Jeff Randall could well have commented on the disproportionate notice
taken of the Third Runway furore. This will probasbly never happen
and the YouGov poll of Londoners show them very divided on the
subject anyway. Tory voters are exactly evenly split!!!
But his target of the ‘Green Shoots’ episode is justifided (You will
note i’ve barely mentioned it in my postings). But the dreadful auto-
speak of Yvette Cooper as she dishonoured all of us by betraying
hundreds of thousdands of cheated Britons in defiance of the order of
the ombudsman was ghastly to listen to. Randall picks this up.
xxxxxxxxx cs
===================
TELEGRAPH 16.1.09
In the theatre of sound bites, all that matters is scoring points
Jeff Randall believes that Baroness Vadera's comment about 'green
shoots' was unfortunate, but nothing compared with the damage caused
by Labour's policies.
By Jeff Randall
For those in commerce who deal regularly with government, it has
become increasingly evident during the financial crisis that Baroness
Vadera is one of the Prime Minister's most trusted and powerful
advisers. From the "drive-by shooting" of RBS's Sir Fred Goodwin, to
ill-starred attempts at a rescue for Woolworths, the fingerprints of
Shriti the Shriek are all over the place.
As an Oxford-educated woman from an ethnic minority, she's very New
Labour. Given her intellectual hardware and natural authority, it was
puzzling to some why she had not been promoted for media interviews.
Now we know the answer. Unpractised in the black art of vacuous
rhetoric, Lady Vadera popped up on ITV, where Alastair Stewart, an
experienced interviewer, nutmegged her without breaking sweat. In the
warped world of politico-speak, she made a schoolgirl error:
answering the question, instead of parroting propaganda.
As the foundations collapse under Gordon Brown's credibility, her
mumbled response, "I am seeing a few green shoots but it's a little
bit too early to say exactly how they'd grow," seemed more suited to
amateur night at the Glasgow Empire than a serious assessment of our
car-crash economy.
For an administration that is addicted to massaging the message, such
loss of control represents a failure of policy. Or, as Lord Jones,
the former trade minister, told me with alarming frankness on Sky
News: "One of the problems that she [Vadera] and one or two of her
colleagues have is that they are good at spinning, and they are good
at getting the headline out. And so... when they actually commit a
genuine and honest and, frankly, quite harmless mistake, people read
lots into it." Yes, the spinner gets spun.
Compare and contrast Lady Vadera's gaffe with the way other ministers
have handled the media this week. On Monday, BBC Radio's Evan Davis
asked James Purnell, the Work and Pensions Secretary, about the
appalling rise in job losses. How bad is it going to get? With so
many people worried about looming redundancy, it was hardly an
unreasonable interrogation.
Mr Purnell, however, was having none of it. Donning a cloak of ersatz
superiority, he reminded listeners that government does not make
forecasts about unemployment. This was, of course, completely untrue.
Inside the Chancellor's bunker there are miles of spreadsheets on
various scenarios for job losses. Mr Darling could not produce an
estimate for next year's borrowing requirement (currently £118
billion), without adding to his calculations a firm forecast for
unemployment. What Mr Purnell really meant was: "Yes, we do have a
figure but I'm not going to tell you."
Before Lady Vadera is next wheeled out to face the press, she might
care to spend a few sessions at the Yvette Cooper School for Empty
Grandiloquence. Miss Cooper, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, is so
permanently on-message that one wonders if her head contains anything
more than batteries and wires, programmed by a sinister operative
from the Lubyanka of Downing Street.
When speaking about government policy, she has been conditioned to
end each sentence with the devotional incantation: "Because it's the
right thing to do." I'm curious to know if her irritating mantras can
be switched off after work, or is husband Ed Balls forced to endure
them during pillow talk?
Ed: "Is it my turn to collect the shopping?"
Yvette: "Yes, dearest... bleep... fair trade... bleep...
sustainability, social justice... bleep... we're not just going to
walk away... bleep, bleep... because it's the right thing to do."
Political rivals seized on Lady Vadera's outbreak of foot-in-mouth
with a mixture of fake concern and barely concealed joy. It was a
silly thing to say, but not a war crime. Never mind. In Westminster's
theatre of sound bites, all that matters is scoring points against
the other lot.
At a time when so many of Labour's diseased chickens are coming home
to roost, the Opposition should not need cheap jibes to hurt the
enemy. The trouble is, having watched Mr Brown for more than a decade
buying his way to the top with the currency of false claims and
poisonous distortions, his
adversaries cannot resist playing the same game.
