Ed Balls - deficit denier and now personal debt denier

Guido has the scoop on this odious individual's attempts to deny liability for personal debts. Not as dramatic as the debts he and his erstwhile boss Gordon "deficit denier" Brown have left the country with, but it is an interesting insight into the delusions of this socialist fantasist.

Thirteen Years of Labour Lies, Deceit and Mismanagement

Watch this video-clip compilation to remind you just how awful was Labour's most recent tenure in office. Just 101 days ago this shower of shysters was the government of this country:



- Point of information: this video-clip is indeed a 'propaganda piece' put together by the Conservative Party prior to the last General Election, but that in no way detracts from the absolute truth of everything shown in it.
(The idea for including this video-clip here is 'filched' without shame or apology from an article in the excellent Guido Fawkes blog.)

Labour never worked, "Labour isn't working", Labour never will work!

Watch the latest amusing video-clip from Guido News (courtesy Guido Fawkes) with some harsh facts about the economic competency (not) of the Labour government. I knew all these facts already, indeed any person who is not a totally-blinkered Labour 'drone' cannot be unaware of them either in my view, but it still startles to see it all laid out quite so explicitly:

Hannan has interesting take on McBride/Draper affair

Daniel Hannan has an interesting personal observation on how the sleaze-masters of our governing Party, Labour, operate. Amusingly the implicit snobbery and racism of an arch-leftwing journalist, Kevin Maguire, is a part of his report; for a party that says it believes in 'equality' it often displays a remarkable closed-mindedness and seemingly willful ignorance about the wider world.

A Labour MP tries, unsuccessfully, to distance the Party from Damien McBride

Labour MP Paul Flynn publishes a video-clip seemingly intended to advance the agenda that Damien McBride is some 'unknown' and not, in fact, a central cog in the Brown spin-machine!

Dear Mr Flynn, you may be sincere in your condemnation of Damien McBride and his political tactics and machinations, but you must be even more ignorant and 'head in the sand' than I imagined if you expect anyone to accept that McBride is some 'unknown'. Give us a break! Let's face it, what really upsets Labour is that this man's (take your pick, applies to both McBride and Brown) sordid machinations have been exposed, not the fact that similar tactics have been used by Labour for years!

Unfortunately the sound-track in Mr Flynn's video-clip is very quiet even with the volume turned up to the max.; I suggest (respectfully), Mr Flynn, that you get this sorted for future video-clips:




PS/ I've just left a message in Paul Flynn MP's blog here:

I've just watched your recently-uploaded YouTube video clip, describing Damien McBride as some 'unknown'. Are you being deliberately disingenuous? Sorry, I can't take such bald propaganda and spin at all seriously. A simple admission that McBride has brought shame on your Party would have much more credibility. Charles Clarke MP is not my favourite person (I am NOT a Labour supporter, candidly), but I respect his honest acceptance of a massive gaffe much more than I do your own attempt at spin. Very sincerely Bill Cameron

The sound of silence

I've just realised I haven't updated either of my blogs in over a week. There's no special reason - I'm just doing other things and quite enjoying it. I did draft a few posts during the week, but couldn't be bothered to finalise them and press the 'publish' button. There's certainly been a lot to record with the government continuing its spiral downward from incompetence and sleaze to mendacity - lots of bloggers are doing a first-rate job of exposing and commenting (too many to mention) on this. Nothing new, it's just the usual from the shambles of a Labour government that is currently (but hopefully for not much longer) still in power, even if it still has the power to surprise with its brazenness.

As for me, well I'm sitting here after lunch contemplating a walk up over the nearby hills. It's a beautiful day, bright blue sky and warm out of the wind, although there is a slight coolness out of the sun - not so much though that I can't sit here quite comfortably on the sofa with the front door open out on to the patio, overlooking the valley in front. The air is quite remarkably clear today (yesterday, too) so the other rim of the bowl/valley (maybe 7-10km away) is extremely distinct.

!hasta mañana!

Northern Rock and New Labour's reversion to Socialist-type

So the 'inevitable' (copyright Vince Cable, the LibDem's guru on such matters, in case you had no idea who he is) has happened - Northern Rock has been nationalised; marvel at the bare-faced effrontery of our 'glorious leader', Gordon Brown; the coward even has Alistair Darling alongside him to try and deflect some of the flak from his august personage - it doesn't wash! Naturally none of this 'guff' has anything to do with the number of Labour seats potentially at risk in the north-east of England, Northern Rock's home-base, or at least so we are led to believe.

Rather than spending a lot of time writing a ranting post about this latest development in the saga that the government has allowed Northern Rock to become, I refer you to an excellent post, justifiably excoriating in tone, from Guido; it tells you all you need to know about what a useless bunch of [.......] (*) this Labour government is. I never ever believed for one minute the hype in 1997, particularly from Gordon Brown himself, that this Labour government would be any better at managing the economy than previous Labour governments; it has taken them just over 10 years, but I think this present shower of incompetents will go down in history as being even more incompetent than the governments run by Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, 'ably assisted' by the likes of Hilary Benn's dad, Tony, that other Brown (George) and not forgetting that amiable old buffer Dennis Healey, who still pops up on TV occasionally.

The only other thing I write aobut this right now is that I thought Alistair Darling, Chancellor of the Exchequer, was even more unimpressive than usual on the Today programme this morning. Of course he is to some extent just the hapless fall-guy for his incompetent and cowardly boss, Gordon Brown, the man who actually created the conditions that allowed Northern Rock to get into the mess it has.

