Fear factor

oldtimer

The thing Labour MPs seem to fear is loss of office and the salary and perks with no, or inadequate, means to replace them. That is why I think Brown will be left to stumble on - a Prime Micawber presiding over a government of bungling incompetence.

It is a shabby, contemptible spectacle. I think we shall have to survive this until the last possible date for calling a general election.

Bruce. UK

Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his country for his life.

TGF UKIP

Treasury cash spending figure for 10/11 is £679.8bn or £27k per household or £21k per taxpayer.

And Dave and Boy George are saying they can't and shouldn't cut that. No waste, no fat, no padding, no quangos that they dare touch. Nothing that the state is spending and wasting and should rightly be returned to taxpayers. The saddest and most depressing thing of all, though, is that they will doubtless be applauded by their groupies on the editorial staff of the Speccie and in the Coffee House for not "frightening the horses" or "deluging the voters with doubt."

Small wonder that the Tory lead is so soft and geographically limited. They clearly have no convictions least of all conservative convictions.

This demonstrates once again that poor old Britain has the worst government faced by the worst, wettest, lamest, limpest opposition for at least the last fifty years.

Max Kaye

Good.

(So long as 'everybody' means only the Labour Party).

Verity

Well, it's true to say that not a member of the cabinet will be able to find work in the private sector. They have to dash their resumés off to quangoes - which Cameron should, but won't, promise to abolish, and "think tanks". Suck, suck, suck, suck, suck, suck ... at the ever full teat.

Craig Strachan

“If GB goes down, he's going to take everybody with him."

How would he accomplish that, I wonder? Ask for a dissolution if there's a leadership challenge?

Fred

Okay, part of the problem is that under Blair/Brown, the number of ministers has bloated upwards. Using the state to bribe people for support. Will Cameron be any different? I fear not, and this lack of difference is part of the reason Brown can continue.

Teledu

TGF UKIP : As usual I find myself in complete agreement with the sentiments you express.
What we need is an opposition with, what in my circles they call "bollocks": the courage of their convictions even if it gets up a lot of peoples noses; even if it loses votes.
I haven't noticed any "leading" politicians of any party that have this quality. I'd rather have a PM that was "nasty" but pursued his or her beliefs (assuming they still had beliefs)for the good of the country (not the party or the EU) than a shallow, spin-obsessed clone who's just in the job because...?

TrevorsDen

The word is that Brown is going to do a mea culpa and ask for a second chance at the party conference.

!!!

A second chance to do what?

To further bugger up the country with his failed paradigm??

To further demonstrate that he lives in a completely different world from the rest of us?
On Planet Gordon everybody behaves as Gordon tells us as Gordon wants us and as Gordon expects us. On Planet Gordon all events proceed as Gordon decrees. And on Planet Gordon everyone is too thick to notice that our Emperor has no clothes.

A second chance indeed ... is this how dim he really thinks we are?

Austin Barry

Is any member of the public entitled to apply under Section 2 of the Mental Health Act, 1983 to have Gordon Brown sectioned? Perhaps a Coffee House lawyer could provide some pro bono legal advice.

mitch

"A second chance to do what?"

If he had called the election he wouldn't have got a first chance.

what's he gonna do threaten every MP then get them all to cheer at the conference.

Draughtsman

I don't think that Dave and George will have any choice other than to make drastic cuts whatever they may or may not be saying now. The country has been virtually bankrupted already and by the time Brown has been wheelbarrowed out of No.10 in 2010 they will inherit a truly desperate financial and social situation.

Tiberius

If anyone hasn't seen it, please read Cameron's interview in the ST today.

The door into the stable where the horse that kicked Cameron's kin and kith as recently as 12 months ago has now been gently opened, as many said it would. The horse is now relaxed enough to be led into the arena to keep his appointed time. No kicking, no bolting, and no turning up too early and having to endure a dangerously long wait.

A clear round beckons, but with the quality of the opposition, 4 faults might still win it - no more than that, though, because complacency would be an equally formidable opponent.

David C

I think the idea was to make an example of those who challenge him, to quell further insurrection - NOT declare war on his own party.

I don't believe this will instill fear, I rather think it will stiffen the sinews of those who seek Brown's departure and swell their ranks.
The man's a maniac - he's got to go.

