Labour Largely unchanged as UK Politics changes for good

As Gordon Brown was forced into keeping the cabinet largely unchanged, the electorate it seems had already made up their minds a day before that they would vote almost anything other than labour. The big winners were the single issue parties such as the Greens, the BNP and most notably UKIP. Even tiny parties such as The Christian Party picked up 3% of the vote in London alone. Whilst the Labour vote
was expected to collapse it seems that in the light of the Mp's expenses scandal people have registered their disdain by voting for the party that most closely reflects their particular area of concern. The blow for Gordon is that they do what he has been incapable of doing; namely getting their message across. These European elections have only been given significance in the context of a General Election given the scope of Labour's defeat. However a more subtle point, that will be troubling for all the main parties is that people will no longer be voting strictly
along party lines. As people can get information online on a specific candidates
detailed voting intentions on every issue they will refuse to vote for prospective Mp's put up by mainstream parties. They will instead opt for independents or single issue parties. A Euro-sceptic Tory will not vote for a pro-European Tory put up in his or her constituency. Information which in previous years the voter either didn't have or didn't bother with. The power of the political whip will decline as the information age ushers in a new era of micro analysis for each candidate.
Brown will remain safe as long as the premiership is seen as a poisoned chalice by any potential plotter. A year is still a long time in politics, but Labour will
be kicked out 'big style' if they cannot communicate the simple fact that they have the best policies to deal with the recession. Tory failure to have any policies
of note on the economy meant that in real terms their share of the vote increased only by 1% in these European elections even amidst a Labour meltdown.

A reader captures Public Disgust at MP's Expenses by invoking Cromwell's oratory

"It is high time for Me to put an End to your Sitting in this Place, which you have dishonoured by your Contempt of all Virtue, and defiled by your Practice of every Vice;
Ye are a factious Crew and Enemies of all good Government; Ye are a Pack of mercenary Wretches and would, like Esau, Sell your Country for a Mess of Pottage; and like Judas, betray your God for a few Pieces of Money; Is there a single Virtue now remaining amongst you?
Is there one Vice that you do not possess? Ye have no more Religion than my horse! Gold is your God: Which of you have not bartered your Conscience for Bribes?
Is there a Man amongst you that has the least care for the Good of the Commonwealth?
Ye sordid prostitutes! Have you not defiled this Sacred Place, and turned the Lord's Temple into a Den of Thieves by your immoral Principles and wicked Practices? Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole Nation.
Your Country therefore calls upon me to cleanse the Augean Stable, by putting a final Period to your Iniquitous Proceedings in this House, and which by God's Help, and the strength He has given Me, I now come to do.
I command ye, therefore, upon the Peril of your Lives, to depart immediately out of this Place;
Go! Get out! Make haste, ye Venal Slaves, begone!"
Oliver Cromwell 1653

Fraud is Fraud

If Gordon Brown is to maintain any semblance of authority he needs to analyse these expense claims, separate the petty from the fraudulent and sack those that have crossed the line. The real tragedy is that the quite sickening greed of a few may jeopardize the confidence in government that is so necessary at a time of fragile economic recovery. If he doesn't have the political strength to let a few heads roll then he cannot have the political authority to lead us through this recession with all the deep sacrifices that it will entail for the vast majority
of the British Public. Gordon Brown's cleaner is not the issue here. We are talking about the immeasurable cost to the nation if we do not have a cleaner political system. Please see the Open Letters section to see the level of public outrage.

How Will The Budget Affect You?

One of the most surprising aspects of the budget was the fact that people seem to be surprised at the scale of the borrowing. Almost as if the enormous bank bailouts were somehow not going to be factored in. Yes, this was the budget that would expose how severely we have to pay for the extent of corporate greed. No it hasn't made those responsible pay for the bulk of the damage. The 50% bracket as has widely been reported can easily be bypassed by those who got us in this mess because they are experts in financial engineering. They can easily convert their gains to stocks which would pay the much lower rate of corporate tax. As a nation, this is the moment we realize that the guy who had promised us free drinks at the bar all night was a con artist and has done a runner. Since no-one was keeping tabs its no point having a massive argument about who drank what and when etc. this seems to be the Tory position. They offered many criticisms but no solutions and I still don't understand how without a significant fiscal expansion they would stop this recession
turning into a depression.
TWEET: Labour Bad-tories worse-alternatives non-existent

Public outrage at politician's greed and sordid expense claims

Usually confined to the open letters section it would be amiss not to post one of the many letters of anger and frustration concerning Mp's expenses. Making us pay
for her husband's porn has touched a very raw nerve at the most inappropriate of economic times. perhaps if she had id monitored her husband this scandal may have been avoided! Below is one of the letters emailed
Dear Gordon Brown,
I am absolutely disgusted that tax payers are paying for MP's husbands "porn" - had it not been for the mole inside Government, we would never have known about this - what I would like to know is who / what else have we been paying for ... hopefully the "mole" will not be caught and we will be allowed to see the full extent of what we are paying for.
I say sack J Smith !!! and get some decent staff in.
Yours faithfully
Caroline Vines

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs...