(*) My self-imposed policy in this blog prevents me from using the appropriate word here; it begins with 't' and ends with 's'.

UPDATE: (Monday 18FEB08 17.45 RST) John Redwood MP has a post up about Nortern Rock today, as one would expect. He has a useful recapitualtion of the steps that led to where we are now and how the government has at every stage shown poor judgement in its handling of this crisis; I agree completely. However, I'm with Guido in the comments to that post when he criticises the idea of a 'solution' having been to pump liquidity into Northern Rock; as I've written before this would have been like giving a drug addict ready and continuing access to the cause of its distress; businesses and their shareholders should expect to suffer the consequences of poor management decisions, just as they should receive just rewards for more successful risk-taking - Northern Rock should have been no exception. If the speech Alistair Darling gave on 13th September, and which John Redwood refers to as 'stupid', had not been delivered, it is highly probable that the crisis would not have been so severe or perhaps even have happened at all. The speech was a product, in my view, of the ignorance of most people in this government, who have little commercial or business experience, of understanding of the dynamics of capitalism. They may have tried to emulate the thought-processes of people who operate successfully in a market economy, but fundamentally they do not believe in it; they are instinctive 'socialists'.

Hain under investigation by Met. Police - and resigns from Government

Peter Hain, Labour MP for Neath, who only a few days ago received a vote of utmost confidence from Neath Constituency Labour Party, is to be investigated by the Metropolitan Police in connection with apparently 'dodgy' donations he received to help fight the Labour Party deputy leadership contest recently.

Minutes after the announcement of the police investigation, he announced he is resigning from the government, where he held two Cabinet positions in charge of the Department for Work and Pensions and the Wales Office. The official story is that he is resigning in order to be able to fight to clear his name. Good luck to him!

Perhaps he will eventually be cleared. However, I just wonder if his resignation from the government will not be followed in due time by his resignation as an MP and his return to a well-deserved obscurity - hopefully not on the public pay-roll, although I imagine that some sinecure will, whatever happens, be found for him.

This Labour government is not only serially incompetent, but the stench of graft hangs around it. Enough!

"Soldier's death due to shortages"

That's the claim of a military inquiry into the death of Cpl Mark Wright, who could not be abstracted quickly from the battlefield in Afghanistan after being gravely injured by a landmine because the 'RAF Chinook sent to pick him up did not have a rescue winch so he had to wait five hours to be rescued by a US helicopter'. The MoD claimed that 'all of the winches had been returned to the UK for inspection'. One other shocking part of the linked article:

Major General Andrew Farquhar, who presided over the inquiry, said his wounds may not have proved fatal had a British helicopter been equipped to get soldiers out of a minefield.

Quite sickening!

This blog is hereby 'resurrected' ...

Well, you may be thinking, it didin't take him (i.e. me) long to renege on his merciful promise to save us all from further dreary comment! My last post here, theoretically 'signing off' for good, was on 30th September last, but as a Prime Minister (MacMillan) once said - "Events, dear boy, events." Hmmm ...

Maybe I'm just an irredeemable internet junkie who can't keep away from a regular 'fix' of pontification. The spur for this change of heart has been developing over the past few weeks firstly with the unfolding fiasco of the Northern Rock and its need to get outside help as quickly as possible to stop it going belly-up (and thereby jeopardising a fair few jobs in the north-east of England, a Labour stronghold). Naturally, billions of our tax pounds have to go to such a worthy cause as trying to save the Labour Party from electoral oblivion. And who am I to object to this use of public funds? It is obvious to all that we have, these past ten years, been living in the best-managed major country in the world (according to the Prime Minister Gordon Brown, that is).

Now we come to the latest example of the incomptence of those who govern us! The personal details of almost HALF THE POPULATION OF THE UK (roughly twenty-five million people) have been cavalierly treated by Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, until earlier this year presided over, for these past wonderful ten years, by 'Big Brother' Gordon Brown. Half the population is now at risk from identity theft and fraud as a direct result of policies put in place by Gordon Brown. The head of HMRC has resigned yesterday, but is this really enough? The Prime Minister apologised today for this debacle, as well he might, but it is simply no good to conduct yet another 'review'; the last time thousands of records were mishandled by the same department, just a few months ago, we were told steps would be taken to ensure that such things couldn't happen again. Whatever measures were taken have, to put it mildly, been completely ineffective!

How was it possible for a 'junior' employee at HMRC to circumvent the rules Gordon Brown read out at PMQs? Having worked in a bank, and at one time been responsible for the data security of our operations in the country where I worked at the time, it would have been completely impossible for a 'junior' employee to duplicate records onto recordable media without me knowing about it. A security system worth the name does not just rely on a rule book, but has a system of checks and balances to ensure that no one employee can circumvent whatever rules are laid down.

On the radio this morning and later in the day (so far) three things have struck me particularly:
- the guy in charge of the Data Protection Office (on the 'Today' programme) made the uncontroversial comment that security must not just be aimed at preventing criminal acts, but must be idiot-proof, too;
- this same gentleman agreed with the 'Today' presenter that the government may have contravened the Data Protection Act. Quite extraordinary!
- a Lord Errol (?sp), described as a Cross-bencher, speaking on 'The World at One', queried why the National Audit Office had the right to seek information from the HMRC on the tax details of citizens? Perhaps its request was orthodox, but I think this line of inquiry is worth pursuing.

There's a very great deal more that needs to be said about this shambles of a government, but I must go out now to visit the hospital where my mother has been for the past week or so.