UK - So, at last, we are out of recession! Wednesday saw street parties and tickertape parades all around the country as the Prime Minister came good on his word and we stormed back into the black.
I strongly suggest overseas readers stop reading here and return to consider a mist inducing set of false memories. Small boys bowling hoops down a country road, gents in bowler hats reading the (proper sized) London Times and giving up seats for ladies, brownies helping old dears across the road and carrying their shopping.
What follows is strictly for home consumption only.
0.1% !!! 0.1%. Who are you kidding Gordon, are you actually serious?
The unelected PM with his unelected Dark Lord scanner controller says he thinks the worst is over. What that tiny, miniscule, ridiculous percentage means is that, in the month we all went mad for Christmas and spent every penny we could, we appeared to stop the plunge into a black financial abyss we have been falling toward for the past two years or more.
Now ask yourself, would you let him look after your kids?
Let alone run a country.
I have to stop now, I need the blood pressure tablets (or I would if I had such things).
.......
Enough, let us lighten the mood and fiddle whilst Rome (or Blighty) burns.
So what else is new?
The despised Blair appeared before the Beak like a nervous, skinny version of the Fat Owl of the Remove.
What’s with the shaking and sweating Tone? And Lord did he shake and sweat.
How many weeks has he kept the wide mouth frog up reciting his answers to the inevitable awkward questions. What a sight that would be, fly on wall etc. Two lawyers cross questioning and answering across the flowery duvet.
“No Tony you idiot you didn’t agree anything on Georges ranch! Do try and pay attention.”
I don’t trust the man but watching him I was minded about the scene from the film of “Clear and Present danger” the Tom Clancy classic when Harrison Ford says to the President in reference to an old colleague murdered whilst drug smuggling “Just tell them he WAS my Friend”.
I was not disappointed, Blair used, I thought, exactly the right tactics (at the enquiry that is , not the war).
Saddam did take part in a war with a million deaths, he did gas thousands of his own people, he did murder 100,000 Kurds.
If he had any WMD’s tucked under the settee believe me, the son of a bitch would have used them given the chance. He didn’t have any BECAUSE he’d used them.
He ignored twelve UN sanctions (so what bloody use are they) so why wouldn’t he just carry on regardless.
So all in all Mr B that’s the very first time I thought you took the right line. So. Why so nervous?
The boss tells me it’s a conspiracy, and she IS normally right.
Get her indoors started about the mysterious death of Dr Kelly and the loathsome A. Campbell, former literary pornographer, and she’ll go off like Old Faithfull with a dose of Montezuma’s Revenge.
So what can we take from this.
Well, politicians are usually a waste of space. Something inherent in our current system is not working. As I remember my History, Britain started, as far back as is worth talking about, with a King as head of state, feudal Lords under him and the “commons” at the bottom.
Move forward a few centuries and we’d demoted the royal blood to the bottom (head to the bottom of an executioners basket in one case) politically, Lords still in the middle, but only with a limited power of veto, and what is laughably known now as the House of Commons actually making the laws. Now, that’s fine and dandy when you have a basis of honest well intentioned do-gooders in the aforementioned Commons.
We however, have a chamber mostly manned, or at least run by, a bunch of self serving professional politicians. They have whips (they call them whips for Gods sake) to control their “parties” and have their cake and eat it.
Now I’m sorry these are not the common people, half of them wouldn't want to sit at the same table as a "commoner", these guys don’t inhabit the same planet Earth.
In all the “common” places I’ve ever worked a bloke coming up using a combination of promises and blackmail to get you to agree with something you didn’t would normally end the conversation with a degree of embarrassment or possibly a fat lip. I know it’s a cliché to harp on about the expenses scandal but I think it’s worthwhile “lest we forget” as they say.
These people are thieves. Now I have known many villains in my long and some might say colourful career, but at least, when confronted with the facts, they admitted they were somewhat less than perfect.
This lot can’t even do that, if they can use the “within the rules” defence they will, even when to any observer it was good old fiddling the expenses. Rory says it better than me.............
Now, I understand, prospective dads are to receive equal rights in paternity leave as their spouses do. If the wife returns to work early, the new dad can have the time off instead.
Don’t get me wrong, if you work for a big group company then fair enough. We do not however all work for big companies. Having heard a (female) spokesman (oops person) for womens rights admit in an interview she would never employ a woman of childbearing age in her small business for obvious reasons, it seems this Government is oblivious once again to reality.
Those of us who have run small businesses with three or four employees know that to lose one to a Government regulation could cripple the firm. Small businesses need separate legislation for all these matters, not a Government so inexperienced in real world commerce that they make up such stupid regulations.
We could be in France!
So that’s the Captains view of the current state of British Politics.
To sum up a disliked and , in many eyes, disgraced former PM, the current incumbent with a lower popularity rating than any of his predecessors (and that’s saying something) being overseen by a pretend aristocrat who has been disgraced three times after a fashion that, in any other age would have seen him banished from public life forever.
A cabinet of ill found jumped up wannabes without the courage to step up, a handful of other disgraced colleagues, the main opposition viewed by many as a schoolboy gang of braying toffs, a second opposition who has one MP who anyone knows and a House of Commons packed to the gills with a plethora of very ‘umble Uriah Heep characters who you wouldn’t sleep in the same room as.
So, out of recession?
That’s good then.




