The Last Ditch

Labour's greatest achievement?

Link: Sinn Fein leaders invited to wedding of top Blair aide: ThePost.ie.

Apparently, having snubbed him daily for 10 years, Gordon Brown congratulated Jonathan Powell, as he left Downing Street at the end of the Blair era, on his achievements in Northern Ireland. Powell was Blair's runner to the IRA/Sinn Fein terrorists throughout the peace process.

I will not join those in the media condemning him for suggesting the West should enter into negotiations with Al Qaida, as Blair did with IRA/Sinn Fein. Of course we must do so at some point and, as he told Andrew Marr, merely to talk is not to surrender. However, I was sickened to watch him tell New Labour's arch-sycophant that he had become friends with Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. His job may have required him to deal with them, but how could any decent human befriend them?

Perhaps the best published comment about him (in an otherwise unctuous Guardian profile) refers snidely to his ancestor; one of the four knights who killed Saint Thomas à Becket in Canterbury Cathedral.

Educated at King's School, Canterbury, within a stone's throw of the cathedral where his ancestor Hugh de Moreville gave an early taste of the family's devotion to contentious public service, Powell has none of the stuffiness of traditional Oxbridge diplomats.

On friendly terms with traitors and murderers? Yes, but not at all stuffy. Well, that's OK then.

Support for Labour hits 25-year low

Link: Support for Labour hits 25-year low - Times Online.

Given the devastation wrought to civil liberties, it is amazing to me that anyone still intends to vote Labour. Still, it is encouraging that people are beginning to notice that our rulers may not be entirely on our side.

To put this in context, the last time Labour was so unpopular, this is what the latest computer looked like.

McDonald's had only just introduced these.

And this was Labour's idea of wind-power.

Please remind me what was "new" about New Labour.

Please read the items here, here and here and then let me know.

h/t Tim Worstall for the Finkelstein piece, which I had missed

Absolutely, incredibly, utterly wrong! (or is it?)

Link: Absolutely, incredibly, utterly wrong! | Anatole Kaletsky - Times Online.

Anatole Kaletsky's analysis of the Northern Rock disaster says it all on the economics of the matter. He seems to miss the politics, however. He asks why the Government should put £100 billion on the line to save 6,000 jobs at the Crock, when one-tenth or even 100th of that could have saved many more jobs in more important and valuable companies. What a naive question. The Crock is from the corrupt heartlands of the Labour North where it's simply a given that the Party will look after its own. This was the building society that subsidised the miners in their struggle with the Thatcher Government. This is the bank that diverted profits (when it had some) to a list of projects which read like a New Labour manifesto, including IPPR "the only English policy and research think tank outside London" (which Guido describes as "New Labour's favourite think-tank and source of policy ideas")

Kaletsky then naively observes that

It is quite likely that the European Commission will veto the business plans for Northern Rock unless these provide for a rapid rundown of both its lending and deposit-taking operations.

He may be missing the point there. Of course this nationalisation expropriation is illegal "state aid" of the kind Brown has vociferously opposed elsewhere in Europe. In announcing "business as usual," Gordon Brown knows he cannot deliver, but also that he can blame the EU for his eventual failure to do so. It is in the nature of Britain's toxic relationship with the EU that it is used as an excuse for every unpalatable action. I am a Eurosceptic myself, but rational enough to know that the EU is not to blame for everything.

Wat Tyler today spells out the mess the Crock is in.

NR's Mortgages in arrears topped £1bn in December - up by nearly a quarter on the position five months earlier. The number of mortgages in arrears also increased by nearly 20% between July and December to more than 9, 000 households.

Repossessions in December more than doubled over the previous month. Northern Rock had to take the keys to 237 properties, swelling its pool of repossessed homes to some 1,100. Properties with mortgages in excess of the value of the property have also been steadily rising - up by more than 10% in five months.

