It’s now 2010 and in the run up to the forthcoming election, constituents in Hove and Portslade are having this crap from New Labour shoved throught their letterboxes…

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Whoever produced this dross has a very short memory or, probably more likely, a galloping dose of denial. They’ve clearly forgotten or are studiously ignoring this little nugget from a certain Gordon Brown in September 2007…

I am a conviction politician like her, and I think many people will see Mrs Thatcher as not only a person who saw the need for change in our country and took big decisions to achieve that, but also is and remains a conviction politician, true to the beliefs that she holds.

A week later Brown had her round to tea at Downing Street and he paraded his guest in front of the waiting media. When do we get to see that in New Labour campaign leaflets?

EDIT: Sorry, not sure I made it clear that this is a New Labour leaflet I’m talking about here. Here’s the other side of it…

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I’ve edited the post slightly to make things clearer. In short, Thatcher is a source of embarrassment for Clegg, a cause of admiration for Brown.

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Insulting the country’s intelligence by wheeling out the wife seems to be a political tactic for all scenarios. Gordon Brown is seen as too serious by voters so the solution is to push out his wife to say nice things about him. David Cameron is seen as not serious enough by voters so the solution is to push out his wife to say nice things about him. The meagre amounts of dignity and self-respect on display are such you wouldn’t be surprised to see the two leaders being dropped off at the televised election debates by their mums.

What about Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg? Well, his wife is yet to mouth platitudes in a documentary or to be filmed in close-up wiping away a tear on a chatshow so it’s as yet impossible to come to a reasoned opinion about the leader of the Liberal Democrat’s character. Hopefully she’ll be shoved out to entertain the nation soon enough.

The media of course lap all this up like dogs going at a pavement pizza. Two women who appear to be reasonably intelligent and successful women in their own rights are reduced to clothes horses entered into a semi-naughty catfight. When the inevitable backlash kicks off after the election and one of these women’s life is made a misery by press intrusion and vilification their husbands won’t have a leg to stand on, them having signed of on the strategy in the first place.

Still, all this gives the rest of us a pointer towards what we should do when we’re facing life’s little challenges. Things not going well at work? When called into the bosses office all you need say is, ‘Yes, what I’m doing is shit and you don’t like me but have you heard what my Mrs has to say about me? I think you may very well change your mind.’

Why not take your significant other along with you the next time you have a job interview? They can tell your prospective employer about how, even though you’re a bit untidy, you like to cook and are good with kids. When the interviewer asks about your ideas for increasing the company’s productivity, your partner can interject with a swift ‘I can honestly say that I don’t think he’s ever let me down’. The job will be yours.

With the polls narrowing towards election day, and with further desperation bound to creep in, who’s to say where we’ll end up next? We’ve already had the excuciating private details of the last days and hours of the children they both lost but there must be some mileage left there.

We’ve had the awkward and wooden marriage proposal story from Brown but how about the marriage consummation stories from both men? They could borrow from the Blairs and boast about how many times a night they stick it to the missus or give intimate details of how their children were conceived. As ever, with the continuing degeneration of British politics, the Blairs with their manifest lack of class and their no-depth-too-low will to win have so much to answer for.

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…you don’t tackle the fear of crime by cultivating it, by ramping up a public sense of panic, by abusing the figures and claiming our society is broken…

Way to go Gordon. His intervention is a fresh breeze through this debate. Creating fear of crime where none should exist is cynical, dangerous and not worthy of serious politicians. His illustrious predecessor Mr Tony rode to power by kicking off a crime and punishment arms race between New Labour and the Tories, and preying on people’s fears (when he was Shadow Home Secretary he called the murder of James Bulger ‘the ugly manifestations of a society that is becoming unworthy of that name’), so it’s great to see Brown condemning such transparent and tawdry charlatanism and blatant pandering to right-wing tabloidism.

But then, later on in the speech we got…

The next time you hear somebody question the value of retaining DNA profiles from those who have been arrested but not convicted, remember Jeremiah Sheridan. And most of all remember the innocent woman he attacked.

It was futile, one supposes, to expect any kind of consistency or cohesion between arguments when cheap political points need to be scored in an election year. So Brown thought he was well within his rights to use the rape of a disabled woman as a weapon with which to attack his opponents.

In summing up, Gordon says fear of crime is being stoked by the Tories and is a Very Bad Thing. But also, if you don’t back New Labour’s policy on the DNA database, it will mean horrible men will escape justice to continue their reigns of mayhem and terror. Don’t listen to Tory fear-mongering but pay close attention to Gordon’s in case you end up giving comfort to rapists and murderers. Think on.

