Brown's Cronies Still Delusional

A serious Labour politician

The sound of son of a butcher and former schoolteacher Paul "Lord" Myners on the Today programme this morning was all the reminding I needed of how utterly delusional members of the previous government remain, particularly in the area of their economic (mis)management. He seemed to be saying that what the coalition government is doing in announcing what amount to, in reality, pretty modest savings in the short term, designed merely to halt the speed of expansion of the national debt by slowing down government spending rather than slashing it, is putting some kind of Labourist-inspired 'recovery' at risk. I kid you not.

He and his ilk still seem to think that the last months of Brown, where spending was allowed to run out of control not as part of any genuine attempt to kick start the economy through some kind of novel notion (which even Keynes never proposed) that you can spend your way out of recession while servicing gigantic levels of borrowing, but as part of a calculated effort to save nothing more and nothing less than Brown's political career by bribing Labour's heartlands and key marginals, is actually defensible. It's not, epsecially because it worked, predictably, in the North East, North West and, to a slightly lesser degree, Yorkshire, hence there was no Labour wipeout even if it didn't save Brown (nothing could), but it didn't work in the marginals, hence the coalition.

The point is, let us hear no more from the likes of Myners pretending that there was no political calculation involved with the reckless spending levels following the crash, or, indeed, that Labour had nothing to do with causing that crash with its disastrous system of banking regulation or deliberate stoking-up of cheap credit into a gargantuan property bubble. Even without the credit crunch (which did start in America) there would have been a crash in Britain inevitably, and a pretty big one at that.

Additionally, Myners completed his flight from reality by claiming that the latest G20 meeting was pointless and lacked the substance of the London summit in 2009, presumably because Cameron was there making the case for deficit reduction in the UK, rather than arrogantly lecturing the rest of the world about how to manage their own economies. I suppose Myners was so dismissive about the event because there was no really big chunk of money to boast about at the end. I think it was a mere one trillion dollars at the London event wasn't it? Well, of 'promised' money that is, of course, although hardly any of it ever materialised and hardly any of that which did had any effect on the forces of nature driving the economic cycle anyway. But socialists don't understand that, see? Sometimes the right thing to do strategically is nothing. Well, it matters not for the likes of Myners or Brown or, come to think of it, Alistair "Apologise To Me!" Darling any more. All they can do from now on is nothing. That, at least, should mean that they can do no more damage, thank God.

One last thing I thought worth mentioning: at the end of that programme we also had the annoying, schoolboy voice of Nick Robinson putting the sneering BBC spin on the Cameron G20 performance by referring to a picture of him with his head in his hands as the utterly outclassed, out-thought and luckless England team went 4-1 down to the dreaded Germans and musing, rather lamely I thought, as to whether this "new leader on the world stage" (he's not that new) would end up "hapless" and ignored by the others. I wondered to myself at that point, seeing as it was apparently the day to make sweepingly dismissive statements, whether the performance of this England team, rather than somehow reflecting a "hapless" David Cameron, at least in mind of the Robinson talking head, had far more symbolic force as representing the end of the era of expensive under-performers who nevertheless walk away with a fortune despite having been kicked out of the tournament. That's not England, thought I, that's New Labour! Funny how the two eras, the "Golden Generation" and the gilt-edged years of plenty under New Labour, seem to parallel one another. But, of course, the reality check in the Merchant of Venice (Act 2, Scene 7) says it all:
All that glitters is not gold/Often have you heard that told/Many a man has his soul sold...

Less money (unless deserved), more passion (motivation) and more graft (productivity): that's what we need not only from England's footballers, but from the British population generally. Less bling and more sting; more passion - and less fashion. The superficiality of England's performance almost perfectly parallels the intellectual and moral vacuum at the heart of New Labour. Over-rated and all mouth, costing a fortune, but when the going gets tough they crumble and the results become disastrous. In England's case, Germany showed them up for what they really are, in New Labour's, it was the crash. The only difference is, of course, that England were beaten by superior opponents, which is fair enough, but Myners is trying to defend Gordon Brown, the team captain who made all the wrong moves, chose all the wrong tactics and managed to defeat himself, taking the country with him. And that was after the credit crunch began. That was merely his Germany in the economic tournament. The moment Brown was really tested, the whole economic kingdom of debt that he created crumbled, and so did New Labour.

Myners and others who choose their own narrative on this lamentable passage in British history according to their political orientation are naturally welcome to do so. It might even be a coherent, even persuasive, story for the gullible, but it will never make it right.

As for the BBC, well, I assume there will come a time when the Conservative party finally has its bellyful of the licence fee-funded, left wing dominated organisation's constant breaching of its charter and either disinfects it once and for all or breaks it up into little pieces, some commercial (the ones that are already, that is!) and some taxpayer-funded, with no licence fee. Then the left will have to go away and infect some other institution, if there are any remaining in the United Kingdom, which I doubt.

