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.

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.

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.

Gordon Brown: doing the right thing

There's a title I wasn't expecting to be composing too often when I started up this repository for ranting. It's inspired by this:

Gordon Brown to reject energy windfall tax

Gordon Brown is set to defy Labour MPs and public opinion by rejecting a multi-billion pound windfall tax on energy firms.

Remarkable - one must have thought the temptation of a left-wing Prime Minister to remove money from Evil Profiteering Companies would be nigh on irresistible. Particularly when we consider this:

Dozens of Labour MPs are backing a big windfall tax and a poll yesterday suggested that the majority of voters agree.

...

The YouGov poll, commissioned by the left-wing Compass pressure group, showed that 67 per cent of voters support a major one-off tax on energy firms' profits.

I'm not all that surprised a majority of people support such a move, however fabulously ill-conceived it is. Big companies are easy to view as an easy target to steal from (sorry, tax) - and with them being both large enough to withstand it and sufficiently Evil as to deserve it, it should therefore be done.

Jon Cruddas, a former Labour deputy leadership candidate and Compass member said the tax would allow Labour to differentiate itself from the Conservatives.

Mr Cruddas is, of course, a dribbling lefty halfwit, and would think that. If he thinks differentiating Labour from the Tories by being even more left-wing is a good thing, one can only assume he desire electoral apocalypse.

However, Mr Brown is understood to have concluded that a multi-billion pound tax on energy firms at a time when the UK economy stands on the brink of recession would be politically and economically risky. John Hutton, the Business Secretary, has also privately opposed the tax.

Indeed he has. By the dismal standards of Labour frontbencher, John Hutton is one of the few who appear remotely acquainted with the real world, and how it works.

Cruddas, and other dimwitted dinosaurs of the Leftism of old, think that money can simply be taken from profitable companies with no downside. But there is, and it's explained quite beautifully here by the excellent Martin Vander Weyer in the Speccie:

We’ve estimated that over the next ten to 12 years the UK will need up to £100 billion of new investment in our energy infrastructure,’ he told me the other day. ‘That investment is mobile - it can go anywhere it will get a decent rate of return. You’ve always got to structure your tax policy against that background. That’s the new reality. We’ve got to show that the tax framework is as competitive as it possibly can be and I know the Chancellor wants to make sure that it is.’

Genuine long-term thinking is quite rare in politics, and turning down a plan down just because it's wrong is depressingly uncommon - particularly when there is a good deal of (misplaced) support for it. Well done John Hutton. Well done (begrudgingly) Gordon Brown. Shut the fuck up, Jon Cruddas.

"An end to boom and bust"

Or so went Gordon Brown's favourite saying, rattled off in that dreadful monotone so reminiscent of Soviet era politicans droning about increasing tractor production while the people starved.

Now we see an end to "an end to boom and bust":

UK economic growth ground to a halt between April and June, according to the latest official data.

The Office for National Statistics said economic growth was unchanged in the second quarter from the first, revising an earlier estimate of 0.2% growth.

This also renders obsolete another of his beloved sayings: "x consecutive quarters of growth", where x is a very large number whose origins (unspoken, of course) are under the last Tory government, who can take credit for those on their own watch and probably all of them under Brown's time too.

But now the house of cards of is crumbling:

"The figures are very weak and suggest the UK economy is already in recession," said George Buckley, an economist at Deutsche Bank.

Your humble scribe is no economist, and will leave the more forensic destructions of Gordon Brown's abysmal record to them. Although I probably know about it than Gordon Brown, who for some unfathomable reason appears to think that he, and he alone, can make socialist tax-and-spend fuckwittedness work, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Now he must reap what he has sown. A perfect economic storm awaits - the economy is likely to worsen for at least another eighteen months, which will neatly incorporate the next General Election. Labour is certain to be obliterated, and Gordon Brown will take his deserved place at the head of future lists of "Really, Really Shit Prime Ministers".

His personal and professional destruction will make for enjoyable viewing - but only for those who manage to ride it out. Unfortunately we must all reap what he has sown. And while seeing this shower of shits out of power for a generation is an appealing prospect, the pain the country must suffer in order for this to happen may not make it worthwhile.

What an absolute twat.

It's like ten thousand spoons

Yvette Cooper has been chirruping away in a lefty newspaper about our future Prime Minister. It seems that David Cameron is actually going to be a total disaster, and his economic ideas will ruin us all. She even coins a cute term for the impending cataclysm: "Cameronimcs". Disaster, thy name is known.

Luckily, we still have a couple of years before the end of days, during which time the Great Helmsman will be steering us through the choppy waters. Or so his comrades would have us believe - those who actually know what they're talking about seem to think things aren't quite as rosy:

Recession looms in the UK in the next six to nine months as firms face "a difficult and risky climate", the British Chambers of Commerce warns.

Gordon Brown, of course, told us that "boom and bust" had been abolished - as though somehow the economic cycle didn't apply to him. So how can this be?

Well, Ms Cooper may rail against something of which she's only guessing about, but we already know what Brownonomics is. It's gone a bit like this:

• inherit an economy in good and improving shape
• raise taxes
• spend lots of money
• borrow money
• spend more money
• raise taxes some more
• spend even more money
  
• shit yourself when the economy take a down-turn
• borrow money
• continue spending
• look puzzled when the money runs out
  

It's a favoured phrase of many that Labour governments always end with the money running out, and we shouldn't be surprised. Socialism has been tested to destruction, and anyone who thinks it's worth another try should be kept firmly away from the country's finances. And hit, often, with large sticks.