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There was this woman, just shouting, shouting at my sister to get up. She was in bed asleep and she’s only five so she was crying and the woman just kept shouting at her. She didn’t have to do that. The search was bad. Why did they have to search my sister? She is only five, what is she going to have? They touch you all over and they’re rough. [1]

…

He had previously been a happy child who was successful at school, but now became very sad, skipped school, lost his appetite, slept poorly, was plagued by nightmares, and screamed in the night. [2]

…

‘I wanted to kill myself all the time I was there. And I think Joseph picked up on how I felt, because he cried so much. Some of his hair fell out, he wouldn’t eat and became ill’ [3]

…

‘You don’t know how it feels to be a kid full of dreams and to feel that nobody cares, that the dreams are not important to anyone. My little sister Jessica is four years old. You think, well, she won’t understand, but in her world Jessica knew what was happening.’ [4]

…

[O]lder children were so stressed they wet their beds and soiled their pants. [5]

…

In actual fact, those testimonies are from children who have been detained and imprisoned by our government in the last few years.

Now, you might think that’s a cheap shot. That it demeans the suffering of those children taken from their families under the Child Migrant Programme and deported overseas where they faced abuse and misery along with the the hard work of the people who support them. I don’t mean to: those people deserve apologies, riches and peace. It’s just… how can the Prime Minister’s apology carry any weight whatsoever when his own government’s agencies are – right now – giving children similar treatment here and then deporting them to countries where they and their parents face abuse or worse? Brown said today…

“We are sorry they were allowed to be sent away at the time when they were most vulnerable. We are sorry that instead of caring for them, this country turned its back.

“And we are sorry that the voices of these children were not always heard, their cries for help not always heeded. And we are sorry that it has taken so long for this important day to come and for the full and unconditional apology that is justly deserved.”

He also said they were cruelly lied to and their childhoods “robbed”, and described the scheme as “shameful” and “a deportation of the innocents”.

Sound familiar? How long until the children of Yarl’s Wood and Dungavel get their apology?

It’s Brown who demeans the suffering of the survivors of the Child Migrant Programme. His apology is worthless while children under his government’s supposed care also suffer.

(Visit the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns website. Sign the Downing Street petition calling on the Prime Minister to end child immigration detention.)

[1] Mark Easton: Children in detention at Yarl’s Wood
[2] The Children’s Commissioner for England’s follow up report to: The arrest and detention of children subject to immigration control
[3] New Statesman: Katherine’s testimony
[4] New Statesman: “My dreams are not important to anyone”
[5] OurKingdom: Roll calls, body searches and sex games

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Take Alistair Darling and his peach-like ego for instance. He goes on the telly last night and says Gordon Brown’s crew unleashed the ‘the forces of hell‘ against him when he predicted the worst recession in 60 years, as if he was some poor Germanic tribesman being swooped down upon by a horse-riding, sword-wielding Russell Crowe.

It’s the complete and utter lack of perspective and self-awareness (on both Darling’s part and the way the media have lapped it up) that makes you torn between whether to laugh yourself sick or emigrate with alacrity off this toilet-bound rock. We unleashed ‘the forces of hell’ on millions of Iraqi men, women and children. Alistair Darling had a couple of fat blokes say a few things about him that he didn’t like. He’s still in his job and nobody died.

How about New Labour’s much heralded ‘Fast Track’ asylum system, built to outflank the Tories and appease the right-wing press? Human Rights Watch released a report yesterday that…

…documents how women asylum seekers with complex claims are being routed into a system designed for much simpler claims. The women are held in detention largely for the UK’s administrative convenience, have very little time to prepare a legal case, and have only a few days to appeal if refused. But the claims often involve such sensitive and difficult issues as sexual violence, female genital mutilation, trafficking, and domestic abuse. There is little time for lawyers or other representatives to build the trust with their clients needed for them to explain their claims or to obtain medical or other evidence needed to verify them.

It’s more and more apparent you couldn’t trust Gordon Brown’s moral compass to stop him taking a whizz on the the bathroom rug let alone show some humanity to these people.

Speaking of the devil, the Prime Minister is in this morning’s Telegraph speaking out against assisted suicide. Such deep respect for human life would be laudable, consistent and admirable coming from most people but Gordon Brown was at the centre of a government that assisted at the very least 100,000 Iraqis off this plane of existence.

Is he the right person to be lecturing us that, in high moral tones that ‘I know in my heart that there is such a thing as a good death’? I suppose there’s an argument to be made somewhere that those herds of brown people had good deaths in that they died in the service of the Greater Good (not, unfortunately, the abstract concept but the exclusive club of politicians and business leaders).

Brown’s obvious hypocrisy would be lessened if palliative care centres weren’t having to hold fundraising events and the hospice movement (founded by Brown’s heroine Dame Cicely Saunders) wasn’t scraping to get by. After 13 years of New Labour, many people have anything but ‘a good death’ in this country.

