Ken Livingstone or Boris Johnson. Come May, one of those two (sorry Brian Paddick) will be Mayor of London. Maybe this is someone’s idea of a sick joke.

Neither candidate is particularly inspiring. Livingstone, the incumbent, has been fairly decent. The congestion charge is controversial, but is probably the best centre-left policy enacted in Britain since the minimum wage. Under Livingstone, London has cemented its position as a financial hub and, at the time of writing, no other banks have fallen into receivership this week.

This article by Johann Hari was written a few days ago, but I've only just come across it. Memo to self: must read more of his stuff.

It gives four very good reasons for why Labour shouldn't implode, and instead stop David Cameron being Prime Minister. Given the chance, the Conservatives would screw over some of Britain's most vulnerable:

1) Chronic drug addicts
2) The poorest students
3) Part-time workers
4) Single mothers

These are the practical issues at stake if Labour continues to ebb in the opinion polls. How much more important are they than when precisely Jon Mendelsohn knew that some weirdo was giving money to Labour under different names – the question that has been riveting the process-obsessed Nick Robinson school of politics for weeks? And how much more important are all these real people – chronic drug addicts, poor students, part-time workers, single mums – than the fatuous, foolish questions our pundits are incessantly asking about Gordon Brown's personality?

Cory

Here's my interview with Richard Corbett MEP for Redbrick. He is a genuinely nice guy, and it's great to talk with someone who is so obviously passionate in favour of the EU. Makes a nice change:

Cory

Another week, another government computer system goes tits up.

Last week Channel Four reported that the £4 billion MOD computer system was “not fit for purpose” (John Reid’s phrase is seemingly here to stay). The Defence Information Infrastructure (DII) was meant to be online by the end of March this year. It is supposed to allow the army to order supplies more efficiently, for instance. Despite costing billions of pounds, DII is eighteen months behind schedule.

The MOD chose a consortium called Atlas to implement DII. At the head of Atlas is EDS, a company that has already screwed up the tax credits system which shelled out over £5 billion in overpayments. It doesn’t take great insight, surely, to realise that DII was always going to go wrong. It’s like putting Harold Shipman in charge of an old people’s home.

Back in March, you may remember, thousands of junior doctors’ details somehow made it onto the internet. These details included their criminal records, sexual orientation and religious beliefs. Then Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt said that MTAS, the online application system used by those applying for their first hospital position, “had not been an unmitigated disaster”. So that’s alright then. As long as it’s only a slight disaster, that’s good enough for Pat.

Incredibly, an even bigger loss of personal data happened this week at HM Revenue and Customs. Computer discs containing the personal details of everyone who receives child benefit have been lost. That’s over seven million families and 25 million names.

25 million?! That’s a stupid number. It’s more than three times the population of Switzerland. How can you possibly lose that many names?

It seems that the discs were put in the post, not by recorded delivery as is usual procedure, and never appeared at their final destination (the National Audit Office, for those who are interested).

This is an incredible piece of incompetence. There is probably more care taken over delivering a book by Amazon, than there is over the names, addresses, bank account details and National Insurance numbers of 25 million people.

The discs are password protected, and according to Chancellor Alistair Darling, the discs haven’t “fallen into the wrong hands”. But this was still a breach of data protection (this sort of personal info shouldn’t just be bunged in the internal post) and the head of HM Revenue and Customs, Paul Gray, has resigned over the issue.

It’s nice to see the head of an organisation taking responsibility and resigning for once. Unlike, say, Sir Ian Blair. When a string of operational procedures goes wrong and an innocent man is shot, Sir Ian does not see this as a resigning issue. What is the point of paying the head of something lots of money if they can’t be arsed to take responsibility when things go wrong?

The scariest thing about all these computer systems failures is that the government wants to set up an even bigger computer system. The national database for ID cards would be humungously (yes, I’m sure that’s a word) large, with personal details and even biometrics on them. It’s not just names and addresses, but people’s eye scans and fingerprint details too.

No Harman-y

All this talk about Gordon Brown’s election problems is very boring. He may have had a bad Prime Minister’s Questions, but that doesn’t really matter. Nobody watches PMQs anyway. Or knows what his “Vision for Britain” is. Only that it consists of Gordon Brown being in power for at least another eighteen months or so.

