2008
"Gordon Brown is no newcomer to the political scene, someone starting with a clean sheet. We know him to be a miserable, bean-counting bungler with a tenuous grasp of the truth. He now says that he has changed and he plans to change everything to do with government. But experience says he's about as genuine as a 9-bob note. So Gordon has a severely uphill task ahead of him."

April 2008 LABOUR IN ACTION After launching a sleaze campaign against faith schools, Eddie 'Crazy Tongue' Balls is doing the same to grammar schools. The country's best schools just don't fit in to his crypto-communist social engineering plans as excellence is 'elitist' and anathema to the class-war wing of the Labour party, which is striving to drive everything decent into the dirt in the hope that if nothing works and nothing is any good, then no one will notice how useless the Labour government is! March 2008 OUR MONEY Four Financial Services Authority executive directors collected £300,000 from the taxpayer in bonuses while asleep at the wheel and letting the Northern Rock catastrophe happen. And Adam Applecart, the man who sank the bank, is in line for £760,000 from the government as part of New Labour's policy of rewarding failure with generous hand-outs of taxpayers' cash. OUR MONEY Gorbals Mick, the Commons' speaker, has spent £1.7 million of taxpayers' cash on home improvements to his grace & favour residence since October 2000. FRIEND OF TERROR Justice Minister Jack Straw's minions are letting terrorists out of gaol early to make room for other criminals. HOGWASH The government's claim that mass migration is good for our economy has been exposed as garbage by the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee. Immigrants grow the economy but they also consume any gains, so their nett contribution balances out at zero. BROWN TOWNS The government is exhuming failed plans for commuter dormitory towns, giving them a fake 'green' spin and recycling them as eco-town schemes. In the Brown era, bad plans become good ones in the name of green posturing. OUR MONEY The upper limit for second-home expenses claims for MPs is £23,000. Labour MP Chris Mullins has just confirmed that most MPs see this as a spending target to aim for, which explains why most of them claim just a few hundred pounds less than the 23 grand. GOAL POSTS MOVED The government can't meet its target of halving MRSA infections in NHS hospitals by this month, so March has been scrapped in favour of June 2008, but this target date isn't set in stone either. OUR MONEY Over the last 8 years, the government has wasted £10 billion on a half-baked plan to get half of all people between 18 and 30 into a university. At the current rate of progress, the target will be met in 2126 at a cost to the nation of a further £147,500,000,000. SHORT-CHANGED A scam, which was uncovered last month, has cost the taxpayer twice as much as the government admitted. Prisoners taking college courses in gaol have claimed £730,000 in grants and student loans, not £370,000 as the government wanted us to believe. OUR MONEY The Commons speaker is wasting £100,000 of taxpayers' money on a spurious appeal against a Freedom of Information tribunal's order that the second home expenses of 14 big league (ex-)MPs should be published. The MPs include David Cameron & Gordon Brown, and they have all said they have no objection to publication of the data (but none has been in any rush to do it). LABOUR IN ACTION The government has signed us up to an EU scheme to make 5% of all petrol & diesel come from biofuel sources by 2010. But both Professor Robert Watson, the govenment's chief environmental scientist and Sir David King, the former government chief scientist, are saying that some biofuel sources can accelerate climate change and they all help to put up food prices and encourage starvation in poor countries. SWINDLER The Statistics Commission has rapped Eddie Balls, the Childrens' Sec., over the knuckles for making up his own statistics for shabby political stunts, and for failing to maintain the required standard of integrity for government ministers. SWINDLE In January, staple food & drink prices went up by 5.6% and utility prices (gas, electricity) rose by 3.5%. But the government's Consumer Prices Index rose by only 2.5%. This scam is achieved by including occasional-purchase items, such as DVD players, in the official figure to drag it down artificially and allow the government to swindle pensioners and the receipients of other paid-for state benefits. MONEY GRUBBING After 13 years, an MP is entitled to a pension of £20,000 per year. The average person doing a proper job in the private sector would have to work for 62 years to build up the same pension pot. MONEY GRUBBING Councils which have switched to