The Cuckoo Cloud Gathers

Only yesterday I gave some, if I say so myself, very good ideas for Labour to try and turn around their faltering ship and possibly pull off an unlikely election victory.

On the eve of the last Party Conference before the election, they have some rallying to do. However, apparently the News of the World has found just over 1,000 people somewhere, probably who do not read the news or live on this planet, 48% of whom give Brown a 'slim chance' of winning the election while another 11% are more unreserved, and perhaps crackers, in saying Labour will win.

The one piece of advice I failed to give yesterday is that Labour should not delude themselves. While such polls will give a straw with which they can clutch on, the last thing they need to do is to trivialise the task they have ahead of them, because if they truly believe that they can win the election from the current position they are in without a radical change in their approach, then we are talking a landslide to the Tories at minimum.

Mandy has rallied the troops - and he will be lurking in the corridors of conference bashing anyone who starts to talk of ditching the past and looking to the future. On that score, the Millibands, Ed and Dave, are both in line for slaps on the wrist with Mandy's wet Sunday Times (he reads nothing else as he is such good friends with the Murdochs) as they have already started gloom-mongering with speeches about how the party must now 'look to the future' - a known political euphemism for 'we've lost so let's have a leadership election and my name is in the hat.'

Mandy himself has shrewdly said that this election is 'not in the bag - either for us or the Tories'. He can congratulate himself for being at least 50% right with that statement but one thing he must realise also will be that the next few months, weeks even, may well hand the election to the Tories. And that's another matter than trying to rally his team to try and win. Literally, if ministers persist in trying to lie about the next steps based on the position we are in today, then Labour lose by handing the election to the Tories. What I mean by that is that Cameron really doesn't have a policy to think of, and yet he could still win the election simply by Labour handing it to him. In many respects, that could the worst thing that could happen.

But it would be easy to do, particularly if Labour start to believe their own rhetoric and do little to change the public's perception. In fact, if they believe their own bull too much, then they will probably do nothing and their arrogance will get them voted out.

A prime example of this is that Darling has talked of making a legal pledge to halve the debt by 2015. A LEGAL pledge - this is not his word, best endeavours or anything else, but this a pledge that essentially we could all sue him for. How daft is that kind of idiot behaviour? Given his current inability to work out the numbers from one month to the next, not only is he suddenly going to get a grip on his calculator but Britain will now emerge from recession like an Exocet and grow like topsy.

Why must that happen? Because in the same breath, his fearless leader is actually saying that his party will not make cuts in services - in fact, he has implied they will continue to invest. You do not have to be a genius to work out that if unemployment will peak in 2010, then less than 5 years later, we will have halved debt. All estimates by learned and quite sane economists say that by 2014 we will have DOUBLED debt from today's current position to almost 99% of GDP. Is Darling expecting us to believe that by a year later he will have performed a conjuring trick worthy of Gordon's namesake or David Copperfield and made our debt disappear like a rabbit in a top hat?

The answer lies in Labour electioneering. It appears that there will be a series of equivocal statements designed to cleverly say things which mean at least two things. The hand of Mandelson is very much in evidence as only he could be so damn devious and think he could get away with that as he has done many times before.

The tragedy is that it looks that rather than being honest with the electorate to get us all behind what needs to be done, we are going to be played for fools once again. I think that is a terrible mistake for as stupid as we undoubtedly are, we are fully aware of how dire the situation is. Wishful thinking and forlorn battle cries based around ambiguous statements will not fool s this time.

But wait a minute. The clouds in Cuckooland are gathering. Maybe we are that stupid after all. We'll see.

Can Labour Win The Next Election?

There are lot of gloom mongers out there, mainly Labour Party activists, who think it is a foregone conclusion that Labour will lose the next election.

Certainly, I would say that Gordon Brown has more chance of buying the winning lottery ticket in tonight’s draw than of retaining the PM’s seat at the next election. But can he turn around this sinking ship and set it fair to win at this late stage? I will offer some of my pearls of wisdom and advice as a member of the electorate to suggest a few salient ideas.

