Right-wing chigger, Ed Balls: ‘His passion, his pragmatism and his creation of the NHS are what make me a Bevanite’.

If Bevan were alive today, the likes of Balls would be anonymously slagging him off to gutter journalists.

Here’s a breathless, erotic press release from the Ministry of Defence. I bet the guy who wrote this had a sock handy:

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles scanned the horizon for enemy action. Jackal vehicles with their awesome firepower raced ahead using the latest surveillance and targeting systems. Infantry stood ready to strike with deadly sniper rifles, mortars and grenade machine guns - this wasn’t a major operation in Afghanistan but the UK’s largest demonstration of military equipment purchased urgently for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Oh my God, I think… I’m going to… ohhh… deploy.

Can I just ask one thing though. If all these throbbing, thrusting engines of hot death have been ‘purchased urgently for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan’ then WHY THE BLOODY HELL are they being flaunted on Salisbury Plain for drooling death fetishists? Shouldn’t they be on transports heading to where they’re needed?

(Those are rhetorical questions by the way. There’s no brownie points in just sending this stuff to the army, is there? Where’s the PR value in that? If New Labour hadn’t made such a cock-up of supplying troops up until now, there wouldn’t be any need for this dick-waving. ‘Look at us! Look at us! We’re finally getting it right! And it only took 14 years and four wars to do it!‘)

Work and Pensions Secretary, alleged New Labour wunderkind, right-wing trojan horse and future leadership disappointment, James Purnell, says the current econogeddon has meant ‘people slightly turned away‘ from New Labour. It’s that slightly, I like. It’s a self-deluding, fooling-nobody slightly. Who’s he trying to fool? People who don’t read newspapers and those don’t own radios and televisions?

People have only slightly turned away, have they? And only this year, did they? Take a look at the share of the vote New Labour received at the last three general elections…

Between 1997 and 2005, New Labour managed to misplace nearly four million ‘people’. They turned away. Did they do it in anticipation of a 2007 economic cocking up? Did they turn away massively or did they all individually turn away slightly which collectively meant a collapse in New Labour’s support?

Today the Tories are only slightly ahead in the polls at 52% with New Labour slightly behind on 24%. Following Purnell’s thinking, it will only take people turning slightly back towards New Labour to turn around that 28 point deficit.

Going on this definition of slightly, Purnell sounds only slightly ridiculous. Rome is only slightly burning. New Labour will be only slightly out of power at the next election.

I was with Matthew Norman’s excellent if (self-admitted) fantastical column today right up until the final paragraph:

This is not, as even his more relentless critics generally agree, a shallow, selfish, bad or foolish man. This is a decent man of undeniable gifts atrophying daily in a role to which he is luminescently unsuited, and it is not a pleasant thing to watch.

You hear this, this stuff about Gordon-not-a-bastard, a lot but I’ve yet to see evidence proving it. I’m not sure why it’s done unless a lot of journalists think they’ll be seen as rhetorically kicking a puppy. It’s like all this talk about Brown being a warm character in private - I’ll believe it when I see it. There’s no public evidence to substantiate the assertions.

Until last year, Brown signed the cheques for every New Labour disaster. He backed several wars to the hilt, chased a neo-Thatcherite economic agenda that’s going to plague us for decades, and ran his own inner circle of thugs who monstered anyone who so much as spoke out of line. And continues to do so.

Where’s Matthew Norman been for the last 14 years? Writing journalism tearing strips off the various depredations, incompetences and crimes of New Labour, that’s where. They weren’t all Tony Blair’s fault.

Christ alive, are these the best character references New Labour could muster to vouchsafe their suitability for re-election?

- A morbidly obese and adulterous carpet-bagging class traitor whose only achievement while in office was [FORENSIC POLITICAL RESEARCH ONGOING]

- A scowling bully whose deceits helped bury hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men, women and children, whose own pathological drive for self-vindication led to the death of David Kelly, and who’s single-handedly done more to drag the reputation of politics through the shit than a trillion whining bloggers ever could.

