I can't wait for the BBC to explain this away as 'a single error' or 'taken out of context' or come up with half a dozen examples of Tories saying worse.
Showing posts with label GORDON BROWN. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GORDON BROWN. Show all posts
Wednesday, 28 April 2010
Bigotry
I can't wait for the BBC to explain this away as 'a single error' or 'taken out of context' or come up with half a dozen examples of Tories saying worse.
Friday, 5 March 2010
Who cares, as long as he?...
I'm sure we've all thought it, and I'm sure most of us have said or written it so this is nothing new but I'm in a hurry, but if Britain is the Mother of Parliaments then what, exactly, does that make Gordon Brown?
Friday, 19 February 2010
Pot Rage
Gene pool comedy guest star Gordon Brown comes up with so many really good jokes that I don’t always notice them or get them at the time. Here’s one that belatedly hit me in a hard place this week.
Last Saturday my old car went south in every sense of the expression not involving Linda Lovelace and too many tequila slammers, and so I found myself thoroughly pedestrian once again, like my prose.
Natch, I need wheels to visit Tiny Northwester; take Mrs. Northwester to belly dance festivals when she’s not getting her latest Supernatural hit of Sam and Deany goodness courtesy of Amazon and Postman Pat; and to schlep home the monthly grocery shop to a narrow terraced street where even Sainsbury’s enterprising crew cannot boldly go.
So, to save a few quid from what little’s left of Mama and Papa Northwester’s inheritance, I thought I’d do much what I did last time and ring round to get myself a good little car. By ‘good’ and ‘little’ here I mean one with a small engine (preferably diesel and allegedly good for the invirrament, as if I cared) and therefore low insurance costs. Last time, Jade and I found a nice little Corsa in the sub £2,000 range from a small independent trader that lasted me seven years before Saturday’s ‘phut’ and the interesting experience of suddenly finding myself at the wheel of a one-ton go-cart on the M5.
Thank God for road works.
Long and the short of it, since last time the sub four grand car market locally (i.e., in
The small independent trader, bless his tartan tie and Teflon smile, had always fed my thrifty Northern soul with economical vehicles that wouldn’t set the tarmac blazing but that got my passengers, modest amounts of consumer goods and luggage and me from places where we already were to places where my passengers, modest amounts of consumer goods and luggage and I already weren’t.
Swiss Toni (okay, Pennine Kev) explained that the government’s scrappage scheme had sucked in (and not in a Linda Lovelace sense) all the decent sub £4k elderly cars owned by those willing and able to finance (that is, to raise loans from tax-rich banks or to pay on interest to motor trade companies FFS!) or buy outright brand new cars.
Now I’m lucky, because I have a few quid saved up and so meeting the £4,000 bill of a marketable car will be less painful for me than for - say - hard working families who are not so well supplied with higher education which gets you to the job interviews every time or educated parents who really believed in life insurance.
Also, I missed out on the scrappage scheme so if you want to believe that this post is merely sour grapes, then you go right ahead.
Labour’s destroyed an entire market here with its double-barreled, half-arsed plan to save the planet by taking usable cars off the road (or ones in hindsight like mine ready for the scrap yard free of charge to the taxpayers anyway) and to encourage people to buy brand new ones from Britain’s large-scale, nationally organised, deep pocketed, easily contacted, ‘consulted’ and lobbied motor trade.
And all that’s like ‘Oh,’ for me.
Still, though you can conspiracy-theory all you want about yet another large-scale transfer of taxpayers’ money to a concentrated group of established commercial interests to the detriment of a greater number of diffuse and less accessible independent traders, I’m going to go on sulking here as would-be consumer from a hard-working family, and speculate which groups might have slipped on Gordon’s banana skin in this one.
# Below average wage couples and singles who need cheapish and reliable transport to find and hold down jobs not on bus routes. (Forget the option of trains here for commuting. Sunday’s picaresque two-change trip back to Castle City started off with the local train company offering me this choice of carriage type: grumbling drunken lunatic or non-grumbling drunken lunatic.)
# Formerly unemployed individuals who are offered jobs contingent on their having a car such as: many sales staff; fast food industry employees; everyone who works beyond three miles from a town or city, and public and private care and health workers.
Such as nurses.
