LONDONERS: if you don’t vote for Ken Livingstone then Boris Johnson will win the London mayoral election this Thursday. And it’s as simple as that.

And here’s a few reasons why that is a bad thing.

Today’s Observer reports that David Cameron gave a speech this week about the NHS. This is what he said:

“We’re not reforming the NHS because it’s easy. Let alone popular. We’re doing it because it is right and necessary. In fact, it is more than that. It is unavoidable and it is urgent.” He said he was prepared to “take a hit” in terms of popularity for the sake of health reforms that were right.

The medical profession and most of the public both seem fairly clear that the NHS changes (not reforms) are in fact a bad idea. So what is going on in Cameron’s head? This is not a rhetorical question. I’m genuinely curious: what does he think is happening here? Does he believe he is genuinely doing good? Or is he semi-openly selling off the NHS to a variety of private companies in order to be able to sit on a giant pile of money and giggle for the rest of his life?

Well, it’s possible that Cameron is actually a Bond villain and is deliberately doing something evil knowing it’s evil to further his own ends. But Bond villains are rare on the ground – and even the actual Bond villains tend to justify their action to themselves. In fact, more or less everyone justifies themselves: we’re built to rationalise what we believe so that we can keep an image of ourselves as being a good person.

So I’m assuming that Cameron has successfully justified his actions to himself over the last year or so using a variety of rationalisations: he has no choice; dissenters will come to realise he’s actually doing good in the long run; the country really is full of idle people who just want to lie around watching TV while the state feeds them peeled grapes wrapped in £10 notes. And now I think that, in his head, Cameron has reacted to the widespread condemnation of the NHS changes by casting himself as a version of that well-known movie hero, The Man Who Will Do What He Knows Is Right No Matter What Anyone Else Says.

It’s a popular trope. The maverick cop who will do whatever it takes to bring the bad guy down; the determined investigator who’s threatened and beaten up but still solves the case; the plucky underdog who is the only person to realise that the conspiracy is real. This is the image Cameron seems to want to portray at this  point, and I hope people don’t fall for it. Though I’m not hopeful, given that the public seem to have bought his earlier persona of The Man Who Will Root Out Benefit Scroungers And Show Them The Error Of Their Ways By Taking Away Everyone Else’s Benefits Too (just like those self-righeous teachers who would give everyone detention because they thought that one student cheated on a test).

Of course, the two options – Bond villain and plucky maverick – aren’t necessarily contradictory, because we are so very good at rationalising. Maybe in Cameron’s head he’s managing to juggle both of them, never quite becoming aware of the disconnect. He wouldn’t be the first. The trouble is, while he’s in the middle of this confused balancing act, we’re going to lose our National Health Service, and we’ve already lost our welfare state.

Because the trouble with the maverick persona is that for every maverick cop, doctor or lawyer who turns out to have been right all along, there are a hundred who turn out to have been confused, stubborn and wrong all along. They just don’t get as many movie roles. Being the boring old non-maverick who actually listens to other people’s criticisms and takes them on board: there’s a role Cameron could afford to take on.

When I started this blog, twelve months ago, I was unsure as to whether anyone would read it. The political climate seemed right for a hate-filled, Socialist blog…but was it ready for my hate-filled, Socialist blog? And yet we have had 15,176 all-time views, the most in a single day being a stunning 802. Although most of Choler’s traffic comes from the major cities in England we have had readers across the UK and as far afield as Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Jamaica, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, the Czech Republic, Germany, Luxembourg, France, South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Morocco, Egypt, India, South Korea, Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Uruguay, Turkey, and across the mighty US of A (my second most popular ‘market’). Cholerics are school students, retired people, teachers, barristers and the unemployed. They like football and [American] football, the poetry of John Donne, the films of Quentin Tarantino and Ska music. They also, of course, like none of these.

