91Èȱ¬

The right long term decisions!
What, like PFI? Or pensions? Or ID cards?
We've got another nutter in charge!

Nick, why do you continue to relay Gordon's message ? That he makes good long term decisions and the Tories are short term opportunists.

Gordon Brown = debt. Short, medium and long term debt. The only long term decisions he has made for your children and mine is to saddle them with debt so he can look a hero.

The truth of debt is not the 91Èȱ¬'s much vaunted 'Evanomics' but repayment and doing it from a shrinking economy. And the economy is shrinking because (like it or loathe it) GDP growth doesn't exist outside the City. GDP never grew. Personal debt grew.

Whay do you and your colleagues ignore the Enronic off Balance Sheet accounting he uses for PPP/PFI etc ?

Or perhaps you don't understand debt?

OOOooooooh - how exciting! Actually not really - these are mostly tinkering with an over-complicated system and offer few new or radical ideas.

Now, back to those missing discs containing the details of 25 million citizens, the appalling state of military morale and financing, illegal contributions to Nu Labour, etc, etc,

Welfare Reform.

IIRC Gordon made Frank Fiedd's job as Minister of Welfare Reform (in TB's first Government) - impossible..

So Filed resigned cos he could get nowhere without Brown's support.

You could not make it up. More spin.

Gordon Brown is over 50. At that age, it's impossible for the leopard to change. So expect more of the same.

Lets hope the Uranium don't go missing and the runway don't run off.

The best thing Gorden Brown can do is 'say now't n' promise nothing', then we'll all be better off at least for the time being.

Has this guy ever done anything right, but still your only as good as the team.

Chuckle brothers of Chuckle Vision would do a better job.

It's public policy as normal when party leaders put forward their different ideas for seizing our nation's opportunities. So I welcome both the Brown and Cameron proposals.

Neither leader is 'fighting back'- that's a journalist spin. What Brown is doing is stimulating debate on how to get more people into work and reduce the benefits bill we all have to pay. He's also seeking to get more of those who were poorly educated decades ago into training so they can get worthwhile jobs.

Neither proposition is about party disputes. Both are about effective governance.

So in reality it's all about short term political advantage once again, rather than any genuine long term thinking.

Why do you and other commentators continue to give Brown the benefit of the doubt? Politicians care mainly about gaining and keeping power and office, and precious little about "vision". He is probably worse than most.

Inasmuch as there is ang long term vision it seems to be mainly about pushing through new airport capacity and nuclear power regardless of public sentiment, rather than presuading people of their merits - although there is an arguable case for both.

Dear Nick,

Gordon Brown should have a chat with Dick Strawbridge.....

I found this comment whilst looking at green isues, it is from Mr Dickie Strawbridge TV's favourite moustache.

quote;

The best idea I’ve seen to tackle climate change is…
I’m working with a company that has found a way of capturing CO2 emissions from internal combustion engines, which could mean that soon cars, power stations and any form of motor powered by fossil fuels won’t contribute to climate change.

If this company has achieved this as Mr Strawbridge is saying then we are looking at the next Industrial revolution as discribed by Mr Gordon Brown earlier last week.

The comments were of this being worth Trillions to the British Economy and a million new jobs for UK workers.

Does anybody know who they are as every company in the country, nether mind the world will need there services. If Al Gore got a Nobel peace prize for a film on Climte Change, what will these guys get for actually halting it?

I look forward to reading the next issue, maybe finding out who they are?

Yours truly

Clare.

Oh dear, the General Secretary of the Labour Party has resigned after being "unaware" of the law on donations.

Mr Brown is having a bad week.

He said he would be transparent. He is .. but not in the way he meant.

I think we are now in the situation where we have no government and no opposition. New Labour has gone broke just at the point where all the Tories - my own party - can do is recycle their old ideas, play to the lowest-common-denominator on immigration without proposing any concrete solutions like Michael Howard's points plan suggested in 2005, and have shot themselves in the foot with the defector from the LibDems having been sharply critical of Tory homophobia and racism. The British people deserve a better alternative and there is still time before any election for a change of Tory leadership and a policy platform worthy of the name.

No-one I know has much confidence in either government or opposition, and I come from outside London where "Wisconsin-style solutions" are unheard of and think-tanks are aquariums for intelligent fish. To be honest both parties have come adrift from the voters, and Cameron is only benefiting in the polls from government incompetence and not from any enthusiasm for him or his policies. Sadly we might see Labour re-elected next time - with an increased majority - for want of an opposition which would stand up to the scrutiny of a three-week election campaing.

