Friday 30 April 2010

IF THE ECONOMY WAS HIS STRENGTH, HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT HIS WEAKNESS WAS



Once again, I didn’t watch last night’s debate. I just couldn’t be bothered.

Clearly they were going to lie through their teeth. It was out of the question that they would tell us the between 70 and 80% of cuts that they would have to make, as estimated by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. They wouldn’t even say they would hurt the unemployed, usually a popular target to abuse, but there are a lot of them... and even unemployed people have votes....

The Governor of the Bank of England, who might be assumed to
know a bit about the economy, says that the party that wins this election will have to do things so horrific that they will be out of power for a generation.

Anyway, I’ve read and heard about it all day and it seems like everyone was expecting that Brown would win this because it was on the economy (not to mention he was with the BBC, Labour’s friend) and the economy is Brown’s strongest suite. Well, if the economy in Brown’s strongest suite, I’d not like to see his weak ones.

This is the man who:

* sold the gold at the bottom of the market;

* wrecked the UK’s world beating company pension schemes;

* didn’t regulate the banks, so that they had to be bailed out;

* didn’t limit credit, so that he could preside over his never ending boom and tell us how clever he was;

* allowed everyone to borrow and borrow no matter how uncreditworthy, so that individually Brits are up to their eyes in credit.

* allowed banks to operate as both high street facilities (which we are all now obliged to use) and merchant banks;

* allowed banks to be so big that they couldn’t fail without bankrupting a large section of the population and the business community;

* encouraged the housing price boom, making everyone feel rich. (People earned more a year from the increase in value of their houses than they did from working.) People re mortgaged, based on the collateral that they had in their grossly inflated properties. Instead of paying their debts off, they borrowed more money and spent it... in the main on products manufactured outside the country.

* mortgaged the future with his unimaginably stupid PFI to build hospitals and schools, so that the government would look good at the same time as taxes were held reasonably low;

* allowed, encouraged or even forced students to build up £30,000+ debt before they even started their working lives;

* did nothing about the public sector pension debt, now so enormous that it can’t be contemplated;

* failed, during 10 years of unstoppable “growth” to overturn Thatcher’s linking of pensions to inflation rather than wages, which along with his wrecking of the private pension scheme, left the poorer OAPs living a third world life in their later years;

* doubled the bottom rate of tax.

He seems to have the idea that when you borrow money you never have to pay it back. A weird idea for the much vaunted son of the Presbyterian Manse.

Really what a failure Brown has been, as chancellor and as prime minister. Britain would be a far better place today if he'd taken up work as a cobbler.

37 comments:

  1. Pretty comprehensive. Nice one!

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  2. Thanks denverthen. I'd be happy to hear anything that you, or anyone else thinks I've left out.

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  3. It really takes yer breath away when ye see it written doon tris. The writin' wis oan the wa' an' it said "Ah'm comin' tae get ye" an' "It's gaun tae hurt." We should've read it.

    Whitever auld Mrs Thatcher's motivations were fer startin' the Big Boom in the City, seein' aw that overt greed gettin' its pay-off drove millions tae go fer their wee bit. An' if ye had thae fears o' owerstretchin' yer pay-packet, ye were telt "Naw! Dinnae fash yersel. Here, wid ye like anither caird? Immediate credit."

    We were only weans. We didnae ken whit we were daein'. We were telt "Nae mair Booms an' Busts" Auld Mr Broon had found the secret o' eternal growth, we were safe in his hands, an' thae o' his glaikit pal Mr Darling. Well we're gaun tae pay fer it now.

    Ah tried tae watch the debate, but ma mind kept driftin'. It wis worse than gaun tae the kirk. Bring back Sir Alec Douglas-Home, at least he could tap-dance.

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  4. Gordon Brown has wrecked the UK economy and your Pretty comprehensive list clearly illustrates this but to give him some credit (not literally) I thought he was strong on substance last night but he ruined it with his overpowering negativity and the endless jibs on Cameron scrapping the working tax credit.

    His smile at the end was truly horrific and I'm in the process of complaining to the BBC that last nights program should have had an 18 years of age guidance attached too it.

    Tris one of your sidebar headings has caught my eye again. Labour are now on 24%!

    It was the smile that done it!

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  5. Ah wis keepin' ma een oan the worms durin' that debate. Maist o' the time it wis like watchin' worms. Have ye ever done that? Just sat in yer gairden watchin' worms? Naw?

