Rob Lowe IQ (or Left <25 Right >35 =Winston Churchill)

Heart throb actor Rob Lowe is quoted in last Sunday’s Observer as saying:

"You know, there's that great quote: 'If you're young and you're not a liberal, you have no heart. If you're older and not a conservative, you have no brain.' I started out being a really, really liberal Democrat. [That changes] as you get older and you have children and you get more life experience."

Is it just me that gets annoyed by the use of this brain dead platitude?

Winston Churchill is supposed to have stated that “ If you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative by the time you're 35, you have no brain."

However there is no record of anyone hearing Churchill say this and it does not appear in his written works. Furthermore it makes no sense at all because Churchill was a Tory at 25 and crossed the floor to the Liberals at 28 and remained there at 35. Furthermore he was a lifelong Imperialist without any evidence of youthful progressive vigor.

Lets face it, some people grow old, get tired, get disillusioned or increasingly comfortable and stop giving a toss. Can you please not bore us with your diminishing lack of imagination by repeating this tedious quote or even worse, some half arsed version of it.

Hey Progressive- Don't waste eight months whinging and angsting- vote now with an application form!

The prospect of eight months of liberal and left angsting about 'who should get my vote' fills me with dread. As if the non political middle ground isn't, for now, bored and angry and shifting towards a classic memory loss vote for the nasty party. 

Get this into your head's progressive types- how you vote in May will not be your definitive contribution to making the world a better place this year. The right will have its day in May. Why? Because Labour has wasted three election victories and years of our lives. People know this in their bones. 

Labour will loose. No other progressive party can win. By all means vote Labour, Green, Respect, Socialist etc etc. Just don't waste my time with drawn out laments about how 1997 was such a time of hope and the joys of lesser evilism blah blah blah. The five seconds you spend voting next May is not worth boring me to death.

By all means join the Greens, join the fight to move Labour to the left in opposition, join the fight to establish a new Left Party, but please don't drone on about whether voting Lib Dem is a better progressive option (No it clearly isn't) or whether to staple your nose closed and vote Mandleson. 

The most important thing you can do this year is join a Union. That is where the fight is going to be. Go to the TUC web site, find the union for you and join it. 

End of.

Mandleson

To be frank, I told you so. I knew they would be bastards in 1997. Nothing has proved me wrong. Yes we got health and education spending, but the the PFI mortages, the health managers, the academy schools, the US union busting health companies, all came with the package. And these two issues are supposed to be the positive parts of the legacy. 

I too have the sinking feeling that comes from the prospect of Oxford Bullingdon club arrogance getting elected. Yet as much as I despair at this, there is at least the prospect that the Tories will not be that strong in government because most people will simply not vote. Subsequently there is an outside chance, that the unions, freed from the 'don't rock the boat' shackles that tie them to Labour centre right politics, will punch Cameron and Osbourne in the face so hard that their testicles vibrate.

In the meantime we are faced with the site of a morally bankrupt Labour Party fawning at the feet an unelected war mongering privatising shit . Why? Simply because he is good at being an unelected war mongering privatising shit and on the sinking Labour ship he gives the impression that he is keeping his head.