Gordon Brown – Page 9

75 quid? They could’ve got the same result with Jaffa Cakes…

Published on September 23, 2007

Tory blog Ian Dale’s Diary is alleging that Labour’s consultation process (the epitome of which is to be the laughable ‘citizens jury’) is a complete sham; and worse, that attendees are being paid cash in envelopes for their participation.

£75 for a Consultation? That’ll Do Nicely…

The word “consultation” means different things to different people. To me (and hopefully you) it would mean asking local people what they think of a particualr policy or plan. To New Labour it means something entirely different, as you are about to discover. t’s from the Dr Ray’s Focal Spot blog. In this post, Dr Ray, a hospital consultant describes the consultation process for the closure of a local District General Hospital. Perhaps I shouldn’t be shocked by this, but I am…

Yesterday evening I had an insight into the workings of Nulabours “consultation” process on the planned closure of NHS District General Hospitals and replacement with dumbed down polyclinics.A few weeks ago invitations to attend a public consultation were sent to consultants at our Trust. We were only given one day to reply for the meeting in the near future even though we have to give 6 weeks notice of leave because of “choose and book”. Obviously this meant that most of us could not attend but one consultant did take up the invitation.The location of the meeting was kept secret until three days before the event and when this consultant was eventually told the location and turned up in Birmingham for the “Citizens Jury” it turned out that medical staff were outnumbered 2:1 by laypeople specifically chosen by an agency to attend the event. The media were present and had obviously been invited to publicise the event.

The delegates were split up into groups and each allocated an electronic voting device. A “minder” was allocated to each group.Then the stars of the show arrived: Gordon Brown, Alan Johnson and Ara Darzi.There followed a rapid succession of questions from the podium on which the delegates were asked to vote. The minder was available to suggest the best answer if there was any doubt.Strangely, almost all the votes were 2:1 in favour of Nulabour’s policy. Even the question: “Would you prefer gynaecological surgery to be carried out in your GP practice even if it meant the closure of your DGH facility?” was answered with 2:1 in favour.Following the “consultation” the medical delegates were told to leave but the other 2/3 of the audience were kept back and each given an envelope.

My colleague was intrigued by this and managed to catch one of the “chosen ones” and ask about the contents. Each envelope contained £75 in cash! So now the consultation is over and the results indicate there is overwhelming public and doctor support for closing down the DGHs. I can only say that the way the voting was done makes the “Blue Peter” voting fraud seem like, well, “Blue Peter”. According to the Downing Street website there are nine more of these “consultations” due around the county. Thats an awful lot of people to bribe with taxpayers money, but once they’re done the business of closing the DGHs can start in earnest.

I’d like to think that this will be followed up by Her Magesty’s Press.

I’d like to think so too, but unless Greg Palast gets given the editorship of a broadsheet paper it’s doubtful.

Alhough the potential bribery aspect is a new wrinkle to me, anyone who’s participated in a community consultation exercise at any level during the past ten years will know for themselves that community consultation, while it may be fantastic in theory, is in political practice little more than a tick box exercise where there’s only one box to tick.

I’ve taken part in several consultation exercises, as a service user, an activist and in a professional capacity, and every single one has been a joke where we’ve been deliberately guided toward a predermined goal – though the tea and biscuits werre nice (foil-wrapped chocolate if we were lucky).

Apparently these days you get a bit more than nice china and unlimited gingernuts as an incentive.

It’s crystal-clear to those who’ve had dealings with New Labour that consultation exercises, or whatever the latest euphemism is, are totally empty gestures. The result has already been decided, the facts remain to be fixed around the policy.

Brown’s New Labour get their political way by dishonesty and spin whilst being at the same time political zealots comvinced of their own rectitude, even though evidence says otherwise. To deal with the cognitive dissonance that creates they must have us publicly agree with their policies, even if we don’t.

That’s what consultations are really for, maintaining an image of approving popular democracy, while doing what you want anyway.

Mind you, a consultation contract is a marvellous method of bestowing largesse to political or personal loyalists. Oddly enough they then often miraculously find that the populace is broadly in tune with policy goals. Voila, instant validation, except when it’s not – but then it’s all “the methodology must have been wrong, we need another consultation” . And another fat cheque from the Treasury.

Gordo Uber Alles

Published on August 7, 2007

So, what’s the state of play in UK Politics? Despite death, danger and pestilence all around, everything’s in safe hands, the media tells us.

