The fantastical ravings of Gordon Brown

I'm off work ill today, so I had the dubious pleasure of watching Gordon Brown's speech to the Labour Party conference this afternoon. Quite why I thought this would improve my mood is something I cannot readily explain, but it was that or yet another sodding documentary, so I bravely opted to endure it.

It was a lumpen, dreadful speech made all the worse because despite his attempts to push his own "seriousness" there was some cringeworthy attempts at emoting. However, he's always a shocker speaker, so this 3/10 effort actually exceeds the norm.

However, as so often with Gordon Brown speeches, they don't take too long to unravel. The man is a complete moron when it comes to thinking he won't get caught out. But within a matter of hours, ConservativeHome was already on the case. Mr Brown suggested:

You know our party so often in its history has been home to the big ideas - ideas later taken for granted, but revolutionary in their time.

Just think, the vote for working men, and then for women, the NHS, legal protection from race or sex discrimination.

However...

...it was a Conservative government under Benjamin Disraeli which extended the vote to working men in 1867 - decades before the Labour Party was formed. It was also a Liberal/Conservative National Government that gave women over the age of 30 the vote in 1918 and a Conservative government under Stanley Baldwin that in 1928 established an equal voting age of 21 for men and women.

And this man is our Prime Minister. Unelected, inflicted unwanted on us by a gaggle of fuckwitted Labour MPs, but Prime Minister nonetheless. The mind boggles.

The rest of it was a depressing lurch to the left, filled with vastly expensive promises of things we'll be paying off for years to come, so no real change there. What a truly abysmal man he is.

Fuck EU

Via Mr Eugenides, I see this appeared in yesterday's Telegraph:

Marianne Mikko, an Estonian centre-left MEP, is concerned that growing numbers of blogs are being used by individuals with "malicious intentions or hidden agendas".

"The blogosphere has so far been a haven of good intentions and relatively honest dealing. However, with blogs becoming commonplace, less principled people will want to use them," she said.

Mrs Mikko has proposed that bloggers should be required to identify themselves and that some popular blogs should come with a declaration of interests.

It is, remarkably, still possible to find people who consider the EU to be a good thing. But quite why an Estonian MEP should be given direct influence over my life is something I suspect even the most witless pro-EU sort would struggle to justify.

Now, this isn't a popular blog, nor is it ever intended to be. I find that articulating my anger about the sheer shitness of certain people does wonders for my capacity to remain tranquil as their assaults upon common sense multiply. And that's why I do it.

But just in case...

Here's my identity: someone who absolutely fucking detests Mrs Mikko. That's all you need to know.
Here's my declaration of interests: I can say what I want, because this is a free country, and your frankly fascist attempts to change that will never succeed. This means calling a twat a twat, which I enjoy, and you are in desperate need of being reminded of.

"We do not need to know the exact identity of bloggers. We need some credentials, a quality mark, a certain disclosure of who is writing and why. We need this to be able to trust and rely on the source," she said.

The cream rises to the top. There are lots of excellent and very popular blogs, and invariably they link to their sources, state their reasoning and if enough people like them, they remain popular. The crap ones, like this one, remain little more than a way of channelling the rage. Blogging is much more open than the mainstream media, which invariably lifts stories without accreditation, or simply fabricates them.

Chris Heaton Harris, a British Conservative Euro MP, has rejected any moves to "regulate and restrict independent media sources".

"Mrs Mikko obviously does not understand that blogs have become the life blood of a vibrant democracy," he said.

"I hope these proposals are kicked out.

Quite.

Thursday's vote in the European Parliament is not legally binding but is an indicator of growing EU concern over the influence of blogs on the internet.

A recent internal European Commission report, leaked three weeks ago, found that the EU was losing the battle for hearts and minds online.

This may be directly linked to the fact that the EU is shit, and is being exposed as such. If the EU stopped being shit (or better still, was dismantled altogether), people may stop being so horrid.

"Blog activity remains overwhelmingly negative," it said.