- The wife of the never-was (he didn’t achieve enough to be a has-been) who paved the way (and gave political cover) for New Labour and its attendant war, deceit, death, lies, neo-Thatcherism, death, spin, lies, death and war.

- Some bloke who used to be Sports Minister.

Gordon, it’s worse than we all thought. Give it up, man, you haven’t got a hope. This new movement is called ‘Go Fourth’. At this rate and on this show of ’support’, you’ll be lucky to finish in that position.

And another thing:: This from the Four Horsemen of New Labour’s apocalypse:

If most of us were to stop people at random in the street, and ask them to name three things that David Cameron would do as prime minister, it is not an insult to the public to suggest most would struggle to answer.

Likewise, most people would struggle to name more than two or three current members of the shadow cabinet. The people who would run our schools, hospitals, roads, armed forces are virtual unknowns outside the Westminster village.

In those paragraphs, replace ‘David Cameron would do’ with ‘Gordon Brown does’, remove ’shadow’ altogether, and replace ‘would run’ with ‘do run’. Read it back to me.

When was the last time the Brown government announced a policy that wasn’t immediately shredded like a small, stupid child lost in the woods and surrounded by wolves? Less than 24 hours after Gordon Brown declared his ’sea change in energy efficiency’ (by which I mean I think it’s going to make us all feel queasy), it’s already hanging in tatters.

The government has admitted that it is powerless to stop energy firms passing on the cost on its fuel assistance package onto customers.

Business Secretary John Hutton said he could not stop firms increasing bills in response but said there would be “no justification” for them doing so.

In other words, there is absolutely nothing New Labour can do to stop it happening and when it does they’ll try their best to feign being jolly disappointed while still grabbing its ankles for the men with the fat cigars.

I like the offer that we can all get 50 per cent off insulating our homes as well. It’s a clever move - a lot of people, struggling financially as they are, will find it difficult to find that 50 per cent outlay and so will not take up the offer. ‘No one will be able to say they do not know how to reduce their energy bill,’ the government says. How? I’m not so sure. I’d like to bet there’ll be a lot of people asking ‘how the hell do I find 50 per cent of this insulation bill?’

Still, when the figures come in and show a poor uptake the government can blame the swinish masses. Well, we offered a solution but some people just won’t help themselves, you can hear them saying. Genius. To heap insult upon insult, around nine million houses in the UK aren’t suitable for cavity wall insulation either. Cheers.

Meanwhile, outside, the wind howled. Or was it wolves?

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…)

In a move to get the feckless and the dressing-gowned off their sofas and into the 21st century economy, which offers so very many golden opportunities to the under-trained and under-educated, New Labour are seeking to recruit motivational speaker, Jeremy Kyle.

A man who has made his career from humiliating the lower classes and inciting them to violence is seen as the ideal choice for easing the unemployed back into indentured servitude. Jeremy Kyle’s Underclass Deathmatch will see carefully selected layabouts facing off in a number of disciplines. Hair-pulling, head-locking, and broken bottle brawls will be just some of the events to feature.

Speaking about Kyle’s chequered history as a talk show host, a government source said: ‘Of course the government deplores violence when it affects the deserving poor and people who vote in marginal constituencies. But surveys conducted amongst tabloid newspaper readers tell us that, in a controlled environment, it could be extremely useful in getting the unemployed active again, reducing jobless figures, and fostering vote-winning class hatred.’

The show will be shown on weekday mornings when real people are either at work or having a cup of tea with the nanny.

Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling has so much ‘utmost respect‘ for ex-Scottish Labour leader Wendy Alexander that he told a national newspaper that she is ‘not likable at all‘.

Only in New Labour can contradictory ideas like these be mashed together, like a child with red and yellow plasticine. It’s what the party was built on and stands for.

I’m not sure what you get if you mix chicken salad with chicken shit but I sure as hell don’t want to eat it.

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.