The first point I would make is that hanging on until the last possible moment in June of next year is just dumb. Firstly, it smacks of a very desperate man who is hoping for some miracle to happen or for the cavalry to arrive to bail him out. It could be a sudden, rapid rise in our economic fortunes with Britain emerging from recession and then putting on a spurt of unprecedented growth. However, the indicators show that by the time of the next election unemployment may have risen to 3m and house prices may not have recovered sufficiently to give us the 'feelgood' factor of new prosperity. It’s a forlorn hope, and Brown may be better off shocking his opponents by calling an election quickly and at an unfashionable hustings time. To be honest, he doesn’t have a lot to lose and it may just wipe that smug smile off David Cameron’s chops.

Perhaps the best hope he has is to try to convince us all that now is not the time to change. We must follow through his tactics to beat the recession and get us out of the dire financial mess those nasty bankers (not him) and sub-prime got us into. This would again argue going to the polls earlier rather than later as the best tack. If he can contrive to dupe us that his super-hero antics of last year actually laid some kind of foundation to recovery and that it is so fragile that even the merest tinkering could destroy its course then he might stand a chance of making the Tories seem idiotic in their plans for the economy. I dare say by reminding us all what fabulous prosperity we all had under his Chancellorship for 10 years as we leveraged our assets rather than earned more will help to dupe us that he is once again right or maybe right this time around.

He could, of course, ‘out Tory the Tories’. It may sound daft but Ed Balls’ tactics of selflessly volunteering education to take a £2bn budget cut and to hell with the next generation of kids, may stymie the Tory bullies who think there are only secret cuts to be made after the election. It would bring it all out in the open and maybe we could see parties duelling as to who can cut furthest and deepest to rescue us. It was an enormous gamble by Balls, one designed no doubt, along with his new hairstyle, to show the electorate he is the new face of Labour while it flew in the face of Peter Mandelson who is carefully organising the tactics and language to once again make us all vote Labour. Perhaps by showing that cuts CAN be made and tough decisions on priorities can be made by Labour, then they might just blunt the Tory sword on all this. Certainly, the rather odd stance that you can actually get the budget deficit and the borrowing mountain down without cutting budgets by Alistair Darling is looking more moronic by the second. As his debt calculations have been out by tens of billions so far, has someone not yet told the poor man that he is going slowly crackers?

On the subject of Mandelson, simple mathematics proves he is a liability. The public, I believe I can talk on behalf of a comfortable majority of it, thinks he is sleazy, untrustworthy and pretty dishonest. He panders to wealthy people, gets freebies and then helps oil the political machine to help those back-scratchers get what they want. Even if he says it is not true, the public think it happens and twice before he has been forced from Government even by his best mate under the shadow of dodgy dealings. Since his dramatic recall to the team and 3 year pay off deal with Brussels, a peerage and the second most powerful position in the country, arguably the most powerful, Labour has seen the Tory lead drift from 12 to 16 points in the polls. No sitting Government in modern history has come back from such a deficit. Sidelining Mandelson would have an immediate and positive effect on the Party and reflect well on Brown – for whatever good Mandelson may doing in the background and the Labour machine, even activists in his own Party hate him. It could be an internal confidence boost that will chirp up and motivate the front end Party workers so vital at election time.

Ditching the sound bites will help. Spin and deception has been the hallmark of this whole New Labour franchise. They are far too clever for their own good and nobody takes things at face value anymore. We got a prime example last night at the UN. After Colonel Gadaffi’s 90 minute, frankly, bizarre speech in which he tore up the UN charter, Brown got to the stand and immediately tried to score a heavy point by saying he was not tearing up the same charter. How dumb was that to try to score points off the man and country he has worked so hard to rehabilitate in the mainstream political and world debate? You either accept that Gadaffi is a Dictator, as mad as a March hare downright dangerous or you rightly place him as a dodgy character whose regime aided and abetted terrorism. Neither option is particularly palatable yet in the wake of the release of the Lockerbie Bomber from BRITISH jurisdiction which has outraged most common people on both sides of the Atlantic; it was a cheap shot to try to endear himself back into the hearts of the people who now so deeply distrust him and his double dealings. The sooner he learns to live with the truth the better it will be for him, his party and the electorate. Trust has fallen to an all time low in the Labour movement, so much so that even the Unions think they are idiots.

