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.

It looks like all those billions New Labour poured into the NHS are beginning to pay off. Just look how they looked after Peter Mandelson…

Mr Mandelson, 54, began complaining of abdominal pain over the weekend. Yesterday, as he was having dinner with a friend at his £3.5 million Regent’s Park home, the pain worsened and he rang for medical help.

Two doctors arrived and, suspecting a serious problem, they called in Lord Darzi. The health minister drove Mr Mandelson to St Mary’s, where tests revealed he had a kidney stones.

Fantastic. I’m almost looking forward to being ill. Two doctors and a minister of state? Wow. That’s medical care you just can’t buy. I take it all back - New Labour really have made a difference. No wonder the NHS is the envy of the world. God bless it.

Un-bloody-believable:

Alastair Campbell is to lecture university students on the Tony Blair years.

Do we have a law against corrupting the nation’s youth in this country? If not why not? Or is this like one of those things in America where they send drug dealers to speak to school children? ‘Don’t do what I done kids…’

What’s the title of the lecture, do you think? ‘Political depravity at the turn of the 21st Century’, perhaps. I wonder if there’ll be a module on how to drive whistleblowers to suicide.

There’s a real 1997 vibe in the air what with disgraced ex-ministers and war criminals welcomed back into the club with open arms. And here’s the venerable Austin Mitchell MP on Gordon Brown’s new economic offensive:

Gordon Brown’s speech at the Parliamentary Labour Party last night was powerful, effective and well received. He knows that’s right. And puts the blame where it lies: on the greedy, the speculators, the lack of effective control.

Now, it might have escaped Austin’s notice but his party have been in power for eleven bloody years. It’s not a new broom we’re talking about here; a new government sweeping up the wreckage of the previous raddled and corrupt regime.

Gordon Brown’s blaming ‘the greedy, the speculators, the lack of effective control’, is he? So who’s been in charge for the last decade while the greedy and the speculators filled their boots? Who been quite content with with less than ‘effective’ control?

I’ll give you a clue: he’s an miserable, unkempt, out of his depth Scotsman with a funny mouth. This latterday conversion to the iniquities of greed has nothing to do with wanting to join the lynching in the hope he’ll avoid being lynched himself, of course.

Gordon’s been more than happy for these bad puppies to crap on the rug these long years. Now he’s going to rub their noses in it? We had Peter Mandelson fondling the rich at the birth of the New Labour government and John Hutton stroking them at its death. Brown’s got a brass neck, frankly, the horrible old hypocrite.

Look who’s back. Alastair Campbell, blood still dripping from his hands returns once more to stink up British politics with his filth like a walking, talking dirty protest. Talk about rubbing our noses in it. Just one more reminder to thousands that we’ll never vote for this revolting bunch ever again.

Someone really should tell Gordon Brown that it’s not the political equivalent of The Beatles he’s putting back together here. New Labour’s greatest hits were on downtown Baghdad and Basra when their bombs were pulverising children. Bringing back Bomb Aimer (First Class) Campbell only reminds us of that, doesn’t it? Shall we run a book on who’ll be first to wander into the woods with their painkillers and pocketknife?

No, it’s not The Beatles Brown’s reforming. Far, far, far from it. It’s empty chancers 5ive he’s putting back together. When 5ive decided to reform, the glorious drawback was they could only get four of them, one having gone on to ‘better’ things. Lack of interest and poor new material meant the relaunch died on its arse. The sense that politics could imitate ‘art’ at any moment is tantalising.

Gone?

Gordon Brown has been warned not to force through plans to allow terror suspects to be held for up to 42 days before charge, the BBC understands.

The plan scraped through the Commons and is due before the Lords next week, where it is expected to be defeated.

BBC political editor Nick Robinson says the PM has been warned by ministers it would be “politically suicidal” to push it through by using the Parliament Act.

Will Gordon dare slide another brick from his Jenga tower of a premiership? The bastard in me says it’s time for a pro-42 days campaign.

About turn: The BBC webmonkeys, in their infinite wisdom and without a record of edits, have changed the story with the older version disappearing as if it had never existed. 42 days is very much still ‘on’ apparently.

Or is ‘poacher turned gamekeeper’ the cliché we’re looking for here? I only ask because Mandelson’s apparently been rehabilitated to help clear up the wreckage of the credit crunch - a mess caused largely by moody mortgages. Who better to do that that a man who lied on his mortgage application?

The Guardian’s Martin Kettle buffs himself to a shine over the return of Peter Mandelson with the strangest of analogies…

Mandelson is, of course, no Churchill – the most he aspires to do is to save his party, not save the country. Nevertheless, both Labour and Tory strategists treat him with the same sort of awe that wartime Allied strategists thought of Rommel, a man who can change the game, a lucky general, an infinitely wily opponent.

Mandelson as… Rommel? That being the case, we all know what that makes Blair. And Alastair Campbell. I doubt, however, we’ll be reading Kettle’s purple prose about how ‘both Labour and Tory strategists treat Blair/Campbell with the same sort of awe that wartime Allied strategists thought of Hitler/Goebbels’.

Lucky? The man’s twice disgraced (and counting). Wily? Tell that to the people whose careers the bastard destroyed with a whispered briefing to a journalist (the kind of sly, anonymous, top secret briefing that fuels the likes of Kettle’s self-importance). Mandelson’s a preening, passive-aggressive coward with a moral compass like a propeller. What kind of deficiency of faculty does it take to regard his reappointment as a good thing? Or him as a Nazi hero?