PS: Actually, Myners' performance on this morning's show was all the more bizarre when you consider that speech he made torpedoing current Labour politicians' arguments against Tory plans. As Wiki says of the speech:

On 8 June 2010, Myners made headlines with a speech he made in the Lords. He said, "We clearly need a policy of fiscal caution. It was right to support the economy during the global recession but there now needs to be fiscal adjustment, as evidenced by the last Government in the Fiscal Responsibility Act. There is nothing progressive about a Government who consistently spend more than they can raise in taxation, and certainly nothing progressive that endows generations to come with the liabilities incurred by the current generation."

Well, my feeling is now that he made that speech certainly not for the benefit of the Tories but to influence the Labour leadership race, possibly in favour of Ed Balls. Conclusive proof, if you'll forgive the straw man, that Labour is only talking to itself. Long may that continue.

BP Is Finished - It's Only A Matter Of Time

Hayward: Bleak Prospects

It's getting pretty clear now that the United States government will settle for nothing less than the destruction of BP as punishment for the environmental and economic impact of the disastrous Gulf oil spill. This is the conclusion that a lot of people have now if not reached, then are certainly nearing. After BP's flat footed and presentationally poor chief Tony Hayward's performance in front of a bunch of nauseating US administrators yesterday, which demonstrated his stamina but nothing more than that, no one in their right mind can dismiss the idea that BP is gravely ill. The oil leak is bleeding it anaemic. Credibility, credit worthiness and gargantuan sums of money are all being poured into the stratosphere. Pretty soon, all that will be left is the name.

The evidence for this pessimism? The Telegraph's report today, which has been covered widely in the US on Fox and CNBC too, that the cost to BP for its liability will top $100 Billion should be enough, shouldn't it? No company can withstand that kind of bill and remain intact, no matter how large it is. That's the kind of money that takes down entire middle-sized countries. United States congressmen and women don't give two hoots about that, however, this being an election year. All they care about is the hysterical US public opinion. It's a simple calculation that US politicians from the pisspoor president down have made: 'the more we hurt BP (shake it down and pump it dry) and dogwhistle the anti-British meme, the more votes we get'. It's as pathetic as it is dismally feeble as it is dishonest.

BP will be gone by the end of the year. I'll put money on it.

The economic, political - even the historical - implications of this are truly frightening (particularly in terms of just how rotten the United States political classes have become) but they're separate issues that I'll have a stab at in a later post.

Or maybe someone else, if they accept the basic premiss (that BP is finished), could have a go.

Inflation Storm Clouds

That senior economists are even talking about inflation now, having pretended it didn't exist for so long, should be a source of anxiety. That one of them should say something like this should be the prelude to panic.

In an opinion piece for on Friday, Mr Bean writes: "Some people have suggested that a bit of extra inflation now might actually be a good thing. After all, wouldn't it help to get the economy going by reducing the real value of public and private debt? This is severely misguided.

"Aside from the dubious morality of redistributing wealth from savers to borrowers, we have seen from past experience that a bit of inflation has a nasty habit of turning into a lot of inflation."

Deflation was a smoke screen for devaluation and new debt. However, someone has now broken ranks to warn of the true nature of the coming catastrophe: hyperinflation.

We're doomed! Doomed!

Update:

Of course, I forgot. Without debt (money - or rather the promise of non-existent money), and more and more of it at that, the entire world economy would collapse into depression. Stupid me...

Get it? I don't. Let's get this straight again, without debt there would be no money = Great Depression II.

Well, you figure it out because I sure can't.

Danny Alexander's Challenge

This is the global lending merry go-round as explained for the general public by two leading Australian economists, wisely employing a variation of the Socratic method.



There is an answer to all this, you know, and it's called 'cuts'. I wonder if young Danny Alexander is up to the challenge. Ha! Fat chance.

Remember John Redwood? We might have had a chance with him.

Hat tip: Tangled Web

Letters From A Tory, RIP

A few days ago, discreet - and now defunct - blogger "Letters from A. Tory" posted what I think is one his finest bits of commentary, among many fine bits of commentary from that individual over the years. We'd come to expect it, value it, even.

It's worth noting, at least on my diary of political angst - for personal posterity, in other words, you understand - that I'd been reading the Letters blog for a couple of years or so already, long before I'd thought about the idea of an online diary of my own. But it was his efforts that finally convinced me to have a crack at it myself - at the start of last year. I have to be grateful for that, not least because it's more or less kept me sane.

Well, now he's gone, sadly. But his last post doesn't just resonate as much as all his others, it's a perfect warning to David Cameron, a man who, so far, has done pretty well as coaltionist Prime Minister, but he's also ignored, alarmingly, his people.

