Someone tell Brown that he is Prime Minister

One thing that Woody is finding increasingly enervating is Brown's habit of talking as if he is not in control of government policy, but rather as if he is leader of the Opposition, or even worse, some grubby lobbyist. Take this for example:

What I want to see is anybody who is using a knife goes to prison,'' Brown said during his monthly press conference today. (Bloomberg, my bold.)

It's as if Richard Branson announced "What I want to see is that all Virgin planes carry the Virgin logo".

Well you're the boss, make it happen. That's the point of being Prime Minister.

He just wants to 'look tough' but avoid taking any decisions that might end up back-firing on him. Totally pathetic.

Along with this, he spends most of his time and energy hectoring other people to change their behaviour.

This is wholly unacceptable, Mugabe must not be allowed the steal the election which is now less than two weeks away, Brown said.

Ok what's happening in Zimbabwe is terrible. But this is just hot air isn't it? There is zero chance that Mugabe will pay any attention whatsoever to what Brown says. So how about actually doing something in the control of the British government instead?

Or how about this? Telling British car producers what they should be making? What a total and utter waste of time.

What this reveals is that Brown is psychologically unfit to lead a government. He has the mindset of an oppositionalist - someone comfortable pressing for change, but not responsible for delivering it. Woody has been here before in another guise.

He should never have been allowed to reach high office.

Brown calls on self to take tough action on knife crime

Today Prime Minister Gordon Brown took the unprecedented step of calling upon himself to “stop dithering and finally do something about the epidemic of knife crime in this country.”

Mr Brown made the interjection at a press conference called after Jermayne Phillips became the 42^nd teenager to be stabbed to death in London this year. Mr Phillips, 17, of Tottenham, was stabbed repeatedly in the teeth while travelling on the 134 bus.

Responding to himself, Mr Brown pledged to “do his utmost to take knives off our streets and put them back in kitchens.” He promised to set up a Stop Stabbing Taskforce to spearhead the new campaign. However, he said that its success would depend on whether he could secure support from himself to make it happen. He added that “the ball was now firmly in his own court.”

Mr Brown was unavailable to comment.

Would the real coward please stand up?

Benazhir Bhutto, the supposed saviour of democracy in Pakistan, has been assassinated. This has prompted Gordon Brown, our self-appointed expert on courage, to describe the perpetrators as "cowards [who are] afraid of democracy".

It strikes Woody that this is an excellent example of what psychologists call projection - casting your own obvious failings onto others in an attempt to distance yourself from them.


Just in case anyone forgot, Brown the Clown:

• Bottled out of standing against Smith for the party leadership in 1992
• Bottled out of standing against Blair for the party leadership in 1994
• Did everything he could to ensure that he was handed the party leadership without any opposition or general election
• Bottled out of a general election in November 2007, when he realised he might lose

So who's really the coward who's afraid of democracy?

Woody apologises for falling off a cliff in his blogging earlier this month. He hopes to be more consistent in future.

Ignorance should be no excuse

Another week, another scandal.

The Labour Party have been caught breaking a 2000 law they themselves introduced by taking money from David Abrahams when he was known to be avoiding public disclosure by channelling his donations through his employees.

According to the 2000 Act, anyone who did anything which could have made it easier for the secret donations to be made, has committed an offence. The relevant section is below.

Offences concerned with evasion of restrictions on donations

(1) A person commits an offence if he—

(a) knowingly enters into, or

(b) knowingly does any act in furtherance of,

any arrangement which facilitates or is likely to facilitate, whether by means of any concealment or disguise or otherwise, the making of donations to a registered party by any person or body other than a permissible donor.

This is why all the key players are making ignorance the central plank of their defence. Because if they were in anyway knowingly involved in the arrangements, they would have committed an offence.

In Brown's case, he claims:

"I had no knowledge until Saturday night, either of the donations or of the practice which had grown up where they were improperly declared to the Electoral Commission... The money was not lawfully declared."

Woody says: If that's true you should be ashamed, because you had no oversight over the fundraising practices of your own party. And if it's false you should be even more ashamed because you have brazenly lied and cooperated in breaking the law.

