A Few Bad Men

I enjoyed watching the film A Few Good Men (written by Aaron Sorkin, starring Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson and Jack Bauer) for the first time last night. Quite an excellent film. The crucial juncture comes towards the end where Cruise's lawyer character cross-examines the Colonel (Nicholson) in charge at Guantanamo Bay at the time when a timid soldier was killed in his room by two other soldiers (accused of murder, they claim they were hazing him under orders). He traps the Colonel within his own contradiction, that both the timid soldier was considered to be "in danger" from his fellow soldiers - and yet, all the soldiers at the camp are steadfastly loyal to the Colonel and would never disobey an order no matter their conscience on it.

And so I turn to today's headlines. Gordon Brown and Labour have for months been claiming that the recession is a global problem started in America and has nothing to do with what's going on here. But now they're attacking the bankers of this country for landing us in this mess. Well steady on there, it's either one or the other, isn't it? Or maybe it's the fault of the government and the Chancellor who was apparently sleeping on the job. You want the truth? You can't handle the truth!

Newsarama has an interesting article on the rights and wrongs of comic book publishers (such as Marvel) putting out material involving a public figure (in this case, Barack Obama).

My question to Marvel would be why they permitted an sequence involving Gordon Brown to appear in Captain Britain and MI13 #1 (which generated a lot of positive coverage for him over here) and blocked a similar sequence in a future issue involving David Cameron.

Now I doubt that anyone at the publisher seriously favours one over the other (I would not presume anyone at Marvel knows anything about UK politics, why would they?) but this lack of equality in coverage essentially boils down to political interference over here. - especially given that it's added to Gordon Brown's personal delusion that he's some sort of superhero, "saving the world" he says, which is doing serious damage to the way he runs the country.

Gordon attempts table tennis

Accountability

Mike Smithson off the telly has posted at his site Political Betting that he thinks Gordon is cutting down on his PMQs sittings (both by reducing parliamentary sitting time and by avoiding it by visiting other countries) and that he thinks this is constitutionally dangerous because PMQs are a key instrument in the PM's accountability.

I'm not entirely convinced this is the case - he missed, I think, four PMQs events in 2008, although he didn't actually miss any during his first six months (when things were going pretty easy for him). What I mean is that under Brown, PMQs has become a half hour of bashing the Tories and Tory policy at every available opportunity (and shoehorning even more in). Brown doesn't actually answer any questions from opposition politicians and uses the vast majority of his response time (on live, terrestrial TV) to propagandise against the Conservatives. Where does accountability come into that?

Meanwhile Brown is instead in Iraq, shamelessly abusing the army in an effort to appeal to the masses. This time he's set a date for Iraq withdrawl - after the suggested spring election. (Yes, I am now convinced they are preparing for a spring election, but this time Labour insiders are sensible enough to shut up about it. Another example here; having been threatening to wreck my friend's life for twelve weeks, they have realised that alienating voters at that particular time might not be such a great idea.) It doesn't have anything to do with the job being done (it isn't; we have a duty to protect Iraq's citizens after the shambles we made of the occupation) it's just being opportunistic. Hopefully he will chicken out of a spring election and this will bite him in the arse.

And what would the soldiers be coming back to? Either redeployment to Afghanistan, or a nasty recession (just as WWI veterans did). Plus a disgusting lack of public sentiment (thanks for nothing, Polly Toynbee).

Crash Gordon

He has delusions of grandeur. He plays the worst sort of politics. He believes that only he can save the world. He is incapable of thinking on his feet.

He is Nixon.

The Mugabe-esque arrest of Damian Green

I find it utterly astonishing that, beyond denying all involvement (yeah right!), the government has not made any comment on this.

Meanwhile, it's been confirmed that counter-terrorism police have confiscated documents and computers from Green's Commons offices. There goes the confidentiality of all his constituents then, along with perhaps the confidentiality the rest of us entrust in our MPs, whose files can apparently be arbitrated by the police on a whim. Bastards.

45% on the highest earners would lead to 1978 madness

Anyone who knows anything about economics knows this is an unworkable policy from a man who knows he can't win the next election, so he's putting Labour on full-on damage limitation mode by appealing directly to the left and the "class war" types in the strongest possible terms. Tomorrow, David Cameron must clearly point out that the man who doth protest so loudly at his opponent's supposed "party politics" is the most tribalistic leader to ever inhabit Downing Street.

Pull the other one

Today, Gordon Brown said he was "not thinking about anything related to internal politics".

LOL! He never thinks about anything ELSE. He frames every political decision he makes around how best to boost himself and damage the Tories.

How not to interview, part 2

Gordon Brown's latest line of attack is that the Tories are being "partisan" on matters supposedly too important, which is not only rubbish (as if to question his policies is a partisan matter? Isn't that the entire point of having an opposition?) but also utterly hypocritical - is Gordon Brown physically capable of giving an interview in which he doesn't veer off on a bizarre tangent specifically to attack the Tories?

