Hey, have a look at these pretty graphs!
The world economy is tracking or doing worse than during the Great Depression
How wobbly do THEM apples make your bowels feel?
Politics
It’s so sa-a-a-ad that you’re leaving
Mark Steel, The Independent, 6 May 2009:
The leaders of the Labour Party have reached a fascinating stage, where they hate each other but don’t know why, and aren’t allowed to criticise each other, and if they do they have to assure everyone that: “When I said he’s arsed everything up like the steaming Scottish cowpat he is, this was in no sense meant as a criticism, but as a contribution to the wider debate of how we move Britain forward with the forwardness the British people look forward to.”
And this is while they look so hopeless you can imagine a researcher running to Gordon Brown and saying “There’s excellent news on the public reaction to our health message. We’re now only 3 per cent behind swine flu in the polls.”
If a Labour leader’s marriage is falling apart, he must say to his wife: “I continue to have every confidence in you as the right person to lead us through the challenges ahead. Furthermore, the Philippino hooker you caught me with in the shower has no ambitions to replace you, and is delighted to remain in her current post for the foreseeable future.”
They’re almost heartbreakingly clueless as to why they’re in trouble. Hazel Blears described the problem as the need for politicians to “re-engage” with voters, as if they just have to find new ways of getting their message across. But that’s the thinking that led to the genius of Brown on You-Tube. You can imagine cabinet meetings where Ed Balls calls out: “I know, let’s get Harriet Harman to go on Britain’s Got Talent, and perform the figures on reduced NHS waiting lists expressed as a piece of hip-hop dance.”
Labour’s problem is that people ARE engaged with them, and they’ve decided they don’t like them, because their message HAS come across. The cabinet can’t honestly think: “People WOULD vote for us, if only they were aware that we sent the country into war on a pack of lies, insisted there was no more boom or bust, fiddled second homes and let bankers rob the place.”
Part of their difficulty can be found in the nature of their arguments. They can’t describe clearly the reasons they disagree, because they don’t actually believe in anything. In the lamented Old Labour Party, leaders disagreed about nuclear weapons or nationalisation, but New Labour arguments are about petty personal squabbles as if they’re teenage girls. These articles in Sunday newspapers should go: “Asked for his opinion of the current cabinet, one senior minister said ‘Alistair Darling! Like, get real. Fiscal this, fiscal that, dur dur. I’m like SO going to get his job off his sorry grey ass’.”
Inspired by Blair, they think everything revolves around presentation while the reality doesn’t matter. It’s as if a builder had a discussion with you that went: “I have to accept that the bond between us has been fractured in these difficult times, which is why I’d like this opportunity to reflect on the many positive aspects of our work.”
“You blew up my house.”
“Yes, and this was an unpopular policy, and I recognise it as such. But I’m sure that when the time comes, you’ll decide that I am the builder best qualified to lead you out of the rubble.”
Even on the fiasco of trying to stop Gurkhas having the right to settle here, the criticism from Hazel Blears was that it came over badly, and the cabinet will probably conclude it’s worth two points in the polls to always do the same as Joanna Lumley. Now, for a laugh, Joanna Lumley should make an announcement every week such as “I think there should be more yellow insects”, and within half an hour the Home Office would have workmen in every borough spraying ant-hills with custard.
But not one of these Labour leaders has made the obvious point by saying: “What the hell were we doing denying soldiers who’d fought for Britain the right to live here, to the extent that we’ve managed to make ourselves open to attack as too heartless on immigration by the bloody Tories – aaaaaaaaaaagh!!!!!”
If the current cabinet was asked for its criticisms of the Third Reich, they’d say: “The invasion of Russia should have been presented as part of a wider package of reforms, and the dislocation this mishandled opportunity created between the Government and its core support reversed the popularity it had gained in middle-class Europe following its strategy of firm but necessary labour laws.”
So there’s no point in a leadership election at all. As all the candidates could sum up their position as: “Under me, the party will be taken in a new direction, in which we do exactly the same shit but excuse it with more plausible lies.”
30 years of hurt never stopped me dreaming…
Whether we like[d] it or not, the single most important British political event of my generation’s life (to date) occurred 30 years ago today.
Can’t think what it was? Let me jog your memory:
Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.
Seriously, those four lines never stop making me laugh. Or vomit.
As a seven-year-old I wasn’t too politically aware: I remember going with my mother when she voted (NOT for That Bloody Woman, I hasten to add) and I remember it being a big deal that we had a woman Prime Minister.
Nice legs, shame about the boat race
But fuck it: I’ve not got a good word to say about the woman, so there’s no point pretending just because of an anniversary.
She won in 1979 and she did what she wanted. The “reforms” she heralded were a social fucking catastrophe. She would have been out on her arse at the first time of asking if she hadn’t engineered a war with Argentina. What she went on to do after 1983 made this a less nice place to live and ultimately resulted in the Clusterfuck. History isn’t going to be half as kind to her as she thinks it is.