# Single mothers with enough integrity and grit to seek work long before the benefits gravy train leaves the station.
#Newly qualified teachers without rich parents but in possession of large student debts who need to live away from the Escape From New York schools they find work in.
# Young men straight from school or sixth-form college with the gumption to seek and find work but whose bosses lack the foresight and central planning wisdom of Gordon Brown to build their premises within walking distance of said lads’ homes.
So that’s social mobility - as well as the other kind - on the scrap heap along with the Northwester Porsche and many chances of a bottom-up economic recovery.
Let’s hope that regional Nissan dealers’ wives hire a lot of domestic staff, eh, Mister Brown?
Picture from here.
Monday, 4 January 2010
On a personal note...
I’m reminded of the character Russel Casse in Independence Day.
He’s the alcoholic
They rib him for his far-fetched tales of his capture and torture and torment him about its supposedly sexual nature: somehow managing both to imply he was indeed sexually humiliated and at the same time that they don’t believe a word of his story.
It’s a common thing, denial.
The battle lines for the general election were drawn today as the prime minister declared that the coming contest would be a "big choice" for the nation and attempted to clarify the difference between the main parties' approaches to handling the economy.
Declaring that Labour would fight "every inch of the way" for victory, Gordon Brown returned to a strategy of insisting that cutting public spending was not necessarily the way to tackle the deficit.
Once again attempting to cast Labour as the party of investment versus Conservative cuts, Brown's approach marks a shift following an autumn in which both parties appeared to accept the need for spending cuts. Next year public borrowing will hit £178bn and many within government had worked hard to persuade the prime minister to accept spending cuts would be as vital as tax rises to bring this down.
Brown told BBC1's Andrew Marr show that his plan to halve
But he refused to concede that his party would have to make significant cuts.
We’ve been here before, to say the least.
So, on the one hand, the public debt has to be reduced (for some unspecified reason most assuredly unconnected in any way with the Labour government’s tax and spend policies: no siree Bob) but that whole spending element need not be touched.
So, argues Gordon Brown like the gormless Secretary for Defence and paid cover-upper of the existence of alien life Mister Nimziki, if the huge great big public debt problem exists (and fallen, as it were from the alien and hostile skies of American economic mismanagement and the machinations of the Banking Clans), what we’ve clearly got to do is nuke our cities in the hope of taking out this unfortunate problem that was in no way caused or exacerbated by decades of official governmental secrecy and denial.
The plan is to ignore everyone outside the wise inner circle of professionals who have it all in hand despite unevacuated
Singling out the TV presenter's salary, Brown said: "Our deficit reduction plan was the first in the world. It is halving the deficit in four years. We are raising your [Andrew Marr's] taxes to do it.
"You will have to pay more in the top rate of tax to do it. The pension tax reliefs that were very generous in the past have had to be removed. We are raising National Insurance by 1% to protect our public services so that we can still spend more on health and more on education and more on policing."
Though the prime minister stuck to the same three areas of policy earmarked in November's pre-budget report for increased spending - education, health and policing - he dismissed analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies that the ringfencing of these areas meant other non-ringfenced policy areas would see cuts between 15% and 20%.
… the children's secretary, Ed Balls - the fiercest proponent of the government's Labour investment versus Tory cuts strategy - was equally defiant. Writing about one of the areas Brown has said will receive an injection of funds, Balls said: "Don't let anyone tell us that this election is simply about change. Our country faces hugely important choices.
"On education, the Tories have made theirs: to pursue a reckless free market experiment with the state system; and to cut the frontline schools' budgets relied on by millions to give an inheritance tax cut to the wealthiest few."
Poor Mr Casse: arrested and jailed for papering the town hall with anti-alien propaganda after the TV news stations show the hostile spaceships hovering menacing over the great coastal cities of the
Fans of the film will remember that, even though Mister Casse is recruited to take part of the air attack on the triumphant alien fleet over the shattered and defeated world, when he mentions his abduction experiences of a decade ago even some of his fellow pilots and the military who are training him raise their eyes to some Psych-ward heaven at this obvious loon’s imaginary abduction experiences.
Alien abduction – who’s got time to worry about such Fortean Times fantasies as the civilised world faces conquest from outer space?
Expenditure cuts asks Labour – what kind of a fruitcake suggests expenditure cuts at a time of massive public debt?