But what WILL Cameronomics look like? The Tory right want lots of juicy tax cuts and public spending slashed to bits. As do I - taxes are too high, public spending is wildly out of control. I can almost picture the manic gleam in John Redwood's eye as he decimates the obscenely bloated public sector.

Unfortunately Gordon Brown is pursuing a scorched earth policy, making a bad situation intentionally worse. The finances that David Cameron inherits are certain to be worse than those bequeathed by Sir John Major to Tony Blair. This is certain to tie Cameron's hands quite considerably with his scope for swift tax cuts, although long term the frankly immoral portion of our earnings the government steals simply has to come down. This will annoy the Tory right, and indeed anyone else who knows the first thing about economics - how Dave deals with this in his first term will be the most interesting test of Ms Cooper's "Cameronomics".

Better the devil you knew?

Tony Blair won three General Elections as Labour leader. This is a feat without precedent; given the likelihood of a Conservative government occupying most of the 2010s, it's an achievement some of us may not be around for the next time it happens. Indeed, if you follow the gloomy predictions of Fraser Nelson and Ian Martin, Labour may not survive the next decade as a serious party of government, an deliciously amusing prospect. Now more comedy comes from a Telegraph poll feasting on the richly entertaining despair of Gordon Brown, observing:

In fact, the only Labour figure who could significantly narrow the gap with the Tories is the man the party forced out of office last year: Tony Blair. Yet even with Mr Blair as leader, Labour would trail the Conservatives by 32 per cent to 41 per cent.

I do not much care for Tony Blair - a vain, shallow man with a messiah complex whose legacy may be starkly at odds with his own view of himself. But his capacity for charm is incontestable. Eleven years on from the first of his two landslides, a slightly revisionist view has crept in that he was only awarded such a handsome victory because of the revulsion shown for John Major's Tories.

Nonsense. Tony Blair was genuinely popular to point of being beloved, and those who seek to claim otherwise are letting his subsequent failure to live up to his own promise impair their recollection. Even in the midst of the Iraq war, New Labour's growing sense of tarnishment, increasing frustration with the government, Tony Blair remained a winner in 2005. People voted for him time after time.

Historians will mull over this and think "just what the fuck were they doing when they kicked him out for Gordon Brown?" A flawed winner, replaced by a serial election-dodger, a moody, uncommunicative socialist automaton, whose answer to everything is either sulking, hiding, lying or dully churinng out tractor production figures. Or a combination of the three.

And it's not as though there wasn't ample evidence of his unsuitability BEFORE he took office. The superb Political Betting shows quite clearly that he was not the public's favoured option when up against David Cameron. This data will have been known to Labour MPs. And still they crowned him, without a vote, and sent him out to a distrusting and restless public which is beginning to realise it didn't mind that nice Mr Blair so much after all.

Truly, they reap what they sow. And as for Tony, he has kept his counsel well. But you can almost see the old rogue's winsome smile as he surveys the post-Blair Labour party.

And still they ponder...

There's no constitutional requirement for Labour to call a General Election if they replace Gordon Brown. We vote for MPs aligned (usually) to a political party, the largest of which then chooses a leader and Prime Minister.

When Labour decided it'd had enough of Tony Blair (General Elections won: 3) and summoned its king over the water, he was annointed without anything as troublesome as a General Election, or indeed an internal party election. He was simply foisted upon us, and we were expected to be grateful.

Some observe that a repeat of this exercise, even if garnished with a Labour leadership election, would again mean there'd be no need of a General Election. Technically this is correct. Morally? Take your pick. Practically? No chance.

In such an event, the most common refrain would surely be "look at what happened last time you lot inflicted someone on us without bothering to ask." Deposing the leader without then submitting themselves to the country may not lance the boil. If anything, it may make the eventual day of reckoning an even ghastlier as the country punishes the whole party for its arrogant refusal to consult the electorate - a heavy defeat could become near-obliteration.

Would the Parliamentary Labour Party really choose a course that could see them out of power until the 2020s, and would that be a good thing? The sensible part of me thinks that lengthy reigns by one party are inherently unhealthy for any democracy; but most of me wants the bastards out for as long as possible. Sometimes, sadistic pleasure is too just much to resist.

Gordon is a Moron (see what I did there?)

So, after the carnage of Glasgow East, Gordon Brown is finished. Or so runs the convential wisdom, which often tends not to be very wise. On balance, I fancy he'll cling on - a lifetime of scheming and plotting has gone into him becoming Prime Minister, and so obdurate an individual is unlikely to yield his position over something as inconsequential as everyone despising him.

William Hill presently offer just 8/13 on him being out by the end of 2008. I'd like to lay at that price, if only because his Cabinet and backbenchers are afflicted by excessively soggy spinal equipment and, like a gaggle of timid children whose ball has landed in the garden of the neighbourhood ogre, they're all fearfully eyeing each other and silently imploring someone else to go sort it out, please.

A pitiful spectacle - but ironic in its own darkly amusing way: to think that the infamously cowardly Gordon Brown could survive just because his colleagues in the Parliamentary Labour Party are even more cowardly than him should provide comic relief for future generations.

Though not, admittedly, as much as archive footage of his wobbly jaw flapping around in disbelief as the men in white coats gently prise his fingernails from the door of Number 10. will entertain them. And to think we're of the generation that'll get to enjoy it happening live - aren't we lucky!