There are many 'ifs' facing Barack Obama and Gordon Brown if they are to succeed in seeing us through the global economic crisis but one thing is for sure, cool heads and decisive action have served both polticians well over the past couple of months. Make no mistake the fundamental challenges are immense but they can be overcome:
If the fiscal stimuli in an increasingly interconnected world are coordinated between countries in their implementation.
If they get the timing right so that they have the maximum impact.
If we can marginalise the views of those who are against borrowing now for a classic Keynsian expansion to kick start the economy (Cameron's position is analagous to a doctor not wanting to use the defribillators on a patient whose heart has stopped for fear of future electricity bills.)
If we realise how deep this international crisis is and how very interdependant we are as nation states such that no country retreats into isolationism and no country is hampered by oppositions who delay action for political gain.
If we can force the banks to lend to small busineses with pre-crisis elasticity as a price for the huge public bailouts we granted them.
If we accept that economics is a science as well as an art and the decisive manner in which policy is implemented can be equally as important as choosing the correct policies.( Thatcher was against the ERM, Lawson for it.Its not that either position could have been characterized as right or wrong but it was the appearance of a weak government that led to the markets being bold enough to bet against the pound and lead to its collapse.) Statements by George Osborne that there may be a run on the pound are highly irresponsible and can become self fulfilling prophecies. Our politicians must close ranks as they would in a time of war.
If we believe enough in the soaring rhetoric of our politicians such that they can instill hope; a 'rational exuberance' if you like to counterbalnce 'the irrational
exuberance' that has driven us into this wilderness.
If the media can check their cynicism without comprimising their judgement and 'act as men' in seeing their role as leaders too in this battle as guardians of our morale
If we do not neglect the poor;an action which so often leads to revolution and war,
Then indeed as in in the words of Kipling in his great poem 'If' ,the earth can be ours 'and everything that's in it.'

World looks to clunking fist to tame invisible hand

With Gordon Brown's political fortunes fluctuating with the same speed as the markets the Prime Minister may have just had his 'finest hour' following the
US and the European Union deciding to follow his lead in investing in domestic
banks to ease the global liquidity crisis.Praise has even been forthcoming from
the new Noble Prize recipient for economics.Rightfully emboldened Brown conveniently
bypassed PMQs to attend the European Summit to suggest even bolder moves to come up
with a new Bretton Woods for the 21st century.Indeed such global economic agreements
need updating and now may just be the perfect time to implement such changes.This is Gordon Brown at his best a man who understands the economics and has the international clout to implement policy.It is sad that this Brown never emerged as he had so promised in the realm of third world poverty alleviation.One could argue that when thirty thousand children dying every day in third world countries from preventable diseases is not seen as a signal to correct the status quo capitalist system and its self serving instutions such as the IMF and the World Bank-then other massive indicators albeit less moral were bound to be ignored.Cruel irony now that the Fed is now forced into nationalization schemes which are the exact opposite
of what they have been forcing on the most deprived countries.
However in this fast changing world finest hour literally could mean a few days.
Gordon Brown's real test will be to see if he can use this momentum to spearhead changes to the world economic institutions in a way which is more democratic and which addresses the needs of the third world.Furthermore he has the added task of mollifying the oncoming recession in the UK in such a way as to buy him electoral success.