These facts are well known to the government, which has spent millions on the best advice available. Gordon Brown may know nothing about economics but he is a well advised, viciously cunning politician. He knows he will reap political benefits from a pretence of "saving" Northern Rock. He has already recovered from much of the damage Northern Rock did to his opinion poll ratings. In opposing his actions, the Tories will appear to  an economically-naive electorate to be the nasty party from the South of England baying for Northern blood. The average voter simply cannot get his head around the idea of £100 billion (which is why I think the cost of all government projects should be expressed as the number of working lives consumed to pay for them).

When, finally, the government is "forced" to do what Kaletsky thinks it should, it will do so "reluctantly" in the face of EU pressure. "Brussels" will be cast in its usual role in Britain as the political equivalent of Satan.

Nationalisation may well be "Absolutely, incredibly, utterly wrong" economically, but it may not prove to be such bad politics.

Pension details of 6,500 lost in new data fiasco

Link: Pension details of 6,500 lost in new data fiasco - Telegraph.

The Daily Telegraph says the Government is "reeling." In what sense? Lord Denning used to say that he had "all the Christian virtues, except resignation." The members of this Government don't have that, or any other, virtue. They are shameless rascals to a man and woman.

It is a paradox to say that, when politicians were amateurs, they were more professional. But it is true. A politician who follows the path from studying politics at university, serving as a researcher or working in PR/GR or the political media directly into Parliament knows nothing of real life. A politician who had been a lawyer, business person or even trade unionist (if in the private sector) at least knew how the real world worked; how wealth was created. These idiots quite simply don't. They are prone, in consequence, to propose solutions that people in business would fire underlings even for contemplating.

If they knew how the world worked, they would understand that government on the scale we have it now is doomed to fail. Millions of people administering tens of millions of other people's money will never take care of how it is spent. Especially when more can simply be taken by force to meet any shortfall. Such people will inevitably be taken for a ride by service providers. They will be overcharged and under served in every respect. With no meaningful economic forces at play in their lives, their employees will be lackadaisical at best; corrupt at worst. Yet our "leaders" have no such concerns. Every day they propose some aspect of our lives that they should manage. The grandiosity of their schemes varies inversely with their ability to execute them. The fascist ID database and cards are the best examples. Forget the moral case for a moment, the scheme's proponents lack even the wit to understand why they can't make it work.

Their incompetence is proved daily but, frankly, it needs no proof. With the best will in the world how could an unutterable loser like Gordon Brown have acquired any practical skills when he has never done an honest job? He has done nothing but spin and plot since he was a student politician. In a sense, he still is a student politician; a naif, for all his grumpy affectation of worldly-wisdom. Most of my junior staff could (under my supervision) take him to the cleaners, while juggling thirty other tasks. Our rulers may be professional politicians, but they are amateurs at life. Yet still they aspire to lead the skilled, the experienced, the industrious and the talented. What fools they are. What greater fools we are to let them.

Trailer

The Last Ditch is an ever so humble commentary blog. It is rare that I have the chance to break an original story. However, over dinner last week, I heard an account of a Labour Party luminary being humiliated and having his corrupt gains trashed by members of his own trade union when caught on the take. I cannot claim this as "news" as it happened many years ago, but extensive googling on my part has not come up with any published account.

In the interests of being prepared for any libel action, I await further and better particulars from my source (a proud participant). In the meantime, I am chortling constantly at the thought of blogging this and decided to share my glee. Watch this space...

Councillor Terry Kelly: GUTEN MORGEN & DIYEN DOBRI - COMRADES

Link: Councillor Terry Kelly: GUTEN MORGEN & DIYEN DOBRI - COMRADES.

Have a read of the comments to this post. One has to ask why the Labour Party, if it is the modern Social-Democratic organisation it claims to be, does not sling this man out on his Stalinist ear?

Where's the meat, Harman?

Link: Harriet’s Blog » A particular pleasure to meet Janice Gregory AM in Wales.

Isn't it supposed to be the amateur blogosphere that is full of people boring on about trivia? This woman is a minister, with her own "website team," SpAds and spin-doctors. Yet here she is banging on about nothing much, rather like the most boring 70.5 million of the world's 71 million bloggers. Could she be more anodyne if she tried?

