27/04/2006
Idiocy abounds
This year the Government will spend £80bn on the NHS, the equivalent of £1,333 for every person in the UK.
Seeing as Labour currently seems hell bent on buggering everything up completely including the NHS, is the answer perhaps simply to give everyone in the country £1,333 and let them make their own arrangements?
It's hard to imagine this could make things any worse.
"Free Money For All," that's what I say. Get that one on the side of the battle bus and you'd clear up on 4th May and fix the NHS all in one go.
Yours etc.,
Spinoff.
10:55 Posted in News | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
26/04/2006
On brazenness
Today marks a new low in British political life. Is it "a low"? Perhaps not; perhaps it's a high. The difference depends on what line of work you happen to be in; for Yardie granny-murderers it's a high, while for Home Secretaries a terrible low.
1,023 foreign criminals have been let out of UK jails and nobody knows where they are. This number includes a range of highly-skilled individuals, with extensive experience of rape, kidnap, murder, drug-running and kiddy-fiddling. It is, without doubt, a massive, utterly awful breakdown of domestic security.
It betrays deep inefficiencies in Government, lack of organisational capacity, failures on the part of the Prison Service, the Home Office, the Immigration services, the Police, Civil Servants, their secretaries, cleaners, temps, family, children and pets - the whole shebang.
The favoured phrase in such cases is "systemic failure", ironic seeing as the Home Office wants to introduce the single biggest computer profiling system the world has ever seen - ID cards. Can the Home Office catalogue data on 60 million people, keep it safe, make sure it's all correct and use it to fight international terror networks when they can't even keep an eye on 1,023 cons already in UK jails? The words "pissup," and "brewery," suggest themselves.
This is uselessness of the highest order - the person responsible must go. We are fighting a war at the moment, and when you are fighting wars you need clued-up people running domestic security. The man in charge has now been shown up as a fool, more obsessed with tin pot schemes than the fundamentals of security.
But who is "the man in charge"? The roar going up from the crowd surrounding the great British political guillotine roars back in unison "Charles Clarke!" and it would give Spinoff a great deal of pleasure to see Charles "Fat, Unfriendly" Clarke relieved of that large-eared potato atop his shoulders.
But the problem for the government is greater than just deciding whether or not bring down the blade on Clarke. Responsibility for this idiocy extends to former Home Secretaries too. David Blunket was on the throne during accidental prisoner releases too, but then again he got shot down long ago, and you can't put forward a sacrificial lamb if it's already dead now, can you? No sir.
Much more alarming for the New Labour machine, accidental releases also happened on Jack Straw's watch. This is tricky as it prohibits Clarke - in public at least - from using the staple "it was all the previous administration's fault," defence, as the previous administration in this case happens to be the current Foreign bloody Secretary.
Oh the cheek of it! The cheek that people should ask Charles to flap off into political obscurity because of a problem that kicked off under Jack sodding Straw! Pah! No wonder Charles wobbled so furiously under questioning during his round of the TV news sofas last night. Being hung out to dry for other people's screw-ups is always sickening - bloody Straw; he owes me one, the bastard.
But despite all this, Clarke has factors on his side, the main one being that actually it is not all his fault and the polity knows it. Also, because it's an inherited problem that reaches back to Straw's tenure, Clarke will get backed to the hilt by Labour because they know if they try and sacrifice Clarke, he'll point out that blame also rests with his predecessors, ie. Jack Straw.
So it's simple - either Clarke goes, possibly taking Jack Straw with him too, or Labour closes ranks, the PM pledges support, Clarke stays, and the whole thing is held together with sellotape, blu-tack, media bluster and sheer will power until the 4th May local elections are done, by which time hopefully everyone will have forgotten about: the armies of al Quaeda-trained paedophiles Labour accidentally released onto our streets, Charles Clarke's massive head and deep general unpleasantness, and - perhaps worst of all - the fact that John Prescott turned out to be a dirty old shagger.
Which prompts the question; nowadays, just what do you have to do to get sacked? How bad does a boob have to be before you get the push? Clarke is in charge of the mass accidental release of killers, rapists and so on, so surely he should shoulder responsibility and go. After all, there's a bloody war on you know.
But no. No - despite it all, he's blindly, stupidly, counterintuitively determined to stay. What is best for the country - that he gets the boot and we get someone competent - has become clouded by Clarke's desire to cling onto power. This desire is not of Clarke alone. Don Rumsfeld has run the worst war ever prosecuted by the US and has Generals left right and centre calling for his resignation, but he refuses to go. Trish Hewitt is delivering a crash course in 'brazening-it-out' so shocking it could stun a rhino at fifty yards. De Villepin's labour reforms nearly destroyed Paris, yet he and his glorious haircut still grace the corridors of power, and as for Berlusconi's election performance, only one word will do - 'woah'.
'Brazenness' is the word. As the General said, "Oh well - if all else fails, a complete inability to look facts in the face will have to see us through". It's a very great shame our current crop of politicians seem determined to cling to this incredibly damaging mantra with the tenacity of very determined limpets.
Yours etc.,
Spinoff.
12:25 Posted in News | Permalink | Comments (1) | Email this