The Final Week

So here it is. One week left. Orders are still pouring in for official You Didn't Win postcards, and we're sending them out as fast as we can, but if you don't have time to get them, remember that you can send any postcard you want to 10 Downing Street, as long as you write a 'you didn't win' message on the back! And don't forget to take photos of your cards and upload them using youdidntwin as a tag!

Remember that we want cards to be sent early on May 5th to arrive in time for May 6th, the anniversary of the election no-one won. And remember the address you need to send cards to: David Cameron, 10 Downing Street, London SW1A 2AA.

Now for the new stuff. For this last week, we want to let as many people know about the campaign as possible. That's where we need your help. We want to get #youdidntwin trending on twitter this week. So tell your friends about it. Tweet people you think will RT the hashtag. Email people. Talk to people about it! Contact your MP and see if they want to get involved - we're really pleased that Washington and Sunderland West MP Sharon Hodgson has agreed to take some of our cards and distribute them. Obviously it helps if your MP is Labour but don't forget that, as we've said here before, recognition that Dave didn't win extends across the political spectrum. If you have a really right-wing Tory as your local MP they might feel Cameron needs a reminder of his failure to carry enough of the vote at the last election to form a majority government too!

Remember why we're doing this: Cameron's Tory-led government needs to be reminded that it has no mandate for its policies; that they failed to secure a big enough parliamentary majority to form a government on their own. Cameron's support for the 'First Past the Post' electoral system has been all over the news with the referendum approaching - if he supports the system so much he must also be aware that he failed to win under that system. So why does he press on with ideologically-driven policies which not enough of the electorate supports? Why does he keep acting as if he did win, bullying and patronising opponents and refusing to accept criticism or moderate his policies? Because he can get away with it: because even when people mention that he didn't win, they do so in passing and move on to other matters.

To resist the Tory-led government's policies we must stress their lack of legitimacy. David Cameron's failure to win the last election should not be something we stress in passing, it needs to form the core of our opposition to the government he leads. Our aim in this campaign is to remind Cameron that he can't pretend he won anymore, and to put his failure to win at the centre of political discourse about this government.

And that is why, during this final week of our campaign, we want the words You Didn't Win spread far and wide. Please help us do that in whatever way you can.

The Postcards are Here!

Exciting times here at You Didn't Win headquarters. This afternoon, while I was tucking into some wholewheat fusili and watching the start of Michael Moore's Capitalism: a Love Story, I heard a loud knocking at my door. I opened it and, after signing one of those electronic things that makes my writing look even more like that of a four-year-old than usual, I was presented with a large box. And do you know what was in that box?

The official You Didn't Win postcards, that's what!

Now that we have postcards, we need to start distributing them. And that's where you come in. If you want some cards to distribute in your area, email us at youdidntwin@hotmail.co.uk or message us on our Twitter feed or Facebook page telling us how many you need and we'll send 'em to you! There's no fixed price, but the observant among you will have noted the appearance of a Paypal button at the side of this blog - we'd love it if people would donate whatever you feel you can to support the campaign - this will cover the cost of this run of postcards (and maybe another if we have time before the end of the week) as well as postage for sending the cards out and any other operating expenses we incur. Any surplus left over will be donated to a charity of our choosing.

Remember, we don't want cards sent to Dave yet - send them on May 5th to arrive for the election anniversary. But if you want official cards to send - get in touch with us now and we'll get them sent out as soon as we can, so that this Friday we can all remind Cameron and his Tory-led government that they didn't win!

Postcards

It's nearly time to start sending postcards to Dave. As per our instructions, we would love it if people were to send cards showing pictures of local landmarks to 10 Downing Street, to show the Tory-led government that people all over the country remember that they didn't win the 2010 election, but we know that some people like the idea of having a special postcard to send too. We are getting some postcards printed up, but for anyone who can't get a physical card, this post will give you downloadable designs for the front and back of your own card to send to our not-entirely-elected PM.

First, download the front:

And then you can download the back, with the address and our message to Mr C, here.

