Obama's Anti-British Venom

It has consequences, this incomprehensible, outmoded, spiteful anti-British venom of Obama's.

For instance, for it to be sustained, this poor President must deny the reality of the true impact of his cheaply political, unthinking, bargain-basement, anachronistic Brit-bashing. That 'true reality' is framed rather neatly by Iain Martin this evening:

If President Obama can break off from crafting his next anti-British Petroleum soundbite, it might be worth him checking out the ownership structure of BP and pausing for a moment. It appears that 39% of the shares in the company are American owned (25% by U.S. pension funds and 14% by individual American investors). According to BP’s figures, 40% of the stock is owned in the U.K.

So, the company not paying, limiting or delaying payment of its dividend (as Mr. Obama has demanded as retribution for BP causing him so many problems — no, I mean desecrating the Gulf of Mexico) would impact directly on rather a lot of American investors, and those with pensions.

Who is going to tell the president? Perhaps it could be British Prime Minister David Cameron, when the pair talk on Saturday in an attempt to limit the diplomatic damage from the crisis.

No wonder serious US stockmarket commentators are getting a little nervous about Obama's loud mouth. BP is a massive multinational, with investment interests in the US that at least parallel those of the UK - and we're talking hundreds of billions here, all told - not just market value. If BP Plc goes down, which is what the idiot Obama and his fellow administration coat tail morons seem to want, then BP Inc will have already died - and that one, giant company's politically induced failure could take the entire, fragile world economy down with it.

Taking out a company as big as BP just because you want to look tough could trigger another depression - globally. People should understand that that's the desperate game Obama has chosen to play, but just doesn't understand.

This terrible political decision tree should be seen for what it is, and then he (Obama) should be seen for what he really is, and then, once the dawn of clarity has finally set in, anything he says or does from here on in should be stoically resisted, on both sides of the Atlantic.

The fact that Cameron hasn't even made a decent position statement on this travesty yet tells me one thing, however. Ordinary Americans and Brits still have at least one thing in common: our respective political leaders are basically first order and ineffective world class shits!

Now that's the real "Special Relationship" that I've had the privilege of enjoying for many decades (thanks to my roots).

Go Easy On BP

I stand by my opinion that Tony Hayward has done enough diplomatic and other damage with his foot-in-mouth mismanagement of the Gulf disaster to warrant his dignified exit, an analysis with which a former head of Shell Oil Inc. on Radio 4 this morning appeared to agree with, at least in part.

However, it would be fair to add that while Hayward has undoubtedly been poor in the face of a near-hysterical US media maelstrom whipping up public outrage, the behaviour of Obama has simply been beneath contempt. The man is unfit for the office of the Presidency. It was no accident, for instance, that when I watched the opening of that live press conference on the latest US posturing over Iran (again, suspiciously timed), I honestly and completely believed Obama was talking about BP again!

But then I realised, he was being far too diplomatic. Never once would he have said "I want to kick Iran's ass". But to him, apparently, it's fine to do that with a major multinational company. Think it's not comparable? Well, you'd be right. Telling that lunatic Ahmadinajacket that he was about to be given the proverbial, presidential ass whoopin' of his life would have had zero impact on the zombie relations between the two nations and certainly would have had no discernible economic effect.

Compare and contrast Obama's pathetic posturing and filthy, insulting language - and threats to abuse his own nation's system of law to make it pay and pay big - with BP. Remember, without there actually having been a trial to find out just who really is ultimately responsible for the disaster - my money is on the US government - this kind of thing from Obama is calculated to be prejudicial not against BP Inc, but against the mother company. It's deliberate! It's also working. Forty percent plus of the value of that company's shares has been destroyed so far.

That's about £60billion to you and me. And the point is, it could well be you and me that end up on the receiving end of the Obama asskicking because our pension funds are taking a hammering as a consequence of this big mouthed/small minded man. Our oh-so wonderful ally, led by such a person as this, seems perfectly happy to sit back and watch Britain humiliated once more. It's sickening. Whether Ben Brogan thinks so or not, that "special relationship" the Westminster villagers love to drone on about? Hey, Ben. It's over.

BP didn't kill it, Obama did.

