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Wednesday 20 February 2008

Gordon is not only a moron; he’s a liar and a bully, too.

When Gordon Brown anointed himself Prime Minister of Great Britain last June, he was at great pains to point up the differences between himself and the erstwhile incumbent, T.B. Liar.
His regime, Gordon assured us, would exemplify probity and honest, open government. He was, after all, a son of the manse, a pillar of Scottish rectitude stuffed chock-full of the traditional British values of democracy, fairness, tolerance and fair-play.
Not for him the cronyism endemic in the Blair regime: Or Blair's preference for lying even when the truth would have been an easier option. No sir. Under Honest Flash Gordon, spin would be left to Monty Panesar. His open government would be one of “all the talents”, a veritable brains trust which, with Gordon’s light but sure touch on the tiller, would steer the great ship of state into tranquil seas of unbounded prosperity and righteous happiness..
Well, he came into power on the back of a great big whopper and has managed to out-Blair Blair with the spinning he has done ever since.
One of his big themes was respect for individual liberty and privacy. He was going to make it a personal crusade to restore the liberties so systematically eroded by you-know-who over the course of the preceding decade.
So, it’s rather odd that this session of Parliament will see the introduction of over a dozen new items of legislation which will grant bureaucrats at local and national level ever more rights to enter our homes: So much for an Englishman’s home being his castle.
Where personal liberty has gone, democracy will rapidly follow. Not So Flash Gordon and his gang regard democracy as some antique conceit which suits the likes of Iraq, struggling to slip the chains of dictatorship, but is far too unwieldy and clunky for a modern, sophisticated society like the YooKay. They dutifully posture about democracy for the benefit of a global political audience. At home, they pay lip service to the concept while doing their utmost to dilute it.
While most of the Press has been distracted by tawdry tales of MPs fiddling their expenses, NSF Gordon has been busy stealing our country from under our noses and tying it up with a nice, neat bow ready for delivery to his fellow commissars in the Soviet Republic of Europa.
The first step was to renege on the promised referendum on the new EU Constitution. Never mind that Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and Giscard D’Estaing said that the Lisbon Treaty and the Constitution were manifestly one and the same. Gordon simply said that they weren’t. When people protested, he did what this administration has done – superbly – ever since it gained power: he lied, stalled and cavilled in the certain knowledge that the next, big story would blow the whole controversy off the front pages. And he was right.
Along came Northern Rock, crooked MPs and feral yobs to dominate the media and bury the EU treaty debate in the news hinterland.
Gordon’s satisfaction with this state of affairs demonstrates more clearly than anything his very real contempt not just for democracy but for the British population at large. Now he has tinkered with the way the Bill enabling the Treaty of Lisbon goes through Parliament. NSF Gordon has got together with henchmen such as the Speaker, Mick Martin, and devised a system whereby MPs get to examine bite size chunks of the Treaty at single sittings, leaving very little time for examination of the fine print, debate, or any form of opposition.
Since there has been no squeak of outrage from either David Cameron or Nick Clegg, we must assume that, like their predecessors, they have been shown the shining light at the end of the European tunnel and the places their acquiescence will guarantee them at the communal trough.
But even if our nominal leaders have been finessed into acquiescence, where is the concerted roar of disapproval from MPs of all stripes, kicking against this official betrayal of Parliamentary democracy. Since everything has, so obviously, been well and truly stitched up perhaps they see very little profit in making waves and have simply decided to make the best of the situation.
Once the EU assumes complete control of our administration, all MPs will have plenty of time on their hands. They could use it to kick against the pricks; or, more usefully, spend it concocting new ways to employ wives, girlfriends and significant others, pay off their second mortgages and otherwise enrich themselves.
Only if the great unwashed get wise to the fact that MPs' work and influence decreases in inversion proportion to the amount of money they earn, might they finally decide that enough is enough and storm the Houses of Parliament to send the whole lot of them packing.
I digress once again: although perhaps not as much as it may seem. Because, surely, the state of Parliament, the Civil Service, the Police and the country at large is simply a reflection of the Government we have had to endure for the last eleven years?
What that reflection tells us is that this administration is rotten to its very core. And that core is – and has been for a decade – Gordon Brown. Never mind that he was “only” the Chancellor of the Exchequer under Blair. He never lost an opportunity to make it clear that nothing happened under Blair without his specific agreement. He can refer to “previous administrations” as often as he likes in an attempt to distance himself from the Blair years. But none of us will forget his contribution as the Iron Chancellor, the Great Clunking Fist and the other tough-guy sobriquets in which he so clearly delighted - and which are strangely at odds with his mincing, Frankie Howerd walk and simpering smile.
