Got no mansion; got no yacht, Still I'm happy with I've got
I've got The Sun in the morning and The Sun at night" (as Annie almost sang in "Annie Get Your Gun" or as Cameron sang in his bath this morning)
The Sun’s switch of allegiance is rational and principled. It’s one of the bizarre twists that this paper can be simultaneously down-market in presentation and highly intelligent in its political commentary (think Trevor Kavanagh)
In Scotland the headlines say “Scottish Sun not backing Tories”. but when you go furtherr it rejects Labour and is in a cleft stick because it backs the Union (so cant’t back the SNP) and the Tories are a long way behind. So they’re scratching their heads!
Anyway after The Sun’s editorial some more comments!
All in all not good reading for Brown .
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YouGov in pursuit of headlines did a poll of those watching the whole speech - all 673 idiots with nothing better to do. Surprise, surprise! They loved it. Who but a political anorak like me watches a whole conference speech (and I didn't - I read it in full!). And who but Labour anoraks watches Brown speaking.
Christina
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THE SUN - The Sun Says 30.9.09
Labour's lost it
The Sun Says: Labour’s lost it
This Labour Government has lost its way. Now it’s lost The Sun’s support too
TWELVE years ago, Britain was crying out for change from a divided, exhausted Government. Today we are there again.
In 1997, "New" Labour, shorn of its destructive hard-Left doctrines and with an energetic and charismatic leader, seemed the answer. Tony Blair said things could only get better, and few doubted him. But did they get better? Well, you could point to investment in schools and shorter hospital waiting lists and say yes, some things did - a little.
But the real story of the Labour years is one of under-achievement, rank failure and a vast expansion of wasteful government interference in everyone's lives.
Nobody can doubt the dedication of Gordon Brown - or the love and loyalty of his wife Sarah, who delivered a moving plea on his behalf yesterday.
But nor can they disguise the failures of Labour in Government over the last 12 years, many of them embarrassingly laid bare by the PM's own words yesterday.
Britain feels broken . . . and the Government is out of excuses.
Blair took office with bulging coffers, an invincible majority and weak opposition, and he and Gordon Brown could have worked miracles.
But they FAILED on law and order, their mantra "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" becoming a national joke. Knife murders are soaring. Smirking criminals routinely walk free in the name of political correctness, while decent people live in a virtual police state of snooping cameras and petty officials empowered to spy and to punish.
Labour FAILED on schools. Yes, facilities improved - but four in 10 kids leave those shiny classrooms still unable to read, write or add up properly. We are plummeting down international league tables for maths and literacy, but every year "grade inflation" ensures record GCSE and A-level passes to fuel Government propaganda.
Labour FAILED on health - spending billions on clipboard-ticking target managers instead of on frontline care. [NHS ranked 14th in Europe - Netherlands top! -cs]
Labour FAILED on immigration, opening our borders without any regard to the consequences. Illegal migrants and bogus asylum seekers poured in.
Labour FAILED the children they claimed to have made their priority. After 12 years of Blair and Brown, Britain is officially the WORST country in the developed world in which to grow up.
Most disgracefully of all, Labour FAILED our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, leaving them to die through chronic under-funding and the shambolic leadership of dismal Defence Secretaries like Bob Ainsworth.
As our forces in two war zones suffered, the scale of Government waste at home was mind-boggling and tragic:
Billions blown employing a useless layer of public service middle-managers like those who condemned Baby P to die.
Billions more spent, insanely, making benefits more lucrative than a pay cheque - creating a huge, idle underclass for whom work is a dirty word. And all along the Government has had one overriding concern: Itself.
Blair and Brown's puerile feud has long been a cancer at the heart of New Labour, their divisions often paralysing the country.
Labour's driving ambition has not been to improve Britain. It has been to retain power at all costs - with no lie judged too great in its ruthless and relentless self-promotion.
They promised a referendum on Europe. They claimed they had ended "boom and bust". They tried to con the public with promises of endless investment, when they knew they would have to cut.
At the 2005 election, we and our readers believed Labour had many failings but gave them one last chance over a lacklustre Tory party.
They have had that chance and failed.
That is a fact Gordon Brown cannot escape, for all his rhetoric yesterday - his rewriting of history, his absurd caricature of the "heartless" Tories, his tired promises to solve problems he has had 12 years to solve.
Britain needs a brave and wise Government to restore our self-respect, our natural entrepreneurship and the will of every family to improve its lot through its own efforts, without depending on handouts.
We need a Government that will cut the red tape strangling businesses, that will make affordable tax cuts to stimulate growth, that will reform wasteful public services.
