A government of automatons

Greg

Fraser, Paul Waugh had this ages before Guido.

Credit where credit's due and that..

Andy Leeds

I have no love for the Labour Party, but I want its total and utter destruction. After the mess they have created over the last 12 years they deserve no other fate.

Silent Hunter

Guido was NOT the first to expose this - Paul Waugh WAS.

Give us the facts dear boy . . . the facts.

BTW - I saw you beating "Obarmy Beach" over the head at his last news conference - excellent work in rattling him so comprehensively.

Not Quite Hayek

"I have no love for the Labour Party but I do want them to be a fierce Opposition"

Really? I'd prefer it if the Lib Dems were a fierce Opposition.

kevin

gordon brown is in the process of destroying the labour party.for a fierce opposition in future you will have to look to nick clegg

James J

It is because they are no longer a National Government merely a Regional Assembly most of the power being in Brussels.
They know it, and we increasingly know it.

Oscar

Gosh - that briefing note is just like listening to the BBC. I wonder why?

Alan Douglas

First found by Paul Waugh at the Evening Standard.

Alan Douglas

Publius

Mr Nelson. Does anyone actually know the UK Euro election results? I notice that there are some pretty definite speculations dribbling out in the media, and when I think about it it seems to me the votes must have been counted and the result must be known.

Do you know? Is it something that is embargoed by the media?

PS. A belated congrats on your questioning of Brown. It was appalling to watch him lying straight after going on about his integrity and his goddam "values".

hadrian

The Opposition banner deserves to pass to the Liberals I think.
If Labour is quashed into humiliating third place it will only be what they so richly deserve.

maurice brady

Incredibly weak & shallow politicians populate this facile Labour Government. However, with the equally revolting Tories waiting in the wings & the unelectable Lib/Dems completing this unholy triumvirate, the remaining tenure of this gov. must spur the electorate towards radical options! But alas, I fear they have neither the stomach nor the inclination for the challenge. Even at this early stage the Conservatives appear to be the beneficiaries, in spite of their egregious self-indulgence. John Major was the nadir of political humiliation, now Brown looks to trump that! Are we doomed to follow some Grecian tragedy, a la Echo? Woe is me, the politics of despair!

Vulture

I think that by their corrupt and utterly immoral behaviour since 1997 Liebour has forfeited the right to the respect we once afforded to a civilised political party. I certainly don't want them to be a 'fierce oppositon' Fraser. I want them to be annihilated, obliterated and consigned to the dustbin of history where they belong. Their remaining MPs, contemptible curs who have defecated on a once proud and honourable party, deserve oblivion and the sneer of posterity.

Patriot

Mandelson is now de facto head of the New Labour Party, Brown is just a puppet.

David

To be fair, having lines to take is something all political parties do.

Corsair

"I have no love for the Labour Party but I do want them to be a fierce Opposition"

I want to see it extirpated from our national life all together. And with Dave Cameron's green-tinged Euro-lefties in office, I'd like to see a proper, fierce, conservative opposition

Oscar

I presume this briefing is written by Mandelson. Watching Brown do his 'ups and down' waffle today I believe Mandelson is writing Brown's script too. We have a lame duck PM entirely at the mercy of the First Minister of the State.

Guido IMHO has it absolutely right 'Mandelson's vanity overcame his good judgement':
http://order-order.com/

Hawkeye

Andy Leeds said: "I have no love for the Labour Party, but I want its total and utter destruction. "

I agree 100% with you. The sooner this political excrescence is burned out and consigned to the history of failed political ideologies, the happier I'll be.

oldtimer

I was startled to read on page 161 of that excellent book The Plan, by Carswell and Hannan, that "there is at present no formal mechanism to prevent MPs from voting to extend the life of the current Parliament to 20 or 50 years."

No doubt The Great Leader is already contemplating the deployment of his payroll vote to achieve just such a result and to ensure that his self-righteous mision may be accomplished, whatever it takes and however long it takes, unencumbered by the nuisance and distraction of a general election. Consider the briefing notes in this light and all is clear. We have been warned - dictatorship beckons.

Frank Middle England

A strong and fierce opposition is one thing, Fraser, but can you be sure we are going to get a strong government? Surely the latter is more important.