Jacqui ‘chins’ Smith on the loss of yet more sensitive data:

This was data that was being held in a secure form, but was downloaded onto a memory stick by an external contractor

BZZZZT! Wrong answer.

Memo to Ms Smith: If you have a system that allows some herbert to download information from it to a memory stick and then go out and lose said memory stick, THAT INFORMATION IS NOT IN A ‘SECURE FORM’. This system is, like so many, many others, is bollocks.

Is Smith ignorant or is she relying on the ignorance of the public here? I think probably both - Smith gives every impression of being genuinely witless on this matter and that, by lucky chance, allows her bad news masseurs to befuddle the ‘ee, I don’t understand computers, me’ public.

Clutching at straws, AC Grayling finds a lone reason recommending David Miliband as Prime Minister: he’s an atheist.

Grayling then proceeds to draw up a list of wishful thinking; a list of all the amazing things a non-believing prime minister will do. All very nice:

Atheist leaders are more likely to take a literally down-to-earth view of the needs, interests and circumstances of people in the here and now, and will not be influenced by the belief that present sufferings and inequalities will be compensated in some posthumous dispensation.

Wouldn’t that be lovely? Has Miliband gone on the public record anywhere giving even the merest hint that he might think along these lines? He was head of Tony Blair’s Policy Unity from 1997 to 2001, for crying our loud. He backed the Iraq war despite his belief that everyone fighting might squander their one existence without hope of the reward of an after-life.

The thing is, I have doubts whether religious (non) beliefs of any stripe colour the judgement of leaders to any large extent. For all his self-proclaimed Christian beneficence, Tony Blair displays very, very few of the qualities that mark someone as a Christian. Ditto ’son of the manse’ Gordon Brown. See also George Bush.

But here we go again, imprinting another potential Prime Minister with our tenuous hopes. Haven’t we learned our lesson in the last year? Miliband, like Gordon Brown, is a leading figure and architect of New Labour. He is the status quo; another bag carrier for the post-Thatcherite consensus.

He bought into all that when he was a kid. He’s been soaked in power-without-purpose politics for decades. Does he look like a boat-rocker to you? An ‘agent’ of ‘change’? The idea that, as he crosses the threshold of Number 10 as Prime Minister, his atheism gland will kick in and rewrite his New Labour DNA is, frankly, ludicrous.

The government flashes its knickers at BAE…

BAE Systems has signed a 15-year deal with the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to supply the UK armed forces with small arms and medium-calibre ammunition.

It also includes mortar bombs, tank, artillery and naval gun shells, but not weapons such as guided missiles.

No guided missiles? That’s a relief. Still, this should encourage us all. It shows that corruption is no barrier to success.

BAE, needless to say, are jumping about with joy. Here’s Charlie Blakemore, managing director of BAE Systems Land Systems Munitions…

You can imagine that the rate of production that we are now at, it’s been some achievement to keep that going in that period to make sure that we deliver on time.

You can imagine that the rate of production that we are now at. Oh do shut up, Charlie, you sound like a teenager talking about how much self-abuse he manages to fit into a day. Well done for keeping it up this long. You can almost hear the grin in the statement.

I know embellishing one’s CV is frowned up but think of the benefits. Worried you might not get that job? Just say you bought prostitutes - sorry, hostesses - and yachts for Saudi Princes and you’ll be quids in. There are those out there who’ll find it irresistible, like a spray of Lynx for your career.

More faceless ’sources’ keep the Miliband bandwagon rolling:

If it comes to a contest, putting Alan Milburn forward as a proposed Chancellor would show everyone just how serious about rescuing the Labour Party David is.

Which would be ‘not very’, Milburn being a very poor joke of a politician from his smirk to his ridiculous bouffant haircut. From his contempt for his female colleagues to his commitment to his party and his country that saw him resign from the cabinet to flog MRI scanners for the private sector and flog junk for Pepsi Cola.

He supposedly resigned from the cabinet to ’spend more time with his family’. I take it, if this Miliband stuff is true, they’re now either sick of him or he is of them and is willing to put them back under the kind of pressure that last time was said to have threatened his relationship with his partner.