Gordon cannot be allowed to bask in the glory of Help For Heroes

I just saw the X Factor start with Gordon Brown praising its charity single in aid of Help For Heroes, and the hosts thanking him for dropping VAT on sales of the CD.

The charity Help For Heroes would not be remotely necessary though, if Gordon had not worked completely against the military covenant during his eleven years in Downing Street, failing soldiers by cutting funding for their healthcare, equipment and housing, among many other necessities. The charity only exists because the situation has simply become that dire.

So Gordon must not be allowed to bask in the glory of someone else's initiative - especially when it's yet another disaster of his own making.

Guest blog: Ed Reynolds (1 of 2)

Gordon Brown has declared that he must act with "vision and courage" (no really) to end "The Age of Irresponsibility".

But Gord, who was it who:
- Put taxes up to record levels.
- Borrowed at record amounts (10-figures).
- Presided over a boom built on debt (10-figures).
- Has the biggest budget deficit in the G8 and almost all the developed world.
- Sold our gold reserves at the bottom of the market.
- Taxed to oblivion the pension fund which in '97 had more than the rest of Europe put together, sending many private funds broke and leaving people destitute in retirement.
- Clobbered students.
- Masked unemployment by rapidly expanding the size of the state, put everyone on final-salary pensions worth 5x that of those in the private sector.
- Spent the fund to pay public sector pensions!

It's unbelievable to me that he's got away with this. Well, now of course, it's too late. He hasn't just spent the money, but he's spent the money for nearly a century to come.

Just think about the enormity of that. Everything of value he's cashed in; every bill he's shoved under the mat for the next guy.

He's hardwired poverty into the British national DNA for generations.


Bush is nearly as bad -- his only saving grace is that at least the American stock market grew under him so there was some money being generated to make up for the money he was pissing up the wall; and he offered a timely tax rebate. But he's carried on like a big government maniac on his tinpot projects to socially engineer a country full of right little Bushes and Dicks.

See, suddenly everyone is talking sagely in revential tones about the failure of the free market. No. This is on governments.

We expect bankers to behave like, well, complete bankers because that's their job to be ruthless to generate money -- money which as well as lining their bonuses also ultimately pays for health and education and so on. I didn't see the Senate Banking Committee grumble as they were cut all those hefty cheques for their election campaigns from the mortgage giants. Nor did I see the Senate Banking Committee tapping their generous benefactors on the shoulder and saying "oi, oi" BEFORE the thing collapsed. I'm sure of course, that bail-out they arrange for their benefactors is going to be quite the slap on the wrist...

But obviously everyone screams "regulate!" as though this is a magic bullet.

Regulating the market into oblivion didn't help after Enron -- it just pushed business out of the USA. Gordon Brown's corpulent FSA, in eye-poppingly lush Canary Wharf offices, do nothing but regulate. Their last go at "pensions simplification" increased the size of the rulebook. But did it do any good? No -- our stockmarket has more or less flatlined for the last 11 years.

The FSA spent millions on thousand-page rulebooks but still couldn't tell Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley that 100% mortgages are a colossally stupid idea.

The problem is the culture, the lack of integrity, the "spend today, worry tomorrow" attitude and that comes from the top, from both Bush (where are the GOP's budget hawks?!) and Brown.

The free market works because bad businesses fail and good businesses survive. Regulation, which will clobber everyone, is counter-productive and largely pointless without a culture of integrity and responsibility from those at the top. It's for the government to say, in effect, "you break it, you buy it" way ahead of time.

When people actually carry the can for their failures, it concentrates the mind wonderfully.

An observation

Gordon Brown, so they tell us, is the man to steer us through a crisis. But he was absolutely hopeless when we weren't in a crisis, and when we were simply on the verge of one. It's therefore in Gordon's interest for Britain to constantly be in crisis. (In fact during the YEAR between the collapse of Northern Rock and this current financial crisis he failed to legislate ANY financial regulatory reform which could have prevented the hole from becoming so big - presumably he was too busy "surviving from one fortnight to the next".) Is this really something we as a nation can sustain, for the sake of one man's ego? Wouldn't it be better for all of us to have leaders who can keep us from getting us into a mess in the first place?

Why is Gordon laughing?!?

Lord Baron Mandelson

Has the world gone mad? Brown hates that guy. In fact, everybody does. Still he was, we are told, instrumental in Labour's 1997 victory. Doesn't this just smack of desperation?

And who's going to replace him as EU Commissioner? Gordon surely doesn't want to risk a by-election given his state in the polls? But who else is there he could appoint? Blair is surely out of the question. I hear Tamsin Dunwoody is out of a job. Baroness Ashton's got it. That was a close one. ;)