Remember not to send your cards too early - May 5th is when we want them sent, so we can be sure they'll arrive in time for the anniversary of the election no-one won...and ruin Dave's 'victory' party!

Calm Down Dave, you're only a Loser

One of the most annoying things about recent Prime Ministers was that too often it was sometimes possible to find oneself liking them. Gordon Brown got a lot of stick from the foaming-at-the-mouth Tory tendency, but if you were in any sense a halfway decent person you couldn't help but feel sorry for him, trying to pick up the ruins of the British economy after his predecessor, Tony Blair, had scarpered as soon as he saw the going get tough. Blair himself led us into an illegal war in an effort to ingratiate himself with possibly the worst American President since Nixon   of all time, but the slimy little bastard had a weird kind of charm that could sneak up on you unexpectedly and trick you into liking him. John Major is remembered chiefly for liking garden peas and shagging Edwina Currie, but had the disarming advantage of not being Margaret Thatcher, which caused a sense of relief so profound it actually won him an election. You have to look back to Thatcher for a PM so utterly demonic as to be genuinely hated, and even then there was the occasional guilty feeling that those of us on the left should kind of admire her for being the first (and so far only) woman to achieve the British premiership.

David Cameron, however, is rapidly proving himself to be the heir to Thatcher in more than ideology, as almost his every public utterance cements himself more strongly as the first Prime Minister in over a decade you can really hate. Today's news from Prime Ministers' Questions shows that he doesn't even have Thatcher's rudimentary feminist bonafides. As the 'Political Scrapbook' blog puts it:

David Cameron is presumably now regretting telling Angela Eagle “Calm down, dear” during heated exchanges on the NHS. Her shadow treasury team colleague Ed Balls was certainly not impressed, repeatedly calling upon the prime minister to apologise.

The media are treating this petulant outburst from the supposedly-relaxed Call-me-Dave as something out of character - in fact it's anything but. Cameron has form for losing his rag at the despatch box. Mirror Journalist James Lyons reports here on Cameron calling Ed balls 'the most irritating man in British politics' (a statement which suggests an astonishing lack of self-awareness on Dave's part) and also belittling a hard-working backbench Labour MP by telling him he had 'absolutely no idea who you are'.

This is just a taste. Over at The Green Ribbon Tom Griffin has a detailed list of Cameron's strops. Of particular interest in Griffin's list is this piece by Telegraph journalist David Hughes which finds the columnist wondering if Cameron is a bit of a 'Bullingdon bully' way back in November of last year; and this exchange reported on BBC Democracy live in which Ed Milliband turns the tables on Cameron's sneering description of Milli-E as a 'student politician' by pointing out that when the Labour leader was a student he 'was not hanging around with people who were throwing bread rolls and wrecking restaurants.'

So we can see that the bad temper displayed in by Cameron today was hardly out of character. And, as Lisa Ansell observes in her takedown of the welfare reform bill, neither is the misogyny which he displayed to Angela Eagle. Cameron's government is closing Sure Start centres, handing anti-sex-trafficking cash to the homophobic and transphobic Salvation Army rather than the well-respected Poppy Project, and undermining the Public Sector Equality Duty and womens' right to choose. It's no wonder Cameron has now resorted to telling women to 'calm down' - given his government's policies, it's nothing short of a miracle that women aren't hurling firebombs in the streets (then again, given his government's economic policy, they probably can't afford the petrol).

Watching the video of Cameron's performance, it's rather a pathetic sight, really - reminiscent of Cameron's fellow Tory (and misogynist) David Starkey losing control of his class on Jamie's Dream School after insulting a fat kid. But is it really any wonder that Cameron grows more and more aggressive and insufferable? After all, as we've documented here, there 's a steadily-increasing drip-drip-drip of voices reminding the electorate - and Cameron himself - that despite all the advantages he had going into the 2010 election, he still couldn't deliver the Tory landslide everybody predicted. For someone as arrogant and entitled as Dave, that has to eat away at him, reminding him again and again of his own inadequacies, his own failures, his own lack of fitness for the job.

So is it really any wonder that these days the only way Dave can feel like a Winner is by pretending to be Michael?

