There is universal agreement that the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics were the best ever, brilliantly organised, flawlessly presented with the stadium packed to the max every day (By the way, Mitt Romney, we are still waiting for that apology…) As a result London Mayor Boris Johnson has probably become one of the most popular figures in Britain – and considering he is a politician that is an astonishing feat – most of us Brits place politicians lower in our scale of trust and approval than estate agents, car salesmen or even journalists…..

Boris is a Tory but his appeal crosses the lines of party, class, gender and race. Last May when the Conservative Party vote was collapsing in the local elections he was re-elected as Mayor of London in a city that is traditionally left wing even though his core beliefs are those of the Thatcherite wing of his party – euro sceptic, smaller government, robust on crime, pro business etc

That’s partly because those values, though despised by by the Guardianista detachment of the middle classes cosily ensconced in the fashionable quarters of North London, happen to resonate with a substantial element of working class voters in the poorer boroughs. But it’s also because Boris, out of the box eccentric that he is, can connect with ordinary folk better than any other politician in the UK. His delivery, his vocabulary, his sense of humour break every rule of political speaking – just like Sarah Palin in the USA. Yet the two of them, although their styles are different, manage to achieve something golden – an electrical charge with their audience that creates a shared experience no other politician can hope to emulate.

They also share another special quality – the ability to use a folksy golly gosh manner to camouflage a shrewd and savvy political brain that is always five moves ahead of anyone else…

Just watch the reactions of the crowd before him and the athletes behind – this man CONNECTS…no wonder PM David Cameron looked a little nervous beside Boris – he could be watching the emergence of a future party leadership rival…

So Michael Gove, Secretary of Stae for Education has appointed a school meals Czar

For crying out loud..

I had hoped that Gove was impervious to all this nonsense. When you consider the dire straits of our educational system, the lack of attainment, the absence of a proper learning culture, the total waste of literally billions of pounds for nil effect the last thing we need to concern ourselves with is school dinners.

School meals at every level of education have always been crap because it is mass produced cooking for a captive audience. Added to that the natural gravitational pull between junk food and adolescents and it is obvious that any attempt to get secondary students to pig out on poncy colour supplement trendy cuisine must be doomed to failure.

But we live in a world where self appointed messiahs are just so eager to poke their noses into our own affairs by hectoring us about our sinful behaviour and an infantile media, unable to reverse its own decline, jumps on any bandwagon to scare us into demanding something must be done – and the current panic about school meals becomes flavour of the month.

Let’s get things straight. Schools and teachers are not parent substitutes. They should not be used as freebie child minders. They cannot heal the halt, the sick or the psychologically unstable. Their job is to enable a common cultural inheritance to be passed to the next generation by providing children with the basic tools to understand and add to that inheritance.

Give them the tools and the money to do that effectively for once and just outsource school meals to MacDonalds and Domino’s Pizza – and put gaffer tape around the mouths of every celebrity chef and chattering class food critic…

‘Fat cat’ doctors to hold 24-hour strike for routine operations and GP appointments

That was the headline in the Evening Standard – and it upset some of the chaps at the BMA.

Thousands of patients are to have operations and appointments cancelled as doctors take industrial action for the first time in nearly 40 years.
GPs and hospital doctors will stop routine work to protest at government pension reforms.
Emergency operations and treatment will still be carried out on the day of action, June 21. But the strike will mean the postponement of non-urgent cases such as knee and hip surgery.
The British Medical Association said doctors will see anyone who is ill, or who believes they are ill, but will not do paperwork

Average pay £100,000 per year.
Thanks to an over generous deal with the previous Labour government no compulsory out of hours cover
Minimal weekend hospital cover by consultants
Very few doctors surgeries open at user friendly times in the evenings/weekends
Most doctors starting in 2015 will retire on an annual pension of £68,000

In the 1940s Bevan bribed them into the NHS by “stuffing their mouths with gold” and the stream of gold continues to this day – and it’s all out of the taxpayers pockets.

