Randall rants over Brown
Randall discusses ghost writing
Brown is a busted flush, and he’s taking us down with him.
Jeff Randall has a snorter of a piece in the Telegraph, if you have ten minutes to spare you can read it all here.
One or two tasty morsels to whet the appetite:
You have to hand it to Tony Blair. As the foundations subside beneath the New Labour project, rocked by a crumbling economy, the timing of his exit is looking more and more like a chronometric masterpiece.
The penny is dropping, even in some Labour strongholds, that for all his crude social engineering, stealth taxes and raids on pensions (with the likelihood of yet more punishment to come in the Budget), the Prime Minister has over-promised and under-delivered.
Education standards are going down. The gap between private schools and state comprehensives is widening. Last week, I dined with half a dozen teachers and professors from one of the country’s best universities, all of whom insisted that A-levels had been debased.
Getting Mr Brown face-to-face with reality is no easy task, but the Institute of Fiscal Studies did its best this week with a damning analysis of the country’s prospects. At the rate we are going, Britain faces a £20 billion-a-year “double whammy” of tax rises and spending cuts to restore order to public finances. It could take until 2029 for government debt to recede to “normal” levels.
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
Interesting that you didn’t single out these lines for comment:
“I don’t believe the country is hugely enthusiastic about David Cameron’s Conservatives. They are simply the default position for voters who are nauseated by Labour’s incompetence. “
Besides the blistering rant, there isn’t much of substance there. There’s certainly no acknowledgement that the Labour years have simply continued the work started by Thatcher and continued by Major. But the passage I quote is simply earth-shattering. For a journalist on a respected national newspaper to publically indicate that our political system is so utterly defunct that voters should simply vote for whichever of the two mainstream parties they dislike least is simply staggering. That he should do so as an aside to a rant, clearly missing the profound implications of these throw-away lines is as revealing as to the incompetence of the mainstream media as it is the misanthropic nature of the political system.
punkscience
January 31, 2009 at 11:39 am