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.

Some auntie

I hate the BBC.

Most people don't; it continues to enjoy a fuzzy sense of admiration from many, and enduringly misguided loyalty.

I have absolutely no idea why. Imagine hearing of an equivalent elsewhere: a left-wing state broadcaster employing 28,000 people, possessing an annual budget of £4bn, funded by a compulsory television tax. You'd snort with derision. Yet here, we speak warmly of "Auntie Beeb".

Its bias is so obvious it has even been forced to admit it. In spite of the principles of public broadcasting, it engages in the same mad dash for ratings that makes ITV wholly unwatchable. The crucial difference is that we don't pay for ITV to exist - it pays for itself, and while its schedule is filled with abysmal lowest-common-denominator rubbish, at least it does this off its own back.

So should the BBC be privatised?

Why not. Just to see what happens. Just to see how this fat, lazy, complacent organisation copes when exposed to the real world. Just to see how many of those 28,500 staff it actually does need. Just to see whether £4bn is the actual cost of its operations. Just to see the wails of horror from its pro-EU, AGW-fantasy-propagating, Tories-are-all-evil correspondents.

And best of all, having spent so long rubbishing the Conservatives, their backs are up. It's too late to back-track and make amends. Any right-wing party worth its salt should be opposed to a monumental waste of public money such as the British Broadcasting Corporation, let alone one that so palpably hates it. Revenge is in the air, and the Tories are likely to have a long time in office in which to settle a few scores.

This would be a great place to start.