fortnightly rubbish collections now have the government's permission to charge households £50/year for weekly collections. Additional collection charges have nothing to do with saving the planet, it's just another Labour Stealth Tax. SWINDLER Eddie Balls, the Childrens' Sec., has been caught in the act of burying more bad news. He tried to hide the fact that the government's system deprived 100,000 children of a place at their first choice school behind some imaginary admission code violations cooked up by his department. OUR MONEY In 2013, Britain will pay £10.5 billion to the EU as the price of membership but receive only £4.2 billion back in grants. This is a consequence of Tony Blair's attempt to buy himself popularity by surrendering a huge chunk of the rebates won by Mrs. Thatcher. LABOUR IN ACTION New sentencing guidelines mean that addicts who steal to feed a drug habit won't go to gaol. They'll be left in the community and allowed to carry on stealing. OUR MONEY The estimated cost of Blair's wars in Iraq & Afghanistan for this year is £3.3 billion – twice last year's figure despite massive troop withdrawals from Iraq (where the forecast is a 72% rise in spending). The forecast for Afghanistan is up by 122% and £10 billion has been wasted on these two wars since 2003. The latest figures show that the government has been hiding the true cost of these wars in past years but increasing scrutiny is forcing part of the truth into the open. LABOUR IN ACTION The Ministry of Defence closed a repair facility for RAF Tornado aircraft to save money. Which means it now has to raid a fund for removing land mines to pay BAe Systems to keep half a dozen Tornados flying in Iraq. BROWN'S BRITAIN Average family incomes up 3.4% this year, the family cost of living up 9%. LABOUR IN ACTION The government has spent £350 million since April 2006 on a 'flagship' scheme to get first-time buyers onto the housing ladder. Just 45 people have benefitted; 7 in London, 115 in the South East, 55 in the South West and none at all in the East Midlands. The cost to the taxpayer is £780,000 per customer. JUST PLAIN CRAZY As a £8 million upgrade project approaches completion, the government wants to close down the world famous Joderell Bank radio telescope to save £2.7 million; which is the amount of cash claimed as expenses by 16.8 greedy MPs. DODGY STATISTICS The government has 'proved' that 24-hour drinking has produced no increase in disorder, violent crime and hospital admissions. How? By leaving any figures which conflict with the desired result out of its latest batch of bogus statistics. OUR MONEY The British Chambers of Commerce have calculated that the 83 'most expensive' regulation introduced by Labour since 1997 have cost British industry £66 billion. The BCC lacked the strength of will to cost a further 1,800 somewhat less burdensome bits of red tape. NHS WAITING LISTS The government's target on waiting times for hospital treatment has eliminated long and short waits, but it has also removed clinical judgement and need for treatment as a factor in deciding how quickly a patient gets to hospital. The net effect of the target has been to INCREASE the average waiting time.    At present, 72% of trusts meet the government target of 18 weeks and waiting times are increasing. OUR MONEY Gordon Brown's foolish decision to sell half of Britain's gold reserves when he became Chancellor, and his botched execution of the sale, cost the country £4 billion. Which is twice what the Bank of England lost when Britain crashed out of the European Monetary System and headed off down the road to a strong, low-inflation economy, which that liar Brown claims he created. LABOUR IN ACTION Companies involved in the government's PFI projects are moving the income and profits to tax havens abroad. PFIs were Gordon Brown's method of moving the risk of public projects to the public sector, while hiding liabilities off the books to avoid breaking his elastic Golden Rule. He has also removed the risk of the taxpayer sharing any profits. And if a PFI company goes bust while the project is being built, the taxpayer has to pick up the pieces. LABOUR IN ACTION NHS trusts in England cut services when they were in debt, and kept the cuts in place when the books balanced again. As a result the NHS is heading for a surplus this year of £2,000,000,000 – all cash which could have been spent on patient care but wasn't. JUST SPIN Gordon Brown's target of halving child povery by 2010 has been confirmed as bogus. Neither the will nor the cash is available. LABOUR IN ACTION The government is insisting that anyone who gets a British passport must be able to speak English. But it has already blown over £1,000,000 of taxpayers' money on translators for passport applicants who can't speak English.

