Letter to Gordon Brown

[Ted Max]

I think that's a much better argument that any made in the letter you posted, MM. The sense of opportunity lost to personal ambition is tangible to all. Where do you think that started? In Granita? With Brown's golden rule - meaning Labour became the PFI party - a true divorce from its own Parliamentary Party's gut instinct? With Blair's war?

Do you think the lack of a counter argument from the Tories, epecially on the economy, has been because of the point I raised - it's hard for them to establish any "clear blue water" (remember that phrase?) from Labour's (mis)administration. After months of deepening crisis, and years in opposition to talk this through, they are only now "Beginning to work out a coherent set of policies"? You might say it's just as well they're not in power then, or we might be still waiting for a decision on Northern Rock.

This is why Cable got an early lead on banking and financial policy, if not the economy as a whole, which he has kept hold of.

[Asset]

Mmmmm, Ian Duncan Smith - wasn't he the one that got caught paying his wife a salary out of public funds........

[Huguenot]

Oh, I don't know it's so black and white.

I can't disagree that the government has utterly lost it's way of late, just as MM and Mockney Piers observe.

I've always argued that a government can actually 'do' very little. The majority of the budget is tied up in social services, health, education and defence. None of these respond to short term (i.e 10 year) improvements because they're crippled by the unions and by bureaucracy. Nurses and Teachers got paid more, and a few more got employed.

You could argue that deregulation in financial services wasn't well thought out, but that would be to ignore the larger picture. Globalisation, protectionist employment demands, and a lack of national resource put paid to manufacturing. There was nothing left but financial services. Any government would have come to the same conclusion. Financial restrictions would have brought the country to its knees ten years earlier, and the City could never have funded the nation.

Other 'goverment' legislation was progressive - devolution and London's Mayor have all delivered more power back to the people.

In the workplace, the national minimum wage was inspired, paternity leave was generous and you now get 24 days paid leave in full time employment.

Environmental policy means we're now scoring better on rivers and beaches since pre-Industrial revolution, and fox hunting was banned. They saw the end of fur farming and greater restrictions on the testing of cosmetics on animals.

Socially we saw the end of clause 28, a horrendous piece of fascist legislation which the Tories tried to enforce in the Lords. We saw the introduction of the equality and human rights commissions.

Internationally we saw cancellation of penal levels of debt for poverty stricken countries, and a doubling of the international aid budget.

Finally the ramifications of the Iraq war are impossible to discuss reasonably, because the majority of the nation is in denial about how utterly dependent we are on oil and how critical it was to alter the landscape of the Middle East to secure the viability of the UK. It is anathema to discuss the possibility that the UK went to war over resources for fear of inflaming global sentiment.

In the end it was an exercise that had no realistic alternative outcome. If oil had hit $300 or $400 per barrel because of the posturing of dictators in the Middle East then the country could have become an industrial wasteland with no possible resolution in sight.

We live in the UK at the expense of poverty in the rest of the world, because there simply isn't enough of everything to go round. They don't like it, and the UK will eventually pay the price.

So who knows?

But at the moment, yes Labour are prats, and so are the Tories. The whole lot of them are blundering around in the poverty of their own initiatives.