GB - Liar or incompetent?

So, it wasn't Call Me Dave who tripped Mr Brown up at Prime Minister's Questions this week but a Tory back-bencher who had bothered to do some research in the Commons Library on the topic of funding for the military. Tony Baldry challenged Gorgon on his statement to the Chilcot Enquiry that military spending had risen "in real terms" year on year under the Labour Government. He pointed out that there were at least three years where this had not been the case, according to the Commons Library.
Forced onto the back foot, Brown confirmed that he had already written to the Enquiry admitting his error. Unfortunately, Cameron and Clegg were so overjoyed at the prospect of landing a few cheap shots that they failed to ask the obvious question: If Brown had already written to the Chilcott Enquiry, how long had he been aware that the evidence he presented at the enqury was false? Moreover, how could a man who claimed that it was only his financial savvy that had saved the world's financial systems from total collapse be so utterly useless at adding up that he didn't know that, during the three fallow years Baldry mentioned, military expenditure had actually declined rather than increased, in real terms?
The truth is that we cannot know whether or not he simply made a mistake or simply lied to Chilcot.
Whichever version is the truth, it cannot disguise the fact that the man who wants to lead this country for another five years is either a serial liar - or a serial incompetent.
It does not exactly represent a very rosy future for the rest of us, does it?

A`peculiar equality

Equality is a much abused term, favoured by a whole slew of carpetbaggers intent only on promoting their own narrowly-focused agenda. As a consequence, we get situations like the one that arose this week when two dicta from different arms of the equality octopus seemed to confound and contradict each other.

The first deals with a heinous crime - rape. The second concerns itself with the much less serious problem of equality between the sexes in a gymnasium or health club. One is of real importance but is subtly undermined by the spurious nature of the other whose only purpose is to provide added froth to the feminist agenda.

We are already familiar with the extreme feminist view that all sex is rape; or, to be more precise, all heterosexual sex is rape. Now, it appears, that this is close to becoming the official position. Any woman who has sex with a man whilst drunk can now, officially, be regarded as having been raped since, by definition, she was not in a position to provide informed consent to the act. On the other hand, should the man be in an equally catatonic condition - but not presumably have been afflicted by the dreaded brewer's droop - he cannot use this as a defence to the charge of rape. Irrespective of his alchoholic intake, he is deemed to be capable of asking for and understanding whether or not consent has been given before proceeding.

From this we can only infer that men are deemed to be the stronger sex in any situation where alchohol is involved. If both sexes were, indeed, equal it stands to reason that they would be affected by alchohol equally and, by extension, would be equally as capable of deciding whether or not they want to have sex. But, this is apparently not the official view.
Which is strange because, in the health club, total equality between the sexes is to be adhered to so rigidly that simply offering a woman a lighter set of weights to lift than a man is regarded as discriminatory.
This might give rise to an interesting dilemma in the future, given our predilection for litigation based on Health & Safety issues in this country. It is not difficult to envisage a scenario in which a petite woman is provided with a set of weights more suited to a hefty male, tears a muscle, ricks her back or otherwise damages herself and then sues the trainer and the health club for failing to follow health and safety procedures.
It would be a delicious irony if any such failure were to be cancelled out by the trainer's strict adherence to the letter of the Equalities Act.

Dereliction of duty?

English Common Law holds that we all, whether as individuals or as members of an organisation, have a Duty of Care to others irrespective of whether they are known to us or not.
This being the case, I find it hard to understand why someone has not brought ministers and senior Civil Servants in the Ministry of Defence to book over the number of service personnel killed by mines and IEDs in Afghanistan. Warnings about the inadequacy of the kit that army personnel have to put up with are as old as the campaign itself. Yet, every day we hear horror stories of troops forced to patrol in Snatch land Rovers designed for use in Ulster, inadequate body armour or faulty or missing mine detection equipment.
The latest inquest on the deaths of the first female soldier and three SAS TA troopers reinforces the point that someone, within the MOD or the military, sent these young people out on patrol knowing full well they did not have the right equipment to protect them from harm. They travelled in a Snatch Land Rover - christened the mobile coffin because of its total unsuitability for conditions in Afghanistan - with only one working mine detection system and a bare minimum of training or instruction on its use.
That is negligence of the highest order and a patent dereliction of duty of care. Yet, as we all know, none of the civil servants repsonsible for specifying, ordering and supplying this equipment will be blamed. Neither will any of the politicians, including Gordon Brown, whose parsimony towards the Armed Forces has been repaid with the loss of countless young lives.
His excursions to Afghanistan, clad in the very best body armour money can buy, are as fleeting as his encounters with the truth. He will still rise at at PM's questions, solemnly intone the list of the latest casualties, lie about the number of armoured cars he has actually allowed to be ordered and then resume his seat without a shred of shame or discomfort at the risks he has subjected our forces to thanks to his penny-pinching.
If I were a clever lawyer with any sort of a conscience I would have gone after him for breach of duty of care a long, long time ago. It may not succeed, but, at the very least, it would expose him to the kind of cross-examination on a public stage that he will never have to face in Parliament or through the media.