Good old Gordo, just look at him, chairing his twice-daily crisis committee during the latest foot and mouth crisis. Oooh, isn’t he strong jawed, isn’t he resolute and calm, isn’t he just the very picture of a father of the nation?

So unlike like that odiious simpering Blair…. Crises, what crises? Gordo will save us!

That’s the picture we’re being given anyhow:the British political media would have us believe that their own personal relief at finally being shot of the Blair/Campbell spin machine that they’ve been such slaves to all this time somehow translates into a general wiping-clean of Labour’s political slate. All is forgotten and it’s a bright new day with Uncle Gordo!

Even the Tory press loves him.

But just because there’s been a change at No.10 doesn’t mean this is a new start: it’s the same authoritarian, secretive and incompetent government it always was.

Proof of this comes from Conservative blogger Ian Dale who has kindly fisked most of Brown’s recent “New!” policy statements and his sincere promises to a disaster-hit population and found nearly every one to be a complete sham.

Meanwhile those journalists who were so cowed by Campbell that they forgot how to do their jobs are now so releived to have someone who doesn’t shout in charge that they’re sucking up Brown’s own spin even more obediently than before.

Brown’s image-making is very clever – his voice is slow, measured, almost whispering and every announcement he makes is in that ‘more in sorrow than in anger’ tone, like Daddy dishing out the discipline; but he too relies on it resonating with a particular public archetype of masculinity, just as the laddish and crush-prone Campbell sold Blair’s image of debonair international statesmanship. Campbell must’ve been chuffed to bits when Hugh Grant was cast as PM.

But like Blair’s, Brown’s public image is a facade: look behind the heroic moral posturing and his soothing paternal words and there’s nothing there but mendacity and greed for power.

Nevertheless thanks to a compliant press the spin appears to be working. After all, who is there to oppose it?

As Ian Dales’ post shows the official Opposition has actually got ammunition to use against Brown, but none of it seems to be scoring a direct hit. I doubt it ever will while David Cameron is in charge, either.

Cameron may have been a necessary transitional Tory leader in that he changed the party structure, but he’s well outlived his usefulness now and is dead in the water – he just hasn’t realised it yet. Failed challenger David Davis and former party leader Willam Hague are just giving the Etonian Cameron enough rope to hang himself before swooping in to deliver the coup de grace and take the party back to it’s petty-bourgeois Thatcherite roots..

The Lib Dems’ seemingly unshiftable Ming Campbell, while being a throughly decent and principled man, has about as much oomph as a wet sponge. Saving the return of the bibulous Charles Kennedy there’s no-one with any gumption there at all. At the moment we have effectively no Opposition whatsoever and there is no political means to get an opposing voice heard, except by direct action, but try that and you’ll end up in pokey for terrorism offences. We seem to be turning into a one-party state.

The End For The ASBO, But Still No Sense On Drugs

Published on July 28, 20071 Comment

The amusingly-named Ed Balls, Gordon Brown’s former right-hand man and no Secretary of State for Children, Skills and Families says Antisocial Behaviour Orders have been a failure and appears to be trailing a u-turn in policy.

About bloody time. The ASBO, with drugs, poverty and a rampant consumer culture, has helped create a lost generation in Britain that’s way beyond antisocial and accelerating and no-one seens to care.

No-one knows what is to be done and the default policy is just round em up, stick a label on ’em and write them off forever. What’s resulted is a permanent population of excluded youth who live at the margins and pick off what they can, as the law-abiding, knowing the police are useless, pull up their metaphorical drawbridges against what they imagine is a ravening horde of feral youth.

It’s been way past time for a rethink. Could it be? Could a Brown government be prepared to not only dump the ASBO but to rethink their entire youth justice polcy?

I wish I could be that hopeful.

hen Jacqui Smith and 7 other minsitersd admitted their own dopesmoking youth there was an opportunity for a real public coversation and real change – but the cabinet has had a chance to entirely rethink its drugs policy in a radical way and has flunked it, saying to the nations’ youth ” We smoked dope and that was a youthful indiscretion – but you, you’re a criminal”. It then promptly proposied to reclassify cannabis upwards because it was shown that it might cause a propensity to mental illness in the still- growing brains of young Crispin or Emily and stop them getting into Durham or Bristol..

Well, yes, so does binge-drinking at Rock in August or alcopops round the back of the Aldi but heaven forbid Tesco or Sainsbury’s or Allied Domecq or whoever should stop making money from drink sales. This country’s whole public attitude to intoxicating subtsances and their regulation and use is a sick joke.

