Here are some well aimed darts fired at the incompetent allegedly running - or should it be ruining - Great Britain. Just in case any foreigners unfortunate enough to get a visit from this fool think that he has anything sensible to say. Read- and enjoy. ALAN FRANKLIN.
Tonight we look at Brown's record in ruining Britain.
First Jeff Randall uses the sheer secondrateness of Harriet Harman as a vehicle to pinpoint the key weaknesses as he sees them
Then MEP Dan Hannan ( a member of the European Parliament) reflects on the astonishing worldwide success of his face-to-face attack on Gordon Brown at the EU parliament and on the anger around the world that produced such an astonishing ripple effect.
Finally: The Tory party issues a pamphlet with all Brown's U-turns listed in his own words, plus quotations from all the press. On his own admission he is judged a failure. But then those losing their jobs in Britain, not to mention all those who have seen their pensions decimated, have already worked that out.
Christina Speight
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TELEGRAPH� � �27.3.09
1. Britain's broke, Labour's finished: mission complete, Agent Harman
Jeff Randall believes the Leader of the House of Commons must be part of a Tory plot to destroy the Government
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By Jeff Randall�
How does one explain the monument to absurdity that is Harriet Harman? For those who enjoy conspiracy theories, try this: she is a plant inside the Left-wing establishment, put there by far-thinking Conservative controllers in the Ted Heath years.
Her mission: to spend a lifetime infiltrating Labour's upper echelons, creeping and crawling her way to positions of great power, with the aim of destroying from within the credibility of Keir Hardie's creation. On current form, she is doing a first-class job.
�
Stretch the imagination, and it is possible to view Miss Harman as the symmetrical opposite of the Cambridge Spies � Philby, Burgess, Maclean and Blunt � who wove themselves into the fabric of British intelligence, while really working for Moscow.
For years, the KGB was amazed that authorities in London could be so blinkered as to allow operators with barely disguised communist sympathies into positions of trust. Miss Harman has achieved something similar � only for the other side.
One day, surely, Labour loyalists will wake up and ask: "What stopped us from spotting her treachery? It was so obvious." By which time Miss Harman will have been spirited away by Mission Control to the security of an old rectory in the Tory shires and retirement with English Springers.
As the daughter of a Harley Street physician and niece of Lord Longford, she was born into privilege. Educated at St Paul's, an elite public school, young Harriet seemed destined to become one of the poppets who feature as pin-ups in Country Life and marry Army captains from Gloucester.
Mysteriously, however, after a politics degree at York University, Miss Harman emerged as a fully paid-up member of Labour's moon gazers � Mad Hattie Harperson. Could it have been on York's pretty lakeside campus that a plot was hatched to insert an unprincipled student as a grinding cog in Labour's machinery? I like to think so
.
By hitching up with Jack Dromey, an activist on Brent Trades Council, her "progressive" credentials were firmly secured. She was, literally, sleeping with the enemy. Since then, she has worked tirelessly to attract ridicule and opprobrium to the Labour movement, while pretending to fight for its advancement. Few double dealers have done so well.
Now 58, a strikingly youthful Miss Harman is Leader of the House of Commons and perfectly placed to cause maximum damage to Gordon Brown's crumbling regime. In recent weeks, she has excelled. Her Conservative minder � let's call him Big Blue � must be delighted.
In particular, her clodhopping intervention in the row over Sir Fred Goodwin's pension was brilliant. By insisting that the Court of Public Opinion should supersede contract law, she invited the mob to conclude that the destruction of property rights was perfectly acceptable under Labour.
One feature of a civilised society is that it protects unpopular citizens, even venal bankers. By contrast, Miss Harman made clear that she was not interested in issues of legality, only the power of expropriation.
This is the road to despotism � and we are well down it. While the Bank of England prints money to mask a ruined economy, thugs smash up Sir Fred's Edinburgh home, and the Government shrugs its shoulders. Next stop, Bulawayo.
Invited by Sky News's Colin Brazier to admit that her ad hominem attacks had helped incite vandalism, Miss Harman dished out a lecture (as only human rights lawyers can) on Sir Fred's misdeeds. The sub-text of her response was: "It couldn't have happened to a nicer bloke."
The Government's demonising of Sir Fred, as if he were the sole cause of the country's woes, has been an inelegant display of low-rent politics. Royal Bank of Scotland's former boss has provided ministers with a seemingly irresistible opportunity to deflect attention from their catastrophic blunders.
It has worked on a superficial level, gaining lurid headlines. But exporting blame is a palliative, not a panacea. Britain's descent into fiscal and monetary chaos will not be avoided by hanging up Sir Fred on thumb screws. Once unleashed, mob vengeance is like anthrax: hard to control and indiscriminate in selecting victims.
