"...and Brutus is an honourable man..."

Let's face it Gordon, with Tony out rooting for you how could you fail?

Even the Germans hate Gordon...

Here's a brilliant video from a chap called Herrkamel in Germany that only got 67 views on YouTube. I reckon it's worth a hell of a lot more than that, so see what you think!



Credit where it's due - who says Germans have no sense of humour?

What future ?

Your very own Labour pledge card

Cut this out and show it to your Labour candidate when he knocks on your door...

Gordon sings "I've got no Friends"

Sing along to Gordon Brown's new song, a reworking of that great James Taylor classic "You've got a friend" ....

+++++ STOP PRESS +++++
I HAVE A VIDEO OF GORDON HIMSELF PLAYING THIS!
RELEASE DATE : 2nd APRIL
DON'T MISS IT !

When you're broke and jobless

And you're living on the dole
And you think you might be
Sleeping out on the street
Close your eyes and think of me
And curse my name out loud
It's no good knocking upon my door

Chorus 1:
You just call out my name
But you know wherever I am
I'm not listening
I simply don't care
Winter, spring , summer or fall
You say that I'm no use at all
You all hate me and I know
I've got no friends

When the people 'round me
Turn dark and want my job
And my friends all tell me
It's time to go
I dig my heels in harder
And barricade the doors
It's no use you picketing number ten

Chorus 2:
I know my time has come
But there's no way I will be going
I am stubborn
And really quite dumb
You know I'll hang on to the end
There's no way that you'll get me to bend
I'm the best man for the job
I'm Gordon Brown

Bridge:
Ain't it sad to know
That I've got no friends
People can be so cold
They hurt you and desert you
They'll take my job if I let them
Oh, but, I won't let them

Chorus 3:
You will never get me out
No matter how much you yell or you shout
I'm not going
I'm hanging on in
Milliband, Mandy and co
I know you all want me to go
But I'll take you all down with me
'Cos you're not my friends

Coda:
I'm hanging on 'til the end
I've got no friends

A personal message from Alastair Darling

Hello everybody. My name is Alastair Darling and I just wanted to take this opportunity to talk to you about the reasoning behind my latest budget.

As you all know, there is a General election coming shortly, so naturally I cannot say anything in my Budget speech that would jeopardise the chances of Ed Balls becoming Chancellor in Gordon's next cabinet. Equally, of course, I must give Ed every opportunity to start with a clean slate by being able to use me as a scapegoat.

Unfortunately, public finances are in such a poor state that I have found myself unable to buy the numbers of your votes that I would like, but I have done my best by concentrating on the following key areas :

(1) Fuel tax

In my last budget, I announced that fuel tax would increase by 3p, When I announced this, I hoped that by the time it came into effect, you would all have forgotten the announcement and you would not notice.

Now I have decided that in order to make it look as if I am actually cutting fuel tax, I will phase in the increase more slowly, leaving most of it until after the election.

(2) Alcohol taxes

You were all expecting increases in alcohol duties, so I felt I could get away with this. In addition, I have decided that I will dramatically increase duty on cider as it has been pointed out to me that most people who drink cider are too young to vote.

(3) Inheritance tax

I was forced to do something about inheritance tax for a number of reasons :

• the Tories have said they will reduce it, so naturally I have to do the opposite,
• most Labour supporters do not earn enough - with the exception of Civil Servants and union leaders, obviously - to pay inheritance tax,
• there is little sympathy amongst our core vote for people with lots of money, and
• most importantly, dead people can't protest and don't vote

(4) More lending by banks

I have taken measures to ensure that an extra 1 million people have access to bank accounts. This means that there will be and extra 1 million customers for our banks to refuse to lend money to and that money laundering will become much easier. I believe this will be of particular benefit to those of you wishing to divert funds to our party.

(5) Income tax

I have left headline tax rates the same, but have effectively introduced a 60% rate for people earning just over £100,000. Again this only applies in the vast majority of cases to Tory voters with mansions and duck houses.