Every day this becomes more like the final weeks in the Fuhrer Bunker.

Nicholas

I think DC is misreading this. There are a lot of people out there who would welcome some real conservative rhetoric about Labour and Britain. The political climate has already moved on from Blair's centre-left "third way" and I think DC could legitimately attack the fascism of the Left, enviro-bullying, PC, public sector bloating, waste, centralisation, reckless immigration, the projectile vomiting of laws and authoritarianism. The English, at least, would be 100% behind him.

Andy

Yes Trevor, to continue to **** everything up like he has done for the last 11 years.

I hope to God that when the election comes the Labour Party is destroyed.

Nicholas

The conference is going to be like the Mad Hatter's Tea Party gate-crashed by the Red Queen (Brown).

Austin Barry

How long is this shabby farce to continue? A Cabinet of power-bloated, expense-sucking cowards dither around the festering but still twitching carcass of a paranoid PM now apparently given, via his flabby consiglierie Nick Brown, to making B-movie gangster threats. Pathetic.

Anglica

Austin Barry at 5:14 p.m.
14pm ---"Is any member of the public entitled to apply under Section 2 of the Mental Health Act, 1983 to have Gordon Brown sectioned?"

Maybe it wouldn't be too hard to prove? Perhaps many of us are scanning the photos published of him - I do it partly because I want to know what kind of face hides a man like that. And I think he doesn't look like a very well man.

I'm not a betting woman, but...

Frank Pulley

"If GB goes down he will take everyone else with him."

GB has already gone down - Great Britain that is. Its superlative is simply no longer appropriate; which was the aim of Hegel, Marx, Feuerbach, the Fabian Socialist movement, Gramsci, Benjamin Bloom, George Lukacs, and Saul Alinski, et al., who have not only deeply influenced George Brown and his current bunch of cronies, but have among their disciples both Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama. It is the political philosophy of change by stealth and brainwashing. They are all espousers of the New World Order: the counter culture revolution: soviet communism by other means. It is a science, a cult and the most powerful covert radical force still extant in this changing world. Western civilisation is under dire threat. Listen up people. It is the Eleventh Hour. CHANGE is the Marxist code word. Note the frequency of its use in current political jargon.

I commend to Coffee Housers an article that was published in 2000 by a San Diego Detective named Phillip Worts. It was brought to my attention because since October 2003 on blogs various ( particularly Melanie Phillips's blog since it was launched in 2003), I have continually warned of the influence of the disciples of Antonio Gramsci (some say ad nauseum):

http://www.crossroad.to/articles2/Community-Policing.htm

Read it all. The experience of that police officer in America accords directly with what I know of current policing in this country. Useful idiots proliferate. He explains it in this article far better than I have been able to do for the past five years of plugging away. I hope to correspond with him shortly to update progress in the field.

Barack Obama's history and connections need very close examination indeed. And Gordon Brown achieved his current power via the Trojan Horse of Tony Blair. I'm not sure that Blair knew how what he was being used to accomplish (probably his wife failed to explain it) so he diverted from the script - the game plan. It's just possible that that diversion has given us time to recoup some lost ground - but like Verity of this parish I am less than certain that the Cameroons are the remedy. To convince me (and others like me) they need to urgently renounce any vestige of multi-culti, pro-European Constitution, pro-Euro currency replacement of Sterling; pro-immigration sympathies and fight, fight, fight to halt the slow, long stealthy march of the Gramsci Moles - and then try to reclaim the lost ground. I pray that they have not already been recruited to the Gramscian ethos; I wish they would do something to prove that they declined the brainwasher in the Halls of Academe.

My apologies for straying off topic - but if you think about it affects all topical polemical debate.

Fergus Pickering

Nothing Cameron does will get Brown outof Downing Street a day before Brown wants to go. The Labour majority is too large. So all this blathering about Cameron having firmer policies etc etc is beside the point. Camero will win when the election comes, just as Blair was going to win when Major's time ran out. Cameron, like Blair, has to wait and resist the urge to chuck policies about. Blair had NO policies Which gave him plenty of scope. I know it's difficult for all you people who want everything changed by last Tuesday but there's nothingto do but WAIT.

