• home • about • twitter • archives • subscribe • email •

We’ve just got a puppy. Lovely little fella he is. Before we got him we sat our eight year-old down and had a long talk about how a puppy would change our lives and how much hard work and dedication would be needed.

Now we have the puppy that’s been forgotten. Cuddling the puppy is fine – who doesn’t like cuddling puppies? But the walking, training, and active input? The shiftless eight year-old doesn’t enjoy that so much. It’s hard work. You see, when you’re eight, the idea of having a puppy is very, very nice. The annoying reality? Not so much.

Which brings me to human rights. Obviously.

You see, when you’re the government, the idea of having human rights is very, very nice. The annoying reality? Not so much. Look at the kids losing their minds in Yarl’s Wood detention centre. Reminisce on the ‘humanitarian intervention‘ conducted with airstrikes and cluster bombs and depleted uranium and beatings and hoodings and murder. Watch a British government nuzzling beheaders and torturers in the name of business. See Jack Straw flashing his petticoat at the Daily Mail and accusing the Human Rights Act of being a ‘villains’ charter’.

For some unexplained reason Gordon Brown gave the keynote speech at the Equality and Human Rights Commission yesterday to mark the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Chuckle Brothers, a more appropriate choice, were presumably busy. You really do have to wonder how Brown summons the balls to turn out on such occasions. Anyone with a scrap more of self-awareness and scrap less self-denial would have stayed at home, nursed a beer and covered up the mirrors.

He even had the sheer big brass bollocks to quote Eleanor bloody Roosevelt – ‘Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home…’ – and then proceeded to list atrocities far away while his government helps cover up corrupt arms deals with dictators, demonises the unemployed, terrorises asylum seekers, and debases itself before tabloid newspaper editors who hate their readers almost as much as they hate foreigners, homosexuals, the unemployed, the weak, the vulnerable, and New Labour. The so-called underclass, the despised Great Unwashed of Work and Pensions Secretary James Purnell’s and Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre’s sweaty power fantasies, have far more insight into human dignity.

Like the eight year-old with the puppy, Gordon has a pleasant but hazy idea about human rights. Everything else is irritating piles of poo and puddles of pee for somebody else to clear up. Yeah, that’s right – I said poo and pee.

Here’s Gordon Brown in a Freudian slip – power fantasy mash-up. To the Prime Minister’s right is Secretary of State for Scotland Jim Murphy who, like the good little New Labour automaton he is, kept a straight face. Harriet Harman’s expression was, however, a peach.

Anybody else would have made a joke of it. But Gordon just kept on like a very humourless steamroller.

Gordon Brown marks World AIDS Day:

On this day, we remember those who have lost their lives to this terrible virus and those who have suffered from prejudice, misunderstanding or from lack of available treatment and support.

The Government marks World AIDS Day:

Two years ago, Sitiwe, who prefers not to give her full name, lived in the UK and was on regular medication for HIV. She was able to go about her normal life without worrying that her health might suddenly deteriorate. Last year she was deported to her native Zimbabwe.

To be fair to Gordon Brown, he was speaking in the past tense.

* Don’t forget the distinction.

Officer, arrest that man!

When Gordon Brown went to bow and scrape before some of the world’s most murderous theocrats last week, he took ‘27 leading business figures‘ with him. We can’t be sure who all the companies were but I think we can safely assume swimsuit and pet food manufacturers weren’t invited.

One company who was invited however was – surprise, surprise – arms dealer BAE systems. Because nothing signals the beginning of a new era of financial accountability and openness that Gordon Brown has called for than touring countries with human rights record to make Satan puke with a merchant of death mired in allegations of corruption.

And all for a reputed 500 million quid’s worth of business deals for British businesses. That’s a whopping 1.35 per cent of the £37 billion the government are pouring into the banks.

That’s not the end of the good news, as business secretary Peter Mandelson said:

“If you really want to know my true opinion, the amount of goodwill that has been generated by this will far, far exceed the value of the immediate agreements.”

The goodwill of floggers and beheaders is a great resource as we all know. Much better than cash. You can mash it up to make a nutritious broth, lag your loft with it, and it makes an excellent substitute for natural gas.

Yes, everything’s going to be all right.

