Brown Loses Gurkha Vote - Time to Go

Brown lost the vote on new Gurkha immigration rules, quite rightly in my opinion. See my post two back. What was interesting was the numbers of the Labour MPs either voting against or abstaining. If my arithmetic is correct of the 356 MPs they have 83 didn't vote and 27 voted against.

Now it might be too much to ask for that wowser Phil Woolas and his boss Jacqui Smith resign. (She has quite a few issues she could resign over.) It's certainly too much to ask Gordon Brown to make way for a leadership contest. But the numbers are there. Of these 110 MPs surely enough know that it's time for a real change if they are to have any chance in next year's election.

So where has all the money gone!

What Brown, Darling, Cameron and Osborne have in common in this financial crisis is it was correct to save the banks and because of the cost of doing this with taxpayers money things like health and education will be cut. The differences will be in how big the cuts are. The Tories are reverting to old style Thatcherism so forget all about the hug-a-hoody PR.

I read on the BBC website that Mandelson said soundbites are not dead. How about this one then? Following on from Tom Cruise's "Show me the money" in Jerry Maguire, "Follow the money".

Now I'm sure there are good reasons for keeping the banks solvent, bailing them out so they can repay the people they owe money to may be a good thing. Maybe the future earnings and tax income of the City investment banks justifies paying off the present investors in them and keeping London's reputation untarnished among the rich and powerful. If this is the case shouldn't Darling show us the maths?

Now don't confuse saving the banks with small depositors savings or even bank workers jobs. Deposit insurance protects the former and nationalization after bankruptcy would take care of the latter. All I am saying is there was an alternative, bank failure, to throwing billions at the banks. It might not have been the best option but it would be nice to know why not.

So where did the money go? Who had invested in all these failing funds and bad investment instruments at the banks? I wonder whose names would come up. For sure from the UK would be the pension funds. So we have indirectly bailed out some pension funds but that doesn't stop Mandelson talking about the problem of funding the Post Office workers pensions needing outside money. Who else? Must be some UK based hedge funds I guess but then I would be looking overseas. How about the Russian oligarchs, the oil rich Arab sheikdoms and the money that the Chinese have been putting out on the world markets instead of raising the standard of living of their own people. On top of that we would find the rich and famous both from the UK and overseas. Probably find we bailed out the Blairs and the Camerons.

Wouldn't it be nice to know?

Phil Woolas - What a Wowser

From Wikipedia - Wowser: The Australian writer C.J. Dennis defined it thus: 'Wowser: an ineffably pious person who mistakes this world for a penitentiary and himself for a warder'.

So what is going through the mind of Immigration Minister Phil Woolas? He says that in a worse case it would mean 100,000 immigrants coming in if he allowed ex-Gurkha servicemen to settle in the UK. I just saw him on TV saying that if he allowed in the Gurkhas it would open the door to other groups to go get a court ruling. Are there other groups that the UK owes as much to as the Gurkhas? If so we should let them in also.

Woolas shows all the worst in New Labour. He's the man behind the counter at the dole office, the petty bureaucrats that run our health service, and all those well paid administration jobs that Blair and Brown have created. What they can't see that everyone else in the country can, is they are shooting themselves in the foot every time they open their mouths. The tabloids couldn't have made it up. We have a wheelchair bound, VC wearing, Gurkha next to Joanna Lumley protesting outside parliament.

You wouldn't mind as much if it was just one New Labour groupie, but like the Mandelson Post Office statements, Gordon Brown jumps right behind with support. Brown must go and better before the election than after.

New Labour - Militant with Money!

If I lived in the UK it would probably be back in my old home in the Erith and Thamesmead constituency. Right now I would really be pissed off as the New Labour leadership tries to fix the selection of the next Labour candidate against the wishes of the local Labour members.

First the London party takes away control of the selection from the local party and declares it an all women shortlist. Then the Blairites drop in the 22 year old daughter of Blair advisor, millionaire and now Baron Philip Gould with unlimited money to spend. So it looks like Erith will get the Hon. Georgia Gould as their Labour candidate.

If the leaders of Militant have anything on their consciences it should be that they opened the door to the most undemocratic faction in the Labour Party's history, New Labour.