    That's cos it's even mair duller than watchin' a Prime Meenister Debate oan the telly. They jist seemed tae sit there, barely movin' except fer when Cameron talked aboot immigration. Then it went wild, aw writhin' aboot an' tryin' tae climb up the inside o' the screen. Ah had ma stick in ma hand at yin point.

    Suffice tae say that the worms were gettin' excited when ah wisnae, no that they were quiet when ah wis excited, fer ah nivver really got excited in the first place.

    It's funny whit makes some audiences twitch.

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  6. Auld Mr Broon's smile gie's me the shudders. Ah aye huv this awfy thought, wheniver he smiles, that he's aboot tae kiss me.

    Try it fer yersel. It's gantin' is it no?

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  7. Yes Sophia. It is frightening. I remember at one point saying to my brother, who's a bit of a sharper knife than I am when it comes to money matters... If wages go up at about 4-5% every year, and houses go up at about 10 -15%, how long will it be before the Sultan of Brunei and Bill Gates will be the only ones who can afford to buy them. Which is a bit of a waste because they probably already have one, if not more.

    It must have occurred to Brown that this was wrong, unsustainable. He must have known it would crash round his ears.... but no, he went on. Anythjing to fuel his "end of bust". (No rude comments Mr Niko.)

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  8. Allan... just because you're over 18 doesn't mean to say you can cope with that smile!

    Tax credits have merit, but they are so complex that most people cannot understand them; the staff who implement them don't know how they work, and there are so many mistakes made in their calculations. The resulting incorrect monies paid cause endless misery to recipients.

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  9. Thanks Dean. :) I've comment over at your place about it too.

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  10. Erm yes Sophia. Actually sometimes I do just sit and watch worms, or ladybirds or woodlice (slaters as I call them). I'm a funny lad when it comes to creepy crawlies. I go around saving them. I stand over a worm in the garden till he gets under the earth so that no birds can get him. I fish struggling wasps out of rain butts, even although I’m allergic to their stings, and blow on them till their wings are dry enough for them to fly off.... and I take spiders I find in the bath outside and find them a congenial plant pot to live in....

    They are far nicer than most politicians, and they don’t lie as much.

    OK now everyone things I’m a nutter.

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  11. When they've been at that job fer sae long that they cannae tell the difference between a sainted national treasure and a bigot, then they've lost it.

    When auld Mr Broon met Elvis Presley the other day, an' says tae him that he's gaun tae get oot an' meet ordnery folk, he got hissel' aw worked up aboot it, an' so when he actually had tae say hello tae auld Mrs Duffy, he thought she wid get ontae him, an' did ye hear him, did ye hear whit he wis sayin? he sounded like he wis in the Hoose, he sounded like he wis talkin' tae wee Dave, he wisnae listenin' tae her. He couldnae wait tae get away fae her.

    Whit an auld stumer he is.

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  12. Sophia, I might be a nutter who risks wasp stings and stuff, but I’m not going to imagine, even for the briefest of seconds, Mr Brown coming anywhere near me.... never mind .... oh jeeeeeez, I can’t even type it.

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  13. Sophia. I think that that was where the real fault lay....

    He wouldn’t listen. He didn’t want to listen to some middle aged working class woman rambling on about her concerns. He’s not interested in her concerns.

    We’ve all been polite to someone in front of them and been rude about them behind their backs. Well most of us at least, But he wanted to put on an act of listening to people without actually having to listen to anyone beneath the level of President, preferable Obama.

    So, when he (and most of the rest of them two talks about going up and down this great country and LISTENING to the fears and concerns of “hard working” British families (never lazy ones, and never people living alone) they are lying through their back teeth. They don’t listen to a bloody word; they don’t actually give a stuff.

    What Brown wants is another 5 years shot at being Prime Minister. That’s what he cares about. And we shouldn’t kid or selves that any of them are very much different.

    This whole thing was much much more than one man calling a woman a bigot. It was a wakeup call to us all. Don’t believe them when they tell you that they care. Few of them do.

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  14. Sophia Pangloss Lol it's okay I will take your word for it. Think I'm about to boke!

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  15. Tris

    Lol your right, maybe a warning sign would had been appropriate!

    The tax credits are complex but basically where I agree with Cameron is where a family who have a joint income of over £50,000 should not be entitled to the tax credit.

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  16. Lol @ Sophia Pangloss on all accounts. She talks so much sense but its the way she puts it.

