This is an excellent idea – an independent website which will check the facts spouted by the politicians between now and the general election. Perhaps it will encourage our party leaders to be more honest in their speeches, instead of making false claims in order to scare voters into voting for them above the opposition parties. Perhaps it will mean that the leaders can no longer hide from the truth about their past performance behind some dodgily compiled selective statistics. Perhaps it will even stop the politicians from telling outright lies.

This is one site that’s going straight into my bookmark list (and this site’s sidebar), and I imagine I’ll be commenting on it quite often over the coming weeks… Right now, if you want some more background on the service, check out this Guardian article.

GPs will provide a wider range of services, taking in areas which were once the preserve of traditional hospital care under government plans unveiled today.

This seems like an excellent idea, given how many GPs we have sitting around doing nothing. When I phone my GP, he practically begs me to come down because he’s bored out of his brain.

But seriously, how does John ‘Attack Dog’ Reid really expect to be able to squeeze even more people into the GP queue, especially when he’s busy encouraging GPs to aboloish their appointment systems? People with chronic diseases like rheumatoid arthritis (RA) inevitably need regular care, which lends itself to an appointment system, not the “phone-up-on-the-day” system that Reid is advocating for GP Practices in order to meet his waiting list targets.

At the same time as announcing a whole raft of new responsibilities for GPs to take on, he’s also announcing

I want to free up our GPs to be all they can be in providing services of a wider range, more conveniently, to patients.

And don’t forget today’s other NHS story:

The NHS is failing to provide adequate family doctor services for patients needing emergency care outside of normal office hours, it emerged today.

So, to summarise, we don’t have enough GPs to go around. Labour’s way of fixing this is to force a whole new set of responsibilities and patients onto GPs, hence freeing them up to provide better services more conveniently to patients.

And Labour say the Conservatives’ plans don’t add up.

The Labour Party are at is again, clearly not having learned from their last disastrous email attempt, which was widely criticised. And, unbelievably, they still aren’t publicising anything about their policies – just attacking the Conservatives, as usual…

Hello,

Hi!

I once got a computerised letter from the New Statesman that said ‘Dear John O’Farrell, subscribe now and get a free copy of Things Can Only Get Better by John O’Farrell’.

How fascinating. There’s a good reason for me to vote for you, if ever there was one.

I’m emailing you as a fellow supporter,

But I don’t support Labour!

don’t worry you don’t have to buy the book.

What a relief. Isn’t your sense of humour just spot-on?!

Anyway, as a Labour activist who has helped the party lose elections at every level, I have been asked to say why I’m going out leafleting for Labour for the general election and why I hope you’ll volunteer to do something too.

Well you certainly weren’t asked to do so by me, so why has this ended up clogging my inbox?

Everyone agrees the election, whenever that may come, is going to be the closest since 1992 and it is perfectly possible that the Tories could defy the polls to win power as they did in 1970.

Possibly the only sentence in this whole email I don’t have a problem with.

A major factor between now and polling day is how many Labour supporters we can mobilise. As Voltaire said; ‘All that is necessary for the Tories to triumph is that Labour Party supporters do nothing.’ (Okay, it’s a very loose translation.)

Oh, there you are with the humour again. Stop it, or I’ll giggle my socks off.

Like me, you may not agree with everything that has happened since 1997,

Too true.

but come election time we cannot risk throwing away all the fantastic achievements of the past eight years.

But can we afford not to throw away all of the terrible disasters and failures of the past eight years?

If we sit back and do nothing now, we’ll be turning our backs on all the millions who’ve had their lives radically improved by the minimum wage or Working Families Tax Credit not to mention the millions of people in the third world who’ve benefited from the massive increase in overseas aid.

Equally, if we support you, we’d turn our back on the millions of bereaved relatives in Iraq, not to mention the millions of people in this country who’ve suffered from increased council tax and top-up fees.

This isn’t emotional blackmail. Oh all right, it is emotional blackmail, but what the hell?

Well, Alan Milburn said you’d do anything to win the election. Clearly, blackmail isn’t beyond you. But what should be expect from a party with a culture of lying, sleaze, and revolving doors?

It is vital that we get our leaflets through millions of letter boxes over the next few weeks – otherwise those rabid Rottweilers waiting on the other side of the door will have nothing to rip to shreds.