They would serve the people more effectively by concentrating on the
damage that Labour is inflicting upon us, as it seeks to pay for past
mistakes by loading future generations with ever higher taxes. In its
panic to give the impression of doing something, of being in control,
the Government is trying to pass off activity as competence; eg,
headline-grabbing summits accompanied by fiscal incontinence.
After 12 years of shameless social engineering, during which
excellence in private schools and Russell Group universities has been
undermined because it highlights the inability of Mr Brown's spending
binge to deliver real improvement of standards in state education, we
are being treated to the return of Alan Milburn as a crusader for
social mobility.
Writing in The Sunday Times, Mr Milburn informed us: "We know, from
evidence across the globe, what makes for a more upwardly mobile
society: A welfare system that encourages work and not dependence."
This from an administration that has built a shockingly complex web
of tax credits, hand-outs and personal subsidies, while allowing 2.7
million people to claim incapacity benefit, even though ministers
acknowledge that about one million of them are not disabled. It's
simply disguised unemployment.
The Government's modus operandi is to identify longstanding problems
as if they were something new, and then find someone else to blame.
Thus, the dreadful state of our national finances has nothing to do
with Mr Brown's flawed stewardship; it's all the fault of
unscrupulous American bankers.
The paucity of comprehensive-educated officers in the British Army
does not reflect the hostility of the National Union of Teachers in
state schools to military recruitment. No, sir. It is the product of
social "elitism".
Only recently, Mr Darling said: "Our regulatory system is not geared
up to multinational, global banks." Well, hello, who has been in
charge of bank regulation since 1997? Who reformed the system,
setting up a tripartite structure (involving the Treasury, the Bank
of England and the Financial Services Authority), the cracks in which
Northern Rock dropped through?
Mr Brown boasts that his latest initiatives on infrastructure
spending will create 100,000 jobs. But to whom will they go? Will it
be, as he once claimed, British jobs for British workers? Or, will
the vacancies (if they ever come to pass) be soaked up by the
recipients of 130,000 work permits, granted by government to
immigrants from outside the European Union?
Labour's attack on Britain's spirit of enterprise is abominable. By
comparison, Lady Vadera's slip of the tongue was a parking offence.
----------------------------------------------------
'Jeff Randall Live', a 30-minute news programme focusing on business
and politics, is broadcast on Sky News at 7.30pm, Monday to Thursday.
taken of the Third Runway furore. This will probasbly never happen
and the YouGov poll of Londoners show them very divided on the
subject anyway. Tory voters are exactly evenly split!!!
But his target of the ‘Green Shoots’ episode is justifided (You will
note i’ve barely mentioned it in my postings). But the dreadful auto-
speak of Yvette Cooper as she dishonoured all of us by betraying
hundreds of thousdands of cheated Britons in defiance of the order of
the ombudsman was ghastly to listen to. Randall picks this up.
xxxxxxxxx cs
===================
TELEGRAPH 16.1.09
In the theatre of sound bites, all that matters is scoring points
Jeff Randall believes that Baroness Vadera's comment about 'green
shoots' was unfortunate, but nothing compared with the damage caused
by Labour's policies.
By Jeff Randall
For those in commerce who deal regularly with government, it has
become increasingly evident during the financial crisis that Baroness
Vadera is one of the Prime Minister's most trusted and powerful
advisers. From the "drive-by shooting" of RBS's Sir Fred Goodwin, to
ill-starred attempts at a rescue for Woolworths, the fingerprints of
Shriti the Shriek are all over the place.
As an Oxford-educated woman from an ethnic minority, she's very New
Labour. Given her intellectual hardware and natural authority, it was
puzzling to some why she had not been promoted for media interviews.
Now we know the answer. Unpractised in the black art of vacuous
rhetoric, Lady Vadera popped up on ITV, where Alastair Stewart, an
experienced interviewer, nutmegged her without breaking sweat. In the
warped world of politico-speak, she made a schoolgirl error:
answering the question, instead of parroting propaganda.
As the foundations collapse under Gordon Brown's credibility, her
mumbled response, "I am seeing a few green shoots but it's a little
bit too early to say exactly how they'd grow," seemed more suited to
amateur night at the Glasgow Empire than a serious assessment of our
car-crash economy.
For an administration that is addicted to massaging the message, such
loss of control represents a failure of policy. Or, as Lord Jones,
the former trade minister, told me with alarming frankness on Sky
News: "One of the problems that she [Vadera] and one or two of her
colleagues have is that they are good at spinning, and they are good
at getting the headline out. And so... when they actually commit a
genuine and honest and, frankly, quite harmless mistake, people read
lots into it." Yes, the spinner gets spun.
