Tag Archives: Gordon Brown

AV — Labour’s death rattle and a gigantic fraud

Gordon Brown

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First-past-the-post has served this country well …  We should be mad to adopt a system less fair than the one we have

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So says Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, in an article in The Daily Telegraph to-day (February 28, 2011).

He draws a comparison between Colonel Mu‘ammar al-Gadaffi and unlamented former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown — pointing out a certain similarity of appearance and their common love of long, rambling speeches on socialist theory (in which he gives the edge, in logic and coherence, to the Colonel).

Continue reading AV — Labour’s death rattle and a gigantic fraud

Nick Clegg’s Message

The British began to make the big subconscious assumption that there would be a change of government in 2010

I am certain that the Tories will win

What crouton of substance did Nick Clegg offer last Thursday?

It must have been a couple of years ago that I was having dinner with the great Max Hastings, former editor of this paper, and he was being so gloomy about Conservative prospects that I scented a financial opportunity. Tell you what, I said, let’s have a bet. A thousand pounds says the Tories will win the next election. How about that?

Continue reading Nick Clegg’s Message

Will Gordon Brown return to No. 10?

 

I love newspaper headlines, the way that they shout at you competitively from the stand on a Sunday morning – imploring your attention like a bunch of gape-mouthed nestlings. I have always admired the art with which the headline writer will take the story before him and bleach it of conditionals, sharpening and condensing and pushing it to the limit of credibility so that the faltering fingers of the deluded consumer will feel unable to resist. And yet in all my years of knowing chuckling at the headlines, I don’t think I have ever come across such a brazen confection of suggestio falsi and suppressio veri as appeared yesterday in large print across one of the Sundays. “Brown on course to win election,” it said.

When I had regained my breath, I thought of some other propositions the headline writer might have touted – with an equal measure of foundation. How about “Pope on course to win Wimbledon”? Or “Simon Heffer on course to win Miss World”?

I have an answer for all those befuddled by the recent mutability of the polls. May I direct you to Betfair, a political betting website that in my experience is almost uncanny in its accuracy. Here you are looking at the predictions that people are willing to defend with their own money, and the money is still overwhelmingly on the Tories. The single most likely outcome – and you can actually watch as the bets go down and the stakes mount up – is that the Tories will have a comfortable overall majority, easily enough to govern for five years. As for the idea that Gordon Brown ‘s Labour Party could win the election, with an overall majority – that possibility has been flatlining for months at between five and 10 per cent. The reason I trust the punters of Betfair more than I trust a poll in a Sunday paper is that the punters have thought it through with the care of those investing their own money.

They have put themselves in the position of the tens of millions of sensible men and women who will be going to the polling stations in the next few weeks. The gamblers have focused hardheadedly on the reality of the choice.

There you are on May 6 (or whenever), pencil poised. Are you really going to give Gordon Brown another five years in Downing Street? This is a Government that has spent the past two years lurching disastrously from one abortive putsch to another. One by one, they have stepped up to plunge the rubber dagger into his impervious back, from Clarke to Hoon to Hewitt to Alistair Darling himself, while the atmosphere has become so poisonous that some talents – Siôn Simon and James Purnell, for example – have not only abandoned their ministerial careers, but given up on the Commons altogether.

Do we really want another five years of the holepunch-hurling horror of Gordon Brown’s management style? Do we want the Downing Street switchboard to be endlessly jammed with people bleating to some “bullying helpline”? Is this any way to run a country? And that is just froth compared to the real charges against Labour.

If Gordon Brown is on course to win the election, then Elvis Presley is on course to win The X Factor and Shergar to win the Grand National.

For more news, comment and to read this article in full go to The Daily Telegraph

The Prime Minister’s Behaviour

With apologies to Tennessee Ernie Ford, let’s have another little song thanks to Dungeekin[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIfu2A0ezq0[/youtube]

New Labour’s legacy is money and blood,
Under them this country has been dragged through the mud,
The damage began with Grinning Tone,
Now the PM’s weak and it’s all gone wrong,

Continue reading The Prime Minister’s Behaviour

We should not abandon Afghanistan

To abandon Afghanistan now would be a betayal of the fallen.  The campaign to defeat the Taliban must endure, says Boris Johnson – whatever it takes.