Of course, there would be many that would take this a step further. Some would argue that Brown himself should step aside and let the aspiring newbies take over, like Johnson, Milliband or Balls. That has to be a mistake – Milliband looks like an extra from Harry Potter, Balls is another sound bite merchant while Johnson simply comes across as another puerile school snitch that just wants the top job but has no idea why. The fact is, Brown was meant to have this job and Labour have got themselves into an almighty mess – they need to rally around him as at least he has enough intelligence to be something of a leader whereas all the others are just opportunist wannabes.

Accepting the truth is something that simply eludes most politicians. They are taught from an early age that admitting you are wrong shows weakness. The problem is that in the face of overwhelming evidence that Labour has taken us into disastrous territory by repeatedly claiming nothing can happen to our robust economy only for us all to find out that it was about as robust as a damp tissue in a pond means that Labour simply look as if they are out of touch with reality as they continue to try to tell us we are actually better off than we are. The continuously shocked looking Alistair Darling, who always looks like a startled deer, just seems to get his sums wrong monthly and our burgeoning debt mountain gets higher each time as borrowing estimates have to be revised. It doesn’t do our confidence any good but when the magical new money from Quantitative Easing stops buying our own National Debt and the bonds go back on the open market, he could be in for a real shock that may whiten his eyebrows in line with the rest of his hair. There is a real risk that no sane investor will buy them. As an electorate, we are easily led but we are not always stupid. There comes a time that if we encounter a pile of dog poo, despite Government sound bites telling us it’s really a pile of gold, we actually recognise it as smelly and bad. It is time to concede that we are actually in a mess, the Government helped cause it and now here is the path to the future. Instead we got a fix that has saved the necks of a small number of very rich people for them to go and be even more fabulously wealthy while the country pays with extra taxes until 2032 and in lost jobs – and underwrites their antics for the future. In that context, banks could not have got a better result. Only last night, Brown claimed that 7m jobs globally have been saved – we are not stupid, we can read the numbers, British unemployment is up. Further, he Janet & John’d us by saying by saving the banks he stopped ATMs drying up. Not once did he consider an alternative way of doing this as other countries have – in the US they accepted the largest corporate failure in history and 94 banks have collapsed, yet he ATMs never skipped a beat. It is the assumption that we are gullible and stupid that will trigger his downfall.

A really populist, and therefore it could get a nasty backlash as not his idea and that's important to Gordon, is to start savagely cutting the layers of Government - very quickly. The Dept of Business Secretary alone runs 9 junior ministers and is a sub-Government in itself with Mandelson wandering around as effective PM anyway. No one would lose any sleep if that department and few others lost a several faces fast. Risky, but equally enjoyable, would be to see the Welsh Assembly turfed out of their lavish buildings and stripped of office so that not so many of them can claim expenses. Another good move would be to enforce shorter holidays, less allowances and a salary decrease on all MPs. Of course, it would be blasting his own foot but, boy, would all that go down well with the voters.

He's already on the case with bank bonuses but I still don't think he really gets it. This Government has gone out of its way to pander to super rich people in a manner you would expect Tories to do - and it looks so sleazy and sickening as to be revolting. It would really score a few points if retrospective non-domicile legislation came in to grab a portion of the £billions in taxes we have lost to people like Philip Green and other revered 'entrepreneurs' and bastions of Labour's inner court of lovelies. On top of that, it would be really wise to look at what Hedge Funds do in terms of helping the market so that people just cannot earn £billions in a year and walk away from us scot free of taxes. Then there is the general bankers themselves - why fiddle with bonuses when it is what they actually do that is the problem? Outlaw risky products as being what they are, make believe money spinners, and force banks to focus on trading things with intrinsic value - curb these daft bonus schemes as most 5 year olds could do their jobs. That would win a few votes.