Anyway, here's the quitter's last post:

Dear David Cameron,
This is the final letter that I will ever write, as this blog will sadly be closing down tomorrow (along with a final goodbye from me). I appreciate that this salient fact may have escaped your attention due to some rather important events in your own life and career over the past few days. Even so, regardless of the election result, you were always going to be the last person that I wrote to, as there is so much that I’d like to say.
When you became leader of the Conservative Party in 2005, I had barely heard of you. Along you came, with a superb leadership campaign and a genuine belief that the Conservative Party had to change in order to win an election – which was, of course, entirely correct. Over the following months and years, we saw the environment take centre-stage, euroscepticism get quietly tucked away and centre-ground political thinking forced onto a somewhat reluctant group of MPs. It was necessary, but it was a bitter pill to swallow. Nevertheless, the Conservative MPs on the benches behind you in the House of Commons soon realised that you could deliver a Conservative government, and for that reason alone they kept their mouths shut (most of the time). However, your inner cabal of strategists, image gurus and modernisers did not have it all their own way. On several occasions, including the election campaign itself and the election that never was in 2007, your closed circle came under huge pressure from the electorate and your own party. Yes, they survived, as did you, but only just. As we approached the recent general election, voters were still unsure about who you were and what you believed in, which is staggering after five years of leading the opposition. Your desire to keep your cards close to your chest and deal purely in intangibles and soundbytes almost cost you a place in 10 Downing Street. The public don’t like feeling uneasy about potential Prime Ministers, yet they were fed uneasiness in spades. Despite all the funding you could have asked for and a crippled government, it so nearly went horribly wrong.
Here we are, just a few days later, witnessing a truly historic coalition between you – a liberal conservative – and the Liberal Democrats. Ironically enough, everything is completely different yet little has changed. You still have a group of MPs who will be sitting behind you, watching, waiting, holding their nerve for as long as possible in the hope that you can deliver a truly successful and admired Conservative government. Common sense tells them to keep quiet rather than voice their anger and irritation. You will have your inner cabal with you in government as they were in opposition, making decisions that affect everyone and everything despite having shown their incompetence on more than one occasion. Moreover, the coalition deal has put many of your favoured issues – social justice, a green economy, civil liberties – at the heart of your plans for government. You didn’t hide your disappointment at not getting a majority in the House of Commons, yet you have gracefully and seamlessly organised a historic coalition with another party. The question on everyone’s lips now is, naturally, will it last? I have no idea what the answer is to that question, but then again neither do you. What I find interesting, though, is not that things could go well or go badly – that is just stating the obvious. The most incredible element of this coalition is the breathtaking gulf between the best case scenario and worst case scenario for you and the Conservative Party.
The best case scenario for 2015 is simple enough. The economy will be growing at a healthy rate and both unemployment and economic inactivity will be reduced. The welfare state will have been transformed by supporting people into work and punishing those who chose not to get a job. Our broken society will have begun its long healing process through stronger families, good schools, lower crime and genuine localism taking hold. Government waste will have been largely eliminated and the state will be much leaner and fitter than it is now. British people will be put first, civil liberties will be untouchable and immigration will be severely curtailed. People’s faith in politics and politicians will have been mostly restored. The Lib Dems will have kept their end of the deal, leaving themselves with absolutely no electoral appeal relative to the Conservative Party and facing annihilation. The Labour Party will be rife with infighting and weak leadership, making them virtually unelectable given your strong performance as Prime Minister and with the memory of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown fresh in many people’s minds.
The worst scenario, however, is nothing short of disaster. The coalition falls apart within months as the Lib Dems walk away, accusing you of ignoring them and not delivering on promises. You look weak and indecisive, with your own party demanding tougher action on any number of issues. The Conservative grassroots refuse to campaign because you and your inner cabal leave them disillusioned with pointless platitudes and non-traditional policies. The economy staggers along, still badly wounded, and public sector cuts push unemployment in the wrong direction. The voters ignore your pleas over the necessity of cutting government spending while every policy announcement is met with scorn and cries of ’spin’. Your school reforms and localist agenda stumble and fall. Your welfare reforms leave you branded as abandoning the poor and needy. Uncontrolled immigration continues unabated and the anger spills over onto the streets. Your pro-EU stance forces some backbench MPs to break ranks and speak out against the party line. Labour regroups and, as the only strong opposition party, lap up your failures and convince the floating Lib Dems and disgruntled Conservative voters to join them. Electoral defeat is little more than an inevitability.
My political crystal ball is of no use. For the life of me, I just cannot see where this will all end up. Neither the best case scenario nor the worst case scenario are implausible, outlandish or inconceivable, yet the two scenarios are a staggering distance apart. The only thing that I can say with any certainty is that the future is very uncertain. The history books will remember the next five years of British politics as one of the most incredible periods in living memory. I just can’t decide whether that will be for better or for worse.
Good luck, Mr Cameron. You’re going to need it.
Yours sincerely,
A.Tory

Wise words, wouldn't you think?

I'm not going to link through to the source site of this article because it's now officially (so I've been told) dead.

Meanwhile, In Other News...

Dow crashes 1000 points in 15 minutes on Greek/EU debt crisis. Wall Street thought it was a computer malfunction. It wasn't.

Um...

Source: CNBC

Where's Darling?

I was surprised to learn from Sky News this morning that the latest general election economics debate, if I heard right, will be between George Osborne, Vince Cable and...er...Peter Mandelson.

