‘U TURN’ IF YOU NEED TO …

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UPDATE: 27th April, 2008 – Brown set for second ‘U-Turn’ – on 42 days terror detention

Read extract from leaked document, Jacqui Smith, Home Sec. (pdf) – we “could …” etc

23rd April, 2008

With the news that Brown has done a virtual “u-turn” – we might paraphrase this as “You turn if you need to. The gentleman’s for turning.” (original, Margaret Thatcher).

Or even ” I can go any way you like. I’ve got a reverse gear.” (original, Tony Blair.)

Frank Field has withdrawn his amendment and David Cameron says it is a ‘humiliating climbdown’ as well as accusing Brown of “weakness, dithering and indecision”. Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg called Mr Brown “increasingly pointless”.

And Brown’s party, in their pyrrhic victory, have to chew over the major mistake that Brown made in his last budget, 2007. Not to mention the other major mistake they ALL made in allowing their REAL LEADER to be ousted. Coming to terms with that and its long term repercussions, might be even more unpalatable than just a cock-up in Brown’s last budget.

A slow-motion car crash, with few, if any survivors. What a come-uppance.

So is Brown’s number up? And all over 10 pence?

Well, maybe. Then again, maybe not. But this numbers business got me thinking.

10p – 42 Days – 39 – 46 Revolting MPs! It’s all a Numbers Game

Perhaps he should buy a lottery ticket this weekend – pick some of these numbers – 10 / 39 / 46 / 67 / 28 / 42 / 7 / 1 / 3 / 4 – and cross his fingers.

But it is intriguing that this Chancellor of the Exchequer … Prime Minister … is having such problems adding up. And we thought he’d had plenty of practice doing his sums over the last 10 years as Britain’s finance minister.

First there was the present rumbling, which none of them seem to have noticed until NOW, strangely. Or could it be that they HAD noticed and were distracted, blindfold or just as complicit in their silence as Brown in the expectation that he would sort it out in some way or another before any election?

The abolition of Brown’s 10p tax rate, introduced by Brown and then abolished by Brown in his last budget statement, meant that 5.3 million low-income households could lose around £3 – £4 per week.

And if Mr Brown and his government has survived the 10p business, by promising compensation for those who would have lost out, AND they survive the May 1st local elections, what’s the next big number threatening Brown?

42 DAYS DETENTION VOTE: THE MESSAGE IS IN THE NUMBERS AGAIN

If this vote goes ahead without placating the MPs, and Brown is defeated in Parliament, it will be of enormous importance. It took Blair eight & a half years to be defeated in a Parliamentary vote (and by his own MPs). It will be roughly the same number of months if it happens to Brown.

So the imminent 42 days plans for detention of terrorist suspects, being pushed for by the Home Secretary and Mr Brown, is the next big test. Blair’s failure to get the 90 days support from his own party will be fresh in their memories. But Blair’s defeat, the first of his premiership, was in November 2005, eight and a half years after he first came to power. The 39-ers or 46-ers who have signed a motion against the Government in the 10p debate are still plotting menacingly in Westminster corners. Yvette Cooper, on Newsnight, cold give NO clear numbers to Paxman, and very few clear words either. And there seems to be a rolling back of the supposed promise to compensate “all” who would have lost under the abolition of the 10p rate.

I still think that Brown’s … Blair’s 2005 majority of 67 is under threat. And victory strengthens the arm. Brown will not be forgetting that there are even more revolting MPs lined up to vote against the 42 Days bit of fun and games, coming to a screen near you … very soon. Can hardly wait; now I’ve seen the trailer.

Reference to these numbers: Alistair Darling says it would cost £7bn to “unpick” the foul-up whereby 5.3 million households would lose out because of the abolition of the 10p tax band. [...] Anyway, according to Newsnight, it would cost a mere £2.5bn just to raise the tax threshold across the board.

And then there’s this, in defence of Brown (more or less.)

And past decisions still hang over the present prime minister – like the sell-off of gold bullion between 1999 – 2002, at it slowest price for 20 years. That is estimated to have cost the country £2 billion.

Is Brown steering this Labour government vehicle to a horrendous crash? If so, has he the time, guile, will or political nous to change direction? And if so, is he about to turn left or right?

You’d think one headache would be enough for the government right now. Or even a heavy migraine. In fact they also have the pain in the neck to worry about. Revolting backbenchers.

All right, so they were there during Tony Blair’s reign too. But somehow, for years Blair managed to keep them at bay. Certainly, few of them would have imagined that Brown had so miscalculated his own MPs that he and the present chancellor would have had to humble themselves at the PLP meeting twice recently. Begging for his own party’s support was never written into the original script.

The very idea is astonishing. After only 9 months as PM his backbenchers, those who longed for Brown after Blair, must be weeping into their cornflakes every morning when they read the dailies. The refrain, “Oh my Gord … what’s happened now?” must echo round various MP homes. And, I dread to think the echoes around Number 10! Eating words might be on the menu here, amidst the “Why the fu*k didn’t Tony warn me about these b*st*rds?”

Serves ‘em right! All of ‘em.

And if Brown thinks he has bought them off – well, THAT was only a warm-up.

LOCK UP YOUR MPs FOR, WELL, AT LEAST 42 DAYS, GORDON

The vote on the 42 Days Detention for Terrorism suspects might make this little debacle look easy-peasy. As well as, genuinely caring about the poor in society, many Labour MPs are fully paid up members of the Guardian For Civil Rights Brigade. They swallowed whole the leftie liberals’ preaching in recent years on our ‘loss of civil rights’ and our need for constant vigilance of human rights. They swallowed it to the nth degree. Every other consideration was subordinated to this self-centred mantra. And so, they were persuaded that Blair was out of kilter with public opinion.

He wasn’t. They were.