Strike back at the ugly mess that MP Expenses have made. Don't just stand around pretending MPs have made forgetful mistakes and call it what it is - fraud. Sack the swines who did it, particularly the worst offenders like Blears and force the Tories to do the same like McBride. The sight of MPs claiming for Chunky Kitkats, duck houses, manure and the likes is just downright abhorrent to an electorate who are struggling to meet their bills with greater fear over the jobs. A touch of reality to all the offenders would be a popular move.

This one is not rocket science. Pictures of dead or mutilated British soldiers coming home each week is not good PR if you honestly think you have the Afghanistan situation in hand. It really is insulting to listen to unqualified ministers like Ainsworth and that idiot Foulkes rabbiting on about what we have done for the soldiers. It's clear we are fighting a war without the kind of support and equipment they need to get the job done without suffering unnecessary casualties. First, stop parading the thought of Mandelson strolling down an aisle in a supermarket smiling and putting weapons in his trolley when that clearly is not what he is doing. Second, get some decent body armour, trucks that withstand more than the force of a peashooter and some helicopters in - fast. Third, up the compensation for deaths and injuries for troops beyond the disgusting levels of today and stop taking victims to court in 'Test cases' to curb payouts when you really should not be quibbling over such trivia.

The public would rather pay more tax for wounded or dead soldier's compensation than for Fred Goodwin's bloody pension or to save some champagne guzzling Porsche driver in the City who is risking our livelihood not theirs - so go figure what wins votes.

Then there are the other, more desperate, possibilities. The Afghanistan war has cost us billions and over 216 brave soldiers have died and countless others have been injured and maimed. History shows that not since Alexander the Great has Afghanistan been successfully occupied and even modern armies have not done so. It’s a losing battle and it doesn’t help that we have soldiers not equipped properly for the job, territorials who no longer use live ammo to train, not enough armour in vehicles to stop IEDs and not enough aircraft to properly mobilise the forces or rescue hurt ones. Afghanistan is a mistake and a lost cause – it lacked a plan from the start and there still is not one. What Brown needs is a short sharp war, preferably picked with a nation of insufficient capability to fight back, that our troops can win one handed and not have too far to travel and we have no helicopters left. A startling victory somewhere will help, like the Malvinas, err, Falklands.

If all else fails, then there are two more options he can try. One is to get his wife on ‘Celebrity Big Brother’ (oops gone) or ‘I’m Celebrity Get Me Out of Here’ and then she can do jungle challenges half naked and get off with a dismally failed prima donna pop star, then come home and work tirelessly for charity while having a TV program made about her every move. Obviously, she would need breast implants, quick.

Or, Brown needs to hang around a lake or canal in a pair of trunks, wait to see a toddler in trouble and then hurl himself into the water, pull the gasping child out, and give it the kiss of life while selflessly losing a limb in the act.

Like I said, I would start buying lottery tickets if I were Gordon.

What Makes You Vote For Who?

Party Conferences are the pinnacle of excitement for most Party Activists - a few days in a coastal resort geared for retiring couples listening to waffle after guff is the height of ecstasy, roundly marked by sore hands and a croaky throat at the end.

The Lib Dem Conference has been about as inspiring as a pound of wet tripe and yet bits caught my eye. It seems that both the Conservatives and the Lib Dems are going for the youthful, energetic, almost uncontainable excited kid in a candy store look whereas Labour, having used that formula to formidable advantage in 1997, have the brow-beaten, haggard look of a man who cannot get out of the whole place fast enough.

It made me ponder - do looks have anything to do with how we vote?

Well ask John McCain whose retired diddyman look did nothing against the smart, debonair and refreshingly earnest, but with a smile, looks of Barack Obama. The awful attempt to 'put lipstick on the pig' by introducing a complete unknown, and as it turned out a liability, in Sarah Palin as running partner was a poor attempt to divert eyes from the aspiring but ageing president wannabe. Looking back on it, Obama's words sounded very compelling, prophetic even, and yet when you delved into the detail it was more in hope than with any kind of practical substance, which is very reminiscent of Tony Blair all those years ago. He rode in on a wave of 'Cool Britannia' and it lasted a long while having inherited as good an economy as any incoming PM could wish for and everything looked rosy for a good while as we all enjoyed prosperity.

