To return briefly to a subject I discussed earlier in the month, in the Guardian today Patrick Wintour and Nicholas Watt highlight the aborted election as the key moment that Brown lost his way.
I still believe that it was the Inheritance Tax incident that followed shortly afterwards for the reasons stated earlier.
“It is putting people off working with children, knowing that they have to be checked for previous offences against children. Why can’t we be left to use our intuition?”
Off the top of my head I can think of a couple of reasons.
This isn’t a civil liberties issue, it isn’t “political correctness gone mad”, it is a necessary precaution. I’ve yet to hear a decent argument to the contrary.
Hey kids, are you stuck for things to do when it rains during the summer holidays? Why not make like a grown up and write to the Daily Mail? It’s fun, it gets you attention and it only costs the price of a stamp. Here’s how: Continue reading ‘Write a letter to the Daily Mail’
With David Davis gone, this is an opportune time to reacquaint ourselves with the top Tories in Britain today. Here they are in all of their glory: Continue reading ‘The top Tories in Britain today’
The worry is that middle America falls for nonsense such as this. Between bloggers with a screw loose and the systemic smear campaign being waged by Fox, Obama is up against more blatant dirty tricks than I’ve seen in a Presidential campaign.
Unless you count stealing Florida as a dirty trick, obviously.
Probably early for a post-mortem, but even David Davis’s grandstanding won’t damage the Conservatives sufficiently to rescue the Gordon Brown train-wreck we’re seeing unfold. A Labour Party that has simultaneously alienated its natural left-wing support and also the centre-ground voters it needs to secure victory and has responded with a bid to woo right-wing voters with its 42-day detention bill, is beyond hope surely? So, at what point did it become apparent that the Government had lost its way? Continue reading ‘When did it become beyond repair?’
I spoke earlier about the hapless political manouevering of Gordon Brown and his advisers. Reluctantly I have to applaud the oh-so intelligent reaction of David Davis. His motivation is clearly to undermine and destabilise the Government further, but the outcome will hopefully be the end of the misbegotten 42-day detention plan and possibly Brown himself. And he’s putting the boot into ‘Call Me Dave’ at the same time. It’s about time he took a hit.
The Lib Dem decision not to oppose the Tory candidate at the resultant Haltemprice and Howden by-election also increases my suspicion that in a hung Parliament (and that’s a long-shot at best) they’d go blue.
Harping back to a recurrent theme on this blog, Labour have to accept they’re losing the next election and start trying to do the right thing rather than the populist thing. They should legislate with the freedom that a relegated team plays football.
The way that Gordon Brown and Jacqui Smith have clung to their plan for extended detention (now reduced to 42 days from 90 in a kind of political closing down sale) is perversely admirable. Like those mad inventors who just will not be told that their combined fridge and tumble dryer will not sell, Brown has ploughed ahead in spite of almost limitless opposition from everyone but his most loyal Cabinet acolytes and a few Police Chiefs. They’re hardly going to mention that they’ve never yet needed these powers, are they?
Well, he has blundered through the first hurdle in his bid to move UK law to the top of the draconian measures league table. But in truth it is a pyrrhic victory. So misbegotten is the concept that he has been forced to bully and bribe his Parliamentary colleagues to get it through. Following the £2.7 billion compensation package for the abolition of the 10p Tax Rate, he has been open to charges of bribing the electorate. To add the charge of bribing the DUP with £1.2billion in order to push this legislation forward to its inevitable failure in the second chamber is mind-bogglingly incompetent.
Brown was faced with a choice: back down and say you have listened to advice and are acting upon it, or press ahead at any cost. He chose to win the battle and lose the war. Whatever the qualms about his time as Chancellor (and I happen to prefer splashing out in an attempt to improve the lives of the vast majority to squirrelling away money to boost Corporate giants faced with a profit reduction when the wheel turns) no-one can be in any doubt now that he was far better suited to that than to strategic political leadership.
Doing just enough to avoid losing your job as you limp along toward an inevitable electoral massacre isn’t in the interests of the Labour Party Gordon. But it’s clear that the interests of the Labour Party or the people that they purport to represent stopped being a concern for you quite some time ago.
Unless they’ve been misquoted, in the last 24 hours John Prescott, Alan Johnson and David Miliband have all used the phrase ‘there is no appetite’ to rule out a move to oust Gordon Brown from number 10. The day before that the Guardian used it.
Now THAT is being on-message.