I had a few vague ideas about whom I intended to write for from the beginning. My first, entirely non-fictional potential reader was someone I shall call Ms K. Ms K. has a good heart and a fine social conscience, but little political experience. She voted Lib-Dem at the last election and Choler exists to make sure that this doesn’t happen again. Secondly we have Ms L. She is unquestionably a Socialist but new to the struggle; she is full of passion, idealism, lager, principle and lager. Choler exists to focus Ms L’s passion and to direct her towards various campaigns and campaign groups. And very lastly we have Mr A. Mr A was active in the movement decades ago, but burnt out from too much activism, and too few fresh vegetables. He tends towards cynicism, but recognises that the recent crisis (or should that be crises) of Capitalism has created the potential for a new revolutionary epoch. Choler exists to get him back into the struggle.

It took a while for Choler to develop its house style, and for me to find my voice. There are many fine left-wing blogs out there in the tubes (and some are listed to the right), but I have found several to be rather wordy, worthy and rather angled towards a more politically experienced readership. There is really no point in my producing another blog like these, and Choler is unashamedly tabloid in its style. We are, most of us, time poor and if I can get a complicated message across simply and briefly (using plenty of links, photographs and bad jokes) then I shall do.

The notion that Choler is a hate-filled, Victorian, tory Socialist who dictates his pieces of bile to a long-suffering scribe; who then edits them for a 21st century audience, is one which emerged in the early days of the blog and, I must admit, amuses me greatly. It’s probably a sign of my perilous mental state that I know absolutely everything about Choler – from his favorite drink (a pint of port, naturally) to his favorite sporting team (Surrey County Cricket Club). Whether any of the rest of you is as fond of the appalling old goat as I am, is quite another matter!

Guest pieces have proved to be extremely popular in our first year, and my most popular post is Fat, Stale and Unprofitable? by the Guardian, f-word and Huffington Post-syndicated blogger Kate Harrad, which has been read 1,285 times. Less popular was my Reviews & Recommendations, page which disappeared in a purge and has never been seen again. My polls have also received a mixed response, with the most popular one asking: Who is the MOST likely to lose power by the end of the year? I received 99 votes, and the results were as follows.

1. Colonel Gaddafi in Libya. (55.56%, 55 Votes)
2. Silvio Berlusconi in Italy. (19.19%, 19 Votes)
3. Cameron/Clegg in the UK. (18.18%, 18 Votes)
4. Sheikh Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa in Bahrain. (7.07%, 7 Votes)

So well done there, clever readers, your first and second choices have gone and we can hope that the other two/three go in 2012.

The most popular post written by yours truly was a historically based piece wot I wrote called A New, New Poor Law. A proposal…, with 181 views. And the site received a lot of attention during the N30 strike action and the Royal Wedding. In the near future I’m hoping that a series of articles on ‘political correctness’ that I have planned, with Harpy and Kate Harrad, will also prove both provocative and interesting.

To close I’d just like to say thank you to each and every one of you for your support in our first year; our virtual pages remain open to guest articles, and you can keep up with new posts by befriending Choler on facebook. And I hope that you will join us for what I hope will be an eventful, and yellow bile-filled, second one!

Now we might say disabled people, or people with disabilities. However ConDem Nation has made it quite clear what they call people like my filthy scribe‘s brother [paralysed from the chest down since the bloody fool fell asleep whilst riding his motorcycle]: they call them lying scroungers, and they are determined that they take up their mats and pay for capitalism crises.

Currently Mr G receives the DLA (the Disability Living Allowance) which is designed to help people with the extra costs resulting from their disability. But under ConDem Nation’s proposed Welfare Reform Bill (which has been slithering its way through the House of Lords) this will be replaced with a Personal Independence Payment (PIP). This change is not merely one of terminology though, and all 3,200,000 people now receiving the DLA, both those in work and out of work, will be reassessed. I imagine that Mr G’s reassessment will consist of someone poking him with a stick and asking him whether that pesky inch of spinal column has miraculously grown back! Perhaps you think that I might be exaggerating? How about this anecdote from one my scribes acquaintances (the wretch has no friends as such)…the person in question, who has significant mobility challenges, was summoned to a reassessment and with great difficulty made it across London. There they were asked what did they like to do in their spare time, ‘watch television’ they replied. There benefits were, of course, cut. The reasoning being that if they could make it to the assessment their disability couldn’t prevent them from going to work, and if they could watch a television then they could use a computer monitor. Speaking personally if I wanted to cut the number of scroungers using mobility issues as their feeble excuse to rob honest, Daily Mail-reading tax payers I would hold the assessments up several flights of steep stairs…if they couldn’t get to the top I would cut their benefit for failure to present themselves for the reassessment, and if they made it to the top I’d cut their benefit due to their ability to climb stairs. The blind and partially sighted could be sent their notification of reassessment using an extremely small and difficult to read typeface with similar results. Even without my helpful suggestions it has been estimated that some 500,000 people will lose out if/when the DLA is replaced by the PIP, and many times this number will be affected. And if you think reassessment is going to be difficult for people like Mr G who can point (with difficulty) to his disability, then imagine how difficult this process will be for people with invisible disabilities such as mental health challenges.

