Gordon Brown – Page 10

Fire and Rain

Published on July 2, 2007

More devastating than any carbomb

I haven’t blogged over the past weekend because, as have most other Britons, I’ve been following the news about the attempted bombings in London and the incendiary attack on Glasgow airport. From a media junkie’s perspective alone it was an event of note – the photos, posted almost as it was happening, were incredible. And it made a change from the endless rain and floods.

But setting sheer news value aside for the moment I’m sure I can’t be the only one whose first reaction was “How very convenient for Gordon Brown – bloody typical Labour PR stunt, an ‘attack’ in his first week so he can act the calm, resolute leader.” In the light of so many scandals bubbling under, these latest outrages seems all too horribly convenient. Or something very like that.

Two remarkable things happened in the last two days within half a mile of each other, at either end of Piccadilly. One, the car bomb, you have probably heard of. The second you probably haven’t.

This is a straight reproduction of a small article from The Metro newspaper, Friday June 29, 2007
“Mossad Spy” Found Dead

An Egyptian financier accused of spying for Israel has been found dead outside his London home in mysterious circumstances. Ashraf Marwan was alleged to have worked for Israeli intelligence agency Mossad during the 1973 Yom Kippur war with Egypt and Syria. He was accused of tipping Israel off about the war. Police said “He appears to have fallen from a balcony. The death is being treated as unexplained.” The 62 year old son-in-law of former Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser was found on Wednesday in St James’s, Central London.

The fact that these two incidents are less than ten minutes walk apart does not make them connected. They may or may not be. But I note this, and the list above, to help those who have difficulty imagining that there is any need to consider any possibility other than Islamic terrorism to explain the apparent Haymarket car bomb. Astonishing things do happen in London.
More…

Even the fact that there were (mercifully) no fataiities seems to support conspiracy, such are the depths of cynicism to which New Labour has brought us, with its exaggerations, lies and ridiculous security theatre.

So I fully expected the usual flurry of hyperbolic government press releases and a rash of pointless security crackdowns – No cars within 5 miles of an airport! Exclusion zones around London nightclubs! Round up the usual suspects!- but surprisingly. it hasn’t happened, although the tabloids have been doing their best to whip up public panic. On the whole the government’s response has been unexpectedly rational.So my initial reaction was tempered somewhat by the lack of hoohah.

But now I just don’t know what to think; the pendulum is swinging wildly as new facts emerge.

Peiple have been arrested already, which is good, well done police – but isn’t that speed of arrest in itself suspicious? Then it turns out the arrestees are not British and several are on the run – one is a middle-eastern doctor – and the pendulum swings the other way.

Could this be Saudi money funding terror plots as payback for BAE? Who knows? The policing of terrorism is an area where truth has historically been a shifting thing, construed according to the political expediency of the moment. Consider Lockerbie, for instance.

I will give the new Home Secretary Jacqui Smith credit, though and not just because she’s female. She has managed to come over as calm and competent in stark contrast to her predecessor John Reid, who took trouble to be as threatening and unpleasant in demeanour as possible to mask his essential incompetence and weakness.

(But if you think she’s a real change, don’t – as Chief Labour whip, Smith has been responsible for enforcing MP’s compliance in voting for all Blair’s plans. When it comes to Iraq, she’s up to it in her neck, just like her new boss.)

I just don’t know what those attacks were all about, and neither does anyone else except those involved. Conspiracy or actual attack? Does it really matter? It’s all distraction. It’s the effect that aimed at that’s important, whoever’s responsible, and the anticipated response to the attacks was fear. So I am glad to see that people don’t seem to be giving into it, despite ridiculous headlines like ‘Britain Under Seige’ from rightwing redtops like the Daily Mail.

I mean bloody hell, we’re the generation that grew up under the constant threat of nuclear annihilation and IRA violence, when there was a bomb a week and you couldn’t go to a city centre pub without fear of immolation, when planes were regularly hijacked and an Olympic team was massacred. Remember the coach full of military families blown up on the motorway? The IRA, ETA. Red Brigade, Fatah – those were household names. Oh, we took precautions: remember when the streets became a public rubbish dump when all the bins were sealed after Bishopsgate to stop bombs being hidden in them? But life went on. This is nothing. We will not succumb to US-style pissypants crybabyism.

