That'll Show Them

George 'School Snitch' Osbourne is a complicated character. He looks like a cross between a snooty school bully who operates largely behind everyone's backs and something a little more sinister.

Then he opens his mouth and, while he is trying to make a point, garbage seems to fly out. Yesterday was a classic example.

In an attempt to boldly take on the City bonus culture he firmly said that he would curb bonuses to just £2,000 of cash and the rest in shares. That way the banks could use the precious savings, estimated so far as around £6bn of accrued bonuses, as money they could lend.

It was a daft policy on many counts.

Not least, he defined he would use the policy for this year only. In a recent reality test conducted by most citizens, it appeared that Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling were still, albeit by the skin of their teeth and arguably not for much longer, at the helm of the country. So the chances of it ever being more than just a stream of words from his well educated but inexperienced mouth was absolutely zero. Secondly, the fact was that despite the incredible sums of money poured into banks via new money printing, loans, capital and guarantees, lending is down by some £15bn. So the evidence shows that banks would just hoard the cash to make their balance look good if that was what they were compelled to do with it in the last resort.

But Osbourne missed a vital point in is idea, which was about as a worthy as that of an 11 year old winner of a class project. Banks are devious fellows and they would have paid the bonus in the form of some other precious and valuable commodity - en primeur fine wine or platinum or gold as good examples. True they all would have had to have large cupboards and the nous to realise the value but give these whizz kids some credit.

Far be it for me to say this was just political grandstanding but that's what it was. The trouble is that it was not very intelligent grandstanding from a guy with a lot of education but no common sense. It perhaps sums up the whole Tory challenge - a lot of wet wind and flannel but no real substance.

The danger is that we have people like Osbourne in high office and we start actually wanting Darling back.

What a nightmare scenario that would be.

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 Long, Hard Winter Ahead

The hot air may be copious and the fervour close to boiling point, but the prospects are of a long, hard winter of discontent.

There must be an election by June next year, that cannot be avoided, unless Mandelson deposes Brown and instigates some kind of Putin-esque review of our Constitution that would allow for another unelected official leading the country this time without a General Election. Perish the thought - I hope.

The mastermind himself is expected to rally the country to the Labour cause in the next few days with a stirring speech to some expensive and unnecessary Think Tank that he could have written himself which will warn of hard choices ahead and that all Labour spending commitments are to be reviewed. It comes hot on the heels of the emergency measures which brought forward spending schemes in the face of the economic crisis and now that we have blown more money than a Premier League team owner has in bailing a slim minority of super-rich people out, we can now look forward to having a more frugal future because of it.

Interestingly, Mandelson himself, in a massive volte face on the last 12 years of Labour governing, has said that they can no longer solve problems by 'Throwing money at them'. If only Labour had thought of that before wasting so much money without thinking things through on health, education and defence to name but a few, but the biggest waste has been the bank bailout itself where no one will ever know exactly how much was required to solve the issues - they just kept throwing billion after billion in a frenzy of pure guesswork, with zero accountability to the poor fools who had to stump up for the bill.

It will be Labour's enduring legacy - the biggest spenders of money on record and so little to show for it.

Spending cuts are necessary without doubt. This year's deficit alone will be £175bn and we are forecast to have a National Debt of well over £1 trillion by 2014, and that's just on last month's projections by Alistair Darling who has been having a terrible problem with his calculator of late. We can expect around 10% cut off the budget in short order and that means many services will be hit.

In retaliation, the TUC has already issued stern warnings that it does not share the Labour view and will fight any cuts in services, particularly if it leads to more unemployment. In fact, by the TUC's estimates, if Labour get their way, unemployment will rise to a staggering 4m and we are already back at the heights of unemployment last seen at the end of the last Conservative Government.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives themselves are keen to start at the top. They have a vision which is quite appetising - less Politicians, less spending on bureaucracy and fewer layers of fat administrators on magnificent pension plans. However, as always with the Conservatives, it is short on detail and put together by a few former public school swots who keep shouting 'I know, I know!' with new zany idea. Meanwhile, school sneak, George Osbourne, stalks the room looking for those not paying attention with a length of Bunsen burner hose. The policies just reek of half-arsed schoolroom projects which just have a nice thought but are probably totally unmanageable let alone unachievable.

What it all points to is that we are going to have an unpleasant Winter of party warmongering with soundbites probably even lobbed into the Queen's Speech while the TUC continue to threaten and spit with venomous possibilities of strikes which can only make matters worse - but you cannot preach logic to a Trade Union. Their only recourse is to chuck their toys out of their prams and go on strike which is equivalent to taking a scalpel to your nose in order to spite your face.

Bah, humbug. With talk of a 'false dawn' in the housing markets and 'double dips' on the recession, I just hope that we have some decent Bond Films on over Christmas because I really could do without nauseous comments by Mandelson, Brown, Cameron and Osbourne spoiling my holidays.

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.

Enough To Make You Choke

About the only thing more disgusting than Fred Goodwin being able to draw a £650,000 per annum pension for life from the age of 50 is the knowledge that it could have been prevented.

Alistair Darling has admitted that once again the Government did not do anything to prevent it although they could have. Now they have the embarrassing job of once again trying to lock the gate after the horse has bolted by trying, via legal means, to prevent Goodwin having it.

The Deal

Goodwin lied to the Treasury Committee when he said he had the same pension as all other employs of RBS, a Defined Benefits Scheme. If you want to be pedantic, he got defined benefits alright but only those allowed by topping his pension pot up to the tune of £8m when he was sacked. No wonder he waived any rights to a pay off - he was laughing for life. If such a scheme were granted to all employees of RBS then the business would no longer be viable.

Gross Negligence

Under the RBS scheme, and by virtue of him being sacked, RBS and the Government had every right to prevent him drawing this absurd pension and particularly when he was only 50.

It once again beggars belief that we allow this Government time and again to get away with such negligence and incompetence under the guise of bank bail outs and rescue plans.

It all comes back to the advice they are getting. The Directors of RBS weren't going to stop Goodwin getting his money - after all he had given them their nice, well apportioned positions and they enjoyed the ride. It was as much as they could do to make sure that taxpayer money looks after their favoured son in his 'retirement'.

The real culprits here are Ministers who are constantly advised by the very people who condoned what Goodwin did - Investment Bankers. At every move, the Government is found to be lacking in thinking through the plans, properly accounting for money and blindly guessing their way forward hoping it vaguely takes them nearer some sort of economic salvation.

It's a strange day when George Osbourne gets one over on you but Darling's excuse on lack of due diligence and the Government's obsession with getting through the bail out and ousting Goodwin in a simultaneous blow was indicative of the whole credit crunch fiasco - no one cared to study the detail. Lord Myners certainly did not - he was one of the boys from the City.

It's time they paid attention to how they spend that money because I think it is high time we start, as taxpayers, withholding it until we are convinced that it will be spent on the right things, for the right reasons.

Enough, surely, is enough.