Stop being a set of cunts, then.

At last...

Someone who knows what he's talking about!

Okay - he looks to have troublingly extra-terrestrial origins. And the video of him miming the Welsh national anthem in 1993 is just cringeworthy. (Although I'll forgive him for not knowing the Welsh national anthem, in the same way you'd forgive someone for not being able to recite pi to a million decimal places, or something equally irrelevant). Oh, and his bids to be the Conservatives' leader were, uh, not awfully distinguished.

But he DOES know economics, and lucky for we mortals, he shares his views on a regular basis right here. It's pithy, incisive and informed, and as the global financial situation worsens, I'll most certainly be keeping an eye on it.

The Ryder Cup

I never really know what to do when the Ryder Cup comes around.

Unlike many (most?), I don't mind watching golf. It's a game of immense skill that I could spend the rest of my life trying to be good at without remotely succeeding, so I respect those people who can propel a small sphere around a gigantic course with such mind-boggling precision. Watching is easy.

Deciding who to support isn't. I'm not American - this much is obvious by the fact I can spell "colour", understand the LBW law and recognise irony as the supreme form of wit.

But then again, I'm not European either. I measure in feet and inches. My car, usually, can be found on the left side of the road. I have no dress sense. At all.

Of course, Britain is in Europe, and thus I should support Europe. Even though France is in Europe, and they suck.

But..."Europe" is the first word in "European Union", which I detest with a mildly unhinged passion.

But...Americans whoop, and holler, and like shit like NFL, and invented cheeseburger pizzas, and mangle our language in a positively Neanderthal fashion.

But...Europeans like socialism, have dodgy war records (either starting them, or dodging them) and keep beating us on penalty shoot-outs.

And so on.

So basically, I'm stuck. And watching sport as a pure neutral is a pretty sappy thing to do - you need to have someone to support. So I settled the issue in the only way I could think of: I put £50 on America at 11/8, and now I can cheer for them free of guilt.

Cheerio

Lloyds TSB taking over the stricken HBOS is good news, for two different but equally important reasons:

1. it means that Global Financial Armageddon has been averted, which is generally to be welcomed

2. Lloyds TSB would never, ever have inflicted this upon us:

Better Off Out

The Devil's Kitchen is advocating a splendid wheeze by the UKIP Blog that it'd be impolite not to doff a cap to:

Now's the time to tell the Eurocrats which if their rules we want to see abolished!

The Sun has teamed up with a German and Polish newspaper to take the pulse of the three nations. Which of the bureaucrats' barmy rules should be consigned to the dustbin of history?

Bendy bananas? Carrots are fruit? Biofuels pushing up food prices worldwide?

All worthy contenders of course but there's one much more important.

This one.

Yes, the European Communities Act 1972.

Repeal that one and we'll be free of all their crazed rules, not just one or other of them.

So, start here at The Sun.

In the first box, "European Communities Act 1972".

Second box "Because it is the reason the UK is a member of the EU" or something like that perhaps.

Third box: "If we leave the EU by repealing this Act then we are free of all their barmy bureacrats' rules, not just one." or something like that again.

Fill in the contact details and away we go!

Spread the word around, let's see if we can make our voices heard!

Heh heh heh.

Two silver linings..

Grim days. Unimaginably vast companies are up shit creek, the economy's knacked, British banks are teetering - so let's give our thanks to two moments of comedy on an otherwise unlovely day. First up, Nick "Cleggover" Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats:

"I can't tell you every step on the road for us as a party, but I can tell you where we're headed - government."

Aaaaahahahahahaahahhaaaa!

What a plucky chap. What a sweet boy. Bless his little heart. Don't you just want to ruffle his hair and tell the little scamp to take ten pence to the sweetshop and treat himself?

Now it's Labour's turn:

...a MORI poll tomorrow showing the Conservatives at 52%, Labour at 24% and the Lib Dems at 12%.