Gordion Brown’s certainly been trying to make the most of it: you could see him yesterday being given the solemn-faced, dramatically-lit interview by Andrew Marr, heavily powdered to hide his 5 o’ clock shadow, three-quarter-posed for the camera so as to look statesmanlike, jowls wobbling with suppressed ’emotion’, doing his best to come over as the solid rock of sanity in a crisis. (Haha. Ahahhahahahaha.)

When I see him do that, the pendulum swngs back towards conspiracy again. But then I remind myself, these attacks are nothings. They’re mere squibs. Whoever’s responsible for this latest bit of terrorist agitprop, a few mad individuals or a grand organised conspiracy, it really doesn’t matter. We need to treat the ‘war on terror’ as the sideshow it is. We’ve got a real threat facing us and it’s bigger than any government plot or terrorist outrage.

The UK in 2050, projected

Europe

To fly from the UK to Italy last week was like crossing continents: Britain’s cold rain gave way to suffocating heat and a ferocious scirocco, the hot Saharan wind, in Sicily. The Fiat car plant was closed after employees refused to work in the heat. Fires were burning in southern Italy, with Calabria (24 blazes) and Puglia (22) worst affected. In Greece, seven people have died. Firefighters and soldiers are battling a fire which has destroyed much of Mt Arnitha National Park, and threatens Athens. Peter Popham

Australia

From the worst drought in a century to the worst floods in decades, Australians are wondering what will come next. Severe storms have battered the east coast, causing major flooding in New South Wales. In the low-lying Gippsland region of Victoria, hundreds of people had to abandon homes and businesses at the weekend after rivers burst their banks. Helicopters rescued residents as floods engulfed houses, barns and paddocks, leaving cattle stranded. Floods have also hit the Newcastle area, north of Sydney, leaving nine people dead. Another attempt is being made to refloat the Pasha Bulker, a coal freighter swept on to a sandbank just off a Newcastle beach three weeks ago.Kathy Marks

Americas

The first days of summer in the United States have seen fire and water combine with devastating effect. Wildfires around Lake Tahoe, California, have consumed more than 250 homes. Fire chiefs predict that the week-old fire should finally be brought under control by tomorrow. Boston broke high temperature records on Wednesday while black-outs in a sweltering New York City stranded a quarter of a million commuters. Meanwhile Texas and Oklahoma, until recently struggling with drought, have been hit with record rains and widespread flooding. Storms in the southern plains left 11 people dead.David Usborne

[…]

The world over, people are getting the message that the planet is ailing. Results last week from an unprecedented poll in 46 countries by the US-based Pew Research Centre showed environmental degradation is the number one concern of people around the world, eclipsing worry even about nuclear attacks, ethnic rivalries or Aids.

“It’s going to get worse before it gets better,” says David Masur, director of PennEnvironment, an environmental advocacy group in Pennsylvania. “We’re not even at the tipping point yet, in terms of the worst of the worst.”

More…

British people have had a taste of the real danger themselves this past week and they don’t like it. About 27,000 homes and 5,000 businesses have been affected by flooding and storms with insurers estimating the cost at over a billion pounds.

It’s gradually sinking in (if you’ll excuse the pun) that we’ve got much more imminent threats to worry about than car-bombing.

Comedy Double: So, Farewell, Then…

Published on June 29, 2007

What else could today’s comedy double be, but a selection of Tony Blair’s YouTube greatest hits?

Blair was the first boomer PM we’ve had but what he really wanted to be… was a rock star:

Blair has been defined by the people around him as much as anything, there’s Cherie the scouse scrounger for a start, with her own unfortunate taste in friends:

Oh Cherie.