Hang on a minute, do they mean Lord Peter "We're all fighting to get re-elected" Mandelson, Business Secretary (among many other hats)? He's not Chancellor of the Exchequer as well these days is he? That's Alistair Darling, isn't it?

Have I missed something? Has Darling come down with an inexplicable stomach complaint (soon after having tea and crumpets with the Evil One yesterday afternoon, no doubt)?

If I haven't missed something, however, but there's no highly suspicious sudden sickness involved (it'd have to be a pretty serious affliction to force you to miss your own debate seven days before the election, wouldn't it?), then we are all entitled to ask a grave question about this very fishy affair: where the hell is Ali?

I think we should be told.

PS: If someone knows, by the way, why Darling has been elbowed, do let me know in the comments.

I wonder if George knows...

==Update==

Not entirely my fault because this wasn't made clear on the news - or I was half asleep - but the three mentioned above are all giving speeches to the Institute of Directors today, not debating, according to Sky.com.

Even so, the question remains: where's Darling!

Or, looking at it another way, why not send Clarke into bat against Mandelson instead of Osborne whose eyes, let's face it, are probably still watering after being on the receiving end of a couple of severe spankings in the past administered with thinly disguised fetishistic relish by the Lord of the Lies.

Ken Clarke, in contrast, owns Mandy's ass.

Winning The Argument

It should not be seen as much of a coincidence that on the day Greek debt is downgraded to junk, a poll comes out that lends weight to the view that the Tories are winning the key argument in this general election campaign, the economic argument.

The only game in town is Europe at the moment, with Portugal and, somewhere further down the road, Spain, next on the list for the dreaded rating drop. Whatever the virtues of wonderful and exciting policies such as Michael Gove's brilliant education plan, which has already caused a Damascene conversion of former Fabian research chairman and now editor of the Jewish Chronicle (Martin Bright take note), Stephen Pollard, the vindication of the Tories in at least promising to focus urgently on Britain's own Brown/Labour-caused debt crisis is surely now unchallengeable. Brown and Labour can go on denying the seriousness of the crisis all they want, but that will not make it go away.

And that's clearly why people increasingly are now seeing that they must therefore make Labour go away on May 6th. The stakes have never been higher - for everyone. One thing's for sure, a hung parliament or, heaven forbid, five more years of Brown - though one could and most likely would lead to the other - and we would be the ones in the unfortunate Greeks' shoes next: 16+% government borrowing interest rates, a shattered credit rating and staring down both barrels of a titanic debt default and a bombed out economy.

But the message is finally getting through: Brown or Clegg mean economic crisis and meltdown. And only the Tories offer any hope of averting both.

The Cable Guy

What a day. Not one minute to myself. Every second of it belonged to The Man. However, I'm plodding on regardless, inspired by that tireless campaigner for truth, justice, and the Cameron way, Ollie Cromwell, who's blogged the video of a superstar slapdown by Andrew Neil of the Cable guy, as edited by Guy News.

I'm not gonna embed it here. Go to Ollie's awesome Red Rag site (which puts mine rightly to shame) to see it. Click on this link.

The demolition of the fraud Cable is a wonderful thing to behold.

Ramsay McBrown Addresses the Nation

I know Labour are broke and that they have a nasty habit of recycling old policies and passing them off as new ideas, but don't you think they've gone a bit too far with this latest election broadcast. I mean, whatever next?

First, Ramsay McBrown addresses the nation about the grave economic crisis:


And on a more personal note:

(They couldn't afford sound for that one. Charlie said no.)

Isn't it funny how all Labour governments end in a total economic shambles? Funny as in strange, not amusing.

Oh, and I do hope Brown isn't going get any odd ideas from this about trying to rig some sort of national government with him in charge (on the very slim chance that this election ends in deadlock).

There'd be fighting in the streets. And I'd bring the Molotovs.

Let's Talk About Debt

Who would have thought it? After years of denial Brown finally admits, sort of, responsibility for the banking collapse by deregulating them 'in the nineties', thus proving, incidentally, that the Tory banking regulatory checks and balances worked perfectly. If it ain't broke, Brown fixes it. Now Britain's broke.

Speaking of which, I am hoping tonight that Cameron nails Brown on the scale of the debt crisis this country faces and that his policies caused. The fact that the mainstream media can't seem to grasp this, nor most of the bizarre economic 'expert' commentariat of this country (the Anatole Kaletsky-types), should not frighten the Tory leader. He must make it plain to all that we really can't go on like this. Brown can't blame the banks for making him cave in on deregulation 'in the nineties'. And, as Dan Hannan I think said yesterday, if the banks' advice about deregulation was wrong - and Brown shouldn't have listened to it - why did he decide to listen to the same bankers over the public, trillion-pound bailout? Fool me once and all that. Two wrongs don't make a right.

Debt. Cameron's got to talk about it, not just to demolish Brown, but to be straight with the electorate about the scale of the challenge Brown's scorched earth policies have left for a Conservative government to repair and for future generations to pay off. We are, indeed, all in this together. Everyone. So what is there to be done?