But execution is the key to success - great plans are just great plans until they are acted upon with dedication and accuracy, making sure all issues that arise are dealt with. So many of the ill-thought policies of this Government have been put into place on the wave of popular opinion without any real substance to them and enacted by people who had no idea what they were doing. Obama may yet suffer the same fate. If people cannot share your dream to the nth degree then they will get the practical bit wrong - but maybe the dream had not been thought through to account for all the possible outcomes.

Yesterday I heard that idiot Lembit whatshisname on the radio who was having a great old time at conference. 'Lib Dem is all about outcomes,' was his little strapline and he claimed boldly that we should not force incoming migrants to learn English as that was imposing on their civil liberties. Then a lady came on the phone and slaughtered him within seconds homing in on the fact that we have 'bubbles' of unintegrated society as many migrants just talk amongst themselves and do not engage with the local population. When Lembit tried to argue the point, the lady pointed out in her superb English that she was an immigrant too and she saw it with her own eyes.

It exposed that fact that so many MPs engage in 'Thought Experiments' with Think Tanks or committees and try to dream up policy by homing in on the 'outcome' of their own choice to 'sell' to the nation as a soundbite. Lembit's next one was a classic on the point that we are a conservative society only because we are nanny-ed by the state and so we cannot see, as a for instance, that if we made legal Class A drugs like heroin or cocaine legal and available via the NHS, then we could reduce crime by half. It was a brilliant notion. In the same vain, we could produce an amnesty for all murderers and issue them free knives to kill people and then perhaps the fun will have gone so much that they won't kill so often. The logic that we should not only legalise high end drug taking but subsidise it by making it available on the NHS is pretty stupid, perhaps we should make alcohol or tobacco subsidised substances also. But the premise itself is abhorrent to most people - we want to tell young people drug taking is bad for them and therefore wrong, yet we legalise it. Further, Opik's premise that it would half crime was complete guess and theorises only that a great deal of crime is committed by drug addicts who commit crime to fund their habit. By legalising and subsidising drugs was his 'guess' that those people would no longer commit crimes. While it may be a fair assumption, in practice it may not be the case. Such guesswork, in attempting to prove its point, may actually have several unthought of and undesired effects, while the British public would have to swallow its feelings on having to subsidise the taking of hard drugs to satisfy the whim of a group of politicians who 'thought' it was a great idea.

It brings into stark clarity why the Lib Dems are unelectable, yet the earnest, youthful features of its leader may con us all into thinking he is progressive and forward thinking. A bright new, young future. It's all spoilt by the main spokesperson being Vince 'The Enforcer' Cable who looks like one of these sidekicks for a movie baddie.

And then there is David Cameron, epitomised by the Private Eye cartoon as an ex-Etonian, fresh-faced lad and toff full of ideas while also pointing the finger at the Government and shouting negative taunts. In the background lurks 'Chief Snitch', George Osbourne, who breached the rules of the workings of the super-rich by ratting on Peter Mandelson attending meetings on Oleg Deripaska's £80m yacht by stupidly forgetting he had to have been there himself to have witnessed it, casting equal suspicion on both - suspicion that was carefully swept under the carpet by both sides as the powerful Rothschild family members subtlety yet forcefully reminded everyone who keeps them in power.

Cameron has failed to make the impact he desperately wants despite his attempt to communicate with the youth by using hip and almost slang language. Again, much of the cerebral work has to be left to former heavyweights like Ken Clarke or the newly invigorated William Hague but the Conservatives are a long way off the pace of a decent opposition and they are only really so popular because the present Government has fouled up so royally.