The most hypocritical thing of all is that the shadow economy of the whole nation is run on drugs money. The government in effect relies on drugs money to supplement the incomes of unemployed youth and stop them from rioting – why else would it expect a teenager living on their own to live on forty quid a week?

But the money that circulates in the drugs ecoinomy on the street doesn’t xtay there and enrich local businesses or families; in a neat reverse of Reaganesque economic theory the wealth trickles up.

I wonder how many of the neighbours in those posh gated communities in Cheshire or Surrey or wherever, that they’ve retreated to to get away from the crime and the druggies and the chavs, know how many of their neighbours are making money, albeit indirectly, from drugs? How many private schools or lucury car dealers, or estate agents are unwittingly laundering drug money when they accept fees from the new rich?

Drugs are the elephant in the roon when it comes to criime, and youth crime in particular. It’s insane the way British people use drugs in private and condemn them in public, all the while consigning a cohort of its own young to social nothingness for supplying them. Where do they think that twenty quid for a teenth went? Into the building society?

Even more insane is that there is a legal drug that does more damage to more people than any amount of drugs, and which is available 24hrs a day with the government even taking a cut of the proceeds.

Until the government gets to grips with the concept of the use, regulation and yes, taxation of intoxicants of whatever nature this growing divide in society between the young urban and exurban poor and the comfortable suburbans and metropolitans will only become even more marked.

But first Labour has to admit to itself, and the British in general have to admit to themselves, their own complicity in the drugs trade, even if it’s only a toke and a movie on a Saturday night or a couple of E’s at a Labour Party Conference fringe do. That joint came from somewhere, it didn’t just miraculously appear.

The nation as a whole has a substance abuse problem, it’s just that some substances are more illegal than others If we don’t want to become a fearful, locked-down society preyed upon by the armed young urban poor we have to stage our own intervention and work out a sensible decriminalisation, use, treatment and regulation policy that doesn’t turn a cohort of each succeeding generation of children into criminals with nothing to lose.

UPDATE

As if to prove my point….

What Lies Beneath

Published on July 27, 2007

No this isn’t about the horrible floods, except as they’re being used by the Brown government to bury things they really don’t want us to notice.

How very convenient that the papers’re full of strong-jawed resolute Gordon overseeing natural disaster and that the usual attack-dogs, Paxman, Humphreys et al, are all off in Tuscany or Cornwall or fly-fishing in Iceland till the end of August.

Take the Guardian, for example, which couldn’t be giving Brown an easier ride; here’s Jonathan Freedland:

It’s been an intense initiation, but people are listening to Labour again

Brown’s first month, and his carefully signalled priorities, look like a success, despite the unexpectedly tough start

More…

Gordon is sitting pretty with the media right now, which means the Brown regime can get away with being equally as politically corrupt as Blair ever was, but with hardly anyone noticing.

Item one: Brown took a leaf out of the Karl Rove playbook this week and did an info dump the day before Parliament recessed; quite a lot of important announcements were made all at once, not least the least interesting of which is that the chair of the Guardian media group has been appointed to his fourth government post. (Why don’t they just rename it the Brown Guardian and have done?)

None of these announcements can be questioned in parliament because it’s not sitting and as mentioned the parliamentary reporters are away on holiday so by the time parliament returns events will have overtaken any questions anyway.

Nod, nod, wink wink, say no more.

Item two: Leader of the House and Secretary of State Harriet Harman also tried the same trick in the Commons, waiting until the very last moment to try and ourageously push through the appointment of the odious Keith Vaz as chair of the Home Affairs Select committee, the supposedly independent, cross-party parliamentary body which oversees all executive actvity in prisons, terrorism, policing, community cohesion and so on.

It’s hard to overestimate the potential power that the Chair of a truly independent Home Affairs select committe could have to hold a rampant executive to account – so of course Brown seeks to decapitate it by disregarding the constitution and getting one cabinet puppet to interfere in another branch of government and appoint another puppet as committee chair. Simon Carr in the Independent:

{…]

…may we express some post-honeymoon scepticism about the PM’s assertions on the value of an independent Commons as well. He doesn’t believe anything of the sort.

As a result, Harriet Harman had great lumps torn out of her on the floor of the House. There was that, at least.

She had suspended Standing Orders in order to appoint Keith Vaz as the new member of the Home Affairs Select Committee (and, under the whips’ instructions, to be the next chair of it).