I knew someone would eventually put the irrefutable case against ID cards and their attendant database in such simple and stark terms, I just can’t believe it’s the Prime Minister that’s done it…

Gordon Brown admitted yesterday that ministers can never guarantee the security of sensitive data…

Killer fact! Every time somebody argues in favour of ID cards, just quote Gordon Brown at them.

Just what that message might be though is uncertain. Here’s the Prime Minister on October 17:

The UK must reduce its dependency on oil as an energy source and move to nuclear and renewables, the PM has said. [...] Gordon Brown said the Government’s strategy was to move to a low carbon economy and escape the “dictatorship of oil”.

And here he is on November 2:

The Saudis and other countries in the Gulf States are very important, they are the countries with great revenues and oil wealth. What starts with negotiations in Saudi and elsewhere can end with great benefits for families in Britain.

So, the message seems to be that we’re going to end the ‘dictatorship of oil’ by going on our hands and knees to the plutocratic butchers that produce it. It that it? Sorted.

Would anyone like to guess what the word behind the Prime Minister’s head is in this photo?

When Gordon Brown became prime minister, he promised to…

…build trust in our democracy, I’m sure we need a more open form of dialogue with citizens and politicians to genuinely talk about problems and solutions. It is about a different type of politics, a more open and honest dialogue…’

So what the hell happened? Take the government’s consultation on nuclear power for example. It’s bent…

Late yesterday we received an astonishing response to our complaint to the Marketing Research Standards Board about the government’s second public consultation on nuclear power. The board sets the standards for opinion research and found that the market research company Opinion Leader Research breached the Code of Conduct. The board said Opinion Leader “information was inaccurately or misleadingly presented, or was imbalanced, which gave rise to a material risk of respondents being led towards a particular answer.”

Is that an ‘open form of dialogue with citizens’ and politicians talking ‘genuinely’ about ‘problems and solutions’? Is is ‘a different type of politics’ and ‘a more open and honest dialogue’?

I’m going to hazard a ‘no’.

All I can say is thank God it was Iceland’s banks that collapsed while holding British deposits and not, say, China’s. Imagine the statesmanlike strength and courage it took use anti-terrorism laws to freeze the assets of a country with a population of 320,000 and no standing army. RAAAARRR! How’s that for national pride reasserted? When do we invade?

Imagine the contortions and wriggling Brown would have done to avoid describing such a catastrophe happening somewhere big as ‘effectively illegal’ and ‘completely unacceptable’. He’s very fond of saying the financial apocalypse started in America but he’s yet to make a moral judgement out loud. Is there a parallel world somewhere where a Gordon Brown is saying ‘we are freezing the assets of American companies in the United Kingdom where we can’? Is there shite.

Isn’t that the very essence of New Labour? Pushing the little kids about while holding the big lad’s coat?

Ha ha ha! Sorry, hang on a sec. Ha ha! Stop the press! Ha ha! Gordon Brown can recite piss poor jokes written for him by somebody else! Ha ha!

I know him raising a smile is pretty unusual – like a monkey that can bring you a beer – but I’m fairly sure yesterday wasn’t that slow a news day. I know his handlers are desperate to show that the Prime Minister is actually human in the face of all the evidence – I just wonder if showing how much he’s in his element right now and how much he’s enjoying himself while people’s jobs, savings, and houses are being flushed down the toilet is the way to do it. What next, sending him down to an orphanage on Mother’s Day to sing Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep?

Isn’t he unpopular enough? Or is he trying win over those of us who can’t afford houses, pensions and savings? Has his private polling shown him the size of the dirt poor schadenfreude vote, perhaps? I imagine that’s a big constituency right now.

I suppose it at least once again shows the low expectations and regard we have for Gordon Brown. But at least he’s trying, bless him. Look everyone! The Prime Minister can make a hand-picked audience of sycophants clap! He does have a rudimentary sense of humour! The poor, poor sod.

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.

(more…)

The leader of the Labour Party:

Some people have been asking why I haven’t served my children up for spreads in the papers. And my answer is simple. My children aren’t props; they’re people.

So what does that make his wife then? He never paraded her at the party conference like that before now.

The word ‘prop’ has two meanings – ‘a theatrical property’ and ‘one that serves as a means of support or assistance’. Gordon has no talent for the former, obviously. So poorly regarded is he, however, that he needs his wife to be the latter.