The BMA is part of the producers cartel that aims to run the NHS strictly for the benefit and convenience of the people who work in it. For years they have dined out on the angels/saints narrative that convinced previous generations to regard them as selfless moral beings dedicated to serve – and quite a number are, of course. Nevertheless they get paid very well and maybe this is the moment for us, the customers who, via taxation, pay them their wages, to draw the line and make our demands that they start organising their working routines to benefit us.

Perhaps also this is the moment when some politician might dare to query the “free at the point of entry NHS” mantra that has thus far blocked any serious attempt at reform. The simple truth is that we can no longer sustain this model of the NHS – at some time in the future we shall have to introduce a contributory social insurance structure. Then, of course, we shall all realise we are paying customers and start querying why we aren’t getting value for money – and that should mark the end of the NHS as a producers cartel.

Terry Leahy (or Sir Terry since his audience with the Queen) is the man who in twenty years transformed Tesco from third rate shabbiness to one of the biggest retail businesses in the world.

He was brought up on a tough council estate in Liverpool and, like his brothers and most of his friends, he expected to leave school at the earliest opportunity and drift into low level jobs.

But one of his teachers, Mr McCann, lit a spark of ambition in young Terry

Mr McCann would talk about life beyond the council estate — he’d say such things as: “When you grow up you’re going to be a lawyer or an accountant or a businessman,” ’ says Sir Terry. ‘He talked about things you never dared imagine. He made them seem possible. He made me realise that if you worked hard, you could do as well as anyone else.’

His teacher’s words motivated him to grammar school and university and into the rather unfashionable world of retail management

Isn’t that what education should be about – not just learning facts and doing well in tests, but also inspiring young people to have confidence in their own ability to fashion their own futures by hard graft, determination and a sense of vision. A good teacher is someone who can sow the seed of inspiration in young minds and make them realise that all things are possible.

Sounds a bit old fashioned, doesn’t it – maybe because we appear nowadays to celebrate the idea of not rewarding/celebrating achievement for fear of offending those without ambition….

Not much room for inspiration in the cultivation of mediocrity…….

What do you see nurse, what do you see?
What are you thinking when you look at me,
A crabby old woman, not very wise,
Uncertain of habit with far away eyes,
Who dribbles her food, and makes no reply,
When you say in a loud voice: “I do wish you’d try.”
Who seems not to notice the things that you do,
And forever is losing a stocking or shoe,
Who, quite unresisting, lets you do as you will
With bathing and feeding, the long day to fill.
Is that what you’re thinking, is that what you see?
Then open your eyes, you’re not looking at me.

I’ll tell you who I am, as I sit here so still,
As I move at your bidding, as I eat at your will,
I’m a small child of ten, with a father and mother,
And brothers and sisters, who love one another,

A girl of sixteen, with wings on her feet,
Dreaming that soon a lover she’ll meet;
A bride soon a twenty my heart gives a leap,
Remembering the vows that I promised to keep;

At twenty-five now I have young of my own,
Who need me to build a secure, happy home;
A woman of thirty, my young now grow fast,
Bound together with ties that should last;

At forty, my young sons have grown up and gone;
But my man stays beside me to see I don’t mourn;
AT fifty once more babies play ’round my knee;
Again we know children, my loved one and me.

Dark days are upon me, my husband is dead,
I look at the future, I shudder with dread.
For my young are all busy, wit young of their own,
And I think of the years and the love I have known.

I’m an old woman now, and nature is cruel,
‘Tis her jest to make old age look like a fool.
The body, it crumbles, grace and vigor depart,
There is a stone where I once had a heart.

But inside this old carcass, a young girl still dwells,
And now and again my battered heart swells.
I remember the joys, I remember the pain,
And I’m loving and living all over again.
I think of the years, all too few and gone too fast,
And accept the stark fact that nothing can last.
So open your eyes, nurses, open and see,
But a crabby old woman, look closer, see me.

h/t Mattie

There appears to have been a brawl in a House of Commons bar yesterday. Guido, as usual has the details.

