Jobless Bloke: "I Love Lisa"

While I was messing around with the word 'hypnosis' on YouTube, I stumbled on this gem.


I certainly like to listen to the sound of her woyce and I really dig the deep, hype-notic sleep that her beautiful, green-eyed woyce generates with a little of what amounts to your basic counting, as far as I can tell.

Good/bad, this puppy would definitely sleep with Lisa. (That is what she said, right?)

Whatever. But you know what? I reckon this is a Tory party political aimed at indolent male dole spongers. Brilliant! This will be one of the most effective deficit reduction strategies of all time. A government-subsidised young Russian(?) dominatrix's sex promise in exchange for significant efforts finally to find a job and stick with it.

It's definitely novel and it could be a winner. So well done, George Osborne! (As long as that's not your sister. That would be weird.)

Budget Bluster

What a load of laughable lightweight rhetoric. "I believe that government can make a difference," whimpers Darling. Yes, mate. But not this one. Not your bust government.

The whole tone of the thing makes me think that he's decided to vote Tory himself, actually (on the sly), because then, in his confused mind, at least he could guarantee the "big changes" he thinks we so desperately need - without Gordon there to wreck them, that is. Well, at least that's two things we can agree on then: the need for big changes and the necessity to vote Conservative to get them.

Peter Hoskin was a little less (a very little less) scathing about this pre-budget manure. He also thinks it's a signal that Darling's nicked another Tory policy and is going to cut business tax. I doubt it will be handled competently even if he does, however, given this nightmare government's record when it comes to the private, productive heart of the British economy. What's more, you can guarantee that it will be paid for not with vital cuts in government debt and overspending, but with tax hikes everywhere. Prepare to become a lot poorer after tomorrow, everyone.

Epic, unravelling fail, 24 hours before it's even happened.

Brown To Wales: You've Never Had It So Good

Fraser Nelson, who finally appears to have twigged that another five years of Labour would probably be a Bad Thing, has posted on Brown's latest nonsense address to the Welsh Labourists. In it, Brown seems to be suggesting that Wales has never had it so good than under Labour, citing the creation of 100,000 phantom jobs and talking, laughably, about his own family's 'poverty', though he has to go back eighty-odd years to his grandparent's generation to find at least the suggestion of it. Nelson gives the lie very effectively to this complacent, vacuous claptrap, and to Brown's murky Welsh job creation figures.

Gordon Brown does not have much of a personal “backstory” but he does talk about his family. When he’s feeling guilty about something, he mentions his father. But today, speaking to the Welsh Labour Party, he again talks about a figure we heard about a few days ago: his grandfather.

“Like so many here I come from a family whose grandfather went without work during much of the 1930s. A grandfather whose small savings gave his son, my father, the chance of an education, the first in our family to go to university. And the lesson of those days is that even in the worst of times families helped each other, supported each other, came to the aid of each other through thousands of acts of friendship caring and support. And that reveals the most important lesson of all; that it’s not markets that create morals: morals spring from the compassion of our hearts”

Given how utterly unremarkable it is to have grandparents who had a tough time in the 1930s, one can only presume that Brown’s aim is to contrast this with Cameron’s grandparents. But playing the “poor family background” card really is pushing it. As a Church of Scotland minister, Brown’s father was in a position to give his family a very comfortable life. Brown simply does not have a poverty song to sing.

Most strikingly, Brown tries to tell Wales how good they’ve had it under Labour with 100,000 more jobs. But, as nationally, how many of these were imported? Surely matters is to what extent economic growth helped those on benefits in Wales. In its case, not very much – as the below graph shows (data from DWP)

On the one hand - the 1930s - I can confirm that Nelson is absolutely right. My great grandfather on my dad's side was a timber salesman in Cumbria. During the Depression, he could only afford to send one of his two sons to university. My grandfather, being the youngest, drew the short straw. Fortunately for him, however, he excelled in school and managed to win a place with the Civil Service, where he enjoyed a long and pretty illustrious career. The only hand-up he'd ever had was a decent education in a selective school. I wonder how he would have fared in Brown's Britain. Mickey Mouse GCSEs followed by Mickey Mouse A-levels followed by - well - followed by nothing. Britain has the highest levels of youth unemployment in Europe (see chart left).