I’m pretty sure that Mister Cameron hasn’t got the right stuff to deal with the magnitude of the problem, but I’d be happy to join him this morning with Mister Casse’s gallant battle cry:
“In the words of my generation, up yours.”
Monday, 19 October 2009
Gloating Haiku
Mark Wadsworth points out in my previous post that I might be a trifle long-winded, and implies that brevity can be the soul of wit: wisdom painfully contradicted by irritable former girlfriends.
James Higham is a little kinder, but still all that got me to thinking that perhaps - just perhaps - a shorter post might do the trick for a change.
Here’s Polly Toynbee, perhaps taking a break from editing Practical Villa Maintenance, to confess (stealthily in self-exculpatory prose that the unreformed Left must use) that Labour's game is up. The public finances are bust. And, without in any way expressing any responsibility for the mindset that she has spent an adult lifetime inserting into the echoing skulls of the British political class, she's really saying, ‘Labour were wrong to do what I’ve been telling them to do forever, it’s been noticed, but I’m jolly well not going to admit that, and instead will blame only the banking arm of the UK’s bricks-and-mortar Darien Venture.’
Enjoy it as she squirms.
Meantime, here’s my view of Polly’s squirming finger in the manner of the people who gave The Bridge on the River Kwai to the world and then and sold us the DVD players with which to watch it.
Guilt’s tears dissemble.
Outsize pantsuits stay unpressed
‘This was not my plan.’
Saturday, 17 October 2009
Parkinson's heart
Rubber-gloved cleaners at BBC News Online must have been busy last night with the Mr. Muscle in their
Win for Labour in key by-election
Labour has kept control of
Roy Butterwood received 1,520 votes to take the
BNP candidate Lisa Brooksbank came second, receiving 590 votes in the election, which recorded a 31% turnout.
Britain’s special needs Prime Minister will be grateful to hear that if epic understatement in the face of abject humiliation is the electoral campaign formation that will revive the Labour Party’s electoral fortunes, then Steve Houghton is bold Leonidas and the Barnley Labour Party his brave Three Hundred.
ST HELENS BY-ELECTION RESULT
Roy Butterwood, Labour: 1520
Lisa Brooksbank, BNP: 590
Daniel Clive Pickering, Barnsley Independent Group: 171
Neil Robinson, UKIP: 94
Clive Watkinson, Conservative: 89
Eddie Gouthwaite, Liberal Democrat: 78
Turnout = 31%
Total votes cast 2542
Labour plus BNP votes cast 2110
Let’s do some non-climate change model maths with this, shall we?
I know, I know: the richly-funded private schools have all the best teachers and physics, plus superior literature and arithmetic and so they monopolise the Laws of Thermodynamics, Shakespeare, and 2+2=4, whereas those of us unlucky enough to be educated in the state sector have to use poor and ineffective substitutes (as all exam results throughout the land show every single year) such as: bad teachers; the Phlogiston Theory; The Collected Tracy Beaker and 2+2=fuckoffmiss, but we’ll do what we can regardless.
The BNP got 38% as many votes as Labour. BBC to English translation – assuming that the independents, Tories and Glib Dems were largely middle class, then 27% of Labour’s hardcore and founding demographic out voted for the Nationalists.
The BNP received 23% of the total vote.
23 out of hundred Barnsley folk willing to get off the sofa this time did so for a party that rejects immigration and immigrant values, abhors Labour’s non-punishment criminal justice system, and Labour’s willingness to spill British blood in far-off countries of which (I’d guess) many Barnsley folk know rather too much.
When asked if he thought the BNP might have won, Mr Butterwood said: "They thought there was a good chance of increasing their result and reducing the majority.
"I'm sure they're very disappointed with the result."
At this point the BBC journalist’s mobile credit ran out and so he/she was unable to pursue the truth of the matter all the way to the second most successful a candidate. He/she must have been similarly devastated not to be able to interview the trounced candidate of the national party most likely to form the government of, and agree to the design of postage stamps for, the nuclear armed county council that is the government of the
The vote followed the death of David Bostwick earlier this year.
Labour, which held nearly all the seats in Barnsley in 1997, would have lost overall control of the council for the first time since the 1930s if it had not retained the seat.