Institutional hostility towards people with disabilities within the Conservative Party is evidenced by the recent case of the Hull city council Conservative leader John Fareham who was quite comfortable to attack his political opponents as ‘retards’. And another Conservative councillor, Ollie Fitcroft, has left his party due to ’…the government’s endless attacks on disabled people and their right to independence and full equality’. The government has faced some opposition in the House of Lords and lost three votes, but an amendment by 11-time Paralympic gold medal-winner Baroness Grey-Thompson which would have delayed the introduction of PIPs until further testing was carried out was defeated by 16 votes. She had argued that ‘There needs to be careful scrutiny of who will be affected by these changes. For me there’s a real concern about whether it could lead to a deterioration of people’s health’. The government’s persuasive counter argument, put eloquently by Lord Freud, was that this would cost £1.4bn. Lady Grey-Thompson tried to introduce another amendment to the Welfare Reform Bill, in which she argued reports from doctors should be a mandatory part of the PIP assessment process, but this was withdrawn without a vote. After all, what do doctors know about disability compared to former advertising executives like the current Minister for the Disabled, Maria Miller?

[The above is Maria Miller, the Minister for the Disabled. I am, currently, at a lost as to what actually qualifies her for this post.]

As a follow-up to my Shit Tories Say blog post, Choler casts his port and nicotine-stained eyes over the pond to see what the Republicans have been saying recently. Starting with Prick Sanitorium: 

I believe and I think that the right approach is to accept this horribly created, in the sense of rape, but nevertheless, in a very broken way, a gift of human life, and accept what God is giving to you. As you know, in lots of different aspects of our life we have horrible things happening. I can’t think of anything more horrible, but nevertheless we have to make the best out of a bad situation. And that is making the best of a bad situation. Rick Santorum explaining why he would advise one of his daughters not to have an abortion, even in the case of them haven been raped.

I pay all the taxes that are legally required and not a dollar more. I don’t think you want someone as the candidate for president who pays more taxes than he owes. Mitt Romney justifying the fact that he paid a tax rate of just 13.9% in 2010 and an expected rate of 15.4% in 2011, on an income of $42,500,000 over those two years.

As your bishop, my concern is with the child. Mitt Romney, as a Mormon stake president for Boston. told a congregant (in 1990) who already had five children that she must not abort her sixth pregnancy even though doctors warned a pelvic blood clot meant giving birth might kill her and the infant.

If the court makes a fundamentally wrong decision, the president can in fact ignore it. Newt Gingrich saying that he would ignore the US Supreme Court if he disagreed with it. With particular reference to the granting of limited legal rights to terrorism suspects, and the Roe vs Wade verdict of 1973, which legalised abortion.

I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money… Rick Santorum, although he later suggested that he hadn’t used the word black, and if he had then he hadn’t meant to! 

Bonjour, je m’appelle Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney when he was chief executive of the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City, in the US state of Utah. He has been criticised for speaking French in a Newt Gingrich campaign ad - the speaking of French being, obviously, a sign of woolly minded liberalism.

I would not put invasion on the table, but would put clearly there that we would use air strikes to degrade those facilities unless they open them up for inspectors. Rick Santorum, wouldn’t invade Iran to stop their nuclear program…but would bomb them. He is probably another French-speaking liberal at heart.

I’m prepared, if the NAACP [the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] invites me, I’ll go to their convention and talk about why the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps. Newt Gingrich, who may or may not speak French, implying once again that all African-Americans are on benefits…despite the fact that the majority of Americans receiving food stamps are white.

