The press has woken up to the fact that the great British public has
stirred from its deep slumbers and is - to coin a phrase - not
inconsiderably displeased.
Just look at a few key phrases from today:
== "Rage is now Britain's only growth industry"
== "A nation destabilised by fury"
== "the party's over"
== "it's all a national joke . At our expense"
== "While top earners pay highest tax in 20 years, our MPs escape
Scot-free"
And that's just one page from one paper!
I don't normally give undue prominence to Simon Heffer but as the
crisis deepens his rants have turned into cool fury and he is more
coldly measured in his judgments. Therefore he gets pride of place
today.
But one other thing is now apparent, David Cameron is firming-up,
facing reality and the commentators have noticed (Even Simon Heffer -
belowis cooling his rhetoric)! I also give in this first posting of
today the last paragraphs of the Telegraph's blockbuster leading
article. Most of this is an excellent analysis of the present chaos
and the responsibility for it but at the end it deals with the
future , Under the generic headline of:
"Out of disaster comes political liberation"
it writes with positive hope.
xxxxxxxxxxxx cs
=================================
TELEGRAPH 25.4.09
We'll be lucky to get a bowl of soup
The Brown Economic Miracle has turned Britain into a basket case,
says Simon Heffer.
We know that senior politicians are incapable of admitting error,
even when the error is of the gargantuan proportions of dropping the
equivalent of a nuclear weapon on the British economy. This is partly
because of the levels of mental illness and moral turpitude that are
usually required to reach high office these days, and also because of
the new constitutional rule - at least I assume it is a
constitutional rule - that no minister is ever allowed to resign,
however disastrous or bent he or she may be.
So we should not be surprised that the picture of epic debt and
failure that was outlined in the Budget on Wednesday was accompanied
by an absolute refusal to accept responsibility by those who had
caused it, either in owning up or doing the decent thing and leaving
public life. These people - the Prime Minister and, to a lesser
extent, his puppet Chancellor of the Exchequer - are so dishonourable
as to be despicable, and it is as well to say so.
If they don't recognise the horror they have created, the markets do.
Sterling has slid since Wednesday, even against other currencies from
basket-case economies: for there is no basket case bigger than ours.
It has been said, not least by the Tories, who don't quite know what
to do, that the rise in the top rate of tax to 50p is a ploy to
distract us from the proposed borrowing of an incomprehensible £606
billion over the next four years. The huge new debt is to pay the
bribes to Labour's client state. In fact, the two are linked by their
base politics, and in their destructiveness. Borrowing of that order
will not merely beggar our children, and quite possibly their
children too. It will also force up interest rates and harm people by
that means. And the top rate of tax will not merely hit "the rich".
Many of those in Labour's core vote will soon find they are punished
too when, in order to pay their extra taxes, "the rich" stop using
the products and services provided by blue-collar workers, or simply
move abroad. Every aspect of this Budget was designed to make Britain
poorer.
I was in the second or third week of my A-level economics course in
1976 when our class had the most superb object lesson in finance: the
then Labour government ran up the white flag and called in the
International Monetary Fund to sort out our economy. The IMF did what
the administrators of any failed enterprise must: they cut borrowing
and cut spending to make the books balance. Like me, many of you will
remember that things in 1976 were bad, but they weren't nearly so bad
as they are now. So where is the IMF?
I'm told that the IMF can't afford to take on a problem the size of
ours. If that is so then the sooner we arrange a takeover by China or
Abu Dhabi the better. Otherwise, another few months of the Brown
Economic Miracle will have half of us working in call centres and the
other half unemployed and sitting in soup kitchens. But even if the
IMF can't face trying to sort out the worst mess in modern British
economic history - for I believe this also goes beyond 1931 - it can
at least continue to do excellent work such as it did on Wednesday
when, within 40 minutes of the Chancellor sitting down, it published
official figures that made a mockery of most of his.
If the markets and international authorities keep taunting Britain
for the failure of those trying to run its economy then perhaps we
might even force the parasites responsible out of office. Had they a
shred of honour they would, after this failure, call an immediate
election. Dave clearly needs further help about what to do - his
reasoning behind not promising to reverse the 50p tax band (he
doesn't want to be seen to help "the rich") is stupid, for it would
help the poor even more. But it now becomes a matter of national
urgency to get these vandals and idiots out of power and into
disgrace. [Barring a miracle, however, we've got to wait 14 months.
Who knows what more damage Brown can do in that time -cs] This week
was a watershed. We now know there is a war on.
MPs need to work in the real world
Almost as contemptible as the Budget was the plan to address the
matter of the allowance for MPs' second homes, announced by way of a
distraction the previous day. This was a stunt, aimed at embarrassing
Tories with outside interests who would now be forced, like trades
unionists, to clock on and clock off at Parliament.
I can't see what the number of hours spent at Westminster has to do
with the quality of the MP, or with whether he or she should have a
taxpayer-funded second home. Since Parliament now works office hours,
any MP whose constituents commute can commute too. A ring should be
drawn 40 miles around London. Anyone whose seat is within it would be
denied an allowance: simple as that. And as for time spent at the
Commons, only the blind can fail to notice that many MPs who are
there all the time are quite useless, so it would be as well to
encourage them to have more interests outside rather than fewer.
I do not regard it as the job of my MP to be a social worker. It is
to represent me on great national issues according to his judgment,
for which he is answerable at every election. That judgment will be
better honed by more experience of the world in which his voters live.
[Sir Nicholas Winterton: "No mention is made of how members will pay
for the accommodation they have to maintain during the summer
recess.". Brown's ludicrous proposal would pay almost as much money
in total - which is one thing that is wrong with it! While everone
else is being squeezed 'till the pips hurt' the truth is (mentioned
in my intro "our MPs escape Scot-free " -cs]
===============AND ------->
2. Out of disaster comes political liberation
(An extract from today's leading article which concludes :- - -)
"The really encouraging sign is that the Conservatives are starting
to hold this position confidently. David Cameron is instinctively a
supporter of small government, but he spent a long time erasing the
impression that the Tories despised public services on principle.
That task is now accomplished. Admittedly, his party should have
protested more loudly when schools and the health service were hosed
down with tax revenues that did nothing to improve standards, but the
message is clear: Conservatives believe that an efficient public
sector is central to national wellbeing.
For a long time, the Tories also insisted that they would match
Labour's spending plans. That era is now well and truly over. The
Leader of the Opposition yesterday attacked Britain's "quangocracy" -
an ugly but memorable word for a very ugly phenomenon. And this fact
is not a portent of cruel and unnecessary "Tory cuts". It is an
indication that Conservatives have rejected the politics of despair,
in which you carry on spraying money at problems regardless of the
outcome. We have reached the end of a political generation, and with
it a poisoned legacy of political thought. A new generation of
politicians find themselves paradoxically liberated by economic
disaster to create wealth and redraw the boundaries of the state.
Britain faces years of hardship; but the road out of this mess has
suddenly become illuminated."
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