This week's intervention by Mervyn King, the Bank of England's Governor, was a humiliation for Downing Street.�
Mr King is a seasoned performer, who knows perfectly well that every word he utters is picked over by investors and the media. His disavowal of Mr Brown's futile attempts to borrow this Government's way out of debt was no slip of the tongue.
Questioned in the Commons about Threadneedle Street's truculence, Miss Harman made a preposterous attempt to spin Mr King's comments as support for Labour's budgetary incontinence. The guffaws echoed well beyond opposition benches. Across the country, it is dawning on ordinary folk that this administration has lost its only real strength: an ability to cook the books while massaging the message. A shocking truth is seeping out.
Not since the early 1960s, when Lord Cromer made disobliging comments about Harold Wilson's profligate spending plans, has an incumbent governor been so publicly at odds with a prime minister. Cromer, of course, was vindicated by events � after a decade of Labour's mismanagement, Britain collapsed into the arms of the International Monetary Fund. And who can be sure that it will not happen again?
According to the Ernst & Young Item Club, a forecasting group, Britain will need to raise �350 billion between 2009 and 2011. As a share of national income, public borrowing is expected to rise from 2.6 per cent in 2007-08 to 12.6 per cent in 2009-10 (as a rule of thumb, anything over 10 per cent is considered to be in the territory of a banana republic). No nation in the G20 is going downhill more rapidly than Britain, says the IMF.
The Treasury's failure this week to sell Government gilts was one way for the financial markets to tell us that Britain is going broke. Currency traders are losing confidence in our ability to pay the bills, which explains sterling's sharp devaluation. As Jim Callaghan and Denis Healey discovered, there is no pain-free escape route. When unemployment soars, taxes rise and public sector excesses are reined back, a disgusted electorate will punish those whose recklessness drove the country into penury.
At this point, Mr Brown's trite wittering about "doing nothing not being an option" will be exposed for what it is: a vacuous soundbite from a leader of a party that began with a golden legacy and turned it into a dunghill.
It took Labour 18 years in the wilderness to recover from its last debacle. Unless David Cameron does something really stupid, it could be heading that way again. With an election due next June, I envisage a faceless Conservative in a secret location preparing a final coded message for Harriet: "Agent Harman. Mission accomplished. Return to base."
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2. For once, Gordon Brown had to sit and listen
Daniel Hannan is staggered by the huge global reaction to his home truths about the PM
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By Daniel Hannan�
Most of us, I suspect, have a thing or two that we'd like to say to Gordon Brown. But few of us get the opportunity. On Tuesday, I was one of those few. The Prime Minister was in the European Parliament, trying to persuade the rest of the EU to react to the financial crisis in the way that he has, viz by fire-hosing cash at it. I was one of the eight MEPs who got to respond, and was given three minutes to make my point.
According to convention, Mr Brown had to remain in his place while I spoke. Right, I thought, for once you're going to have to listen to what people are saying. The country was in negative equity, I said; the weight of his debt would press down on our children yet unborn and unbegot, I said; surely he could see that his bail-outs and nationalisations had failed, I said; we should stop throwing good money after bad, I said.
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No doubt you can imagine how Mr Brown reacted; you might have watched him do it week after week at Prime Minister's Questions. He chatted ostentatiously to his neighbours; he pretended to doodle; he pulled his face into that grin that makes us think of the cold glint of moonlight on a silver coffin plate. Not for the first time, it struck me that the PM won't listen to criticism. I don't mean that he won't respond to criticism; I mean that he literally won't listen to it.
Afterwards, I posted my speech on my blog, as I often do, and emailed it to a couple of journalists. They, unsurprisingly, ignored it: "Conservative politician attacks Gordon Brown" is hardly front-page stuff. Then I went to dinner with the leader of the Icelandic anti-EU campaign and forgot all about it.
When I got into my office on Wednesday, it was clear that something was up. My phone was clogged with texts, my inbox silted with emails. Overnight, 36,000 people had watched my clip on YouTube. By lunchtime, it was up to 170,000, and the film was the single most watched video online. Then the American bloggers, The Drudge Report foremost among them, picked it up. The clip was played on Rush Limbaugh's radio show, and I was interviewed on Fox News. When I last looked, roughly three quarters of a million people have watched the speech.
"Whoa, dude," I muttered to myself, slipping into the idiom of those posting most of the comments. "Like: wow!" The idea that a speech in the European Parliament could become the single most popular video in the world, even if only for 48 hours, is faintly surreal. I mean, I've been making similar speeches all over my Home Counties constituency for the past decade, and posting them online for the better part of a year, attracting 700 or 800 hits if I'm lucky. So what caught people's imagination?