BP (BP "Inc", lest we forget) has done all it can to clear up this mess, so I agree with those who say lay off them (that doesn't mean lay off the accident prone Hayward, however). The real villain of this piece as it turns out? Ladies and gentleman, I give you the most unpresidential president since, er, the last one - Barack Hussain Obama.



Witty.

But for Britain, sadly, this really is no laughing matter.

Serendipitous Oil Spills

Dizzy has found a remarkable website charting the spread of the Gulf of Mexico BP oil spill. It's a hefty leak, and what you can do with this tool is superimpose its vast expanse on wherever you like in the world to see just how huge it is. I suppose there is some valid environmental message in such an exercise somewhere. I'm not sure what it is, exactly, beyond 'Cor, that really brings it home to you', or maybe, 'Cor, isn't the ocean big!'.

There is another use, however, of this program, as Dizzy demonstrates. You can bury your least favourite bits of your own country under thirty million barrels of oil slick. Neat. Dizzy chose Scotland. I sort of approved at first, but in the end it wasn't target-rich enough for me, so I opted for an alternative ground zero of Huddersfield so that I could take out the entire expanse of the two giant northern English conurbations and Labour heartlands.

Unfortunately, I had to take out York, Harrogate, the Peaks and the Dales in order to get Tyneside. Oh, and half the Irish Sea, all of North Wales - and Shrewsbury. Well, sacrifices had to be made to get them all under the one spill - without threatening the Home Counties. Besides, who's really going to miss Mold? And I did save the Lake District...sort of. You just can't get to it any more.

Sharpening The Message

Guido has highlighted a new, public-sourced, 'anti-politics' (whatever that actually means - politics is politics isn't it?) anti-some other stuff attack page designed to reveal just how major and sustained a disaster the Brown years have been for Britain.

LabourVision.TV launches tomorrow – a crowd sourced effort to produce an online anti-party, anti-political election broadcast. Details revealed tomorrow of how your video can be part of Gordon – the Disaster Movie premiering on May Day. The bar is high. Come back tomorrow…

The page can be found at the link in the quote and will be well worth a visit, not least because we have the tantalising prospect of the May Day movie, coming soon to a blog near you.

If this outstanding first effort is anything to go on, the results of this project could be pretty damaging for an already severely wounded Brown-Labour campaign.



I think this is what you call 'sharpening the message' and hats off to Guido for doing it. Tory campaign HQ should take note.

A Summary Of The Damage

Aside from savaging this country's entire political class - a few would say with some justification - in his column today, Christopher Booker also provided a pretty clear summary of the carnage caused by 13 long years of Labour misrule:

It is almost impossible to measure the damage done by 13 years of rule by Blair and Brown. They have left the country effectively bankrupt, its manufacturing industry halved, the City tottering and under threat. They have allowed the United Kingdom to splinter, debauched the House of Lords and brought politics into contempt. They have done irreparable damage to our Armed Forces (not least through the humilating fiasco which led to our being thrown out of Iraq). Our country's standing on the world stage has never been lower.

What's hard to believe is that this is by no means a comprehensive summary. Booker decides not to mention the immigration scandal, the politicisation of the civil service, the filthy and dangerous hospitals (that now cost us twice as much as they used to, at a cool £100Bn a year), a state sector that has grown to the point where it swallows-up 52% of the nation's wealth, the lies and the smears and the spin - and so on and so on and on and on. It's no wonder that right-minded people find it impossible to believe that, so the polls say, probably misleadingly, Labour still enjoys support from 30%-odd of the electorate.

But it is worth repeating Booker's summary nonetheless. People should bear it mind when they look to cast their votes in May.

Where's Gordon?

It looks like becoming what The Scotsman is now calling Gordon Brown's "Spring of Discontent", and the strikes and the latest sleaze scandals look to have produced the classic reaction from Macavity. "I wasn't there" Brown has vanished again. Where is he? Safely tucked up in the bunker, I would think, furiously scribbling apparently disconnected notes in his thick, black, felt-tip pen, but which have, in fact, one, recurring theme: how can he screw up the country even more. We know this how? Because it's happened before, several times.

We've always known that he really is bloody hopeless, and clearly a bit of a depressive as well - that's what all the hiding is about - but what's becoming crystal clear also is how powerless he's become. His is an empty shell of a premiership, hollowed out by coup attempts from the sensible-ish right of his party and now held to ransom by the militant tendency of the loony left.