I’ve expressed surprise before that Milburn isn’t treated more widely as the lightweight self-preening tit that he is. I’m even more surprised that serious thinkers who I respect think Milburn is the man to turn New Labour around. I suppose he’s something of political geek’s in-joke, more’s the pity.

His attempt to run New Labour’s 2005 general election campaign was a study in political comedy that must have had Armando Iannucci boiling in jealous rage. If only Milburn was a strutting empty suit from The Thick Of It.

The composer Delius was a bit of a lad. In his early years he caught syphilis which, in his later years, left him blind and wheelchair bound. In order to continue writing music, Delius took on Eric Fenby as his amanuensis to who he dictated his final works.

So what’s David Miliband’s excuse for his incoherent, opaque utterances that need interpreting by flunkies? He ‘wrote’ an article for the Guardian yesterday which has the likes of publicly-funded gossip Nick Robinson (the BBC’s ‘political editor’) breathless with excitement.

Apparently, it was not what Miliband said in his piece but what he didn’t say (that is, full-throated support for the Prime Minister) which has caused the fuss. The article is apparently a coded signal that Miliband is ready to usurp Gordon Brown and take the country for his own.

I have to confess that I saw the piece as merely a repetition of the usual vacuous New Labour platitudes, a packet of politically nutrition-free rice cakes, if you will, which when munched on reveal themselves to be something else altogether indigestible. Some of us have still got the bills to pay, David, while you’re crapping on about the ‘public service challenge’, ‘pursuing traditional goals in a modern way’, and an obsessive-compulsive ‘restlessness for change’.

Nevertheless, Miliband’s own amanuenses - the aforementioned Robinson along with the likes of the Independent’s Steve Richards - are feverishly transcribing the man who would be king’s utterances and fashioning them into something allegedly coherent.

You have to say that if the article was a warning to Gordon Brown, it was a particular craven and skulking one. Don’t beat about the bush David, say what you really mean. If you think you’ve got the balls to run this country then let’s see them. Don’t leave it to self-serving journalists to sketch them from their imagination. It’s the bulldog spirit we’re after not Scooby Doo.

If, on the other hand, the article was a genuine statement of intent for the future of New Labour and not a piss-weak gissa job, then it’s merely a restatement of the admission that at the heart of the party is an echoing, policy-free void.

There’s nothing new in what he’s saying. Is Miliband’s article anything more than reworked brochure blurb for a once shiny election winning machine that never had or found the versatility to do anything else? You might as well expect a brick to double up as a Swiss Army Knife.

You can swap the gawping Scot for the bum-fluffed kid if you like, but in terms of change or new ideas or direction or whatever else it is we’re supposed to expect from a 43 year-old who went from Oxford to MiT to policy wonk to safe seat to ministership to cabinet without touching the sides, you might as well put David’s face on Gordon’s head Face/Off style for all the difference Prime Minister Miliband is going to make. The government will still be in a state of paralysis and dependent on willing minions to translate its obscure utterances.

Oh, for Christ’s sake. Here we go again. John Harris on David Miliband:

A good performance, then – even his everyman-ish glottal stops are sounding more natural.

Another charlatan. I suppose after so long we should be used to journalists swiftly moving over such casual yet contemptuous deceit with nary a backward glance.

Blair was a master at it, talking like a working class salt while batting away the soft questions on the Des O’Connor Show and on other televisual sofas. Others followed.

Listen to the two voices of Harriet Harman, pre- and post- her deputy leadership victory. The niece of an earl slumming it with the party members and then putting the plum back in when she’s got what she was after.

But she didn’t understand. She just smiled and held my hand.

It’s one of the minor paradoxes of New Labour that they’ve worked so hard to sound like the people they so clearly loathe and have worked so hard to destroy. It’s camouflage I suppose - your killer is hiding in plain sight. Like Norman Bates becoming his mother.