David Does Drugs

No, not an unsubstantiated allegation against our nation's shiny-faced Chief Prefect, but an apt description of the latest bit of propaganda that Team Tory have released to support their ideologically-driven austerity programme - the numbers of Incapacity Benefit claimants who are obese or addicted to drugs and/or alcohol. Unfortunately, there's a hidden agenda as obvious as the airbrushing on Cameron's campaign posters in this announcement, and - just like Dave's policy of clicking his true-blue shoes together and repeating 'there's no place like the private sector' - the attitudes revealed by the release of this information show how out of touch the Tory-led government is with the world the rest of us live in. Below, a You Didn't Win blogger looks in more detail at what this announcement tells us about the kind of people running our country, and how little they understand about the needs of the most vulnerable:

Last week, the Government announced that more than 80,000 Incapacity Benefit claimants were doing so because of reasons of obesity and addiction (to drugs or alcohol). If you've yet to click on that link, be aware that Reuters have chosen to illustrate the article with a photo of an obligatory headless fatteh. Isn't it funny that, with the rise of the Scourge of Humanity that is the Obesity Epidemic (TM), they focus on that instead of substance dependency? I say 'funny', I really mean 'lazy and disappointing'.

Anyway. It should be remembered that there are just under 2 million receiving Incapacity Benefit (IB) so this 81,000 really only makes up just under 5% of the total claimants. Putting this very small sub-section of claimants beside the total IB bill is probably not accidental - 'those horrible fatties and junkies, costing the public purse £7billion' - certainly fits with the Tory narrative of all these people who could be out at work, contributing to society but instead choosing to leech instead. It's like they write their statements to fulfil Daily Mail wet dreams...

At this point, I'd like to point you to an excellent piece by Vicky Allen in yesterday's Sunday Herald. It's behind a registration wall - free to sign up, and if you uncheck the right boxes, you won't get a heap of spam from them - but I understand that not everyone wants to do that, and probably not just for one article, though I really would recommend this piece highly. As it is, I may quote Ms. Allen a little, as she makes pretty much the same points as I want to, in places. (It's tempting to copy/paste the whole thing and leave it at that, but that's a bit unfair.)

The way the Government has been talking about these people, their conditions exist in a vacuum. The idea that there's probably an underlying cause for both incapacitating obesity and substance dependency seems to have eluded them. If someone has had a severe injury that impedes their mobility, they probably can't take exercise. If someone experienced abuse as a child, they may well self-medicate with drugs and/or alcohol. Not that these are the only causes for such conditions, but they are worthy examples. Some people also self-medicate with food. In this culture where certain foods are actively marketed as treats and rewards, it's not so outlandish as it may seem at first blush - there are also countless women who consciously or subconsiously gain weight as a response to sexual assault, in an attempt to make them less attractive and therefore less attackable. (I'm restraining myself from wandering into a desconstruction of the 'rape as a compliment' myth as it's wildly off topic.)

Some years ago, I read Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow by Peter Hoeg. One thing that has stayed with me for a very long time is the point that the author made about addiction. If you were wealthy and use drugs, you can afford to maintain your habit without too much risk. Paying for your next hit isn't too much trouble, and the drugs you buy as much less likely to be contaminated. Think about it; how often do the police release warnings about unsafe drugs? Not that often, to be fair, but it's usually to say that either a handful of addicts have died after taking heroin cut with something that's lethal, or that they've taken heroin much purer than they usually use (it's not been cut with talc or whatever) and have overdosed. Needle exchanges exist because one of the biggest risks to health was the use of non-sterile needles. The opiate heroin in and of itself, assuming all other factors are as safe as they can be, isn't that hazardous to health. Not that I'm suggesting that we should all go out and start using!

However, if one was a member of an elite group, such as, say the Bullingdon Club, where I wouldn't be surprised if cocaine, for example, was occasionally in circulation, one probably would have direct experience of casual drug use. And if one had been a member of the Bullingdon Club and was now on the front bench, one would probably assume that that meant that one now knows what one is talking about. Never mind that, if one knew that old Johnny had gotten a bit keen on the Charlie, Johnny (or his family) could easily afford the very best in private drug treatment.

