How low can this country sink? We have borrowed to a level that will affect our growth for decades. We have a war which is costing lives we have no right to spend – our own and others. We dishonour the military covenant in our treatment of our armed forces during and after engagement in this unjustifiable conflict. We have a leader who cannot make decisions when we most need them. Now we have had the shame of seeing – daily – our Prime Minister on the world stage, stalking the US President like an obsessed and unwanted lover, craving a look, a word, a touch – on camera.
Brown neglects the armed forces
Men are sent to fight a war no one believes in, without the right equipment they need to fight it; or the appropriate care they need when they suffer injuries and post-traumatic stress; and the support they need when they confront readjustment to life out of the theatre of war.
The Scots’ Major-General Andrew Mackay, Commander of Army forces in Scotland, Northern England and Northern Ireland, has just resigned in protest at Government strategy in Afghanistan and at the inadequate resources committed to front line operations. He is not the first to resign for this reason but he is the most senior.
He has chosen to go after only a few months in his present post. What he has learned since his appointment has obviously been too much for a man of his responsibilities to accept.
Brown has also promoted Bob Ainsworth to the post of Secretary for Defence – an appointment received with as much gravity, within and without the armed forces, as if it had been Dennis the Menace.
Brown makes the worst possible decision on Trident
The Prime Minister makes yet another indecisive ‘decision’, leaving the country with the worst of two worlds.
To save money – but not much – he has chosen to reduce the UK’s spend on Trident II by cutting the number of new Vanguard submarines from four to three.
This leaves the UK national submarine base at Argyll’s Faslane unable to mount a secure, uninterrupted deterrent patrol.
Four submarines is the minimum necessary to keep one submarine permanently at sea. One is always out of service for a refit. One is used for training. One is at sea on patrol. One is working up to readiness to take over patrol.
The other problem of this ‘decision’ is that it maintains the UK’s controversial commitment to the nuclear deterrent. Cancelling Trident altogether would have been a very significant saving for the Treasury in this time of historically unprecedented borrowing levels. It would also have gained the party support from the anti-nuclear lobby.
Castrating the Vanguard programme simply leaves the country with an expensive deterrent programme that cannot do what it is supposed to do; that saves relatively little money – far less than 25% of the Vanguard contract; and that leaves the UK tied to what is recognised to be an anachronistic cold war defence strategy.
Brown embarrasses the UK internationally
The last few days at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh must be the UK’s lowest point. The Prime Minister’s aides were manically trying to get him a one-to-one meeting (a bi-lateral) with the US President, Barack Obama. Obama’s aides just kept shrugging them off.
Brown was seen on television clips scurrying to try to catch up with Obama as the phalanx of leaders moved off, just to get the you-and-me moment on camera – however unplanned, inconsequential and fleeting.
When the jeers back home were relayed to Obama’s team, there was no bi-lateral but the great man paused en passant to pat Gordon’s arm a couple of times, eyes disengaged. The UK’s Prime Minister was seen serially in an orgasmic state at such signs of affection – a needy adolescent with a crush, not a statesman with a job to do. And this was the man who came to unelected power saying there was to be an end to spin?
The culmination of this national cringefest was when Obama and his wife were moved by sheer compassion at the patent desperation of the Browns for recognition. They did the hand-holding photocall reminiscent of nothing more than the shot of the parents of the bride and groom in a wedding album.
Incompetent at home, dangerously so; an unparalleled embarrassment abroad – get him out or have an early election and let us do it ourselves. Then we can get down to recovery.
One of the successes of Gordon Brown’s reign is to have managed to conceal the true state of our finances and to deceive people into thinking that everything is under control. The Bank of England has invented money which it has flooded into the economy (which automatically devalues the currency – it can do nothing else) and we have taken on huge extra borrowings (with the Chinese holding the IOUs). Our national debt is now rising a the rate of about £400 million per month and by 2011 this will become unserviceable unless there is an unexpected miracle. What UK would do without Oil Revenues doesn’t bear thinking about. All that Brown and Darling have done is put off the evil day in the hope of scrambling to an highly unlikely victory at the next election.
Our economy is in fact in a much worse state than the economies of Ireland and Iceland, both of which have been routinely insulted by Brown’s gang, but both of these countries have bitten the bullet already and done the hard but right thing – cut wages and public expenditure – and both will be out of recession long before the UK is.
Meanwhile little Norway’s oil fund now stands at £295 billion ( £2,950,000,000,000) and could pay off the UK’s huge national debt tomorrow.
I think Scotland should seek to join Norway (Snorland?).
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very illuminating to see the snp want to cut wages .
how hypocritical for the snp to constantly complain about budget cuts when their leading supporters acknowledge they are necessary and are happy to see spending and wages cut
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kintyre1
Any sensible comment on the main thrust of my remarks?
Thought not.
I’m afraid as a result of the UK’s perilous economic position the wage cuts are happening already and being accompnaied by wage cancellations as hundreds of thousands lose their jobs.
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there is a world economic crisis
it is ridiculous to suggest a breakaway nationalist run scotland would somehow be immune from these global forces
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Where did I suggest that an independent Scotland would be immune from global forces?
Every one of the 199 independent nations in the world, over half of them smaller than Scotland, is affected by the global economic crisis.
They all have the self respect to set about dealing with and sorting their own problems.
The most significant success of the unionist spin machine to date is to persuade a certain number of timid, gullible and ill informed Scots that in the whole world Scotland is uniquely unfit to do the same.
Of course only a particular breed of feart Scots make up this subset (known colloquially as the “Scottish cringe”) and the unionists aim their juvenile spin unerringly at these sorry specimans.
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scots are neither timid or gullible which is why the nationalists are likely to remain on the fringes of the serious debate to be had in the forthcoming general election
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Oh dear. Is this the best you can do?
Let’s get serious.
Do you believe that Scotland alone in the world is incapable of running its own affairs?
Dos the family next door take in your wages,run your budget, decide your spending and hand you out some pocket money?
Do you believe that the best people in Scotland to solve Scotland’s problems and deal with Scotland’s ambitions are the people who actually live and work in Scotland?
Do you believe Scotland needs handouts from the English taxpayer?
If you do, do you believe that that means that the union is “successful”?
Why is the UK desperate to hang onto us if we are costing them money?
Do you believe that politicians always tell the truth?
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Game, Set and Match to Dave in straight sets. Wasn’t much of a game though !
I don’t think that poor soul’s heart is in it and he seems to be out there all on his own.
He brings to mind the cartoon of a couple of ghillies looking a two distant stooped figures in silhouette on a faraway horizon and saying, “Looks like a brace of Tories but I doubt if they are a breeding pair.”
Or as Donnie Stewart once said, “Occasionally you may come over a bluff and find a few of them milling around close to water but the days of the thundering herds are gone forever!”
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