Power Napping

John Redwood was accused of 'nodding' off during Shadow Chancellor, George Osbourne's recent speech on the economy in the Commons. Yvette Cooper, leading the Government in the absence of Alistair Darling who was getting another pep talk from his Boss, made the scurrilous accusation to draw attention away from the fact she was useless at her job and fast asleep at the wheel of the speeding car that was the UK economy.

Rather like Labour Lord Ahmed, who killed a man while texting and driving his car in the outside lane of a motorway, Cooper and her crew of idiots have not just wrecked the economy but botched the attempts at solutions, only to get off scot free.

Cooper has been at the heart of the debacle of bail outs and negligence.

Contrition

It seems that Labour have this issue with being accountable. They put in lots of daft targets - one for the Foreign Office was apparently 'To make the world a safer place'. You may think that was not measurable but after the 9/11 tragedy in the US, 7/7 in the UK, Bali, Madrid, Russia etc and now wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, tensions in Iran and North Korea, I would say that there has been massive failure. Don't even start on the NHS or Education.

Gordon Brown came the closest he has ever done to accepting blame for the financial mess we are in recently when he said he should have been stronger in pressing other countries after the Asian Crisis in 1997. Right, that explains what you did not do in 1997, so talk us through the 12 years since - what else did you not do that would have avoided this financial havoc we are in?

Unregulated markets, greed culture, over dependence on bank profits, poor taxation policy on corporates, stealth taxation, lack of planning for the future in terms of squirreling profits in good times and pension provision for retirement (except of course for public servants who are laughing), openly rewarding private equity and financiers with tax breaks, not dealing with the non-domicile problems, allowing Non Executive Directors to make money with zero responsibility and governance, allowing the housing market to spiral out of control and the financial products associated with it to become ever more unsound, making people think they could create money from their assets to subsidise their living when wages were dropping, not reading the warning signs in the economy as long as 6 years ago when the IMF made it clear Britain was heading for trouble, borrowing too much and creating a 'credit culture', allowing an unprecedented growth in unsecured loans, letting the benefit system get out of control.......

You could go on and on but the basic premise is that this Government came in on a wave of good economic conditions. Whether you liked the Conservatives or not, many of the toughest decisions on the economy had already been made and the books were in far better order than the horrible mess Labour created last time around - for all her dictatorial, hard-headedness, Margaret Thatcher had given Britain a second chance. Change was definitely needed and Labour took over and just kept the economy in simple shape by watching certain dials and setting limits. It all seemed so easy.

The Shape of Things That Did Come

But a feature of this Government was how they avoided detail - they thought governing was easy and as long as the numbers looked big, it was all fine. The defining moment came quite early for me and set the scene for 'laissez faire' Government. The late Robin Cook, as Foreign Secretary, was awoken one night to find that Britain was involved in a fracas in Sierra Leone. He was baffled - he had no idea that there was trouble there and least of all that British troops were deployed. His Civil Servant lackys pointed out that if he had read his Dispatch Boxes, he would have been fully aware of the situation. Cook had famously swept into his office saying that he did not read the Dispatch Boxes and governed on a 'need to know' basis only. Presumably, he got his updates from newspapers and hearsay in the corridors of power.

Mandelson, Blair, Vaz, Lord Levy, Lord Sainsbury, Robinson and many others have flirted with the heady mix of power and sleaze/cronyism. Blair relied on a body of external advisers to effectively run the country so much so that at one point Alistair Campbell effectively ran the Government. Meanwhile Blair could get his head into the trough and sort out things for non-domiciles like Mittal and then invest in properties for his son via his Trust that wasn't so blind, using the services of a convicted conman in the process. The peerages for loan scandals slipped off his greasy back after certain email servers seemed 'inaccessible' to investigating police who in the end were vilified for wasting public time when in fact people should have been brought to book. Mandelson we know is an unreformed character - with constant 'diplomatic shuttles' to Brazil which must be the most promising of links to Britain judging by the number of times he has been there, murky meetings on yachts with Russian Oligarchs and now even a blind trust for a career politician whose wages surely should not justify it, yet he has nice properties and a lavish lifestyle. He only recently got his handy 3 year unwarranted pay off from the EU for services rendered and backs scratched so it is curious as to how he enough money to afford one as setting them ain't cheap.

Again, you could go on.

Sleeping At The Wheel

My point is, John Redwood nodding off in the Commons during yet another speech haranguing the Government's abysmal record is nothing compared to the sleeping at the wheel by people like Yvette Cooper.

Because of this Government's failure to govern properly, every taxpaying citizen is in hock to the tune of £40,000 over and above what our normal tax liabilities are on an annual basis. It doesn't sound very much when you say it like that, but like any debt, we will have to pay it off over time and we end up paying a multiple of the principal - and that's if we have the wherewithal the afford it.

Contrition and accountability are lost words in this Government's vocabulary but I would forgive them that if they could just do their jobs properly and stop trying to deflect blame onto some mythical global blob of energy that has supposedly created the financial meltdown. People are not stupid - all the warning signs were there. We now get bleats on avoiding protectionism so that we can once more feed on that global energy and revamp our nation.

Yvette Cooper is the 'Janet & John' of politicians with her simple words so that idiots can understand that numbers are big and we are too stupid to comprehend them so leave it to her to sort out.

No thanks, Yvette. You lot slept for 12 years and have the gall to complain someone dozed for a few seconds. How very Blairist of you.