And Another Thing…

Thats definitely true, I was surprised to see it, particularly after Clegg had grabbed the headlines after PMQs. I suspect Cameron is cosying up to Clegg, firstly to share the glory and secondly in the case of the need of a coalition government.

But ultimately, its way beside the point. They’re both right on this, and I’m just not sure the government realise how wrong they are on this unfortunately.

Sometimes, Mr Harris, you display the same gutter instincts as so many of your fellow Labour tribalists.

Clegg obtained Cameron’s support in a campaign to achieve justice for Gurka ex-sevicemen.

Many Labour MPs joined the Lib Dems & Conservatives in voting for last night’s motion. Shame you were in the no lobby.

As there are only 63 Lib Dem MPs, Clegg could not win on his own, so it was only right that both opposition parties shared in the success.

Not every issue should be seen through your narrow political prism whereby party advantage is the only thing that matters. Your hapless and hopeless Prime Minister needs to learn that lesson too.

What’s more Cameron went stupid during his last (?) question when he suggested the simple solution of offering every commonwealth soldier and crown employee right of abode was the way to go. Shortly after that Liam Fox basically reneged on the whole deal suggesting that Gurkhas and others might simply get a few extra points when it comes to the immigration lottery. Or not. What would Jesus do? And how about the Tories?

Well I guess some Parliamentarians just care more for the Gurkhas than for your half baked opinion.
POINT OF ORDER Bolloks is spelt bollocks.

Well Joanna Lumley would have been in the picture.

The only people in any picture should have been Joanna Lumley plus those who’ve worked tirelessly for this and, of course, the Ghurkas.

Good on the LibDems for backing this and if Cameron gets a boost who cares.

I suspect Nick Clegg backed the motion because it was the honourable and just thing to do, if it cost him having to be photographed with Cameron I’ms sure he thought it was a price worth paying.

Try and understand Tom, this is not about party or petty politics or money.

This is about justice, the honour of the UK and fulfilling the debt we owe to loyal friends who have served the crown for over 200 years.

Stuff your friends and cosy up to those who would do the country harm seems to be the dear leaders motto.

Instead of criticising Cameron – who not only can look after himself, but congratulated Clegg yesterday – you should worry about the leadership of your own party.

Perhaps when you have recovered form drowning your sorrows, you would like to blog about how Labour can recover from this position.

Making cheap points about Cameron is easy. Tackling the issue of Brown’s leadership is the hard part that you and other Labour MPs need now to address.

“had this been a Conservative motion and a Conservative-led campaign, would Cameron have been pictured today with Joanna Lumley and Nick Clegg?”

It depends on whether or not the Conservatives see a mid-range advantage in capitalising on anti-Labour tactical voting and having the LDs offer a viable home to dissaffected Blairites.

Cheap comments Tom.

Labour have lost sight of what they are for ie to represent the people not just their party.

Your party is wrong over this just admit it or explain to me why you have let so many others into this county but not The Gurkhas.

Not sour grapes I hope. Anyway, before you blindly vote what the pager tells you today Tom, why don’t you watch that youtube video and reflect what a large section of your fellow Labour MPs feel about what Brown has done for their chances of re-election.

…and Mandy is on Today supporting Brown, cringe. Is that the last contractual appearance he has for being enobled?

Labour are wrong on this one, and it shows they still have not learned a dam thing about how the people of this country feel. The London Bubble has not bust at all and the Leader and his MP’s have no sodding idea of what real people think. Roll on election time.

And yes the Tories and the Lib Dem’s are making good on this who can blame them when Labour are so out of touch.

Tom, I think it may be worth putting in some practise at being a gracious loser.

In fairness he wouldn’t have won without Cameron’s support so it’s fair they share the limelight.

The bigger question is how Gordon managed to get himself into the situation in the first place and his cack-handed attempts to get out.

Better ‘Jonny come lately’ than Johnny never turning up at all? I’m assuming you will also be voting for the government in today’s expenses vote.

Governing party with working majority of 64 loses a vote on a LibDem motion by 21. Gets funnier every time I see it

Tom you should be focussed on your own party leader not the Oppositions.Get rid of Gordon before it’s toooooooooo late.Get someone in to limit the damage caused by Brown. The no.1 petition on the no.10 website demonstrates how the public feel about him.Don’t ignore the bleeding obvious.