‘She gives him warmth,’ apparently (and for crying out loud). A reflected glow. Look at the Prime Minister, we’re supposed to think, he can’t be the emotionally infantile and brooding, micro-managing liar, warmongerer and sociopath of popular perception because he’s got quite a personable wife.

Is he Arnold Schwarzenegger to her young John Connor or something? Being taught simple tics, the better to blend in as a human? Gordon knows now why you cry… but it is something he could never do.

The Prime Minister wheels out his missus, reads a list out loud, tells the story about his eye again, and suddenly he’s back on top. Just like that. The biggest comeback since Dirty Den.

Who knew it was that easy? All it took was for him to read reasonably competently off a sheet of A4 some words somebody else had written for him. He should have done it six months ago and saved himself a whole load of bother.

Here’s a good one. Gordon Brown is still clinging to his job because…

I was chancellor for 10 years. I’m in a position to deal the international and the national events that are happening. I’ve got the experience to deal with these events. I think you’ve seen over the last few days that we’ve been making the right decisions, sometimes ahead of other countries …

So how is he putting this experience to the test? How is he making the right decisions? From someone who’s supposed to be a massive control freak, it turns out that the Prime Minister is a huge delegator…

What can be done about excessive bonuses?

Brown: Well, the Financial Services Authority is looking at that.

Can you legislate to stop bonuses?

Brown: I think it’s difficult to do that because you are dealing with a global economy […] The Financial Services Authority is looking at these issues.

Did you never wonder about the obscene greed of the City?

Brown: What did we do? We created the Financial Services Authority.

And the FSA did what, exactly? If the Financial Services Authority is doing all the heavy lifting (whatever that is), if the Prime Minister is incapable of a single, simple moral judgement, why the hell do we need him? He says one minute that his experience as chancellor qualifies him to stay. The next minute he’s telling us that someone is else doing the work. Which is it? Why not make the head of the FSA prime minister? You know, cut out the middle man.

No doubt if the FSA sort it all out (slim chance), Gordon can turn around, claim the credit and say ‘I told them to do that’. If they fail, well, people have to be held accountable. Here’s Gordon dropping a hint:

I think the FSA have said themselves that it’s not an issue of the powers they had at this particular point in time, but what they did.

…and…

Whatever it takes means that if the FSA needs new powers, they will get them. But don’t forget this. We are a pro-business government. We rely on an economy that is pro-enterprise…

Translation: The FSA will get bigger boots for kicking arses, they just better not upset anybody by kicking those arses too hard.

The control freak is a delegator. The Prime Minister makes the decisions except when he doesn’t. There’s a consignment of jam arriving tomorrow but you probably won’t like the taste. And isn’t that what leadership in this day and age is all about at the end of the day?

…some explode spectacularly, like New South Wales Police Minister Matt Brown’s:

A witness told The Australian Mr Brown stripped down to his “very brief” underpants and danced to loud “Oxford Street-style” techno music on a green leather Chesterfield couch he had recently ordered for his office.

The witness said Mr Brown “mounted the chest” of Wollongong MP Noreen Hay.

The witness said Mr Brown called out to Ms Hay’s adult daughter during the performance: “Look at this, I’m tittie-f..king your mother!”

More politicians should do it. Surely to God Gordon Brown knows his number’s up. Instead of pathetically limping on for another few months, like a wounded animal, before slowly and painfully expiring in a mewling, sobbing heap, Gordon should dry hump the Home Secretary live at Prime Minister’s Questions.

Gordon would salvage some dignity and the rest of us would talk about nothing else for the rest of our lives.

(Via Warren Ellis)

Matthew Norman on public servants serving the public:

[A] report by the ISC committee of peers and MPs into communication failures between West Yorkshire police and MI5 before the London bombings of 7 July 2005 has been abandoned “for legal reasons”, whatever they might be. The PM has read the document, which apparently implies that the bombings may have been avoidable, but prefers to keep it to himself, possibly for fear of distressing any poor police darlings already traumatised by a jury’s scepticism regarding the guilt of those charged with conspiring to blow up planes with bombs made from formula baby milk and contact lens cleaner.

I suppose a little while back there’d have been some outrage generated by all this. But these days who has the energy for anything more than a resigned shrug?

