Bruce Anderson in the Indy.
We have a Prime Minister who would do anything to win the next election. If he could scrape home, he would not care what state the country was in. If he lost, he would have as little interest in Britain's wellbeing as the Hitler of April 1945 did in post-war Germany's recovery from defeat.
Last week, the Irish Finance Minister delivered one of the bleakest economic assessments in the history of democratic politics. He had only one priority: his country's national interest. This week, every week, until the end, the Brown bunker will be scheming and plotting and brooding, in a fug of ill-temper and resentment. The national interest: never be naive enough to look for that in their agenda.
Harsh, Mr Anderson, but a fair application of the journalistic boot to Brown's gonadal area. Especially after the quite blatant political maneouvring of the PBR which seemed to have been drawn up by the PLP desperation committee rather than a Chancellor surveying the wreckage of UK Plc.
This weekend's cat and mouse, Labour/Tory, we're ready/so are we, game of electoral chicken over a possible March election is further proof, if we needed any, of Brown's - and Labour's - treacherous manipulation of the political process for their own selfish ends.
Removing the need for a Labour pre-election budget, and with it the damage that would be done to Labour's vote by actually doing something about the economic catastrofuck they have created, is surely one of the prime motivations behind the idea.
These sickening, self-interested maggots, and their dung beetle overlord, have already lobbed Britain's future self-determination onto the out-of-control EU inferno, against the wishes of the people, and the promises they made to the electorate in 2005. They have ushered in an era of suspicion and paedohysteria whereby all are presumed guilty until proven otherwise. They have destroyed community, social cohesion and quiet enjoyment of life with an overbearing, dictatorial predilection for healthist finger-wagging. While at the same time encouraging the most obnoxious, holier-than thou arseholes in society to be even more assiduous in their interference in the lives of others - a plan at which they intend to throw even more scarcely affordable money in the future.
They could use the diminishing months before the election to rectify these problems. They could have started making cuts in the PBR but resisted. They could have adhered to democracy instead of despatching Brown to squint in a European darkened room as he signed off Lisbon. They could scrap, or dramatically roll back, the remit of the CRB (and cease the endless hilarity at that policy amongst fellow Europeans). They could take their fingers out of their fucking ears and realise that many have different ideas about enjoyment of life than those prescribed by vested interest lobbyists. And they could re-instil the lost British tradition of looking out for your neighbours instead of ratting on them.
They could but, as anyone who has ever received a Number 10 e-petition response will tell you, they won't. Nor do they want to. I fact, they are perversely accelerating their destructive policies exponentially as the general election looms. Shovelling more shit in the cesspool before someone orders them to stop as it's already overflowing.
Instead, this weasel administration merely look for ways of gerrymandering the electoral process to their own advantage. Ways to cheat, ways to misdirect, ways to place a quango barrier between them and the public, ways to gain votes in any snidey way they possibly can without actually listening to voters.
You are not important to Labour. Never have been, never will be. Only Labour, and their dogmatic, selfish pet projects, are important to Labour.
5 comments:
"He had only one priority: his country's national interest."
Please don't hold our Glorious Leader up as an example of ideal leadership.
The happy triumvirate of Government, Builders and Banks have landed Ireland in a recession far worse than in any other country.
He claimed he had to make up a budgetary shortfall of four billion, and did so by forcing pay cuts on even the lowest paid, and by cutting social welfare payments by as much as a half. At the same time, tax breaks and incentives were left in place for the builder pals, and the banks can have any amount they wish, leaving us even further debt.
Don't be under any illusions - our lot are every bit as power crazed as your lot.
Grandad: I'm not going to make myself popular here, I expect, but ... "cutting social welfare payments by as much as a half"
Is that necessarily bad? As long as no-one starves, what's the problem?
Over here, the unemployed are wealthy enough to go out on the shant till the early hours and sometimes kill people. You couldn't really call them poor.
Why should those on benefits not also share the financial burden?