Bwwwwaaaaaaaaahhahhahahhahahhahahhahahahahaaaaaaaaa!

Just for fun (heh), let's see how this figures would play out if repeated across the country, using just these raw figures:

National Prediction: CON Majority 336

...and Labour wiped out, possibly forever. Now THAT'S funny.

Seriously, just fuck off

Even his own Ministers want him gone now:

Scotland Office minister David Cairns has resigned from the government, saying the time has come to "allow a leadership debate to run its course".

This has transcended partisan politics now. As a Tory-leaner and devout anti-socialist, there's an obvious appeal to Gordon Brown stumbling on until 2010, and leading Labour to a massacre on such a grand scale that they're kept safely out of power until the 2020s. I'd quite like to live the middle part of my life free from the threat of these stupid bastards running the country.

But no - things have got to change right now. This isn't necessarily an entreaty for Cameron and Osborne to take over, because I'm not convinced they'll be all that great, although they'd have to try their hardest to do worse. What's needed is someone, anyone, to replace this unspeakably dreadful specimen.

For policy is now being devised not for the good of the country, but with the aim of propping up a failing Brown government. The £2.7bn was spent on a doomed by-election in the North-West is the most blatant example - this is government of an unprecedentedly awful dreadful nature.

We all hate you, Gordon. It's too late. It's all over. Just quit, with however much meagre dignity you can scrape together, and stop harming the country in pursuit of your own personal ends, you absolutely fucker.

The Guardian versus America, Round 2

We all remember with affection the Guardian's sweetly naive attempt to encourage intelligent left-wing British people to educate stupid redneck Americans in Ohio about the evils of voting for George W Bush in 2004.

We also remember fondly, with a chuckle, the outcome: Bush's lead in Orange County increased. For some reason, Americans didn't take too kindly to being lectured by smarmy patronising limey liberal dickwads.

Happily, we report that the Guardian, in the insufferable guise of Jonathan Freedland, has not learned its lesson:

"The world's verdict will be harsh if the US rejects the man it yearns for"

I doubt it'll mind too much, as Barack Obama is as over-rated as John McCain is over-rated - a few years of a McCain presidency (plus the chance to lust over Sarah Palin) will see us right.

And anyway, do you think the average American will give a shit? They didn't last time, and the sulking, pet-lipped whinnying of bleating Euro-lefties like Jonathan Freedland is hardly going to change their minds.

One can only hope that in the event of a McCain win, Britain's leading lefty lecturers treat us to another masterpiece like this...

The state of the nation

Today saw the commencement of perhaps the most wondrous and fascinating scientific experiment ever conducted.

It also sees us increasingly suffering the effects of a worsening economy.

The government of the day is hated.

Large parts of the country are struggling in the aftermath of appalling weather.

England's football team play a crucial World Cup qualifier tonight.

Here's how some of the British press is reacting to these weighty and interesting topics:





Further comment would be entirely superfluous.

The pub is shut, closed down, and in its doorway sleeps a man of indeterminate age and health. The building's closure does not look recent.

Further down this road, another pub sits closed, its demise appearing more recent.

Shops have shutters down not for the night, but forever. Two overweight women in their 50s huddle underneath a bus shelter, both smoking.

I continue west, reflecting on how this street used to look. Bustling - the shops were all open, with myriad trades represented, but with the city's fishing heritage proudly represented above all. It now looks heartbreakingly forlorn. It's 10pm - hardly daytime, but we're far from the witching hour, and the only places open are a pizza shop, a Chinese takeaway, a gaming centre and a giant Asda, senselessly spewing neon light into the sky.

I've been cycling around my home city, and I do not like what I see.

Let me explain: I live in a comfortable suburban part of a bitterly deprived northern city, ravaged by industrial decline before I was born. The student area is my residence, and it's not so bad around here. You could nearly call it prosperous. The desperate area I cycled through was a road famous throughout the city just three miles from where I now write, and its death spiral must surely be terminal. The last time I passed through I was accosted by prostitutes, twice - now it seems even they have given up.