Well, the first thing to do is to face up to reality. The other two parties can't do this because they are wedded to a particular ideology of big state interventionism, so the Conservatives, as always, will have to do it on their own - with a little help from the population. The reality is that public spending is bankrupting the country. I'm not saying that Cameron should be specific about where the axe will fall, but fall it must - hard and often. He's got to level with people, but in a positive way: a little pain now; pleasure later. Reform everything, abolish waste, get more bang for your buck and fix the public finances, starting with Labour's nightmarish overspending, currently putting us at a humiliating 20% bankruptcy risk (five times higher than France, Germany or the USA).

Labour's all about pleasure, pleasure, pleasure -now, now, now - until there's simply no money left to pay for it. That's just infantile.

If the infants are returned, therefore, with "economy killer" Brown at the helm, this country will effectively be bankrupt within a few years.

As it is we already face a period of Labournomic, fake growth (where every £1 of expansion in the economy actually costs the taxpayer £2 in 'stimulus' money. Hey, that's just what the figures say.) As it is we already face a period of stagflation. As it is we already face what could be another lost decade, just like the last time Labour was in charge.

Anyway, those are the sorts of things Cameron needs to talk about, along with all the optimistic stuff, obviously. People want an effective leader, not just a charming one.

Brown is neither. Cameron could be both.

Blair Knew

I nearly missed this extraordinary piece buried in the business pages of yesterday's Telegraph by half-decent economics commentator (and there aren't many of those) Edmund Conway. The thrust of the piece, supported by an interesting flashback to the days when Blair was, apparently, Labour's City spokesman, just when the '87 bubble burst, is that a series of FoI requests have revealed that Blair knew about Brown's mega housing bust as early as 2004, possibly before. Said Conway:

So concerned was the PM back in 2004 that the housing market was turning into a bubble that he asked the Treasury for a full briefing note (in fact he was prompted by an FT column by Martin Wolf, warning: “Nobody knows when the bust will come. But come, I believe, it will”.)

Fine, but nothing, as everyone no doubt recalls, happened. Why? I think we can guess. Conway continues:

Now, it probably isn’t a surprise to hear that the Treasury dismissed this view in its document, which PricedOut has attained under a Freedom of Information request. But I was surprised by the length of the document (eight chunky pages) and throughout its length a sheer unwillingness to countenance the possibility that the housing market would crash. It underlines the simple fact that the Treasury under Gordon Brown was blind to the possibility that things could go horribly wrong – even within the confines of Downing Street. It turns out no-one was allowed to challenge the “end to boom and bust” trope – even Tony Blair himself.

Blair's role in this debacle simply demonstrates how weak a prime minister, and person, he actually was. And, of course, it shows how far he would go to keep the title. He knew and yet he did nothing. If he'd had a spine, he would have fired Brown when he had the chance. But he didn't, and should be judged accordingly.

As for Brown. My God! Is it any wonder that I hate him (and I mean hate) and all he stands for? Is it really that surprising that I, and millions of others, believe he is the worst man ever to have held high office in this country? Should it really be that much of a shock that I am 100% sure that if this unelected, incompetent, vainglorious oddball is somehow given a mandate this year, the damage he will do to this country afterwards would make terrible harm he's caused so far look like the good old days?

At least the politics are therefore very straightforward: you vote Labour in your constituency and you will get five more years of the lying economic wrecker. Vote Tory, you don't.

As far as I'm concerned, it's a moral duty to vote Conservative this time around, and all that that implies if you don't. That what's at stake here. The documentary proof in Conway's article provides the proof, as if more were needed.

And now, just for a bit of extra entertainment, and in case you can't be bothered to click through to original article, is that video of Blair in '87. Who'd have thought a wet-behind-the-ears political unknown, who'd never had a proper a job in his life, would one day be prime minister.

Well, so much for David Cameron. But it is interesting to see Blair back then...



...about the same as he looks now, only less suntanned and without the Yank accent.

The World Wants Britain To Vote Tory

Read this and weep, Labour wreckers.

The world expects a rational conclusion to the British general election, and that means kicking out this Labour government. Only idiots and socialists would fail to do that simple thing, and let the entire world down as a consequence. But idiots and socialists - they're one in the same thing, aren't they? They refuse to "get it".

"Don't let them [the British idiots and socialists] ruin Britain again," is the clear message from the rest of planet earth.

The only way forward for Britain, and the only way the international community will listen to Britain again (rather than being lectured to by an arrogant, unrepresentative weirdo like Brown), is by meeting their expectations by voting the arrogant fool out. Forever.

We absolutely musn't disappoint the world.

Setting The Agenda And The Bigger Picture

The latest Labour outbursts over their tax on jobs, containing further and deeper Brownian abuse of the Conservatives, a growing number of business leaders and, by implication, the millions of ordinary people (like me) earning over £20,000, is kind of losing its context. Perhaps that's Brown's and, in particular, the interminably corrosive Mandelson's, intention: to distract people from the scale of what's at stake in this election by obsessively focusing on one policy area, albeit a crucial and highly symbolic one. The NI hike tax on jobs and the resistance to waste cuts is an argument that has been comprehensively lost by Brown, and David Cameron knows it. It's time to move on.

