Coming close to the end of the Labour conference I thought I should reflect, in my own partisan way, the stomach churning spectacle of the past few days. The announcements are still coming thick and fast and we may yet get ‘the big one’ as conference closes. Today Jack Straw has announced new laws designed to offer more legal protection to so called ‘have a go heroes.’ Such changes were rejected by the government in 2004. The last review of the self-defence laws, launched in 2004 following pressure from, (surprise, surprise), the Conservatives, led Tony Blair to rule out any changes, describing then existing legislation as "sound". Just one of many policy initiatives exorcised from the 2003-2005 Michael Howard era joining MRSA deep cleaning, matron in charge and chucking out migrants dealing weed.
We also had ‘British Jobs For British Workers’ a proposition so ghastly, and one which I had hoped had been resigned to the dustbin of British politics or at least the fringe parties but appears to be taking centre stage. For a government to encourage foreign workers into our job market only to parrot the ‘takin’ our jobs’ mentality of the grumbling working class and the Daily Mail/Paul Dacre thought bubble is shocking. Yet still the seals in the conference hall whacked their flippers together in unifying appreciation of it’s bigoted vote winning brilliance. Elsewhere ‘Magpie Brown’ has been creaming off the populist tidbits from the 2005 Tory manifesto (copyright D. Cameron of Witney, Oxon) and the conference hall lapped it up, though whether or not they knew what they were lapping up is another question. As long as it was wrapped up in red, anything was digestable (even if you pounded the streets two years ago opposing the very same policies the dear leader was now proposing)
We also had an extra £2bn for the NHS in England (hooray!) which comes on the heels of the £2bn cut at the last budget (huh?)
And now the speech which made Neil Kinnock cry for the first time since Joe Biden plagiarised him has itself been plagiarised! Or, at the very least, his sermon from the heart has the finger prints of Bob Shrum, as the Times noted;
‘It suggests that Mr Brown’s recent attempts to appeal as a prime minister who rejects spin have been crafted, at least in part, by one of America’s highest-paid political advertising and speech consultants. ‘
In short; Talk about you, your mum, dad, childhood, wife, lessons learnt from family mum, dad, childhood and wife, wheel on a token hero of the day (John Smeaton) chuck in some God, not too much, but enough . Make sure you clarify each proposition with ‘let us be clear’ (used by Ted Kennedy in every speech Bob Shrum has written for him). Most of the rest of the speech was mindnumbingly ‘Gordon’ (which was still more entertaining than Millibands speech) and he resorted to plagiarising Michael Howard rather than Shrum.
Chris Grayling, summed it up well. He said: “We all know Gordon Brown’s announcements are reheated, and now his language seems reheated too. This destroys the myth that we are seeing a Prime Minister who has given up spin. Far from being the genuine article, he is just a copycat prime minister rehashing old material from US politicians.”
The question we are are faced with is, is this what we want? Where’s the real Gordon? Who’s writing his speeches, who’s dressing him up? What happened to policy making in the Labour Party? Why is Labour tolerating a neo-Thatcherite? Answers after the election
Let’s see what happens next week
