I love a good juxtaposition me. I had to laugh the week TV autocue reader Fern Britton chose to tearfully announce she’d preferred surgery over willpower in her quest to stop shovelling food into her gawping maw.

It was the same week world leaders sat down in Rome to ‘urgently’ discuss the world food crisis. What starving Africans would make of it if they had the time to pay attention instead of, you know, starving, is anybody’s guess.

Then I was tickled to see the Prime Minister in his speech yesterday leading another demagogic assault on the undeserving poor - ‘Our aim is a something for something, nothing for nothing Britain’ - just as Western governments are furiously shovelling billions in the direction of the undeserving rich.

And then there’s this…

‘I don’t believe Britain is broken - I think it’s the best country in the world. I believe in Britain.’

…uttered by the Prime Minister on the same day as the news was announced that…

Britain is perceived internationally as more corrupt than at any time in the last 13 years because of the Government’s decision to pull a probe into arms contracts with Saudi Arabia and the taint in politics left by the cash for peerages affair.

All we really need is to depose the monarchy and global warming to make to climate warm enough to grow bananas and we’ll be all the way.

Brown also said:

‘And where I’ve made mistakes I’ll put my hand up and try to put them right. So what happened with 10p stung me because it really hurt that suddenly people felt I wasn’t on the side of people on middle and modest incomes - because on the side of hard-working families is the only place I’ve ever wanted to be. And from now on it’s the only place I ever will be.’

Brown denied there was a problem with the abolition of the 10p tax rate for a year. It’s what caused the ruckus in the first place. He didn’t put his hand up - it had to be dragged up when it looked like the whole balls-up was going to flush his government down the toilet. He now seems to be admitting that the denial wasn’t because he thought he was right all along but because of some juvenile tantrum (’It really hurt’) over the widespread ‘perception’ that he was sticking it to the poor to show off to the rich.

‘People felt I wasn’t on the side of people on middle and modest incomes.’ Felt, mate, felt? They saw. It really hurt? Get over yourself, you utter berk. Go and have a word with those still affected by your cock up to find out about hurt.

Which brings us to fairness. Gordon loves fairness. Fairness, fairness, fairness. Twenty-two mentions in an hour. ‘We do it because fairness is in our DNA,’ he said? Do what?

The dawn raid on the asylum seekers who come here because they want to one of Gordon’s much loved ‘hard working families’ but aren’t allowed to be?

Lauding dead MP to the skies while it’s revealed your government was blocking the compensation that might have made his last days more comfortable?

Wanting to intern suspects for six weeks? (’A fair solution,’ says Brown.)

Gay and Lesbian asylum seekers fearing death being deported and told to act ‘discreetly‘?

Ending a corruption investigation because a bunch of torturers and beheaders told you to?

A rise in deaths at work while the Health & Safety Executive has been cut back?

Vowing to end ‘off balance sheet accounting‘ while running billions of Private Finance Initiative debt off the government’s books?

Soldiers taking out private insurance because government support is so shit?

You could go on all day. Dave Osler has more. Brown then vowed…

David Miliband, Douglas Alexander and I will do everything in our power to bring justice and democracy, to Burma, to Zimbabwe and to Darfur.

And then you see how many people have been sent back to Zimbabwe in the last five years. Look at government ministers fighting in the courts to send people back to Darfur. The Burmese dissidents having the door slammed in their faces. Justice? Fairness? You’d have to be dead not to laugh at the gaping chasm between the words and the reality.

That the newspapers are falling over themselves to declare Brown reinvigorated and back, back, back! on the strength of one speech would be equally amusing if it wasn’t so perverse. They’ll be all over him like the clap again this time next week.

Posted on September 24th, 2008 at 10:19 am

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