It’s fairly clear Harriet knew Vaz was the replacement last Monday, when the appointments committee was due to sit. But as Sir George Young said, and as its chair, Rosemary McKenna, confirmed “there was no government business to conduct so the meeting was cancelled”.

Harriet then springs her surprise motion the day before the House rises for the recess.

Richard Shepherd: “To the casual viewer, this looks like the Government choosing who shall be chairman of the Home Affairs Committee… This looks like executive control over the choices of the Chamber and bypassing the very function of the Committee of Selection. It is outrageous!”

Also, “great discredit” (Simon Hughes), “withdraw the motion” (George Young), “I suppose we have to accept [it] at face value” (Nicholas Winterton), “Will the Leader of the House give way?” (Douglas Hogg, George Young, Richard Shepherd, John Bercow.) “I’m an idiot” (Harriet Harman).

Yes, all right, you’re so pernickety. It’s true that one of those quotations has been fabricated

It was just a matter of timing, she said. She wasn’t in a position to put forward his name on Monday, she said.

She’s not a real QC, you know.

Under Vaz’s leadership, we can speculate that the committee will now come out in favour of 58-day detention without charge and that the body of the acting chairman, David Winnick, will be found swinging under Blackfriars Bridge. This is for the future.

More…

Not only Gordon Brown is trying to put the government in charge of oversight of itself he’s rubbing salt in the wound by appointing the sleazy Keith Vaz, a man with several alleged stains on his character.

In February 2000 the Parliamentary standards watchdog Elizabeth Filkin was requested to investigate allegations of undisclosed payments to Vaz from businessmen in his constituency.[1] The following year, 2001, members of the opposition began to question what role Vaz may have played in helping the billionaire Indian Hinduja brothers – linked with a corruption probe in India – to secure UK passports.

In March 2001, the Filkin report cleared Vaz of nine of the 18 allegations of various financial wrongdoings, but Elizabeth Filkin accused Mr Vaz of blocking her investigation into eight of the allegations. He was also censured for one allegation – that he failed to register two payments worth £450 in total from Sarosh Zaiwalla, a solicitor whom he recommended for an honour several years later.

Mrs Filkin announced in the same month a new inquiry which would focus on whether or not a company connected to Vaz received a donation from a charitable foundation run by the Hinduja brothers. The results of the inquiry were published in 2002 and it was concluded that Vaz had “committed serious breaches of the Code of Conduct and a contempt of the House” and it was recommended that he be suspended from the House of Commons for one month[2].

Keith Vaz was also a director of the company General Mediterranean Holdings’ owned by the Anglo-Iraqi billionaire Nadhmi Auchi, who had in the past hired British politicians Lord David Steel and Lord Norman Lamont as directors. Vaz resigned his post as director when he became Minister for Europe, but it was later discovered that he had remained in contact with Auchi and had made enquiries on his behalf over a French extradition warrant, Auchi even calling Vaz at home to ask the minister for advice.

And this is the man who should have parliamentary oversight of policing?

What lies beneath the superficial veneer of Brown’s strong-jawed manly Scottish probity is the same old corrupt New Labour. He can reverse the gambling bill, take his conspicuously low-key and self-denying holidays in an eco-friendly country cottages in Scotland, he can push his ‘son of the manse’, prudence and probity schtick as much as he likes, but that’s all it is, a veneer; underneath nothing has changed. It’s just another face on the same old Labour sleaze.

UPDATE: To further reinforce my point, I jjust came across this:

NI minimum wage ‘may be reduced’

Mr Brown is believed to be considering reducing the minimum wage in NI
Prime Minister Gordon Brown is considering plans which could see the minimum wage reduced in Northern Ireland, it is believed.

The minimum wage is set at £5.35 across the UK, however, if the plans go ahead it will be reduced in NI, Scotland, Wales and the north east of England.

[My emphasis]

That’s only 10,272 pounds annually for a 50 week, 40 hour week year- before tax. the national average after tax is 22,202.

For comparison’s sake, MP’s salaries are over 60,000 pounds annually (and are about to rise by another 2%, at least) plus allowances of around 85,000 pounds, plus special responsibility allowances and perks for ministers.

Bad Guido, No Biscuit

Published on July 12, 2007

A musical viral mobile phone video of Gordon Brown eating his own snot is doing the rounds at the moment, courtesy Guido Fawkes.

Put http://www.messagespace.co.uk/bogeyman/bogeyman.3gp into your phone or PDA browser, or if online now click here to launch a RealPlayer window.

Looks better on the phone though. If nothing else you’ll be earwormed with Kylie all day.