The people have spoken......the bastards!

The people have spoken, so what are we to make of the mid-terms? In two previous elections the GOP got hammered for making a deficit worse with unaffordable tax cuts, letting Wall Street screw Main Street, two wars, stagnant wages and rising job insecurity. Now there is a jobless ‘recovery’, rising unemployment, even more job insecurity, and still war. So was this a vote for O’s opponents? My take is that it was more a howl of rage. If ‘none of the above’ had been an option, it may have been very attractive to many – I have long believed that people don’t vote governments in; they vote incumbents out.

Back in la-la land, Dave’s defence review beggars belief. The matchless Matt in the DT sums it up.

We will have a carrier with no aircraft for 8 years. When the aircraft arrive they will not be the VSTOL Joint Strike Fighter but the conventional carrier version that needs a longer deck and a stonking great catapult. What we are not told is that carriers also require a mini-fleet of escort ships and supply vessels. Not that this would matter for very long in real hostilities. Dave simultaneously cancelled the updated Nimrod. So HMS Prince of Wales will go to war with no planes, no protective escort, and no airborne early warning radar system. Should last about as long as the previous POW that the Japs made short work of in 1941. The hypersonic anti-ship Sizzler missile might see to that.

Never mind, Johnny Frog will help us out. At this point let me reprise the great pun by Miles Kington. The French Navy decided it needed a stirring battle cry, so they decided on ‘To the water; it is time’ (a l’eau; c’est l’heure). Vive l’entente cordiale.

Excellent news is that the former Minister for Immigration in the Broon tyranny, he who got handbagged by the gorgeous pouting Joanna Lumley, has been unseated and banned from Parliament for 3 years for electoral malpractice – in this case telling the most outrageous porkies against his opponent during the campaign. That’s right; what appears to be normal practice in US elections is actually an offence in the UK. This is the first case of its kind in 99 years, and demonstrates the depths to which political morality sank in the NuLab years.

There should now be a by-election and Labour will lose the seat, unless Mr Speaker, the small but beautifully formed Tory John Bercow so decides (he may delay it until any appeal has been heard or until his Socialist wife, who is much bigger than him, tells him what to do).

That last sentence was intended to be satirical. Scarcely had I written it when the DT announces that the by-election has been postponed by Mr Speaker after the intervention of his wife. Beyond satire!

As with so many things debauched by Blair, the voting system, in the words of the Judge on the enquiry into hanky-panky at elections in Birmingham, ‘would disgrace a banana republic’. It was all fitted up quite simply. In former times, you could only get a postal vote for good reason e.g you were in hospital or incapacitated. Very few were handed out – maybe a couple of hundred in a constituency of 80,000. Under Blair, postal votes were handed out to all and sundry. Result: party apparatchiks would go around collecting up as many as possible and – bingo – our man elected! The official responsible in Birmingham left the £130,000+ a year job under a cloud shortly afterwards and immediately got another public service job at £140,000+ a year. As Immigration commissar. You couldn’t make it up!

More mendacity over Dave’s ‘cuts’. Public expenditure will actually increase during the Brokeback Coalition’s 5-year Plan. ‘More’ is the new ‘less’.

Meanwhile, a member of the nomenklatura of UNITE, the portmanteau of trade unions, declares that ‘upwards of 1 million’ hard-working, deserving, devoted public servants will be thrown on the scrapheap. ‘Upwards’, comrades, means ‘more than’, not quite what you meant to say, I fancy. The Plan predicates a reduction of 800,000 over 5 years.

During that time a large number will be accounted for by natural wastage. There is the related prospect of savings through a recruitment moratorium. Many will take early retirement at age 50 (public service pensions provide for the full pension to be paid on a 40/80 basis so that once you have done 40 years you get a 50% index-linked pension, but there can be 10 added years meaning that you can retire on full pension at age 50 on completion of only 30 years, plus a lump sum). Still with me? Do try to keep up.

Others will take voluntary redundancy. Many staff in any event will be on fixed term contracts. Others will be temporary staff. Compulsory redundancy will certainly be nowhere near the figures quoted by the comrades. But I remember years ago when the Civil Service had to be slashed, a Government Department fired all its temps at the end of the financial year so that the reduction showed up in the statistics. Then they took them all back on again. Moral: never mind about job reductions. Let’s see establishment reductions, so that there is no headcount-creep later.

Scrapheap, anybody? The big loser, of course, will be UNITE as it watches whole swathes of its membership evaporate.

‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’. Er.......not quite. Whilst things are falling apart domestically, the ever-generous British taxpayer will be consoled by the thought that that the overseas aid budget, which was the fastest growing budget under the Blair/Broon reign of terror (by a factor of nearly 3-times the 1997 figure), is set to increase by a whopping 37%. Triples all round, then, in Kampala, Addis Ababa and other centres of political rectitude. And now we have revelations that Dave has a raft of ‘vanity’ staff, including his personal photographer, video cameraman, wife’s style advisor (a what?) and other drones on the public payroll; rather insensitive in these hard times, n’est pas?