To the north lie the estates. No snob am I, for I was born on a notoriously difficult estate at the outset of Thatcherism. Life was hard, and while reciting hardships of the past is a tiresome enterprise, I do indeed know what it's like when you need to choose between food and clothing. Things like that have a way of staying with you.

The estates have changed, while remaining just the same. Outwardly affluent, with council-funded double glazing, large gardens front and rear, but this prosperous veneer fools no-one except those who wish to be fooled. Unemployment is rife, a benefits-sponsored existence a normal way of life. I do not regret coming from such an environment, but I am immeasurably thankful it did not extend beyond the early years of my childhood. Perhaps I am a snob after all. But I also fancy myself a realist.

I didn't visit them tonight. I don't need to, nor did I want to. I just wanted to go home.

There's no real point to this ramble, other than to exclaim dismay at how things are. It really needn't be like this. So much human potential is being wasted - wasted because schools do not teach, parents do not parent, the unimaginable evil that is the welfare state viciously traps and imprisons whole generations at a time, and no-one seems able to do anything about it.

A chill wind is blowing - both as I cycle glumly home, and figuratively as I worry about the years of gloom that await England. The signs of decline are abundant, and growing. None of our politicians have any worthwhile suggestions about how to mend this. Too many think that throwing money at a problem solves it. It doesn't, but they keep right on doing it.

But no - we'll rant about bastard politicians another day. Tonight, I feel only a sense of unease and sadness for things I can barely identify and can't begin to explain. It's not a pleasant feeling.

Is it 1979 already? II

I also hate the public sector. A lot.

And no, I'm not having any of this shite about them doing "essential, difficult" jobs, blah blah blah. My old man is a truck driver - he works seemingly thousand of hours doing a boring, tough and occasionally dangerous job, but his ilk don't get simpering tributes from the BBC and the trade unions. That too is an essential job, because the economy depends upon stuff being transported across the country.

How about fisherman? Now that looks bloody tough. And not only because I'm not quite as impervious to seasickness as I like to think. Cold, wet, dangerous, decidedly unprofitable - and that's before the evil empire get going. Also essential, because food is somewhat important, and fish is tasty.

I could go on, but you get the picture. Somehow, I doubt that most public sector workers, sat doing pointless non-jobs in comfortable offices with massive pensions (all paid by us), disproportionately rising pay, a culture that rewards skiving - and the fuckers still complain!

There are some jobs in the world I'd dearly love to do, and would take a pay cut for. Being a professional footballer would be nice; a cricketer even more so. I still haven't quite given up on being an astronaut. But how good would it be to be in charge of deciding the size and cost of the public sector?

It'd be a bloodbath. An abattoir. Across the country, lazy bastards would be turfed out of their non-jobs and told to bloody well go and get a proper job like the rest of us. Whole industries that suck gazillions of pounds of money from the productive (private) sector into the unproductive (public) sector would be closed down. The squeals of pain from the unions, the BBC, the Guardian would provoke near-orgasmic joy. I'd love it. It'd be less a job, and more a calling...

Is it 1979 already? I

I hate trade unions. A lot.

Of course, the Blessed Margaret stamped hard on these bastards a long time ago, and it seemed like the threat had largely dissipated. Not so, and perhaps we celebrated their demise a little too early, however. For just like Noel Edmonds, football hooliganism and cancer, brain-dead socialism fuckwittedness never really goes away.

For now we hear the TUC bleating on about strikes if their members are only given a 2% pay-rise, which it rather creatively termed "unfair and unjust". They're not there yet...but they will be. Trade unions are notoriously immune to reason, logic and fairness, and unless their demands are not met, they will strike.

And as in the late 1970s, a Labour government will end with the money running out, the threat of industrial action from hysterical unions parading their economic illiteracy almost as a badge of honour, and the whole country seething at socialist mismanagement. Back in June, Tory MP Michael Spicer nailed it perfectly at PMQs:

"Why are there always so many strikes at the end of a Labour Government?"

