist who was unable to understand that the most likely reason for redundancy was that the employer could no longer afford to employ that person.
Its was a well judged line of attack - you could sense the horror on the Labour benches.
@el-sid - would that be the left-foot-forward funded by Unite site ?
Hrm. I wouldn't have thought that would be too hard to answer (although I haven't watched PMQ's yet). Something along the lines of "It's not for me to tell ordinary union members what to do, but I would urge the leadership to step back from the brink and return to talks"...
Good work indeed - for arguably the first time in her 'shadow ministerial career.'
Perhaps the Shadow Cabinet aren't quite the bunch of ninnies they have often appeared to be. I live in hope, anyway.
Under Blair, PMQs always used to be available on the internet within an hour or so, so if you missed it on TV you could see it very soon afterwards online. But since Brown took over, it has been much harder to find PMQs online, and it is often not posted until the following day, when most people are no longer interested.
If you search google for PMQs, the first thing that comes up is this: http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page306 Thursday 29 May 2002!
Is Downing Street deliberately trying to stop us seeing Brown's abysmal performances?
Does anyone know any other way of seeing today's PMQs, without having to go back and check the Downing Street website now and then over the next few days?
The question about defence spending floored him as well
And this 'future fair for all' post has been repeated verbatim on labourhome
http://futurefairforall.org/post/430224381/gordon-browns-defence-spending-untruths-to-chilcot
PS and by the way - when Brown accused the tories of cuts - going way back to the early 90's he forgot to mention his own governments assertion in 1998 ...
"In its 1998 Strategic Defence Review, the government acknowledged that "The so-called 'peace dividend' from the ending of the Cold War has already been taken." "
This above and what follows below is from a scathing Heritage Foundation Report ...
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2008/11/British-Defense-Cuts-Threaten-the-Anglo-American-Special-Relationship
This report adds ...
"However, as Chart 2 shows, the increases from 1999 through 2004 did not even compensate for the cuts that the government made on entering office in 1997. Only in 2005 did defense spending pass 1996 levels. This should come as no surprise. In its 1998 Review, the government, in defiance of its acknowledgement that Britain had already taken its peace dividend, called for a decrease in real spending on defense through 2001-2002."
Based on these reductions Blair with Browns approval (according to his evidence) took us into shooting wars.
"As overall public expenditures increased 20 percent in real terms from 2001-2002 to 2006-2007, expenditures on defense rose only 9 percent. "
The result of all this ....
"In late 2007, British forces, after making a secret deal with the Iranian-backed militias to allow them to depart safely, abandoned their compound in Basra for a heavily attacked airport base outside the city.As one U.S. intelligence official stated, "[t]he British have basically been defeated in the south."
Britain returned to Basra in 2008 on the heels of Operation Charge of the Knights, conducted by Iraqi and U.S. forces. Brigadier Julian Free, commander of the British 4th Mechanised Brigade, admitted that Britain needed the "huge amount of armoured combat power" that the U.S. brought to bear because Britain "didn't have enough capacity in the air and...didn't have enough capability on the ground." "
The huge depth of lies that hide behind a 'brownie'. Read this report and weep!
@Treacle
Try the BBC Daily Politics website on the day of PMQs, the middle half hour is normally PMQs
Then you get Brillo spit roasting politicos for 30 minutes afterwards
Great sport
Treacle: BBC always put PMQs online within a few hours, on this page:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8572085.stm
Treacle. It's available after about half an hour on the Beeb. You go to the BBC News webpage. Click on the Politics link on the LHS. In the Search box towards the top, type in PMQs and the latest instalment is available at the top of the page, LHS.
Treacle.. go to the BBC iPlayer.. there you have the TV coverage from the BBC Parliament channel...
Victor,
No-one is suggesting that the airline should not adopt cost cutting measures but BA appear to be determined to break the union. If that is the goal, and they certainly give every impression that it is, then there seems little room to compromise.
I can't see that this was a particularly brilliant line to take. Union bashing is obviously meat and drink to Daily Hitler readers who were going to vote tory anyway, but I suspect the main effect will be to remind disenchanted trade unionists who would otherwise have stayed at home why voting Labour still matters, even if it is only to avoid electing someone who believes it is the job of the PM to encourage scabs. I was reminded of the bit in Brideshead Revisited when Charles helps out on the buses during the General Strike.
"Jimmy said...
Would it be safe to assume Richard Balfe didn't make that meeting?"
Ah, the troll's tactic No. 2 - deflect at all costs.
Britain owes 858.5 billion, it has an interest payment of 40 billion a year, there were 54000 fewer in gainful employment than in the last reporting quarter, there is no chance that Britain is going to be able to hit the EU target of a deficit of 3% of GDP by 2014 with Brown at the helm. By 2015, Britain will have a debt of 1.3 trillion and interest payments of 60billion a year.
It is your fault - you voted Labour.
It's a stupid line in reality. The strike should be a private matter for BA and the union -- politicians shouldn't take sides.
Treacle 8:17pm - You can see PMQ's on-line here -
http://callingengland.blogspot.com/2010/03/pmqs-summary.html
Gordon and his lies led the ITV News at Ten. They gave him an absolute bashing and finished the item with a sickly death mask of a picture of him.
The story didn't lead on BBC1 at Ten. I assume it will appear at some point, perhaps with Toenails telling us that he wiped the floor with Cameron during PMQs.
Unite should return the £4.5 million it has received from the Union Modernization Fund because it clearly has reverted back to an Old Labour Union.
Well done. Unfortunately the BBC online page is trying to hide the story as usual. I attach the following text from my complaint to them which shows some interesting stats on Nick Robinson for the is month........
"The online (uk) News home page has lead all day, and indeed yesterday with the Sahil Saeed story. At 10pm it remained the lead story. Meanwhile the Prime Minister admitted misleading the Chilcott enquiry and the House of Commons at 12.05 today. In fact even that correction was misleading as he stated that defense spending fell in real terms on only 'one or two years' since 1997, when in fact it fell on four individual years during that period. A story about the Prime Minister misleading parliament is surely more important. On the ten o'clock news you put this story first and the Sahil Saeed story second. ITV played the PM story first and the Sahil Saeed story fourth. Interesting editorial choice of priority by the online editor I would say.
This is strong evidence of bias. Furthermore Nick Robinson's only post today managed to feature Lord Ashcroft's name. Mr Robinson did not see any story from PMQs worth commenting on. Meanwhile he has managed to work Lord Ashcroft into 8 of his 14 March Postings.
Other interesting stats for March on Mr Robinson's Blog. Lord Ashcroft appears 52 times, Mr Brown (by name or title) appears just 46 times, Lord Paul 4 times and Unite just 3 times."
Villiers can think of as many questions as she likes, as can anyone else, but they will not get an answer from brown, infact no one gets an answer to any question asked of him.
Thanks, everyone, for telling me about all those places where I can find PMQs. No need now for Pravda, aka the Downing Street website (which is all that google comes up with). It's been frustrating missing out on Brown's ritual slaughter every week.
Union bashing is obviously meat and drink to Daily Hitler readers...
And all of a sudden... whooosh!!! You could almost hear the intelligence draining from that post.
It was like sitting in the Student Union Lower Bar in 1983, as insults were traded between various varieties of left-winger as they tried to prove they were more left wing than any of the others present.
@Man in a Shed (7:44 PM)
FWIW in the comments Will Straw claims that they've never taken money directly from Unite, the only union money is from the telecoms union Connect. There may be indirect funding somehow, I don't pretend to know the ins and outs of it.
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