BBC to English translation: This is a place where traditionally they don’t count Labour votes: they weigh them, but you need to chuck about a quarter of the votes into the box labelled by the managed media and the national
So, from not existing in 1981 to owning one of the four chambers of
The Tories got to play the part of the dumb, flat-chested co-ed blonde to the chainsaw-wielding maniac of the white working class as usual in Milltown’s Inferno, and the Liberal Democrats were her plain-Jane brunette room-mate who almost makes it back to the house after getting her insulin from the station wagon in the next scene. I’m sorry to say that my own favoured UKIP barely got the rusty old shotgun loaded before a pair of gauntleted hands flung them to the ground in the penultimate reel.
These numbers won’t translate nationwide of course as Barnsley was until recently a political monopoly where the other national parties with
But still and all, even with first-past-the-post still the norm in proper British elections, what this says for Labour’s standing in its own heartlands is not something about which the BBC cares to speculate.
And as to why the BNP did so well; nary a dicky-bird.
The rest is £800,000,000 per year BBC silence.
Sunday, 2 August 2009
Stable public finance
Last day of silly week.
This is from the Department for Business Innovation and skills and it’s very, very silly.
Over-Indebtedness
The term over-indebtedness is used to describe debt which has become a major burden for the borrower. Over-indebtedness can be caused by, and contributes to, social exclusion, financial exclusion and poverty.
Er…
The Government is committed to social justice and prosperity for all. Over-indebtedness presents a barrier to delivery of objectives across Government,
Hmm..
…from tackling child poverty and social exclusion, to reducing barriers to work,
Hmph..
…and encouraging appropriate saving and investment
Tackling Over-indebtedness
There is much going on across Government to tackle over-indebtedness. This all supports the overall strategy of
(i) helping people to avoid becoming over-indebted
Ah…
(ii) providing support for those who do.
hah!...
This comprehensive complementary activity builds on the cross-departmental over-indebtedness Action Plan, that was issued in 2004.
Good timing, that. A couple of years early, even. Well done.
Activities are detailed individually on BIS's and other Government Departments' websites.
Debt Monitoring Papers
Monitoring papers on household debt which monitor aggregate levels of household debt, general macroeconomic and debt market conditions and the level of problem debt are now listed on the Monitoring Papers page.
How did that monitoring go for you, do you think?
Drivers of Over-indebtedness Report
In line with a request in the Pre-Budget Report (PBR) 2007 to conduct a review of current evidence on the drivers of problem debt, BERR commissioned Professor Richard Disney at the
Was Northern Rock mentioned at all, I wonder?…
This report utilises both qualitative evidence – from in-depth interviews with key stakeholders in the credit market – and quantitative evidence from two large-scale household panel data sets – Family and Children Survey; British Household Panel Survey – to address a range of issues, including: definitions of over-indebtedness,
We’ve got a really good definition of debt right now, if you’re interested. It’s got no end of lovely zeros…
…incidence and persistence of over-indebtedness across households and potential ‘triggers’ that move households into, or out of, potential debt problems.
Hmm. Aha. Ahah! Ah…ha ha ha ha,
ha ha ha ha ha, ha ha, ha ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha ha, ha ha, ha , ha ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha ha, ha ha, ha ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha ha, ha ha, ha , ha ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha ha, ha ha, ha ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha ha, ha ha, ha , ha ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha ha, ha ha, ha ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha ha, ha ha, ha , ha ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha ha, ha ha, ha ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha ha, ha ha, ha , ha ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha ha
Sunday, 19 July 2009
Oak is the new khaki
Comedy Scotsman Gordon Brown has finally squared the circle.
He has struck a much-needed balance between those universal prudent economic values shared by all hard-working families throughout Britain on the one hand, and the need to preserve important and valuable pieces of military equipment such as helicopters; body armour; both the Royal Navy's foreign fishermen's support vessels and, oh, those other things - what are they called again? Forget my own head if it wasn't screwed on...You know hard and brown on the outside, red and squishy inside.
Oh yes; servicemen.
Apparently the far-Right media such as the BBC and The Guardian have been spreading rumours that British ground troops are vulnerable to land mines and booby-traps which the Taliban are putting wherever they hope to lure them to walk or to drive in armoured vehicles - some of whose armour is so strong that it almost reaches TCCB-approved levels for helmets, pads and boxes for three-day matches.
