Blair To Blame For Brown

Quite aside from all his other disastrous decisions, mainly on foreign policy, it seems perfectly fair to me that Blair be blamed for not seeing while he was Prime Minister that Britain wasn't saddled with a successor he himself thought was unfit to govern. This is, according to Andrew Rawnsley in his extraordinarily excoriating assault on virtually the entire Labour administration, the thing for which Blair, ultimately, is most guilty. It's a heck of a read and should be disastrous for all Labour's leadership candidates, tainted as they are with the charge of cowardice, arch and chronic dishonesty and, simply put, self-interested misgovernance. Anyway, here's a taste of something which, if you haven't already read it, is well worth a look:

If Blair thought that Brown was unfit to be prime minister – and there's now lots of evidence that this is precisely what Blair thought – he had an obligation to his party and his country to do something about it. At the very least, he should have, as he could have, ensured that there was a contest for the succession in 2007 rather than allow Brown to be crowned without proper scrutiny. It was one of Blair's most selfish acts and a gross dereliction of duty to swan off to make his millions while leaving his party and country to cope with the consequences of a Brown premiership.

The implication from this is that by the time he had finally given in to the forces of hell unleashed by Brown in the form of Balls, Wheelan et al in 2006, Blair simply didn't give a toss about what happened next. A more damning indictment of the man as Prime Minister is simply inconceivable, even one involving his misleading the House of Commons, the country and the world over WMDs in Iraq. It's actually quite difficult accurately to describe a person like that, whose self-interest and vanity is only trumped by his greed and dishonesty. In some ways if one views it in the light of this unforgivable dereliction of duty, as Rawnsley rightly calls it, Blair ends up as an even worse national leader than Brown, difficult though that might be for some (like me) to swallow.

If you do accept Rawnsley's characterisation of Blair, it is, however, perfectly possible to argue that he was worse than Brown as a man and as a leader. The only difference between the two frauds being, therefore, that Blair was a far better con man than Brown ever could be, which meant that Blair was able to trick the country into believing him and then voting for him. By contrast, Brown was just Brown: paranoid, delusional, vicious, incompetent even in disguising his many falsehoods and, ultimately, a total electoral liability and a catastrophe for the nation.

The impact of these realisations on the Labour leadership campaign as I said should be massive. All the candidates are as discredited as each other for failing to make the decision Blair couldn't be ar*ed to make and stopping Brown once it was crystal clear he was utterly hopeless. As Rawnsley says, quite fairly and quite mildly in truth:

Andy Burnham was one of the nodding dogs who would declare to TV cameras that the cabinet had every confidence in Gordon Brown when the reverse was the case. Ed Balls ran the thuggish Brownite machine and the decade-long insurgency against Tony Blair to put his master in Number 10. Ed Miliband makes pious noises denouncing "factionalism" as if he is a saintly figure who never had anything to do with it. "The emissary from Planet Fuck" – as he was known among Blair's aides during the civil war – was at the heart of the Brown faction.It is a bit tricky for David Miliband. He was one of the senior members of the cabinet who knew Brown was taking them to defeat and failed to act before it was too late.

So they all should be screwed - and rightly so. For all his hypocrisy, Mandelson doesn't really matter because he's not a leadership candidate. So, assuming (and this is a big assumption) the MSM ends its own version of Labourist dishonesty and begins to treat the rest with the contempt they should have coming to them for their pathetic behaviour in propping up Brown, the only untainted candidate in the Labour leadership race is, hilariously, Diane Abbott!

Either way, and this is essentially Rawnsley's conclusion, Labour is truly, deservedly and royally buggered. And in the end, of course, they themselves are the ones who are to blame for it. After all, Blair only gave us Brown because he'd given up, and that's how history will judge him. But the Milibands, Burnham and Balls (and Mandelson) are the ones who propped the disastrous loser up. That was unforgivable - and the country isn't going to forgive them, ever.

Now, thankfully, their past seems finally to be catching up with them. Soon there'll be nowhere left for them to hide any more and no amount of continued lying will save their collective political bacon. If the PLP is stupid enough to elect one of them, (and it's almost certain that it is that stupid) then they should prepare to be out of power for decades, if not forever. Mind you, exactly the same thing will happen if they choose bonkers Abbott.

Catch 22 for the Labourist wreckers - and music to my ears!

Mandelson Spins His Own Memoirs

New Labour Spin Twins: currently out-lying each other

Hardly surprising, I know, but since they have not been entirely well-received by his own party it was necessary for Mandelson to spin his memoirs for all he was worth upon their publication today in the face of what I predict will be pretty poor sales - and some reasonably tough questioning from Evan Davies this morning.

Even so, to hear Mandelson actually trying to spin his own, printed words from his own, conceited book - to hear him attempt the epistemologically impossible and wriggle and squirm as he did so - was a source of some pleasure for me as I battled my way into work through sheets and sheets of West Wales rain.

Doesn't he realise we stopped believing anything he says long ago? Davies made the point quite well: something like, don't you think the public will find it quite annoying that only three months ago you were telling them to vote for what you now call a 'dysfunctional' prime minister and party. Mandelson had no convincing answer to that, at least, not convincing enough for any potential readership, I would say.

But is this a case of one spin operation too far for the Prince of Spain (sic)? I suppose it's inevitable, actually, that spinners end up spectacularly but stubbornly contradicting themselves. After all, 'spin' is merely a euphemism for 'lie'. And Mandelson, after Alistair Campbell, is the biggest spinner of them all.

The only important thing about this book of Mandy's is that it represents the first shot in Labour's latest civil war, a war which, with enough luck, should keep them away from office - and us - for a generation.

So well done he. Sort of.