Still, we sort of got the last laugh: she’s gone down with dementia, been widowed, seen her son convicted for trying – and characteristically failing – to orchestrate an African coup and her daughter outed as a “racist” with a bad attitude, and is hopefully condemned to another couple of decades of sitting in her own piss before we all get to enjoy a fucking massive nationwide street party when she finally gives up the ghost.
You may have brought despair, Margaret. But we’re still clinging to that last bit of hope.
Ray Von
If it IS him [00:13-00:16], then it goes a long way to explaining how Black Wednesday unfolded just four years later when he somehow found himself working in the Treasury.
“I seem to have left an important part of my brain somewhere, somewhere in a field in Hampshire. Alright!”
Now my stomach is sick
YOU MOTHERFUCKING, HYPOCRITICAL, SHITEHAWK, CHANCER CUNT!
Former Home Secretary David Blunkett says the government should scrap plans to introduce ID cards for all in favour of mandatory biometric passports.
Speaking at InfoSec 2009, a security conference held in London, the MP for Sheffield Brightside said biometric passports could do the job.
He said he had put the idea to the current Home Secretary Jacqui Smith.
It is something of a u-turn for the MP who first mooted the idea of ID cards when he was Home Secretary in 2001.
Wave goodbye, the spineless, pathetic fucking lot of you.
If ever there was a time to emigrate…
Perhaps the most interesting section of PBD’s “age of austerity” speech at the weekend has gone largely unreported.
It’s the section sub-titled “Technology“:
There’s one more way to combine financial discipline with our positive vision.
Today, technology means everyone can have the information that was once kept by the privileged few.
In the hands of a party like Labour, that believes in central control, this opportunity is stifled.
Just look at computerising the NHS.
Labour say: let’s call in the expensive consultants. Let’s commission a massive IT project. Let’s make the state more powerful with a new, centralised computer to store everyone’s health records.
The result: NHS Connecting for Health, costing over twelve billion pounds.
One part of it is the Electronic Patient Records system – a central state-run database designed to let GPs, hospital doctors and nurses share your medical notes.
Now I want you to imagine how we’d have gone about it, if we’d had the chance.
We would have said: today, you don’t need a massive central computer to do this.
People can store their health records securely online, they can show them to whichever doctor they want.
They’re in control, not the state.
And when they’re in control of their own health records, they’re more interested in their health, so they might start living more healthily, saving the NHS money.
But best of all in this age of austerity, a web-based version of the government’s bureaucratic scheme services like Google Health or Microsoft Health Vault cost virtually nothing to run.
So this is where some really big savings could be made.
Not just shaving a bit off this budget here; that cost there.
Instead replacing whole chunks of the expensive, bureaucratic government machine with more modern methods – for a tiny fraction of the cost.
But it will only happen if you have a government that actually believes in giving power away.
So it’s clear: when the Eton Trifles are elected next year, they will trust unto Google’s and Microsoft’s “cloud” servers Britain’s medical records.
Because it’s cheap.
We’ll be in the very safest of hands.
What could POSSIBLY go wrong…?
What’choo talkin’ ’bout, Dave?
Is a direct descendant of King William IV – a man who is the fifth cousin, twice removed, of the Queen; a man who is the grandson of a Baronet; a man educated at Eton College; a man married to a woman who is herself the daughter of a Baronet and directly descended from King Charles II – really best placed to lecture the country about “thrift” and “pathetic piece[s] of class war posturing”?
The Eton Trifles: 403 days and counting…
Now I know there’s no way I can right those wrongs
On Sunday 2 September 1990 Melvyn Bragg finally confirmed he’d permanently lost the plot by devoting a South Bank Show Special to George Michael in celebration of the release the next day of Yog’s second solo album Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1.
Nearly two decades on, that album is remarkable mainly for its mediocrity. The singles tanked – in turn reaching numbers 6, 23, 28, 31 and 45 in the UK, in no small part thanks to Precious’s oh-so-artistic decision not to appear in his own videos – after which Bubble promptly lobbed his toys from his pram where his record company was concerned, all but retiring from the studio for six years until Virgin bought out his deal with Sony.
The best tracks on the album remain a Stevie Wonder cover (They Won’t Go When I Go) and a single with an annoyingly-infectious chorus that performed much better on the charts when Robbie Williams covered it six years later (Freedom ’90).
For much of the album Michael bangs on about the awful state of the world and, in particular, just how unbelievably horrific it is to be a multi-millionaire, multi-award winning singer and songwriter with never-ending access to all the drugs and groupies you can eat.
The sentiment is about as easy for the average punter to swallow as was Bono whining a couple of years earlier about how he Still Hadn’t Found What He Was Looking For. (Perhaps the diminutive Dubliner simply couldn’t see it hidden behind all those enormous piles of his cash.)