Which brings us to Brown's second laughable claim, this time about Welsh jobs and how 'good' life is in Wales thanks to his largesse with taxpayers' money. The graph to which Nelson refers tells us all we need to know (see above). In terms of benefit dependency, things have only got worse in Wales. Nelson is also right about Brown's pie in the sky jobs figures. If they have been created, then they've been imported. While their numbers have certainly thinned over the past 12 months, and while I am very pleased to count some of them as friends, including my next door neighbours, the fact is that the torrent of Polish immigration to my own town sucked up any spare, low-paid jobs. Mind you, the real reason for this is, if the Poles I know are anything to go on, that they have a powerful work ethic entirely absent from the psychology of your average, undereducated young Welsh man or woman, and this syndrome is repeated throughout Britain.

Poles depend on work in the same way that a large portion of Welsh men and women depend on benefits. Brown and his ilk depend on the latter's votes - and straightforward lies - to maintain power, so the likelihood is that he will want to keep it that way, however morally bankrupt the arrangement clearly is.

So it's certainly time for change in Wales and while I am an ardent Conservative, I am also a realist. The Tories aren't part of the political landscape in this part of the world. They aren't even on the radar. So I will be voting Plaid Cymru in the general election. A tactical vote, I freely admit, but not a wasted one if it helps to kick out Labour from government, and Brown out of Number 10. I am also a bit of a fan of Elfyn Llwyd, who is one of the most impressive figures in Welsh (and Westminster) politics. And I'm a fan of Plaid generally, even if I can never agree with one or two of their policies concerning the future of the Principality.

The point is, all the people I've spoken to over the past year in this part of Carmarthenshire appear to have reached a similar conclusion. They're all ready to send Brown a powerful message about just how 'good' they think it's been under his trainwreck regime, and, in many cases, how totally betrayed they feel.

About time.

You Turn If You Want To, Gordo

Before I pick up on the main theme of this post, I've got to tell you, it really has been one of those days today. This is the day, for instance, that my mother attended the cremation of a young Vietnamese man, murdered on the streets of my home town - an act of mindless savagery sadly all-too common in Labour's Britain. His family are too poor to make the trip from Vietnam to bury their son, so my mother's church arranged everything. About 50 people - mainly from the congregation but complete strangers to the boy, so I'm told - turned-out to pay their respects. That was a cause for some optimism, at least. There is some decency left among people in Britain; people who seem still to have some sense of duty. But I fear they almost exclusively belong to my mother and father's generation. And none of them is getting any younger.

Turning to happier events, it seems Brown has finally performed his much-awaited about face in the "cuts" debate - he's actually joined it, in other words. So he's filled the empty chair left for him by his enitre cabinet and set-out a clear plan for bringing public spending under control as soon as possible.

Well, no. Not really. The actual Brown outburst at the TUC was rather more muddled than that, as Iain Dale, among others, has already spotted. In the first place, he hasn't really changed his tune one iota. He's just tweaked the lyrics a little bit. And made them worse. Dale:

I had thought that Darling had persuaded him not to use the line about saving 500,000 jobs as it couldn't be substantiated, but he used it again in this speech. His criticism of the Conservatives was so laboured that it seemed as if he was just going through the motions. Indeed, it was a little odd for him to criticise Conservative public spending cuts, when his people were spinning that he was about to copy them. It's a major strategic error for Brown to go down this road.

Odd indeed. The Speccy's David Blackburn goes into a little more detail about why the cuts issue has become a no-win issue personally for Brown and generally for Labour, thanks to Brown's dithering and lack of courage.

Six months after a Politics Home/Spectator poll illustrated that ‘cuts’ was no longer a dirty word, Gordon Brown squared up and let slip the c-word.