February 2008 OUR MONEY 20% of all Council Tax is being used to fund gold-plated, final-salary pensions for council staff, who can retire as young as 55. LABOUR IN ACTION Labour's 24-hour drinking culture is responsible for 180,000 more crimes since November 2005. CRIMINAL NEGLIGENCE The government has been stealing from hundred of thousands of households knowingly and deliberately for years. The Blair regime discovered in 2005 that thousands of houses had been placed in the wrong Council Tax band. Instead correcting the errors, the government chose to cover up an embarrassing blunder – which has now been exposed.    Up to 400,000 houses are involved in mistakes going back to 1993, which is when Council Tax was introduced. The taxpayer will now have to stump up rebates for overpayment running into tens of millions of pounds. STEALTH TAXES People buying houses have had to put £31.5 billion into Gordon Brown's coffers since Labour took power. He achieved this shameful grab by failing to increase the threshold for the tax in line with rising house prices. YET MORE SPIN Labour's claim to have ended youth employment has been exposed as just spin. The government's own figures show that 1.24 million (one-sixth) of the nation's young people are not in work or education, and that's an increase of 15% since 1997. LABOUR IN ACTION The government has had to drop its policy of equality in the crimes counted towards its arbitrary targets. Someone has realized that the police are concentrating on littering and kids chalking hopscotch grids on the pavement as they count the same as armed robbery & murder but don't involve much effort.    Some gullible people expect this to mean that the police will now be obliged to go after real criminals but more seasoned travellers in the New Labour world know that their senior officers will just find a new way of giving us purely cosmetic policing. CRIMINAL NEGLIGENCE When Chancellor, Gordon Brown made it his personal policy to deprive the Armed Services of the money which they need for proper equipment. And the Ministry of Defeence under Labour is staffed by people who aren't up to the job. As a result, the Oxford coroner is ruling that troops sent ill-equipped to Afghanistan and Iraq were "unlawfully killed" because of this government's negligence. MORE MONEY WASTED The government is wasting £130 million per year by failing to use or rent out the empty office buildings and official residences owned by various government departments. Some 78 acres of floor space are allowed to lie vacant in prime areas of London and elsewhere while the taxpayer continues to pay for leases and maintenance. DUMBING FURTHER DOWN Children will be able to get a foreign language GCSE without being able to write or speak the language if the government adopts the latest bright idea from its advisors. Written exam papers have already been abolished in favour of multiple-choice papers with tick-boxes. Oral exams could go next because they are "too stressful" for pupils. JUST PLAIN USELESS The government, which has a record of getting troops killed by sending them into battle without proper equipment, is sending the last of the army's reserves to newly independent Kosovo. If there is an emergency elsewhere, the MoD will have no reinforcements left to send to the trouble spot. The decision has been called 'unsustainable' and 'demented'. YET MORE SPIN Labour's latest Big Idea for messing education around lasted just 10 minutes before htting the buffers. Culture Sec. Andy Burnham announced on Radio 4's Today that every British schoolkid would have to endure 5 hours of culture per week. But by 8:20, Mr. Humphries had forced him to admit that it's not a guarantee, only an 'aspiration'. Especially if the government hopes to fund all this culture on £15 per pupil per year. YET MORE LIES The government would like us to believe that half of all migrants come from the EU and they have no control over them. But Imigration Minister Liam Byrne has been caught out in a whopper. In fact, two-thirds of all migrants come from non-EU countries and he does have the power to limit their flood with visa and work-permit restrictions. STEALTH TAXATION The government is abandoning its plans to build more roads in favour of 'active traffice management' schemes. Which comes down to installing more speed cameras and sending out more speeding tickets to motorist who ignore local speed limit changes. LABOUR'S SPY FORCE The government's latest crime-fighting BIG IDEA is to turn Neighbourhood Watch groups into its own version of the Stasi, which will be tasked with checking up on tax discs on neighbours' cars and rubbish put out on the wrong day as well as watching yobs and the homes of drug dealers. ANOTHER LAZY INCOMPETENT The Electoral Commission has let Scottish Labour leader Wendy Alexander off