Brown Implodes Mandelson's Campaign

Been reading a few hand-wringing blogposts around and about reinforcing the idea that after that truly appalling rant at the weird, "Citizen UK" rally, Brown had somehow found his voice at the eleventh hour. Of course, it's in the nature of the media that these things become self-reinforcing narratives leading, usually at breakneck speed, to some sort of settled view or consensus, however totally detached from the truth - or reality - it might be. In fact, you could argue that the general election battle is a battle not just for a vote, but to influence that mercurial, flowing media narrative and try to alter, if you like, the course of the discourse - so to speak.

So in one sense - this sense - one could say that Brown sort of succeeded. He has shifted the narrative slightly - maybe - with the BBC on this morning's Today programme being willing accomplices, typically, or even the initiators of this latest little change of tack. But we know that the whole narrative, whichever way it is leaning, is generally nonsense anyway; that the reality is rather different, regardless of whether it influences people's minds or not.

The reality is that Brown, with his back against the wall and his campaign leaders pulling in three different directions, telling their own voters to vote for other parties (David Blackburn was pretty amusing on this in the morning), has decided unsurprisingly to get all atavistic on our butts; to go back to the old irrational, deceitful, Tory-hating, prehistoric Balls-Brown fake dividing line that Mandelson and Darling worked so hard to move away from and onto less toxic, less risky ground. They tried to decontaminate brand Brown. It seems they failed.

But they at least could see the bigger picture that concerns the whole future of Labour. I figure they calculated that if they allowed Brown to lie about phantom Tory cuts/ equally phantom Labour spending, won the election and then proceeded to cut everything in sight having been ordered to by the IMF, they would lose the next election (which would probably come soon afterwards anyway) by a country mile, be truly obliterated this time by a livid electorate, and secure 25 years of Tory government into the bargain without David Cameron even having to break sweat.

So, the upshot is that, despite the direction in which the media narrative is currently veering, apparently and irrelevantly, the fact is that Brown has got it disastrously wrong. He's not only reverted to type (who could have doubted that he wouldn't - that's all he is, after all), but he's actually going to lose the election on the back of it too, so we can skip the brief period of the total turmoil of a Labour government winning on a lie and collapsing within months as the economy tears itself apart and move straight onto the Tories.

All in all, the couple of more rational members of the former Labour cabinet must be tearing their collective hair out (that doesn't include Liam Byrne, naturally) gnashing their teeth and generally wailing a lot. Thanks to Gordon Brown, the whole, elegantly triangulated (and exquisitely dishonest rather than brutally deceitful) Mandelsonian election campaign strategy has now totally imploded and will suck the party down with it.

As I've said before, they only have themselves to blame. They could have removed Brown a long time ago. Hell, they never should have taken the piss out of the electorate by giving the auld wrecker a coronation in the first place. But that's all history now, and so is Labour. The one silver lining is that if there is any justice left in this world, or, indeed, sense left in this country, then even if Labour aren't kicked into third place and kicked into touch for a generation - even if they manage by some miracle to keep Cameron down to a minority government - Brown will be gone.

Even I, ever the optimist who still firmly believes in the clear Tory triumph - if by some horrible, perverted twist of fate I'm wrong, even I would happily settle just for the end of Brown if I can't have anything else. That outcome would be by no means satisfying, or even satisfactory, but it'd be one hell of a relief.

Dale Destroys Labour's Latest Lies

The latest PEB from Labour represents a new low in hate politics, exploitation and smearing propaganda, even for them. This is it:


Fortunately, Iain Dale, having highlighted it in the first place, in one of the most apoplectic posts I've ever seen him write on his blog in the two years or so I've been reading it, quickly destroys the claims too. A GP has emailed him cataloguing the lies underpinning the most dishonest campaign video in British political history. Read it here.

Well done to him and to Mr Dale for knocking it down before it has a chance to gain any kind of traction. I trust this will be all over the MSM tomorrow - with the story being not only the Labour lies and filth about Conservative health and child support policy, but the abject bankruptcy of the Labour election campaign as a whole.

Mind you, they are totally desperate so they will probably get even worse.

New Day, Same Old Story

Yesterday, we were greeted with the second morning in a row of that nauseating LibDum father and son double act (the Cable and Clegg show) on the BBC. Full coverage of two very dull press conferences. Today, it was the turn of the Marx (as in Karl) brothers: Mandy, Balls & Burnham. The BBC provided them with as much live airtime as they wanted to spread what I can only call, having read (bits of) the Conservative manifesto (it was free!), outright, barefaced, scurrilous, amoral, wickedly misleading lies. From start to finish, you had the three of these strangers to reality, let alone the truth, dishing out scaremongering propaganda that simply wasn't true. None of it. Nada. Not a thing. Labour's dirty tricks are big news for the BBC.

I didn't have time to wait for the Q/A section. Was there one? Or has the BBC finally given up even the pretence of impartiality now and decided to allow any attacks on the Tories, however perfidious and, in this case, outrageously smearing, in some cases personally, to go unchallenged altogether? It's a fair question and the answer to it, if the past two mornings of its coverage are any evidence, is disturbing.

Don't get me started on the Today programme. Suffice to say, its editors appear to be attempting to maintain some kind of 'balance' - by at least allowing a few, you know, Conservatives actually to answer the critics wheeled on, conveyor belt-style to trash policies, especially good ones. But the agenda is crystal clear. Treat the Tories like they've been in power for thirteen years - and treat Labour like the official opposition. Clever. But a nightmare to listen to and watch, a sign of how corrupt and contaminated the BBC really is, and bad news for the Conservative party.