There’s a current internet meme which runs ‘shit X says to Y’, and so I thought I’d take a quick look at the shit that the Tories have been saying (and doing) to us over the past week or so. And should you discover any True Blue pearls of wisdom you’d like to share with us, then please do so in the comments or pop over to Choler’s facebook page and post them there.

We start with our rubbery Prime Minister:

Open markets and free enterprise are the best imaginable force for improving human wealth and happiness. David Cameron.

…where they work properly, open markets and free enterprise can actually promote morality. David Cameron.

I would like to be one of the first to offer tangible support to the concept, by offering up to £5million towards the construction costs of a new, effective and flexible royal yacht. Controversial Conservative peer Lord Ashcroft (he must read Choler).

Teaching a child at the age of seven to apply a condom on a banana is almost saying: ‘Now go and try this for yourself’. Nadine Dorries MP, who has dropped her bill to get schoolgirls to attend lessons on sexual abstinence.

The only time that I use the state is when my driver drives on public roads  from the City to my country estate. I don’t like it, but I can’t help it. An un-named financier, said to be worth £500,000,000, quoted in the Daily Telegraph.

Many colleagues are worried that it would fundamentally affect how marriage between a man and woman has historically been viewed in this country…”Gay marriage is a debate we don’t need to have at this stage. It is not an issue people are hammering us on the doorstep to do something about…It is important that there is a reasoned debate around how we view marriage rather than about homosexual rights. It may open up old wounds and put people into the trenches; no one wants that. David Burrowes Conservative MP.

15 hours in council today, very hard-hitting day and the usual collection of  retards in the public gallery spoiling it for real people. John Fareham, Conservative group leader at Hull City Council.

And here are some blasts from the past as I take a look at Shit Tories Have Said To Us In The Past (taken from the New Statesman).

People are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture. Margaret Thatcher.

One shark turned to the other to say he was fed up chasing tuna and the other said, ‘Why don’t we go to Morecambe Bay and get some Chinese?” Ann Winterton Conservative MP, making a joke about the deaths of Chinese cockle pickers, at a dinner party in Whitehall in February 2004.

There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. Margaret Thatcher.

He’s a good, brave and honourable soldier. Conservative minister Norman Lamont on ex-Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

If gay marriage was OK … then I saw no reason in principle why a union should not be consecrated between three men, as well as two men; or indeed three men and a dog. Boris Johnson.

The only solution is to kill 600 people in one night. Let the UN and Bill Clinton and everyone else make a scene – and it is over for 20 years. Alan Clark MP, on how to deal with the IRA.

My good friends, this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. And now I recommend you to go home and sleep quietly in your beds. Neville Chamberlain.

I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. Winston Churchill.

We had to fight the enemy without in the Falklands. We always have to be aware of the enemy within, which is much more difficult to fight and more dangerous to liberty. Margaret Thatcher on the miners, CND and anyone who opposed her.

Hang Mandela! Federation of Conservative Students during the 1980s.

And, to conclude, here’s some Shit Tories Do…

Perhaps you may have wondered what happened to Aidan Burley, the Conservative MP for Cannock Chase, who was fired as a ministerial aide in December after he allegedly hired an SS costume and attended a Nazi-themed stag party? Herr Burley is leading the parliamentary council of the anti-union Trade Union Reform Campaign which seeks to attack trade union reps facility time, union meetings in public buildings and government employers subtracting union dues from pay packets. Joining Obersturmführer Burley in this noble cause is the former Defence Secretary Liam Fox, who resigned from his ministerial post last October due to his links with the lobbyist Adam Werritty and Mark Clarke, a director of the Young Briton’s Foundation. The YBF is a moderate Conservative student/educational group that doesn’t make trips to the USA to fire assault rifles, nor does it describe itself as a ‘Conservative madrassa’, and it would never describe the NHS as the biggest waste of money in the UK. And of course it doesn’t rubbish climate change or suggest that ‘waterboarding’ has a place in interrogation.