Yog won’t even let that particular bone go on the album’s closing track, Waiting (Reprise). The difference here, however, is that this slowed-down, stripped-back version of the album’s torpid third single, Waiting For The Day, contains the best lyric and most soulful vocal of Michael’s career.
It being the one track from the album remaining on my My Top Rated playlist, Waiting (Reprise) has always held something of a fascination for me, echoing as it does an interview I read with ABC’s Martin Fry from around the same time saying that even on the night he celebrated The Lexicon Of Love album reaching number one he felt empty, realising that his ultimate musical achievement was leaving him hopelessly unfulfilled.
(It came as little surprise that Bubble chose Waiting (Reprise) to open his recent 25 Live tour; it not only builds to a crescendo of “Here I am!”, but that final note is still comfortably within Michael’s increasingly limited range.)
The feeling when listening to Michael soulfully crying Waiting (Reprise) is that the singer genuinely doesn’t know the answer to the artfully-constructed, if self-pitying, question: “You look for your dreams in Heaven, but what the Hell are you supposed to do when they come true?”
Having achieved everything he thought he wanted and everything he strove for years to attain, it made him fucking miserable. A story old as time – having been awarded the ultimate prize, the prizewinner simply didn’t know what to do with it.
George’s answer was to smoke so much weed that he became a Flowerpot Man. While I can certainly see the attractions of that, it’s not a route I can necessarily condone for today’s equivalent, the Right Honourable James Gordon Brown MP.
It took the poor miserablist 14 years from election as a Member of Parliament to enter government. It then took a further decade before he could make the short walk from 11 Downing Street to the neighbouring abode. While he was – broadly speaking – a solid enough Chancellor, he never even tried to hide just how badly he wanted the Premiership or how little he felt Tony Blair deserved the crown.
Rightly or wrongly (and I never saw too much evidence to substantiate the claim) Brown was perceived as all gravitas and sincerity to Blair’s Chancerite philosophy of smiling vacuously and talking bollocks like a Hughie Green for the 90s. The feeling was that after Brown had done Waiting For That Day, he would herald a new dawn, a serious antidote to the complete and utter fluff of the Blair era.
As he finally stood outside Number 10 in June 2007, the nation wanted to believe that it was going to get its credibility back. As we had in May 1997, so we demonstrated – at first – a willingness to believe that things were now, finally, going to get better. I, too, was prepared to go with the flow.
The shit sandwich he has served up to the British population since late September 2007 has been a rude awakening for us all. But at least he found time to pay tribute to Jade Goody, eh?
As Arrivederci would have known if he’d listened to Waiting (Reprise) more attentively, “There ain’t no point in moving on until you’ve got somewhere to go.” Yet, remarkably, the man who had been so consumed for so long with the pursuit of the Prime Ministerial office seems never to have thought about what he would do with the power once he got it.
Blown this way and that by the vicissitudes of life the poor wretch has lurched from crisis to crisis, attempting to patch up his administration with populist utterance after knee-jerk initiative. Nobody is fooled anymore – he just isn’t up to the job.
(Not, I should add in all fairness, that there is anybody else in either of the two main parties that inspire anything remotely approaching confidence that they could do appreciably better, with the sole possible exception of professional Tory leadership election loser Kenneth Clarke.)
The man who claimed he went into politics to help the poor is the man who as Chancellor and Prime Minister has overseen a situation whereby people earning as little as £6,400 a year now pay income tax. The minimum wage is £5.73 an hour: you therefore only have to work for 21 hours a week at minimum wage to pay income tax. More than two millions of Britain’s poorest taxpayers face marginal tax rates in excess of 60%, a situation that will only become worse when VAT shoots up to 20%, as it surely now must at the end of this year. Keir Hardie’s fairly glowing with pride.
While the introduction of the 50% income tax band on the highest-earning 1% of the population is welcome and grabs some easy headlines, it does nothing for those most in need and raises (in terms of the stratospheric debt mountain we must now scale as a nation) sod all in revenue.
The man who built his reputation as a fiscal colossus on three pillars – deregulated wholesale financial services markets; open-to-all consumer finance; and a domestic property bubble – now oversees a financial services sector in tatters, with neither banks lending nor individuals borrowing, and a ruined housing market which still has far further to fall than the 20% already lost over the past year.
The ever-reliable Vince Cable was right this week to point out that it’s more than a little sickening to see Brown and Darling shoring up the same mortgage-backed securities that got us into this mess with public money that doesn’t exist, legitimising bribery to try to get consumers to buy foreign cars, and hiring the same former investment bankers who fucked us all over to try to convince foreign lenders to buy the country’s debt – particularly when the administration still clings to discredited white elephants such as the ID card scheme, the nationwide NHS IT project, a replacement for Trident, and so on.