As The Rich Feel The Pinch The Poor Feel The Punch

Having repented of the 10p tax debacle Gordon Brown felt,perhaps for the first time in his political career, that the situation was bad enough that he should apologize. Lagging 20 odd points behind the Tories it was time for the American
style personalization of this once great Goliath of British politics. Threatened
by two seamingling annointed David's at the same time (Cameron & Miliband) it was fitting that he should try to kill two bird's with one stone using the soundbyte
'It is no time for a novice'. But this PM who has managed to survive what can only
be describe as a political stoning faces an avalanche of problems to come. Firstly
as a Labour PM he needs to politically justify the bailing out of some of our richest
institutions using taxpayer's money at a time when the gap between rich and poor
in this country has never been greater. Make no mistake this bailout is an economic necessity but if it fails (and much may depend on the speed at which it is implemented both here and in the USA) Labour will cruise to the much forecasted drubbing at the next election. If it succeeds one of two things can happen. Either Brown is credited with being the strong hand that arrested the wonderings of an increasing errant invisible hand of capitlism or people may feel they are rich enough to afford change in the guise of a Tory Government. But the problems don't stop there. This born-again Brown's moral failures on abortion and failing the poorest (in the UK and abroad) has led to the resignation of Ruth Kelly (a staunch Catholic) which has already dented his post conference bounce.
If he wants to borrow from McCain's campaign in
playing the experience card against George Osborne and David Cameron then he needs
to remember that John McCain has coupled that strategy with obtaining the high moral ground. To restore the latter he needs to stop passing the buck when it comes to oil prices. It is no good throwing your hands up in the air and describing it as an exogenous shock to UK economic system when in fact you were part of a government that has paralysed the oil producing capacity of the world's second biggest oil exporter.Furthermore please stop insulting our intelligence by pretending that the PM
can somehow affect the price of oil with a trip to Saudi Arabia. The truth is that the emergence of oil hungry China and India has not happened overnight and should have been adequately accounted for in terms of purchasing reserves.
Furthermore let us not dictate to other countries what they should do with their civilian nuclear programs while we have just sold our's to the French. The French are not to be trusted with our national security as it was they who sold nuclear technology to the Israeli army and started this nuclear standoff in the Middle-East.
But not all is doom and gloom for the Labour Party. If I recall correctly the conservative party were what seemed then an insurmountable 10 points behind Labour this time last year before the Tories turned it around in conference season. My hope is that New Brown if not New Labour delivers on the slogan borrowed from the Obama campaign-Change we can believe in!

G8 Policies Will Do To The 3rd world What Mugabe Has Done To Zimbabwe

So Gordon Brown decided to be a Blair to George Bush in return for a US policy which would be tough on Mugabe and give Brown some sort of foreign policy victory.
One caricaturist portrayed Brown as a lapdog where Bush is seen to be commenting
'this doggy even better than the last one'.One would have thought that it was not ideal timing to give a lecture to the British Public on our 'buy one get one free'
culture of waste.A message that was made all the more farcical once it was revealed that this years G8 summit had cost the hosts £500 million.A figure incidentally which
is greater than the amount Japan (the world's second largest economy) is increasing it's aid by to the world's poorest countries.So little was achieved in this summit
in terms of addressing the issues surrounding our current global environmental and food crisis that analysts have been left with very little to comment on.One thing
the majority of g8 commentators can agree on is that the failure to meet Gleneagles
summit pledges on aid and debt relief will lead to millions of deaths through malnutrition, starvation and disease.
The reason why this reflects so negatively on Gordon Brown is that, Global Poverty, is his Terra Firma.It is the one area where he has pitched himself to be
better than the rest and a potential source of influence on less willing countries.
As it turns out his influence,much like his faltering resolve in the face of global recession,was and is as weak as the will of the lame and by in large domestically weak leaders of the G8.
Brown thought that all these failings could be masked if he could just be seen to be tackling the Zimbabwe situation.However he got royally duped by the Russians
who are incidentally not too pleased that the British legal system is being used to
implicate their president (in all but name) Vladimir Putin.So having given positive signals at the G8 and for a brief instance allowing Gordon to be every bit the statesman that he has for 10 years aspired to be, they pulled the rug from under his feet by vetoing further UN action against Mugabe at the security council.The Russians feel with some justification that given the dropping of charges
against the Saudis in The AL Yamama Bribery scandal, which has made a mockery of the whole British Legal system, the British government can no longer pick and choose where they decide to turn a blind eye for political expediency.

Miliband's ambitions unmasked as Labour gets Crewed

David Miliband could not hide his glee as an audience member on Question Time suggested that Labour may be rescued if he were to take over from Gordon Brown.
why anyone would think that this pale,robotic product of the new labour machine
could benefit the Left or the Labour party is beyond me.the polls have consistently shown that it has been Brown's mismanagement as PM and not Tory strategy that has caused the change in Tory fortunes.it seems that all the qualities that made Gordon
a good chancellor have conspired against him as Prime Minister.Take the 42 day detention for example.Brown would have used classic Game Theory to adopt his position.He thought he had created a win/win scenario for himself in which whatever way the vote went he would have personally looked tough on crime.Factor in the political element with the disastrous loss in Crewe and Nantwich and we are left with a sorry looking politician desperately looking for a win to reassert his authority.it's sad that in this process,the fundamental goalposts of liberty are having to be moved to score an own goal.Having got himself into a mess Brown has
reverted to his now all too familiar prevarication mode.Cruel irony then, that his latest attempt to deflect attention by focusing on knife crime should come at a time when the knives are out for him.