(more…)

Right here. Prepare yourself.

Gordon Brown vowed to bring back competitive elections in politics today, saying it had been wrong to discourage politicians from competing against each other.

The prime minister promised to extend the range of policies available to voters and revealed that a taskforce of the country’s female political champions would be set up to inspire more girls to participate.

“We want to encourage competitive elections in politics, not the ‘medals for Gordon’ culture we have seen in previous years,” he said. “It was wrong because it doesn’t work. In politics you get better by challenging yourself against other people. A lot of politics are team games where people have to work together but they play against other teams.”

Brown said the government had now begun to “correct the tragic mistake of reducing the competitive element in politics”.

(With apologies)

When MP John MacDougall died, Gordon Brown gave a eulogy at the funeral…

And we are here today because we have lost in John a tireless fighter for social justice, we have lost an endlessly loyal champion of decent values…

Could Brown say the same about himself? Bollocks could he:

John MacDougall, the former MP for Glenrothes, launched a court action against the Ministry of Defence (MoD) last November after the Government turned down his request for a £300,000 payout. Mr MacDougall believed his lung cancer was contracted as a result of working at the Royal Naval dockyards in Rosyth in the 1960s and 1970s when he was exposed to asbestos

Only in New Labour can you write a man’s eulogy with one hand while making his last, hard days even harder with the other. As it has been and always will be under this lot, misery is tribute just as bombs bring peace.

The hypocrisy on display on Brown’s eulogy is breathtaking even for his myriad mendacities. How about his on MacDougall’s heroics during the Miners’ Strike:

And John [MacDougall] and Bert [Gough] were true to their words; when faced with the provocation of social security relief withdrawn, with miners reliant on soup kitchens, they used the Social Work Scotland Act to give essential relief to miners’ families.

Social security relief withdrawn? Why those bastard Tories. What monsters. What’s that? Oh, hang on…

‘More long-term unemployed people could have their benefits cut – or stopped altogether – under new proposals‘ … ‘Benefits could be withdrawn almost immediately if people do not cooperate‘ … ‘These proposals will make those people worse off, and that’s of course how these savings are to be made‘

Life is indeed measured by deeds. Gordon Brown, the morally vacuous old joke, has been measured. Please be sodding off now.

In a not-at-all-patronising speech to troops in Afghanistan, the Prime Minister compared British soldiers to our Olympic heroes…

This week we are celebrating the Olympics, where we have had great success. People have been winning medals in areas where we have been breaking ground.

But this week also I believe that our Olympic athletes and everybody else in our country will remember that you have showed exactly the same courage, professionalism and dedication.

…said the Prime Minister likening ‘exactly‘ the courage, professionalism and dedication needed to ride a bicycle round in circles to the courage, professionalism and dedication needed to fight the Taleban. I think that’s what they call faint praise.

He is of course, however, exactly right. Our troops are just like our Olympians. They’re underfunded and spend most of their time abroad. They perform obscure activities that we only pay attention to once in a blue moon before turning over to watch the X-Factor. And politicians love their reflected glory unless they’re losing in which case they get barely a mention.

It’s all over. You do have to feel for them a little bit…

ITEM: You have a prime minister who everyone says is dour and humourless. People feel free to impugn his mental state and say he’s out of touch.

ITEM: Number 10 attempt a light-hearted and humorous video involving Jeremy Clarkson. People feel free to impugn their mental state and say they’re out of touch.

(Coming soon: Complaints when Gordon Brown decides to give everyone a fifty pound note. ‘It’s a disgrace that people weren’t given the choice of two twenties and a ten,’ say critics.)

There’s a piece in the current Private Eye comparing Gordon Brown’s statement after Labour’s defeat at the Crewe and Nantwich by-election…

The message that we have got is that people are concerned. They are concerned about rising food prices, rising petrol prices. People are concerned rightly about gas and electricity bills. They are concerned about what is happening to the economy. I think the message that I have to get to people is that we are unequivocal and clear in our direction, that we are going to address and are addressing these problems. We will continue to do so. My task is to steer the British economy through what have been very difficult times in every country in the world and that I will continue to do with a clear direction that shows that we will address all the problems that people are facing.