In Harman's case, that she did not know that the money came from Abrahams rather than from Kidd.

Woody says: I refer the right dishonourable lady to the answer I gave above.

In the case of Abrahams himself he claims:

"Until the weekend I didn't know it was illegal for a person who hadn't personally donated to have to declare his hand to the Electoral Commission."

Woody says: And I didn't know I couldn't w**k on the bus. You broke the law, and you should face the consequences.

And in any case, the law is totally flawed - ignorance should be no defence at all.

If ignorance is a permissible defence then all Brown and Harman would have to do (and in practice exactly what they seem to have done) is to say to their funding teams "Just get the money in, I don't care how you do it, I just don't want to be told about it or involved in any way."

And then the team would have carte blanche to break the law, with Brown / Harman knowing full well that in the unlikely event that it comes to light they would be able to claim ignorance.

Such a law simply encourages politicians to deliberately lose sight of fundraising, when in fact they should be held responsible for it.

The whole thing stinks to high heaven.

Why is Brown apologising?

Woody is confused.

Brown yesterday apologised for the loss of two discs holding personal data on 25 million children. But why?

If it's a genuine apology then that means he is admitting he is responsible for the breach - in which case surely his position as PM is untenable.

He can't simply be apologising 'on behalf' of HMRC, because HMRC have already apologised for it. They are not some wayward child that Brown has to apologise 'on behalf of'.

On the other hand if it's not a genuine apology then he's just being insincere isn't he? And doesn't that just add insult to the injury already caused?

It seems that Labour think that an apology is just what you do when things are so bad you can't spin your way out of it.

How Discgate has let Blair and Smith off the hook

Here are two people who will be breathing easier today.


It's a fact of life that the media only ever have room for one big scandal. There can only be one 'top story' which obsesses them, and brings out their periodic ability to ferret out interesting and embarassing truths.

But one unfortunate side-effect of this is that when there are several big stories at the same, some people get off too lightly.

It seems that the current massive 'Discgate' scandal, which looks set to rumble on for a while, has taken the pressure of two people who were in a quite a pickle before all this kicked off.

Ian Blair. Who presided over a series of failures in basic policing which led to the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. He then tried to deliberately obstruct the investigation of the IPCC. He has just escaped a vote of no confidence by the Met.

That's like Genghis Khan getting the thumbs-up from a band of marauding Mongols. Nevertheless it looks like he's survived.

Jacqui Smith. Whose Department allowed huge numbers of illegal immigrants to work in government security posts and arguably misled Parliament about it.

No one's talking about that any more. Lucky her.

The Opposition would do well not to forget this. Because together it starts to make a compelling case for an arrogant and incompetent government who have let standards slip and failed to fulfil basic governmental responsibilities.

Let's hope McLaren's sacking doesn't push Darling and Brown off the front pages for too long...

The Nobody PM

It's hard to believe now that some people held out hope that this man would be a great Prime Minister.

After 6 months in the job he's shown that his entire political philosophy can be summarised as follows.

He's Not Tony Blair.
He's Not a Conservative.
He's Not a Socialist.
He's Not Great Mates with Bush.
He's Not Anti-American.
Etc.

The fact is, he's just a nobody who wants power for the sake of power.

When Miliband made that gaffe on Question Time, it seems he pretty much hit the nail on the head.

Blair was a huge disappointment but even he realised that ultimately any worthwhile political career must amount to something positive and substantive.

Brown doesn't even seem to care.

Now there's an airport I'd like to visit

Vice-Fuhrer Gordon Brown today announced a number of spurious measures to change the design of public buildings to make them 'safe' from terrorists.















Shame no one can make the public safe from him. The beeb have helpfully provided a mock-up of how public buildings like airports and train stations will look in our brave, new, ultra-secure world. Imagine Heathrow - but with entrances and exits barricaded, and external security checks before you enter a building made of non-fragmenting material (presumably diamond).

Does he really expect anyone to be impressed by this? I guess the clever boys in Number 10 thought - "It works for Number 10, so it should work everywhere".

In that case we should feel very safe indeed.