So what's he done? Disappeared, just like he always does when the pressure really is on.

Well, you can't hide forever, Gordon. You'll have to face us sooner or later. It's the law.

Understatement of the Year (So Far)

Nick "I know which side my bread is buttered" Robinson, BBC-Labour's tame political pundit, after the start of the UK's so-called economic recovery (0.1% to be adjusted is not exactly Darling's "trampoline" recovery now is it, especially after squillions in printed inflation-fuel has been chucked at it?), has just concluded on his hyper-moderated blog:

...some voters may note that we are still not securely out of the longest and deepest recession since the war and may conclude that the current custodians of the economy can no longer be trusted to finish the job.

You think?

The fact that Brown and his cohort of economic nincompoops and ne're-do-wells, whose now-legendary incompetence is only just about trumped by their compulsive mendacity, have managed to bankrupt the country in search of some sort of theoretical, artificially stimulated recovery that, as these figures show with devastating clarity, has utterly failed to materialise will not have gone unnoticed by the general public.

So, toenails, my old china, for "may conclude," read "decided a long time ago," and for "the current custodians of the economy," read "the Brownite, Labourist liars and wreckers," and for "can no longer be trusted to finish the job," read "are going to be lucky to get away with not being hanged en masse from the nearest tree, never mind an election defeat, for the cataclysmic economic harm they've managed to do to Britain, not to mention the desperate harm they've managed to do throughout British society, during their overlong period in office."

This is no time for understatement, you see!

But it is time for a Tory government. And if you read between Robinson's BBC-approved lines, even he knows that most sane people have known that for quite some time.

Brown: Just Not Good Enough

It's not so much the letter - I suspect that, given his visual disabilities, it might be a little unfair to go overboard in criticising Brown for his careless spelling and semi-literate scrawl, desperately unfortunate though these proved to be in the circumstances - but failing to bow his head at the Cenotaph yesterday? That is an entirely different matter for which he has offered no valid explanation as yet, something I personally find absolutely extraordinary - and, yes, unforgivable. If the Queen feels she must do that to honour the war dead, then so should Brown. "Forgetting," which, I suggest, will eventually emerge as the excuse this time, uttered all over the airwaves by one of Brown's substandard ministerial cronies, no doubt (just like Millepede Minor this morning over that letter - in between re-announcing a nuclear programme that will never get off the ground while Labour are still in power), is just not good enough.

But that's really the fundamental problem with Brown, isn't it? He lumbers from one crisis to another, one gaffe to another, one bit of cringe-making social ineptitude to another and still no one - in the mainstream media at least - has the guts or the sense to admit the blindingly obvious, very simple fact: he's just not good enough.

Judging by the weekend's G20 fiasco, the rest of the world seems to have understood that now. As usual, Britain is just a bit slow on the uptake.

Massie Attack

This massive attack from Alex Massie is the only piece you will ever really need to read to understand just how very bad Brown's speech litany of lies was.

Gordon Brown Fail.

Gordon Brown's speech to the Labour party conference this afternoon was, in its way, breathtaking. Breathtakingly shameless, mendacious, confused, contradictory, delusional, dishonest and irresponsible that is. It was also the speech of a Prime Minister resigned to defeat.

Elections are won in the centre, not on the extremes. But Gordon's speech was designed to appeal to the Labour base, not to Middle Britain. It was, then, designed to shore up existing support, not appeal to floating voters. It was for the left wing of the Labour party, not the Blairite voters who flocked to the party in 1997. Some of them left in 2001, still more stayed at home in 2005. On this evidence many of them will vote Conservative in 2010.

The Prime Minister takes the electorate for fools. But voters appreciate the appalling fiscal position the next government is going to inherit. They know that urgent action is required. But Brown pretended - as politicians are wont to do - that he could promise cakes for all and that everyone would still lose weight. Despite dozens of spending commitments - rhetorical commitments anyway - the deficit will be halvd in four years. The only thing missing was the promise of a free pony to every seven year old girl in Britain.

It was, also, inspired by a misguided analysis that seemed to have been written by Bob Shrum. Brown is for the "hard-working majority" not the "privileged few". The Tories, by contrast, are heartless toffs who want to put a "cap on aspiration" so that they and their gilded pals can loot the country.