Simple sums Tom..

The LibDems need Conservative MPs to vote with them to defeat labour.

I can see that, a child of 10 could in my day see that.

I know Labour have screwed the Education sistim but you were edukated before that.

Votes count… No Conservative votes: no defeet…

Credit where it’s due – Clegg has been on about this particular cause long before anyone else but receiving Cameron’s support surely isn’t a failure?

We’re lucky though that two of the three main parties saw fit to vote in support of a group of soldiers who have always been treated poorly by the British Army – your Labour colleagues with some degree of decency who voted against the government excepted of course.

That’s a bad one Tom. The ‘what a mug’ attitude, always watch for the short term advantage, is one reason why so many people despise politicans. Most viewers, I’d guess, would think, ‘great these guys can drop their differences when an important moral issue is at stake’. That might be naive, they’re letting themselves be manipulated perhaps, but that’s what they will have seen anyway. And, after all, this was about decency, something that most people instinctively prefer to believe in, however rarely they see it.

It’s Labour who look like the nasty party today. So, who’s the mug?

A cheap shot, Tom, and unworthy of you. It smacks of typical Labour spin – i.e. change the story to one that deflects the attention of the public from another Labour failure.

Spin – soooooo last year, darling……….

PS. My father had Gurkhas serving under him in WWII. Presented him with a ceremonial pair of Kukris. Finest fighting men he ever encountered he said.

Have no doubt, those who are prepared to lay down their lives for our country have an absolute right to settle here. We have trillions to throw at the banks, and then close our doors to the Gurkhas.

Shame on Brown.

Completely agree, Tom. If the Tories cared so much for the Gurkhas, why in 18 years in power did they not put in place the generous system we have now? All this was was a coordinated attempt to embarass the Gov. So coordinated that front-bench Tories were going round the tea rooms and bars on tuesday night offering peerages to Labour MPs they thought they might be able to poach afterwards.

Credit to them, though, they did a good job of it.

@Yorkshire Terrorist.

You might want to research why, in 1997 (incidentally, the year Labour came to power) the whole picture changed, re the Gurkhas, due to Hong Kong being ceded to China. THAT’S why the Tories did nothing in the 18 years – because the Gurkhas were happy with the HK arrangement.

Offering Peerages to Labour MPs – your source for that?

I agree with Tom and YT. It’s rank hypocrisy of the Tory party to suddenly become champions of the Gurkhas when they did nothing for them during their 18 years in power. As Tom pointed out in a previous post, the present government have done a lot more for the Gurkhas.

And then, just when it’s politically expedient to support the Gurkhas (a cynical move in order to demean Brown) suddenly they’re the Gurkhas’ best friends.

I suppose to be fair to Clegg, being a nicely brought up boy, he probably felt he couldn’t very well tell Cameron to s*d off once he’d muscled his way to the front with himself and Miss Lumley. But like you say Tom, if the boot had been on the other foot, Cameron & co wouldn’t have let Clegg anywhere in the frame for the photo op.

Yorkshire Terrorist

Of course, New Labour would never do anything like that, would they? Even with a leader who cannot keep the party political out of anything, and who has broken the essential safeguard of our democracy, Parliament as defence against the executive.

Shame on Brown. Shame on you as well.

Looking again at that photo of Cameron, Joannna Lumley and Clegg, Cameron has an odd look on his face. A sort of mixture of sheepishness and fear. Sheepish because he knows he’s been a hypocritical humbug and he’s trying to brazen it out. And the fear because he’s a bit scared of Joanna Lumley.

How small-minded of Clegg this was. Unable to make any comment without sneering at Cameron for coming late to the Gurkha cause. What hope for a united opposition to a failed government when the Lib-Dem leader is so ungracious?

perhaps Nick Clegg David Cameron!
like to share some stardust with each other.Lord knows Gordon could do with some.

And Tom please take note nobody likes a sore loser especially when in the eyes of many they deserved to lose.

“…Sometimes, Mr Harris, you display the same gutter instincts as so many of your fellow Labour tribalists….”

Sadly, I could not have put it better than ‘yet another David’

More shame on you, Tom.

Do you really think that your stance is calculated to make anyone think any better of your party?

Labour are just disgusting now.