It is true that I have increased National Insurance, but this really only effects those of you who have jobs. Therefore, I have effectively taken 3 million people out of the National Insurance net altogether. We are the only party that can claim to have done that!

(6) Cost savings

I have to say that this has been an area where I really have to dig deep to find anything good to say. Naturally, any cuts to public spending will lead to large numbers of people not voting for us, so I am going to leave these for Ed's first budget after the election.

Bearing in mind we have bought large numbers of votes by employing lots of extra civil servants since we came to power and have ensured these votes were retained by awarding larger than average wage increases, you will understand that it is difficult to know what else I can do.

But I do believe I have come up with a vote winner! We will relocate 15,000 civil servants out of London, and rest assured you all will be given generous relocation allowances and will all be able to afford to buy much nicer houses. Indeed, if you follow your MPs' examples, you can even avoid paying stamp duty altogether by flipping your purchase to your partner if he/she is a first time buyer.

The only stipulation is that you must be prepared to live in marginal constituencies.

I am sure you will appreciate why these steps are essential to ensure our party's - sorry, I mean our country's - future prosperity.

Are you 'avin' a larf?

Sometimes it is good to get away from politics and just settle down in front of the telly for a good comedy. It lightens the mood and refreshes the soul.

Or at least it used to...

Recently the complete absence of anything even remotely passing for comedy on the TV has sent me reaching back into the annals of time to find something that is actually worth the electricity consumed by the TV set. There is no shortage of such programs on the internet that can be downloaded and, believe me, I have trawled deeply lately.

But what has become apparent to me is the number of programs from the last century which today would never get past the program managers, pressure groups and censors that are strangling modern scheduling. Let's look back at a few that are fresh in my mind :

Dave Allen at Large

Sorry Dave, but we can't have you smoking and drinking on television! After all, we are telling everyone that smoking kills and that drinking ruins your mind and body. And all your jokes about the Catholic church - well that will never do. And please don't wave that missing finger around or you will offend the disabled lobby...

Not the Nine O'Clock News

The edition I just watched referred, amongst other things, to 'red commie bastards', 'niggers', 'poofs', and 'pakis'. How many laws does that list break? But it did at least say that immigrants 'couldn't help being black'.
And the police were portrayed as a bunch of thickies and thugs - which will never do!

'Til Death Us Do Part

The election night special with Alf Garnet stood in a pub having a row with Spike Milligan's character from 'Curry and Chips'. Do I really need to expand on the picture that is painting in your minds?

Spitting Image

The Queen Mum as a gin swilling Geordie, Norman Tebbitt in a nazi helmet, Gummer swine, John Major inspecting his peas, and many more. We all had our own favourites, but can you see that getting screened today?

The list is almost endless of 'politically incorrect' programs. Yes it is true to say that many were irreverent - indeed, they were offensive - but we laughed at them and at ourselves and didn't take them seriously. And we were the better for it.

Not any more. Comedy is dead. 'The Thick of It', for example, would be much better without the expletives that show it up as shallow, sensationalist and frankly lacking in real content. Billed as a 'Yes Minister' for the 21st century, you just couldn't imagine Sir Humphrey or Jim Hacker carrying on like that.

But then, they say art mimics life, and given the way things are these days, maybe there just isn't anything to laugh about any more?....

Bad Attitude...

As the BA strike continues, let's spend a little time looking into the ins and outs of this dispute.

Now I will admit that I have been known to fly quite a bit and that recently this has been in the comfort of club class on British Airways. It is true to say that I've paid through the nose for this privilege. However, when you compare the comfort of the front cabin to the comparative squalor of the World Traveller cabin, I consider this to be money well spent.

As I understand this dispute, BA want to reduce the number of cabin crew on the long haul flights flying out of Heathrow airport from 15 to 14. I reflected upon this as was returning from Barbados to Gatwick airport a few weeks ago. Now given that the staff on this particular flight had already 'suffered' this massive reduction in manning, I am forced to say that I did not notice that the comfort and service had particularly deteriorated when compared to similar flights that I had taken from Heathrow.