Instead, let’s talk about Harriet Harman. You have probably forgotten who she is already – she won the Labour Deputy Leadership contest earlier this year. Which surprised me. As a Labour party member I voted in the election, and Harriet’s campaign seemed to be the worst. Worse even than Hazel Blears, and the sight of Hazel Blears on television usually makes me want to gouge my eyes out with rusty spoons. Harman’s campaign seemed to rest on two main planks. The first was essentially “Vote for me because I am a woman”. The second was to say that Labour ought to apologise for the Iraq war. She then denied saying this after she became deputy leader.

Furthermore, she doesn’t seem to have talked to anyone before unveiling this idea. Gordon Brown has said nothing about it. On the Labour website there is nothing. Other senior Labour figures have said, you guessed it, nothing. Perhaps we should just put Harriet Harman and Ed Balls in a cupboard or something, and let them out after Labour wins the next election. They will cause less damage there.

End of the Ming dynasty

Liberal Democrat MPs make unlikely assassins, but they have now stabbed two leaders in the back within nineteen months. I feel sorry for Ming Campbell, whose only fault was not his ability or his views, but his age. Now their caretaker leader is Vince Cable, a man who looks like Ming, but with less hair and bushier eyebrows. Potential leaders have until October 31^st to throw their name into the hat.

For the moment, however, there is the usual claptrap that is spouted after a leader goes. Lib Dem MPs are continually praising Ming. Party president Simon Hughes, for instance, said that he had brought “purpose and stability” to the party. But if Ming was so good, why was his job “under discussion” - as the aforementioned Mr Cable said the day before Ming resigned? David Laws, Lib Dem spokesman for something or other, appeared on Channel 4 news to praise Ming. When asked who he thought should be the next leader, he replied that it was inappropriate to speculate at this moment in time. If you cannot speculate on who should be your new party leader when there is a vacancy, then when can you speculate?

Well, I am going to speculate now. The frontrunners are Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne. Nick Clegg is a trendy, David Cameron-type. But if you were going to vote for a David Cameron type, wouldn’t you just vote for David Cameron? Chris Huhne, by contrast, is boring. The Lib Dems need a vote winner, someone who the voters recognise. Which is why the new leader should either be Charles Kennedy or Lembit Opik.

By getting rid of Charles Kennedy, the Lib Dems lost their only electoral asset. Bringing him back would be embarrassing, but necessary. If that proves to be too embarrassing, then the Lib Dems should embrace Mr Cheeky Girl as their new leader. He at least is recognised by most of the general public, and this counts for more than policy in British politics today. As Alistair Darling as shown, if you don’t have a policy of your own, just nick the Opposition’s. With Labour and the Tories increasingly similar, there is a need for the Lib Dems to be distinctive. And how much more distinctive can you get than Lembit Opik?

And finally…

Laughing at the Lib Dems is harmless enough, but laughing at Tories is much more fun. They were left £8million in the will of Branislav Kostic. Sadly, he had been suffering from serious mental health problems, and was convinced only the Conservatives could protect humanity from evil spirits. This week a judge forced them to return the money to his family, and ruled that Mr Kostic would not have given to the Conservative Party “if he were of sane mind”. Well, who would?

Cory

Kerron Cross has national security on his mind, obviously. It appears he has just received his new Parliamentary pass, so he thought that it would be a great idea to tell the world what his password is:

"I put in my own birthday. Which I'm pretty sure I got right. ;-)"

Isn't it common sense not to write a lengthy post on the inner security workings of Parliament? I despair. As one of the commenters says:

"sweet Jesus you are a cretin sometimes..."

Well, quite.

Cory

I suppose that after you've attended a few left-wing meetings, you are going to have a favourite 'looney left' story. One of my favourite lines is, "What should be the proper socialist response to a congestion charge?". This is the sort of left I read about in Mark Steel and John O'Farrell's books, and it seemed a rather surreal if slightly despairing place to hang out, but one that was hardly ever boring.