And it seems some of her friends are really, really unfortunate – dodginess personified in fact, like Alan B’stard (NSFW):

Then there’s that “frenemy” thing he’s had got going on with Gordon Brown. Little Britain sums up the roiling depths of green-eyed envy behind Gordon’s Easter Islandesque visage:

What about John Prescott, AKA Prezza, AKA 2 Shags, AKA the Deputy PM? He was with Blair every step of the way, making no sense whatsoever:

But then, then there was that fateful day and that fateful meeting and the tragic, doomed relationship that followed. It was shock and awe, a folie a deux, a coup de foudre, many coups de lots of foudre in fact – but it could’ve been so, so beautiful:

Many wondered what it was they talked about when they were together in private. Now you know – here’s some fly-on-the-wall video from the short-lived comedy series Doubletake:

But why, oh why, oh why did he invade Iraq? Was it just for love? John Culshaw explains on behalf of the PM at a special edition of PMQ’s:

By now it was all going horribly wrong and the press were asking even more awkward questions. Bush & Blair were forced hold a joint press conference on Iraq, courtesy of Dead Ringers:

Georgies’ advice to Tone? Tell ’em “It wasn’t me”. Why not? Worked for him.

That didn’t work though and by then the electorate was getting restless and wanted him gone. Or so you’d’ve thought – but bugger me if he didn’t go and win another election. How very odd!

Electorally victorious Blair may have been, but Iraq’s was still a clusterfuck and then there was the sleaze and the cash for honours scandal at home, and by this the public was not best pleased:

Pressure from the media , pressure from the electorate, pressure from El Gordo – should he stay or should he go?

Reports said he was descending into madness and was seeing ghosts:

But he kept telling us things could only get better. Via Don’t Watch That, Watch This:

But it wasn’t getting better, oh no. Time Trumpet documents the depths to which Blair’s popularity had sunk:

Finally, finally – he resigns. according to Armando Ianucci a bottle of amaretto is mysteriously involved:

His resignation speech was a doozy. Or at least this resignation speech is:

At last, he’s gone and here’s a final goodbye, from Bloggerheads:

and a response to Cherie’s parting comments to the media at the door of No. 10 – “We won’t miss you”:

But we can’t let Mr. Tony Blair go until we’ve said thankyou. So thankyou, thankyou, thankyou Tony Blair – you’re still super!

Bonus clips:

Now we have a new PM. Hello, I’m ~~Frank Zappa~~ Gordon Brown!

But will Brown be a safe pair of hands? Bremner Bird & Fortune put the new PM in a reasonably-priced car to try and find out:

What will satire be like under Brown? The ‘Gordon Is A Moron” vids have already started:

Not to mention the ‘Golden Brown” filks:

Not sure the satirists have quite got the measure of the man yet. But fear not! The Beloved leader has not died, he’s just been transmogrified:

So if the Gordon Brown thing doesn’t work out, we can have a Timelord as PM. Sorted. Fantastic.

A Feeble Excuse

Published on June 28, 2007

I need to be away from the pc today because I hurt ( wasn’t feeling well, fell asleep on the sofa, woke up at 4.30am and can hardly move my neck now) so instead of a test pattern, here are some pictures of our cats.

Hector poised for Teletubby time:

Mine, all mine, mwahaha.

Dinner. Now. I said now, puny human!

And just as a teaser, one very ugly cat from the pictures folder, which is stuffed with them. . I’ll post lots more tomorow.

On the political front, US politics and blogs are in danger of disappearing up their own arses in a flurry of domestic wrongdoing and accusations; the rest of the world has ceased to exist for them, and the UK media too, who are falling all over themselves to suck up to Brown and his coterie.

Expect a Brown cabinet by the end of the day: I see ~~Pitt The Very Very Younger~~ David Milliband has already got Foreign Secretary. Yay, foreign policy by MySpace. What larks.

Peter Hain has got DWP, so expect fake tan to be allowed as a disregarded expense for benefits, and Alan Johnston, who left school with no qualifications, has got Health. The doctors’ll love that. All the Blair babes have upped sticks and left, leaving Brown with a bunch of blokes.

Plus ca change.

New Neighbours To Blair- Get Off My Lawn, You Oik!

Published on June 26, 20071 Comment

It seems the Blairs’ new neighbours in Connaught Square are not best pleased with their pending arrival and have got up a petition against them. Here’s some of the Blairs’ neighbours in full fighting fig:

Even though the neighbours are loathsome snobbish hunt-supporting buggers (see above) – can you blame them?

I wouldn’t want the Blairs on my street either: I’d prefer not to be arrested for giving into the perfectly natural impulse to punch one of the elder Blairs in the face should we run into each other on our way to the corner shop for milk and a paper.