The corollary to an anti-euthanasia stance should be well-funded, universal, humane and dignified palliative care systems, shouldn’t it? His claims to seeing ’such a thing as a good death’ in his heart is one thing, seeing it in his government’s actions is quite another. As with many other things, Brown’s claims to morality on this are engulfed by a greater one. That’s conveniently forgotten, however, when another pitch has to be made to religious voters and Daily Mail readers in an election year.

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Largely trampled beneath the deeply unedifying flurry of handbags that we must now call Bullygate was the announcement that the Prime Minister is to give evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War on March 5. However, lost in the distant mists of time B.B. (Before Bullygate), was Gordon Brown’s launch of a pre-emptive strike on the Inquiry.

On February 19, 2010 at approximately 15:27 GMT explosions were heard in the Chilcot Inquiry. Special operations commandos from Number 10’s News Management Division, infiltrated throughout Westminster, called in the early air strike.

Getting his retailiation in first, Brown announced ‘the threat of weapons of mass destruction was not the reason he backed the invasion of Iraq’. ‘History will be kind to me for I intend to write it,’ said Winston Churchill. Brown hopes to ape him.

Mr Brown said weapons were not his prime motivation, and instead it was Iraq’s persistent disregard for United Nations’ resolutions which “put at risk” global security.

Ah, yes. Respect for international law and the will of the international community (or at least the five permament members of the UN security council) are important considerations. Although, how a disregard for United Nations’ resolutions in this instance puts global security at risk if we discount WMDs is for much more morally flexible minds than mine.

And isn’t it fortunate that Gordon now reveals he didn’t regard Saddam an imminent threat, just as that argument is shown (once again) to be a stinking pile of mendacious horseshit. If only Brown had had a quiet word in Alastair Campbell’s ear back in 2002, all of this unpleasantness might have been avoided. Brown seems to have had no consideration of Iraqi human rights (as Blair later tried to twist it) and admits Saddam could have stayed in power if only he’d come clean about the weapons he didn’t have.

If anything, Brown’s case for cluster-bombing children is even weaker than Blair’s. At least Blair tried to convince us of some threat that needed countering. Brown makes the deaths of – at the very least – 100,000 people, the destruction of a country, and the debasement of UK foreign policy sound like an early bed time for disobedience. I have children who have a ‘persistent disregard’ for what they’re told. God help them if I take up the Brown Doctrine.

Mission Accomplished.

Still, should Brown win the election I for one look forward to him taking to new theatres his intolerance of countries whose flouting United Resolutions ‘put at risk’ global security. What are the chances, do you think?

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Thatcher

Musharraf

Abdullah

Gaddafi

Kissinger

Hewson

It’s to be accepted and expected that, in an age of so-called realpolitik (the euphemism we use when politicians set aside their morality), Brown has to lick the claws of monsters in the name of arms sales and securing the future career prospects of his cabinet colleagues. But how desperate for admiration does someone have to be to take a lump of glass from Henry Kissinger?

(The Case Against Henry Kissinger part one and part two.)

Update: Alastair Campbell thinks getting a glass bird from Henry ‘illegal bombing‘ Kissinger is something to crow about. Birds of a feather, I suppose…

Update updated: Speaking on BBC Five Live this afternoon Gordon Brown said he wouldn’t shake hands with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. There’s clearly a complex and subtle calculation that Brown performs before he sticks out his paw. BAE plus BP times the number of potential directorships available divided by the number of New Labour cabinet ministers and special advisers, perhaps. In the case of Ahmadinejad the numbers come up short.

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In parliament today he was unable to say whether the inquiry will have the power to compel witnesses to appear before it or whether they will have to give evidence under oath. Brown did his best to blame the Tories for the way the inquiry will be conducted. ‘The opposition wanted a Franks style inquiry [the inquiry into the Falklands war] and that’s what we’re having,’ he said making it sound like a generous concession to Tory lobbying. You’re all in this one together, lads.

One of the members of the inquiry’s committee is Sir Lawrence Freedman, professor of War Studies at King’s College, London. Writing in the Independent in 2003 at the outbreak of the war, he had this to say…

Even if it takes time to dislodge Saddam’s regime, the US – and also Britain – will emerge from this conflict hardened in their power and ready to exercise far greater influence over not only the development of Iraq but also the wider Middle East.

Let’s hope Sir Lawrence is better at recording history than he is at predicting it.

Update: Jamie: ‘Let the assistant gravedigger bury the dead‘. There aren’t any words, really. Not longer than one syllable at any rate.

Update updated: A good point from Bob:

But at the end of the day I suspect few will change their opinions because of the inquiry, in public or private. And I’m one of those. To me, Blair either lied on WMD or was conned by the US. Fool or Knave, it makes no difference, both were things for which he should have been made to resign, and if he had some evidence which would persuade me otherwise I’m damn sure he would have put it in the public domain by now.

