Month: July 2010

Labour’s Leadership Contestants – “It Weren’t Me, Guv”?

Is it just me, or does the dominant mood music from Labour’s potential leaders sound rather like  “it weren’t me, guv”?

I focus on Labour for purely expedient reasons – I haven’t been a member of any party for many years and have no party loyalty to any of them. I’m using Labour merely because they are now the sole major opposition to a Government that appears hell-bent of re-shaping the State in fundamentally regressive directions. Continue reading “Labour’s Leadership Contestants – “It Weren’t Me, Guv”?” →

OBR: Dead Duck Waddling?

The Financial Times has now established that OBR “massaged” the employment figures it so helpfully produced for David Cameron last week… see here. By inserting some completely invented assumptions about possible future government policy, OBR trimmed 175,000 public sector job losses from the total, enabling Cameron to claim their job losses would be less than Labour’s. So OBR’s forecasts, which were barely credible to start with, are now shown to have been manipulated in quite outrageous ways. Maybe it’s because I’m in Beijing, but I can’t help thinking of dead ducks.

Things Gove Wrong In Government

Education Secretary Michael Gove is learning a painful lesson – things go wrong in government. One could almost be sympathetic, if it wasn’t for the sanctimonious way in which Coalition Ministers have been gleefully highlighting every little, and big, error of their predecessors in the Labour government. Continue reading “Things Gove Wrong In Government” →