But this too simply shows how politically tone deaf Gordon is. Cameron's weakest point is his past career in Public Relations, not his privileged upbringing.(Gordon's upbringing, incidentally, was, in the context of Kirkcaldy also privileged: son of the Manse and fast-tracked through an educational "hot house". But never mind...)

And, like all desperate politicians, he tried to wrap himself in the flag: Labour is the only properly patriotic party. Shameless and, in this instance, a leaf pilfered from the GOP playbook.

Indeed, this was a speech that might be best seen as a left-wing version of Mitt Romney's presidential campaign. Like Romney, Brown flip-flopped on a dozen policies he'd previously favoured leaving him in the curious position of, in effect, running against his own past. This, it must be said, is a tactic that rarely convinces.

There was, of course, the usual headline-grabbing nonsense: workhouses for single mothers and a National Family intervention Agency that, given how our bureacracy works, is a guaranteed disaster. But imagine the outcry if a Tory politician called for "Gulags for Slags" or "Wormwood Scrubs for Scrubbers"? Family breakdown is a real issue, but this was a gimmick designed for the sake of gimmickry, not any serious attempt to address a problem. Because addressing it would require a total rethink of tax and welfare policy and, consequently, demand another U-turn.

In other words, this was not in fact a serious speech by a serious politician in serious times. Quite the opposite in fact. It was yet another missed opportunity by a failed Prime Minister whose time is up. We know it and he must know it too. Given the chance to be straight with the electorate, Brown chose to be crooked and, worse still, absurd.

I didn't really think that Brown could fail to meet my exceedingly low expectations but, by god, he did.

It's political freefall from here on in for Brown (and Labour). What else could it be after a trainwreck performance like that? They'd better believe it - because he never will!

(Massie's still completely wrong about Megrahi, though ;)

==Update==
The policy-on-the-hoof proposed by Brown in that speech to bundle bunches of badly behaved teenage single mothers into state-controlled housing, (quickly rebranded "Gulags for Slags" by some wits) was stolen from - wait for it - the BNP, Guido reveals.

I had no idea Brown was a fascist as well as being the most dishonest politician in the history of British politics. Naive of me.

The freefall accelerates - already. The Brownfall that up to this afternoon was dragging along so excruciatingly and so agonisingly is rapidly becoming a blur. Blink, and you might miss it. So keep 'em peeled, fellow bloggers. He's finally going down.

Lib Dem FUBAR

I've been quite happy to be a spectator of the total train wreck that has been the Lib Dem conference over the past few days.

There are many, quite old expressions to describe their - and their laughable "leader" Clegg's - shocking performance. "FUBAR" is one of them. (If you really don't know what that means, email me at denver037@hotmail.com for a colourful definition).

Sometimes you have to let the total morons speak for themselves...

Hear Hear!

For the incurable optimist — of which there are no doubt several in the Downing Street bunker — there are signs that Britain is starting to recover. The stock market is booming once more, confidence is returning to the housing market and the recession may soon be over. Is it possible Gordon Brown really has saved the world — even if it is too late to save himself? Or, as Labour used to warble, might things only get better?

If only. The bleak truth for UK plc is that after 12 years of stupefying Labour incompetence, the worst is yet to come. Britain is once again on the slide towards the margins of economic influence and military clout. We have the worst public finances of any comparable western economy. The British Chambers of Commerce warned this week that the UK faces a ‘grim’ economic future, with a high risk of a relapse. Unemployment is not just spreading but setting like concrete for years to come. And our shabbily treated troops, once a match for the world’s best, will soon be driven humiliatingly out of Afghanistan.

This is not the slow, managed decline of an empire looking for a role. It is a sudden, embarrassing discovery that we don’t count on the world stage any more. Thanks to our lumbering Prime Minister, we have been given the unwelcome gift to see ourselves as others see us. And it ain’t pretty.

I am writing this from New York, whose citizens once saw Britain as a staunch economic, diplomatic and military ally. It is only a few short years since they hailed Tony Blair as a 9/11 hero and awarded him the Congressional Medal he was so embarrassed to collect. That was the high-water mark for New Labour.

