Friday 28 September 2007

Dave Cameron Keen on return to Conservative values - Before Brown steals them all

It seems that Dave the Chameleon is now keen on re-branding himself.

Many members of the party formerly known as the Conservatives must have been wondering what on earth he was playing at, when some of his more ludicrous ideas were touted to the press and bombed with many of his natural supporters, whist simultaneously failing to convince anyone else.

It all almost seemed calculated to alienate his natural constituency whist at the same time be lukewarm at best to floating voters and the hoards of Ming the merciless.

It must have been galling watching Broon make direct appeals to Tory voters and Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, has finally been forced to fight back, to try to regain lost ground and attempt to prevent the PM looking more far more conservative than his own leader.

So, instead of the ‘heir to Blair’ he is now keen to be seen as the ‘heir to Thatcher’ - Unfortunately it looks like he was a bit too slow again. He turned up at the new busking pitch only to find that Broon got there first.

He really does desperately need to dump the comparison many see with Blair. That is a millstone round his neck.

Gordon Brown has stolen virtually all his clothes while he wasn’t looking (Dave had thought they were out of fashion). Now all he has left to protect his modesty is a dodgy suit he got from Tony that still has several payments left on it. Because of the suit, when he goes out at night people keep mistaking him for Tony and he gets into trouble over that.

Still all is not necessarily entirely lost, there is hope of some light at the end of the tunnel , Dave will probably be hoping that it is not just an oncoming train ;-)

Nu-Lab’s campaign against ‘traditional’ light bulbs gathers pace.

Son of staring eyed Left Winger Anthony Wedgwood Benn, Hilary, Nu-Lab’s Environment Secretary, informed their conference he wanted to see sales of 150-watt bulbs banned from next January.

But of course it is not just 150 watt bulbs - He wants to take the same ‘defeat in detail’ route Nu-Lab so successfully applied with HIPs, that minimises resistance to the point where it can be ignored.

He stated "our aim is for traditional 150-watt light bulbs to be phased out by January next year, 100-watt bulbs the year after, 40-watt bulbs the year after that and all high-energy light bulbs by 2011."

This might be worthwhile if it had a reasonable chance of ‘doing what it says on the tin’, as they say.

Mr Benn claims that the ban could save five million tonnes of CO2 a year. Typically he appears to fail to take several factors into account:

Firstly he appears to fail to take into account that the heat generated by incandescent bulbs, that he is counting as wasted, actually contributes to heating the premises the bulbs are used in - and this reduction in heat will actually largely have to be made up by additional heating costs and result in increased CO2 emissions required in heating that will offset the supposed saving to be gained in introducing the bulbs.

So a lot of expense in changing all the bulbs for far less gain than touted. Then there are the disparities in production costs… All this will be coming out of the consumers pockets.

Then there is the small matter of the mercury that goes into making the ‘low energy’ bulbs. Nu-Labs Euro MPs were so concerned about the threat of mercury to the environment that they banned mercury barometers, but they seem happy turn a blind eye to the threat of a metric ton of Mercury being dumped in the UK each year that these bulbs pose.