Four Legs Good Two Legs Bad....

This was the first rule of the revolutionaries that kicked out the tory farmer suppressing the workers in Orwell's Animal Farm.As in the political allegory for all socialist revolutionary movements the more clever workers soon became the oppressors
of the the working class.They soon begin to change their original ideals to benefit themselves;the new elite.You don't have to be a political theorist to see how this applies to the New Labour movement, with the Daily Mail courting Gordon Brown,actually trying to pass a budget that literally took from the poor and redistributed wealth to the rich.Somewhere down the line The fundamental Labour principle of protecting the most needy and vulnerable in our society has been forgotten.this took a macabre twist in the rushing through of the human embryo and fertilisation bill.Despite the demand from many MP's for more time to think about the implications of the human-animal hybrid embryos-this was denied.the most vulnerable in our society,the unborn,will continue to be allowed to be murdered-legally.The Conservative MP who tabled the motion for the reduction of time in the upper limit for abortions rightfully asserted that the womb is the most dangerous place in Britain for a child to be.The motion to not insist that the father is placed
on the birth certificate is nothing short of institutional bastardization of a nation.thankyou Gordon Brown,no doubt the working people of Crewe and Nantwich will let their feelings be known in today's by-election.

Brown terminates his Christian Vote

There is 3D evidence that babies feel pain and gruesome stories from medics of what it is actually like to pull a 24 week baby out of a mother's womb and kill it – and yet still Gordon Brown, refused to support a reduction in the age limit of abortions and now gloats over the failure of the amendment to bring the limit down. Why? Because he is a 1970's socialist and the absolute mantra for a committed left-winger on the issue of abortion in that supposedly radical but sad decade was that a woman had an absolute right over what happened to their own bodies,as well as the other individual within their womb. So whatever evidence comes in front of Gordon Brown and his secular colleagues, they cannot bring themselves to demolish an icon that inspired them in the days of their youth.
The sad irony of all this is that while Gordon Brown's first specialist subject was History, he can not see the larger historical forces working on him. He is simply being swept along by all the half baked ideals that filled smoked filled Junior Common Rooms in the Seventies. Those ideals dreamed of creating a fairer world, but just as the early Christian Socialism of Keir Hardie later got enmeshed with atheistic Marxism, so too the idealism of the left in the Sixties married itself heart and soul to a strident anti establishment secularism that had no room for Christianity. This was because Christianity, as caricatured in simplistic films like 'If', was perceived to be part and parcel of a hypocritical establishment that according to the wise young men of the universities had brought about the havoc of two world wars and the seemingly appalling gap between rich and poor. Capitalism and religion belonged together, so in the new utopia planned by Gordon Brown and his fellow socialists, religion would have to take a back seat. A part of the perceived oppressiveness of Christianity was against women. It was a paternalistic faith, wanting to keep the woman at home and inferior to men. And so chorused along by the hedonistic voices of the time. the right for a woman to an abortion became a part of the creed for all those who wanted to remove this terrible Christian establishment.
Very conveniently for these young men their campaign against oppressive Christianity meant they could also attack Christian teaching on sex. The left-winger was very concerned by the poor – and would patronisingly pat the church on the back for its record of aid – but he had no time at all for the church's teaching that casual sex was wrong. Back in history honest sinners have enjoyed sex without commitment, but have known it wasn't very honourable. But now it was all a part of tearing up the establishment that had caused such apparent oppression. To be sexually prolificand uncommital was to be 'liberal'. And if the lust led to unwanted pregnancies – well it was for the woman to decide, for the foetus belongs to her.
The tragedy in all this is that the post-war reaction against the Christian establishment, though understandable, was completely unjustified. Sure there was hypocrisy, but by and large, it was Christianity that had sustained Britain against the Nazis – indeed Churchill had said it was a matter of fighting for 'Christian civilisation'. And yet Gordon Brown's generation was unable to see that in reality the youth movement of the 1960's was essentially shallow and a part of a natural historical reaction to the war years and instead dressed it all up in pseudo philosophising that has unleashed an unprecedented attack on Christian values.
Gordon Brown was very much a part of all this – both at a public and personal level. Publicly he has never condemned the darker aspects of the Freudian pleasure seeking principle of his generation, nor spoken out for Christian family values in the market place. Instead he has simply parroted the mantras of his age which support mindless sex and tragically killing living babies. Privately he is not the son of the Manse he likes to claim he is. Unlike Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair who were both privately practising Christians, Gordon Brown is by design spiritually ambiguous.
Gordon Brown can perhaps be proud of his economic socialism. He has shifted a certain amount of wealth from the rich to the government and some of that has reached the poor. But there is nothing for him to be proud about tonight as he goes to contemplate his victory over those who wanted to bring the age limit of abortion down. Instead he has shown himself to have never matured from the student mantras that demanded in the name of liberal socialism that men have sex, women have abortions, and babies die. T.Hawksley

