Fitaloon at MicroShaft

Remember that 200bn Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling spent on Quantative Easing (QE). Well it may be going to the rats if this starts to get worse.

James Kirkup in the Daily Telegraph has this

I am.

Time for a Change

Gilts: the City is openly talking about a buyers’ strike. Be afraid. – Telegraph Blogs.

Was it only two days ago Gordon told us how he was the great reformer of Parliament and his deluded, grandiose plans for reform with the introduction of AV voting. There he was telling us in his speech at the IPPR

He said:

“I believe that the choice before us is clear: Whether we advance towards a new politics, where individuals have more say and more control over their lives or whether – by doing nothing, or by design – we retreat into a discredited old politics, leaving power concentrated in the hands of the old elites.”

The PM said the agenda for a new politics would revolve around two fundamental debates about change:

• How the Government distributes power between individuals,neighbourhoods, regions and the centre; and
• How the Government restores the legitimacy, credibility and effectiveness of parliament, through reform of the unelected House of Lords, a new electoral system for the House of Commons, and a public life that starts to reflect the dynamism and diversity of Britain

So two days later we hear that this was obviously a man deluded as his government were now ratting on a concrete promise on a date for the Commons to vote on the recommendations of the Wright Committee on Reform of the House of Commons.

According to Martin Salter in the article

Time and time again, Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman have stated their commitment to Parliamentary reform as a means, especially following the expenses scandal, of helping restore trust in our political system. But yet again, the business managers and the whips are doing all they can to put the breaks on these urgent reforms by insisting on a bizarre procedural motion that means that the recommendation will fall if a single Member yells “object”. No doubt a suitable stooge can be prevailed upon to oblige them.

Martin, is of course, another Labour MP who is standing down this year.

This is, I think, about the fifth proposal that Gordon has made this week, that has almost instantly turned to nothing. He is either completely delusional or just plain bonkers.

Time for a Change.

Harriet Harman bottles it on parliamentary reform – Telegraph Blogs.

Mike Molloy

Mike Molloy editor of the Daily Mirror has this to say in the Daily Mail

My father cherished his job as a civil servant in the Stationery Office, although he always claimed that government wasted money.

He was a patriotic man, who believed families bound the country together.

As a life-long Labour Party supporter, he was immensely proud when I became editor of the Left-leaning Daily Mirror, a job I held for ten years at a time when the paper was selling four million copies a day.

I was brought up to believe the Labour Party was the best hope for ordinary people to make a better life.

The men I was taught to revere – Clem Attlee, Stafford Cripps, Ernie Bevin and Herbert Morrison – were people of the finest moral values who put their crusade for a fairer society before personal advancement.

For them to have clung to office in the face of error or transgression and allowed people below them to take the blame for the conduct of their departments would have been unthinkable.

Today, the hierarchy of New Labour has no such scruples; they shift and slide like desert sands depending on how the wind blows.

So I can only hope that my ancestors would understand when I vote Conservative at the next election. It was the hardest decision I have ever made.

More in the Daily Mail article

Not only is the former Mirror editor now going to vote Tory but here are a few more items that mean that Labour are screwed for the GE

• The economy is where it was back in 2005 but with Debt doubled and inflation on the march.
• The recession has only ‘ended’ in London. Everywhere else it is stuck-fast with Scotland probably still in recession
• Darling has admitted that there was a lot of capital funding brought forward to Q4 to try and haul us out of recession. Public Sector growth was up 0.2% in Q4 using Quantitative Easing (QE) money so the rest of the economy must have still shrunk.
• Many of the stimulus packages are now coming to an end and there is little money to add to or extend them.
• Th printing presses are now worn out so we have no more QE money left to throw away.
• The world’s largest buyer of bonds characterised UK as a ‘must avoid’.  Bill Gross, who runs the world’s biggest mutual fund warned the British economy was lying on ‘a bed of nitroglycerine’.
• The bad weather in January will have slowed  economic output so much that we are likely to have negative growth in Q1 2010, not quite a recession but as near as dammit.
• Gordon is back in his Bunker behaving like Macavity. This is a sure sign that things are bad.