I think it has to do with pent-up frustration. People feel ignored, ripped off, lied to, taken for granted. No one asked them whether they wanted to run up the biggest deficit in the world. No one asked permission before seizing their money in tax and giving it to the banks, only for the banks to lend it back to them at interest. The whole thing was done without so much as consulting Parliament. And there was I thinking that we had come through a civil war in order to establish the principle that only the House of Commons might raise revenue through taxation
When people hear the Prime Minister blithely asserting that all is well, that the recession is coming to an end, that Britain is well placed to "come through stronger" they want to grab the man by his lapels and shout at him. Not being able to do so, perhaps they enjoyed the sight of someone else doing it for them.
The episode serves to show how utterly and irretrievably the internet has changed politics. In 24 hours, 380,000 people had watched a video before a word appeared on the BBC or in any newspaper. The Daily Telegraph was the first. The days when political journalists got to decide what was news are over. Ten or even five years ago, a dozen lobby correspondents would dictate the next day's headlines. Now, millions of bloggers and commentators come to an aggregate view.
Political parties in Britain have been slow to accommodate themselves to the change. As Robert Colvile pointed out in his pamphlet Politics, Policy and the Internet, they tried to conscript the web, to treat it as just one more way to get their message across. But the internet has altered the rules of the game. Until very recently, a politician commanded attention by virtue of his position: a press release from the minister for widgets was guaranteed at least a measure of coverage. Now, he must compel attention by virtue of having something worth saying. This is where Gordon Brown falls down: hence the devastating force of David Cameron's charge that he is an analogue politician in a digital age.
The internet age, and the disintermediation of the message which it has brought, has unsettled some professional politicians and journalists. But it is surely good news for conservatives and libertarians everywhere. The Left has always depended on control of information as of other resources. That control is now technically impossible.
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Daniel Hannan is a Conservative MEP and blogs every day on telegraph.co.uk
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CONSERVATIVE CENTRAL HQ� � � 26.3.09
Debt�s Rocketing and the Pound�s Collapsed
Finally Brown takes our Advice.
Gordon Brown�s economic
policy has now collapsed twice
Brown Mark 1, 1997 - 2008: You can�t spend your
way out of recession, monetary policy has to take
the lead
�And I tell you we have learned from past mistakes.
Just as you cannot spend your way out of recession,
you cannot, in a global economy, simply spend your
way through recovery either.�
(Gordon Brown, Labour Party Annual Conference, 29
September 1997)
�Loosening fiscal policy when the underlying
structural fiscal position was poor could damage
consumer and business confidence, thus having the
opposite effect to that intended.�
(HM Treasury, Analyzing Fiscal Policy, 1999)
�What we will not do is put stability at risk by
irresponsible, unfunded and reckless tax cuts.�
(Gordon Brown, Hansard, 26 October 2006)
COLLAPSEDwhen Gordon Brown tried to spend his
way out of recession
Brown Mark 2, 2008 - 2009: Fiscal stimulus is the
answer, monetary policy won�t work
�I cannot see how the Conservative party can continue
to resist the idea that we should have, as we are having,
a fiscal stimulus in the economy.� (Gordon Brown,
Hansard, 23 March 2009)
�I do believe that this debate about the real help of the
fiscal stimulus has got to be won in every part of the
world. If the monetary mechanism is not working then
all that is left to government, and rightly so, is to use
its fiscal policy.�
(Gordon Brown, Q&A session at Brookings, 10
February 2009)
�The fact is if your monetary policy is cutting interest
rates, but there is an impaired mechanism that you
have got to gradually be able to sort out, then
governments have to use fiscal policy, and that has
been seen in every country of the world.�
(Gordon Brown, press conference, 19 December 2008)
COLLAPSED when Mervyn King said it wasn�t
affordable
�But I think the fiscal position in the UK is not one
where we could say, well, why don�t we just engage in
another significant round of fiscal expansion. We
could do more monetary easing if necessary, but
monetary policy should bear the brunt of dealing with
the ups and downs of the economy�
(Mervyn King, evidence to the Treasury Select
Committee, 24 March 2009)
�Brown retreats on new fiscal stimulus�,
Financial Times, 26 March 2009
�Shadow of huge debt mountain forces Brown to back
off tax cuts�,
Times, 26 March 2009
�Brown spending retreat as City sounds warning�,
Guardian, 26 March 2009
�City alarm as Britain fails to sell its bonds�,
Telegraph, 26 March 2009
�Brown backs down on tax�,
Sun, 26 March 2009
�Brown spooked by the markets�,
Daily Mail, 26 March 2009
�Nobody is suggesting that people come to the G20
meeting and put on the table the budget that they�re
going to have for the next year. What we are suggesting
is that we have together to look at what we have done
so far cumulatively.�
(Gordon Brown, New York, 25 March 2009)
And now the Chancellor has made things worse by
refusing to express confidence in the Governor of
the Bank of England
�I've made it clear on a number of occasions this
morning that the difference is not between me, the
Prime Minister or the Governor.� (Alistair Darling in
Parliament this morning when asked if he has �full
confidence in the Governor of the Bank of England�)
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