Don't Look Now,Gordon Brown Induces Labour's Next Crisis

After having done a U-turn on the 10p debacle it seems Gordon Brown may be moving into another storm of his own making.having watched the lengthy and informed debate
on the human embryo and fertilisation bill in the house of commons two things became
very apparent.firstly parliamentarians are at their best when they are not forced to slavishly tow the party line as is usually the case on matters of conscience. secondly most speakers agreed that the bill needed much more time.after all,there are four seperate items that have to be voted on.Hybrid embryos(mixing human and animal genetic material),saviour siblings(allowing couples to choose embryos that may best develop to help a sick elder sibling)The right to omit the genetic father's name from the birth certificate (in cases where there is a sperm donor)and finally dropping the legal abortion cut off date from the current 24 weeks to 21 weeks.controversially Gordon Brown has allowed a free vote on 3 out 4 of these measures.the exception being the reduction of 24 week late abortion threshhold.You can see from graphic photos on this website that at 24 weeks the child is not a 'clump of cells' but a near fully formed baby.It should be noted that the oppositon benches have allowed a free vote on all sections of the bill.Given that there have been babies who have survived at 21 weeks from a moral perspective this is nothing short of infanticide.It also continues the ridiculous scenario where doctors in one part of a hospital may be trying to save a baby of the same age as one being aborted in another part of the same hospital.Morally this is reprehensible but politically it shows one of Gordon Brown's fundamental flaws.namely his natural knack to isolate pockets of the electorate with the very ease with which his predecessor used to win them over.

World Food Riots....oh and Boris wins London!

When commodities are so scarce Labour can't afford to have egg on it's face.
Brown must shoulder some of the blame for labour's mauling in the local elections.what started as a cheap jibe by the opposition about his dithering
has become a political reality.this reality was magnified by his disastrous
trip to america where he publicly declared that the world owes George Bush
a great debt.A quite phenomenal U-turn on his original frostiness towards
a man who has plunged his country and the planet into great turmoil.a billion of the worlds poorest people live on less than a dollar a day.they typically spend 70%
of that dollar on food;so a doubling of food prices means starvation for the worlds's very poorest,hence the unrest.So a more accurate account of events would say that the world has been thrown further into indebtedness as a result of Bush's policies.On the domestic front people are also beginning to feel the pinch as the cost of living has spiralled out of control.naturally this has been taken out on the goverment at a time when they have so lost their moral compass that they are taking money out of the pockets of the poor in this country to subsidise headline grabbing tax cuts.Brown says he will listen but you can tell by his demeanour that he'd rather not.And it is this demeanour ,what with the faked smiles and mistimed over-politicking that has cost Labour dear.Gordon Brown's failure to grasp the nettle on matters such as world poverty despite all his grandstanding on the issue has eaten into what was perceived as his core strength;substance.the world bank recently announced that the fight against poverty has been set back by as much as seven years.
That's probably an understatement and given that Brown has been trying to the tackle this matter for over ten years it has left him looking very incompetent.coupled with a poor PR team that has failed to reign in in his obsession with courting the right at the expense of his core base the UK could be heading for further misery in the shape of a Tory Government.The only silver lining for Labour is that they may be outdone in the sphere of incompetence by Boris Johnson ,the only manifestation
of Tory power since the conservatives were thrown out in 1997.

From Conviction Politics To Convicting politicians!

It seems the culture of greed is so endemic amongst MPs on all sides of the house that they will do anything to stop the details of their expense accounts coming out.
Tonight, after a tribunal had agreed that the expense accounts of some of the more prominent MPs should be made public,they are further using taxpayers money to appeal the decision.Even the congenial speaker of the house has been caught up in this scandal.Any dissenting voices have been roundly booed.the mighty insult that is added to an already injured electorate is that we are talking about details of out-of-pocket expenses for their SECOND homes.There must be an ex-machina system whereby
MPs don't get to vote on their own salaries and don't get to decide their own punishments when rules have been broken.the police and courts must get involved to dole out fitting punishment for those who have grossly misused taxpayers money.the citizen's
equivalent of this crime is fiddling our taxes and i can't imagine that the Inland revenue would let any one of us get away with mild censure.