So the Government's response to any criticism of unfairly focusing on this very small group has been of the 'we want to help them to help themselves' variety. Supporting them out of their addiction and into work. To quote Chris Grayling "help them back into work, even if that work is different to what they did previously." (Today, BBC Radio 4, 21st April) Reading the subtext; they Government just want them off the benefits, no matter what kind of employment they find themselves in, no matter how inappropriate. And we're back to the culture of forcing people in to jobs they don't want to do (or can't really do) because it's the only job available. Given that ex-users can be vulnerable to relapse in times of stress, is that even going to work in the long term? (How illuminating to read that addiction is specifically not covered by the Equality Act 2010) Would the £580million not be better spent supporting people through dealing with the underlying causes that led to them using and trying to make it much less likely that people will relapse, instead of merely preparing them for employment?

Look at the Bad Thing

 I've always thought one of the best lines in the better-than-expected adaptation of Alan Moore's V for Vendetta occurs in the scene where a news  report on the TV channel which serves as the propaganda arm of the dystopian England where the story is set refers to V's speech on television encouraging people to rise up against their oppressors as 'a message of hate'.

It's a good choice of language because it captures the way contemporary media propaganda reduces complex issues down to simple emotional, goodies and baddies pap. This You Didn't Win blogger used to work in a bookshop, and we had a similarly goo-goo-doll politics book on our shelves about radical Islam, called Because They Hate, which argued that Islamic terrorism doesn't occur because of, say, the situation in Gaza, the stifiling of more traditional dissent in Wahabist countries, poverty or anything like that - it occurs because Muslims are nasty, nasty men.

This retreat to the language of the nursery is always a good way of identifying when the meeja are trying to sell you a line. It shows that the authorities are unable to convince using rational argument or by pointing out the genuinely deleterious effects a thing will have, and so they are reduced to pointing at the bad thing, then waving their arms and saying 'oooooh, spooky spooky bad thing, spooky spooky bad thing' over and over until hopefully people start to be scared of it.

The March 26th March for the Alternative was a good example of the 'spooky spooky bad thing' school of reporting. Half a million people came together to object, peacefully, to the Britain-breaking agenda which Cameron and the Tories are implementing, despite having no mandate, but because people protesting peacefully and with dignity is not very telegenic and doesn't support the status quo, the media chose to focus again and again on a few examples of violence from a group of 'anarchists'. And, with their close-ups, overhead shots and dramatic camera angles they could make it look really scary.

I walked down Oxford Street just after the banks and rich stores had had their windows smashed. It looked no worse than what I've seen at North East bus stops on a Saturday morning. It didn't look threatening or terrifying; it looked pathetic really, in the way that vandalism often does. And I was in Oxford Circus when the placard fire that looked like such an inferno in the overhead shots shown on TV happened, and again, at ground level, up close, it, too, seemed underwhelming. It looked like an act not so much of violence but despair.

But to the media, the violence had to be hyped up, and so papers and reports were full of pictures of scary masked anarchists and sensational stories about 'lightbulbs filled with ammonia' and 'fireworks filled with coins' being hurled at the police. Spooky. Spooky. Look at the bad bad thing.

So when I read reports like those emerging from Stokes Croft today, telling us with a straight face that police turned up mob-handed to arrest 'a number of people they said were "a real threat to the local community"' and also accuse those people of 'harbouring petrol bombs', and then a crowd of 300 people turned up to protect these ne'er-do-wells, I wonder.

Hundreds of people do not try to impede the police when they're after people who threaten their community. That kind of thing only happens when the crowd in an area sees those targeted as members of their community, and thus regards the police as a threat.

Behind this scary riot story it seems there's another story entirely - a story about a bohemian but highly-cohesive community trying to resist the opening of a Tesco Express store foisted on them by Terry Leahy's retail behemoth and the local council. This is a story about the 'Big Society', surely? This is a story about Cameron's sacred promise to let locals be more involved in planning decisions than councils, right?

