Prepare for your blood to boil

Any one of these stories on their own ought to make your blood boil: they are all in the print media today. What kind of country have Blair and Brown given us? And will the Tories do anything to sort this out..?

1. A psychiatrist who let a schizophrenic out to kill wants a £300,000 payout.

2. A crack-addict serial rapist stabbed a mother to death in front of her baby son after he had been freed on bail.

3. A village bobby is banned from riding his bike because he hasn't passed his cycling proficiency test.

4. Maidstone's mayor can no longer fly the town crest on the front of her car because it is a health and safety danger (the same reason Jaguars no longer display their logo in the same way anymore in England).

5. Yet another senior Asian police officer wants hundreds of thousands of pounds in compensation for being denied promotion.

6. A muslim accused of conspiracy to cause explosions and conspiracy to murder has gone on the run while on bail (begging the question as to why a terrorist suspect is even on bail).

7. As further evidence of our compensation culture, a school caretaker who'd managed to use ladders for 30 years successfully sued his employer when he fell from a ladder - because they hadn't showed him how to use it properly and he injured himself at work.

8. Further evidence of declining educational standards - kids can pass their SATS test in Maths by getting just 21%.

9. Despite an outbreak of obesity among the young, parents are set to be banned from ferrying other families' kids to football matches next year unless they have had criminal records checks, while the FA has banned competitive matches among young kids.

The Sun famously invited the last person to leave Britain in 1992 to turn off the lights if Kinnock became Prime Minister. Even the Welsh Windbag wouldn't have been this bad as Prime Minister, would he..?

Tamsin's educational difficulties

Tamsin Dunwoody likes to tell us the Tories are soft on yobs - a charge so laughable that one wonders how she can make it with a straight face. I always thought leftists whined that Tories that were unremittingly tough on yobs but such is Labour's desperation that they will resort to lying in an effort to win in Crewe. It is a strategy doomed to fail.

Tamsin has also sought to make class an issue in the campaign - again to little effect. Maybe she should make education an issue instead - given that she has managed to spell "possession" incorrectly when referring to "unauthorised possession of a gun" on her website - see the screencap below.



Hat Tip: Sarkis Zeronian.

How much more incompetent can the government become?

Relaxing on Jersey, my attention has been drawn to this astonishing story in The Daily Mail. One of the nine Afghan hijackers (who took control of a plane in 2000 and landed with 160 frightened passengers at Stansted before being granted asylum) now works at Heathrow as a cleaner!

Putting aside the fact that I cannot believe that this gang aren't still in jail (let alone my anger that they were allowed to remain in Britain at all) how on earth was a conviction for hijacking not picked up when Nazamuddin Mohammidy applied for this job?

And where do the other eight hijackers now work?

Your pay's been cut, Darling

John Redwood makes an interesting point: Alastair Darling's pay should be cut, such has been his disastrous tenure at the Treasury. 

There is a parliamentary procedure whereby such a pay cut could indeed be demanded by MPs. From memory it was last attempted when Patricia Hewitt was Health Secretary (the same hapless harridan who is set to be appointed as Peter Mandelson's successor in Brussels). Might it be worth seeing whether MPs could force Gordon Brown to cut his successor's pay? 

I expect Labour MPs will vote along party lines which, at the very least, means their endorsement of the inept Chancellor of the Exchequer can come back to haunt them over the coming months and years as leaflet after leaflet points out how they voted to endorse Darling instead of to censure him.

My Two Cents...on Labour's incompetent government

While I was away, politics in Britain sank to a new low. Not content with playing politics with the election date – albeit he was deliciously scarred by the experience – our Prime Minister tried to play politics with the country’s finances in the pre-budget report and comprehensive spending review announcement rolled out last week. That too went down like a cup of cold sick.

With a National Health Service that allows patients to get fatal infections in filthy hospitals and, so we learn today, sees some patients indulging in DIY dentistry, the government now has the gall to whine about obesity levels – instead of tackling the criminal rate of deaths from preventable infections and conditions that are treatable in the rest of the civilized world such as early stage cancer and heart disease.

Our state schools turn out hordes of ill-disciplined, innumerate and illiterate kids, taught – if I can use the word loosely – by too many teachers who don’t seem to care about the kids in their care. If they did, they’d put the effort in that the counterparts do in the private sector.

Gun crime, knife crime and gang violence are prevalent throughout our inner cities and, increasingly, in the shires. The police obsess with targeting motorists, attending politically correct training courses, not offending Islamofascists, tip-toeing around profiling and even waving the white flag in the war on drugs.

The City of London – the ONLY reason England isn’t a third world socialist hell-hole like Scotland – is now being ruined by our Scottish Prime Minister and Scottish Chancellor in some seeming act of national revenge for Culloden. The decision to hammer entrepreneurs by almost doubling Capital Gains Tax is beyond moronic. It is simply dangerous for the health of our nation as any investor, entrepreneur or businessman worth his or her salt will be thinking twice about keeping their wealth in the UK.

Instead of dealing with the crises in the NHS, our education system, law and order and the economy, the government fiddles while Britain burns, ministers squabbling among themselves and passing more authoritarian laws that infringe our freedom of expression.

We are led by pygmies. If you thought the likes of John Prescott, Charles Clarke and David Blunkett were lightweight, they look like political titans compared to the shambolic losers governing us today.

It’s good to be back after a week in the Land of the Free. I’m ready for the fight: I do hope you are too!

My Two Cents...on Labour incompetence

There is a mild sense of panic among senior Tories at the size of the Brown Bounce and the solid start to the Brown premiership. There is no need to be if David Cameron and his advisors recognize that the strategy that worked so well to attack Tony Blair needs to be adapted to the new challenges of Gordon Brown holding the reins of power. All of the issues the Tories could and did rely on – Labour sleaze, the Iraq War, government incompetence, Blair’s personality traits – are no longer live issues.

The loans for peerages scandal died when Blair left office and Brown is evidently not as sleazy as Blair was. Brown has distanced himself from Blair’s War and from President Bush so that issue is no longer in play either. Government incompetence has been replaced with the perception of sure-footed handling of the floods, the attempted terrorist attacks and now the foot and mouth crisis. And Blair’s personality traits that so grated with the public have been replaced by Brown’s aura of dour solidity – so much so that it is Cameron who reminds people of Blair and who suffers as a result.

There is still, however, an opportunity for the Tories. Labour remains incompetent in office in a number of respects, and in ways that play into Tory hands. 14 immigrant offenders still at large after escaping from the Campsfield Detention Centre are not merely escaped asylum seekers. It’s worse than that. They are convicted criminals who were awaiting deportation. What was there to wait for? Were all the flights out of Heathrow fully booked? If they were awaiting deportation they should have been deported promptly, full stop. The contract to run the Centre may be in private hands but the government decides how much money to pay the Centre operators and how such facilities should be run.

If any of the 14 foreign criminals on the run commits a crime – and past precedent shows that they will – then the responsibility for such crimes rests with the Prime Minister. The buck stops with him. And the Tories should be relentless in driving home the fact that the escape of these foreign prisoners – who should have been deported by now – is a direct result of Labour’s immigration and prisons policies and Brown’s decisions when he was Chancellor.