Neither would I be happy about my whole street becoming the No 2 world terrorist target after the White House.

But what the Blair’s posh neighbours (who include way-too-old for winsome-rich-girl yoof tv presenter, Claudia Winkelman) are bothered about isn’t annihilation by suicide bomb or anthrax letter, it’s the sheer bloody inconvenience, darling.

The Independent:

:There goes the neighbourhood: ‘The Blairs ought not to be living here…’

[…]

What has alarmed the residents of the square is the extraordinary precautions underway to ensure that the former prime minister and his wife are protected from anyone who may be contemplating revenge for the war in Iraq or over some other grievance.

If the Blairs are really that much at risk, the neighbours say, someone should tell them for their own sake that it is not a good idea to be living in a crowded part of central London. On the other hand, if the risk is low, life in Connaught Square is being disrupted for no good reason. A petition has been passed around the Square pleading for help from Westminster Council. It says: “It has been suggested that to protect the Blairs it may be necessary to prevent vehicles and unauthorised pedestrians entering the west side of the Square, run part of the Square into a gated community, policed by armed guards, prune or cut down some of our magnificent old plane trees [and] have a police helicopter hovering above the Square.”

“It has been suggested that to protect the Blairs it may be necessary to prevent vehicles and unauthorised pedestrians entering the west side of the Square, run part of the Square into a gated community, policed by armed guards, prune or cut down some of our magnificent old plane trees [and] have a police helicopter hovering above the Square.”

Oh dear. They’re going to cut down a tree. In a historic square, in central London. They didn’t want to do that…

But really at the heart of this petition is distaste and a massive amount of snobbery.

Who wants to live near to someone like the vainglorious, lying jumped-up Blair and his horrible greedy wife with their pretensions and their overweening arrogance and self-importance? And they’re just so bloody middle class, sweetie. I doubt that the pro-hunting types who attended to the Connaught Square Squirrel Hunt Ball will be popping round to Tony and Cherie’s for sherry and little cheesy things.Somehow I can’t see an invitation to this year’s event plopping onto the anti-hunting Blairs’ new doormat either.

This all raises an interesting and potentially very entertaining possibility. Once the local authority’s bureaucratic machine starts to grind into action (and you can bet it’ll grind extra-slow for the Blairs after tomorrow) this dispute could take months, years even, to resolve, especially if the planning department gets involved. The Blairs are staying at Chequers, the country house allotted to prime ministers, at some public expense until they can move in.

That was kind of Gordon Brown, though I wonder how kind he’ll be feeling when he can’t get them out again. I can see the Blairs’ll be the freeloading guests who check in but never leave; they’ve certainly had the practice:

Mr Blair has stubbornly refused to fork out for his own summer holiday, and every year that he has relied on freebies has brought trouble. First, he accepted Geoffrey Robinson’s villa, a favour which feeds the businessman’s sense of injustice at being dismissed from the Government after he placed his wealth at New Labour’s disposal. These resentments are likely to feature heavily in his autobiographical reckoning later this year. Last year, the Prime Minister lighted on Prince Girolamo Strozzi’s renaissance palace. The Prince was miffed to be banished to the stables and Mr Blair ended up fending off completely avoidable criticism.

This year, La Nazione anointed him “the scrounger”. The beach around the house has been sealed off to protect the privacy of the Blairs at play: and then sealed on again to forestall local protest at the inconvenience. Once a public figure has allowed himself to become the target of such easy carping, everything – from a local restaurant which stops serving at 6pm to feed the hungry to the Leaning Tower of Pisa having to open specially so that Mr Blair could enjoy the forgotten sensation of something leaning to the left – becomes a big deal.

It would be nothing to the Blairs, given this record of barefaced freeloading, to just stay on at Chequers on sufferance when they can’t get into Connaught Square. Won’t it be fun if Gordon Brown ends up having to call in the bailiffs to get them out?

Just Because Everything Is Different Doesn’t Mean That Everything Has Changed

Published on June 25, 2007

It’s all change at the top of British government, what with a change of PM and a new deputy Labour party leader and all.

Except it’s not.