Heaven knows I'll be glad to see the back of this shower but I am yet to be convinced by Cameron. I was never a big fan of Thatcher but at least she was effective and where was the opposition in the eighties? Nowhere.

So no, I don't care if we have a fierce opposition or not. Let's have a strong government to replace this one, so it can do what needs to be done in Europe and sort out the economic, constitutional and devolutional mess that Labour are leaving us with.

Henry Rogers

Come down to earth, Maurice Brady! It is in the nature of sensible human beings to cock things up and when you have a gang of loonies trying to run things you shouldn't expect anything better.

I don't think people here expect any Tory to walk on water or David Cameron to clear buildings at a single bound but I'd be surprised if they were not a moderate improvement on the present situation.

While the Telegraph's revelations have shown us that some Tories are indeed self-indulgent I think it might be slightly unreasonable to label all Tories as that.

Furthermore I don't think the creepiness of Brown, Mandelson (should that really be Meddlesome?), Straw and the rest damns every Labour voter or even every Labour activist. There are misguided idealists there as well as exploitative cynics.

With cock-ups in a democracy, people can do something about them. Bugger the politics of despair! if you give up that easily you really will end up with something that is beyond cure by anything but bullets.

simon s

Fascinating to see the "party line" document. I wonder who wrote it? Mandelson? They really all do parrot from it.

The tories need to realise that whenever a new "party line" set of phrases emerge they must be countered and even ridiculed. This is the heart of the New Labour spin operation - disciplined sticking to daft 'dividing lines'.

An example of counteracting: "difficult circumstances" which "from the US". Who is responsible? Brown.
- stupid housing boom - like the US
- overleveraged banks - like the US
- casino capitalism in the city with inadequate regulation via the FSA. - like the US

Tiberius

"Brown and his Cabinet are androids" shock.

It would explain a lot of the human-gravity defying aerobatics that Brown has demonstrated.

hadrian

Fraser- Can you clarify?
What's all this about Labour winning seats from SNP in Scotland? So far as I know we Scots were voting purely on the E.U., not on local councils, and the results ain't out yet.
Just puzzled.

maurice brady

For the perusal of Henry Rogers! Consider the tail-end of J. Major's Gov. & the political carnage that followed. Good men, their careers & possible future contributions, were laid waste. No one can deny that was excellent theatre! But was it politics? Impossible standards were set, hence the present furore. The parallels are striking, agreed? Now we have a Tory Pretender, most would also agree lacking the personal charisma of one T.Blair, but eminently acceptable. Party politics aside, take a serious look at Dave & his Merry Men & tell me you wholeheartedly approve, really? We were fooled by Blair; we are ALLOWING ourselves to be fooled by Cameron! It’s not the standard of our politicians that’s in question, but the quality of the electors & their ability to step outside perceived convention! ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.’

strapworld

old timer..I did think that was definately on the cards. I was of the view they would also bring into play the Civil Disturbances Act-telling us all, no doubt, that there were weapons of mass destruction hidden in Bradford!

However, the expenses scandal has changed that dramatically.

The anger throughout the country amazed those Westminster politicians and the Westminster journalists. They never thought the British people could get so aroused and angry over politics.

If this administration attempted to extend its life, I hate to think what would happen. But the Pole Tax Riots would be looked upon as a little squirmish in comparison.

No, because of the expenses scandal, there will be a general election. You see Good does come from Bad!

Henry Rogers

"The parallels are striking, agreed?"

Matthew,
No, not agreed! I think John Major was a poor PM and should have resigned immediately after the Black Wednesday affair. He was after all, like Brown, an enthusiast for the ERM from which so much flowed.

Whether the Tories would have found a better successor or whether they would have elected somebody worse and collapsed into a shambolic heap a few months later is anybody's guess. However I don't think Major was quite in the same league as Blair, Brown, Lord Meddlesome et al. for mendacity and spite. For me Major's main crime was the Maastricht treaty rather than failure to see through Aitken and Archer quickly enough. Given the internal strife that caused to the Tories and the harm it caused the country you can see the reluctance of Tories in opposition to re-open old wounds.

I like the flow of your impassioned rhetoric but the trouble is is it's just words. And we've heard too many of those over the last 12 years, and not all of them were true.