Even I'm beginning to think that the political bias of the BBC, ever-more flagrant, and the hard-nosed commercial agenda of Sky/Murdoch (hung parliaments sell papers and boost viewing figures) is beginning to influence the direction of this general election campaign. If these factors influence the outcome, then the outcome will be meaningless and the country will have been betrayed. That much is at stake so wouldn't it be nice to hear a little more complaining from the big boy bloggers from now on, too? Or don't they care?

If you think I'm exaggerating, just ask yourself this question: where is the BBC's coverage of a Tory press conference? If there isn't any coverage in the next few days, maybe then people will begin to realise what is happening; it's not just tinfoilhattery on my part.

I'm assuming the Tories have planned a few press conferences. They have, haven't they? Well, if they haven't, they damn well should!

A Future Fair For All? No, Just More Labour Lies

Ollie Cromwell has done it again!

"A Future Vague For All"

I nearly missed this funny Marten Morland cartoon summary of Labour's and Brown's whole campaign strategy from the Sunday Times. Never a truer word, as they say.

At least the Tories are committed to some genuine policies, which will be life-changing (if not life-saving) to thousands of people as they right Labour's wrongs.

Brown plans to "create a million skilled jobs" if the country's stupid enough to give him a mandate, or so he told us this morning. I think that comes under the "raise fuzziness" category. Or is it "build haziness"? It's so difficult to tell with Brown what he or his party really mean.

And there you have the problem in a nutshell. Because they'll say anything to try to woo voters, they end up saying nothing. And we're all left wishing they'd just keep their noiseholes shut, especially the prime movers - you know, dissembling thugs like Whelan and Balls, strangers to the truth both and entirely.

"A future vague for all". Indeed!

Finally, Some Real Perspective On Darling's Larceny Budget

Jeff Randall, as usual, has said precisely what needed to be said (ie: the truth) about the implications of Labour's latest act of political violence against the country we somehow collectively permitted it to ruin once again. Now don't get me wrong. I'm a grown-up (sort of) so I can take a bunch of socialist tax rises and spending lunacy on the chin. I'd expect nothing less from these power-hungry economic illiterates.

What I will not tolerate, at all, however, is the prospect of future generations having to pick up the bill for their rank electioneering and amoral, scorched earth economic blitz. Randall explains how and why this is precisely what will happen if the current voting generation really is stupid enough to allow the Labour fraud to work come the general election.

I'm no longer in the habit of lifting whole pieces from other sites (it breaks one of the ten blogging commandments that I take pretty seriously these days), but there are exceptions. This is most certainly one of them, because it's too important to ignore:

If you want to know what would become of Britain were Labour to win another five years in power, turn to page 189 of the Treasury's Budget book. Before you do so, however, slip into a straitjacket and gulp down an elephant tranquilliser. Prepare to feel like Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as he was administered huge electric shocks.

In Table C3 – Current and Capital Budgets – there's a line showing Public Sector Net Debt, ie how much we, as a country, will owe our creditors (not including personal borrowings). Now, cast your eyes over the column
"2014-15". Pow! I bet that hurt. Have another go: it's not a printing error.

Yes, according to the Treasury's forecasts, the United Kingdom will nearly double its indebtedness from £776 billion (in 2009-10) to £1.4 trillion. Even in Gordon Brown's devalued, debased and degraded system of accounting, that is still a poleaxing sum, equal to about one year's national output.

It gets worse, because this unprecedented and unimaginable debt projection is based on Alistair Darling's optimistic assumption that, from 2010-11, the UK's economic growth will bounce back to 3-3.5 per cent, well above long-term trend. If you are feeling confused, don't worry, you are meant to be.

Listen to the assurances of Mr Brown – that his ministers are acting to "halve the deficit" – and you might be forgiven for thinking that there's a credible plan to reduce our national debt. In fact, the very opposite is true.

Labour's plan, if one can so dignify it, involves a viral proliferation of state borrowing. In effect, the Government has turned the country into a home-owner whose mortgage is too onerous. Interest obligations are increasing faster than our ability to repay. Money goes out of the national account every month, but the capital owed is ballooning.

Consider this: the UK's deficit (annual shortfall) is scheduled to drop over the course of the next five years to £163 billion, £131 billion, £110 billion, £89 billion and £74 billion. But total state debt in the same period will rise to £952 billion, £1,095 billion, £1,218 billion, £1,320 billion and £1,406 billion. At that point, the Treasury's Debt Management Office will be humming like a Guangdong sweatshop.

In his Budget speech, the Chancellor was reserved, cautioning that there is nothing "pre-ordained" about our exit from recession and "there are still uncertainties". But when it comes to inventing numbers to suit his political agenda, the calculations are sexed up with a Panglossian twist.

It makes no sense to warn that Britain's fragile recovery could not possibly withstand the rigours of the Conservatives' tough love, while at the same time attaching to it an assumption of turbo-boosted expansion for next year and the one after. As Ed Balls would not say, this a non-sequitur.

Never mind, let's for argument's sake accept that Mr Darling's wonderland becomes reality and everything in the Treasury's crystal ball turns out to be true. How much will we, Britain's taxpaying classes, have to fork out annually for the pleasure of holding £1.4 trillion of debt? Go on, have a guess.

Well, next year the bill will be £43 billion on £952 billion of debt, an implied interest rate of 4.5 per cent. Apply that to £1.4 trillion and by 2014-5 those who contribute to the Chancellor's coffers will be forking out £63 billion a year in interest. That's 150 per cent of our current defence budget and three times what we will spend next year on industry, agriculture and employment.

Time for another happy pill, because the real outcome will almost certainly be more painful than that. For a start, the OECD rejects Mr Darling's growth prediction, insisting that Britain's economy will expand next year by only 2.2 per cent. Without a drastic slowing of Labour's spending binge, weaker growth will inevitably necessitate even higher levels of state borrowing.