In some ways he has always been a cross dresser. Tough Flash Gordon could, in a bound, become Prudence Brown; a maiden aunt keen to lecture us all on the virtues of watching the pennies. It was the second persona that enabled him to garner a completely unwarranted reputation for financial savvy. Unwarranted because this is the man who announced immediately he entered office in 1997 that gold no longer had any intrinsic value and was gob-smacked when a lot of savvy rich people promptly took tons of it off his hands at knock-down prices.
It's the same man who cancelled the dividend tax relief earned by pension funds and destroyed a Private Pensions system that had for many years been the envy of the world. At a stroke he created a generation of elderly people forced to carry on working, not for the fun of it or to buy a few extra luxuries but simply to keep poverty at bay. Many of their children will find themselves in similar, straitened circumstances, unless of course they are MPS, Civil Servants or our Gordon himself, all of whom have made sure that their own index-linked pensions have been well and truly ring-fenced.
And yes folks, it was the same Incapability Brown who created a tax credits system so complex and ill-conceived that the only people who understand it are illegal immigrants with doctorates in welfare fraud. All it has done for most low-earning Britons is to make them much worse off than their counterparts in virtually every other developed country. To fund this bureaucratic nightmare, he has sucked money out of middle-class wallets which has simply vapourised in the slip stream of any number of useless job creation schemes.
His most recent stroke of genius was to appoint another dour Scot as Chancellor of the Exchequer. To give Brown his due, he probably didn’t appoint Darling because of cronyism. It was the latter's obvious lack of balls and anything remotely resembling experience of either business or economics that appealed to Gordon most. Gordon knows that, at some point, the day of reckoning for his ineptitude will arrive with a bang. Dear Alastair is the useful idiot who will do as he is told and deflect the flak from Gordon long enough for him to distance himself from the unavoidable crash. A peerage after the next election seems Darling's most likely reward for playing Archie Andrews to Gordon’s Peter Brough.
Most economists now regard the UK economy as a basket case. Brown though is in denial. According to him, we are still the strong man of Europe, punching consistently above our weight thanks to his financial brilliance and our low levels of unemployment. His optimism flies so much in the face of reality that it is tempting to wonder if he is actually unhinged.
All of the evidence points to decline. We have low unemployment because we pay almost five million people not to go to work for one reason or another.
There are 2 million young men between the ages of 16 and 18 who don’t work, have never worked and, if the truth be known, are probably incapable of work thanks to years of Noo labour’s version of education and training. Yet, we have given away almost precisely the same number of jobs to economic migrants.
It now looks as if we will be spending over 40% of our GNP every year making interest payments on the National Debt. Debt that, for the most part, was used to fund huge gouts of public spending that have left no discernible improvements in education, health care, infrastructure or prosperity as we now enter the long goodnight of a severe economic downturn.
Not So Flash Gordon refuses to listen to such talk. He is too busy, in his own words, getting on with the job of governing this country. He is always moving on, always announcing new initiatives in the hope that the froth he creates will obscure the damage his policies have caused.
We now enjoy a level of violent crime unseen since pre-Victorian days, perpetrated by drunken youths who are a direct product of child-centred education policies. Unschooled, functionally illiterate and innumerate, but with a sure understanding of their rights and entitlements, these yobs are a physical reflection of another central plank of the Blair/Brown era: bullying.
There has never been another administration that has so revelled in throwing its weight about. Over the last decade, psychological pressure and moral blackmail have been used to crush anybody brave enough to put their head above the twin parapets of political correctness and multiculturalism. Brown, Blair, Mandelson and Campbell took delight in demonstrating that might is right; that all opposition can be obliterated as long as it’s done with maximum speed and force. All our current crop of teenage terrorists has done is to translate that mentality from the salons of Islington and Notting Hill to the streets and alleys of our town centres.
So, our beloved leader, Not so Flash Gordon Brown, these have been your achievements. You have helped to create a country that is devoid of grace, culture and humour, where force rules OK; a country that is prone to severe fits of navel-gazing, self-loathing and depression; one that hectors and lectures those it considers inferior while quaking with little-boy terror and reacting with debilitating indecision when any real problem or threat raises its head.
My god, Gordon, you have managed to recreate us all in your own image.