Now admittedly from the extreme comfort of my full flatbed seat I may have noted that the champagne did arrive a little more slowly and that due to be BA's recent cost-cutting exercises the meals were only up to the standard of a four-star restaurant instead of five, but that was about it. I certainly failed to notice any reduction in the extended rest periods taken by the cabin crew during the fight. In fact, if anything, they seemed to be a little longer than I remembered.

So if the Heathrow flights are forced to work to the same standards as the Gatwick flights, I frankly doubt that anyone will notice the difference.

Taking the above into account, and bearing in mind that Gatwick flights already work to the proposed Heathrow conditions, the reader may be forced to assume that the motivations for the strike must be to do with something other than manning levels, sickness rules, pay rates, and rest periods. If the standard of service that I have experienced on Gatwick flights is reflected at Heathrow, then why is there a problem?

The Conservative party have referred to the current period as Labour's spring of discontent. Given that this is a clear reference back to Labour referring to the Conservative's winter of discontent, I think we can dismiss this as a soundbite. Or can we?

Next week, Alistair Darling delivers his final budget before the general election. It has been muted that the civil servants are preparing to strike on budget day. Given that this government has poured money into the civil service in terms of both pay increases and manning levels, it is hard to see why.

The Unite union donates vast sums to the Labour Party coffers, so it knows that Gordon Brown can do very little to intervene in its manufactured dispute with BA. It also knows that it really doesn't have a case in creating 'Fortress Heathrow' when the very terms and conditions that it is disputing have already been accepted at Gatwick.

We are forced therefore to compare the two strikes and come to the conclusion that they are politically motivated. Neither union wishes to bite the hand that feeds them -- namely the Labour government -- perhaps they are just trying to bite of a finger from that hand.

If so then we are forced to ask whether that finger is our current Prime Minister. Rumour has it that a similar coup d'etat was executed on Harold Wilson. Is it history repeating itself and, if so, then we are forced to ask ourselves who really runs this country?

Who disconnected my MP !?!?

A recent survey in the newspapers this week revealed that MPs feel disconnected from the public, powerless and frustrated. Equally, the electorate feel that politicians are out of touch with their needs and that there is no point in voting in an election.

So what is it that has caused this rift between the government and the people?

To get to the root of this problem we need to look at the way policies are set at the highest levels of government and how they are implemented at the lowest levels. Everyone knows that unemployment is a bad thing. Unfortunately, in recent years the politicians at the top of the tree have decided to implement huge quantities of unnecessary and politically correct legislation in order to create jobs for civil servants and local government officials to implement.

People's lives are affected by it every day minutiae. If you have a problem with your environment, there are huge potholes in your roads, the guy in the house next door is running an illegal and noisy business or even a street light needs to be repaired then it is likely that you will have to deal with some form of local government clerk.

Regrettably, the chances are that the clerk you will be dealing with will be an otherwise unemployable youngster who has been given the job purely for the purposes of removing him from the unemployment statistics. He or she (note the careful observation of equalities legislation here) is probably ill educated and badly trained. It is further quite likely that the legislation and procedures they are being asked to implement are completely beyond their comprehension. Of course, you could argue that this is due to the shortcomings in educational and training policies in the first place.

So, you make your phone call or write your letter. You will probably receive standard response number 22 from the manual of how to deal with 'customers'. This makes you immensely frustrated so eventually you contact your MP. Unfortunately, your MP is locked away in the great white ivory tower known as the Houses of Parliament and is so busy deciding on high-level policies that they frankly do not have time to deal with your problem even if they actually want to.

The fact of the matter is that your MP answers to somewhere around 70,000 constituents -- most of whom must be remembered could not be bothered to vote for them in the first place -- and if every one of those constituents pulled his problem to his MP, he or she would simply be swamped.

So we need to inject some enthusiasm into the lower levels of government. The fact of the matter is that the quality of staff employed is inadequate, and they are demotivated, demoralised and disinterested. The greatest malaise of recent years is this government's obsession with targets. No one is interested in collecting meaningless statistics to be massaged by their manager so that it looks like central government is achieving a target.