It was therefore good to hear Cameron dismiss Labour's new batch of economic lies and smears as desperate and sure signs that the Labour leadership is 'rattled', before indeed moving on to the next part of his agenda of righting Labour's wrongs, this time Labour's social wrongs. The "National Citizen Service" is a great idea. This is the first meat on the bones of the whole, powerful Tory theme of social responsibilty and is an excellent - and radical - proposal designed to make youngsters, from all backgrounds I trust, aware of what it means to belong to the society into which they have been born.

Wresting the terms of the debate so long dominated by socialist dogma in this country is what Cameron is attempting here, and it is no mean undertaking. If it means that one day, "duty" is no longer a dirty word, then he, we, and British society generally, will have won a major victory. The endorsement of Sir Michael Caine notwithstanding, I'm fascinated by how the socialists intend to attack these new ideas - for attack them they will, tooth and nail, and not from a position of principle, but because they regard all-things "social" purely as their preserve (I guess that's why they call themselves "socialists"). It's a battle I'm looking forward to even more than the economic one, actually.

Norman Tebbit, if his latest, brilliant (and witty) blogpost, is anything to go by, might be too. He has said that there is simply no redemption for Brown such is the depth and seriousness of his denial and delusion about, well, anything and everything. It is certainly worth the read. But here, for me, is the key part, and it's all the more powerful for the fact that he is an outspoken critic of aspects of the Cameroon agenda, such as it is known.

The sad aspect of all this is that there can be no redemption of Mr Brown. He is simply unable to learn anything from experience, except that his agenda has not been pursued with sufficient vigour.
That is why the first objective of those unconvinced by Brownian politics should be to remove Mr Brown from office. There only two ways this might be achieved. The first is to allow his colleagues, who have so far bungled every attempt to do so, to have another crack at it.
The other, and the more credible option, is to do the job for them by throwing NuLab out of office, and the only credible way of achieving that is to give the Conservatives a working majority on May 6.
I know that not all those of a conservative temperament will like that conclusion. Some will not accept it. I understand their feelings, but I hope that they will not awake on May 7 to find the ship still on the reef and the same crew in charge.

This is the simplest and most inescapable argument for voting Conservative at the general election, and it's one I've been putting forward on this blog, especially to Kipper and libertarian friends, for some time. I'm not going to split the vote by voting for single-issue or tiny parties, no matter how much I might be drawn to some their arguments about EU referenda or the shortcomings of our political system and our long slide into state-sponsored authoritarianism, expecially under this government. Even taking those things into consideration, as Lord Tebbit often does, the risk of five more years of Labour is a far graver and more urgent concern. They've been that disastrous.

Cameron has won part of the argument on Brown's insane tax and spend waste culture (although I still think he could go further - demolishing Brown's nightmare long-term fiscal and monetary performance, as Tebbit suggests, would be a worthwhile and honest campaigning exercise, for instance). But Cameron also increasingly appears to be aware that this is not the be-all and the end-all; that there's far more to say, and he's going to say it. However far Cameron's dislodged him from it, the economy is still Brown's most comfortable area. It was therefore shrewd of Osborne and co. to take Brown onto that ground, give him a hell of a kicking, and them leave him there to think about it. Meanwhile, Cameron and the Conservatives move on, taking the debate, the country and the news cycle with them.

So what's emerging now are more pertinent, less negative reasons to lend a vote to the Tories because now they are setting the agenda, and the pace. A lot of people have their doubts and still need either an excuse or permission to vote Conservative, but, increasingly to me, Cameron looks like he will deliver on both.

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.

Tax On Jobs and Cuts In Waste

It's incredible, really, how fast the political currents can shift when a couple of objectively true concepts suddenly coalesce into slogans. It's extraordinary that within the space of 24 hours, Labour's 1% NICS rise, conceptually a heroically dumb idea even in the worst of economic times, has now become known - and will be known henceforth until doomsday - as a 'tax on jobs', and 'cuts in frontline public services' has shifted, it seems to me as permanently, to 'cuts in government waste'.

If that's not a massive shift in the 'narrative', (if you like postmodernist critiques of this sort of thing), then I'm a stinking socialist!

Cameron and Osborne have been absolutely dead right on the mad Labour NICS policy since Budget Day (I wonder what Kenneth Clarke's part was in all this), but the real consequences of being right in this case (they've been right a lot of times before, but to little or no political avail) is not merely that they've won the argument hands down, they've changed the very terms of the debate, and there is nothing, but nothing, that the Labour Party media machine can do about it. They've been linguistically neutered. For good. (At last!)

There is now, in everyone's minds, judging by the late night media coverage of the papers, a very clear, articulated, choice between Labour and the Conservatives, between Brown and Cameron: Labour offer nothing more than a tax on jobs and more waste; the Tories will deliver no tax on jobs and they will cut government waste.