Again with the humour! You’re killing me! My sides are splitting!

But if you think those dogs are scary, just imagine Michael Howard on the other side of that front door in Downing Street the morning after the election…

Good at name-calling, aren’t you? Michael Howard’s been Fagin, a Pig, and now a Dog. I’m quite impressed. Certainly valid political arguments, and clear policies of what you plan to do better.

John O’Farrell
Author and Broadcaster

Given up on Tony Blair apparently sending emails, then?

P.S

Oh grief, there’s more!

The Labour Party machine has dragged me in to harass you into campaigning.

Presumably because they don’t want anyone from the Party doing that, because we wouldn’t beleive what they were telling us.

So I’ll be emailing you from now until the election.

Oh joy.

If your friends and family would like to sign up, they just need to follow the link:

Believe me, they don’t.

It amazes me that Peter Hain can write a comment piece in a broadsheet newspaper telling us not to vote for the nasty parties, who have all these terrible plans, and yet still fail to mention, even once, what Labour would do differently. There isn’t a single mention of Labour’s future policies in this article. There’s a fair bit of selective picking-and-choosing of the best bits of what Labour has acheived in the past, but not a hint of the future. And only one fleeting mention of their party leader – which is more than he gets on the Labour party homepage, where (once again) the only party leader pictured is Michael Howard.

The best bit is where Mr Hain decides that he’d like to tell me what I believe:

The truth is, even our most ardent Guardian critics agree with 95% of what Labour has done, in particular building the strongest economy in living memory and record public investment.

If Labour wins on a campaign of ‘Everyone else is mean, vote for us’ then it’s going to make the British public as foolish as were the Americans for voting for George Bush. Unless Labour step-up their game, they’re just going to look increasingly silly, and lose an election that six-months ago they had in the bag.

Mr Flight’s speech was secretly taped and the recording passed to the Times. The move bore all the hallmarks of Labour’s attack squad, which has targeted Tory public meetings in successive election campaigns in an attempt to catch them out.

So keen is Mr Blair to hide from us his actual election manifesto, and so keen is he to avoid a proper debate on the value of a Labour government and the value of his time in office, that he’s now sent his cronies to infiltrate a Conservative private dinner. Not a public meeting, as they have done previously, but a private dinner. It would be nice to observe some of the private goings-on in Number Ten, I’d imagine, but then they won’t even share with us the legal advice on the Iraq War, produced by an Atorney General who ultimately works for us in order to protect our country from legal reprisals. That’s very public business, methinks, so if they won’t disclose that, I’m sure their private affairs will remain so. But how are we to trust a party that stoops to these levels?

I’m going to be one of the few people on this whole issue to stick up for Mr Howard’s course of action – he said he wanted a whiter-than-white government, and if anybody didn’t deliver on their promises they’d be sacked. Therefore, when someone announces that they’ve made public promises that they don’t intend to keep, he sacks them. It’s actually quite a refreshing change from Mr Blair’s government, where you really have to do some blatant lying and cheating to be sacked for six months, after which you’re rehired.

I’m desperately trying to like the Conservatives, because it seems that they are the best people to vote for in my constituency from a tactical standpoint. Whilst the Liberal Democrats would be the ideal party in terms of reflecting my beliefs, past experience shows that they’ve no chance of winning my seat. However, there’s only an 8% gap between Tory and Labour candidates in 2001, so there’s a good chance that we could become a true blue constituency. Anything to stop the slimy David Borrow from retaining his far-from-safe-seat.

Alan Milburn has done a lengthy interview in today’s Weekend magazine, which seems rather ill-advised. It doesn’t reflect well on him at all; it makes him look like he’ll do absolutely anything to win this election. He knows Labour’s record won’t do it, he knows Labour’s policies won’t do it, so he’s insisting on character assassinations instead. Which I personally think will backfire.

The Lib Dems have just proposed that prisoners should be given the vote, and Labour is planning a counter-blast, using a headline from the Evening Standard that labels the Lib Dems as criminally stupid… I find myself becoming angry with Milburn. What is so wrong about giving prisoners the vote? Why should this frighten the British public? Why do you think it is a vote-winner? Isn’t this just negative politics and fear-mongering?

Mr Milburn’s reply?

You’ve got to remember a political campaign is a contest… It’s a question of being realistic about what the nature of a campaign is. You’re trying to win something.