The police eventually arrived and took away an MP (alleged to be the Labour Party’s Eric Joyce) in handcuffs.
Several members tried to stop the fight including a Conservative female MP who placed herself in front of Mr Joyce and told him to punch her instead of anyone else..

Poor Stuart was just having a quiet pint and minding his own business and Eric headbutted him. Stuart was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Several other MPs tried to calm Mr Joyce down, including Labour whip Phil Wilson, who was hit. One woman MP, Thurrock Tory Jackie Doyle-Price, stepped bravely between Mr Joyce and the fracas.

At last a Tory MP with cojones?

The man supected of shooting at the White House last Friday had become obsessed with President Barack Obama, officials have told US media.
It is thought Oscar Ortega-Hernandez, 21, believed God had given him a personal mission to attack the White House, said law enforcement sources.
A US Park Police bulletin said he was “unstable with violent tendencies”.

You would have thought that someone bringing a rifle with him and shooting at the White House would have been on the BBC website’s loop for several days accompanied by a lorry load of speculative think pieces on the dangers of political violence in the US from an assortment of pundits and experts.

Not one mention of the dangers of violent rhetoric.

Could it have been because of the suggestion that this man had been hanging around the Occupy DC gathering? There is no evidence that he was a “member” of that “movement”…..but he might have listened to some of the rhetoric which could have echoed fiery outbursts in New York

Naturally the BBC goes for the safe option and doesn’t even wonder if there is any connection between the endemic violence in so many of the Occupy encampments and an “Obama obsessed” gunman firing a rifle at the Presidential residence.

I wonder why?

At least in the BBC website report of Rep. Giffords interview with the ABC’s Diane Sawyer they had the good grace not mention Sawyer’s sly and serpentine attempt to rehash the lies and innuendo pumped out by a complicit US/UK media associating the Tucson shooting with Governor Palin and the Tea Party….

A “reasonable rant” from PolitiJim

Who appointed Erick Erickson as Conservative Electioneering Sheriff?

Or even Anne Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Charles Dickens or The Incredible Shrinking Man for that matter….but then I don’t think Charles Dickens ever let his publishers change the ending of one of his novels…can’t really say about TISM…

First it was the Jamie Radtke thing. By virtue of his admitted betrayal to her campaign on behalf of his employers (i think he wrote he would ‘gladly’ accommodate their request to pull back on his support to her) and the obvious contrary evidence by RS attendees of his portrayal of her – Erickson is quickly loosing credibility.
Now Erick has decided that he decides who should run, and when. If they don’t do it when it is convenient for him – to hell with them. Or her.”At some point, I decided Sarah Palin could not defeat Barack Obama”

It’s not that Jim dislikes Erickson (or Coulter) but he’s beginning to wonder if they are not morphing into something similar to those figures of the GOP elite they have often mocked and derided who think they are “smarter than regular people” (echoes of Orwell’s “Animal Farm”?)

So, for Erick, a reminder…

And this whole idea that Palin HAS TO get in now. That somehow she “owes it” to the GOP movement …………………….. I’d say you owe her much more than she owes you. Did you forget it was PALIN who helped galvanize and garner the conservative movement in 2008? Have you not read the citations of those of us who started with Santelli and were empowered with Palin who….ended up as ‘the tea party?’ When the ‘big government’ republicans and pretenders forced us onto McCain – Palin was a sign of hope. And she also continued the attack during her own withering assault against Obama, no thanks to you.

She has done far more for the conservative movement than RedState or Erick Erickson could possibly think.

…and, just in case his message remains a little unclear. this self declared non Palinista suggests a post it note that should be attached to the keyboard, microphone or teleprompter of every self proclaimed “conservative” pundit/pontificator/consultant/strategist in the USA.

For what Sarah Palin has done, and continues to do, she has a right to do WHATEVER she wants and still receive the thanks from conservatives – nay, AMERICANS – everywhere.

Read the rest here – it’s interesting stuff.

Cross posted at C4P

h/t from my ever nuanced twitter friend Sissy Willis