You see, this is what we get for allowing British politics to be dominated for so long by only two so-called towering figures who have seen off all challengers to their leadership: when the last of the two is finally tottering, about to fall, you end up with an offensively mediocre chancer with no discernible talent above self promotion and veering, brazen lies within a heartbeat of becoming Prime Minister.

And don’t get me started on Jack Straw. The fact that this strutting little flunky, a man who never met an arse he wouldn’t kiss in order to get where he wants to be, is in the running at all is the final proof that this country is steeped in self hatred. If the UK was a person, you’d be considering having them sectioned for their own protection right about now. The nasty and disturbing things we might be about to do to ourselves…

We can’t produce anything worth a damn. Even the buy-to-let landlord output - the only thing we’ve been good at for years - is tits up. Our production of dossers is thriving, however…

The number of children affected has quadrupled and rough sleepers have increased by a third, says the follow-up study by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. The trust prompted a national debate in March last year after revealing how many failed asylum seekers were surviving only through charity and church support. Chaired by the broadcaster and writer Kate Adie, and including Sayeeda Warsi, now Lady Warsi, the Conservative shadow minister for community cohesion, the original inquiry highlighted an “invisible population which can neither go home nor contribute to British society”.

I’m stepping up from slapping patriots. The next person to tell me how brilliant we are is getting a plank with a nail through it up the Khyber.

Update: Coincidentally, Gordon pops up with some advice:

Speaking to assembled bishops and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, the PM said that poverty can, must and will be eradicated “if we can all work together for change”.

You’ve got your government actively causing poverty on the streets of its own cities and you’ve got the lack of taste and self-awareness to lecture the rest of the world? Do bugger off, you revolting old fraud.

With the news that the Home Secretary has banned a suspected terrorist from studying AS level Biology or Chemistry, Sunny asks…

Hmmm… what other subjects could be put on the ’suspect banned list’? Clearly flying lessons are out of the question. No photography lessons either, the Met police will have you. Mathematics? Foreign languages? The list is endless.

Oxford University’s Philosophy, Politics and Economics degree should definitely top the list. Look at the huge roster of inordinate bastards who’ve graduated in PPE and gone on to bring misery, death and shame to the human race.

The course should be wound up immediately and its lecturers prosecuted for inciting terror. Failing that, all applications should be routed through MI5 who can then have all the wannabe monsters quietly rounded up and shipped to Guantanamo Bay. Hop to it Home Secretary.

Here’s Business Secretary John Hutton on the push for nuclear energy:

Mr Hutton said: “Nuclear power is an essential part of our future energy mix. And, alongside a 10-fold increase in renewables and investment in clean coal technology, it will help wean us off our dependency on oil and protect us against the politicisation of energy supplies.

It doesn’t matter where you stand on the issue of nuclear power - for or against - the assertion that increasing our number of nuclear power stations will ‘protect us against the politicisation of energy supplies’ is manifest bollocks.

Is the UK self sufficient in uranium? No. We’ll have to get it from somewhere else then. That makes notions of so-called ‘energy security’ shakey from the outset. Canada and Australia are the biggest producers. They also happen to be democratic, white and friendly to us (which is nice).

You don’t have to get very far down the list to find that some of the other uranium producers are proper bastards. Kazakstan, Uzbekistan, increasingly tonto Russia, Namibia, and Niger, for example.

(Although to be fair, it’s France, which generates 80 per cent of its electricity from nuclear, that has the big stake in Niger’s uranium. Not that Niger’s people slumped, as they are, at 177 in the United Nations Human Development Index, have seen much benefit.)

So, do we swap one set of oil-supplying bastards - the Saudis, and all - for a different set of uranium-supplying bastards? We might have the decision taken out of our hands if American proposals to form a new uranium cartel are realised. A US State Department advisory body (chaired by no less a figure than Iraq war architect Paul Wolfowitz) has suggested the US and six other producer nations get together to form a ‘uranium bank’ to control supply. Goodbye Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, hello Organization of the Uranium Exporting Countries.