If you find this hard to believe (and you shouldn't, because it true!), then read this Andrew Porter piece for this morning's Telegraph. Brown is now under pressure to kill Labour's National Insurance hike! Business groups, representing 10 million workers, have praised the Tory plan and say they will 'fight' for it to happen.

This is a tectonic shift in the mood of the nation, and the fortunes of the two main parties. I think it started with the hubristic vanity of Mandelson when, off the leash as always and carried away by a sense of his own superiority - as always - during Labour's desperate damage control operation this morning (that went well, lol), he effectively branded a lot of high-powered employers "a bunch of mugs who should know better". They should listen to him, he implied, because he knows best, according to his own estimation of himself.

Massive, massive mistake. And it will cost Labour the election, and then some. Big day, then, for everyone.

Halleluja!

Update:
Iain Martin thinks it was all part of a carefully choreographed Tory sting operation. I'm not so sure. I think this was, in addition to the media planning, a genuine, momentous outing of the truth, and therefore massively more significant in terms of historic political outcomes. No one could have planned an operation as successful as this one. He's underestimated the terrible impact of the Mandelson intervention, in my 'umble.

Byrne Wriggling

Liam Byrne, no stranger to the odd pork pie, told a whole tray-full of them a few minutes ago during his interview on Radio 4. In response to the serious damage caused to Darling's tax-on-jobs NICS policy by 23 business leaders, who between them employ over 500,000 people, and who've come out in favour of the Tory proposal to more or less scrap the plans, Byrne wriggled, exaggerated, diverted and lied like only he can. The ever-changing Labour economic narrative has just morphed again, this time into an even bigger cutting machine.

For instance, while Darling was only a few days ago talking about £12Bn of 'efficiency savings' - of cutting Labour's massive overspending in other words - today Byrne talked about £35Bn in cuts. Where the hell did that come from? I'm sure he has an answer (he always does), but that's a monster leap in the cuts bidding war in just a couple of days, and gives some indication as to how hurt Labour's economic policies have been by the letter (the bigger the lie, the bigger the damage - it's always been proportional with Labour). Anyway, that's the first bit of wild exaggeration.

Then he goes on about the Tories 'magicking' up figures out of thin air (yes, Liam Byrne said that, ho ho). They will need to find an extra £9Bn in cuts, on top of Byrne's new £35Bn mega-number (he was on a roll by now). The reality is, of course, a little more modest. The Tories will need to find £11Bn in savings, of which £4.9Bn will be counted as a loss against the extra NI money that would come from Labour's tax hike and rest pumped back into the services they have ring-fenced. Byrne damned out of his own, lying mouth again, then.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of this Byrne wriggling, what it shows is that the Conservatives have won the argument on cuts; Byrne's wild numbers at least show that the debate is heading in the right direction, that the government must stop overspending so that it can cut the monstrous national debt. The other thing he singularly failed to do was attack the letter from the business leaders itself. Never once did he say that the businessmen were wrong about the tax on jobs, or, directly at least, that the Tory policy was wrong, either. He did make some feeble reference to the last NI rise, hilariously saying that jobs actually rose after it (it was well before Brown's bust, when public sector employment was still ballooning, and paid for by, you guessed it, tax rises lol), but the thrust of his trainwreck argument was that the Tories were right, but they're Tories, so they're still wrong.

Very lame, Liam. Even for you.

Massive win for the Tories.

Barely Alive Chancellor's Debate Blogging

Two things: First: Why has Vince "Preparing for Government" Cable been given the role of pointless avuncular arbitrator.

Oh, and second, Darling is being absolutely annihilated by Osborne, and far more devastatingly than I expected. Well done George.

The third thing is (three, three things): What the hell is Vince Cable for already? I do wish he'd shut the hell up and let the grown-ups (politically) get on with the show.

Update

And lo, Saint Vince of Cables gets the serious clap dose from certain members of the audience at the end. Well, that might have something to do with the fact that he's a complete policy whore, being the Lib Dem who will never see office that he is, who will say anything to "pull". But that fact will make no difference to tomorrow's dumb mainstream media. Hey ho.

The fact that Osborne petered out more-than-somewhat towards the end concerns and irritates me in equal measure, however. Darling, and this saves Osborne to a vast extent, was, by contrast (sort of) a feeble, washed-out non-entity virtually all the way through.

So, forgetting the infinitely forgettable 'Vince Factor' forever, what we have seen here, overall, is a clear win for Osborne. But not, annoyingly, the decisive one it could and should have been.

Game (still) on.

Darling-Osborne Debate Limber-Up

If Osborne sticks to these home truths, and really nails Darling for his own, rather softer brand of mendacious tribalism, then he really could move the Tory argument and campaign forward tonight. Let's hope he's up to it. I think he is - but not everyone does. He's still got a lot to prove to a lot of people, unfairly I feel, especially after his tour de force showing with his plans to scrap Labour's economically suicidal tax-on-jobs NI hike.

Plenty of things to make it decent viewing, then.