A new Politics Home ‘insider poll’ reveals that 86% of respondents believe Labour would be in a stronger position now if they had admitted the need for future cuts at the time of the Budget. That is almost certainly true: the obvious contrivance that was ‘Tory cuts versus Labour investment’, together with the invention of 0% rise economics, torpedoed the government’s credibility. That said, the majority of Labour’s spending cuts will be delayed until we start enjoying the ‘proceeds of growth’ once more – a tactic that’s designed to emphasise a conceited division between ‘gleeful Tory scything’ and ‘Labour investment, regrettably stunted’. In short, little has changed.

The stubborn, pervasive anti-Tory mindset which characterises everything Brown does - he defines his political existence in terms of uncritical and often irrational anti-Toryism, rather than treating the issue on its own merits - has finally done for Labour. Treating the issue on its own merits would mean that he would not have felt the need even to mention the Tory party had he been setting out a genuine, new policy direction in a keynote speech to a major Labour constituency. But no. There it was - fumble the lines and then bash the Tories. The point is that that isn't working any more. It hasn't been working for some time.

Everybody knows that bringing spending under control is now an essential evil. In fact, in many cases, as the voting public now appears to suspect given the shape of the polls, there will be nothing evil about public spending cuts. Some things, like the Labour-infested quangocracy, are ripe for pruning.

But what about Mandelson's scare tactics (excellent ref.: Burning Our Money) - the dreaded 'double-dip', W-shaped recession? Well, a double-dip recession will not be caused by rising unemployment or by slashing spending. That is the neo-Keynesian mantra and it's never been proved (besides, the Keynesian system for pump-priming has never actually been attempted - you're supposed to do it during the upswing in the cycle, not in the middle of a slump). The "double-dipper", if and when it happens, or the stagflation - whatever you want to call it - will be caused by inflation, and inflation is on the way back with a vengeance. This has been known for months and Mervyn King more or less acknowledged it today, as far as I could tell. QE isn't working and Labour have lost control of the money supply. Next stop: devaluation. The "longer and deeper under the Tories" message is, quite simply, a lie. Of course it is - it's what Brown thinks; it's what Mandelson says. But it won't wash any more. Brown has been rumbled and the fact that in this non-U-turn/U-turn speech today all he could do was somehow blame the Tories for something they haven't actually done yet - and won't do anyway (and they haven't been in power for 13 years) will be seen by people as so utterly feeble that it will simply drive them into the welcoming arms of Cameron and Osborne.

Bravo, Gordon. Encore.

Incidentally, Benedict Brogan has written an interesting piece on this subject this evening. Check it out. Oh heck, I'll just rip it ;)

Time to dish out the awards for getting Gordon Brown to surrender on c*ts. First in the queue must be George Osborne and David Cameron, who stuck it to the Prime Minister for months, culminating in that remarkable series of PMQs confrontations in July. Mr Brown is credited with that line about “Oppositions move to the centre, while Governments can move the centre”: The Tories can claim to have pulled off the improbable, which is moving the centre while in Opposition. “Tory cuts v Labour investment” cost them the last two elections, and there was little enthusiasm for a third go. It’s not quite Charles Martel stopping the Saracens at Poitiers, but suddenly they are off the hook.

Labour is now trying to impale them on another one, namely cuts now v cuts later. But if, as Mervyn King suggested today, we are already seeing a return to growth, then Labour’s case for putting off cuts might look fairly empty by Christmas. Remember, 2009/10 is settled. What is in dispute is what happens in FY2010/11. Peter Mandelson tried to head that off with warnings of a double-dip, but Alistair Darling wasn’t buying that idea today. Of course, with Vince Cable beating Labour and Tories in the candour stakes with specific proposals for what might be chopped, there is still plenty of scope for testing the Tory line. But a big achievement nevertheless.