At the first ever Birmingham Young Labour meeting, we encountered a similar example of looney-leftness. We had to elect a commitee of eight. After a long discussion on the voting method (first past the post? single transferable vote? who cares?) someone mentioned whether the eight-person committee should comprise of at least four women.

Sigh. It was suggested that maybe we should elect the best person for the job, rather than decide merely on the basis of their sex. The proposer shook her head, as though it was a laughable proposition. Well, maybe electing the best person for the job isn't in the best tradition of the Labour Party, but one shouldn't be scared to break with tradition.

I am broadly in favour of all-women shortlists for MP jobs, for example. But that is because there are roughly 60 million people in Britain, and roughly 30 million of them are men and roughly 30 million are women. They deserve equal representation. However, if you are in a meeting of about thirty people, and seven of them are women, that isn't so fair (or practical). Some women there also didn't want to represent the committee, are you going to force them to join? Wouldn't you rather have a committed male committee member (if you'll pardon the pun) than a female forced against her will to stand only for the purposes of gender balance? It seems typical of certain elements of the left, who have dogmas rather than principles, which get applied willy-nilly to any situation without the use of common sense. When the left starts to do this, it loses elections.

One committee position was for a women's officer, and it was suggested that only women should vote for the position! To be fair, this was suggested by a male committee member, who is presumably foolish rather than the possessor of a giant chip on his shoulder. I pointed out that if we were all in favour of gender equality, then couldn't we just vote for the (female) member who would campaign for gender equality? Which was agreed upon, and after what seemed a lifetime we eventually had a committee. I am sure they'll do marvellously.

Moving on to that other woman's issue, Harriet Harman. She was my fifth choice on the ballot, reaching that exalted position because she wasn't Hazel Blears. Like the overenthusiastic committee members, I can see no reason why the Deputy Leader has to be a woman, any more than they have to dislike golf, or watch Eastenders. But I'm sure she won't cause too much damage. Some sensible people - Johann Hari for one - like the look of Harman, which reassures me. However, I'm more in thinking with the line of the resurgent Idiots for Labour. All of it is worth reading, especially the bit about Yougov polls, but if you can't be bothered, or are too busy, just read this:

Throughout her career Harriet has campaigned for equality and social justice.
This is not in fact our recollection at all. We recall her leading the effort, as Secretary of State for Social Security in 1997, to reduce the benefits payable by the State to single mothers – people dependent upon those benefits for a decent quality of life for themselves and their families – at a time when she was herself on a total salary package of over £100,000.

This was a proposal that while in Opposition in 1996 she described as “a disincentive to work, as well as being wrong” (you can hear her saying it on the BBC website at the bottom of this page here). It may be said that she argued against it privately and in Cabinet: this may even be true. If she did argue privately against it, she was not successful and is a well-meaning but crap politician; if she did not, she had clearly forgotten all her Labour values in the struggle for the advancement of her own career.

Still, we must all rally round. There is a General Election to win, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon...

Cory

Blears - the shortness is actually an advantage - makes her memorable compared to the others.

If that's what her supporters are counting on, they have problems. I will post on the hustings debate - promise - but rest assured Hazel Blears was as cringingly awful as she usually is.

Cory

Idiots for Labour are back. This is the best news I've heard in ages.

Cory

There's this article in the Observer today:

Gordon Brown will make his most audacious bid to show himself as the unbeatable 'Prime Minister in waiting' this week with a remarkable series of meetings with foreign leaders and the launch of a groundbreaking aid initiative backed by the Pope.

In what one aide described as an effort to 'show what a Brown premiership will look like', the Chancellor told The Observer yesterday of his vision for an ' X-Factor' Britain. He said the reality TV music programme, as well as shows like Dragons' Den and The Apprentice, promoted 'aspiration, how anyone can achieve things' - key to the agenda he hoped to bring to Number 10.

Is there not a limit to how many different times one man can re-brand himself? First it was Africa-man. Then Arctic-Money man. Now this. And what the blazes is "X-Factor Britain". Urgh.

Not for the first time, I think I may just crawl into bed, and not re-emerge until Tony Blair resigns.

Cory