Nicholas

Frank Pulley: Thanks for the link to the community policing article and your succinct post.

For "common good" read "Common Purpose".

cuffleyburgers

I still think Dc is right to tread carefully.

Obviously on this blog there is a strong and correct preumption that cutting taxes, axing quangoes and preparing what will a difficult secession from the EU are all necessary and desirable objectives, the fact is that with 20 months to run until the election and NL seemingly bent on self destruction, he is wise to keep his powder dry.

The socialist paradigm of dependency and the government will provide is deeply ingrained in this country after 60 years of the scum, and the BBC, schools and a part of the press will oppose tooth and nail any attempt to move the political goalposts towards greater freedom. Until we can be sure the Sun will back us for example it's better to take it easy.,

When an election is yours to lose as would seem to be the case with the Tories, you have to play a damn' canny game (just ask Hillary...)

Verity

Frank Pulley - Thank you for a glittering and gritty post. I will write more later a propos your post with regard to Barack Obama. But this is just to say 'thank you' in the meantime.

Craig Strachan

Frank Pulley: "GB has already gone down - Great Britain that is. Its superlative is simply no longer appropriate"

Sure it is. Properly used, it is purely a geographic term: Gran Bretagne as distinct from Bretagne in France.

David Bouvier

I think oldtimer is right that maximising perks and pensions is probably a key factor. I recall the perks for losing MPs in GEs are pretty generous.

A lot of non-entities know that their 12 good years are up and they now have to go back to media studies lecturer or whatever they did in 1997. They know they are going out and not coming back anytime soon. So might as well drag it out while looking for opportunities.

Perhaps the Conservatives should draft and place before the house a bill to offer Labour MPs the same pensions and perks now as they would if losing a general election on the last possible date (maybe +10% for encouragement).

I wonder now many labour MPs would not be able to resist voting for it.

Verity

I was particularly struck by Frank P's pointing, in his well-observed post above, to the number of times the word "change" is employed by the current political establishment that has its roots in the common rooms and the demonstrations of the 70s. They all blanket their speeches with the word. Repetition, repetition, repetition. Yet, the electorate has shown no hunger for change. Rather, in both Great Britain and the United States, they have demonstrated a hunger for a return to stability of social mores and less excitable government.

Barack Obama has based his entire campaign not on experience, not on vision, but one word: change. What kind of "change"? Why, "change you can believe in", of course! He has never got any further than this. Never got off the dime. Just the automaton repetition of "change".

I believe I was the first on the internet - although there are plenty now and I'm sure others came to the thought independently, as I did - to dub Barack Obama, about a year ago, The Manchurian Candidate.

He is, to my mind, the most sinister candidate we have ever had running in a Western democracy.

He came from nowhere, with no experience except sitting in the Illinois Senate for 12 years and being a ward-heeler (or community organiser, if you want to put it politely). I think Rudolph Guliani pointed out that during his years in the Illinois Senate and more latterly in the national Senate, he had an opportunity to vote over 300 times. And all but once, he voted "Present." Isn't that weird? He went into politics - presumably to execute this "change" he believes in so passionately - to vote "Present"? Over 300 times?

My thought: he was biding his time.

He came with a wispy, insubstantial history - indeed, a somewhat confused history. This wasn't his fault. A child goes where its mother takes it, and his mother took him to Indonesia.

Then he seems to have reappeared in Hawaii, where he had been born, but on an Indonesian passport. What happened to his American passport? No parent whose child had an American passport that was about to expire would let it lapse when a trip to the embassy with the original passport would have got him a new one. Yet she applied for an Indonesian passport for him ...

Yesterday, having been trounced in the charts by Sarah Palin and her brand of patriotism, he suddenly remembered that he had "considered joining the army ... the military" ... as though he was just teasing out a new, unformed thought out ... He didn't actually join, of course, but he "thought about it".

His past is curiously insubstantial, but most curious of all is his apparent disconnection with America. He says a lot of things as though he has been programmed - drilled - to say them.

Example, during the campaign, he told reporters he had "visited all 57 states". Every American child has drilled into them from birth that there are 50 states in the Union. Where did 57 come from, unless it was fed in - erroneously - at some point? It's not a mistake an American would make even if dog tired. I would say expecially a Harvard graduate, but every car mechanic, every fruit grower, everyone who works in a factory or a coffee shop knows that America has 50 states.