Brown knows this, but he does not have the nous, nor the political capital in the bank – especially now – to deal with it.

“SHOW ME THE EVIDENCE”, say the oh-so-trustworthies … his MPs. “I want it NOW”, say they.

[Not later when a suspected terrorist is freed after 28 days, laughs up his sleeve at the ineptitude of British law, and blows himself and some of the rest of us to Kingdom Come - the waiting arms of 72 Virgins.]

They want the evidence NOW. It’s all kind of ar*e backwards, really. Normally, we wait until a crime has been committed, charge someone and THEN provide the evidence. But they want the evidence before the crime.

Ah! That’s it! I get it. The government is going about it the wrong way. And the MPs are right. They’re not sold on the preventive measures – that’s too uncivil libertarian. So, they want to be sure there really IS a threat. They’ll be sure one day. After the event.

It’s been clear all along. Funny I hadn’t noticed before.

Looks like Brown’s government will need to provide more evidence of why this change is needed or he will face another climbdown over the Terror Bill.

Although just what the government ministers/cabinet/executive are there for, I have to wonder. Especially if they have to ask their MPs if they can, please, ever-so-please, be allowed to pass a law on the country’s security!

But why would the government want to extend the detention period from 28 days to 42 days, if it isn’t necessary? Despite differing expert opinions, I’d support the government on this one. And for those who voted for 90 days, it completely defies logic that they would object to what is, after all, a temporary measure.

Since 7/7 there have been 12 to 15 plots intercepted, sometimes ALMOST up to the time limit of 28 days. How crazy is it that we don’t legislate for a longer detention period until AFTER we have exceeded that limit?

At some point in the future it is clear that the police and security services will not be able to manage under the present limits.

And my analysis is simple, as it always has been.

LABOUR MPs ARE AFRAID OF DISTANCING THEIR MUSLIM VOTERS

At least the government, in this issue if on little else regarding terrorism, is trying to grab the bull by the horns. Better late than never.

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Asking “Can Labour win the next election?”, Michael Faulkner, of Political Junkies has this, including a lovely poetic quote from spring 1940 after Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler.

“It is difficult to believe that less than ten months ago Gordon Brown, then newly arrived in Downing Street, enjoyed a ten point lead over the Tories in the polls and was widely praised for his decisiveness and firm grip on the reins of government. As I wrote in these columns at the time, the popularity he enjoyed had a lot to do with the fact that he was not Blair. But his management of the two dramatic events that broke during the early days of his premiership – widespread flooding and two attempted terrorist attacks – contributed to the impression of a man who kept a cool head and quietly got on with the job in hand. That has all changed.

One of the most recent opinion polls records the biggest drop in a prime minister’s ratings since 1940, when, in May of that year, after the fall of Norway to the Nazis, the country and parliament turned decisively against Neville Chamberlain. He was compelled to resign, and as everyone knows, was replaced as prime minister by Churchill. While the historical parallel is rather flimsy, I am nevertheless reminded of the famous limerick that did the rounds in Whitehall during that grim spring of 1940:

An elderly statesman with gout,
When asked what the war was about,
In a Written Reply
Said, ‘My colleagues and I
Are doing our best to find out’.”

More from this article, from a clearly Old Labour perspective:

“As I have argued consistently in these columns, the New Labour project, launched by Blair and Brown in the mid nineties, was intended to dismantle the Labour Party as a party of social democracy. In this they have succeeded. Under Blair’s leadership the onslaught on the public sector of the economy, involving the extension of privatization beyond anything attempted by the Tories, was presented as ‘modernisation’ and ‘reform’. This neo-liberal agenda was accompanied by propaganda against its critics on the left, damning them as ‘conservatives’ and ‘antediluvians’. Many hoped that Brown would make a clean break with his predecessor, work to restore the Labour Party as a party of social democratic reform and breathe new life into a government that had so badly disappointed those who had voted for it. To those less familiar with the peculiarities of British party politics, it needs to be stressed that the majority of New Labour’s critics in recent years are not particularly left wing. Many of the critics might be described as Fabians – believers in gradual reform, healthy municipal government and a more equitable distribution of wealth through a progressive taxation system. It is such people, inside and outside the Labour Party, who have been so dismayed and angered by Gordon Brown’s failure to take even the smallest step on this road.”

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A FEW OTHER LITTLE MATTERS OF INTEREST

Question Time for AQ’s al-Zawahiri

On 16 December 2007, Ayman al-Zawahiri] invited supporters of [al-Qaeda] to log on to several password-protected jihadist online forums and send questions to him. Experts at the U.S. Defense Department managed to acquire 1,868 separate questions posed to Zawahiri on [Al-Ekhlas and Al-Hesbah] secure jihadist websites.

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David Miliband’s speech on The Democratic Imperative – “post-Blair, as at Labour’s Progress site. I think it is “unfinished Blair”. We can only hope that Miliband is up to finishing the job Blair was denied the time. The previously named signatories of the Euston Manifesto are now gathered here, with an impressive list of contributors on the progressive left/centre.

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BIG HUG

And if you’re up to laughing around the issue of the Middle East peace process, check this out. This one raised a smile for me at News Biscuit. Amazing what you can do with software these days. Perhaps I should put one together of Tony & Gordon in a state of brotherly affection.

Oh, don’t be silly, BS.

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YOU COULDN’T MAKE IT UP

On the atrocities of 9/11, Al Qaeda says to Iran, who have been blaming Israel for 9/11:

“Shurrup about Israel! It was us wot dun it!”

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Tags: 1. Tony Blair, 10p tax rate abolition, 42 days detention, alistair darling, conservatives, David Cameron, Frank Field, labour party, Margaret Thatcher, opposition Conservative Party Leader, parliament, Tony Brown, u turn if you want to