We’re on the verge of a ‘nuclear renaissance’ we’re told. (The use of ‘renaissance’ is spin, by the way - it evokes a golden age of exploration and enlightenment rather than, in the instance of the nuclear industry, a retreat to ignorance and cover-up). The world and his dog wants a nuclear reactor for some unknown reasons (if someone’s worked out how to keep a 100 per cent safety record and found a safe way of getting rid of the waste they’re keeping bloody quiet about it).

Are we to expect that this cartel’s decisions won’t be politicised in the face of growing competition for uranium whose supply, we might add, is expected to run out before the end of the century at current rates of consumption? The mere suggestion of creating such a body means the ‘politicisation of energy supplies’ as Hutton puts it.

Welcome to 21st century Britain:

The television is our only window on a life we once led. We sit destroyed by poverty and watch the world go by as if we were dead but have yet to fall over. While watching the TV we see MPs and MEPs who spend more on taxis than we get to live on and they are telling the country they are going to get tough on us and people like us because we live on benefits.

I’m off out to slap anyone patriotic.

There’s a smell of the 1970s about the Work and Pensions Secretary James Purnell. It’s the sideburns and the ties. It’s the barely suppressed contempt for the idle, the scroungers, the dossers.

You could drape a camel coat around his shoulders and bingo! he’s the coldly brutal boss of a struggling First Division football team telling them to get out there and commit atrocities. Or he’s a softly spoken crime boss telling his heavies which fingers to break - think of a better looking John Osborne in Get Carter.

As David Hepworth says, it won’t be Purnell getting his hands dirty when it comes to enacting his plan to supplement the servile class with the long term unemployed and disabled:

“Forcing” people to work means somebody’s got to do the forcing. Most of us would do anything rather than that.

And what of the people being forced? How are they supposed to look for proper work while they’re toiling in a New Labour camp? There’s a casual demonisation at play here, that pandering to the myth that the jobless are shiftless.

Why else is ‘community service’ being mentioned? You automatically lump the jobless in with petty criminals. How’s that for cementing the image of the unemployed as parasites? As inherently dodgy? People who say being unemployed is a cushy number would seem to never have experienced it first hand.

I just hope that the details of this are all set down clearly. At least more clear than Purnell was on Radio 4 this morning. He was either being evasive or is ignorant of his own policy, both of which are worrying.

Are there going to be plenty of Job Centre staff to help the jobless? When I was looking for work a few years back, the level of sickness at Hove job centre was incredible. Some weeks you couldn’t even sign on because of the staff shortages. I’d go in week after week looking for desperately needed advice but would be turned away because there was nobody who could speak to me.

When I eventually fell into the clutches of Working Links, the private sector company piloting the New Deal in Brighton, thing didn’t get better. I’ve written about this before. The bloke looking after my case couldn’t advise me on Tax Credits because even though he’s been on the training course ‘it was boring’ and ‘he couldn’t remeber anything about it’.

I hope private sector management of people’s lives has improved in the few years since it tried to screw mine. I hope there is no longer just an emphasis on getting clients (for that’s what the jobless are called) into any job at any cost so the company can get its mitts on the cash.

When I expressed an interest in being a journalist (that is, a career rather than a job) and needing the training they looked at me like I had just taken a dump on their desks. The benefit payments couldn’t be transferred to my partner while I took the training because I was the sole client. Eventually we scraped out of the situation with no help from Working Links whatsoever. They still got to keep the money though. Money for nothing, the lucky bastards.

I wouldn’t expect any of this to have improved in the five years since it happened to me. The unemployed in this country rank just above refugees. They’re not people to be helped, they’re scum permitted to scrape by, to be coerced, and made to feel grateful.

Unemployment benefit, you would think, isn’t a meagre safety net open to everybody, it’s a feather-bedded paradise. It would be wrong of us to hope that some of the mutton-headed rubber johnnies who think like this might get a taste of it in the upcoming recession. We’re not like them.

