Because schools teach very little these days, certainly not how to make judgements, shysters like Tony Blair and Gordon Brown - and the Kenyan conman in America - get away with destroying societies almost unchallenged. However, when things get so bad that even the docile man in the street wakes up, watch out. Britain has now been brought so low by the politically correct, who know how to spend but not to create wealth or anything else, that anger is stirring. Read and enjoy. ALAN FRANKLIN.
Christina Speight adds: The press has woken up to the fact that the great British public has stirred from its deep slumbers and is - to coin a phrase - not inconsiderably displeased.
Just look at a few key phrases from today:
== “Rage is now Britain’s only growth industry”
== “A nation destabilised by fury”
== “the party’s over”
== “it’s all a national joke . At our expense”
== “While top earners pay highest tax in 20 years, our MPs escape Scot-free”
And that’s just one page from one paper!
I don’t normally give undue prominence to Simon Heffer but as the crisis deepens his rants have turned into cool fury and he is more coldly measured in his judgments. Therefore he gets pride of place today.
But one other thing is now apparent, British Conservative leader David Cameron is firming-up, facing reality and the commentators have noticed. I also give in this first posting of today the last paragraphs of the London Daily Telegraph’s blockbuster leading article. Most of this is an excellent analysis of the present chaos and the responsibility for it but at the end it deals with the future , under the generic headline of:
“Out of disaster comes political liberation”
it writes with positive hope.
=================================
TELEGRAPH 25.4.09
We'll be lucky to get a bowl of soup
The Brown Economic Miracle has turned Britain into a basket case, says Simon Heffer.
We know that senior politicians are incapable of admitting error, even when the error is of the gargantuan proportions of dropping the equivalent of a nuclear weapon on the British economy. This is partly because of the levels of mental illness and moral turpitude that are usually required to reach high office these days, and also because of the new constitutional rule – at least I assume it is a constitutional rule – that no minister is ever allowed to resign, however disastrous or bent he or she may be.
So we should not be surprised that the picture of epic debt and failure that was outlined in the Budget on Wednesday was accompanied by an absolute refusal to accept responsibility by those who had caused it, either in owning up or doing the decent thing and leaving public life. These people – the Prime Minister and, to a lesser extent, his puppet Chancellor of the Exchequer – are so dishonourable as to be despicable, and it is as well to say so.
If they don't recognise the horror they have created, the markets do. Sterling has slid since Wednesday, even against other currencies from basket-case economies: for there is no basket case bigger than ours. It has been said, not least by the Tories, who don't quite know what to do, that the rise in the top rate of tax to 50p is a ploy to distract us from the proposed borrowing of an incomprehensible £606 billion over the next four years. The huge new debt is to pay the bribes to Labour's client state. In fact, the two are linked by their base politics, and in their destructiveness. Borrowing of that order will not merely beggar our children, and quite possibly their children too. It will also force up interest rates and harm people by that means. And the top rate of tax will not merely hit "the rich". Many of those in Labour's core vote will soon find they are punished too when, in order to pay their extra taxes, "the rich" stop using the products and services provided by blue-collar workers, or simply move abroad. Every aspect of this Budget was designed to make Britain poorer.
I was in the second or third week of my A-level economics course in 1976 when our class had the most superb object lesson in finance: the then Labour government ran up the white flag and called in the International Monetary Fund to sort out our economy. The IMF did what the administrators of any failed enterprise must: they cut borrowing and cut spending to make the books balance. Like me, many of you will remember that things in 1976 were bad, but they weren't nearly so bad as they are now. So where is the IMF?
I'm told that the IMF can't afford to take on a problem the size of ours. If that is so then the sooner we arrange a takeover by China or Abu Dhabi the better. Otherwise, another few months of the Brown Economic Miracle will have half of us working in call centres and the other half unemployed and sitting in soup kitchens. But even if the IMF can't face trying to sort out the worst mess in modern British economic history - for I believe this also goes beyond 1931 - it can at least continue to do excellent work such as it did on Wednesday when, within 40 minutes of the Chancellor sitting down, it published official figures that made a mockery of most of his.
If the markets and international authorities keep taunting Britain for the failure of those trying to run its economy then perhaps we might even force the parasites responsible out of office. Had they a shred of honour they would, after this failure, call an immediate election. Dave clearly needs further help about what to do – his reasoning behind not promising to reverse the 50p tax band (he doesn't want to be seen to help "the rich") is stupid, for it would help the poor even more. But it now becomes a matter of national urgency to get these vandals and idiots out of power and into disgrace. [Barring a miracle, however, we’ve got to wait 14 months until a General Election. Who knows what more damage Brown can do in that time -cs] This week was a watershed. We now know there is a war on.
MPs need to work in the real world
Almost as contemptible as the Budget was the plan to address the matter of the allowance for MPs’ second homes, announced by way of a distraction the previous day. This was a stunt, aimed at embarrassing Tories with outside interests who would now be forced, like trades unionists, to clock on and clock off at Parliament.
I can’t see what the number of hours spent at Westminster has to do with the quality of the MP, or with whether he or she should have a taxpayer-funded second home. Since Parliament now works office hours, any MP whose constituents commute can commute too. A ring should be drawn 40 miles around London. Anyone whose seat is within it would be denied an allowance: simple as that. And as for time spent at the Commons, only the blind can fail to notice that many MPs who are there all the time are quite useless, so it would be as well to encourage them to have more interests outside rather than fewer.
I do not regard it as the job of my MP to be a social worker. It is to represent me on great national issues according to his judgment, for which he is answerable at every election. That judgment will be better honed by more experience of the world in which his voters live.
[Sir Nicholas Winterton: "No mention is made of how members will pay for the accommodation they have to maintain during the summer recess…". Brown’s ludicrous proposal would pay almost as much money in total - which is one thing that is wrong with it! While everone else is being squeezed ‘till the pips hurt’ the truth is (mentioned in my intro “our MPs escape Scot-free “ -cs]
===============AND ------->
2. Out of disaster comes political liberation
(An extract from today’s leading article which concludes :- - -)
“The really encouraging sign is that the Conservatives are starting to hold this position confidently. David Cameron is instinctively a supporter of small government, but he spent a long time erasing the impression that the Tories despised public services on principle. That task is now accomplished. Admittedly, his party should have protested more loudly when schools and the health service were hosed down with tax revenues that did nothing to improve standards, but the message is clear: Conservatives believe that an efficient public sector is central to national wellbeing.
For a long time, the Tories also insisted that they would match Labour's spending plans. That era is now well and truly over. The Leader of the Opposition yesterday attacked Britain's "quangocracy" – an ugly but memorable word for a very ugly phenomenon. And this fact is not a portent of cruel and unnecessary "Tory cuts". It is an indication that Conservatives have rejected the politics of despair, in which you carry on spraying money at problems regardless of the outcome. We have reached the end of a political generation, and with it a poisoned legacy of political thought. A new generation of politicians find themselves paradoxically liberated by economic disaster to create wealth and redraw the boundaries of the state.
Britain faces years of hardship; but the road out of this mess has suddenly become illuminated.”