charges of accepting illegal donations to her leadership campaign because she's only a bit dodgy and incompetent, not totally corrupt. MORE MONEY WASTED The government has let convicts taking university courses in prisons claim millions of pounds in grants and student loans. JUST PLAIN CROOKED The Queen made a deal with the government under which she surrendered income in exchange for a guarantee that taxpayers' cash would be forthcoming for the upkeep of royal palaces. But this government is depriving Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, Frogmore in the castle's grounds and others of money for essential repairs. No surprise, the cash is being blown on the 2012 Olympics. JUST PLAIN CROOKED The Labour government has stolen £4 billion from national lottery funds since 1998. This money was supposed to be additional to Treasury funding for health and education projects. Gordon Brown has, dishonestly, interpreted that as instead of. GOLDEN RULE? In an uncharacteristic burst of honesty, the Office for National Statistics has insisted on adding the Northern Rock's liabilities to the National Debt, which means the Gordon Brown's much fractured rule about public debt not exceeding 40% of GDP has been broken officially. But no harm done, as the rule has been lying in ruins for years, thanks to PPI and Railtrack liabilities, to name but two, but lying Brown hasn't admitted it before. LABOUR IN ACTION Gordon Brown has handed the job of looking at MPs' perks & expenses to the Members Estimates Committee, which is packed with people who have a record for obstructing attempts to put details of MPs' expenses into the public domain and/or a history of charges of sleaze and abuse of expenses. PLASTIC POLICEMEN HM Inspector of Constabular, Sir Ronny Flanagan, has investigated the state of policing under Labour and found that 3,000,000 to 6,000,000 hours of police time are wasted every year on Labour's pointless bureaucracy, which is the equivalent of taking 1,500 to 3,000 coppers off the front line. And at the senior management level, the police are so scared of missing government targets and getting into trouble that senior coppers actively foster a culture which rules out showing initiative and taking risks.    Labour's constant promises of reform and red-tape cutting have been just spin. Government targets make the police concentrate on easy meat; minor criminals and motorists; and they just won't engage major criminals. LABOUR IN ACTION The new Housing Minister, Caroline Flint, wants councils to evict tenants who are unemployed and won't get a job. But councils have a legal duty to house homeless families, so the evicted workless will just end up in a different council house. From which they will be liable for eviction again. It's just circular bureaucracy and jobs for life for the council staff handling evictions and rehousing, and yet another new Labour way to waste taxpayers' cash. MORE MONEY WASTED Gordon Brown introduced his flagship tax credit scheme in 2003. £6 billion was overpaid in the first 3 years of the scheme. £2 billion was recovered, £700 million was written off. Of the remaining £3.3 billion, £1.6 billion is deemed unrecoverable. An investigation by the Commons Public Accounts Committee has found that HMRC is failing to make the system work and repair Brown's blunders. LABOUR IN ACTION Convicts are to be locked up in their cells for the weekend from Friday afternoon (instead of the evening) to cut prison staffing costs. But the inmates will still be paid for the work they would have done during the afternoon if they hadn't been locked in their cells. MORE MONEY WASTED The government is chasing the Moslem vote by awarding extra allowances to the husbands of multiple wives. Polygamy is illegal in this country, but anyone who marries half a dozen women in a country which permits it can bring them here and collect extra income support spousal allowances for the upkeep of their extra wives, not to mention extra helpings of housing benefit, Council Tax benefit, etc.    The government reached this decision in December 2007 but didn't announce it, hoping that no one would notice. YET MORE LIES The Children's Minister, Kevin Brennan, has denied that the government offered cash bonuses to councils for meeting arbitrary adoption targets and encouraged social workers to kidnap 'cute' babies from vulnerable mothers with the assistance of the family courts. So it must be true. SOFT ON CRIME The government is working up the nerve to abolish prison sentences of less than one year to ease prison overcrowding. Burglars, muggers and other violent criminals will get places on Alternative To Custody projects. They will build bird boxes and other worthy items during the day, and they will be left in the community to continue their criminal career in their spare time.