Hat tip: the increasingly substantial, Guy News roving reporter and top blue blogger,Tory Bear - who delivered a pretty solid performance of his own on Sky a few moments ago ;)

Carbon Junk Bonds

Carbon is universally ubiquitous. It is the fourth most abundant element in the cosmos and the fifteenth most common on this planet. It's the basis of all life as we know it. Yet it seems that this elegant combination of abundance and vital significance will not stop human beings, in their endless pursuit of ever greater levels of folly, from basing an entire new economic model on "trading" the stuff. It reminds me of the Golgafrinchans in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where, having crash-landed on a primeval Planet Earth, decide to use tree leaves as currency, only to discover soon afterwards that they had a serious inflation problem. Their solution? Why, burn down the trees, of course.

So you would think that this comedy science fiction is just that, comedy science fiction. It could never happen in real life, could it? Well, yes, it could. Anthropogenic climate change hysteria (it was anthropogenic global warming, but since the warming abruptly ground to a halt a decade ago, the goalposts were conveniently moved) drummed-up by discredited, numbskull scientists and then exploited mercilessly by leftwing misanthropists and 'financial engineers' alike in pursut of their own agendas, is producing its own version of leaf-trading. Both groups have something in common: while their ultimate goals might be different, they both really don't give a toss about the environment. All the traders really care about is money and all the loony Trots really care about is power. About people in general, they both care nothing.

Leaving the Trots to their own devices for a moment, in Private Eye's latest edition is an interesting article on the father of derivatives trading (junk bonds to you and me), Richard Sander. For those that don't know, derivatives, in their many various forms, are the things that brought the global economy crashing down a couple of years ago, (beginning, interestingly, with Northern Rock in Britain (it didn't 'start in America', as such, you see)). Just to put things in some kind of perspective, the entire market, if memory serves, was worth an wapping $500Tn in 2007, while the real villain of the piece, the CDS (Credit Default Swap), which was a trading invention that effectively rewarded the trader who held them with a payout should there be a default over a set period of time on a 'bundle' of mortgages, which were sold as a package, was $50Tn dollars before the sub-prime crisis went off like a nuclear bomb and plunged half the world into depression.

Well, Sander's at it again. This expert in magicking money out of thin air by trading in worthless assets is the main mover behind all the new bit of 'financial engineering' currently known as 'carbon trading'. Private Eye has done what passes in that magazine for an expose on him, though its typically MSM-style, schizoid editorial stance on all-things climate change means that it doesn't seem to be able to reach any solid conclusions about where this latest global financial scam will take us. Anyway, click on the image to read the article, or on the link above:

Whatever the ins and outs of how this thing's mechanisms are expected to work, a few things stand out in particular. First, the usual suspects are involved (RBS etc). Second, it stinks. What CNBC's Federal Reserve expert, Steve Leisman, called in late 2008, at the height of the crisis, a decade of 'fake growth' amounting to $40Tn, is about to happen all over again. A worthless commodity, in this case a commodity that doesn't actually exist - these are bets designed to offset the 'production' of carbon, or, more accurately, carbon dioxide - (at least with sub-prime, there was a real house lying somewhere at the bottom of it all), will be traded furiously in a market that some are saying will be worth $100Tn (Christopher Booker for instance) before this decade is out. And they are not wrong: one decade was all it took in the case of sub-prime junk bonds, once Alan Greenspan and Bill Clinton (and Gordon Brown in Britain, of course) had created the CDS bonanza for their banking buddies. Lehman et al over there; Royal Bank of Scotland, Bank of Scotland, Northern Rock et al over here. So long as the tax rolled in, no one in government cared. They certainly did not have clue-one about the forces they had unleashed with their vandalism of carefully created regulatory systems. Brown certainly didn't, hence the biggest exposure was in Britain. Within a decade, that market had jumped from a few hundred million in the mid-nineties to trillions by the time of what I consequently like to call 'Brown's bust'.

It's happening all over again, beginning this year. And there is nothing anyone with any political power will do to stop it. Why? Because of the propaganda that is fuelling the scheme's growth and the amount of egg on collective faces there would be should someone decide to hold his hand up and simply say, "Hang on a minute, do we really want to go down this road again?" So it isn't carbon capture we should be worrying about, it's media capture. It isn't money men like Sander we should be worrying about - he's just doing what he does best. It's the crooks in our own government.

It isn't climate change we should be worried about, it's the vast scale of the next bust, which will be inevitable if (or when) these immoral, undemocratic and economically retarded transnational carbon trading schemes are permitted to gain a grip on the world.

We do need alternative energy production systems, of course, and we must work harder to conserve and preserve the planet's ecosystem and protect it from humanity's impact (some would say that that is a human duty). What we certainly don't need is, first, insane, pseudo-scientific thought diseases that will result in real envoronmental damage (as has been seen already), and second, to pour hundreds of billions of pounds of wealth into the stratosphere based on that lie, wealth that could and should be used to modernise the world's infrastructure today.

It is time for people the world over, the vast majority of whom don't believe the climate lies any more in any case, to start shouting out loud: not in my name!