If that doesn’t suggest that Labour is willing to mislead people and slither its way back into Number Ten, then I’m not sure what else does. So for Labour to go on the attack over a now sacked Conservative MP who expressed a personal view that does not represent party policy, when they themselves have a disgraced MP presiding over the dirtiest, slimiest of campaigns, seems a little rich to me. And certainly not a vote-winner.

Labour fail, once again, to tell us what they will do if re-elected.

With this kind of puerile negative campaigning, they don’t deserve to win the next election. It just shows them in their true nasty, cliquey, vindictive light. Not to mention how they like to stretch the truth, considering how the Tories aren’t the only party to be committed to cutting waste in the public services.

I certainly can’t trust and support a party that does this kind of thing, and I hope that you won’t either.

Me, last Sunday:

I agree with Mr Blair on this. I’d perhaps go slightly further than him, because he’s left himself open to attack over women who aren’t in ‘very difficult circumstances’ but still obtain abortions, but he’s in a pretty solid position. For the first time in this not-quite-an-election-campaign, I can say: Well done, Mr Blair!

The Guardian leader, today:

It was Tony Blair who put it best in answer to Cosmopolitan. Nobody likes abortion, he said, but it is wrong to criminalise those who, in very difficult circumstances, make that choice.

They should give me a job right now, I think!

Mr Deputy Speaker:
Stability the foundation.
Investment not cuts.
Every child the best start in life.

I think I missed something early on in Mr Brown’s speech… What’s the new tax rate on verbs? Must be pretty high if even the government’s having trouble affording them.

There’s little in the speech itself to disagree with – there rarely is in a pre-election budget, I expect. I just wonder how he can manage to announce tax cuts, borrowing cuts, and yet massive spending increases. I’m no expert on the economy, but to me that says ‘tax rises after the election’.

The main message that I took away from today’s events was how much better Mr Brown would be as Labour’s leader: Tony Blair’s fake emotion and anger versus Mr Brown’s real commandeering and forceful delivery, appearing to actually believe what he says? I know who I’d choose.

Overall, not a fantastic day for Labour, but not a bad one either. A couple of days of positive reports in the newspapers might give them a bit of a boost, but I think lots of the tabloid press will instead concentrate on picking holes and making Labour look bad.

So all-in-all it’s probably been a pretty neutral day. Not exactly what Labour needed right now, but not so bad that it makes Mr Brown look bad… probably a reasonably good day for him personally.

In what may be a first for this site, I’m actually agreeing with Tony Blair. Don’t worry, I’m not going to be making a habit of it, but if abortion is to become an election issue, then I’ll have to support him on it.

Michael Howard’s position:

I think that what we have now is tantamount to abortion on demand. I believe abortion should be available to everyone, but the law should be changed. In the past I voted for a restriction to 22 weeks, and I would be prepared to go down to 20.

I don’t see what good would be done by reducing the age at which abortion can take place, and I see no scientific evidence for doing so. Mr Howard is responding to the pro-life propaganda pictures of foetuses that look like people. Jelly babies also look a bit like people, but I have no ethical dilemmas when it comes to munching my way through a packet.

Charles Kennedy:

I don’t know what I would do now

That’s not what one would call a well argued thought out position on the issue. And if he doesn’t know his position, how am I supposed to know it? And, indeed, if I don’t know his position on key election issues, how am I supposed to vote for him? Come on Charlie, you can do better than this…

Tony Blair:

However much I might dislike the idea of abortion, you should not criminalise a woman who, in very difficult circumstances, makes that choice. Obviously there is a time beyond which you can’t have an abortion, and we have no plans to change that, although the debate will continue.

I know that this will come as a surprise, but – finally – I agree with Mr Blair on this. I’d perhaps go slightly further than him, because he’s left himself open to attack over women who aren’t in ‘very difficult circumstances’ but still obtain abortions, but he’s in a pretty solid position. For the first time in this not-quite-an-election-campaign, I can say: Well done, Mr Blair!

They’re still at it!

MPs have resumed debate on the government’s controversial anti-terror bill following a 24-hour stand-off with peers in the House of Lords.

The debate now threatens to stretch into the weekend.

All the pundits I saw or read yesterday were predicting that this stand-off would come to an end this morning. They were very clearly wrong. This is one extended game of table tennis!