Then there's the cost of servicing that debt mountain. Today's rock-bottom interest rates are unlikely to be on offer come 2014-5. Add these factors together and it is not unreasonable to conclude that Britain's annual interest bill could be approaching £100 billion five years hence.

This is legalised theft, a national disgrace. Under the bogus banner of "fairness", the Government is stealing from our children's tomorrow in order to buy votes today. It's bad enough that the current generation of university students – including those at third-rate former technical colleges – will emerge with an average debt of £23,500 (see last year's survey on push.co.uk), but they will also have to compensate for their forefathers' profligacy.

When he was in opposition, Mr Brown lambasted John Major's government for "the costs of failure", by which he meant the bills for unemployment and debt interest. He was right to do so. Unfortunately, on this Prime Minister's watch, those very same costs are rocketing out of control. His steadfast refusal to contemplate affordable spending has created an island of debt junkies: economic vandalism.

And for what? Clearly much of that extra funding for education – lots of nice teaching assistants – isn't working, otherwise Mr Brown's little helper, Mr Balls, would not be so angered by the success of grammar and private schools. Next year, the Government will spend £89 billion on education (an 80 per cent increase in 10 years) and yet our best universities are being strong-armed into accepting comprehensive-school pupils with sub-standard A-levels, in order to make up for a state system that is failing the poor.

If we are to extricate ourselves from this dung hill of Labour's making, Britain has three choices. We can default, an option not even Mr Darling favours. We can raise taxes, and that is already happening. But to knock a hole in that £1.4 trillion, punitive taxation would need to extend so far down the food chain that even dinner ladies would be heading for Zurich.

That leaves fiscal responsibility. We can stop pretending that the state is a machine for ever-increasing mass entitlement and, instead, align public-sector spending with our ability to pay.

The trouble is, while Mr Brown remains in charge – and the latest poll in the marginal constituencies suggests he may yet survive – this will never happen. He will always use the public purse as a tool for his party's advantage.

Professor Philip Booth of Cass Business School sums up the problem: "Almost every Budget measure [on Wednesday] involved a spending favour for some small group or other, or some tax relief for a group that the Government hopes to sway behind the Labour Party at the election."

Thanks to Channel 4's Dispatches, we learned this week that the daily rate for former Labour ministers "on the make" is £5,000. Perhaps we should pay the entire Cabinet that rate to clear off for good and save ourselves a fortune.

Five more years of Labour? Over my dead body.

Brenda "SOGAT '82" Dean Shock

Brenda Dean (you know, her of SOGAT '82 fame), now Baroness Dean of somewhere or other, has claimed that she was 'shocked' to find out that Lord Ashcroft was a non-dom, (or maybe it was she was 'shocked' she hadn't been asked by her party to be 'shocked' sooner. Who knows? Who bloody cares?). She's a dyed-in-the-wool Big Union Labourist who's been recruited to try to keep the Ashcroft non-story bubbling along, so she would utter all this disingenuous claptrap wouldn't she.

The surprising thing, therefore, (possibly), is that The Times and, briefly, The Daily Telegraph, thought this to be front page news. The MSM's dodgy, increasingly naff judgment strikes again, then.

There was, however, one MSM source who was having none of it - namely Paul Waugh of the Standard. He joins the historical dots and sifts through Dean's place in the genealogy of the biggest union in Britain:

Baroness Dean gave evidence today on Lord Ashcroft failed to uphold his undertakings on becoming a peer.

The noble baroness was not asked why Lord A should be treated differently from Lord Paul.

But something that many Tories would have wanted her to mention is this:

Brenda Dean made her name as the gen sec of print union Sogat 82.

Sogat 82 later merged with another union to become part of Amicus....which is these days part of...you guessed it....Unite.

Given that tomorrow's DT has evidence that Unite were given £18 million of taxpayer's money, of which £11 million went straight back to the Labour party in what looks increasingly like a really special kind of money laundering, you'd think these tossers, with their ennobled thicko mouthpieces like Dean, would have learned when to shut the hell up.

But they haven't - and I, for one, am counting on that! I'm pretty certain David Cameron and the Conservatives are too. Play it straight, like Hague did today, and let these spinning, lying, corrupt wreckers condemn themselves out of their own mouths, just like Brown did at PMQs yesterday, and ex-Communist Charlie Whelan, who's taken over the Labour party through Unite, too in his laughable interview.

If nothing else, the next few weeks will occasionally make for compulsive viewing.

Brown's Death Rattle

No matter what the increasingly irritating (is that possible?) Nick Robinson might think, quoting himself as usual - always a very bad sign - this was yet another trainwreck interview from Gordon "give me a chance to finish the job of destroying the country" Brown this morning. (Just remember, for instance, that when he growls that ridiculous phrase "continue the stimulus" he really means "continue adding to and Britain's, titanic, horrifying debt mountain".)



You cannot believe word one of a man who thinks that by saying he's 'cutting the deficit', he'll fool people into thinking he's actually tackling the terrifying debt explosion that he, personally, created. They are not the same thing, and this appalling man, who caused the recession in Britain to be far worse thanks to years of hopeless economic mismanagement, is doing what he always has done: telling the country - and the world - a pack of absolute lies. If he does somehow hoodwink - or even bribe - the people of this country into letting him sneak back into power, the rest of the world will deliver its verdict in short order. The economic crisis that would follow would make Brown's first, record-breaking recession look like the good old days.

But I'm pretty confident that, thankfully, the British electorate won't be fooled again. Far from the twit-Robinson's idea that this was somehow an 'assured' performance by a man pretending to be some kind of latter day Churchill, this is Brown's political death rattle. It was the last, desperate diatribe of a very desperate man clinging on to office for dear political life. I'll give him this, he doesn't sell it cheaply. The unelected fraud, who, so it goes, 'thrives' in a crisis - and therefore causes one wherever he goes and with whatever he touches - will soon be gone, gone, gone, thank God.