Well, no. Because for Cameron's Tories locals should only be empowered when they're the right kind of locals. And the Big Society, evidently, is always going to lose out to Big Business where Citizen Dave is concerned. But is that any wonder, when access to Dave's inner circle, the Leader's Group, costs £50,000? Do you know many Community Associations with that kind of spare cash? Of course not. But people in the corporate world do.

Dig deeper into this story, and it reveals the hypocrisy and dishonesty of our Tory overlords, prepared to send armed police in droves to attack people standing up for the very same thing the Tories claim to believe in. But we can't have that, can we? So don't dig. Don't question. Don't think about why 300 people might turn out to protect some 'petrol bombers' from the police, or why we live in a country where riot squads are being sent in to deal with people who protest against Tesco.

Instead, look at the shouty crowds! The flaming cars! Look, look, a police car being attacked! They had saws! They had shields! They were ripping up cobbles I tell you! Look! Look! At the spooky spooky bad thing! And be frightened!

I'm not frightened. Not of protesters. Not of people trying to defend their community from politicised policing. But I am frightened that our police are being used to quell dissent. I am frightened that police were champing at the bit to kettle peaceful protesters during the March for the Alternative. And I'm frightened that a media which should be challenging these actions is enabling them and repeating the police line unquestioningly.

The actions taken by police in Stokes Croft today, and their uncritical reporting by the media, help to feed the arrogance of the Tories who didn't win the 2010 election, but now seek to use their brief time in power to push through as much of their repugnant ideology as they can. That arrogance needs to be challenged. And that's why, this May 6th, the Tories' arrogance must be challenged by reminding them that they didn't win.

Retail to the rescue...or not?

As well as crowing about 'winning' the election, David Cameron occassionally likes to imitate the real grown-up politicians he's seen by announcing what he calls 'policies'. Unfortunately these policies are less carefully thought-out and workable point-by-point solutions to the problems he identifies in politics so much as shallow wish-fulfilment. Perhaps the definitive Cameron policy is his vision of 'the Big Society', which essentially boils down to a heartfelt sight that gosh, chaps, wouldn't it be spiffing if people were just a little bit nicer to one another? and pretends that this is an effective basis for running a welfare state in 21st century Britain. Another of Cameron's flagship brainfarts ideas is that we can gut the public sector needed to stop society tumbling into a Hobbesian nightmare of all-against-all and this will not be a problem because the private sector will rush into the void, create jobs for all the newly-unemployed and run everything super-efficiently - because, as anyone who's spent three hours on the phone to their mobile company to ask why their brand new Blackberry only works if they lean out of a window in their knickers can tell you, the private sector is an absolute paradigm of efficiency.

The following piece by one of our You Didn't Win bloggers looks in more detail at the flaws in Cameron's 'Tesco will save us all' utopia:

The recently released consumer spending figures serve to confirm what most of us already know.

In retail terms, spending is down - the biggest drop of like-for-like (LFL) since records began 16 years ago. Various excuses have been trundled out; the weather, that Easter's much later this year. But anyone who's worked in retail management will likely know that comparing figures isn't as simple as 'on March 1st last year, we made X money; on March 1st this year we made Y.' More often than not, March 1st falls on a different day from one year to the next (actually; every year it's different). A Friday's takings will differ to a Saturday's and a Sunday's. Mondays are often quiet, though most returns come back that day.

(If I may digress, I'm concerned by the creep of retail opening hours. I'm old enough to remember when most shops were shut by 5.30pm. Supermarkets used to close about 7pm. Now, I have heard someone complain that where I currently work opens too late in the morning [8.30am] and that our closing time of 6.30pm is too early. The big supermarkets and chains do have a lot to answer for - a few years ago Debenhams too the decision to open on New Year's Day. As I understand it, the staff were offered triple time and no-one had to work it if they didn't want to. What would happen if the entire staff of one store refused? Would the store stay closed? Probably not. Working elsewhere in a shopping mall that hosted a Debenhams, it was a worrying precedent. There will likely come a point at which people expect retail outlets of all sorts to stay open to their convenience without considering the human cost, never mind the costs to small, independent businesses. At least extending opening hours will create jobs, assuming people can afford to work part-time night shifts for Tesco and Asda Wal-Mart.)

