Brown's speech to Congress: Live blog

ken from glos

Congress has been packed with staffers !!

Says it all does it not?

Andrew

British Honours for British Clap-traps.

oldrightie

Staffers all on speed. Every paragraph jump up! I want to thank you for ruining the financial world?

Hysteria

its all pretty formulaic so far - going on about military service a lot - not sure where he can go with this line given the current combat zones - not sure we are "side ny side" in Iraq - bit of a stretch !!!

Wilhelm

Barak isnt there, he's busy at a scouts meeting, tying knots.

Hysteria

I thought it was parsnips of purpose - no wonder I was confused !!!

Hysteria

Argggg - son of the manse again!!!!

Wilhelm

Gordon squeeeks '' Blah, blah, platitudes, banalities, inanities, global crisis, blah, blah, not my fault, piffle, poor African villages, waffle, son of the manse cliche, blah blah''

Cue deafening silence, tumbleweed, church bell tolling in distance, dog howling, door creaking, tap dripping.

Fergus Pickering

I think it's disgraceful to give that contemptible man Kennedy a knighthood. What for? Is it for cheating in his exams? Leaving a girl to die? Encouraging the IRA to murder? The man should be execrated everywhere.

JohnAnt

"Edward Kennedy’s knighthood"??
OMG.
"He was a very parfait, gentill knight."
Notte.

Verity

Ugh. A knighthood for the coward of Chappaquick. And the vile Kennedy family has always been anti-British. What has frat boy "Teddy" ever done for Britain? He's a nasty piece of work. Probably the nastiest of the three brothers. He used to get in quite a few car accidents from driving drunk - most memorably in Chappaquidick, of course. But always quickly covered up.

What is this gong actually for?

David

"let us build tomorrow today"

That's code for: 'borrow and tax to hell and let someone else sort it out!'

George Laird

Dear James

I would have liked it if the Staffers had booed hard throughout the speech.

This would send the British public the correct signal that the US supports the people living in Britain under the heel of an oppressor such as Brown.

Brown is a dead man walking; he is like a zombie in a Romero film crashing about arms outstretched for a voter, any voter to like him.

It is all over for him now, he should lead Labour to defeat and disappear to his EU guango feather bed nest egg, held in reserve.

Maybe European gravy train cusine will be more his taste.

Yours sincerely

George Laird
The Campaign for Human Rights at Glasgow University

salieri

But the burning question is: is he going to use the dreaded words "which began in America"? That will show whom he is addressing, won't it?

Liz Brown

A HUGE waste of British taxpayers money - a nauseating performance. Still, got him out of the country for a bit - can he now stay in the USA please?

David Lindsay

Gordon Brown is apparently to tell the United States Congress that Europe now has its most “pro-American” leaders “in living memory”.

That, however, may be a touch passé. The people running Britain, France, Germany, Italy and the European Commission have not changed. But the person running America has.

When can Britain, France, Germany, Italy and the European Commission expect to be run by figures who, like President Obama, combine economic populism (including economic patriotism) and foreign policy realism with an appeal to moral and social conservatives in the electorate at large?

As for Sir Ted Kennedy, oh, why not? People who have done far more damage to this country have had it, and not just honorarily. And they haven’t done anything in the bread-and-butter interests of their own country’s working families. In cases such as that of Sir Fred Goodwin, quite the reverse, in fact.

On Northern Ireland, well, he won in the end, didn’t he? To the victors the spoils, I suppose. He never understood the first thing about it, but that is not a peculiarly American (or Nationalist) fault.

As a result of all-round ignorance, Northern Ireland now contains at least four entirely separate societies, each of them maintained one way or another at the expense of the mainland British taxpayer: a Tory one, an Irish Catholic and Old Labour one, a Protestant fundamentalist and working-class populist one, and a Marxist one which is nevertheless obsessed with the stage-Irishness of things like the language.

