Hope Is Not A Strategy

'Hope is not a strategy'. It's a bit of a truism which you can apply to most things from business to politics to sport and lots more. I heard it today in a meeting and it was attributed to the founder of Tech Data inc, Steve Raymond. I like it as a little maxim.

It's immediate application could go on Gordon Brown's speech in the Commons today after the Queen's Speech. In the the outline of some 20 or so bills - the lowest in a Queen's Speech since the 40s allegedly (even John Major squeezed more legislation through in 1996 with a smaller majority in the build up to his loss in 1997 to Blair) - Brown made a legal pledge to halve the budget deficit by 2014.

When pressed on this almost irrelevant attempt to woo the public, he said that his master plan was to tax higher earners and remove the tax relief on pensions - two things he accused the opposition of not supporting. As if those things alone would wipe out the tens of billions required to do what he has pledged. The fact is that he will have to make a whole raft of serious cuts and raise taxes on a wide scale in order to achieve what he has 'committed'. Of course, he will carefully manipulate the agenda so that little gem never gets into law, but it's the legal equivalent of making a statement at a trial, being over ruled but the statement is remembered regardless, having been made in front of the jury. The jury, in this case, is us, the voting public.

Frankly it was a desperate gesture by a desperate man in a desperate Government. Incredibly, and not for the first time, he laid the whole banking crisis on the door of the Conservatives who he claimed had called for less regulation over the last 12 years. Therefore, the incredible tab to pick up by the public was to be blamed on David Cameron. The PM seems to think that despite the fact he was Chancellor at the time and then PM, it was the Opposition that ruled the country. It was a bizarre statement by a seriously deluded man.

It seems the only strategy left to the PM and his limping Government is hope. And hope is not a strategy.

I only hope that the general public see through the outright lie and the fantastical claim the budget deficit can be halved. Then again, I sometimes fear for the sanity of all of us.