It seems that the heavy tread of a fully-equipped British soldier concentrated on as small an area as a footprint or the weight of almost any motor vehicle is enough to set off these improvised explosive devices.
Since the new vehicles recently provided for the campaign have insufficient balance, they have a tendency to roll over and to crush some to their occupants under them.
Contrariwise, it is feared that any more helicopters which might be brought into Afghanistan might prove ever-more valuable targets for the Taliban if ever the Iranians and other foreign supporters provide them with anti-aircraft missiles.
What is needed therefore - and this is Mister Brown's stroke of genius - is a vehicle that is robust, spreads a soldier's weight over a much greater surface area and thus minimises the chances of detonating an IED, which is lightweight and cannot crush them, and which can operate under even low-level anti-aircraft fire.
He has struck a much-needed balance between those universal prudent economic values shared by all hard-working families throughout Britain on the one hand, and the need to preserve important and valuable pieces of military equipment such as helicopters; body armour; both the Royal Navy's foreign fishermen's support vessels and, oh, those other things - what are they called again? Forget my own head if it wasn't screwed on...You know hard and brown on the outside, red and squishy inside.
Oh yes; servicemen.
Apparently the far-Right media such as the BBC and The Guardian have been spreading rumours that British ground troops are vulnerable to land mines and booby-traps which the Taliban are putting wherever they hope to lure them to walk or to drive in armoured vehicles - some of whose armour is so strong that it almost reaches TCCB-approved levels for helmets, pads and boxes for three-day matches.
It seems that the heavy tread of a fully-equipped British soldier concentrated on as small an area as a footprint or the weight of almost any motor vehicle is enough to set off these improvised explosive devices.
Since the new vehicles recently provided for the campaign have insufficient balance, they have a tendency to roll over and to crush some to their occupants under them.
Contrariwise, it is feared that any more helicopters which might be brought into Afghanistan might prove ever-more valuable targets for the Taliban if ever the Iranians and other foreign supporters provide them with anti-aircraft missiles.
What is needed therefore - and this is Mister Brown's stroke of genius - is a vehicle that is robust, spreads a soldier's weight over a much greater surface area and thus minimises the chances of detonating an IED, which is lightweight and cannot crush them, and which can operate under even low-level anti-aircraft fire.
Thursday, 30 April 2009
Small: far away. Small: far away.
From the Daily Mail.
‘Gordon Brown today rejected calls to allow thousands of Gurkha veterans to settle in the
'For us to guarantee £1.4billion would be a very big sum indeed,' he said.
Mr Brown said his mind was open on the Gurkha issue, but that he was unable to meet their demands because there were public expenditure issues to consider.
He said: 'I respect the fact that this is a matter of great concern for everyone in the country.
Expensive.
Expensive.
Expensive.
Or go to the Tax Payers’ Alliance site here.
Click on the picture link to The Gordon Brown Calculator.
Click on any of the numerals and then the = sign.
Not expensive...
…for us.
Monday, 6 April 2009
Seventies versus Noughties
I’m ashamed of myself. I really am.
It’s something I shouldn’t do I know, because it’s just plain wrong. But if it happens by accident and you don’t do it on purpose then it’s not really your fault: especially if you look away at once. Just like glimpsing your elder sister in the shower.
I read Labour List.
Of course, I clicked away from it almost immediately; having averted my eyes as quickly as I could, but ever since seeing it I’ve been having these thoughts. And feelings. Truth be told, I haven’t been able to get rid of those feelings since I saw what I saw. I spent the whole of last night tossing and turning – well, turning, at any rate – and I think the only cure for it is to do what millions of men in my situation do every day – which is to sit down at my PC and use the Internet for its main purpose, which is letting it all out.
The first page was innocent-looking enough: a memory of my pubescent years in the 1970’s under the Labour governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan – hardly the stronger, darker stuff to which we have all become accustomed (one might even say hardened or coarsened) in recent years.
And yet. And yet Helen Symons’ simple, almost wholesome piece reminded me of those long-ago days of my teens and my earliest loss of innocence.
By Helen Symons
I'm sure you've read in the news about the PM's success at the G20 this week - a 1.1 trillion dollar programme to get our economies going again.
I surely did read about the success; it was on the BBC website, in full colour!!! Whoo-ee, what a scorcher!