Also deserving of praise - and arguably the ones who got the PM to shift - are the Lord First Secretary and the Chancellor. Mr Darling is now Labour’s Mr Straight who has used quiet persuasion behind the scenes and incremental rhetorical shifts in public to herd the PM towards today’s statement (although even he must have known that blaming a media ‘game’ was frankly biscuit taking). Likewise Lord M, who has few hang-ups about talking cuts, and has been pressing Mr Brown with ill-disguised frustration to stop offering himself for Tory target practice. They plan now to turn the fire on the Conservatives by pressing for details of what would be sacrificed in that “emergency” Budget Mr Osborne confirmed today.

But there is someone else who deserves several minutes of applause in my book, and that’s my former Room 7 colleague Fraser Nelson. He was the one who earlier than most was banging on about the reality of what would happen to spending in 2011 and beyond. He provided the ammo that the rest of us used. What a potent combo it will be, to have a Spectator editor who is numerate (and who still blogs).

They're offering 4/1 odds at Paddypower on whether Brown will last through November. If you are a gambler, I suggest you take them - they'll only get shorter from here on in.

Darling Flexes Muscles He Never Knew He Had

Darling: just window dressing?

Though flabby and out of condition, Alistair Darling is flexing his newly-found political muscle, it seems. I wondered whether he would actually try to run his own department at some stage, especially now that his position is basically unassailable after he gave his former friend and boss, Brown, an ultimatum about Balls' attempts to steal his job.

However, due to the fact that this Labour government is so extraordinarily directionless, talentless and rotten to the core, the instant consequence of Darling's inevitable move to reverse the ridiculous VAT cut - the most ineffective and expensive tax break in history - is to split the cabinet, or so the ST has just said. It would be hilarious if it wasn't so tragic. Here are the key bits:

His comments [about reversing the VAT cut] come just two days after Harriet Harman said the planned rise from 15 per cent to 17.5 per cent on January 1 was "under review".

Ms Harman, speaking in the wake of the Daily Telegraph's campaign to postpone the increase, said the Government would be flexible about VAT – a move that was welcomed by business groups.

Leading figures in the retail and hospitality industry, including Sir Philip Green and Sir Stuart Rose, have argued it will be an "administrative nightmare" to implement the change not only on a Bank Holiday, but also at the busiest time of the year for restaurants, hotels and shops.

However, Mr Darling publicly "slapped her down", according to a Treasury source, after he made clear the reverse in the temporary cut was still set for the New Year.

Talking on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show, he said it would "definitely" return to its original higher level of 17.5 per cent in January

"...when you consider that it costs almost about a billion pounds a month, I was quite clear at the budget and clear when I announced this last November that the VAT rate would return to the 17.5 per cent at the end of this year. Now that remains the case," the Chancellor said.

It is understood that he was upset that Ms Harman, deputising for the Prime Minister, who in on holiday, spoke on tax matters.

In the Marr interview this morning, Darling also tried to shift the blame for the government's mishandling of the economy back onto banks that are still not lending to businesses, despite Labour assurances last year that this would not happen. Given that the Treasury's own new rules for the banks, which demand that they have double the capitalisation that they could work with previously, and mean they have no option but to hoard QE and bailout cash, it seems rather dishonest of Darling, muscular or otherwise, to try to offload responsibility for his and his governments' hopeless incompetence over loan guarantees onto bank boards hand-picked by him! No more than we've come to expect, though, I suppose. Meanwhile, through all the lies and bluster, thousands of businesses and hundreds of thousands of jobs are being lost in what is a truly horrific downturn - and which could be rapidly turning into a full-blown depression.

While that might be another story, it's all part of the same problem: bad government. The fresh split and the "bad" bank behaviour provides further evidence, as if more were needed, that this government, with its constant infighting and loser leader is completely paralysed. The country needs a united government with a proper mandate to act. It needs a general election far more now than at any time in the post-war era.

You see, Darling might have muscle now, but he has no authority. No-one in this government has - and none moreso than G. Brown, who, laughably, remains our Prime Minister. This really is a crisis, even if it might not feel like one. Remember, though: it never does until it's too late. The clock is ticking on the timebomb that is a sudden and huge acceleration in unemployment, which is where all this is heading.