I’ll tell you why we are in Afghanistan. I could show you the crater in downtown Manhattan, the place they call Ground Zero. They still haven’t built over it, eight years on, and it remains like a great open wound on the American psyche, a reminder of the hideous terrorist attack that was launched from the Afghan lair of Osama bin Laden.

We have 9,000 troops in Afghanistan because the Americans have 70,000 troops there, and because America is our closest ally. We enlisted with America in the cause of driving out the Taliban extremists who were harbouring bin Laden. And whatever the Independent on Sunday may demand, we will remain in Afghanistan, shoulder to shoulder with America, for as long as the mission endures. For us to pull out now – immediately, unilaterally – would not only be to let down Britain’s most vital geo-strategic alliance, it would be this country’s biggest military humiliation since Suez.

Continue reading We should not abandon Afghanistan

Sir Christopher Kelly Report

 Our favourite satirist, Dungeekin, back in the ring with The (Grace) Kelly Report

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzSq29B5Dug&feature=player_embedded#[/youtube]

The (Grace) Kelly Report

So, Dear Reader, today will see Doctor Kelly lance the festering boil that is the MP’s expenses scandal. In his honour, and with the enjoyable spectacle of MPs losing their gravy train ahead, I thought we should have a little song.

[spoken]
I wanna talk to you!
The last time we talked Mr. Kelly you reduced my John Lewis list!
I promise you that won’t happen again!

You tried to redact them,
Tried to conceal them behind spin and lies,
Dishonest and dirty,
Grasping and greedy,
Now it’s you we despise,
The totals are awesome,
Really it’s loathsome,
How you milked us dry!
Why were you greedy?
Living the high life on the cash we supply?

It’s time for the verdict of Kelly, (Oooo)
He says your expenses were bad, (Aaaagh)
The size of your claims were just silly, (Mmmmm)
Your sense of entitlement’s mad!

We paid for your house,
Paid for your booze,
For you to watch porn on Sky!
You were deceitful,
You were just venal,
Claiming for anything you like!
Don’t wanna be mean,
But you were obscene,
Claiming for bath plugs and more!
Why were you greedy?
Why were you greedy?
Why keep on claiming for more?

 

Michael Jackson: the man that Beat It

“…and Gordon Brown will probably moonwalk into Prime Minister’s questions.”

To understand the cult and martyrdom of Michael Jackson, we need to go back to Thriller, the 14-minute masterpiece directed by John Landis in 1982. Jackson hired Landis after seeing An American Werewolf in London and he told him: “I want you to turn me into a monster.”

That is what happens. It is an extraordinary piece of music-TV and it helped the album to sell 65 million copies. Jackson does his breathtaking dance routines, and then morphs into a lycanthrope, his physical features changing almost beyond recognition, so that what was once charming becomes downright scary. Which is what happened, of course, to Jackson himself over the next two decades. He entered into a kind of abusive relationship with the tabloid press, in which his attention-seeking was matched by their prurience. He mutilated himself with plastic surgery, and the world was treated to stomach-churning pictures of dislocated nostrils and drooping eyelids.

Continue reading Michael Jackson: the man that Beat It

Hanging on to jobs and power

If Labour backbenchers want to remove such suspicions, their only choice is to revolt. Will they? Don’t hold your breath.

What a shower. What a farce. […]

The past few days have reminded me of the climactic scenes of one of those Pink Panther films, when the world’s supposedly most ruthless killers are converging on their target, and their mission is Kill Clouseau! or in this case, Kill Gordon! Each has his or her signature weapon, and each manages to bog it up. With an unexpected yell, Purnell springs from the stationery cupboard at the Department of Work and Pensions – and his rubber dagger spangs harmlessly aside. […]

[The full article can be seen as first printed in the Daily Telegraph on 08 June 2009]

Gordon Brown’s Economic Gamble

You know what, I have now heard more than enough about how much Gordon Brown is enjoying this recession. Every time you read about the Prime Minister, they tell you that his mood is getting better and better.

Having been known as a gloomy old nail-biting misery-guts, he is now presented to us as a man “in his element”, the life and soul of the party, a smile or a witty aside never off his lips.