…and then after the Henley by-election…

By-elections come and by-elections go and of course we will listen to what people say. I think people know that we are going through difficult times in the economy. It’s my job to steer us through these difficult times. And people facing higher petrol bills, higher gas and electricity bills, people facing high food prices, it’s my job to make sure I can do more to help people’s standard of living improve.

…and after the Glasgow East by-election…

People are worried at rising food and fuel prices and we’ve got to show that we know that; only we understand and hear them. Labour will take them through these difficult times to help people and hardworking families who are hard pressed. We had a great candidate and I’m sorry that we lost but I know that people are looking to the government for the action that’s necessary. We’re looking at everything we can do for what is a global problem so we can help people through these difficult times and that’s exactly that we will continue to do. My task is to get on with the job of getting us through these difficult times.

To be honest, it sounds like the Prime Minister’s task in the last few months has been to listen to the sound of his own voice and learn just one all-purpose speech. Actually, you wonder if he’s in a bit of daze and thinks he’s commenting on the same by-election.

At least the speech will come in handy again after the Glenrothes by-election. In fact, it could come in handy after the next general election. When Labour are smashed and put out of power for twenty years, Brown could simply turn up for work as usual, declare on the steps of Downing Street that the message from the British public is unequivocal, fuel bills are rising, and that it’s his task to get on with the job. He’ll then attempt to carry on regardless in a lurching futility that’s difficult to watch. Hell, it’s worked perfectly well so far.

There’s a small but significant difference between the transcript of the speech Gordon Brown made to the Knesset today and what he actually said.

Here’s what the transcript says:

We stand ready to lead in taking firmer sanctions and ask the whole international community to join us. Iran has a clear choice to make: suspend its nuclear programme and accept our offer of negotiations or face growing isolation and the collective response not of one nation but of many nations.

Here’s what the Prime Minister actually said:

We stand ready to lead in taking firmer sanctions and ask the whole international community to join us. Iran has a clear choice to make: suspend its nuclear weapons programme and accept our offer of negotiations or face growing isolation and the collective response not of one nation but of many nations.

Did you spot it? Can anybody produce any proof that Iran has a nuclear weapons programme?

This is how politics works: you don’t give a message, you send it. That’s why politicians are always banging on about ’sending a message’.

Take Gordon Brown and his trip to Palestine and Israel. Yesterday while in Bethlehem at a press conference with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Brown criticised Israeli settlements. He was sending a message to the Israelis.

Today, when he has the opportunity to deliver that message in person and in public when he speaks to the Knesset, he’s going to send a message to Iran warning it against developing nuclear weapons. He sending the message to Tehran, do you see?

Who would he warn if he were to find himself in Iran at a press conference, I wonder? Let’s say the producers of Blue Peter over its declining standards. Send them the message. He could then go on Blue Peter and bring the whole thing full circle and warn Hamas about firing rockets into Israel. Easy.

(In real life this is called talking about people behind their backs. They generally don’t like it.)

You can see why he’s doing it though. Very few of us have the balls to be publicly honest to people’s faces. I bet if Gordon had met Jeffrey Dahmer he’d have merely complimented Jeffrey on his collection of skulls.

There’s a quite staggeringly inept, patronising and above all obsequious interview with the Prime Minister in this week’s New Statesman. It deserves an award for its vacuity.

Imagine being given hours with the Prime Minister and only coming up with this. I’d never write a public word again. I imagine the only reason the editor didn’t spike it was because there was no way of sending the ‘political editor of GMTV’ back to do it properly.

He talks about his holiday plans and asks about my work and my parents, but has the politician’s knack of ignoring awkward questions. “You really need to hold on to Glasgow, don’t you?” I ask at one point; he appears not to hear – maybe he doesn’t – and continues to flick through his notes.

THEN WHY DIDN’T YOU REPEAT THE SODDING QUESTION, TORQUEMADA?

Who knew GMTV had a political editor. Or needed one. It’s an oxymoron, isn’t it? Like a Bolivian Vice Admiral. That’s probably why she was allowed into Gordon’s presence rather than somebody who would have asked unanswered questions twice and maybe refrained from asking him what he bought his wife for her birthday. Maybe the Prime Minister thought he was being interviewed for Take a Break rather than the New Statesman.

Shocking. Just shocking.