To make things worse, the people at the top are obsessed with these targets because the figures that are then produced make it look as if they have actually achieved something. The fact of the matter is we have achieved absolutely nothing. What we have done is to create work at the top thinking up new targets and work at the bottom collecting statistics to prove that we have met these targets.

The answer then is quite simple -- we need to set a target for how many targets we can abolish. The money that we save by doing this can be spent on proper education, training and recruitment so that we have the right people in the right places to solve our everyday problems in the first place.

This will make our electorate much more contented, will demonstrate to them that the people we are paying taxes to employ actually have some effect, and will make them feel more inclined to go out and vote.

Alternatively, we could simply set a target to get more voters into the booths....

The Great Leadership Debate

It has recently been announced that there will be a televised debate during the run up to the forthcoming general election. This will give us a chance to look at the three main party leaders Gordon Brown, David Cameron, and Nick Clegg and to judge for ourselves who would make the best leader.

So let's take a look at each of the three party leaders :

1. David Cameron

David Cameron -- or 'Dave' as he prefers to be known -- is probably the most credible leader that the Conservative party has had for many years. But will he make a good Prime Minister? It has been said of him that he is a man with no substance, but only a fool would reveal details of his party's policies before it is necessary to do so. This would, after all, simply give your political opponents opportunities to steal your policies and present them as their own. New Labour has shown itself to be very good at this.

It is certainly true that Dave is a charismatic figure who has, during the recent debacle over MPs expenses, proved that he is capable of strong leadership. The inclusion of former opponents for the leadership into his Cabinet displays a certain confidence which is greatly encouraging. However, his recent assertion that the electorate will have a simple choice between Gordon Brown and himself also displays an unsettling arrogance. This arrogance has in the past been proven to be to the detriment of the party.

If, however, the election is to decided on personalities, then at least Dave seems to have one whereas Gordon seems on occasions to have had a charisma bypass.

2. Gordon Brown

It is undoubtedly true that Gordon Brown is an accomplished and able politician. Unfortunately, in the eyes of many of the electorate, the word politician is frequently taken to mean arrogant and devious. It is interesting to note that during his recent testimony to the Chilcott enquiry he ably showed his ability to answer the question without answering the question.

During an interview with Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight prior to the 1997 election Mr Brown was repeatedly asked whether he was planning to increase National Insurance rates. His response to this was to say that he had no plans to change the current taxation bands. When pressed by Paxman he simply repeated the same answer. Whilst it is true that he has done exactly what he said in relation to taxation -- notwithstanding the recent credit crunch which forced Alistair Darling to introduce a new 50% band -- we should remember what subsequent increases he made made to national insurance contributions.

The most worrying things about Gordon are firstly that he has never been elected either by the electorate or by his own party. Perhaps his opponents were too scared to stand against him in case they would have to face his temper afterwards? Secondly, he has surrounded himself in his Cabinet by people like Lord Mandelson and Lord Adonis who have also never been elected. This cannot be a good thing for democracy.

Mr Brown should either be given a mandate at the forthcoming election or kicked out. Nothing else will really do.

3. Nick Clegg

David Cameron's assertion that it is a two horse race has already been mentioned. This has upset the Liberal Democrats in a big way. However, it is undoubtedly true.

In a recent interview, Vince Cable -- an able economic spokesman for the Lib Dems who has wasted his talents by joining the wrong party -- admitted that he had no chance of becoming the next Chancellor of the Exchequer. Nick Clegg should remember whilst he is voicing his protestations of unfairness that he has about the same chance of being the next Prime Minister.

A hung parliament cannot possibly be a good thing, but if the latest opinion polls are to be believed then this is a very possible outcome to the forthcoming general election. Mr Clegg could well hold the balance of power but that is about the best he can hope for.

Whilst the Lib Dems appear to be very good at local government level, it must be a bad thing for this country that they split the vote during national elections. Whether you are a Labour or Conservative supporter I am sure you would be glad to see the back of the Lib Dems. Of course, if you are a LibDem supporter, you will think this is rubbish.