    You even got fired into Iain Dale the other day I saw lol.

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  17. Allan,

    Absolutely. The benefit of tax credits as opposed to lower taxes, is that it concentrates the money on those who have need of it. Poeple with £50,000 don't need subsidising by me.

    Oh I know it'snot a lot to bring up kids on, but it's 2 or 3 times what some poeple have, so I agree with Cameron on that.

    They need to be simplified though.

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  18. I wish I'd seen that Allan!

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  19. Thanks Tris, woke up this morning quite chirpy and then read your list of Brown's achievements and got quite depressed that despite all that the gullible and the "faithful" will still vote for this charlatan. Did you copy your list from one of David Maddox's articles - perhaps not!

    As for your comments about wasps I had a wasps' nest in my garden and have to confess that I hired a hit-man to get rid of them and now I feel really guilty so I'm going to capture a male and female wasp to see if they can start a new generation. Just as well I've got good eye-sight.

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  20. Oh damn Brownlie. I am sorry. I feel just as guilty about upsetting you as I would feel about letting a wee waspy drown in the rain butt. So now that's two of us depressed. I can honestly say that it is well over 6 months since I've read anything of Mr Maddox's, so nope, I didn't get the idea from him. He is depressing though, I agree.

    Yep, I was trying to work out who was likely to vote for a Labour party that has betrayed its working class roots. Then I remembered last year at a local by-election, I met a guy I'd worked with in the past, in his early 30s, unemployed, unemployable really, for various reasons which I won't go in to, and he scorned me for working for the SNP candidate.

    "Labour for me Tris" he said, "the party of the working (what?!?) man. They're the ones that look after the working class".

    I did keep a straight face as he said it, but I was thinking about it later and I realised that when he was a kid he'd spent a lot of time with his grandad, who would have been a working man in the time when Labour was the party of the "working classes". He'd heard this when he was a kid and it simply stuck with him.

    It used to be a good party. It used to fight for the workers' rights. The likes of Wilson and Callaghan let it get out of hand, I guess, and Michael Foot made it unelectable, as fewer and fewer people were actually working men and he was a stranger to reality. Then Kinnock the nobleman, Smith, Blair the war monger and Mandleson that other nobleman pushed it farther and farther to the right. But people still vote Labour because it's hardwired into their brains that to do anything else would be a betrayal of their class.

    They are wrong. In Scotland the SNP represent a better deal for the poorer people than Labour does; in England the Liberals do to a certain extent. Labour sold its principles for the middle class southern England vote. I'd say it is a slightly right of centre party these days.

    I wish you luck with your wasps, and I'd advise you not to try artificial insemination.....

    And cheer up. Have a nice weekend!

    :¬)

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  21. And he asks not to be judged on his personality because that is crap. What else is there?

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  22. Sometimes Munguin, you just have to feel sorry for a man who, since he was a student, has wanted to be prime minister. When he finally achieves his goal he finds out that he is totally unsuited to the job, completely hopeless at it. He will go down in history as the PM whose time in Downing Street was one disaster after another... and disasters, the handling of which he by and large made a complete mess of.

    Not elected by his party (Buggins turn) and not elected by the people (if you believe that we elect prime ministers, which I don't) he is a miserable wretch of a prime minister, as he was a miserable wretch of a chancellor.

    He has left us with a problem which, in the future, will mean absolutely dire cost cutting and tax rises, or the UK will make Greece look like a kid losing his pocket money.

    We need out of this awful union NOW.

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  23. Tris, yes, there was a guy on the TV last night who when asked who he would vote for said "I'm red till I die". It is difficult to understand that logic when applied to the Labour party.

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  24. When I first heard the recording I thought that Brown had called her a bigot because he thought she'd said another word instead of "flocking" but subsequently he made it clear that he had instructed his staff to only let him speak to individuals who would agree with everything he said and not ask awkward questions.

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  25. Hard wired amongst people who give no thought whatsoever to politics Brownlie.

    This particular man will find himeslf treated equally by either of the two main parties, not that I think that's necessarily wrong, but if he thinks a Labour Government will be softer on his self imposed long term unemployment/idleness, then he can think again. He blames the Poles for his predicament, and before that he blamed the Pakistanis, not because there were that many Pakistanis in the town, but because he's heard other people saying it, and it's as good an excuse as the next one. He doesn't even think up his own excuses. The truth of course is that he is congenitally lazy, having never done a hand's turn in his life. I discovered this after setting up several opportunities for him, all of which he failed to attend. Och well, I won't rant on about that becasue I'm going to do a post on the subject as soon as I can find the time.