Today, thanks to the Oil-for-Megrahi fiasco, we are a bitter disappointment to America. Newspapers from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Daily News are still running every fresh turn in this tawdry story.

It was perfectly summed up by a devastatingly editorial in the News: ‘Gordon Brown has given grounds to believe today’s British are a cowardly, unprincipled, amoral and duplicitous lot. Because he is all of those.’ Those are cruelly exaggerated words, but they put the finger on a single identifiable cause of Britain’s collapse. The new decline in Britain’s standing on the world stage is not just about Lockerbie. Nor is it even the decision to trade a convicted mass murderer for Libya’s vast oil reserves. It is about the shifty, furtive and ultimately disastrous management of a country which, in 1997, had every conceivable chance of becoming great again.

Labour strode to power with a huge Commons majority, the goodwill of the British people and the prospect of at least two terms in office. For the first time, Labour could ride an economy which had just taken off on a long and sustainable boom.

Tony Blair could have done one or two truly great things. His government had the cash and clout to transform a welfare state in which almost three million were on incapacity benefit. Instead, it left them to rot while importing migrants to fill almost all of the three million new jobs created. It could have performed drastic but urgently needed surgery on the lumbering National Health Service. Instead, it poured truckloads of taxpayers’ money into a giant bureaucracy, entrenching inefficiencies that will cost us up to £40 billion a year, every year.

And so it goes on. Read it!

If I'd known how to say it, that's exactly what I would have said - and many others besides me, I strongly suspect.

Fantastic.

Wars Not Worth Winning

Afghanistan, Round 4, is one of them, history and common sense both teach. It's impossible to add anything useful to the following, coruscating tour of force from posh DT scribbler, Gerald Warner:

We did not need Eric Joyce to tell us we are in deep doo-doo in Afghanistan. In that far-off country of which, over the past 170 years, we have come to know too damn much, Britain has previous. For us, this is the Fourth Afghan War and it has turned into every bit as much of a resounding success as the previous three. If there is one thing in which the Ministry of Defence and the British public can claim expertise, it is getting cuffed in Afghanistan.

Tony Blair could not have been expected to know that, with an historical hinterland in which Hugh Gaitskell belonged to the Bronze Age (”Hey, look – come on – I mean – this is a young country”…), but brooding Gordon should have seen nemesis coming. The war is lost: end of story. Even post-neocon America is waking up to the fact, as evidenced by General Stanley McChrystal’s recent remark that “time is not on our side”. Among the American public, support for the war is melting faster than a polar ice-cap in Al Gore’s imagination.

So, how many more young men’s lives are we going to sacrifice on the altar of New Labour vanity, in addition to the 212 already scandalously squandered? Now Brown has given us the alleged justification of the war: to preserve security in this country. What neither he nor any other apologist for this cretinous conflict can explain is precisely what atrocity against Britain can be plotted in Helmand that cannot be equally effectively planned over the border in Waziristan? This echoes the long-established cliché trotted out by red-faced saloon-bar warriors: “Would you rather fight them on the streets of Britain?”

Well, actually, yes. Because the odds would be more stacked against them, despite mass immigration having to some extent provided jihadists with “the sea in which the guerrilla swims like a fish”, as Chairman Mao phrased it, by establishing large Islamic communities. There is no more favourable terrain for Muslim militants than the irrigation ditches and mountains of Afghanistan. So, why do we send our soldiers there, inadequately equipped, to provide them with target practice?

The significance of Brown turning to the “keep terror off British streets” claptrap is that he realises the previous claptrap, about “building democracy”, has even less plausibility after the spectacle of the Afghan elections rigged by the corrupt Karzai regime. Is that what young Britons are dying for? It is time to up sticks and exit. We know the way – we have travelled it three times before.

I'll add something anyway, though (however useless): pointless wars are not worth winning. They're certainly not worth ignorant Bliar's "blood price". And wars prolonged just to keep a man like coward Brown's image on domestic political life-support are just evil. Afghanistan is that war.

How much more of our nation's best blood must be spilled before Brown makes his inevitable exit next year? One more drop is too much. We could win, if we had the need, the will, a general call-up and, subsequently, 20 heavily armed divisions to prosecute it. Costly, but the "way".

