Political Penguin

Gurcharan Singh, David Cameron’s latest recruit has a website with a blog on it. Well, used to that is, sort of. You could find it at:

www.gurcharansingh.co.uk

Sadly though it appears the Tories top techie monkeys have been on to the case and all you get now is a redirect to the Tories homepage. Strangely enough the URL is now entitled ‘The Conservative Party’ and meta tagged ‘The official website of the UK Conservative Party’. Strange that isn’t it?

One might deduce from this that following his switching this morning the Tory spin-meisters have descended to cut off access to anything dear old Gurcharan might have said that could be embarrassing to his new master.

Sadly though, not being particularly competent techies it would seem, his entire blog is still available at:

www.gurcharansingh.co.uk/blog

What could there possibly be to hide? Not that it matters, (entire website safely copied). Well, how about Gurcharan’s views less than a fortnight ago regarding Gordon Brown taking over as Premier?

“I am full of hope for the future as this to me signals the beginning of an era where the Labour party can consolidate its leanings over the last few years and move forward with a new outlook based upon positive change. We progress.

On behalf of myself and those who are kind enough to consider me their representative, I would like to wish PM Gordon Brown all the best.”

Or how about his praise for outgoing Premier Tony Blair:

“I would like to believe that the majority of people will like me, have a genuine appreciation for the fact that up until the last moment, he remained dignified, astute, forever able to deliver a suitable response to a unique situation and of course, a pleasure to observe.

The very fact that he was given a standing ovation from most quarters within the House of Commons, friend and foe, was testament to the impact he made during his tenure as Prime Minister. If I were to call upon my limited vocabulary to sum up his feats in one word it would be remarkable.”

What I find most interesting though is that despite him expressing such praise for Tony Blair and Gordon Brown less than a fortnight ago and now suddenly deciding his true beliefs lie with David Cameron, is the timing of this blog’s launch.

15th of June to be precise. Strangely only five days before the death of Piara Khabra. Now only a cynic might suggest that this rather convenient timing might be a bit of getting in quick to launch a bid for the Labour ticket in the by-election. Something of course Gurcharan Singh did but was ultimately unsuccessful.

That such a change of position in a short time is possible makes one wonder about his motivations. Not of course that this is anything new. Reminds me of a certain former Labour Councillor in Walsall who on not getting selected for a Parliamentary seat a week later ran off to join the Tories. Personally if that’s the kind of people who are attracted to “David Cameron’s Conservatives” then good luck, he’s welcome to them.

By the way, what is it with this David Cameron’s Conservatives? They must not like Davey boy so much up north, their candidate in Sedgefiled is just down as ‘Conservative’.

[Update] Gurcharan’s site has now turned a distinctly blue colour and grown one of those daft little trees. What’s very interesting is the post praising Gordon Brown has been completely removed. I think I’ll ask why.

I’m starting to warm to David Cameron. He’s single-handedly doing more to boost the prospects of the Labour Party through his flagrant opportunism and lack of background research than any amount of work we could do on our own side.

Hat tip to Sunny over at Pickled Politics for this one as he was obviously up later last night than I was. News that Labour Councillor Gurcharan Singh is due to defect to the Tories and you can bet Davey boy has lined up a big media event to welcome him into their ranks.

Sadly though, at least for Cameron is that he may well have jumped before looking, asking some questions and doing his research on his new found recruit. Gurcharan Singh was unsuccessful in obtaining the nomination to be the Labour candidate in the by-election which begs the question of his own opportunism? Perhaps, just perhaps there’s a reason that the Labour Party didn’t select him to stand as our candidate in the Ealing Southall by-election?

I don’t normally do speculation as you know, but according to some good friends from down that neck of the woods, they’ll be very glad to get shot of him and you never know, he may just take a few others with him. Good old Davey boy, you’ve done us all a favour.

[Update] The post over at Pickled Politics seems to have disappeared for some reason. Good job I saved it just in case.

[Update] post back up on Pickled Politics.

OK, the headline is very mischievous but were this to be the Daily Mail then I’m sure it would pass as being wholly legitemate piece of journalism. That said, it’s not necessarily that far from the truth and here’s how.

This stems from his speech to the British Phonographic Industry the other day in which he had this to say regarding the issue of illegal downloads of music.

”
We need you in the music industry itself to continue to innovate and make the sort of technological progress that makes pirating CDs more and more difficult.

They should be doing the same when it comes to digital piracy.”

Dave’s not too good on this whole internet thing as we’ve all sort of picked up on by now but as someone with a desire to take over the reigns of power it would be nice to think he either one, has people with credible enough knowledge of the subject he’s talking on to advice him and two, he knows a little bit about the way the current legal structure works.

First up, let’s deal with Dave’s lack of knowledge on the old technology front and pin him down to something he believes in, yes I know it’s hard but there’s at least one thing we can gather from his speech.

Dave’s a supporter of DRM (digital rights management), which makes him a bit of a divvy in my book purely for that but fundamentally what it reveals is that Davey boy believes that the music industry should continue to waste substantial amounts of money investing in systems that by their very nature are doomed to failure. It does not matter what encoding is placed on media, it’s crackable. There is of course a trade off on performance as well. The more complex the encoding, the longer the decoding takes by whatever legitimate hardware is being used to play back the media which is crap for the end user as well.

However it’s when Mr Cameron moves on to ISP, the internet and filesharing P2P networks that he really drops his pants and deserves a good spanking.

He claims that ISP’s are the ‘gatekeepers’ of the internet. Sorry Dave, no they’re not and quite frankly they have no desire to be either. Thankfully though, those lovely people over at the EU have a nice little directive that covers this one if he’d like to go and look it up, it’s here, the European Directive on Electronic Commerce and it says:

“Article 12