Fitaloon at MicroShaft

Michael Gove gavee a tremendous speech today exposing the corruption that is now at the heart of Brown’s Labour Party. I’ll just highlight a couple of pieces and leave you to read the rest.

First Gove on what has become of Brown’s Labour party:

Under Gordon Brown, Labour has retreated into its traditional comfort zones, ditching the most modernising aspects of the Blair years and going back to many of the failed dogmas the 1970s and 1980s.

The spirit of Seventies socialist nostalgia has re-captured the Labour Party, and it can be found in all those key areas that Blair first recognised had to change.

First, the issues Labour speak about.

Class warfare has not only been resurrected; it has been elevated to holy principle, used in every possible circumstance including, most famously, in vicious, aggressive and direct attacks from a Prime Minister who purports to govern in the national interest.

You can’t help but listen to Labour Ministers speak today and get the impression they feel like men and women set free to campaign in a way they feared had gone out of fashion – but are delighted to find is now all the rage.

Toff-bashing, the politics of envy, an all out assault on aspiration and a war on anyone getting above themselves.

We can now see that the Labour campaign in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election was not an aberration: it was a prototype.

Vintage Labour is back. Deep Red is the New Black.

In place of Tony Blair’s self-consciously unifying rhetoric, the politics of the dividing line is everywhere deployed. Tony Blair wanted the Labour Party to be the political arm not of the trade union movement but of the British people as a whole. But now Labour has become once more the party of division – them and us, partisans and enemies, strikers and bosses.

From such a divisive agenda, so policies naturally flow.

Increasing the top-rate of tax. Cutting pension relief. Raising national insurance contributions on middle income earners. Imposing higher costs on businesses. Freezing the inheritance tax threshold.

So Labour is today as Labour was just a few short decades ago: a movement against aspiration, against enterprise, against anyone who dares to make a better life for themselves or pass something on to their children.

Second we have Gove on the “Forces from Hell” that is Charlie Whelan, a man sent from the Labour Party in disgrace by Blair, bur resurrected by the inept Brown:

And there is, I believe, no better demonstration of this usurpation than the return of Charlie Whelan to the heart of Labour operations.

His indiscretions are well-documented, but for those whose memories do not serve them, let me give a brief potted history of Mr. Whelan.

Like many socialists, he began life as a boarding school-educated middle class lad, in his case from Surrey, before reinventing himself as a trade union official and becoming Gordon Brown’s official spokesman and unofficial henchman in 1992.

With Gordon Brown installed as Chancellor, he started to aggressively promote his boss’s interests while poisonously undermining his enemies – including Tony Blair but also others like Harriet Harman, Frank Field, Robin Cook and Mo Mowlam.

Famed for his obscenity-laden briefings delivered in Westminster pubs, Tony Blair expelled Whelan from his position at Gordon Brown’s side in 1999 after he destabilised the whole Government by bringing down Peter Mandelson.

For a period, Mr Whelan retreated to Scotland and appeared to have mended his ways. Perhaps unsurprisingly this period of internal exile co-incided with Labour’s period of greatest reforming momentum.

But then, just as Gordon Brown staked his claim to the Labour party leadership, Mr Whelan re-surfaced again in 2007, this time as political director of Unite.

From this fairly innocuous sounding position, he managed to get himself copied into Damian McBride’s smear emails, be accused of bullying three members of his staff and brief against Alistair Darling at a press launch.

I would never go as far as calling Charlie Whelan an ‘aggressive hooligan’, ‘serial killer’ or ‘killing machine’, – but then, civil servants and senior Labour figures have already said that.

I would not suggest he was a force from hell – but then, Alistair Darling has described him as that.

And I wouldn’t ever imply that he was ‘economical with the truth’ – but then, he himself had admitted that.

Now, you would have thought Prime Ministers with a moral compass, who “never engage in divisive and partisan politics“, who stand on the steps of Downing Street promising to “reach out beyond narrow party interest” would give figures like Charlie Whelan a particularly wide berth.

Unfortunately not, because today, Mr. Whelan is not just political director at Unite, he is working in Downing Street, masterminding Labour’s election campaign.

Charlie Whelan has thrown the full financial and organisational weight of Unite behind the Labour Party’s attempts to get re-elected, co-ordinating a £5 million marginal seats campaign targeting 100,000 potential Labour voters.

Charlie Whelan has set up a phone bank, held campaigning events for Labour MPs, launched a website and provided over 200 campaign officials in key seats.

But his influence stretches far beyond campaign strategy to devising official government policy.

Charlie Whelan’s distinctive fingerprints can be detected all over Labour’s recent lurch to the left in key policy areas.

This is what we now have to expect from Britain under Brown’s corrupt Labour Party, read more about the new Militant Tendency, Unite and Charlie Whelan here.

The Conservative Party | News | Speeches | Michael Gove: Charlie Whelan’s new militant tendency.