Iain Dale quotes an astonishing piece of dialogue from a Daily Mail interview by Alison Pearson of Gordon Brown. First Dale recycles interminable chunks of sob stuff about Brown’s children and Brown’s eyesight. Pass. But then comes this:
When we finally manage to snatch some time in the study on the first floor, I ask if he has any regrets about his boast: ‘No more boom and bust.’
‘I actually said, ‘No more Tory boom and bust,’ he replies.
He did indeed actually say this, once, at a conference. So, not an actual lie. But, as Iain Dale points out, he said it without the “Tory” on many, many other occasions. The implication is that Labour boom and bust is fine. This is the kind of drivel that this man is now reduced to spouting.
Brown then explains that this particular Labour bust is not really a bust at all:
‘Fifteen per cent interest rates under the Tories! We’ve got interest rates of five per cent, that’s a bit different, isn’t it?’
Yes, and he’s managed to bring the price of oil down too. With his superhuman powers of self-delusion, and his apparently unshakable determination to continue wrecking my country, this man reminds me more and more of Robert Mugabe.
Brown himself is already a failure, doomed to electoral defeat. That is now a given. What interests me is what effect all this insanity, institutional and personal, will have on the Labour Party, whose recent feeble attempts to replace Brown seem now to have fizzled out. Sadly, there seem to be enough faithfully moronic Labour voters to keep a rump of Labour diehards in the House of Commons in quite substantial numbers. But then what? They promised an end to boom and bust. They boomed, after a fashion. They are now busting, and how. And they stuck with the lunatic who said and did all this to the bitter end. What sane person would vote for these incompetent and spineless nutters ever again? Labour could well go the way of the early twentieth century Liberals.
However, I suspect that David Cameron will actually be quite happy, after he wins the next election, to face opposition benches which are clogged up with Labour living dead, rather than populated by people with plausible things to say and serious complaints to voice like lots of new and young and optimistic Conservatives or Lib Dems. Blair coasted along for a decade on the public’s loathing of the Conservatives. Cameron now looks content to do the same, on the back of a near-universal loathing of Labour. I may be misjudging Cameron and I hope I am. But I fear that I am not.
I liked Normblog’s description “He’s not so much toast, as the crumbs left on the plate after you’ve eaten the toast”.
This article(Link) by Matthew Parris is an interesting read. It made me wonder whether we are being set up for the use of the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 (AKA The end of democracy act). It would suit Brown to find some excuse to use it to avoid the inevitable humiliation of defeat at the next General Election and I suspect that he would have no moral compunction to prevent him from doing so. These are dangerous times.
Nobody knows anything about anything anymore.
And that goes double for that one eyed wanker
in a wind tunnel.
Rob wrote:
I think the “government of national unity”/co-option of the opposition style scenarios suggested in Parris’s article are more likely. The Civil Contingencies Act’s definition of an “emergency” does not directly cover a financial/economic crisis (see section 19).
It covers events or situations that threaten serious damage to human welfare, or serious damage to the environment or war or terrorism that threatens serious damage to the security of the UK.
For the economic situation to fall into this category we would need to see large-scale homelessness and/or serious damage to property and/or serious disruptions to the money, food, energy, fuel or water supplies, and/or serious disruption to communications, transport or the distribution of health services.
Things will need to get a LOT worse before any of these are likely. For the time being I see no reason to believe the impact of the current financial turmoil will be worse than the recessions of the late 1970s/early 1980s or the early 1990s.
Of course you could argue that it all depends on how one interprets the word “serious” but I doubt the public or the courts would buy it without tangible demonstrations of a dire situation.