If she wanted to suck up to Z-list Labourite Welsh Assemby Member Janice Gregory for her vote for Deputy Leader couldn't she have written her a thank you note rather than clogging up my RSS feed with unction?

In all seriousness, for whom is she writing this?

That's an interesting question actually, so I thought I would try to answer it. She has no reader stats, natch, but according to Technorati 28 blogs link to her. This post doesn't help her in that respect, because I was already on the list, defending her honour from false accusations that she would be so crass as to hire someone to write this crap.

I had a look through the blogs linking to her and only a few appeared to be more or less normal Labour supporters. Except that a moment's googling revealed that one of them is the volunteer developer of her site, Jon Worth bigging himself up to potential paid employers as her blogging guru. His junior co-developer Helena Markstedt also gets in on the act.

So Harriet is really reaching out to the masses, then.

Bloggers4Labour are there but then they don't really have a choice. Then there's Leon from Pickled Politics weighing in with his predictable, if somewhat tepid, support, plus one lady (that will tick her off) rambling on about "gender stereotying." Blogs are supposed to be chatty. If Harriet lived up to her gender stereotype, she might be more worth a read.

Maybe if her political opponents stopped going there, she could give up what is obviously too great a burden?

Amusingly, if you click on "blogs" in the sidebar, my final picture (click to enlarge) shows what you get, as of now.

I'll take that as a confession then.

Heroes vs Victims

Link: FT.com / World - Iran debacle shows failure to understand the British services.

The linked article is behind a subscription, but even if you can't read the whole thing the following quote makes my point;

Mr Browne and the MoD have fallen into the trap – too commonplace today – of confusing victims with heroes. This strikes at the heart of the culture and morale of the armed forces.

"Confusing victims with heroes" is not only destructive in the military. It destroys human dignity everywhere. It is no "trap." It is New Labour's modus operandi. The Party has journeyed steadily from compassion for the unfortunate, via the schadenfreude of the Leftist middle classes to the pedestalisation of losers. Its oft-repeated mantra - "the most vulnerable members of society" - is spoken with awe. Labour now feeds on vulnerability. It needs dependent people to achieve its only political goal; keeping its parasitic aparatchiks in their places.

Defining poverty in percentage terms guarantees - as Christ said - that "the poor are always with us." But  that  is not enough. Opinion polls show that fewer and fewer people define themselves as working class. As reported here;

While Europe’s social-democratic parties have always been social coalitions, their core, physically and ideologically, has been the industrial working class – in Britain for most of the last 150 years a majority of the working population. The industrial working class was not only the base of the Labour Party but the motor of the interventionist state itself. That class is today very much a minority: by all conventional criteria Britain is now inescapably a middle-class country.

Labour therefore needs a new set of victims to be "the motor of the interventionist state." Preferably lots of them. How else to keep itself at the troughs of public office? By rewarding victims, it seeks to enlist them. Nothing can be more pitiful than to watch my countrymen squabbling over who is the greater victim and more deserving of Government support.

Labour is now the Losers' Party,  but it was not always so. The early days of the Labour movement (in which I include trade unions, the Co-operative movement and such smaller phenomena as Miners' Institutes and workingmen's clubs) were about sturdy self-reliance. They were about working people helping each other to rise from poverty - whether financial, educational or spiritual. They were about "community" but not in the modern sense of people classified into hierarchies of victimhood.

The unstated objective of the elderly Labourites among whom I grew up was to avoid the waste of human potential. Nothing could be more laudable. In the 1920's and 1930's, when their views were formed, I would certainly have been a member, if only because theirs was a Party determined to broaden educational opportunity

Such were, once, the values and aspirations of the English working classes and of the Labour Party. I cannot think of anything more insulting than the condescension implied in Labour's current cult of victimhood. I could not despise anyone more than I despise its high priests; except perhaps the degraded specimens their cult  has produced of the class in which I grew up.

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | For Blair, it's child's play to make us all criminals

Link: Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | For Blair, it's child's play to make us all criminals.

Even the Grauniad (almost) gets it.