But if people aren't spending money, how many jobs will really be created, even in the big food retailers?

Running a retail business, there are two main costs that you can exert influence over; money spent on buying in stock to sell and payroll. Given that you'll lose customers if you don't have the item they're looking for, it would be foolhardy to cut stock levels too much. So that leaves the staff. There are few full-time (35 hours/week and above) positions in retail - usually management and upwards. A part-time employee may only have a 4 hour contract, even if they regularly work a 20 hour week. A reduction in hours as punishment for some transgression is not unheard of - not the most thoughtful response to a situation, but it happens. If you're already on the knife edge, one shift of 4 hours less can be the difference between being able to manage for another month and getting behind on the rent, or not being able to buy food. Even if you have a lovely, even-tempered boss who would never do such a thing as punishment, the possibility of a reduction of hours during quiet periods (such as between Christmas and Easter) is ever-present. It all depends on the nebulous phrase "the needs of the business". So retail staff are often students, or people who need the flexibility to do something else. It doesn't require much qualification, just the ability to be endlessly patient with rude, unthinking people who are entirely self-absorbed and seem to think that if you're working in a shop, you might not actually qualify as a human being, with the benefits and privileges that brings. For example, the woman who approached the counter on her phone (to her Dad, as it turned out) and continued her conversation without acknowledging my existence. She did, however, apologise to her Dad for interrupting the conversation when I asked her if she needed a bag and to tell her how much she was to pay.

There's little going for a retail career - the pay is usually the legal minimum ('we'd pay you less, but we can't!'), the weekend generally doesn't exist in the 'heyhey, Friday night!' sense, and some people make assumptions about you, allowing them to be fantastically rude because you're not doing a Proper Job. It may come as a surprise, but I fully support Charlie Brooker's suggestion that retail staff be encouraged to give as good as they get.

All this said, retail makes up the largest employer in the private sector, the private sector that is key to the current government's plans. The main idea is that, as public sector jobs are cut, the private sector will take up the slack and employ the newly unemployed. Some of them probably will. Though it probably will be quite a pay cut for those new employees - as I mentioned, retail usually attracts the minimum wage or just above - and there generally isn't so much in the way of pension schemes, probably because staff turnover can be so high as to make it unworkable. People in the public sector now, if they are just managing to make ends meet, will quite possibly go under if they are forced into a part-time retail job. And forced they will be, if they don't want the Job Centre to cut off their benefits.

But the minimum wage is to increase in October. That should make it all better, right? (I need to check back on this, but wasn't one of the Tory manifesto points abolishing the age discrimination in minimum wage levels?)

For how many small businesses will this be the final straw? If someone has already cut their staffing levels to the barest minimum required to keep their shop open, will they have any realistic alternative to either letting go of staff or closing altogether? How many will reconsider their opening hours (say, closing Monday all day and reducing the hours to 10am - 5pm), leading to a downward spiral of everyone going to Tesco and complaining that all the small shops have closed? Just today, a kindly visitor to my place of employment asked if I knew that Safeway (really, that's what he said - maybe he meant Morrison's.) were selling the same item about 60p cheaper. Where I work is a stand-alone independent shop. We cannot sell that item 60p cheaper because it probably costs us that to buy it in and while we're not after massive profit, my employers like to be able to pay the electricity bill and their staff wages; also the tax bill. Sainsbury's (or whoever he meant, assuming he didn't step through a time warp and really mean Safeway's and the price they charged for something 5 years ago) can afford to charge less for their stock because of economies of scale. Another important economic concept to keep in mind is the race to the bottom. If everyone takes this attitude, we'll all be shopping in Asda, because they and the other big supermarkets will be all that remain. At least we'll all be able to get a staff discount.

And one last thought on the endless growth that capitalism is predicated on; once any given company has that holy grail of 100% of market share, what would happen?