“None of the candidates has yet to articulate any sense of how he would mould and lead a genuinely changed Conservative Party.  Every time the candidates attack Blair and Brown, the staple of nearly all their speeches, they confirm Labour’s dominance of the landscape, and expose their inability to do what Tony and Gordon did — take arguments about their own party back to basics and build a coherent long-term strategy to change party and country.  It sounds easy.  It wasn’t.  Not one of the Tories on offer understands the nature of what was required by Labour then, and by them now.”

Alasdair Cambell, writing in The Times about the six Tory leadership hopefuls.

Three of them - Sir Malcolm Rifkind, Dr Liam Fox and David Willetts - he writes off as plainly not leadership material.  I agree (and so, please God, will they very soon).  The remaining three - Kenneth Clarke, David Davis and David Cameron - he writes off as plainly incapable of defeating Labour at the polls.  I agree.

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The Norwegian electorate has turned its back on Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik’s Christian Democrats and their main Conservative allies, electing a Red-Green alliance to office and making the “far right” Progress Party the largest party of opposition.

If a parliament dominated by Reds and Greens and the far right sounds pretty wacky you could be right.  But in Norway, apparently, life has the odd political idiosyncrasy.  For one, they get away with some amazing election material:-

“Dangerous Africans walk the streets,” read one campaign slogan on the party’s website, while a poster showed a masked man aiming a shotgun at the reader. “This man is of foreign origin,” the caption said.

The Progress Party also has some very wacky policies for a supposed party of the right:-

... the Progress Party succeeded with a campaign that mixed blaming immigrants for rising crime with calls for tax cuts on alcohol and Mediterranean retirement homes for Norway’s elderly.

Yes, well, we would all like a small retirement apartment in St.Trop.  But there are an awful lot of North Africans mooching around southern France, you know.  Not sure where the benefit lies.

But maybe Jean-Marie could offer French voters a reciprocatory ski deal in the Frozen North, which would at least make the whole thing a cost-free exchange.  That’s “progress”, surely.  Unless French pensioners also wear masks and carry shotguns.

Thanks to Michael R for sending me this lecture (excerpt) to the Mises Institute by Ralph Raico, titled Rethinking Churchill.

Raico’s argument is that, whilst magnificent as a war-time leader, all his life Winnie was an indefatigable Welfarist/Warfarist.  Notwithstanding the inevitable anti-statist slant underlying Raico’s thinking, I think he is broadly right.  Winnie can certainly be criticised for his lack of Conservative principles (any principles at all, according to Raico).  That lack is most starkly visible in the destructive consequences of so many of his actions.

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Example 1: It is by talking to people with varying views that we find out what the range of opinions is. It doesn’t mean we agree with what they are saying.

A government spokesman defending past consultations with Mr Armad Thomson, from the Association of Muslim Lawyers, following the uncovering of his true opinions by the Telegraph.

Example 2: Britain’s political police have impounded the entire lorry load of the September issue of the party newspaper “Voice of Freedom”.

Yes, “this is it”, it is exactly what the Blair regime wants to suppress.

The news, as reported on the BNP’s website, that New Labour doesn’t want you and me to come into contact with the opinions of the patriotic right.

You can, however, “do a New Labour” and “consult” all 16 pages of the VoF on that link.

Thanks to Rob for letting me know that the latest edition of the IE browser brings up MR with Google’s new warning flag (on which John posted last month).  It’s purpose is said by Google to be a warning of “dangerous” content.  In effect, and used against a site like ours, it could take away our reputation as people of honest intent - at least with visitors who do not already know us.

My IE, which I don’t use much these days, is too ancient to replicate this delightfully thoughtful piece of larceny.  So I haven’t seen it.  Still, I am sure Rob has it right and some unscrupulous individual is trying to damage us.

It would be interesting to know from readers using the new IE browser which other political sites have acquired this badge of honour.  Not many on the left, I bet.

Thanks to Fred for pointing out this poster, issued by some governmental body in Germany - that brown-skinned and by no means brown-shirted land of happy Panmixia of respectful equals (except in boxing, running and penis size, obviously).

The inference seems clear enough.  But I wonder whether any kind and eagle-eyed German speakers among the MR readership could translate the copy for us.  Basically, is the model family in the poster being held up as a generic German family, or is it the purpose of the advertiser to reach out specifically to mixed-race families - perhaps for some vaguely defensible administrative reason?

AIDS hasn’t been much in domestic news in Britain for many years.  So you could be forgiven for being a bit surprised by the British government’s new advertising campaign warning of a heterosexual AIDS epidemic?

Celebrities including LL Cool J, Christina Aguilera and Ashley Judd are photographed with their hands clasped over their ears or with their mouths sealed with masking tape.  Below, the relevant bit of the age-old adage is spelt out - Hear no evil, See no evil, Speak no evil - and a reminder about Aids.

The message is clear: when it comes to sex and HIV, we are not listening.  It is the first sally in what will become the most high-profile sex education campaign seen in Britain for many years, including a £50m advertising blitz

Of course, this isn’t the first such campaign.  Back in the 1980’s when the awful shock of AIDs burst upon public consciousness we were treated to a particularly graphic and memorable one.  Falling tombstones, if you recall.  You might also recall that the Tory government of the day was bullied by the homosexual lobby into targeting the campaign at heterosexuals when they all knew who the high-risk minority really was.  It was a spectacularly wrong decision which could have cost many homosexual men their lives.

At least the Tories had to be forced to do the progressive thing.  Labour needs no such encouragment, no bullying to prevent knowledge of the high-risk minority being passed to the population at large.

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The post below, concerning Mr Lahn’s new thesis, is a first offering by Søren Renner.  Alas, I logged him on our members list complete with the Danish slashed “o”, which our software couldn’t accomodate (in blue type, not black!).  All efforts to correct it have so far proved fruitless.

So would you please bear in mind that Søren’s first post, made inglorious by EE’s non-mastery of Danish and my non-mastery of EE, is indeed this one.

Apologies to Søren.  From here on it will have to be slashless o’s in blue.