January 2008 MORE MONEY WASTED EU rules let Poles working in Britain claim child benefit for families living in Poland. So that's £22 million down the drain every year. Plus £30 million more for families living elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Not to mention the undisclosed millions paid out in tax credits. YET MORE LIES The Health Minister Lord Darzi has announced that Labour's multiple manifesto pledge to end mixed-sex wards in NHS hospitals is "not achievable because medicine has moved on".    Translation: "Under Labour, hospital patients are just pieces of meat and target fodder, and their wishes are irrelevant." PLAIN USELESS Gordon Brown's financial regulation system has been condemned as useless by the Treasury Select Committee. The government, the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority were all guilty of 'systematic failure of duty' over the Northern Rock shambles. Darling and Brown dithered until all confidence in Northern Rock had gone, the Bank failed to spot a crisis brewing and the FSA failed to spot the bank's reckless business methods. ANOTHER DIRTY DEAL Gordon Brown has bought off his back-benchers by giving them 1.9%, like the police, but letting them claim on their expenses without producing receipts, up to £43,000 in items costing £250 or less, and giving them an extra £10,000 to pay to members of their families pretending to be office staff. THE BITER BIT? Part of the bonus-winning argument for not paying the police their full 2.5% (the guy who came up with this scam got a £10K bonus) is that there are plenty of people eager to join the police force so the police don't have to be paid properly. But as that same argument applies to MPs, maybe they should get no pay rise at all until the demand for this job slackens. EDUCATION, SCHMEDUCATION Brown crony Eddie Balls, now posing as the Education Minister, has declared that schools will be required to teach their pupils how to cook. But he failed to mention where all the money needed to build kitchens in the schools will come from. Or which other subjects will be dropped from the curriculum to make way for cookery classes. CASINO SPIN There was a big fanfare when Brown cancelled Blair's super casino. But now that the dust has settled, Gordon is eager to go ahead with building the 16 other casinos in the plan. MORE MONEY WASTED The Chancellor, a.k.a. Him With the Eyebrows, has come up with a solution to the government's Northern Rock pickle. Everyone in the country has to give £2,000 to Richard Branston, the prime minister's newest pal. PLAIN USELESS The Ministry of Defence has had 3 laptops, which containing personal details of thousands of (potential) recruits, stolen from cars since 2005, but nothing has been done about letting people take these unencrypted files out of MoD premises.     UPDATE The MoD has admitted that a further 69 laptops and 7 PCs have been stolen from its offices over the last year, proving that its security stinks, and the ministry lacks the technology to encrypt data, one of the officials has further admitted. ANOTHER SWINDLE The Big Lottery Fund, which is supposed to distribute money to good causes, has given £250,000 to Stockport Council (Trivial Democrat run) for a project to 'improve the way staff manage moods'. £883 million has gone to other councils for similar abuses of the system. EXTORTION The government's policy of pricing poor people off the railways, as an alternative to building more track and providing more trains, has made our train fares the highest in Europe. LOR 'N' DISORDER Police officers solve an average of 10 crimes each per year, and each one solved costs the taxpayer £10,000! LOR 'N' DISORDER Home Sec. Jacqui Smith reckons she doesn't feel safe going out at night in London, even with a posse of police minders, after 10 years of Labour's failures on crime. So what hope do the rest of us have? YET MORE LIES The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee has concluded that the Lisbon Treaty, in their area of expertise, is the same as the rejected EU constitution, and government ministers are lying when they say it's completely different. YET MORE SPIN Gordon Brown's plan for ending Labour's "nanny state culture" and disabling the elf 'n' safety nazis is to create yet another quango and give more jobs to more of Labour's mates. So don't expect anything to happen in this