Hard though it might be to take for some, it is time for the Tories to come back, once again to clear up a Labour government's economic catastrophe. It's time for the medicine.

And it's way beyond the time for us to be able to say 'good riddance' to the remorselessly dishonest, politically and nationally corrosive influence that has been and will always be James Gordon Brown, the worst prime minister ever to have been inflicted upon this nation.

"Gordon Brown Is A Dangerous Weirdo"

...Being the conclusion of Minette Marrin's superb analysis in her eponymous Sunday Times column. To me, one of the best quotes, among many others, is this:

The kind of bullying of which Brown is suspected is entirely different. It is the uncontrolled raging of a desperate man, driven in his frustration and misery to lash out randomly at anyone nearby.

If that doesn't perfectly illustrate Gordon Brown's deeply flawed, even dangerous, character, then I'm a socialist.

So please have a glance at the article, when you have a moment. It's wonderfully incisive, and serves further to nourish truth rather than smokescreen spin, and burn away Labour's increasingly delusional, insulting, deviant mythologising about the worst prime minister ever inflicted on our country.

Just for good measure (though, I trust, not to oversell the appeal), here's another little gem of Marrin's insider wisdom:

...the prime minister is without a doubt the strangest, most emotionally dysfunctional person I have met. We were together at a dinner once and I felt that his inability to behave remotely normally was almost pitiful.

Five more years, remember. If you don't vote intelligently, then you get five more years of this damaged oddball. As Hamlet and a fair few Yorkshiremen would say: think on't.

Frailty, thy name is Brown!

Labour's Death Tax: Evil Economics; An Insult to the Elderly

William Roach might be a famous actor who never seems to age (on screen), but he's also a very decent, lovely, ordinary, 77 year-old man (it strikes me). Here he explains why turning back the clock to the Nineties, when the Conservative government of the day's sound economic management created the best-funded pension system in the entire world (public and private), is a far better option for the 2010s and beyond than the insulting, uncosted and unworkable, policy-on-the-hoof, disgusting current Labour alternative.



Let us never forget who destroyed Britain's once legendary pension arrangements, which were bullt up during the 1980s and 90s thanks to carefully designed, delicate, intelligent financial strategies, by the (Conservative) governments of the day, that genuinely benefited not just the few, but the many. The person who destroyed all that brilliant hard work, and has left millions of pensioners exposed as a direct consequence now, was Gordon Brown. Now those people, still working back then during the "sound years", when Brown arrogantly decided, all by himself(!), that Britain didn't need Tory prudence (and deft brilliance - which is what people like Ken Clarke delivered) on funded pensions any more, are facing ruin thanks directly to his destruction of the system the Conservative government built and upon which so many millions of hard-working souls were depending. Brown has spent their pension money, and then some. He's spent mine as well. But, far worse, he's spent our children's pension money too. That's just utterly infamous, especially for a (useless) politician like Brown.

Hang on! Do I really need to add anything to that to convince people that Gordon Brown is the most disastrous, useless, (though still utterly arrogant and convinced of his own weird righteousness), individual ever to fill (barely and by default) the office of Prime Minister, in this nation's history?

Anyone who isn't convinced by that single point, but among so many others, of Brown's total incompetence, either doesn't get out enough or, quite understandably, doesn't care (or works for the mentalist himself - but that can't be too many people, surely).

Just this, though, to anyone and everyone reading this: Brown, however much you might loath (or like) him, can only be understood from one perspective: he hates (his idea of) Tories. He hates Tories - and that's it. That's all he knows because that's the way he was brought up. He's as irrational as he is outdated.

To any sentient British human being, Brown is as utterly locked into his dusty, a-historical weird tribe of sub-Trot Scots Labourism as Cameron (or anyone else, for that matter) represents our hope, our future and our liberation.

I look forward to playing my small part in Brown's downfall. So should you all!

Incoherent Brown's Latest Smears Fool No-One

So today we have the first counterpunches from the sputtering Brown smear machine, on the back of some dumb remarks about Labour's debt crisis and out-of-control deficit spending by a bunch of tame Keynesians in a brace of suspiciously timed letters to the Financial Times. Well, more power to them but I prefer to listen to the previous day's crop of economists who rightly warned that we need to bring Labour's economic chaos under control now, or risk an even deeper crisis going forward. And as for Lord Mandelson of La La Land's latest slimy nonsense on the BBC a few minutes ago about businesses telling him that cutting the so-called stimulus now would be 'daft', well, Sir Richard Branson's comments two days ago pretty much shoots that drivel down in flames - and he's a pretty good businessman! Oh, and top work over Redcar Corus, Mandy. That was really slick. What a useless piece of vastly overrated spinning nothingness Mandelson really is.

But Brown. My God, this man is a piece of work. Let's just have a quick look at some of the latest, increasingly desperate claptrap coming out of his gawping piehole today. His claim, first of all, that this crisis was caused by the banks, suggests that he's retreated into the kind of cowardly, "bunker" mentality that caused people to realise how unsalvageably flawed he was, and totally unsuited to the office he took by default, in the first place. For the record, it was his policies and his light-touch, hopelessly inadequate system of regulation that allowed the banks to behave with such recklessness in the first place. It was his actual encouragement of the property bubble and the massive personal debt bubble that left people so exposed when the bust came. His behaviour, and blinkered, hateful arrogance in suggesting that he had 'abolished boom and bust', virtually guaranteed that when the bubble burst, Britain would be the most exposed major economy in the world and the British people would be the biggest losers. The point is, his ridiculous claim that this was 'all the banks' fault' is palpably ridiculous - and was proved as such long ago.