Shit telly

"Shit telly" is almost a tautology - so much of what is produced is not only shit, but deliberately shit. That's because people are idiots, and they like shit.

Take "Deal or No Deal". I can't watch it without immediately falling into an uncontrollable rage, which is quite unfortunate given the maddening frequency with which it seems to be on. I hate it for two reasons - firstly, it's a pointless game of chance, and secondly, the utter shitstains who go on it.

It's a game of chance that entails morons opening boxes containing sums of money, being offered a sum of money by the "banker" to end their game in case their box contains a hefty sum, which is invariably (tearfully) rejected, only for the greedy halfwit in question to end up settling for a lot less later in the show when whatever passes for their brain fails to alert them to the mathematical likelihood of failure. What the fuck is interesting about people opening boxes? People opening boxes is boring and rubbish, unless those boxes contain something exciting like mustard gas, a naked Charlotte Church, or maybe a velociraptor. Take note, Endemol.

Now, people answering questions, that's okay. You can play along at home, if that is your preference. And answering questions entails a skill, which opening boxes doesn't. Unless you were born with no arms. Which most of us aren't.

Which leads me onto the wretched specimens that invariably populate this dismal cackfest. There are invariably fat women of indeterminate age and hair-colouring, weeping and wailing as they open boxes. There are spanners entrusting with opening these boxes, earnestly offering (unerringly terrible) advice. There's always someone ostentatiously gay. There's a sagely old bloke, a teenager with pink hair, a mumsy housewife. Always.

But worst are the box-deciders, fretting and agonising over which sodding box to choose, as though they can somehow influence a random outcome. YOU CAN'T, you gibbering moron. Just pick a box, STOP CRYING, be grateful if you're offered some decent cash and then fuck the fuck off my screen.

I hate it. Really, really hate it - typical lowest-common-denominator television, idiots on show for consumption by other idiots.

And Noel Edmonds is a smug twat.

Look at this man

This is Gordon Brown, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, as pictured in today's Times.

Do you look well, Gordon? Are you enjoying the job you've schemed and plotted your whole life for, Gordon? Do you realise we all hate you, Gordon?

The answer to all three must be a resounding "no", although in time, once he's left office in the most complete misery, me may realise that we all do hate him.

Yet looking at that, I almost feel sorry for him. Yes, he's a hateful, vengeful socialist whose ideals would impoverish us all, shackling us to his nightmarish vision of a Big Brother surveillance society where only officially authorised behaviour is permitted, and only when people like him say so, economically and emotionally tied to the state.

But...the sun is shining, my workload for the day is pleasingly modest, and looking at this shattered image of a man facing ruin and derision for centuries to come, I almost - I said almost - feel for him.

Just go, Gordon. Go now, for "health reasons", and while we'll all know you went because you couldn't stomach an electoral apocalypse in 2010, at least we might feel a bit sorry for you, rather than dancing on your political grave in a couple of years.

Stamp them out

The Government is terribly vexed about house prices. They're falling, you see - and much of the pyramid scheme upon which Gordon Brown built our economy depends on this not happening.

So what do they propose?

Something peculiar called a "stamp duty holiday". This isn't even a proper tax cut, and we all know there's no such thing as a bad tax cut. Rather, it's a temporary cut. Oh, but only if the property in question is £175,000 or less.

This will apparently cost £600m, which has not been accounted for and sounds terribly dramatic, but in a trillion-pound economy, it's tantamount to losing 50p down the back of the sofa.

No; the obvious problem is more mundane - what happens if you're trying to sell a house for about £200,000 today, having been trying to flog it for a year or so? Chances are you've already cut it be 10% to match falling prices. Who on earth will now offer anything over £174,999 for anything? So your £220,000 house is now likely to sell for£175,000, or it won't sell. A drop of around a quarter, hastening the national drop in house prices they're so anxious to avoid.

You stupid, stupid bastards.