NO2AV take on Huhne

Lobbydog hears the NO2AV campaign plan to do tomorrow what Ed Miliband should have done today – attack Chris Huhne over his cabinet meeting outburst.

Miliband seemed to completely forget about the whole issue at PMQs giving it only a passing mention, when it should have been his most powerful attack line of the day.

The whole situation is a complete gift which could have made Clegg look very silly in the Commons on the eve an election – another one of Ed’s missed opportunities.

Anyway, the NO2AV campaign will send an open letter to Huhne dismissing his claims that they have specifically targeted Nick Clegg and run a dirty campaign against him.

I doubt they’ll go quite as far as accusing Huhne of using the issue to position himself as a potential Liberal Democrat leader, someone should though.

A room full of angry people, one of them covered in spit

Batten down the hatches, the militant homosexuals are coming! They’re going to round people up, teach their kids about being gay and force you at gun point to watch men kiss.

At least that’s what I’ve learnt militant homosexuals do, I’d never heard of them until Nick Griffin blurted out the term on Question Time.

But having seen the light, I’m now hoarding Will and Grace DvDs in the hope of tricking any militant homosexuals who come to get me into thinking I’m on their side.

Putting that weird glimpse into Griffin’s mind, and his sweaty, hand-wringing nervousness aside, the BNP leader held his own just about as well as he could have done.

That is, he did as well as he could have done defending indefensible racism in a room filled with people that wanted to parade his severed head on a pole around television centre.

Tonight’s show was always going to be a fight between two things – on one side a chance to spit at Nick Griffin, and on the other an opportunity to expose him as a racist while making incisive points about how it is the BNP have had electoral success.

As I suspected by the end of the show Griffin was drenched in spittle.

There were, however, just about enough moments to make it worth it – Griffin struggling with his holocaust denial and inappropriately joking about the Ku Klux Klan or Dimbleby pointing out the fake, palatable language used by the BNP.

The thing is Griffin’s attack on immigration policy, on the Iraq War and on UK Muslims – couched in this palatable language – will ring true with some people in the UK.

When these points were raised the mainstream politicians needed to break from the spitfest and engage. Jack Straw failed miserably, his hands tied by the fact that he can’t concede Labour immigration policy has been a mess.

Chris Huhne and Baroness Warsi called Straw out and then made tentative attempts to “square up” to the issue of immigration, something which is easier to do from opposition.

Baroness Warsi did at least highlight the issues of deprivation and poverty, and Huhne the disconnection from the political class, as factors in the BNP’s rise.

These issues could have used a bit more time. But with so much spit to get out – it was positively bubbling from some audience members – it was never going to happen.

Lib Dem crime pledge a bit iffy

I suspected for a moment that Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne (pictured) might be forming some sort of crime-fighting duo.

A yellow Batman and Robin perhaps, or even a Lib Dem Cagney and Lacey.

The thing is they’d promised to solve an extra 82,000 crimes a year if elected, and I couldn’t work out how they could do that without getting on the front line.

It turns out their figure is a rather dubious one worked out from their pledge to get an extra 10,000 bobbies on the beat. Their thinking being:

10,000 extra officers X the average no of crimes solved by each UK bobby = 82,265 extra crimes solved in England and Wales.

The idea that an injection of cash from Westminster would definitely translate into crimes solved has to be ridiculous – there are just so many different factors at play.

I’m pretty sure, for example, that even the Lib Dem’s powers of persuasion wouldn’t be able to win over criminals into playing along.

And there’s more – the pledge to provide the extra bobbies will apparently be paid for through scrapping ID cards, says Lib Dem HQ.

Isn’t that the same cash that the party’s treasury spokesman Vince Cable has already earmarked to help pay off UK debt?

Yes, say party HQ – but actually they’re expecting the ID card scheme to yield more savings than the Government is admitting and so it might be able to cover the police scheme and pay off debt.

Hardly a solid foundation for major parts of finance and home affairs policy.