But that's just he start of it. Instead of stopping the digging while the hole wasn't too deep, he brings out the JCB. This is the Telegraph's report of his, quite frankly, lunatic remarks:

2010 must be the year of growth. It must not be the year when the economy dips back into recession.

''Instead of admitting the mistakes of private banks and institutions in causing the recession, the well-financed right-wing are not only trying to blame governments for the crisis but trying to use legitimate concerns about deficits to scare people into accepting a bleak and austere picture of the future for the majority, and then to use what's happening as a pretext for public services to be marginalised at precisely the moment they should become smarter and more personalised.

''They are using the talk of action on debt to conceal the hard fact that their real position is that they remain wedded, as they have always been, to an ideology that would always make government the problem and deny people the helping hand that government can be.''

While seeking to ''frighten'' voters about the scale of the debt, Conservatives failed to mention that growth would automatically cut into the UK's deficit and bolster investor confidence, said Mr Brown.

''Instead of helping the recovery in our country, Conservative dislike of government, bordering on hatred of government action, would risk recovery now,'' he said.

Never had I really understood how unhinged this guy actually is until I heard this stuff. Aside from the truly awe-inpiring level of economic illiteracy on display, there's the spiteful reference to the 'hatred' of the 'right'. With the former, someone needs to bellow this at the fraud relentlessly: it's not rocket science, Brown, it's basic economics: rising debt means rising inflation; rising inflation means interest rate hikes; interest rate hikes mean higher credit costs with the inevitable consequences of increased business failures, personal insolvencies, higher unemployment, worse public services and, you guessed it, a recession. Not growth, Brown, a r-e-c-e-s-s-i-o-n. Do you think it'd get through that four inch thick skull of his in the end? No, me neither.

Of course, though, we know the ulterior motive here. Brown does not give hoot-one about the catastrophe his "policies" would cause over the next few years, all he cares about, in his fevered political calculations, is the time when he finally, finally!, has to face the electorate. He thinks he can buy votes and sod the future. We are, quite simply, with Brown, back to square one. It's 2008-9 all over again. The guy is incapable of any other mode of thought or operation.

Only this time, with this horribly divisive speech, he's shown a little more of the true, tribal, irrational, Tory-hating core that we know is what fundamentally defines this appalling man. And this is where we see the incoherence:

...their real position is that they remain wedded, as they have always been, to an ideology that would always make government the problem and deny people the helping hand that government can be

This is a smear, obviously, but the scale of the misrepresentation is only topped by the scope of its implausibility. It hardly warrants scrutiny (it certainly doesn't bear any). However, I'll have a crack - again, just for the record. Clearly, as with most smears, it's what's omitted that's most revealing. For instance, it's not 'government' that the Conservatives have ever seen as 'the problem' (as far as I can discern, Tories aren't anarchists), it's big, inefficient government. Further, though, you notice how he confuses (and I don't believe this is deliberate - I think he actually might not understand the distinction, which, if true, is most revealing) the term 'government' with the term 'state'. Government makes policy and enacts law accordingly. The instruments of government (like the MoD), and taxpayer-funded institutions of public service (like the NHS), of which there are many, are what is generally understood, at least in the real world, to be 'the state'. When the instruments of government, public service institutions and government itself have been permitted to become so bloated, inefficient and unaffordable that they begin to cause, overall, more harm than good, then yes, they must be pruned, reformed and reset so that once more (or, in the case of some state institutions, 'for once') they can fulfil their putative functions. To deny any of this is to defy rational thought. But that's what Brown does, in choosing smear and mere narrow-minded tribalism over common sense and, simply, the truth. Plus ca change? Not really: this is Brown we're talking about.

The only difference this time is the incoherence. We're used to the Tory-hating smears - they go with the Brown territory. But combined - and total - confusion over the economy and the difference between government and state is something fairly new, at least to me. I can understand the economic incoherence. Given the state of the British economy after a decade of Chancellor Brown and three further years of him as First Lord of the Treasury, it's not hard to see where that comes from. But this government/state thing: I feel that he really, genuinely, doesn't see a difference; he thinks they are one and the same. Government is the State; people are merely units of that State whose sole purpose is to service it in order that it can provide for them.

Oh my God! Brown really is a socialist! So that's what's been bugging me all this time...

New Labour might have fooled some of the people some of the time, but Brown is fooling no one. His brand of state socialism, masquerading as some kind of government altruism, is not what Britain needs just now, thanks very much (did it ever?). Bring on the election so we can have done with it.

Make Labour History

Tony, whose Cogito Dexter blog won my sincere admiration many months ago, has asked us all to join him in his campaign to Make Labour History.

He has my full support to that end. If you really do want to secure a prosperous, free, pluralist and debt-free future for your children, in the finest traditions of our great country, Tony should also be able to count on yours.

I promise that I will do as much as I can to bring about that desirable, and, for everyone in Britain, and for the nation itself, that desperately vital outcome in this Year of Change, 2010.

Bottom line: if you want to save yourselves, your economy and your nation from total socialist destruction, then Vote Conservative - and make Labour history. After thirteen years of hurt, it's very much more than Labour deserves, and it's what we and our country so desperately need.

(Tony: sterling work, compadre. Outstanding.)

The Real Deniers

Bishop Hill has highlighted this extraordinary, extraordinarily complacent and utterly dishonest press conference by someone who I believe is one of the most corrupt individuals on the face of the earth.


I recognise that Bishop Hill's blog is a serious, wonderful, scholarly front line against the industrial level scam that is climate change. But mine isn't. I'm a private blogger who just has his view, and little else.