We couldn’t afford follies like these before the ship hit the iceberg: there is now no excuse at all for Captain Darling having stood up (albeit briefly – Wednesday’s was the second shortest Budget speech since 1945: precisely the sort of leadership we need when everything’s going to so swimmingly…) and failing to kick them firmly into touch.
Today’s Bloomberg pen portrait of the Downfall-like scene apparently playing out behind that black, shiny door in SW1 is heartbreaking and hilarious in equal measure. There’s no doubt in my mind that Arrivederci is a fundamentally decent enough bloke who has been dealt a bum hand – the staplers, computer printers and mobile phones he’s launching around Downing Street are simply a manifestation of the frustration that must be steadily eating through his soul. But it’s not good enough.
George’s last, most heartfelt question in Waiting (Reprise) is: “is it too late to try again?”
Sadly, Gordon, it’s now much too late for anything but goodbyes and – to Labour’s eternal shame – another decade of Tory government.
Anger is an energy
I fucking hate Twitter.
I fucking hate road signs in the East Riding of Yorkshire, all of which seem to point to Driffield.
I fucking hate the Government.
I really fucking hate the Opposition.
I have absolutely fuck all to say.
This is what an encounter with a particular ex-girlfriend does for the Minister.
Gordon, Gordon, you bastard, I’m through
There’s a stake in your fat black heart/ And the villagers never liked you./ They are dancing and stamping on you./ They always knew it was you./ Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.
Sylvia Plath, Daddy
Until now, it has never been clear what we are supposed to believe about the political phenomenon that is Gordon Brown. Is he the architect of New Labour or the idealist who kept a leash on its worse excesses? Is he the last powerful socialist in UK politics or an egotistical chancer who manipulates everything and everyone for his own aggrandisement? Is he an intellectual or an idiot? A brilliant politician or a terrible one? A statesman, or an incompetent buffoon who has stumbled into politics despite being resolutely unsuited to it? A straight guy or a liar?
Those who started with a relatively favourable impression of Brown during his days at No. 11 (how could we not with Blair in charge?) and swayed by his portrayal in Peter Morgan’s The Deal as the superior candidate cheated out of his rightful place at the top of UK politics by the smirking jester Blair, can be forgiven for cutting Brown a certain measure of slack. Whether one admired his political nous (riding the boom wave to concentrate enormous power in his position as Chancellor without an ounce of the accountability due to the PM) or his apparent idealism (stealth policies to alleviate extreme poverty at a time when New Labour could not afford to publicise what it was doing) or both, one had a right to expect radicalism and results. We have got neither.
The sharpening factionalism of the party – the Blair/Brown camps – could have been viewed as an unfortunate distraction exacerbated by the understandable frustration with Blair’s needless clinging on to power (though it is a truth universally acknowledged that a split party cannot govern) and noises about how the Brownites (the ‘Nutters’ of Iannucci’s The Thick of It) were the worst of the bunch could have been dismissed as Old Blairite propaganda. Not any more.
Any sympathy, latitude or inner belief one might have been prepared to extend to the political phenomenon that is Gordon Brown has now vanished. The McBride affair is shocking not because it is hard to imagine that such individuals or such practices exist in British politics, but that someone directly employed by, and extremely close to, the Prime Minister has been caught doing it. Smearing opposition candidates is a brand of low politics which jostles for a place amongst all the other examples of low politics we have seen in the UK these past 30 years, at the bottom of the barrel . For my money, it’s winning the fight to be right at the very bottom.
Take for example, that apotheosis of political wrongdoing – Watergate. This was a juicy news story because the President, after a thriller plot straight out of John Le Carre, was eventually linked to a very illegal wiretap operation. Next to the McBride affair, which predicates the use of falsehoods to damage an opponent’s standing, then gaining an advantage by unlawfully discovering your opponents next move begins to look like nothing more than canny politics.
For me, this business is far, far worse than Stephen Byers’ aides ‘burying bad news’ after 9/11, even though it provides a less juicy ‘moral outrage’ story for the tabs. At the heart of it all for me, is that put simply, either Gordon Brown knew about it, or he knew about it. One cannot sensibly contemplate any alternative scenario. The only fair-minded and objective conclusion is that at best he sanctioned it and at worst he ordered it. It will take a bulletproof argument delivered by Alan Dershowitz or the ghost of George Carman QC to sway me from that view.
The real fuel for my own outrage, though, was difficult to pin down until I read Frank Field’s piece in the Guardian on Tuesday. It isn’t that Gordon Brown is scum. Although, he quite palpably and demonstrably is. It’s that there is now no inch of doubt left that the government of the last 12 years stands for nothing.
Harold Wilson asserted that the Labour party was a moral crusade or it was nothing. The McBride affair has left Labour members looking at nothing. That is the reality check that McBride has wrought on the party.