Tax and spend and spend some more! Because you can! Because no-one’s ever tried debasing the currency before in all of history! Because the world is young and because we’re only just becoming curious about our economy and what it can do. And what we can do with it, and to whom…
It's important to all of us - because it's ordinary hard-working people who've been hurt the most by the downturn, with jobs and homes being put at risk.
Thanks for your sisterly sympathy, my dear – I’m sure that you mean me and all my friends, right? You don’t mean the underclass with its rough boyish charm or the elegant sensuality of the Political Class that has lifted the underclass onto our backs forever..
Too many people have suffered already - but with a global agreement for action, at least there's hope on the horizon. And I'd like to do what feels a bit like a first in British politics - say well done.
‘Yes, yes,’ she cried, as the Govan Beefcake showed her his magnificent achievement…
Gordon's taken a lot of flack over recent months - with the media doubting his ability to pull an international agreement together. But, yesterday, he came through for all of us.
And indeed on us and all over us. If you thought old
So, good job. But now it's time to get
I will, I will; dear Miss Symons but I think I’ll send it in another way.
The priority of the summit - jobs and the economy
Whose jobs? What economy?
- was right. Action to regulate hedge funds and credit agencies.
Which arose, tall and proud, after the Dear Leader dismantled the Thatcher and Major regulatory structures and bid them go forth and multiply, and add, and to divide into mutually-supporting pyramid-selling insurances…and to account laterally
along with a financial stability board,
Don’t blame it on sunshine…
will help prevent a crisis like this happening again
Don’t blame it on good times…
. And a pledge to invest in green jobs
Don’t blame it on moonlight….
will make sure we are creating a sustainable future for us all.
Blame it on the boogie…
And we must never forget our commitment to ending poverty - both here and abroad.
I just can’t, I just can’t, I just can’t control my banks…
Now, we need to put this progress into action domestically - by putting people first. Jobs must be at the heart of our strategy. We need to invest in our infrastructure - roads, schools and hospitals - keeping people in work rather than on the dole, and also building better homes
Not better than Grace & Favour homes, but still rather better than at least one out of the three homes for which most MPs claim expenses, right?
and public services for all. And we need more help for our manufacturing industry, too, with more investment to keep people in work and to create new jobs.
Sign our petition to support Gordon Brown and to call on him to keep jobs at the heart of our domestic recovery.
We've taken an important step forward. But there's a lot left to do.
Well, that was fun! I t took me back to the happy old days of my youth; to Abba and the Jackson Five (whose lead singer was a stocky little black boy. Wonder what happened to him?), to the Winter of Discontent, to a disarmed
Helen Symons; a name to conjure with, a sweet, girl-next-door fantasy and for me a glimpse back at adolescent worries of national economic crisis and utterly unrealistic fantasies of a strong, virile Conservative party to arrive and sweep us off our feet and give us all what we so yearned for.
And so she dreams her dream of New Labour and Mister Brown’s ‘success’, and revels in the Noughties and tough choices.
But I remember Wilson and Callaghan’s Old Labour: they brought the country to its knees.
But the peep-show temptations and half-hidden implications of Miss Symons soon lost their lustre, and as age saps my strength I found myself looking for something a little darker and harder…
(Picture of David Cameron doing something illegal on a bike with a shiny new helmet deleted. I’m a social conservative, after all.)
Could Cameron have delivered the G20 deal?
I promise that my tweet last night - wondering whether David Cameron as Prime Minister could have delivered the G20 deal - was not merely rhetorical. If the polls are right, and don't change some time soon, then Cameron may be the next PM, suddenly dealing with global economic issues, war and a planet in peril.
our planet in peril! Cue for someone’s Top Ten Tentacle Sites: starting no doubt with the tentacles of Wall Street, the Square Mile, the
So it is a question requiring serious thought.
When Barack Obama was elected, the Tories tried to run the line that the real lesson for
You’re obviously aware that it’s important to keep a sense of humour at times of international economic melt-down and, boy! Have you kept yours Al!
I have always acknowledged that Cameron is perfectly good at the latter. But the G20 has shown once more his weakness on the former. I know from our days in Opposition that it is never easy when a big international event involving Presidents and Prime Ministers is dominating the global agenda. You can get in only at the margins.
But when you do get in, it is worth having something to say.