In this case my view is pretty simple: you can't engage in a serious debate about anything with people who are palpably as dishonest (and that's proved) as Pachauri. That he's still part of the IPCC network is bad enough; that he's still its leader tells you all you need to know about the depth of the corruption associated with that institution.

But it goes further than that. I see this as an emergent behaviour of a political class. We see every day the same kind of casual, habitual, insulting assaults on the rationality of ordinary people by this Labour government. We hear, for instance, the laughable lie that Labour will increase spending this year, at the same time as liars like Mandelson are simultaneously announcing massive public spending cuts this year. We hear, as well, that this disastrous government has wasted untold billions of notional future money trying to curtail housing repossessions. And yet, though the previous Tory government spent nothing (because they wisely knew that such an effort would be futile) to that aim, this government has managed to waste billions and still has seen more people lose their houses than in 1995, the low point of the last recession that was soon followed by extraordinary, and sustainable, sound growth - until the excellent Clarke was replaced by the moron Brown, that is.

The reasoning is hilarious, as well. On the one hand you have a Labour housing minister suggesting that a family losing its home is a 'good thing' (but which shouldn't have happened with the billions spent, should it?) - and in that displaying a level of high-handed, out-of-touch complacent incompetence Ken Clarke never could have been (and never has been, even by Brown) accused of. And on the other, you have this extraordinary, angels-on-a-pinhead, nonsensical Labour counterfactual - "If we hadn't spent all your money - and your children's money - then it would have been twice as bad as it was in 1995." Oh yeah? Who says!

With the former, minor housing minister dumbness, you can put that down to the old "don't really give a shit" factor. But with the latter - with the Brown/Mandelson mixed, though equally dumb, messages, you are faced with a level of economic, political and basic dishonesty that will delay any recovery in this nation almost as long as a continuing Labour government would. Two things: first, spending all that money has achieved nothing on the issue of repossessions, and second, all that meaningless expenditure has guaranteed a double-dip recession - with all the further attendant pain for mortgage-holders and savers alike.

Brown caused this recession and Brown's utter incompetence and dishonesty is prolonging it. On inheriting Ken Clarke's golden legacy he was heard to comment, as well everyone knows:" You want me to write a fucking thank-you note?"

Like Pachauri, another Labour creation, his lies have finally caught up with him, but he's still in total denial about it (again, like Pachauri).

Tell you what, where Brown failed to send Clarke a thank-you note for leaving him with a Golden Legacy (achieved by hard work, honesty and wisdom), when Brown is finally ejected from the office he never earned, Clarke should send him a note of his own - and it should be polite. Something like: "thank God you're out of all our lives. Thanks for the double dip recession (you moron). Don't expect a peerage."

I think Ken Clarke would be pretty justified in sending a note almost identical to that one, but with a little more swearing.

Imported Labour Votes

This article, in today's Telegraph, explains why this country has five million plus more people, born and brought up overseas, living in Britain now than in the year 2000.

And this statement from the report tells us all we need to know about why Labour opened the national floodgates:

Voting trends indicate that migrants and their descendants are much more likely to vote Labour.

No Ellis Island, birth of a nation altruism here. Vote rigging? Social engineering? Well, yes, and much worse than those two evil practices - this is just another example of the straightforward corruption perpetrated by the most utterly corrupt and morally bankrupt government ever inflicited on this country.

Vote them in again, and watch your country - and your democracy - vanish. We only have one chance of ridding ourselves of them. Don't blow it, tempted as you might be, by voting for someone other than the Conservative Party. For all the Tory Party's frailties, do not lose the focus (ridding ourselves of Brown Labour). All sane folk must vote for Cameron. Not to do that is to invite catastrophe out of mere self-indulgence.

Do that - vote for someone other than the Conservative Party at the next GE - and we might just end up with more of the same, which would, quite literally, be an absolute catastrophe for what's left of the United Kingdom. Get it?

So get a grip (especially Kippers)!!

Monckton: IPCC Chief Is Going To Jail

Not "should be going" you will note (when you look at the video below), but "is going". The modal and tense choices are very telling and, I can guarantee, deliberate. Railway engineer and non-climate scientist, but very dodgy chief of the IPCC scam-mongers, Rajendra Pachauri "is going" to jail, says Lord Monckton. A philosopher and logician as precise and vigilant when it comes to language as Christopher Monckton would never have said, publicly or privately, that in this way unless he already knew there was strong enough evidence to permit him to say it without inviting some type of legal challenge.

It's fair to say, therefore, that things are about to get a lot better for us, the long-abused, stolen-from taxpayer - and much worse for Pachauri and his crew. That would, of course, also implicate this Labour government. What a surprise.

If in doubt, vote them out!



Hat tip: Climategate

Astonishing

James Delingpole, citing Bishop Hill, is as gobsmacked as the latter by a professional analysis of the Fourth IPCC Assessment Report (you know, the one with all the "Gates" in it) by a scientist named Andrew Lacis, a colleague of arch warmist James Hansen at GISS, and someone who in no way whatsoever could be branded a "sceptic." Here's an astonishing bit:

There is no scientific merit to be found in the Executive Summary. The presentation sounds like something put together by Greenpeace activists and their legal department. The points being made are made arbitrarily with legal sounding caveats without having established any foundation or basis in fact. The Executive Summary seems to be a political statement that is only designed to annoy greenhouse skeptics. Wasn’t the IPCC Assessment Report intended to be a scientific document that would merit solid backing from the climate science community – instead of forcing many climate scientists into having to agree with greenhouse skeptic criticisms that this is indeed a report with a clear and obvious political agenda. Attribution can not happen until understanding has been clearly demonstrated. Once the facts of climate change have been established and understood, attribution will become self-evident to all. The Executive Summary as it stands is beyond redemption and should simply be deleted.

