Love-hate dilemma of political polls

THE FRIDAY THING: HAVE politics, and especially politicians, ever been in a worse state in this country?

The only consolation we have is that, unlike members of the royal family, at least the MPs have the good sense to keep their clothes on (Edwina Currie is an ex-MP so she doesn’t count and the thought of a naked John Prescott is positively nightmare fodder).
Labour and its local cheerleader and chief scribe Dave Hibbert should be celebrating the news that the party is 15 points ahead in the latest popularity poll.

Prolific writer Dave should be delighted that his party currently enjoys the support of 45 per cent of electorate compared with the Tories’ 30 per cent and the Lib-Dems lost in the wilderness of 10 per cent and falling. Can you just imagine Vince Cable’s expression?

The irony is that Labour leader Ed Miliband is far less popular than chubby Dave, who has support of 60 per cent of voters while only 31 per cent see Ed as the future PM.

But what might just put an over-the-cornflakes smile on Ed’s little face is the news that chubby Dave has been voted the third least favourite post-war PM by the over-50s, behind only the disastrous Alec Douglas-Home and Sir Anthony Eden (ask your grandad). On these figures, unless there is some dramatic but unlikely upturn in fortunes, will anybody bother turning out to vote come 2015 (assuming that the Collision Government lasts that long which seems less and less likely)?

Former sort-of-caretaker PM John Major believes that everything will turn out okay in the end and that the Tory party will triumph, but ever since his pyjama-dropping trysts with Edwina his judgement has never been more than suspect.

There are, of course, a few folk who say it can’t get any worse but even the new contagious rash of bookmakers probably wouldn’t place any odds on that.



I WAS too young for National Service (believe it or not) and so my knowledge of all things military is, to say the least, sketchy.

So, maybe it’s me, but I can’t understand what we are doing in Afghanistan, working alongside Afghan nationals, some of whom are shooting and blowing up our soldiers. It is bad enough that we are in that god-forsaken country trying to win an impossible war and losing lives to roadside bombs and snipers at every turn without us inviting them to come and join us in our so-called safe havens so that they can shoot our troops at close range.

The theory is that we should invite Afghan soldiers to work alongside coalition troops, training them to be police officers or soldiers to defend Afghanistan for when the happy day dawns that all our people can get out of there and leave the locals to kill each other if they feel the need.

So far this year the so-called Afghanistan army members we have been training to be better at shooting our chaps have killed 51 coalition soldiers, just a part of the casualty toll of 430, and yet we continue to ask our soldiers to work alongside them.

Clearly not all those Afghans given uniforms and working alongside our troops can be trusted and we should stop putting coalition soldiers at risk from the enemy within.

The bottom line is that we should just get out and pretty quick, too.



FINAL WORD: Remember Prof Ted Cantle? He wrote a report on the causes of Oldham’s 2001 riots that was not, shall we say, universally welcomed.

Now the good prof is saying that the Government is creating state-sponsored segregation by giving small groups special status and funding and giving undue legitimacy to self-appointed leaders. He calls for an end to state funding for projects and services aimed at or run by religious groups or individual ethnic communities.

Effectively he is promoting the end of multiculturalism and it would be interesting to know what Oldham people (in all communities) think of that.




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