Gordon Brown has been the man in the shadows behind every failed Blair neoliberal economic policy of the past ten years and he’s responsible for a British society more unequal and more divided by class and money than ever before:

Wealth held by the top 10% has increased 7% to 54%
Fewer living in poverty than in 1997
Women more likely to live in poverty
People’s lives largely determined by parents’ social class and skin colour
Low voter turnout giving wealthier more political influence

Brown’s deceptively statist yet entirely market-driven theories of economic management are essentially exercises in creative accounting writ large. It’s as though Brown watched a WTO daytime commercials – “Consolidate all your debts! Unlock your country’s equity!” and thought “Aha! A theory of government!”

In order to move liabilities off the current balance sheet and off into the misty future where Labour will no longer be electorally accountable and to satisy WTO and GATT requirements, and to produce sufficient current income to finance Labour’s many current failed policies (not least in Iraq), Gordon Brown has mortgaged, and in some instances plain-out sold, our common property. It’s asset-stripping on a massive scale and the beneficiaries are the private equity companies, who also benefit from a tax regime that allows them to pay less tax than their lowest-paid employees.

A significant tranche of the proceeds of the sell-offs have gone on expensive free-market-ideologue consultants whose big ideas for government include guess what, more sell-offs;

Government spending of almost £2 billion a year on external consultants has been branded “a scandal” after an influential MPs’ committee said contracts often failed to achieve value for money.

In a report, the Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said a better grip on the use of consultants would lead to efficiency gains of more than £500 million a year.

Brown loves him some City advisors: so much so that he’s brought them into actual government, even going so far as to appoint Bill Gates and the boss of Wal-Mart as economic advisors. Gordon Brown’s International Business Advisory Council meet once a year at Downing Street and will advise him on policies to improve the competitiveness of the UK economy. Members include:

Bernard Arnault, Chairman and CEO, LVMH
Lord Browne, Group Chief Executive, BP
Dr Jean-Pierre Garnier, CEO, GlaxoSmithKline
Bill Gates, Chairman and Chief Software Architect, Microsoft Corporation
Sir Ka-shing Li, Chairman of the Board, Hutchison Whampoa Ltd
Sir Terry Leahy, CEO, Tesco
Sir John Rose, CEO, Rolls Royce
Robert Rubin, Director and Chairman of the Executive Committee, Citigroup Inc
Lee Scott, President and CEO, Wal-Mart
Ratan Tata, Chairman, Tata Group
Meg Whitman, President and CEO, eBay
James Wolfensohn, Special Envoy for Disengagement and Former President of
the World Bank

Hardly hardline socialists, are they?

Under Brown the boundaries of the City and the Treasury have become so blurred it’s hard to tell which is which. The private equity industry and the global accounting companies are driving UK economic policy and it’s not to our benefit.

It’s all about moving public service and welfare expenses from one accounting column to another. Blair and Brown both signed up to trade and economic agreements that require it: it’s what Browns baby, the chaotic tax credit scheme, is all about: it moves welfare spending from the heading ‘welfare spending’ and into the ‘tax’ column (it actually counst as a tax ‘cut’) as per WTO agreements agreed with the US and EU. These agreements say, in effect, ‘open up up public services to the free market, cut your welfare spending, cut business taxes. make the populace pay more for services, shrink government and drown it a bathtub’: Gordon says ‘hell yes’.

Because of Brown’s enthusiasm for this kind of Enron accounting and sleight of hand our children and their children will be paying exorbitant sums to private equity companies for decades to come for the use of their own public services, which they and we once owned in common. Not only will our children will be at the mercy of unaccountable private companies for medical care, welfare and so on, the government is selling their very identities: even the data the government’s collecting on individuals, the biometric details, the DNA, our children’s fingerprints, we don’t own that either. All of it’s being shared with those companies too.

Most of Britain’s infrastructure, even our tax offices, hospitals, defence establishments and materiel, has been auctioned off to pay for New Labour’s repressive, incompetent, surveillance and database society. The shortfall in income is taken from those least able to pay: they are indirectly taxed the most, on food and rent and heating and light and children’s clothes and even water…

I could go on and on.