So should we vote for?

This is not really the big question. The big question is whether you should vote at all. Whoever you decide to vote for, you have an obligation to exercise that vote. It could be argued that voting should be compulsory as per the Australian model. There if you do not vote you are fined but you do have the option on the ballot paper to positively abstain. This would be a far better thing for British democracy and would unarguably improve turnout.

When it comes down to it, you have no right to complain about what you get if you do not vote. Bear this in mind come election day...

Bankers of the World Unite !

So what's all this fuss about banker's bonuses? - that's what I want to know!

When the Labour government came to power in 1997, it brought to an end the 13 years of Tory misrule where Thatcherism ruled and decreed that the people of this country should be empowered to go all out to achieve their ambitions in a spirit of entrepreneurial extravagence and innovation. The party that gave us the big bang and dot com boom had gone. Boom and bust economics would be no more. Things could only get better...

So what went wrong?

Well basically we fell for the marketing hype that so predominates the 21st century. Indeed it could be argued that "New Labour" was the driving force behind the new age of packaging and presentation. Certainly spin doctors like Alastair Campbell must take at least some responsibility for this phenomenom. Unfortunately, when you look carefully beneath the appealing image of the New Labour red rose, we see that underneath the fresh red petals there are just another stemful of pricks.

Despite its protestations of equal opportunity for all, Labour has actually done nothing to stem the culture of celebrity and greed that pervades our rotten society. Indeed, it has been reported that since Tony Blair left office, he has made over 6 million quid - mainly as far as I can see simply for being Tony Blair.

From personal experience, I have seen Gordon Brown as Chancellor expend vast amounts of time and energy in introducing penal new taxes for anyone self employed in this country whilst at the same time pronouncing that he wants to encourage new business and individual initiative. Labour has a pathological hatred of anyone self employed as it sees such people as being outside of the PAYE system and therefore avoiding tax. Perhaps we should remind him that the avoidance of tax is legal, whereas it is the evation of tax that is illegal. These definitions should perhaps be bourne in mind when looking at the thorny subject of MPs expenses?

The people not hated and pursued by Labour would however seem to fall into groups that are of benefit to them. Celebrities that support their party for example. Who can forget the memorable bad taste shown by Mr Blair at his Number Ten receptions in the early days of his government? Anyone recognisable who was prepared to be seen at these events was welcomed with open arms in the hope that our new PM would be seen as inclusive, hip and happening. Some of these notable celebrities have done very well in the honours lists - you know who you are...

More worrying in my opinion was the view of one such celeb who, after attending a dinner with the PM, commented that he expected the sharpest chisel in the toolbox to be his host and was rather concerned that that didn't seem to be the case. Bet he never got a gong in the New Year's honours list!

Also noticable is the growth of the Civil Service, now the home of many former self employed consultants and contractors forced out of business by Mr Brown's taxes into the haven of so called 'proper' jobs. Local Government has also grown noticably, especially in the Labour heartlands and marginal constituencies. To be fair, many of these areas were also those neglected by the Tories, presumably for the same reason - you put the public money into the areas where people vote for your party, and to hell with the rest!

So what about the bankers then I hear you say? Well, look at it this way : they all have proper jobs and are therefore caught by the PAYE system, so no escape there then. I suspect if they were self employed, it would be a different story - but they are not. Also, if the banks didn't pay these bonuses, their profits would go up and then they would spend loads of money on lawyers and tax specialists in order to avoid paying Corporation Tax. Anyone who thinks this doesn't go on should remember the fiasco of Enron not so many years ago. I think we all accept that this money is better going to the Revenue than to fat cat accountants.

I say let them carry on with their bonuses - as long as what they get up to is closely monitored - then take it all off them again with punitive tax rates. Those of you with long memories might remember the Investment Income Surcharge introduced by another Labour Chancellor called Dennis Healey to 'squeeze the rich until the pips squeek'. Now they are resurrecting this as a 'bonus tax'. Works for me!