It's 1978 all over again, folks (or worse). Gawd 'elp us all.

Vauxhall - The End

This morning's news, even the heavily spun BBC-Mandy version, about the takeover rescue/German-bailout of GM Europe will provide no consolation whatsoever for Vauxhall workers.

Read between the lines of the BBC's Labour-sensitive claptrap. It's not hard to work it out; this one can't be spun very much, but boy, how they have tried:

Lord Mandelson said that [Canadian company] Magna had made it clear that they were committed to continued production in the UK. He added he would be seeking a meeting to "reinforce that commitment".

Talks in Berlin - attended by Chancellor Angela Merkel, other German ministers and officials from the German states that contain GM plants - discussed the offer from Magna.

Magna, backed by a Russian bank and Russian truckmaker GAZ, says it will invest more than 500m euros into Opel.

Merkel was there, chequebook at the ready - flush with the German export-driven budget-surplus real buying money left-wing British popular 'economists' of the UK MSM have been criticising ad nauseum recently - from a position of total ignorance, arrogance and delusion it now seems.

Merkal sweetened the deal with the stuff that talks: real cash. The Russian/Canadian agreement was reached with OPEL, guys. There was no mention of Vauxhall anywhere in it because it wasn't part of the deal. Vauxhall was less than a side-issue: it's regarded as a duplicate operation with a limited (right-hand drive) market. They already think the British operation is literally redundant.

You will have noticed in all this by now: no Gordon Brown present - unlike Merkel, who made a point of it. No Brown, no British money at the table (we don't have any anyway and even he knows that). So Mandelson inevitably, utterly failed - and the slithering, hypocritical mountebank knows that as much as Brown knows he's run out of our money.

He was the poor relation at that meeting and it's vital that that truth breaks through the deep fug of Labour's delusional propaganda. The people of Britain must know just how exposed to calamity Brown and his bunch of idiot acolytes have left our nation.

Bulls**t walks - always. Brown, Mandelson, Labour and, in the eyes of the entire world these days, Britain, are all simply bulls**t. We're a total laughing stock, once more. No one will take us seriously until we take control and kick-out the utter, humiliating liability that is Brown's 'government' - and the rest of the world knows that!

Meanwhile, Vauxhall has six months - tops. Another triumph for Labour.

And So It Came To Pass...

...well, nearly. I posted this blog seven days ago, citing an American report in the NYT about the imminent collapse of Chrysler and the break-up of General Motors, following the June 1st restructuring deadline.

Seems it's all now happening (and very quickly, too). Chrysler has just filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, leaving many of its creditors livid - and threatening their businesses. And GM has just opened negotiations with international auto makers to sell off its global operations, as predicted, including (and especially) GM Europe.

This is not the end for Chrysler - quite. Legal permission was given today for a joint Canadian/US government $4.1Bn loan, protected from creditors by the terms of the agreement and paving the way for a takeover by Fiat, according to CNBC.

To cut a long story short, Fiat, as well as taking over Chrysler is now expected to buy GM's Vauxhall car plants in Britain, too, as part of a deal securing it majority ownership of GM Europe. I can tell you now that this is catastrophic news for the British carmaking industry. Fiat will have no inclination whatsoever to preserve what is, in effect, a duplicate company (of Opel). Job losses in the UK will be extremely heavy as Vauxhall car production (now about 380,000 a year) will be wound-down. Fiat chief, Sergio Marchionne, has already come out in support of German-based Opel. Interviewed in Bild today, he said:

We do not want to close the four Opel factories in Germany. I need the factories in the future, to build cars. But naturally, we need to decrease the size of the production firms. They need to be more efficient.

These 'efficiency' savings are likely to be found in Britain meaning another pillar of the British car industry is about to crumble, resulting in widespread knock-on company collapses and rising unemployment in the manufacturing sector. Fiat's vision is to build a European car company, so Marchionne claims, to rival the likes of Toyota.

We want to build a real European car company that will achieve worldwide success. We want to combine Fiat, Opel and Chrysler. If we achieve this we will be the second biggest car company behind Toyota and it will provide jobs not just in Germany, but around the world.