And you though the likes of Cameron and Osborne were right wing…

However we may need to rapidly push forward with the fund-raising effort; given the news that the Lloyds banking group are to cut 700 jobs, 70,000 Scottish public-sector jobs could be lost over the next 5 years, a further 4,200 MoD jobs are going, Premier Foods are to cut 600 jobs, Past Times are going into administration threatening the group’s remaining 500 jobs, RBS are to cut another 3,500 jobs and Little Chef (beloved of our royal family, I’m sure) are to shed 500 jobs. BLIMEY! Reading that little lot anyone would think that our economy was barely afloat, and that Gove’s suggestion was about as insensitive and badly timed as could be imagined…even from a Tory.

The Guardian reported that Israeli scientist Chaim Halevi (shown below with his son Yakir) was assassinated a week ago. The deputy head of Israel’s uranium enrichment facility at Dimona, was in his car on his way to work when he was blown up by a magnetic bomb attached to his car door. He was 32 and married with a young son. Since 2010, three other Israeli nuclear scientists have been killed in similar circumstances, including Eitan Yadin, a 35-year-old electronics expert shot dead outside his daughter’s nursery in Tel Aviv last July. Although no one has claimed responsibility for these murders, the press and International Community strongly suspects Iran’s involvement and Republican nomination candidate Rick Santorum has been quoted as strongly condemning the act.

Except, of course, I made all that up. The nuclear scientist shown above was Iranian, and his killers are widely assumed to be Israeli agents…and that makes it alright. After all the Iranian regime is appalling and the thought that they might possess a nuclear weapon scares many people of all political colours. And this murder has certainly cheered many, as the Guardian article reports:

“On occasion, scientists working on the nuclear programme in Iran turn up dead,” bragged the Republican nomination candidate Rick Santorum in October. “I think that’s a wonderful thing, candidly.” On the day of Roshan’s death, Israel’s military spokesman, Brigadier General Yoav Mordechai, announced on Facebook: “I don’t know who settled the score with the Iranian scientist, but I certainly am not shedding a tear” – a sentiment echoed by the historian Michael Burleigh in the Daily Telegraph: “I shall not shed any tears whenever one of these scientists encounters the unforgiving men on motorbikes.”

So we should shed no tears for the wonderful killings then; Iran’s policies have placed it beyond the pale. But what about those nations with nuclear weapons? Are the governments of Britain, China, France, India, Pakistan, Russia, the United States, North Korea and (most probably) Israel beyond criticism! I trust none of these countries to hold such weapons, and I have no hesitation in condemning the killing of Iranian scientists as state-sponsored terrorism and murder. To oppose the terrorism of organisations such as al-Qaeda and yet allow that of Mossad to pass unopposed is the surest way to fuel political violence around the world.

And it isn’t only Israel carrying out such acts. The Guardian article quoted above also notes the US Government’s use of terror tactics against its own subjects (amongst others):

Take Anwar al-Awlaki, an Islamist preacher, al-Qaida supporter – and US citizen. On 30 September 2011, a CIA drone killed Awlaki and another US citizen, Samir Khan. Two weeks later, another CIA-led drone attack killed Awlaki’s 21-year-old son, Abdul-Rahman. Neither father nor son were ever indicted, let alone tried or convicted, for committing a crime. Both US citizens were assassinated by the US government in violation of the Fifth Amendment (“No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law”).

An investigation by Reuters last October noted how, under the Obama administration, US citizens accused of involvement in terrorism can now be “placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions … There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel … Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.”

And talking of American crimes helping to inspire those forces it professes to oppose:

Of course this policy was never implemented, but the fact that it was even mooted at the highest level is surely proof positive of the insane nature of the 1980s Conservative Governments. I wonder what further revelations will be revealed as the 30 year rule opens up more of Thatcherism’s dark secrets held in the National Archives? A plan to nuke Scotland perhaps? Or the development of a new strain of anthrax that would target miners or CND members (the ‘enemy within‘)?

* My younger readers may not have heard of Keith Joseph (whom I had the great misfortune of meeting once…but that’s a tale for which the world is not yet ready)…he looked like a Nazi war criminal, but in real life he wasn’t that charming. Sir Keith made Thatcher look like a bleeding heart liberal and said:

‘We need inequality to eliminate poverty’. And,

‘It needs to be said that the poor are poor because they don’t have enough money’.

Good Luck Chums! Your 15 questions start below: