I had my hair cut today. This is always an opportunity for me to find out what’s really going on in the world.
‘What’s really going on in the world?’, I asked.
‘Well’, said Mr Sweeney*, ‘everyone’s been talking about Gordon Brown. They say it’s time for him to go; he’s made too many mistakes’.
And, although Gordon Brown may well be an uninspirational and unelected misfit who takes Scottish dourness to levels that make Private Frazer sound like Jeannette Krankie, I feel compelled to rush to his defence:
The Labour party is supposed to have something to do with socialism, right? Well, Gordon Brown at least has some modicum of socialist background, in direct contrast with T Blair, whose handing over of the reins now appears to have been a master stroke.
Most of Brown’s problems have been inherited, and unlike many of his peers, he hasn’t dwelt on the hand he’s been given. Surrounded by people with better sound-bites, he’s seen some phenomenal change in a very short period of time, and I do find it hard to think what he would have done differently in the financial sector of the UK – we may even applaud him for intervention when we look back on 2008/9**
‘Man of the people’ David Cameron, in contrast, seems to have so little to say (still!) about policy, that, at a time when the parties should really be rallying towards each other, his best lines are still the traditional party politic jibes – exactly what he said he wouldn’t do when he was elected leader. I think Cameron is about as out of touch with British society as…well, Boris Johnson, probably, and I really fear the alternative to the current government.
Plus, while I think about it, Cameron annoys me because he’s younger than me. When I was growing up, political leaders (and Tories in particular) were about as old as your grandparents. Which I’m not, so it’s just wrong.
In the European elections, the protest votes included voting in two BNP candidates as MEP’s. Showing that not all forms of protest are especially rational. Gawd help us if thsat thinking continues into a protest election
As we have seen in recent weeks, courtesy of the Daily Telegraph, there are a lot of MP’s out there who are out for themselves as 1st, 2nd and 3rd priorities. Now, we probably all knew that to become an MP you have to be pretty ego-centric, but to have confirmed that large numbers of them are also fraudulent apologists (or, in Sir Anthony Steen’s case, just fraudulent), kind of puts them on another level. And there are a few politicians who thus far have no stain on their character; GB being one of them. Incidentally, if you are a journalist on the Telegraph at the moment, it must be like having a birthday/Christmas/Boris&Petronella scoop every day. After this, the journos are going to really struggle back to real life.
Anyway, he’s not a moron. Even if everyone thinks the country is out of control, I really fear the alternative.
*I have no idea what Mr Sweeney’s real name is, but I’ve had my hair cut by him at his shop (Sweeney’s Barbers; Norwich), for about 20 years now, and not once has he turned me into one of Mrs Miggins’s pies.
** “We” doesn’t include Vince Cable
The Emu 