Lasting impressions I have of Brown,Blair and the Labour govt since 1997 are as follows.
1. Massive hype and headline grabbing "initiatives" to gain short term tabloid attention with Stalinist like targets on all and sundry.
Most of these grandiose targets are to be achieved so far in the future, they will only become to be judged when Brown et al have long left office and everyone will have, anyway, forgotten about them.
2.Selectively quoting different periods in the past which put the most favourble comparable light on current statistics so the govt can always cliam they are making progress.
3.Never admitting that the long stretch of economic progress started prior to 1997 and before Labour came to office.
4. Quoting ad nauseam the meaningless phrase " much has been achieved but we still have lots to do".
5. When confronted with reports of public complaints over policies etc, ministers blithely asserting that "the people" they have talked to are, on the contrary, fully supportive and happy with the policies or the complainants are not representative of the public as a whole. Example the latest furore over 5 previous armed forces chiefs lambasting the govt.
6. An arrogance among ministers in a tired govt that has been in power too long who do not seem to live in the real world. It has been forgotten that the govt is the servant of the people and not vice versa.
7.A complete lack of managerial competence among ministers. What professional qualifications do any of them have to run their departments and how can a minister be one day, say, in charge of health and the next in charge of transport?
The only qualification would seem to be to have the gift of the gab and ability to spin anything to one's own advantage. No wonder so many ministers are lawyers.
8. An inability to live up to the high standards of their office and to take responsibility for their actions. Someone else is always the scapegoat who has to take the blame and resign. It would seem that ministers think their only function is to spew out initiatives but to take no managerial responsibility in the implementation of such policies.
What happened to honour and statesmanship. Now it would seem the underlying priority is to keep one's job.
9.The increasing tendency,especially under Brown for the State to control the minutiae of every citizens lives more and more akin to a communist state so the UK is moulded in the image of what one man, the PM, wants to achieve even if this may be contrary to how the public want to run their lives.
How ironic it is that the public pay this man through their taxes so he can achieve HIS aims even though only about 20% of the voting public actually voted for this govt.

Read this!!
'as were plans to force more jobseekers to accept training places.'
"leave behind the old policies of yesterday"
And he promised tougher rules on people on benefits accepting training offers.

"If the best welfare is no longer the benefits you have today but the skills you gain for tomorrow then the inactive should, wherever possible, be preparing and training to get back into work," he said.

In saying this he has admitted that the last ten years have been a complete waste of time . Quoting ( on TV ) ages from 16 to 19 as losing out - who was in power during their school days him and his loony friend Blair. Spin! the man is a veritable hurricane.

If the problem is with employability then surely he and his New Labour cronies - present and past - must take the blame . They have been in power for ten years and - if after that time - a large proportion of those eligible to work are unemployable there is no one to blame but themselves. After all they have had long enough to undo all the mismanagement of the Tories - you would think so ?

'The problem used to be unemployment, now it's employability'? New Labour's been running schools and tinkering with tests for more than ten years, why are so many people unemployable? Or is this something else they think they can blame on the last Conservative government?

The Prime Minister is correct to switch the focus from containing misery to building success. Under previous administrations the unemployed have been treated as inconvenient facts that just wouldn't go away. Shifting the focus of attention will cause policy development and employment opportunities to follow. I see this as merely one part of a positive and investment led approach.

When business and society follow this lead it will help flesh out a much more permissive environment for enterprise and inclusion instead of the stale swamp that has bred anger and isolation. It will take time to get traction but as events roll forward and it gathers a head of steam better quality opportunities and more settled communities will emerge.

As global terrorism and recession nips at the heels of Britain, the Prime Minister's vision of looking forward and investing in the bottom will drain the swamp of misery. This focused, determined, and patient approach is a quiet revolution in British as we head into choppier waters. By getting ahead of the curve the Prime Minister is helping us all be fit for purpose.

This guy is adrift on an ocean of possibilities which are ever changing and a sea of reviews which are never ending.

Nick
Our beloved leader was also heckled by a disgruntled farmer/haulier today. Is that not news worthy on the beeb?
With regards to the unemployable and the massaged statistics that they live under, GB has absolutely no idea what to do. He will sound tough but in reality these people will carry on milking the system GB has created for them.
Tough decisions - not really, just get the slackers off allowances and doing something, but there is no incentive. Again it will be business that has to pay them for their laziness in the work place if they even managed to get employed.

Why do Robinson's blogs read like statements from the PMs press secretary?

JSA (the dole to you and me)

Actually, Jobseeker's Allowance to me.

'Dole' is something doled out, implying helplessness or laziness in those who receive it, stigmatising them.

On the other hand, JSA supported me - kept me fed and clothed - until I could find a new job.

Show some journalistic responsibility, please, and watch your language - calling it JSA means one thing, calling it the dole means another entirely.

The govt doesn't need to help people gain skills. The govt needs to disincentivise people from not working - they'll get their own skills if they need them.

Of course, this means paying less to core labour voters so is unlikely.

My god some of you people need a relativity check.

In 1990 I had an accident serious the Health and safety said it was a major incident, it was for me I spent eighteen months laying on a hospital bed with a contraption holding my spine in place, I had broke my back and damaged my spinal cord leaving me with a lesion, I had the accident one day and was sacked the next twenty four hours it took my company to sack me.

The HSE found the company guilty of causing the accident, and stated to stop this accident would have cost £2, with a tube of locitite.

I spent two years trying to learn to walk and to some degree did, except my bowel and bladder failed one day out of the blue.

Now then I've a lesion of the spinal cord, I take morphine to control the pain, I use a catheter to empty my bladder and i will have a bowel function when my bowel thinks it's ready i have no control over it.

I went and found another job and then when the down turn came i was sacked the only one. Since this I have failed to find any employment, I belong to a employment group which is a group of disabled people who meet to write or fill in applications for jobs eight of us have failed in four years to get an interview. this group is part of the Job Center which last month said it was getting nowhere and the club broke up, I and others were told to not bother coming back until next year, because it's highly unlikely we will find employment.

Now then what Labour are really saying because I've worked most of my life and because i once worked I should be regarded as being able to work, big difference from actually working. Being regarded as able to work under Labour means i will get £60 a week less in benefits.

When you think the most benefits a disabled person can get is £125 a week it's not a lot.

So I ask when is Labour going to demand that employers take on disabled people here I am come and get me.