Curiouser, at another point in the campaign, he claimed, again, as rote, to have "visited all 48 states and Alaska and Hawaii."

He was born in Hawaii the year after it became a state. He has never known Alaska and Hawaii as anything other than states. Someone fed that in wrongly. And he repeated it because it didn't strike him as wrong.

Finally, for those still awake - stop that fidgeting! - there was the curious business of his birth certificate. Apparently, the issue was resolved to official satisfaction, but again, the refusal to release his birth certificate for public view was odd. Everyone else does, automatically. In fact, it's a requirement, to show that they qualify to run for President.

Now there is the medical records issue. Unlike the birth certificate, this is not a legal requirement, but all the other candidates have, as has become the norm, released their full medical records for scrutiny. Except ... Obama, who issued a doctor's note.

From Day One, I have sensed that this individual is curiously disconnected. And that he's hiding something. He's handsome, he's elegant, he can emote from an autocue ... yet something's not right.

I cannot even imagine a normal American candidate having a personal Presidential Seal fashioned in an almost straight copy of the real Presidential Seal, and having it put on front on his lectern (until told officially to take it off stat). It's simply unthinkable that an unelected American - a Harvard law graduate - would think that that would be OK ...

That's it in a nut shell.

I'm not alone in finding this whole candidacy very bizarre. I'll be interested in your thoughts, if any.

Nicholas

Verity, 57 used to be a trademark of Heinz, who famously make Baked Beans, standing for 57 varieties of tinned food.

Verity

Yes. So what?

Back to the point, Barack Obama thought there are 57 states in the United States. First graders in the US know how many states there are in their country. It's drilled into them. Obama, an American and a Harvard graduate and a lawyer, thought there are 57 states in the United States.

Frank Pulley

Verity

National Review did a marvellous hatchet job on Obama with three articles in the Sep 1st issue, implying that he is a Gramscian disciple through Saul Alinski. If that's the case, and I've been convinced from the start that it is so, then the faint footprints of the Long Slow March to the White House, that were left by Hillary in her subsidiary role (she was an Alinski reader too apparently) when her hubby disgraced the office, will be made more distinct if Obama's stealth is not exposed to the American electorate. In fact they will have achieved the top prize if he makes it. Downing Street has already been captured. I can't imagine Bill Clinton being too influenced by ideology; his interest in power is purely venal with a smattering of sexual opportunity to liven up the action.

Craig

You use 'Great' geographically if you wish (with a name like Craig Strachan - you would, wouldn't you). I'll continue to use the Glorious interpretation in the context of my remarks and I repeat - it sadly no longer is. And with that frog-faced Jock Salmond in charge NOTB, the geographical implications appear dodgier by the minute. United Kingdom it ain't - either! In fact I've never known it to be so disunited in my life, thanks to those bunch of bolshie bastards boondoggling in Birmingham today. What a dog and pony show that was. A disgraceful waste of public money. Yet another travellin' feckin' circus. Ecrasez l'infame!

Frank Pulley

Nicholas

I though Obama's Freudian numerical slip was a mix up with the number of different races and nationalities in his -er - pedigree (or perhaps I should say antecedents).

Verity

Frank, perhaps it was a reference to his multi-national, multi-racial siblings? God knows how many more have yet to appear. I have to give Obama credit for one thing: he doesn't appear to give a rat's arse about them.

Back to the sinister reality: he was referring to the number of states in the United States. Where did the 57 come from when tiny children know it's 50, and he's a Harvard graduate, not a kindergarten attendee. This mistake chilled me because I felt at the time this had been programmed in, in error, but it took.

Verity

Frank P - I don't know that Obama is a Gramscian himself, but it has definitely been programmed in. I remain convinced that this man has been brainwashed probably since adolescence. Tall, handsome, elegant - probably biddable. Perfect.

Craig Strachan

Frank Pulley: "And with that frog-faced Jock Salmond in charge NOTB, the geographical implications appear dodgier by the minute. United Kingdom it ain't - either! In fact I've never known it to be so disunited in my life, thanks to those bunch of bolshie bastards boondoggling in Birmingham today"

Well, we agree on that at least.