Tom,
Clegg a mug? He’s the one with his pic splashed all over the MSM with Joanna Lumley and Cameron in a victory for the people. Doesn’t matter that DC is there as he needed him.

The image it gives to the public is party politics can be put aside for something that is morally right.

Brown blew this totally and then dug his hole deeper by saying the reason the Gurkas couldn’t all be allowed in was £1.5 Bn. Well if he’d said that a year or so ago it might’ve had some impact (although l doubt it) … but £1.5 Bn? When the public sees 10′s of Bn’s being given to the banks etc .. 1.5 Bn is meangingless especially when it involves a moral issue such as the Gurkhas.

Clegg a mug? … Brown would love to be that sort of mug!

@Nicky and YT. Rather than make yourselves look foolish, it might be best to check the facts before you post comments like these.

How the hell else would he have got the votes without Camerons support? They needed each other on this one. O, and also it happened to be the right thing to do!

Tom, granted you’ve just delivered a mea culpa (which, incidentally, is far more honest than the vapid ‘apology’ for everything which has ever happened in Iraq some would see you deliver) but ~*grabs by lapels*~ IT’S NOT THE BLEEDING POINT!!!

Much as it discombobulates me to say this, but the leader of the LibDems acted honourably in this case, and used the blesséd parliamentary system to his advantage. It’s not like conspiring to bring an end to a Government which brought in Thatcher, like.

No doubt whatsoever that Cameron acted to promote his party, but so what? That’s part ‘n parcel of parliamentary politics and was neither diametrically opposed to his previous positions as well as resulting in a good deed. I’d certainly approve of that over *blocking* a good deed in order to promote one’s party.

Nick Clegg did the decent thing by recognising that the Tories joined the Lib Dems in voting for an issue in a decent way.

A pity some Labour MPs still can’t recognise the decent thing to do.

You’re probably actually right on here, but rather than having a go at Cameron for jumping on a very popular wagon, or Clegg’s political skills (for having to get the Tories help to achieve something?) you should be looking at the arse your party is making of itself and this country.

This is supposed to be a DEMOCRACY. There is virtually no-one in the entire freaking country apart from 220 labour MPs who think the Gurkhas should not be allowed to stay. So they should be allowed to stay. That simple.

Z.

Dear Tom,

Obviously you’re in the same orbit around the sun as your beloved leader i.e. not on planet Earth.

A complete NuLab cock-up, with the loyalists trying to blame somebody else.

It is thirty years since the Tory scum gained control of the UK. Unfortunately all that is spread before us is more of the same.

Tom, have a good time as Shadow Scottish Secretary (in the 150 PLP) from June 2010

Surely if the government had been in favour of the Gurkhas staying, the press and the opposition parties would have been against it, whatever anyones moral stance on it, this is all about bringing the government down. nothing more.

When I saw that picture I thought ‘Hello, are they making a new version of ‘The Avengers’ with Lumley once again playing ‘Purdey’, Clegg as ‘Steed’, and Cameron as a right Gareth Hunt ( Cockney rhyming slang ).

I can think of bigger mugs. Anyone still supporting Labour, for example.

This is not about Nick or David or Joanna. Or if it is, it shouldn’t be.

This is about guys who fought for the country; who were prepared to DIE for the country and the fact that we might just have the decency to let them LIVE in the country.

I don’t believe their £1.4 billion tag. It’s highly unlikely that it’s correct, given that every other figure the government has come out with recently has been laughed off the table by everyone… but even if it does cost that, we are supposed to be the 6th richest country in the world. We should find the money.

We might start by halving the number of people in the Commons and reducing the Upper House to 100. Then we could sell Chequers and all the estates that the senior cabinet ministers live in; reduce the royal family’s palaces to 1 in London (instead of the 5 they manage to live in). After that we could sell all the expensive wine that the government buys every month, and all the art work that adorns ministers’ offces. Then maybe we’d have enough money to treat these men, brave men, the way that the should be treated.

Brown is happy enough to hide behind the khaki when it suits him.

Shame on you Tom Harris. How blinkered can you be? Exactly who do you think will vote for you because of this disrespect to British heroes? Both this article and your shameful walk through the division lobby with the rest of your castrated colleagues are disgraceful acts of an ignorant, out of touch, and fag end Government.