Declining political party membership.

Patrick O'Flynn, writing in the Daily Express of 16th June reports that one of his informants claims that the membership of the Conservative Party has fallen from 296000 when Cameron became leader to 160000 today. Just thought that might cheer us up a bit. Anybody want to take a wager that sometime towards the end of next year the Tories might dump Cameron just like they did the sainted Margaret? And guess who is positioning himself to take over? St. George of the Treasury?

Make Trident, not soldiers, redundant

Today more redundancy notices are being issued to our soldiers whilst Cameron, and particularly the odious Osborne, witter on about our 'brave troops'. Elsewhere there are reports of our soldiers contracting the WWI disease of trenchfoot - put down to the use of too much synthetic material presumably because it is cheap. But the Tory Party is still hell bent on spending tens of billions of pounds on a replacement for Trident. How wrong & fatuous is it possible to be and how long are the LibDems going to put up with being tarred by this idiocy? The strategic concept that eventually became Trident was conceived in the military & political environment of the 1950's.It worked well until, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was clearly past its use by date. Whatever world view of 'threats' to UK security you now take this particular weapon system has no value (unless you include war with the USA as an option ! !). But it gets worse. Cyber war is the new horror. Remember the Stuxnet virus? In 2010, when it became known, some of us were puzzled that it appeared to specifically target the Siemens Simatic logic controller. Siemens do not used Windows, or any other public operating system. It seemed likely that this was more than a typical hackers toy. Now we know. Thanks to some brilliant investigative reporting it originated within US Govt agencies in order to specifically disrupt the Iranian nuclear programme. You might think that was legitimate & a good idea & a lot less likely to cause loss of life than an Israeli air attack. You might be right. But the truly scary bit is that it was apparently quite easy for it to escape into the wider world.