Kinnockisms

I thought I'd kick off the election season with some pearls of wisdom from the last Labour loser, Lord Kinnock. Yes, that's right, he's already told us, as reported this morning by Politics Home, that this "isn't 1992" and we all should line up in a row like obedient little sheeple and vote for Crash. Good luck with that line of campaigning, Neil, old boyo.

A couple of gems:

The situation is radically different, and I don't think we'd learn much from 1992. While we had a recession, it wasn't a global recession as it is now.

And there was me thinking the fundamentally dishonest, outrageously simplistic Labour narrative that it "started in America" had been comprehensively debunked, er, by everyone. Seems Kinnock's a bit off the pace.

Everyone now knows that Crash indulged in disastrous levels of deficit spending during a period of putative growth - unlike every other major world economy; that he incompetently deregulated the banking system, arrogantly destroying all the checks and balances built up carefully over the previous 20 years; that he subsequently presided over (encouraged, even) the biggest property and debt bubble in British history and that he failed to manage the bust when it actually came. The crash was, remember, just as terrible in Britain as it was in America, if not worse, thanks to Brown's deregulated banks' toxic assets and lack of real cash. RBS, HBOS, Northern Rock - two Scottish and one Geordie bank, all chummy with Brown so long as they kept giving him the funny tax money. And that was all it took to bring the country to its knees: bad, corrupt even , management, private and political. I could go on. Need I, though?

Brown's economic crimes run far deeper than this and go back far further: destroying the best funded pensions system in the world, selling gold at the bottom of the market, PFI, cuts to the armed forces in wartime and so on. And then lying about it all by, for instance, claiming that since he'd abolished boom and bust, it must have been someone else's fault in some other country, preferably the United States, that his entire house of cards fell to bits at the first sign of financial turbulence. This kind of attitude provided us with some of the evidence that with Brown, a pretty unhinged mind was at work. At least Kinnock was just a harmless windbag, ultimately.

I think it would therefore be sensible for Kinnock to shut-up about Brown's record on the economy. And he's wrong about the comparison with 1992 on at least one level, too. In that election, we voted for a government that would lead us out of recession, and it did. We'll be doing the same this time around. So I'm afraid the outcome won't quite tally with this other, priceless Kinnockism:

...if you want someone to effectively manage the economy, you will vote Labour.

Rofl. To (mis)quote that really funny guy on the Moneysupermarket.com ads: "Trust Labour on the economy? You're 'avin a laugh!"

No tax on jobs, just cuts in waste. That's what we need and only the Tories are offering it.

In fact, so far, they're policies, such as the cancer treatment availability promise and the Equitable Life compensation, seem to me to be all about righting 13 years of accumulated Labour wrongs. I think this is a damn good strategy, not least because between now and election day, they will not run out of Labour wrongs to right. There are so many to choose from.

So, Kinnock, pay attention: if anything, this election seems more like '79 than '92, but there are similarities from certain perspectives with both. It's between the Tories and the Labour party, for instance, just like it was then. See?

Joking apart, ultimately, it's pretty clear that this one is going to be very much its own election with its own characteristics and its own, probably surprising outcome. For me, that 'surprising outcome' will be the sheer scale of the Conservative victory, or the sheer scale of the Brown defeat - whichever makes you happiest.

Both suit me fine.