The Brown Terror

I love the expression 'The Brown Terror' used by Simon Heffer in today's Telegraph. It perfectly sums up the years of anger, hatred and deceit under the butcher of Kirkcaldy and his acolytes.

Even now - and without so much as an apology - some of them are standing for the Labour leadership. The remainder of course, were unable to find the courage to put the British people before personal gain and ideology and stop the terror.

Its not a great choice. And the one man who stood up to the bully and put his moral convictions first is missing. James Purnell was oppointed Chairman of the ippr thinktank on 20th July. I shall read their output with a great deal more enthusiasm from September.

The Great Clunking Fist

‘Gordon Brown's rages are... deeply destructive to good governance, and are a key to understanding why this man's government has been so unco-ordinated, unhappy and ineffectual in so many ways’ writes Jenni Russell in the Guardian. It’s well worth reading.

But it goes a lot deeper than just the personal fear that paralyses good government. It creates a paranoid, inward-looking and self-important elite unable to gain true perspective. Groupthink is the result, where individual creativity, uniqueness, and independent thinking are lost in the pursuit of a bunker mentality. All advantages of reasonable balance in choice and thought disappear.

And then we wonder why they failed to foresee the financial meltdown caused by the credit crunch, the longest and deepest recession in eighty years, MP’s expenses, the 10p tax disaster, or the deeply de-humanising effects of centrally imposed, top-down targets that distort our public services. And all of these in just the last two years of Labour government.