We need a Government with a genuine will to win the war in Afghanistan and the commitment to give our forces whatever they need to do it.
This will not be a Government that merely talks the talk, as Labour has. It will ACT.
We hope, and pray, that the next Government will have the guts and the determination to do these things. And we believe David Cameron should lead it.
Between now and the election Cameron's Conservatives must earn voters' trust by setting out their promising policies in detail.
If elected, Cameron must use the same energy and determination with which he reinvigorated the Tory Party to breathe new life into Britain.
That means genuine, radical change to encourage self-improvers, not wasting time on internal party wrangling or pandering to the forces of political correctness. It also means an honesty and transparency of Government that we have not seen for years.
We are still a great people and, put to the test, will respond to the challenges we face.
The Sun believes - and prays - that the Conservative leadership can put the great back into Great Britain.
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THAT SPEECH -Press Extracts 30.9.09
Guardian - Polly Toynbee
We needed revolution from Gordon Brown but we got triangulation
This was probably the last prime ministerial speech of Gordon Brown's political lifetime. No, this was not "the speech of a lifetime" they said he must make. But it was probably the last prime ministerial conference speech of his lifetime.
Anxious advice came from all sides: forward with a vision for the future, said some. Run on our past record, said others. Sock it to Cameron. No, stay positive, said others. Don't be complacent, say sorry. Be yourself. Oh no, please be the change you wish to see. So in the end there was a bit of everything and not much theme in the pudding. But platitude, pretence and bogus sentiment are the language of all these excruciating set-piece charades.
How does a worried 58-year-old, 12 years at or next to the helm change himself into a future-proofed new man? He did promise to change but which of us ever really can? What you see is what you get – and the voters have seen it, they get it and they don't much like it.
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Daily Mail -Leader
"Mr Brown's entire political philosophy rests, as it's always done, on redistributing wealth from the middle classes to the poor. This springs from his unshakeable belief that the welfare state, with its bewildering array of benefits and fancy-sounding projects, holds the answer to all Britain's social problems. Meanwhile in the real world, binge-drinking teenagers still get pregnant, the feckless have no incentive to work - and feral youths drive a vulnerable woman to kill herself and her disabled daughter. What use were those state targets and lavishly-funded projects, when all Fiona Pilkington needed was a police force that would answer her pleas for help - and parents in her neighbourhood who would teach their children right from wrong?"
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Independent - Leading Article
Labour has a route map, but does it have enough time?
Fighting back will be a monumental challenge.
Where Gordon Brown's speech to the Labour conference in Manchester last year was personal, this year's address in Brighton was pugnacious. The attacks on the Conservatives came thick and fast, particularly on their supposed lack of economic competence. And, in fairness, the Prime Minister did have a strong case to make about the hesitant and confused manner in which the Tories reacted to last year's global financial meltdown.
In other ways, however, the speech served to emphasise the now familiar flaws in the Prime Minister's own character. He failed to convey any acceptance of glaring past mistakes of his own, from the light touch policy on bank supervision to allowing the public finances to become excessively reliant on the revenues from financial services. And he offered no detail on where Labour would cut spending to back up his assertion that Labour would be more humane when it came to tackling the yawning budget deficit.
The focus of the speech on crime and disorder was also unconvincing. It is understandable that the Prime minister and his advisers felt the need to return to the anti-social behaviour agenda given the palpable sense of public outrage over the appalling deaths of Fiona Pilkington and her daughter. But that section of the speech nevertheless came across as rather forced, given that Mr Brown has paid so little attention to this subject in the past.
The policy response he laid out – various innovations such as "family intervention projects" and "police action squads" – also felt depressingly knee-jerk. As the Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, argued in his own conference speech yesterday, the problem is not an absence of tools for the police and local authorities when dealing with problem families, but the failure of the authorities to use those powers.
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Mr Brown's speech and this week's conference have probably done enough to give Labour the space to mount a fightback. But at the moment it is looking like a harder fight than any the party has experienced for 20 years.
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Daily Express
BIG DREAMS, BROWN...BUT WHO PAYS?
GORDON Brown was last night accused of living in his own fantasy world after urging the Labour Party to “dream big dreams”.
The Prime Minister - - - unveil[ed] a string of vastly ambitious promises costing billions. But he didn’t explain how his cash-strapped Government could find the money to fund them,
He provoked a new tide of outrage across Middle Britain by repeatedly claiming to be on the side of the “hard-working majority” while signalling “we will raise tax at the very top” and slashing tax relief on childcare.
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But critics branded the address as his most deluded and deceptive effort yet, questioning whether he had at last entirely lost his grip on reality.
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