A thought occurs about this ‘novice’ tag that’s being bandied about. In his conference speech Gordon Brown said this:

Everyone knows that I’m all in favour of apprenticeships, but let me tell you this is no time for a novice.

And you think, unless I’m very much mistaken Gordon Brown has never led a country through an economic cataclysm before. Which makes him very much a novice as well. Unless he has a time machine allowing him to revisit the 1930s to dry-run his ideas, or he’s channelling the spirit of Ramsay MacDonald, he’s doing this for the first time. I certainly missed the speech in which he declared, ‘It’s fine - I’ve done this loads of times before and I’m a dab hand at it’.

We were all novices once. Tony Blair’s first cabinet contained just one person - Margaret Beckett - who had previous experience of serving in a government. For the rest it was on the job training and boy did it show.

Indeed, this ‘novice’ tag would carry more weight if New Labour didn’t have the awful habit of continually appearing like incompetent ingénues who fail to learn from experience. Tony Blair had fought three wars (Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan) before invading Iraq and yet the whole Iraq campaign turned out like a game of Risk played by chimpanzees wearing boxing gloves.

The litany of lost memory sticks and laptops and the wreckage of umpteen cack-handed computer systems shriek volumes about a government acting like a novice on every occasion. It blunders on like a two-ton toddler, never looking back at the carnage behind it.

The scrapping, backbiting, briefing, screaming, tantrums and smearing we’ve seen and continue to see over the New Labour leadership suggest that not a lot of growing up has been done since 1997. They might not be novices any more but they sure as hell act like it.

Amen, Jennie.

Zoe Williams on Sarah Brown:

She clearly does not seek the limelight, and there’s not a sniff of the compulsive stuff-grab that characterised Cherie Blair. So not only does it reflect well on Gordon that his wife has relinquished her valued privacy in support of him, it also brings a favourable and timely reminder of the ways in which he and his household differ from the Blairs.

Yeah, right.

Simon Hoggart on Ruth Kelly’s goodbye…

She began by saying: “Conference, I hope you will forgive me for departing from my text for a moment” - and the truly weird thing was that this sentence was written down, in the text. Under New Labour, spontaneity has to be planned in advance.

Nothing in her career became her like the leaving of it. She clank-clank-clanked from the stage, servo-motors clicking and whirring. The crowd clapped at her impressive mimicry of human emotions. What a weirdo. What a bunch of weirdos.

…and the irrational prejudices you rode in on. She says she’s stepping down, in the words of that old cliche, ‘to spend more time with her family‘. Who knows, it might even be true. It’s just that that phrase is so overdone and euphemistic, you’d think by now they’d have come up with something else that doesn’t automatically arouse suspicion.

One way to find out if she’s truly quitting to look after her bairns is to keep an eye out on any jobs, directorships, positions with lobby firms, etc she might accept in the near future.

If end she ends up flogging MRI scanners for the private sector or advising Pepsi Cola on how to ‘help it fight the backlash against unhealthy snacks‘ or something similar, like Alan ‘I have found it increasingly difficult to balance having a young family in the north-east with the demands of being a cabinet minister‘ Milburn, you know the family excuse was a crock.

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…)

You know, loathe as I am to agree with the obsequious little weathercock, I think Jack Straw might be on to something here:

Labour will always put victims and their families first. That’s why we are transforming criminal justice from a bureaucratic system to the public’s service It’s about a change of culture, of attitude, about lifting the veil which sometimes keeps justice from view: explaining more, hiding less.

Justice in the open. Explaining more, hiding less. Who could disagree with that? Yes, Jack, I’ll sign up to that.

Now, to start as we mean to go on, how about public inquiries into the Iraq war and the July 7 bombings? You know, if you’re really bothered about lifting veils, explaining more, and hiding less.

(And what is it about Jack Straw and ‘lifting veils‘ anyway?)

Sky News’s Adam Boulton: Alastair Campbell is liar and a bully.

Now, I doubt there are many of us willing to put money in the pockets of a Rupert Murdoch employee by buying his memoirs. But if we were, surely we’d expect those memoirs to tell us something we didn’t already know?

New Labour’s legion of the undead - Prescott, Campbell, Kinnock (Mrs) and a generic ex-sports minister - while lumbering towards defeat had this to say about the Tories:

[M]ost 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.

To which the only reply is: Remove ’shadow’ altogether and replace ‘would run’ with ‘do run’. Read it back to me.

No sooner said than done:

Of 40 people questioned, none could put names to photographs of all 23 Cabinet ministers. Only one managed to recognise more than half of them.

…

A total of seven ministers – nearly a third of the Cabinet - went unrecognised by all surveyed.

Strange really as there’s nobody quite like business secretary John Hutton or culture secretary Andy Burnham for inciting blood-spitting fury. These faceless herberts are probably breathing a big sigh of relief this morning - if the great unwashed did start paying them attention and recognising them even God wouldn’t be able to afford their life insurance premiums.

More witchcraft and wizardry:

Thanking JK Rowling for her £1m contribution to Labour, Brown described her as “one of the world’s greatest ever authors”.

I imagine you’d be prepared to say just about anything about the person who’d given a little palliative care to your dying career so a little witless hyperbole is probably forgiveable in the circumstances. That said, there’s an air of that New Labour cost-of-everything-value-of-nothing vulgarianism about the statement.

Of course she’s one of the world’s greatest ever authors - have you seen how unbelievably rich she is? Oscar Wilde died skint, the big jerk. Never gave a brass razoo to the Labour Party.

‘Ms Rowling said she was motivated by Labour’s record on child poverty’.

It’s an ambiguous statement, isn’t it? Is she praising them (she is a fiction writer after all) and so rewarding them? Or is she motivated by the hope that New Labour might finally get off their arses and do something substantial about child poverty if they’re given a chance to cling on a little longer?

I just want to say, if JK Rowling really wanted to pointlessly squitter a million quid on a shiftless, directionless loser who hasn’t got a clue what he might be doing this time next week, she should have given it to me instead of Gordon Brown. She’d have saved herself all the shitty publicity that’s coming her way. Buying me beer is a much more ethical use of her cash.

Hmmm: Ms Rowling speaks…

‘I believe that poor and vulnerable families will fare much better under the Labour party than they would under a [David] Cameron-led Conservative party.’

I can’t help but note the use of the future tense. Hope springs eternal.

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.