It’s not so much the lying about what Brown says he wants (equality and justice for all and a pony), and what he actually does (feed the rich, starve the poor) that worries me: after all, we’ve lived with that for ten years. What worries me about him is that although he is strongly rumoured to be, on a personal level, a complete and utter bastard, bad-tempered, arrogant, dismissive of those of lesser intellect, conniving, underhand and prone to go into monumental sulks when thwarted, the media is already helping the Brown spin machine find it’s shaky feet, by colluding in the construction of a new cuddly persona. Now Brown has power, all those previously dissident voices are shutting up. They’re all Polly Toynbee now.

Already this past weekend we’ve had encomiums to his ‘human side’, pictures artfully cropped or lit to make that sardonic mask of his look a little less creepy and a more little soft-focus and twinkly, and heartwarming human interest fluff about his humble Scots origins and calvinist values. The Scotsman’s “Brown the healer as he sets out to woo Britain” is just one oleaginous example.

We are not fooled though. Brown is a nascent autocrat, a dictator in embryo. Do you think that a single one of those repressive terrorism, police and criminal justice laws– and let’s not forget the scary, scary Civil Contingencies Act, got by without Treasury approval?

Every would-be dictator needs a compliant sidekick, and in new deputy party leader Harriet Harman Brown has his perfect foil. It’s dour and dumber.

Harriet Harman is a type I know well: there’s a Harriet Harman somewhere in the upper middle management level of every local authority. There’s a Harriet Harman on the management board of every medium-sized charity or NGO too.

They left university with mediocre degrees, soft left politics and a taste for self-importance, went into the civil service or local council at junior management level, supposedly because of committment to public service (but in truth because it’s safe and has a safe pension) then they joined the public service union, Unison (despite the fact they’re management not workers) then they proceeded to use the union’s structure, hierarchy and women’s sections to propel their political career upwards, on the way acquiring a partner or spouse who’s handily influential in party circles, either in Westminster or the unions and/or who is related to a famous Labour ‘name’ – which influence they proceed to leverage to maximum political effect, despite their very public espousal of feminism.

Oh, they mean well, most of the Harriet Harmans, but they have never known real life for an instant, having been featherbedded all their lives since getting themselves safely ensconced in the bosom of the Labour bourgeoisie. I doubt she’s been on a bus or gone to Sainsbury’s herself in 20 years or more.

It’s that Labour bourgeoisie that Brown’s likely to bring into government with him. Look for these names to pop up in the news in the coming week:

Ed Balls – Brown’s wormtongue at the Treasury, tipped to be new Chancellor despite being barely able to shave yet

Sue Nye – married to head of the BBC, nuff said

Ed Miliband – brother of David, legacy Labour welfare recipient.

Andrew Brown and John Brown – Gordon Brown’s brothers: one a PR consultant, the other a Channel 4 news producer

Ian Austin – Labour party enforcer. The commissar.

Yvette Cooper– former youngest MP, married to Ed Balls

Colin Currie – hopsital doctor and university friend, Brown’s Lord Falconer

Shriti Vadera – investment banker, involved in many privatisation deals, former Oxfam chair.

Not exactly a Ministry Of All The Talents, is it?

And what about Iraq? What’s Brown planning on doing? Who knows. He certainly doesn’t. There have been no official pronouncements as yet, though Washington is apparently getting a bit jittery on the topic.

We don’t know what Brown is going to do, or who he’s going to bring into government, or even what is his policies, are, except more of same served up the garnished with a few new platitudes. Meet the new boss same as the old, but with added dismality.

UPDATE: The BBC is reporting that, with the appointment by Brown of a general election co-ordinator, that a snap election is in the offing. We’ll see – I think that’s a bit hopeful myself, the Brown bounce isn’t so big it can redeem the Iraq war.

Or maybe, it occurs to me, that since he approached senior Lib Dems to join his cabinet over the weekend that he’s not impressed with Labour’s own homegrown political ‘talent’ and may be hoping for a hung parliament to get the Lib Dems into cabinet that way.

Who knows. No doubt all will become clear in due course. Or not, as the case may be.

UPDATE II: The Grauniad agrees with me on the hung parliament thing:

New parliamentary boundaries may cost Labour a dozen seats. It has 19 MPs with majorities below 1,000, mostly in the south. And asking for a fourth term is always asking a lot. Even with no campaign miscalculations, that is enough to plunge Mr Brown’s 67-seat majority into hung parliament territory, forcing him to phone Sir Ming again.