None of these any longer has any parallel in the Republic. No one who matters there is still attached to the old Catholic Ireland, or ever was to Old Labour economic policy. And pretty much no one at all in interested in the Irish-speaking but Marxist Ireland envisaged by Sinn Féin, which, particularly in education, it is now busily constructing with British money within the United Kingdom.

Not that that poses any threat to the other three tribes. There are also still, for example, state schools for the Old Labour Catholics, and others for the Tories and for the Protestant fundamentalist working class. Those latter two are not formally separate from each other (not yet, anyway), but they are effectively so in the same way that middle-class and working-class state schools function as two entirely separate systems over here.

Anyone who wishes to live either in the old Catholic Ireland (but with much better social provisions) or in Sinn Féin Land should now move to Northern Ireland. If already there, they should be making every effort to ensure that Northern Ireland remains in the United Kingdom, the only country prepared to pay for either.

The Republic certainly wouldn’t.

And nor would the “Irish America” of Senator Sir Edward Kennedy.

Mike, Brighton

I watched it and thought "big deal, is that it - what NuLab have been pinning their hopes on". It will get a mention on the news tonight and a couple of soundbites but Mr. & Mrs Public will not notice nor care. It will have absolutely no domestic political effect other than perhaps a vague whiff of embarrassment at Brown's awfulness and rudeness from the Americans

Chris

Good to see Ted Kennedy's services to alcoholism, adultery, gluttony and cowardice recognised at last.

Hysteria

"a fairly well crafted and decently delivered speech" - I beg to differ James - it was almost toe curling - patronising, name dropping, the oh so obvious lines to milk applause - and delivery? For Brown it was good - but remember the Labour line "not Flash, just Gordon" - just about summed it up

seb

'Let us build tomorrow today'. Sorry, Gord. I don't see this turning up in Bartlett's Quotations. Ever.

David Bouvier

David - he doesn't get to be Sir Ted - the Americans ban such titles, just Ted Kennedy KBE instead.

Sir Graphus

I liked the bit about tax havens too. Translates as "I'll get that f##ker Blair's money off him if it f##king kills me".

Wilhelm

Gordon Broon grunts

'' There is no old Europe or new Europe, just an Islamic Europe.''

Sir Graphus

And what's with the competition for standing ovations? Stalin holds the world record, so it's pretty meaningless.

Jupiter

What's Teddy Kennedy getting his knighthood for? - Killing his girlfriend and running away.

mac

Brown's tawdry, self-serving sycophancy really is boundless.

And if Sinn Fein regarded Blair as a 'naive eejit', what must their verdict be on Brown, giving a Knighthood to arch-Anglophile Joe K's youngest son? Once they've stopped peeing themselves laughing, that is.

Never mind, the BBC will be on the button to tell us how successful this visit's been, the key criterion being how many robotic standing ovations the creep got from the interns and Hill itinerants herded in to listen.

kinglear

Standing ovations? The only one that counts is Placido Domingo that was 80 odd minutes long...

JONNY

'And the vile Kennedy family has always been anti-British'

Thanks for reminding me Verity.
Wasn't it Ted especially who colluded with the IRA murderers snd helped raise funds for the killings among the Boston Irish American Fraternity.
Nice timing Mr Brown to get the Queen to bestow the jolly old... "Kneel Sir Edward Blah Blah Blah" on this day of all days. Just in time to get him another robotic round of ovation after his incomprehensible gobbledegook.

Chuck Unsworth

Ghastly, a complete humiliation. A meaningless drone from start to finish.

This is our Prime Minister speaking on our behalf to America? How gross and how incredibly embarrassing.

For any Americans who may read this blog let me state quite clearly - 'Not in my name'.

jon dee

If words were a marketable commodity Brown would corner the market. If his cliches could be converted into currency the banks would be lending. If his rhetoric convinced the market, confidence would return.

But the sad fact is, nobody believes him.

