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.

Cut One's Budget Deficit

Amid a ceremony which might have been required some 300 years ago, the Queen will today effectively be the puppet to Lord Mandelson and read out what he thinks the General Election will be fought on next year.

There will be the grandstanding and total impracticality of a bill designed to curb bank bonuses which you can almost guarantee that it will not make it to law but if it does it will just cause chaos because it is so ill thought through and irrelevant. Then there is the superbly named 'Fiscal Responsibility' bill which will be a Government pledge to cut the budget deficit by half over four years.

The chances of the latter making it to law in the 70 or so business days left for the existing Parliament are virtually nil but should it actually get enshrined in law then it will probably be meaningless. By 2014, it is predicted by authorities like the IMF that Britain's borrowing will be over 90% of its GDP. The only thing that could decrease the budget deficit by half would be an incredible upswing in the UK economy so as to wipe out the requirement for further borrowing over that period - the sort of suicidal growth the country does not need or swathing cuts to public expenditure which the Government tells us it will not do.

Other than that, the whole thing is a complete con trick to make you think that the sad bunch has an iota of knowledge about what it is doing. That has been decisively been proven to be not the case in the last two years, though arguably for the last 12.

There are important things that need to be attended to between now and May of next year. Yet again, we have a missed opportunity to get to the heart of some the real problems in Britain for the sake of leading us down the vote decision making path as early as possible. The opposition are up in arms, maybe be rightly, as they don't get the same opportunity. But the howling shame will be that, despite Harriet Harman's lie the 'most' of it will be come law before the election, hardly any of it will actually get on the agenda to become law.

We now have one of the Milliband's spouting off to tell us that we will hang about in Afghanistan until the Taliban are no longer a threat, condemning our Armed Forces to an interminable new Northern Ireland - a tour of duty no one will want as it is where an unseen enemy can take potshots and hone their killing skills on you without much you can do in return. Such a vague strategy has been at the heart of the issue - what is it we want out of Afghanistan as illegal drug production is at a peak, the violence is getting worse and the democracy there - which we sponsored - is a sham amidst a corrupt regime?

The Queen's Speech is about as irrelevant as the content of it - the only important thing to note is that she and the Commons will be summoned to Mandelson's feet in the process.