Hello again Peter Mandelson. If the Prime Minister wants to invite back a divisive, conniving, back-stabbing, money-loving, petulant and twice-disgraced liar - the embodiment of everything that’s slippery and dishonest about New Labour - then that’s his business, I suppose.

It is indicative, however, of just how thin on the ground ‘talent’ is in the modern Labour Party when you have to turn to such characters. It’s worth noting that haughty war criminal Geoff Hoon also mystifyingly continues to prosper.

The masterstroke is putting Mandelson in the House of Lords rather than make him scrap for a seat in the House of Commons. It means Mandelson, sitting in one of the big chairs of government in a time of economic disaster, won’t have to face awkward questions and public scrutiny from MPs. How’s that for the primacy of the House of Commons?

“It is a very black day for the constitutional position around policing,” said a Whitehall ’source’ about the resignation of Sir Ian Blair.

Shocking, just shocking. Those bloody Tories politicising the police? What a diabolical liberty. You’d never catch New Labour doing that - using the police for their own political ends - would you?

Of course not.

Amnesty International have a petition against the planned extension of internment for suspected terrorists to 42 days.

A clever element of the petition is that signatories are sorted by post code and individual MPs will receive a version of the petition containing just their constituents who have signed.

Go and let your MP know you’re against 42 days internment. As Graham Linehan says, ‘42 days is not an interrogation. 42 days is a disappearance.’

I’m the man with the plan, says Cameronman, oh yes I am. He can’t tell us what the plan is or what it does but he’s definitely got one. Oh, yes. What could it possibly be? Personally, I hope it involves monkeys or jetpacks or monkeys with jetpacks.

However, I can’t help but think of this scene from The Simpsons episode, Homer vs. Patty & Selma. Homer, short of money after a disastrous investment in Halloween pumpkins, is desperate…

Homer: If only I could think of an invention…something that would really make money. Must concentrate and work harder than I’ve ever worked — [falls asleep]

[in his dream, a conference table of executives applaud]

Man: Congratulations, Mr. Simpson. This invention of yours has made us all rich, especially you. It’s simply yet ingenious, and it fits right in the palm of your hand. Every person in America now owns one of these, and in many cases, three or four.

Homer: [reaching for the man's palm] Uh, could I just get a look at that?

Man: Ha ha! Why would you need to see it? You’re the genius that invented the product in question.

Homer: But, uh, could I just –

Man: Now don’t worry, you’ll get to see it just as soon as we unveil our new ad campaign.

[a screen projects a hand closed around something]

[everyone stands up and blocks Homer's view]

Homer: Lemme see, lemme see! Out of the way!

[Marge appears in the dream, then awakens Homer]

Marge: Homer! Homer, wake up! There’s still a few minutes till our usual bedtime.

Homer: Oh, my invention! All our money problems could have been –

This plan had better be good. Let’s hope it’s a little more tangible than Gordon Brown’s ‘vision’ (that is, it actually exists).

You know, I can’t think of a single thing to say about David Cameron’s speech. I suppose it was clever that he declared himself ‘the man with the plan‘ - the papers have gone long on that this morning - without actually saying what that plan is.

Nobody seems overly perturbed by the speech’s vacuity, such are the expectations and attention spans of the modern era. It slipped in one ear and out the other without leaving any impression. I suspect that was what it was designed to do for many.

It’s a 1994-1997 rerun. The Tories don’t need to win the next election when New Labour are going to lose it. The cliche was that New Labour could have put up a dog in a suit as their leader in 1997 and still won. All the New Tories need to do now is stop Cameron taking a whizz on the rug.

The Tories’ Shadow Offence Secretary Liam Fox was showing his compassionate side at the party’s conference this week, by all accounts. His heart was bleeding. For arms dealers.

“I don’t think we support our defence industry enough,” said old Blood ‘n’ Guts of one of the UK’s most heavily subsidised industries. “I was in Iraq last week where they are making big purchases. We made the sacrifices but we are not winning the reconstruction contracts. There is no one from the trade department selling weapons in Iraq.”

Moving on from the fact that, despite appearance to the contrary, the government isn’t strictly the sales division of BAE Systems, is Fox guilty of comparing apples and oranges here? We might be excellent at sending our young men thousands of miles away to die in the desert for a lie but does that make us the best people to pour weapons into the hellish nightmare we subsequently created?

And who knew the ‘liberation’ of Iraq was done on a quid pro quo basis? There’s me thinking we did it to save the people of that country from a bloodthirsty dictator, not provide business opportunities for bloodthirsty arms dealers. Whatever happened to a good deed being its own reward? I bet Liam Foxhole helps old ladies across the street and then holds his hand out for a tip.

The next move, presumably, will be to nationalise the country’s gambling debts. To revive confidence amongst blokes in betting offices, the Government will hand over £300bn to cover the money they’ve lost. Then a leading gambler will be quoted as saying: “This package goes some way towards restoring calm. The last week has been horrendous. One of my friends lost a ton on an 8-1 shot he’d been assured was a banker by a minicab driver.”

Read the rest

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.

You have to admit it’s genius:

The first identity cards from the government’s controversial national scheme are due to be revealed.

The biometric card will be issued from November, initially to non-EU students and marriage visa holders.

On the one hand, you have captive test specimens. As Phil Booth from NO2ID says:

They’ve basically picked on a group of people who have no possibility of objecting to the card - they either comply or they are out.

On the other hand, you have the tabloid reading, foreigner-hating classes. They’ll be unaffected by any cock-ups (and trust me there are going to be cock-ups) with the system and they’re not going to complain about a bunch of Johnny Foreigners having their lives dicked about with.

…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…)

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.