Updated update updated: Here’s inquiry committee member Martin Gilbert comparing Bush and Blair to Roosevelt and Churchill.

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This isn’t repellent because it’s a supposedly left wing PM that’s the target – fuck Gordon Brown. His crime in my eyes is getting involved with this shower of deceitful turds in the first place, and he’s been up to his nuts in every scam and scandal of the New Labour years. He wanted the premiership so badly he was prepared to do anything to get it, and now he is getting it, good and hard.

But let’s not dance around what we’ve seen with last week’s press circle jerk and shows like tonight’s Dispatches. It’s a naked attempt by a massive chunk of the nation’s ruling class to pin all the faults of the country they created – the fucked financial system, the sleaze-ridden politics, the empty PR machine that is New Labour – on Brown, leaving the rest of them to get on with business as usual.

Read the rest

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Well I’ve got to tell you, I was brought up in a household where integrity and telling the truth and doing everything honestly was what really mattered.

…surely the only sane response is: so what the bloody hell happened then, Gordon? That whirring sound you can hear is Gordon Brown’s parents spinning in their boxes at speeds matched only by his whirligig moral compass. The weather being what it is right now, I’d quite like to be standing next the Prime Minister’s moral compass – the breeze coming off it as it blurs around its spindle must be cold enough to chill beer.

It’s a sign of his desperation that almost everything that comes out of his mouth is a hostage to fortune. Of the current expenses scandal he says…

What I’ve seen offends my Presbyterian conscience. What I’ve seen is something that is appalling.

He really must get out more or at least take a closer look at just what the party he’s been at the centre of for 15 years has been up to since it came to power. As revolting as some of these MPs’ behaviour is, you have to wonder about a man who’s ‘Presbyterian conscience’ is offended by petty corruption after he wrote the cheques for the bombing of civilians, has a Home Office interning four year-olds, and has a Foreign Secretary trying to cover up allegations of torture.

Or how about this on the Today programme on Radio 4 this morning, on the subject of Damian McBride and his emails:

When people do bad things, they go, they resign, they get sacked.

Define ‘bad’ things for us, Gordon. Grotty emails? Bad. Cluster bombs, depleted uranium, white phosphorus, extraordinary rendition? Sorry, Gordon’s moral judgements on those aren’t on the record – he expects you to make your own.

Barely anything Brown says stands up to even the most cursory scrutiny…

We will be the reforming party on the Constitution. It’s always where I’ve wanted to be. I think you’ve known me for twenty years and you know exactly what my position has been on these issues and can acknowledge that, and now we’re in a position to move this forward.

He’s been Prime Minister for two years. A draft Constitutional Reform Bill is sitting covered in dust. December last year…

Moves to allow MPs a say on going to war and greater scrutiny of treaties were trumpeted by Gordon Brown when he became Prime Minister last year.

But, with recession-fighting measures now central to the Government’s plans, there was no Bill to enact the constitutional “renewal” reforms in today’s Queen’s Speech.

When Brown thought ’saving’ us from the recession was the key to restoring his popularity, constitutional reform could go and twist in the wind. Now bent MPs have pushed the recession off the front pages, it’s all hail Gordon the great reformer.

So is Labour MP Frank Field lying when he says:

Week after week MPs have been turning up but with almost no serious work to do. There is the odd bill to be sure. But there is no legislative programme to speak of… There is a wish amongst all sections of the PLP for the government to start governing. We wouldn’t care too much whether the ideas were Blairite or non-Blairite, as long as we could give the impression of supporting a government that was using the next year to mark out why we should stay in office.

Week after week MPs have been turning up but with almost no serious work to do. If Brown was serious about his hankering for constitutional reform – you know, if these plans of his really have been brewing for ‘twenty years’ and haven’t been thrown together in a panic in the weeks since the Daily Telegraph started printing details of MPs expenses – why didn’t he introduce his reforms into a seemingly almost empty legislative programme?

Let’s break it down. A Prime Minister with a professed twenty year-old urge to reform the way this country is governed shelves a draft bill to do just that despite apparently having plenty of space and time in Parliament to introduce it. Less than a year out from a General Election, when all but the most deluded believe he’ll be dubbed one of the worst Prime Ministers we’ve ever had, and amidst a massive political scandal, he pops up and says ‘oh aye, always been a fan of holding MPs to account and giving the people more power, me’.

You see, it makes no sense. Even if he isn’t he gives every impression of making it up as he goes along. He said on the Today programme that he’s ’staying on’ to ‘clean up’ politics. He’s been an MP since 1983, he was one of the longest serving Chancellors of the Exchequer in history, he’s been the country’s most powerful man for nearly two years. And only now his Presbyterian conscience is offended.

If Gordon Brown had a dog and it took a great big crap in the middle of his living room, we can only assume he’d tiptoe around the turds for the best part of 25 years before it occurred to him to get out the carpet shampoo.

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