If it really was for Britain, then maybe we could and should. But for Brown! It's just not worth it. Nothing has ever been more clear in British history. We must kick Brown out and then finish the "job" in Afghanistan, one way or another. Or bring the troops home - right now.

I think that's what Warner is basically saying. And if I'm right, then he is!

Section A, Q1: Spot The Difference

From a 1968, O-level Maths paper. One of two that gave you two hours to answer umpteen questions you wouldn't find on most A-level courses these days.

Cf: GCSE "Higher" Tier, June 2008.
Um.

And:Still haven't worked it out? I'll give you a clue: one is a Maths exam for 16 year-olds being trained for adulthood and a working life, the other is an infantile joke that 600,000 British "kids" preparing for a life of texting each uvva and the dole have just "passed".

We're finished. And socialism finished us.

Clean And Wholesome Wins Through

Chloe Smith, the new Tory MP for Norwich North

Useless Labour and its chums at the Beeb (and Channel 4 News, as I see just now) are spinning their catastrophic defeat in Norwich North like crazy in what is clearly a prepared line of attack on the Tories' massive victory. It began with Brown's one-eyed lunacy about this somehow being a bad result for all the parties. Huh? You then had Harperson spinning herself into giddy circles saying that the expenses scandal was somehow linked to Brown's superbust - er - the global downturn, which just got a lot worse in this country. Whatever.

It actually amuses me, all this desperately dishonest, nonsensical claptrap. Why? Simply because these people are now spouting such garbled rubbish so regularly, and they are so totally unable to recognise that nobody believes a word they say any more, that they aid the Tories whenever they open their disconnected gobs. Brilliant!

Case in point: Norwich North. Here, a typically smug, smearing Labour campaign was countered (brilliantly, in my humble) by Eric Pickles' home truths and fluffy kittens approach, complete with a lambswool-soft, 27 year-old candidate called Chloe. Ignore the oh-so stale and tedious Labour straw man and ad hominem attacks, coos Pickles. Smother the people in love and sincerity and the butter drips of crumpets. And it's working. Boy, it's working. Labour give you class hatred, McBride and Hoons by the bucketload. Pickles' Tories give you Edward and Chloe: nice, clean, wholesome - and safe. It seems to be exactly what an awful lot of people are craving. That's one impressive bit of 'triangulation', or whatever they call it, by the Tory campaign managers. I'm impressed.

So, the fact is now - and it is a fact - whatever the Beeb and the Grauniad and all the other ideologically and morally bankrupt agents of Brownite darkness might wish to be the truth, and write or broadcast accordingly, has now become irrelevant. It can be ignored in the round, and Pickles is ignoring it. The Tories have stolen the march and created a new kind of campaign: clean and wholesome is the only way!

My view (and many, many others', to be fair) has been, since the era-changing signal that was the Crewe landslide, that Labour simply have absolutely no idea how to cope with this style of campaigning. And that's why I will say it again - mainly because it really feels nice to say it, but also because it's true: Labour are heading for total annihilation whenever the next GE is, and whatever happens to the economy. There is no hope for them. Fabulous. It means there might actually now be hope for the country.

That's assuming Cameron knows what to do when he wins. The hope had better not be misplaced. This is one of the things that people like Purnell, who's getting an awfully big wooing from the right media just now, is secretly hoping, I suspect (that a Cameron government fails to deliver).

But I for one choose to put my faith in Cameron. We could do a lot worse. And we have.

Whatever the future might hold, it is clear that with every fresh, deserved blow to this punch-drunk, journeyman government - and Norwich was if not an out-and-out knock-out then an eight-count at the very least - the Tories grow in confidence, which, in turn, energises their campaign and makes them appear to be a government-in-waiting. This becomes a dynamic shift as people sense the mood and follow it.

Suffice to say - and yes, this is speculation but it's rooted in empirical, historical fact - we're actually way past the comparison with the end of the Major years (he was never hated so completely, so bitterly, as Brown is, for instance. And he was elected). Labour are headed for humiliating, devastating defeat whatever happens and whatever their tame media might argue to the contrary. And the longer they wait, the deeper that humiliation will be.

I would urge readers not to bother to give anyone who might argue that any other outcome is a possibility the time of day. They are either mad or they are a Labour tribalist - which actually means they are both.