The entire thing, naturally, was buried by the IPCC thus:

Rejected. [Executive Summary] summarizes Ch 9, which is based on the peer reviewed literature.

It is quite difficult to frame in one's mind the kind of mentalities and egos at work here. Suffice to say, their levels of by now well-documented obscene corruption, which has already led to the starvation of millions (thanks mainly to the cultivation of subsidised biofuel crops on good agricultural land instead of food), means that we can safely conclude that they will stoop to anything to keep their hideous misanthropic ideology alive - and their own pathetic 'careers' - for as long as they possibly can. This is going to be one hell of a battle - but it is one that common sense, reason and good science cannot afford to lose.

Remember, also, that this Labour government has been, and remains, one of the major villains of this piece. We can start to correct the world's current rational imbalance by ejecting it when we are finally given the opportunity. But once the Tories are in power, if they don't immediately reassess their ridiculous commitment to this unhinged - and now unravelling - politically-motivated (it's mainly inspired by anti-capitalist people-haters) dogma, then they should be next. Better they correct their policies now, then, in a timely and honest fashion.

But first things first. First, we must deal with Labour. I'm utterly confident that the British people will do just that, and good on them for it.

How Do You Suspend A Suspended MP?

David Blackburn has just put an excellent question in his Speccy blog, concerning the case of Elliot Morley, one of three Labourist MPs (so far) now charged with stealing from the British taxpayer.

Sky’s Jon Craig’s asks one of those questions you wished you had posed: wasn’t Elliot Morley suspended already? Yes, he was, on the 14 May 2009 and with immediate effect.

As Blackburn reminds us, Morley was suspended from his party on 14th May 2009 "with immediate effect". It looks like he was reinstated on the sly, however - hence the necessity to "re-suspend" him. Never mind the sneakiness of this - and contempt for public opinion that it shows - asks Blackburn: in the Labour party, what on earth do you have to do to get expelled!

There are three main points to make about this total, Brown-inspired fiasco, and Blackburn implies the first two. First, this Brown U-turn represents an unequivocal triumph for David Cameron, who has been steadfast in his leadership all through the expenses scandal and has gauged the mood of the British public quite deftly. He's acted decisively throughout, and bravely run the risk of severe unpopularity among his own MPs as a consequence by forcing the worst Tory offenders to give up their seats, despite their not having broken any law per se. I still think he could have gone further and forced Brown into a general election last year. A still-bolder leader would and could have, but I guess that's all water under Westminster bridge now.

Second, it further demonstrates just how useless, witless, rudderless and basically clueless Brown is when it comes to offering any kind of leadership on this serious issue (or any other, for that matter - but that's just me, I suppose). That he's been forced to climb down so humiliatingly and bow to Cameron's pressure is very telling, coming so soon as it has after last week's drubbing at the hands of Cameron at PMQs.

Third, there are these explosive Independent revelations by Andrew Grice three days ago, emerging from his coverage of a new book by another Labourist insider. The article's title, in the context of today's Morley mayhem, "Brown 'didn't care about expenses - only himself"" more or less says it all: all, that is, in the sense of what we need to know about why the Labour Party has been in such a God-awful, tail-chasing, directionless, perfidious mess from the start of the whole, sorry affair. The blame lies squarely at Gordon Dithering & Self-Obsessed Brown's door. If you haven't read it already, then I would suggest that you do. A taste:

Mr Price paints a picture of despair within the Brown inner circle at his failure to recognise the seriousness of the expenses scandal. He accuses Mr Brown of creating a climate of distrust within Downing Street and being cut off from the concerns of voters.

I simply cannot believe that Brown or Labour can possibly recover from this. It is the one issue that cannot be brushed under the carpet, or masked with the pathetically desperate fig leaf of a twelfth hour (and utterly wrong-headed, dishonestly motivated) referendum on the Alternative Vote system.

As Cameron said in what looks like an increasingly prescient PMQs last week, "It's back to the bunker with that one..."

It also means, however, that Brown will now drag out this Parliament to the bitterest of bitter ends. Fair enough. It'll just make victory in finally turfing out the worst prime minister this country has ever had inflicted upon all the more sweet for the waiting.

The collective sigh of relief exhaled by people up and down Britain the day after we are rid of him will be audible in France.

Europe: Our "Domestic" Market

Our 'domestic' market

Fanatical europhile Pete "Teflon" Mandelson has admitted Europe is our 'domestic' market. During what can only be regarded as an extraordinarily rude and thinly-veiled attack on the USA's plans for regulating its own banking system, he revealed this peculiar - some might say unique - weltanschauung, presumably, by extension, believing that the United Kingdom is now no more than some kind of local trading area, rather than a sovereign nation.

Of course, we all know what he's up to: softening-us up for entry into the eurozone without a referendum while simulatenously trying to reboot the "only Gordon can save you" routine. Pull the other one, it's got Russian billionaire-paymaster yachts on it. "Dishonest" is simply far too weak a word to describe the depths of this hideous individual's machinations. Here's an example:

Asked specifically about critics of the single currency who argue that by retaining sterling, Britain had been sheltered from the worst of the market backlash against high public deficits, Lord Mandelson said: "That's true.

"But it doesn't necessarily mean that being out of the eurozone will always play to Britain's advantage

"The truth is that Britain depends on a vibrant, growing European economy, this is our domestic market. The one on our doorstep, we don't want it to fail. It will have a better chance of succeeding the more Britain is able to influence its policies.

Europe's become our "domestic market" eh? (tell that to the French and Germans!). And a virtual admission that we're heading for the eurozone, eh? Over my dead body.

Anyway, you can read the rest of the article here.

If anybody else is tempted to vote for these traitors, liars and thieves again, I will be amazed. That 30% of people still, apparently, are planning to, is amazing.