Broon In Trouble

Despite efforts to forestall an impending revolt, it looks as though Brown is in serious trouble. So much so, that Miliband is reminding the troops that it could cost them the election when it comes. To which I can only say; keep up the good work. Not that I have confidence in the Tories’ ability to bring about competent government either, it’s just that they are marginally less awful than the current administration. There’s a fag paper in it, but that fag paper is enough justification – at least we will see if they keep their promise to repeal the Identity Cards Act 2006. That, alone, would be worth it.

While his more than well deserved all time low approval ratings are entirely his own fault, the cyclopean premier remains in denial and looks to the media for a scapegoat, as Martin Ivens notes in the Times today.

The age of deference is dead. If our masters needed further proof, then the unprecedented collapse of Gordon Brown’s approval ratings has provided it.

Quite right, too. Politicians are self-serving, snouts-in-the-trough, lying, pernicious jackanapes who treat the electorate with disdain. Why on earth should we treat these people with deference? I – and it seems I am not alone – treat them with well deserved contempt; for the nasty, thieving bastards that they are.

The prime minister’s election-that-never-was and his handling of Northern Rock were certainly clumsy. Yet John Major didn’t receive as vicious a drubbing for his much worse “crime” of presiding over the pound’s humiliating expulsion from the European exchange-rate mechanism in 1992. Brown blames the “feral beasts of the media” as Tony Blair called us in his farewell speech. The rebellion over the abolition of the 10p tax band is apparently all our fault, too.

This is the Neil Harding trick. It’s all Murdoch’s fault. Now, I certainly don’t hold a torch for Rupert Murdoch and I definitely don’t hold one for journalists, whom I hold in almost as much contempt as I do politicians; but for crying out loud, the problems that Brown and his cohorts are suffering are entirely their own doing. The media didn’t decide to make poor people poorer by removing the 10p tax band, the media are not responsible for the shambolic mismanagement of the Northern Rock collapse, the media are not responsible for the collapse of the pound against other currencies, the media did not systematically mismanage the economy over the past decade, and the media did not erode our civil liberties  – that was the Labour party and if the country censures them for it, then they can only blame themselves. Not that the arrogant cowards will, they have not the slightest understanding of the concept of taking responsibility for their actions.

There has been a sea change in opinion. A young John Simpson of the BBC got a left hook from Harold Wilson, the then prime minister, 38 years ago for daring to ask him the date of the election. Ever since that encounter, journalists have given up pleading: “Have you anything else you would like to tell the country, prime minister?” Now, after years of spin, the public has become a feral beast, too. Voters won’t tug their forelocks to prime ministers, either. That’s democracy for you.

As a sea change, it’s the right one in the right direction. We employ politicians, not the other way around, there is no reason whatsoever why we should look upon them as our betters or even our rulers. They are our servants. If there’s any forelock tugging to be done, they should be deferring to us.

It follows that politicians who come demanding more money had better watch out for the voters’ left hook instead. Taxpayers know that government wastes bank vaults of their money although the sums are too big to grasp…

Indeed so – and it is beginning to look as if the beast is awakening. Ivens goes on to mention the corrupt nature of politicians’ behaviour:

But when politicians exploit their housing allowances and put their sons on the parliamentary payroll, they really get it in the neck. People think there is little difference between a welfare cheat and an MP on the fiddle.

That’s because there isn’t one – apart from the welfare cheat feeling the full brunt of the law and the MP walking away from his “administrative error”. It is not just the fact that they lie, cheat and steal that places politicians beneath contempt; it is the sheer effrontery with which they expect to walk away scot-free from their behaviour that sticks in the craw.

So it’s not a good time for Labour to come cap in hand to the voters asking for a handout. Last week the prime minister had to tell his party’s debtors that they will get their money back later rather than sooner. The wells of loot are drying up in the wake of the cash for peerages and Labour deputy leadership scandals

Well, there are a few idiots around who still think they are worthy of support. The rest of us can see through them – and I notice in my daily travels that people are tired of the lies, of the shenanigans, of the self-serving venality, and of the contempt with which these evil slime-balls treat their employers. Brown can hold off an election until the last moment, but he has all the hallmarks of the John Major years about him; he’s a dead man walking and a humiliating and crippling defeat waits in the wings to serve judgement on a decade and a half of maladministration, lies, theft and titanic conceit.

If the Labour party goes bust, I for one, will not weep for the loss.