One thing is now completely certain, as US banks begin bulldozing repossessed homes rather than pay to maintain houses no one can afford to buy any more and the US car industry retreats and heads for hibernation, British manufacturing will be hardest hit. British jobs are once more on the line, unprotected by a Labour government under which British manufacturing overall has been declining for a decade. After the shameful Labour sponsored (the Red Aussie dominatrix Hewitt again) pre-election sell-off followed by the post-election liquidation of Rover, foreign owners are now only too willing to shed British jobs and shut down British plants rather than German or even American because they know, quite simply, that British workers are easier to fire and British manufacturing is always a spare wheel.

Labour governments are no friends of private workers or of non-state UK manufacturing. Don't let anyone remain fooled now that there has ever been any other reality.

One more Labour catastrophe for the next government to sort out.

GM Cops It

Well, very nearly. My American friends reveal that General Motors is on the very brink of Chapter 11 (managed) bankruptcy. Part of GM's current plan, not so much to avoid this scenario as to come out of the other side of it with some form of independence, is to cut immediately 21,000 jobs. Then it will keep on scaling-down its operations until it's a far smaller, more manageable and, the hope is, profitable operation. The likelihood is that a number of those job cuts will be found abroad.

As the New York Times said yesterday:

By the time it is finished, G.M. expects to have only 38,000 union workers and 34 factories left in the United States, compared with 395,000 workers in more than 150 plants at its peak employment in .1970

This is highly significant for British car workers. If the US parent is planning to downsize on that scale - or face complete failure - then the Vauxhall plant at Ellesmere Port is almost certainly under imminent threat. With 5000 employees producing nearly 16% of the nation's car output (around 380,000 last year), the impact felt here would be simply massive.

Those 5000 workers are the assembly-line, front line of an army of dependent engineering companies that provide parts and spares. Already, for example, as orders continue to dry-up during the slump, one such company in a town near me went bust yesterday with the loss of 100 skilled jobs.

If Vauxhall is shut, which is a distinct probability now, then those 100 job losses will become hundreds of thousands.

This is just one more piece of (non-spun) news that gives a fair indication of just how bad this recession is going to get in the UK, thanks in no small part to the diabolical mismanagement of this Labour government. And don't believe anyone who says otherwise!

Disturbing Trends

Learnt today from a friend that the college where I used to teach is cutting 87 jobs this month. It's not so much the cuts - if the funding isn't there and the overseas student revenue dries-up (that's been happening for 12 months now) then staff losses are unavoidable - it's the fact that senior managers will not be the ones facing the chop.

Like all county colleges over the past 20 years, this one has gradually been 'brought under management' meaning a whole tier of professional managers have been collected, from Principal down to campus office, who are divorced from the teaching profession yet completely and overwhelmingly remain 'in charge' of its highly trained practitioners - and the way they practise. It's never seemed to be a particularly logical arrangement to me, to put it mildly.

I don't object to a teaching institution being profitable one little bit - quite the opposite. And I don't even object to (realistic) target-setting in the name of 'standards' (as long as they are not ideologically motivated pseudo-standards, which, sadly, they invariably are).

I do object to the idea that teachers and ancillary staff are somehow expendable when times are tight but the council employed 'executive' class who've taken over tertiary education always appear to be completely bullet proof.

I suppose that because they are merely an extension of County Council authority in reality, it's inevitable they will behave the same way county councillors always have: with high-handed indifference to the people they are ostensibly put there to serve. It's a corruption of a noble concept which runs through this country from top to bottom. The NHS is the most stand-out example, of course.

If only we could rid ourselves of them somehow, once and for all, so the productive people can finally take over. Publicly funded career managers infiltrating the public professions en masse are palpably counterproductive and a terrible drain on national resources.

Maybe we could go for the Golgafrincham option.

Anyone know how to build a spaceship?

In the meantime, I just feel sorry for former colleagues now finding themselves under heavy sentence for a crime they did not commit.