Like ‘Shut up, so-called free press! When I want your editorial comments I’ll dictate them to you! There are very, very good reasons why a major Labour donor should receive immunity from the tobacco advertising ban in the first weeks of a New Labour government, but national security forbids us to comment further.’
It is not that you have to pretend to be the Government, but you do have to have an analysis and give some indication as to what you would do. And because you can only get in at the margins, you have to have considerable clarity about what it is that you are saying.
Show us your clarity, Al, oh, please do…
So ask yourself - what message, if any, have you heard from David Cameron before, during and since the G20? There will be different responses, but mine would be 'nah nah nah nah nah.'
As the crisis developed, he had no analysis other than that it was a crisis.
It’s so big!
As Gordon Brown took some very hefty decisions,
It’s so hard!
particularly in relation to the banks,
As in ‘What banks? Who; me? No, never met them before, and I don’t know how all those billions of pounds found their way into my Exchequer over the past eleven years.
And these? Oh, they aren’t mine. I found them lying around the house when I moved in. I’m just wearing them in memory of my old pal Tony. Yes, they do pinch a bit, but they are rather wicked boots, aren’t they?’
Cameron was on hand to say they wouldn't work. By now their general line was emerging as a political one - to try to present anything bad in the economy as a particularly British problem.
So what if our main high street banks have only two sets of owners these days – the Barclays family and my grandchildren’s’ wage packets.
As Gordon Brown forced the pace on setting up the G20,
Force it, force it Gordie! But watch out for the black chap – he looks a little big even for you.
and scoping out its agenda, the Tories' analysis was all about the PM, not the economic future of the world.
Two items which have precisely nothing to do with each other.
Mister Campbell and his history-writers will see to their past un-relationship, and the electorate will handle the future.
And if some of the world leaders gathered in
…whilst the eastern ones no doubt picked over the bargain basement sale of Britain’s once-proud financial services industry…
…it would not be the best possible start for his relations with them.
True – they have been in contact with New Labour for over a decade now. Better practise Safe Begging, Dave.
He seemed to see the whole thing as a bit of too little too late jamboree.
Well, Cameron did play Three Wise Monkeys whilst Gordon put the finishing touches on the dog and pony show he’s made of
So then we come to his reaction last night - a melange of limited welcome for changes he would never have been able to secure, something about Doha (I think he felt if he threw out a name of a foreign city, he would acquire gravitas - it could just as easily have been Copenhagen) and then his big message - it's all very well for GB to secure more money for the IMF to help weaker economies, but now it is time he turned his attention to Britain.
The dirty pervert! Putting yourself first! Regarding your own country and the interests of your own people above everyone else who wants to play the game! Nice guys come last, okay? Some things are just too sick even for Big Gray Al to do.
But surely if recent weeks have shown anything it is the inter-connectedness of our economies, and if there is one success above all for which Gordon deserves credit it is in turning that reality into an event of real substance and change.
Any time now, Gordon. When you’re ready.
Playing 'what if?' is not an exact science, but if Cameron's isolationist
This would be the EU fan who just loves Obama, right? That isolationist?
..and laissez-faire ideals..
laissez-faire as in Cameron’s ‘capitalism with a conscience,’ or as in Mister Brown’s ‘regulation with a light touch?’
..had already secured power, it is doubtful he would have been able to organise a meeting like the one we've just had,
…because nobody would be quite ready to dance on
let alone steer it to a decent conclusion.
The ‘conclusion’ was no new money, no new ideas, and no plan to generate wealth by helping productive industry and cutting the super-high costs of government.
In acting as he has in recent weeks, flying round the world, never off the phone, despatching officials left, right and centre to try to assess the best possible outcome and then work towards it,
…which of course in no way looks exactly like utter panic…
Gordon HAS been focussing on the British economy.
Which perversion is it when you look at a corpse through night-vision binoculars, I wonder?..
Because without the global economy reviving, nor will ours.
Time to revive 'no time for a novice.' Because in this case, it is true. DC is no Obama. I'm beginning to wonder if he is even William Hague.
All this is very well, and I can see what they’re getting at, and getting back to. The problem is,
However delightful and tantalizing the colour fantasies that you have spun for us, they just aren’t as good as the real thing.
I want an economy, and I want a
I need the touch of a real woman.
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