RH

'Let's destroy tomorrow (and the day after) today' would fit the bill better. After weeks of agony Brown manages a strap line that could have been crafted by a five year old. Oh well Bob the Builder did Ok for Barack so why not?

Travis Bickle

A knighthood? surely a peerage more in order;

Lord Chappaquiddik perhaps

Verity

Jonny - The Kennedy's have always been violently anti-British. The patriarch, gangster and, during Prohibition, bootlegger extraordinaire - that's where the Kennedy fortune came from, if you didn't know - told his political friends in DC to write Britain off during the War. He was a major admirer of Hitler.

Of the three sons who made it to adulthood, they were all three self-indulgent, egotistical womanisers. Teddy added drinking, and rabble rousing in Irish-American bars, to his portfolio. And cowardice, of course, leaving his secretary crouched over an air pocket in the car that he had thoughtlessly driven off a bridge over Chappaquidick as he was falling down drunk, desperately trying to live.

The next day, he appeared in a neck brace. Oddly enough, he'd managed to wrestle the submerged car door open against the weight of the water, exit the car and swim quite a distance to shore, all with a badly sprained neck. Uh huh.

Thenceforth, any time the Kennedy's were about to essay something political, Kennedy operators went and called on poor Mr and Mrs Kopechne and asked them how they were doing and did they need anything. They never took anything from the Kennedys, always saying that all they needed was to know what were the circumstances of the death of their only child.

The Kennedys make me sick. And now this loathsome government has recommended knighting the greediest and most self-indulgent of the three sons, career drunkard Edward Kennedy.

mac

Verity,

Completely agree with your 7.58. Yet I suspect it isn't this loathsome government but the sycophantic Cape-Cod groupie Brown himself who decided on this further cheapening of the honour: 'now what gesture would go down best when I address Congress?' 'What serves my purpose best? 'Ah, yes, a knighthood for noble, dying, patriarchal EK'.

One half of political Ulster will be crying with laughter, the other spitting blood at the grotesqueness of this disgraceful opportunism.

Rhoda Klapp

Verity, I think Joe Jr. was an adult. Unless you mean Teddy really never was...

Verity

Mac - Teddy is not a "patriarch". I don't even know if he and his wife Joan had any children. His father, Joseph, was the patriarch. His mother, Rose, the matriarch, a very devout Roman Catholic, spent most of her days talking to her priest. There was a lot to discuss.

Rhoda K - After I posted, I realised that someone would pull me up on that. It doesn't alter the substance of my post, which is that this was a greedy, arrogant set of people. Yes, if you're thinking of the other brother, he was an adult too and died. Hence we have "the Kennedy tragedies" myth.

Then we had John F Kennedy, Jr, who so touchingly and iconicly saluted his slain father's coffin as a tiny child back in the Seventies.

With the mind-grazing arrogance of the Kennedys, as an adult, he, a very recently qualified pilot, decided to fly his new wife Carolyn Bessette to, I think, "the Kennedy compound" on Martha's Vineyard, despite thick, thick fog. I mean, fog! He was warned not to take off. Apparently inexperienced pilots become easily disoriented in thick fog and lose their ability to distinguish between up and down. John couldn't so distinguish, because he took himself and his new wife to their watery deaths.

Another Kennedy "tragedy". Self-inflicted. It wasn't the unjust anger of the gods, or God, it was arrogance. (His wife's family sued the Kennedys for unwrongful death.)

I'm surprised they're not mooting Caroline's failure to do a cakewalk into Hillary Clinton's seat in the NY Senate as yet one more Kennedy "tragedy". They even homesteaded Mary Jo Kopechne's death as a "Kennedy tragedy", rather than a Kopechne tragedy.

This is a simply appalling bunch of people. No wonder Jackie took off to Greece and married Aristotle Onassis, who looked measured by comparison.

Hysteria

unwrongful death.....?

Erm - we know what you mean - but an interesting new word there Verity!

Verity

You're right, Hysteria!