But do youthful looks and attitudes actually win votes? Do we now value ideas and hip-language more than the voice and looks of experience? Do we take 'Thought Experiments' on ideas at face value? The fact is that many of the great 'Thought Experiments' by the Labour Government, particularly on spending on NHS, Education and transport has got us nowhere and their ideas on the economy have virtually ruined us as a nation. In 12 years in power, we have more unemployed than when they started and a budget deficit that is fast getting out of control. We are faced with drastic cuts to the services they heartily 'invested in', we partially or wholly own 5 High Street banks in order to save them, we have a green policy that is suspended while we sort out the mess and and we have a potential disaster on pensions only a short step around the corner as many on the cusp of retiring have seen their future wiped out and millions more will follow due to inept policies and lack of planning.

Britain is certainly on its knees - whether it will beat the count is yet to be seen. All bets at the moment are on preserving its status as a financial super centre - if the City of London loses that status then Britain could be all but finished. It started under the Conservatives but Labour somehow loved it, but manufacturing has been systematically dismantled in this country while the Finance industry has become more powerful.

Fresh faced ideas are vote winners on the whole. The smiling, confident face of Tony Blair guffawing at Hague's election stance on immigration and the like is a distant past yet how it has come back to haunt us in strange ways as our population rises to 61m and the net increases are mostly down to new arrivals, even this year as births by new arrivals played a huge part. But can Cameron do something special to rescue us? The policies he espouses certainly don't seem to have substance or detail backing them and seem as hit and hope as the Lib Dems. But we need a change from the complacency and hubris of the last 3 years at least.

It is easy to be cynical about politics, particularly after the extraordinary furore over expenses which we have not really flushed through as most MPs just did not seem to get the whole issue on breach of trust. Still today, many remain as MPs when ordinary people would have either resigned or been sacked and the simpering face of Hazel Blears ,as she held up the cheque she fiddled the HMRC on, epitomised the lack of accountability they all suffer with. She broke the law - it is very simple. The new furore surrounds another Labour darling, Baroness Scotland who, having concocted the laws on employing migrants, was found to have cut corners herself to get cheap labour and employed a migrant without properly checking. As with so many laws today, the onus is on the individual to do the Government's work and how gratifying it is to see how easy it is to become a 'criminal' in today's society for failing to think of everything. Should she go? Well, you live by the sword so you should die by it. But Baroness Scotland will not go - careful handling by the Spin Doctors will 'draw a line' under the affair while she will resolutely claim that an oversight caused the problem - but if only the law helped every citizen in the same way. If only bosses up and down the country allowed people to repay expenses with no punishment, if only the HMRC forgave the odd 'oversight' on taxes and let us carry on. If only being sacked twice would not appear on our CVs for dubious dealings as it does with Peter Mandelson.

That's the world of politics. Maybe fresh faced new guys are less blemished by the past but if Tony Blair's 'loans for peerages' and 'convicted felon of a financial adviser who bought them two flats' are indicators, so too are David Cameron's over-zealous wisteria cutting. The fact is, all politicians have to be a particularly thick-skinned and dubious types to actually want the job.

Fresh faced or not.

A Wave of Foolish Optimism?

This is an old blog entry rehashed - worth a look on this historic day of President Obama's Inauguration.

As the world celebrates the most galvanising US Presidential Election in living memory and Barack Obama takes the applause and oath for the most unlikely of victories - had you tried to predict it even a year ago - the the world waits with baited breath as to whether the audacity of hope can turn to reality.

Have no doubt, what Obama achieved was a resounding victory for those who believed change was required, and even if that meant the selection of the first non-white President in history – something again no one might have predicted at the start of this process and that America had seemed to be against for so long.

Surely this is the dawn of a new era of optimism?

The State of the Unions

Perhaps the best summary of the Blair-Bush-Brown era is a sustained period of missed opportunity.

Both started on a platform of the most stable economics for some time and there was a new mood of change in Britain about the squeaky clean New Labour approach and their vision of a ‘Cool Britannia’. Much has turned out to be false hopes. As the era presided over a number of the most devastating terrorist attacks in the US, the UK, Russia, Bali, Spain, Pakistan, India and more, the ‘Team’ embarked on two major wars only one of which warranted global support.