MIKE MOLLOY: It would break my dad’s heart but I’m voting Tory | Mail Online.

The Guardian has an article by Polly Curtis which I noticed last night but had little time to blog about until now.

According to Polly

Gordon Brown‘s government has become

“utterly dysfunctional”

and needs a major reorganisation to prevent looming spending cuts shackling any future administration, thi is according to the man who represents the most senior civil servants in Whitehall. In a damning critique of the Brown years, Jonathan Baume, head of the FDA union, claimed there was gridlock at the heart of government, with mandarins meeting indecision in Downing Street, ministers who have “given up”, and a culture of “government by announcement”.

“We’ve got to learn from this,” he said. “At the moment No 10 is seen as a blockage. There’s almost a mood where civil servants try to keep No 10 out because you can’t get clear decisions. It’s not sustainable in the longer term. The next government has got to work more clearly, it’s got to take decisions at the centre, because you don’t have that now.

“The dysfunction is partly political and partly organisational. No one is clear how the Treasury, the prime minister’s office and the Cabinet Office actually loop together and come up with a coherent policy initiative. When Gordon Brown became prime minister no clear direction ever emerged from him.” Pressure has grown on the government – and the opposition – to declare how they will achieve the major cuts needed to reduce public debt. Steve Bundred, head of the Audit Commission, warned this week that spending cuts would be the toughest in a lifetime and that it would be “insane” to protect schools and hospitals when they have been most generously funded in recent years.

In the article Baume also goes on to tell how departments have no idea what is going on and how they will be affected by the upcoming cuts. He says there is

“a sense of malaise at the political level. Some ministers have clearly given up the fight and are focusing on what happens after the election. It’s a very strange atmosphere.”

This sound exactly like the the true nature of Gordon Brown. A man who would struggle to run the proverbial whelk stall. Here is a comment that really sums up GordonBrown, It s from a commentator on Political Betting known as EasterRoss. He says

Gordon Brown’s problem has always been that he views himself as a master tactician. Given his background in the Scottish Labour Party, that is easy to understand.

With the exception of Robin Cook, John Smith and Donald Dewar, both much lamented, the average parliamentarian in the Scottish Labour Party is required to have no working brain cells. That is why Tom Harris is so unpopular, possessing more working brain cells than the rest combined. The Scottish Labour Party has traditionally excluded clever people in case they wanted to think for themselves.

Since 1982 Gordon Brown has run the Scottish Labour Party like a private political force and anyone (excluding Dewar and Cook and of course the late John Smith) opposing him found themselves smeared or sidelined very quickly. Surrounded by “yes men” Brown convinced himself that only he knew better than anyone about anything.

Now he finds he cannot manipulate the media or outside world but sadly I do not think he realises it. Brown still thinks he is leading Labour to a resounding victory and a trifle like the Iraq Inquiry offers no threat to his “I saved the world” agenda.

Couldn’t have put it better myself.

This is a remarkable article from a Union leader in the Civil Service and is a real blow to Gordon’s hopes as being seen as the “Saviour” of the UK in the lead up to the election.

Time for a change, time for Gordon to go.

Civil servants’ leader attacks ‘utterly dysfunctional’ government | Politics | The Guardian.

The Times tells us that tomorrow

Mr Cameron will refer to

“the moral failure of Labour’s approach”. He will add: “When parents are rewarded for splitting up, when professionals are told that it is better to follow rules than do what they think is best, when single parents find they take home less for working more, when young people learn that it pays not to get a job, when the kind-hearted are discouraged from doing good in their community — is it any wonder our society is broken?”

Couldn’t have put it better myself!

via David Cameron condemns Labour’s ‘moral failure’ – Times Online.