    In the interests of fairness it works the other way round too. The "blue till I die" brigade who haven't given a thought to what they believe or why they believe it exists within our midst too.... Maybe the "tartan till I die does too".

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  26. Yea well lets face it that woman was a bigot in as much as she had views that even the PM could not alter.

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  27. but then he is also a bigot as she could not alter his views.

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  28. It turns out they are everywhere!

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  29. It’s always so easy to blame everybody else for your shortcomings. For example Dundee has a huge number of unemployed people and yet the soft fruit growers in the Carse of Gowrie would rather their fruit rotted on the vine than try to get these people to pick it. I wonder why? Tris any ideas?

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  30. There was an interesting man on the telly just after this episode erupted. He was Brown's unofficial biographer (forgotten his name). He said two main things that I remember.

    The first is that Brown has no real idea of the mindset of the English working classes. He is Scottish educated middle class himself (although everyone refers to him as ‘Mr Brown’, he is in fact ‘Dr Brown’) and has rarely, if ever, come into contact with people like Mrs Duffy. As an MP he must have seen her Scottish counterpart, but they, reckons the man, are different. He has no ideas what her concerns are and sees any questioning about foreigners as racist... Of course in his middle class world it probably is racist; in hers it is a genuine concern. He is impatient with her because she can’t see what he can, and he is incapable of putting himself in her shoes...she’s so far away from him in every way.

    Secondly he said that Brown had no time at all for anyone who disagreed with him. He is always right, which explains the temper tantrums. If he will not brook other opinions and is surrounded, as he must be, by experienced and intelligent people, who may have different takes on what is going on, I can see where the phone throwing comes from. ....

    He is just so unsuitable in every way for the job.

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  31. I saw that to, but I don’t think that Scotland and England are that different. People like Mrs Duffy don’t like to think in which case it’s easy to blame whatever is easiest for all their problems. And let’s face it the media supplies all the bogymen they will ever need.

    If that is true then they are both bigots like I said.

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  32. Yes Munguin. I've worked for years with unemployed people in Dundee and I’ve been involved in contracts to supply labour for the fruit and veg business in the Carse of Gowrie. Most of the people are gagging to get back to work. A fair number of them work hard when they do. But the work you are talking about is temporary and minimum wage, so you aren’t going to get people with jobs applying for it.

    It’s hard work, often cold, and sometimes based on piece work. You have to work quick and hard on long shifts. My experience is that local labour just won’t do the job. The moan, they complain. They miss shifts because they have been out drinking. I’ve had to deal with complaints of fighting, smoking in the premises, drugs taking or selling, pinching, sexual harassment... absenteeism on a massive scale.

    Some of them appear to have more grannies than I have fingers given the number of time that they die. And I had one guy say, quite innocently, as if it was a reasonable excuse.... “I couldnae come in coz the lass had tae go in the toon wi her mither and I had tae mind the bairn”. Meanwhile the fruit was “maturing”. In fairness the lad thought he had done nothing wrong.

    Many of them have a totally unrealistic view of what life is about. Their parents don’t work, and haven’t for years, and if they were troublesome at school they were shoved into the class that wasn’t going to get targets for the school, and forgotten. If they didn’t turn up, no one bothered. Result: Not only are they ignorant of almost everything; they think that work is something you go to when you have nothing else to do.

    I’m sure there are people in Eastern Europe just like them, as there are everywhere. They are just not the type that gets on their bikes, like Mr Tebbit suggested, and rides all the way over here to find work.

    We should remember incidentally that British people do and have done exactly the same thing. I deal with guys who do construction work in Holland and Germany, because the wages are better over there, the working conditions fabulous compared to here, and yes, they are prepared to work for less than the Dutch or German workers... Auf Wiedersehen Pet!!

    What goes around comes around.

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  33. Yes and these are doubtless the same people who claim that they can’t get a job because the eastern Europeans have go t them all. So very well informed about what the Daily mail or the Sun says is going on and so ill informed about what goes on in their own back yard.

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  34. Aye Munguin, and many of them moan about the Eastern Europeans having taken all the women too!!!!

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  35. Well, yes, I guess they probably do Sophia.

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