As Britain laboured over huge investment and meaningless targets in all aspects of Public Service, laissez faire Government became the order of the day. But a more distinct feature of the period was the rise of the unelected officials who influenced and arguably ran the country culminating in the most bizarre moment when a ‘Political Adviser’ actually strode into a TV Station and ‘demanded’ to be put on a news program at prime time. At the height of the ‘David Kelly Affair’, Alastair Campbell wielded more power than the Prime Minister and flaunted all legal repercussions to give his side of the story on a matter that centred on a document that had been the basis of Britain’s decision to go to war with Iraq which proved to be a pack of lies that either emanated from a ‘spin machine’ or an incompetent Intelligence Service. The Joint Chief got promoted, Campbell retired at his own leisure to enjoy a life of notoriety – the BBC was flayed and the reporter involved in the story is now a minor hack. Mandelson was recently made a peer to become the most second most powerful man in Britain even though he is unelected – so the show goes on.

It’s the Economy, Stupid

The era started with plenty of econo-speak about prudence and cycles and Brown could do little wrong. Despite taxes rising on an unprecedented scale, Britain wallowed in a new freedom of credit which fuelled an explosive growth in house prices. Average families could leverage the equity in their house and their cashflow due to cheap and plentiful credit and borrow and buy on a massive scale whilst savings went negative. As Britain ‘boomed’ a massive hole was appearing in the finances and sums didn’t really add up.

No matter, everyone was doing it – Britain just happened to expose itself more as an economy so very dependent on the Finance Sector for its GDP and house prices rising 160% in 10 years while average earnings actually declined in real terms – the factors underpinning the boom economy were actually going backwards at a rate of knots. The Credit Crunch was a shock to the studious Brown and more of a shock was the fact our economy was far more exposed than he thought despite the obvious warning signs. With all thoughts of economic policy, prudence and regimentation out of the window, Britain has mortgaged itself heavily based on our future tax as part of the so far £4.5 trillion global bail out of the finance system.

Historical Parallels

There is a bit of the ‘Cool Labour’ in the image and talk of Obama. He is fit, young, good looking and he talks the way people want to hear, bringing out over 90% of the voters to make their feelings known. He is inspirational, enigmatic and has joined all parts of society and the world into his vision of the issues we face and the problems he needs to solve.

US foreign policy has gone up a dark alley and its spectre stalks the streets of international badlands with a large stick talking menacingly to anyone they periodically don’t like. They underestimated peoples and countries, they made terrorism a religious thing by having Christian zeal guide their thoughts just as in Britain and have chased laughing shadows and wrestled vicious, slippery eels in their quest to fight a war which they won’t know if they have won should they do so and have no vision or strategy for the world after as well.

Obama has changed that thinking already. He has posed the BIG questions about foreign policy. Britain of all countries knows that in order to fight terrorism you must eventually take away the reason for the fight as the fighters themselves will never be defeated – surely Blair, who nodded in John Major’s tentative cross and scored the winning goal in Ireland, knows that ultimately you have to swallow your pride and talk to the people you don’t like.

It was Blair’s only legacy of note.

Don’t Miss the Opportunity

Bush had his chance and blew it. Maybe he was as dumb as people parodied him for all his Harvard education. Obama does not have that apparent failing – he did not have the burden of dynastic destiny. Two years ago, he was a political nobody who had the audacity to hope and in the face of a shoe-in Democratic nomination in Hilary Clinton, he changed the view of an entire nation and the world too.

The clear view is that the United States has sobered up after a bout of heavy drinking at the trough of world greed and power and having staggered through the world muttering aggressively and causing fights, it’s back, looking clean, fit and lucid and has a new sense of self-worth and purpose.

The world is jubilant and expectant. In the face of global recession, terrorism, instability, imbalance and self-interest, Barack Obama represents the hope of a new world order. Let’s hope he doesn’t do a Rumsfeld and believe the war is won after the ‘Shock and Awe’ of a sweeping Election win because, to use that analogy, the war has yet to begin.

But here is to audacity and hope – Way to Go President Obama.