I completely agree that the Dail may be packed full of idiots as Westminster most certainly is, but I'm surprised on both sides of the Irish Sea, that there seems to be a blind spot with costs to the country of those who are deemed to be almost sacred.
For example, under current constraints, with the economy shrinking, surely the minimum wage should shrink too. It's foolhardy for it not to, but it just won't happen. It's only logical that it should, though.
Similarly should benefits be treated IMO. They are a gift from the productive and should be scaled back if the country is suffering.
Bankers in the UK are being severely punished in the PBR and many say that is fair. Personally, I don't as I believe they have contributed a huge amount to the success of the nation over decades. The intangible trade to the UK has always been in the positive until they fucked up recently.
Why should bankers be the only ones to take the blame when their profits have been contributing greatly to the payments being taken by others for many, many years?
They will pay again to the wealth of the UK and Ireland in the future, too. I can't see that welfare claimants are ever more than a drain.
That's not being nasty or saying that they are there on purpose as I know a vast section aren't like that at all, it's just life. I know many, many who are on benefits (and have blogged about them before), but I know no-one remotely 'poor'.
I'm only half-Irish, but if you want to disown that bit, you're quite welcome. And I'd quite understand, my friend lol.
Torch me if you like, no Labour moderation control-freakery here. :-)
The underlying intent of our budget [it is widely suspected] is to drive down our labour costs. In itself, this is not a bad thing, and is really equivalent to revaluing our currency [if we had one any more!]. However, this is only fair and equitable if there is a corresponding equivalent cut in the total cost of living. Unfortunately this isn't the case.
There were many options open to the government to balance the budget, but the two sectors which remain untouchable are the banking and building industries. While I agree that there are areas in Social Welfare where people do very well for themselves, I do find myself somewhat amazed that a government could cut allowances to the blind and disabled, yet continue to provide tax breaks to the betting industry. Surely you must agree that there is an anomaly there?
Our situation is slightly different to the rest of the world. Yes, we have had our major banking crisis, and have had to bail them out to the tune of billions, but we compounded the whole mess by having a building frenzy that seemed to employ nearly all Poland.
As a result of this, we are grossly overstocked with empty houses, apartment blocks, offices and hotels. House prices which were very overheated have fallen by as much as 50%. We have high unemployment, negative equity, repossessions and banks that now refuse to lend a red cent. The domestic economy has completely imploded, but rather than stimulate it, the government want to revitalise the building economy once more - the very thing that got us into this mess.
And I have no intention of torching you. I would miss your musings in my reader too much.
Dick,
Your comments regarding welfare and the minimum wage really surprised me. But then again, there is welfare and welfare.
There is, on the one hand, the youth of 19 trying hard to get a job where none exists and, on the other hand, the recent immigrant with seven children being housed at public expense in a mansion in London at a cost of two grand a month (or should that be week?). The minimum wage? The value of an hour of a person's effort, using his brain and hands (which computers do not have) is the price to two pints. A week of forty hours work is worth £200. What sort of mortgage would that enable, even taking the whole amount before any deductions at all?
Etc, etc.
But that is not the real point of this post. It is an aside.
I am sure that you are right about the Labour Party squirming to gain whatever electoral advantage it can, but I do not think that that is Gordon Brown's motivation. I think that GB's motivation is that he wants to go down in history as the man who saved the world. Why else would he accept the scaremongering of a few, interconnected climatologists as fact?
Copenhagen is descending into farce, but the politicians are in a frenzy to get a done deal in the same way that, as you say, Blair got a done deal with regard to Iraq.
In view of Climategate, as with passive smoking, this fiddling will not just go away. The purpose of Copenhagen should be changed. It should be a meeting to set up seriously correct methods of monitoring global temperatures, CO2 levels, other gas levels, sea levels, etc for the next ten years. Change nothing other than that - oh, and publish all the info on the internet without interference. Do not believe doom-mongers. Change nothing and wait ten years and see. Let it develop!
Don't forget Brown's lovely perverse acceleration of destructive policy by giving away 1.5 billion to fight global warming in Africa. So generous with our money is Brown.
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