They say that he was giving a speech the other day, and his mobile phone went. “Aha,” quipped funster Gordon Brown, “that’ll be another bank going bust!” Isn’t he a scream?

According to Alastair Campbell – who is now back offering his Luciferian advice – the sheer gravity of the downturn has “brought out the best” in the Prime Minister. It is something to do with the humbling of the capitalists and the brutal necessity of government action – a reordering of our political economy that has put this manic meddler where he wants to be, at the very centre of the stage. “Gordon,” pronounced Campbell, “is a round peg in a round hole.”

Well, folks, I do not presume to comment on the geometry of Gordon’s pegness, but there is no doubt that Campbell is right about one thing. He is in a hole, all right, and a hole very largely of his own digging.

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He yesterday asked Parliament and public to approve a series of estimates for public borrowing that amount to a humiliation for himself and his Government. He is proposing to run a budget deficit of £128 billion by 2010 – that is, eight per cent of GDP. Overall government debt, currently running at 40 per cent, is going to hit 60 per cent of GDP by the same year, more than it has been ever since Harold Wilson was in No 10.

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And the reason he is taking such a frantic and unprecedented gamble is that he has trusted online casino malaysia option. He is running out of time. The electoral cycle is drawing to a close; he funked the election in October last year, and ever since the public have threatened to punish him at the polls. He needs the economy to perk up fast; he needs some signs of life before May 2010, and with the patient prone on the slab, he needs to perform an emergency operation, no matter how risky it may seem. And he may yet be proved right, of course.

Perhaps we will all respond to his fiscal stimulus, like a bunch of overweight and exhausted lab rats shown one last piece of cheese. Perhaps we will all scamper off in the direction of the prize, and boost consumption, and keep the economy moving. Perhaps the news that everything has been reduced by 2.5 per cent will indeed cause the tills to ching for the next 13 months – which is the duration of the VAT reduction.

Perhaps there are millions of people out there who will rethink their plans for a credit crunch Christmas. Instead of giving each other presents of home-made chutney and second-hand books, perhaps they will be so filled with hope and confidence by Alistair Darling that they will pour out to Woolworths (if it still exists), and lash out on the traditional British Yuletide tokens of fealty – Wiis and Nintendos and Plasma TVs.

Perhaps they will think it sensible to buy now, while the tax holiday is there. We must hope that they do; that is, we must hope that all those who have disposable income will spend it, because otherwise the economy will simply seize up; and that, indeed, is the essential argument in favour of some kind of fiscal stimulus by government.

When credit has dried up, when confidence has collapsed, it is the duty of the Government to keep the economy moving with sensible and affordable investment. That is why it is vital to push on with the big infrastructure projects in London that will not only deliver jobs and growth in the short term, but which will help to make the capital and the UK economy better placed, long-term, to compete.

The tragedy of our current predicament, and the tragedy of Gordon Brown, is that by his previous profligacy he has left himself so little room for manoeuvre.

The Government may treat the public like laboratory rats, but they are not entirely idiotic. They can see that this respite is only temporary. They can see that the tax rises are round the corner, and even as they tiptoe towards the cheese, they can see Alistair Darling waiting with his cosh.

They may decide that they are better off keeping their money, and not spending it in the next 13 months, in order to protect themselves against the future rapacity of the Chancellor and the Prime Minister.

We now know that to fund this fiscal stimulus, taxes are going up on incomes over £40,000; we know there are going to be huge increases in national insurance that will hit employees, employers and the self-employed. How on earth is that supposed to boost job creation?

Might it not have been better, if you were going to splurge £20 billion in tax cuts, to spend it on cutting National Insurance and helping business to keep people in work?

There is nothing wrong in principle with a fiscal stimulus. What makes the remedy so desperate is that Gordon Brown managed to squander such eye-watering sums when times were good.

It now emerges that of all the jobs created since 1997, two thirds have been in the public sector. No wonder the country is broke. The more Gordon Brown swanks and preens and claims he is the man to fix things, the more he recalls the firefighters in that American movie called Backdraft, who tried to claim credit for heroically (and abortively) attending an inferno that they had ignited.

[First published in the Daily Telegraph on 24 November 2008 under the heading, ” Why Gordon Brown the manic meddler had to take such a massive gamble”]