ben sutcliffe

With big national debates brewing over policy, it’s not surprising that MPs and PPCs are getting stuck in to debates and it seems that some of the scandal and “old politics” is making its way down to constituent level too. A recent Newbury Liberal Democrat leaflet summarised Conservative health care policy with the quote:

“We’ve lived through this mistake for 60 years now… The reality is it hasn’t worked – it has made people iller…” — Top Conservative Dan Hannan on the NHS

and the bullet point “Privatisation of some existing NHS services”.

Firstly, let’s clear up who this “Top Conservative” is. Dan Hannan is a Conservative MEP and journalist, and whilst he’s the top-dog in South East England for the Conservative representation at the European parliament, he’s no more than that. In fact he’d be considered a Tory back-bencher – he’s never been a Conservative MP and he’s not a PPC at this election. How the Lib Dems surmised that Hannan was a top Tory I don’t know, but perhaps Rendel, Day and their team have been reading the Daily Mirror too much.

Secondly, what’s the real Conservative policy at this election – as the party’s manifesto spells it out? Speaking on BBC Berkshire’s Andrew Peach show (from about 2½ hours) the Conservative MP for Newbury set the record straight on Conservative policy:

“the NHS is our number 1 priority in this election … we as a party are going to protect the increases in spending and continue to make increases in spending – we will make the NHS better. That is our policy, not what the Liberal Democrats are putting out in their literature.”— Richard Benyon

Benyon also criticised the Lib Dem’s aggressive tactics, reverting to the old politics that Clegg has said the Lib Dem’s offer an alternative too. This year’s Newbury Tory campaign has been, at least as far as I’m aware, slander free – just as Cameron thinks it should be. Perhaps the Lib Dem’s have changed only at the top, and down at the grass roots they’re still fighting dirty as they always have done.

There’s one more David Rendel lie out there. On his website Rendel states that “Only the Liberal Democrats will end the scandal of elderly people having to sell their homes in order to pay for personal care.” From the Conservative draft manifesto, published before Rendel’s post, “[the Conservatives] will introduce a voluntary insurance scheme so that people are no longer forced to sell their homes if they need residential care.” It’s not the “free personal care” Rendel wants, but he’s not from the only party addressing the issue, and I’d like to see how he thinks we can afford a National Care Service. Rendel needs to bring his campaign out of the past and up to speed with the modern Conservative party if he wants to offer the Newbury electorate an actual change. Right now he’s still fighting like it’s his first campaign back in ’93.

My closing remarks: well Tony Blair had three words to summarise his priorities, David Cameron has three letters – NHS.

Whenever writing anything, pay attention to those tracebacks. Having only had the benefit of three-word PHP errors and next to useless JavaScript errors, I haven’t been used to checking out error messages. I’ve been getting better, especially with the WebKit developer tools in Safari and Chrome, but tracebacks in Python carry a lot if information.

You can view the outcome of a fatal error by running your application from IDLE, Python’s native editor. Once you’ve opened your app in IDLE, focus on to the shell window and execute the script (F5 on Windows). If you’re getting a fatal error but want to carry on executing after the bug is raised, use an exception to carry on past the error.

import traceback

try:
    # bad code here
except:
    traceback.print_exc()

Remember, tracebacks carry all that sexy information in a long list of jargon. But make sure you read the shell window, and never hide anything behind a try: in the hope that it’ll go away some day. I naively tried that a couple of times, but it just kept coming back to haunt me.