Compare and contrast Lady Vadera's gaffe with the way other ministers
have handled the media this week. On Monday, BBC Radio's Evan Davis
asked James Purnell, the Work and Pensions Secretary, about the
appalling rise in job losses. How bad is it going to get? With so
many people worried about looming redundancy, it was hardly an
unreasonable interrogation.
Mr Purnell, however, was having none of it. Donning a cloak of ersatz
superiority, he reminded listeners that government does not make
forecasts about unemployment. This was, of course, completely untrue.
Inside the Chancellor's bunker there are miles of spreadsheets on
various scenarios for job losses. Mr Darling could not produce an
estimate for next year's borrowing requirement (currently £118
billion), without adding to his calculations a firm forecast for
unemployment. What Mr Purnell really meant was: "Yes, we do have a
figure but I'm not going to tell you."
Before Lady Vadera is next wheeled out to face the press, she might
care to spend a few sessions at the Yvette Cooper School for Empty
Grandiloquence. Miss Cooper, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, is so
permanently on-message that one wonders if her head contains anything
more than batteries and wires, programmed by a sinister operative
from the Lubyanka of Downing Street.
When speaking about government policy, she has been conditioned to
end each sentence with the devotional incantation: "Because it's the
right thing to do." I'm curious to know if her irritating mantras can
be switched off after work, or is husband Ed Balls forced to endure
them during pillow talk?
Ed: "Is it my turn to collect the shopping?"
Yvette: "Yes, dearest... bleep... fair trade... bleep...
sustainability, social justice... bleep... we're not just going to
walk away... bleep, bleep... because it's the right thing to do."
Political rivals seized on Lady Vadera's outbreak of foot-in-mouth
with a mixture of fake concern and barely concealed joy. It was a
silly thing to say, but not a war crime. Never mind. In Westminster's
theatre of sound bites, all that matters is scoring points against
the other lot.
At a time when so many of Labour's diseased chickens are coming home
to roost, the Opposition should not need cheap jibes to hurt the
enemy. The trouble is, having watched Mr Brown for more than a decade
buying his way to the top with the currency of false claims and
poisonous distortions, his
adversaries cannot resist playing the same game.
They would serve the people more effectively by concentrating on the
damage that Labour is inflicting upon us, as it seeks to pay for past
mistakes by loading future generations with ever higher taxes. In its
panic to give the impression of doing something, of being in control,
the Government is trying to pass off activity as competence; eg,
headline-grabbing summits accompanied by fiscal incontinence.
After 12 years of shameless social engineering, during which
excellence in private schools and Russell Group universities has been
undermined because it highlights the inability of Mr Brown's spending
binge to deliver real improvement of standards in state education, we
are being treated to the return of Alan Milburn as a crusader for
social mobility.
Writing in The Sunday Times, Mr Milburn informed us: "We know, from
evidence across the globe, what makes for a more upwardly mobile
society: A welfare system that encourages work and not dependence."
This from an administration that has built a shockingly complex web
of tax credits, hand-outs and personal subsidies, while allowing 2.7
million people to claim incapacity benefit, even though ministers
acknowledge that about one million of them are not disabled. It's
simply disguised unemployment.
The Government's modus operandi is to identify longstanding problems
as if they were something new, and then find someone else to blame.
Thus, the dreadful state of our national finances has nothing to do
with Mr Brown's flawed stewardship; it's all the fault of
unscrupulous American bankers.
The paucity of comprehensive-educated officers in the British Army
does not reflect the hostility of the National Union of Teachers in
state schools to military recruitment. No, sir. It is the product of
social "elitism".
Only recently, Mr Darling said: "Our regulatory system is not geared
up to multinational, global banks." Well, hello, who has been in
charge of bank regulation since 1997? Who reformed the system,
setting up a tripartite structure (involving the Treasury, the Bank
of England and the Financial Services Authority), the cracks in which
Northern Rock dropped through?
Mr Brown boasts that his latest initiatives on infrastructure
spending will create 100,000 jobs. But to whom will they go? Will it
be, as he once claimed, British jobs for British workers? Or, will
the vacancies (if they ever come to pass) be soaked up by the
recipients of 130,000 work permits, granted by government to
immigrants from outside the European Union?
Labour's attack on Britain's spirit of enterprise is abominable. By
comparison, Lady Vadera's slip of the tongue was a parking offence.
----------------------------------------------------
'Jeff Randall Live', a 30-minute news programme focusing on business
and politics, is broadcast on Sky News at 7.30pm, Monday to Thursday.
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