For Cleveland, Ohio, read Hackney, Maryhill….

….Birmingham Ladywood, Peckham, Shoreditch, Manchester Central, Liverpool Riverside….

How do we save our most depressed inner city regions?

• By encouraging inward private sector investment and making it easier for companies to function, giving schools and teachers the flexibility to make their own decisions, and improving services and civic pride by introducing commercial rigour into moribund, union-dominated municipal assets?
• Or by burdening these areas with ever greater levels of regulation, taxation, red tape and bureaucracy, while allowing doctrine, political orthodoxy and self interest to trump common sense and results-driven public services?

Watch this great series of shorts from Drew Carey’s excellent Reason TV and decide for yourself….

No brainer? You would have thought so, wouldn’t you?

Is it possible to agree with both Hitchens brothers?

Today being a bit of a slow news day election-wise, by the look of the front pages of the Telegraph….

….and The Groan….

I would like to draw your attention to two newly added quotations from the brothers Hitchens in my sidebar (down there, on the right somewhere).

I am putting together a more detailed discussion of this question, which I will post quite soon, but I’d be interested in receiving readers’ comments.

I’ve got a bridge you might want to buy

If you believe, that is, that the Conservatives are the only party that accepts donations from non-domiciled billionaires, or indeed if you believe that the Conservatives are the largest beneficiary of these donors.

Not that this deters Lord Mandelson from heaving his giant gut aboard the knackered old hobbyhorse for the second time in ten days.…

I’m sure Mandelson, in his more reflective moments, must allow himself a quiet chuckle at the irony of using a technique so despised by a man the Left always (wrongly, by the way) claims as one of its own….

To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed.

Quote of the week

It’s only Monday but this, from Norman Tebbit, will be hard to beat….

If in the face of the most disastrous government since we lost the American colonies the best the opposition can expect is a hung Parliament, it is time that Camp Cameron asked itself some serious questions. Of course there will be many people, like Phil Keane, a regular poster of comments on this site, who quite rightly point to the potential horrors of another bout of the NuLab infection, saying that we all have a duty to vote in the best way to avoid that. It is the most powerful argument for voting Conservative to be heard at present, but surely we should be hearing some more powerful and positive arguments than that.

As I said a few days ago, perhaps we deserve a hung parliament.

Donor nobis pacem

The Noble Lord Mandelson still insists on flogging Tory party funding from non-domiciled donors. Here he is being interviewed after Saturday’s West Midlands Wake….

The following high profile Labour donors, who have bankrolled the party for millions, are classified as non-dom:

Former Deputy Speaker of the House of Lords and pension fund raider, Lord Paul, Sir Ghulam “cash for peerages” Noon, dubbed the Curry King, and steel mogul, Lakshmi “Garbagegate” Mittal.

And this morning, non-related but absolutely in character….

Spinning, or twisting in the wind?

Well and truly hung

As the Tories’ poll lead heads south and the prospect of a hung parliament moves closer and closer to reality, one can really only marvel at Labour’s ability to defy gravity, and wonder whether the Prime Minister is secretly employing mass hypnosis techniques on a large section of the electorate.

Still, hope springs eternal. This morning’s shock revelation by Andrew Rawnsley that Gordon Brown is emotionally unfit to govern (as if we needed telling) might give the undecided a decisive nudge in the right direction, but if they don’t and a hung Parliament it must be, so be it. Perhaps we need to endure a few more years of pain, mistrust and social unrest before the nation finally awakes from its apathetic torpor.

There is, of course, one policy which would sweep Cameron to power in a landslide, but his position on the matter is sadly all too evident, the argument being some kind imagined threat to party unity. Are they seriously trying to kid us that they couldn’t have found 600-odd candidates who were unanimous about taking us out of the European Union?

If the Liberal Democrats were truly liberal, in the event of a hung parliament they would align themselves with the Conservatives and give this, the most illiberal, authoritarian, interventionist government in three-and-a-half centuries, an unceremonious punt into the political wilderness.

But they aren’t, so they won’t.

Net UK government debt is….