decade. BLACK HOLE £700 million of lottery cash, which should have been repaid after the Olympic Games are over, will now disappear into this black hole as the land which will be sold off after the Games has been overvalued by £1 billion. U-TURN The government has surrendered £1 billion of Britain's EU rebate while getting nothing in return. It had been agreed that the rebate would be dropped only if the Common Agricultural Police was reformed, but Gordon Brown has abandoned that condition. USELESSNESS CONFIRMED Gordon Brown has asked for his Welsh/DWP Minister Peter Hain to be excused for failing to declare more than £100,000 in donations to his failed labour deputy leadership campaign. Hain isn't corrupt, Brown insisted, he's just incompetent.     UPDATE Brown's charge of incompetence against Hain has been backed up by the National Audit Office. As Work & Pensions Sec., Hain has failed to do anything about the £2.5 billion lost through benefit fraud and bungling by the DWP staff. YET MORE SPIN Gordon Brown's promise of a "major new crime crackdown" is jsut a recycle of the same thing promised by Tony Blair, Charles Clarke & Jacqui Smith, who all grabbed a headline and moved on without actually doing anything. SOFT ON CRIME The government is going soft on dangerous drivers. The latest sentencing recommendations will ensure that killing someone with a motor vehicle will normally result in 'community punishment' rather than gaol, even if the driver is totally unqualified and uninsured. U-TURN Labour promised prison staff the right to strike in the 1997 election manifesto and reversed the Tory ban on strikes in office. 11 years on, Justice Sec. Jack Straw now wants a ban on strikes in prison to stop prison staff protesting against a pay swindle of the sort inflicted on the police force. U-TURN Gordon Brown, who says he's in favour of lifetime learning, wants to abolish the grant scheme for mature students, which lets them retrain for the demands of the job market in later life. YET MORE SPIN All 1,500 hospitals in England were supposed to get a 'deep clean' by March. But only 3% (or 30%, Labour won't say which) have been done since last September.  • The medical profession has confirmed that this "gimmick" will have no effect on superbug infections and it's a waste of money. MORE SPIN The government decided in December 2007 to stop deporting bogus students who overstay their visa, a leaked memo from the Border & Immigration Agency has informed us. So Gordon Brown's claim to be running a 'robust' immigration system is just spin. MORE MONEY WASTED The government has admitted wasting £2 billion on abandoned computer projects since 2000. This is an "above the surface figure", however, for a vast Labour iceberg. No figures have been released for the cost of fixing blunders in computers systems which have not yet been abandoned, and the collateral costs to the taxpayer arising from botched computer schemes, e.g. the massive fine imposed by the EU for DEFRA's failure to pass on EU subsidy payments to farmers. U-TURN Six months after droping broad hints about putting an end to New Labour's 24-hour drinking culture, Gordon Brown has gone soft on changing the licensing laws despite clear evidence that the Blair changes are encouraging binge drinking and public disorder. NEW DEAL, WORSE DEAL Councils will be sending out vehicle assessors with tape measures to raise more money from people who dare to park a car outside their own house. This stealth tax will rise by 50% for vehicles of length 12' 10" to 14' 7" and double for vehicles longer than 14' 7". CROSSED WIRES Brown crony Eddy Balls is launching a literacy drive at a time when public libraries are being closed at a rate of over one per week because government interference is forcing councils to spend the money elsewhere. Parents will be required to read to their children for at least 10 minutes per day and cynics are expecting local councils to be obliged to send round inspectors with books of penalty tickets to make sure that the literary obligation is observed. NEW DEAL, WORSE DEAL Gordon Brown is rewriting the NHS Covenant. Only fit and healthy people will be allowed to enjoy the full range of services. The obese and smokers will still have to pay their full contributions to the NHS but they will be told to go away until they are slimmer and/or they have been nicotine-free for 3 months.