You may rather like the idea of redeemers coming down from Heaven or riding in on white horses but personally I don't think democratic politics are quite like that. Voters and politicians are both human and well equipped with human fallibility.

That old and infuriating saying about the best being the enemy of the good is infuriating because it has so much truth in it. I think the evidence available so far suggests that Cameron has a reasonable chance of leading the Tory party to victory at the next election but I don't count on it. If he is elected I think he will probably be both more effective and more honest than Blair and Brown have been, but I'm not counting on that either. Whether he would be able to arrest our slide into the complete, as opposed to the partial, loss of our democracy remains to be seen.

However one thing I'm quite sure about. Once we give up on democratic politics, which you suggest by your earlier remark: "Woe is me, the politics of despair", then the next step can only be armed rebellion, innocent blood spread everywhere and power falling into the hands of political gangsters at the end.

Henry Rogers

Maurice Brady,

Sorry, I think I called you Matthew in my last post for which many apologies! The lines you quote:

‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.’

certainly disturb me. You could, I think, argue that the Roman Republic had finally come to pieces decades before the murder of Julius Caesar but whatever seductive words Shakespeare gives conspirators, the end of the story was military dictatorship. I'd hope you are not advocating that. Whatever the merits of Augustus, and they were many, look at some of the people who followed him.

maurice brady

I simply advocate that voters have the ability to elect so called 'fringe parties' i.e. BNP, UKIP, English Dems. that sort of thing. Tory, Labour & to some degree, Lib/Dems control what are euphemistically referred to as 'safe seats'. As the 'fringe' are mainly bound by core policies, such as out of Europe, no immigration, Britain for Brits ideology; the safe-seated rump would be driven to revise their policies. Failing that, who says democracy is best? Under the democratic banner both Labour & Tory parties have been able to gallop off into the sunset, frantically outdoing each other in some kind of ‘mock auction’ of all we cherish! (Admittedly, the term ‘we’ here, is highly subjective) A reining-in of what’s on offer here is needed, if not absolutely demanded, at least by those of us not party-affiliated!

Verity

Henry Rogers 1:33pm -I enjoyed your well-written and well-reasoned post, but when you despaired that "the next step leads to armed rebellion", I came up short. What on earth is wrong with armed rebellion when the politicians have failed to respond to simple English?

Henry Rogers

Maurice,

I completely agree with your last sentence "A reining in of what's on off here is needed..." One of the problems of democracy is that parties at times do indeed try to outbid each other and a convincing orator can make the voters forget, for the time being, that expenditure and taxes are directly connected. A trick that has worked in plenty of places is to create a majority of those who expect to receive more than they expect to pay. Verity's frequently made point that those who depend on state benefits and contribute nothing to the country should not be entitled to vote is completely logical and moral but would be rather hard to get enacted.

Where I think I disagree with you is over the implications of your point "Failing that, who says democracy is best?". For a start I think most people would agree that it certainly isn't ideal but that it is the least bad idea people have tried. For me, at any rate, the point of democracy is that the public has the responsibility of choice. There is no promise that their choices will be ideal but it does mean that people can, sometimes vainly I agree, hope to get what they actually want rather than what some Olympian figure decides they ought to want. If they subsequently don't like the consequences of their choice that's tough, but providing democracy is still on offer they remain free to try different people and policies next time.

I quite agree that established parties have too much power and that safe seats held by the same persons until well past their 'elect by dates' are deplorable. I think both problems are soluble without resorting to PR and dictators for life, both of which introduce problems of their own.

I'm all for fringe parties in general, though decidely unenthusiastic about some that are currently on offer. However as noisy pressure groups they are bound to concentrate the minds of party elites which has to be a good idea even if such pressure groups don't win many seats.

Henry Rogers

Verity,

The sad thing is that in the face of injustice and oppression armed rebellion is often the only way out. Parliament had to take on Charles I and we are lucky to this day that Parliament won.

My fear is that if EU power is not checked the consequence will be a European civil war when people tire of oppression. I tell those young enough to be around then to pencil 2048 into their diaries though they sometimes look at me blankly. For the record, if I survive that long I shall be well past military age!

hadrian

As one already well past military age I would never advocate armed rebellion. It is the resort of revolutionaries and socialists and is rarely justified; the Civil War was one such rare exception. Now if Broon suddenly announced he was never standing down, well...