Defence Minister Bob Ainsworth is a happy chappy:

I am pleased to inform the House that the Ministry of Defence has concluded a teaming agreement with the industrial grouping known as Team CW to take forward, to the next stage, the Government’s intentions for the UK complex weapons sector

In other words, the armed forces are going to be getting a new consignment of hot death. The Indirect Fire Precision Attack Loitering Munition is my favourite:

The Loitering Munition is so called because it gets fired off into the sky and then lurks about for up to ten hours. At any time, it can be ordered to suddenly plunge down onto a target and explode. If no target crops up, it will self-destruct before running out of fuel.

I can’t wait to see the failure rates on these babies. That said, footage of parents dragging their dead kids out of wrongly bombed houses has never had that much effect on arms manufacturers shareprices (or consciences).

(Link via Matt Wardman)

Can instructions on how to wipe your bottom properly be very far away?

Britons must stop wasting food in an effort to help combat rising living costs, Gordon Brown has said as he travelled to the G8 summit in Japan.

One does have real sympathy with the argument (anybody else here old enough to remember bubble and squeak on a Monday?) but Brown seems to underestimate the entrenched self-centred wankerdom he’s going to have to beat to get his message across let alone acted on.

Hell, it’s so much easier scraping that half tin of beans into the bin than putting them in a bowl covered with clingfilm and into the fridge, isn’t it? You can imagine some people opening a fresh tin and emptying it straight into the bin just for spite.

The PM said “unnecessary” purchases were contributing to price rises, and urged people to plan meals in advance and store food properly.

The thing is, in effect, it’s been Brown who’s told us up until now to be so wasteful. It’s all the money we’ve been squittering for the last ten years that’s propped up his so-called economic miracle. And now he’s telling us to ignore his previous advice and get used to the good times being over. No return to boom and bust, eh Gordon?

Very soon somebody’s going to evoke ‘austerity’ and ‘rationing’ in connection with Brown’s calls for thrift. As if what he needed was to be portrayed even more as a dour, fun-sucking killjoy. The skies are grey, we’re being told we’ll have to work till we drop and now, as the spin will have it, the miserable bastard is telling us to eat leftovers.

And then a reporter is going to find out just how much food Parliament throws away each week. Or how much Number 10 chucks. Or how much was tossed at the last state banquet. And then Gordon will be made to look like a jackass. Again.

I’m not sure if it’s true of all governments but the ability to hold two contradictory ideas simultaneously is one that seems particularly New Labour. Tony Blair was Repugnant Moral Contradiction’s Patient Zero and the infection spread quickly to the rest of the party.

There’s no sign that they’re anywhere near to finding a cure. Take Zimbabwean refugees for example…

Attempts by Gordon Brown to use a meeting of G8 leaders this week to campaign for tougher action against Zimbabwe are in danger of being undermined by claims that Britain is forcing as many as 11,000 Zimbabweans seeking refuge here to make a stark choice between destitution or returning home to possible torture or death. Letters obtained by The Observer show that the Home Office continues to order failed Zimbabwean asylum seekers to return home in the face of mounting violence.

I’m not sure what happened to the moral compass Gordon Brown used to brag about. One can only assume that it’s at the menders after leading its owner up some dark and terrifying, piss-stinking blind alleyway. How else to explain the likes of this:

Sir John Waite, co-chairman of the Independent Asylum Commission, which has just published a report on the asylum system in the UK, described the situation as a source of shame.

He said: ‘We heard testimony from many Zimbabwean asylum seekers and we were shocked by what we found - Zimbabweans sleeping on sofas, in parks and launderettes, reliant on charity and prevented from working.’

Gordon Brown’s father was a committed Christian and church minister. They say Gordon’s ‘moral purpose’ came from his father. They say an apple never falls far from the tree. I say I’d quite to measure the seemingly enormous distance between this tree and its apple. I think it might constitute some kind of record.

Update: Has David Miliband had a letter telling him it’s now safe for him and his family to return to where they came from?