The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

Link: Gordon Brown’s Black Wednesday | Anatole Kaletsky – Times Online.

Just for once, the most trenchant political commentary of the day is not in the blogosphere. Anatole Kaletsky in The Times – for so long a propaganda organ for New Labour at the behest of its owner, the Dirty Digger – ripped Gordon Brown to shreds yesterday in the linked article.

Mrs Paine thinks this will all go over the voters’ heads, but as Kaletsky says;

We all know about using our Mastercard to pay off the Visa debt.

Read the whole thing for a masterful summary of the Northern Rock debacle. In the meantime, here’s a sample;

Mr Brown handed over the keys to the Treasury to Sir Richard Branson
and Goldman Sachs, destroying in the process the entire economic and
political framework that he created as Chancellor in 1997. With
Britain’s foreign policy still firmly in the hands of the White House
and European policy managed from Brussels, it is hard to see why Mr
Brown bothers to turn up to work.

Heady stuff. Or consider this;

…he has chosen the worst of all possible worlds, described by
Vince Cable, of the Liberal Democrats, with his customary precision as
“nationalisation of risks and losses, combined with privatisation of
gains”. In effect, Mr Brown is offering £55 billion of public money to
Sir Richard Branson and other shareholders in Northern Rock, whether
present or future, with which to speculate on the housing market and
the stock market. If these speculations work out, these private
individuals will pocket 90 per cent or more of the profits. If the
speculations fail (which is much more likely) taxpayers will bear the
entire loss. Looting of public wealth on this scale has not been seen
in Britain since the South Sea Bubble.

"Looting of public wealth" is a phrase you are more likely to read at blogs like Burning our Money or the Devil’s Kitchen. Not that I dispute its use. Not at all. It is just surprising to read it in the mainstream media which has been so inadequate to date in dealing with the New Labour spin machine. This may finally signal the beginning of the end for the corrupt and (self-confessedly) incompetent bunch that currently rules us.