Back in the days when I was a callow undergraduate, many of my close friends were devout Christians, as indeed were many people on campus. There were days when I could go from sunrise to its set without ever encountering a pair of wrists naked of the near-ubiquitous What Would Jesus Do? bracelet.

WWJD? was supposed to remind His followers that they should strive to imitate Christ in all their words and actions. Although I never sported the WWJD? jewellery, I was always impressed by its effectiveness and simplicity. There was no uniform consensus about what, specifically, Jesus might do, but at least you could be sure that none of these WWJD? subscribers believed stealing your stuff, plagiarising your work, or snaffling your boyfriend was Something Jesus Would Do. That made campus culture rather pleasant. And of course the WWJD? bracelet was a perfect tool for social accountability, as none of its wearers ever wanted to do things that would cause non-believers to point sardonically at the bracelet with cocked, disbelieving eyebrow.

This came to mind today while I was reading Gordon Brown’s piece on CiF, entitled ‘Markets need morals.’ Why? Because it seemed to me as if he had publicly donned a What Would Adam Smith Do? bracelet. Observe:

I have long been fascinated by Adam Smith, who came from my home town of Kirkcaldy, precisely because he recognised that the invisible hand of the market had to be accompanied by the helping hand of society. He argued that the flourishing of moral sentiments comes before – and is the foundation of – the wealth of nations. In other words, markets need morals.

Somewhere along the line, Gordon Brown realised that Adam Smith holds the same position in the minds of sensible economists as Jesus holds in the minds of campus Christians. When in doubt, the sensible economist turns to his bible to discover What Would Adam Smith Do? And if the answer may not be found therein, the economist will use his knowledge and understanding of Adam Smith to speculate on what Adam Smith might have done. Like Jesus, Adam Smith operated according to a set of general principles from which we may derive his likely conclusions about modern questions of economics.

So Gordon Brown has looked at the condition of Britain today and consulted his WWASD? jewellery. And he has determined that the foundation of wealth is the moral character of the wealth-creating society.

But is he right? Or has he confused Hume’s is and ought?

I am not an expert on the WWASD? question, but I think Smith was simply stating an is. The operation of the market and economy is simply a reflection of the moral values of the society. If a society views freedom, free will, and mutual self-interest as moral goods, its economic exchanges will tend to be free, voluntary, and mutually beneficial, because the moral code to which the people adhere will inform how and why they make economic exchanges. If a society views security, equality, and the common good as moral imperatives, its economic exchanges will reflect those principles instead. The state, which like it or not has the power to regulate economic exchange, also reflects the moral values of its people, and will regulate economic exchange so that it conforms to the prevailing moral character.

Gordon Brown has misread this idea as an ought: economic exchanges ought to conform to morality. Our moral code demands good outcomes for all, so our market must be designed to produce good outcomes for all. But Gordon Brown has gotten his cart and horse mixed up. The fact of the matter is, the condition of our ‘market’ does currently reflect our moral character.

What does our society consider moral goods these days? Allow me to make a list.

• freedom
• security
• free will
• regulation
• self-interest
• the common good
• hard work
• work-life balance
• purchasing power
• anti-consumerism
• a minimum standard of wealth for all
• a maximum standard of wealth for all

If this seems a rather schizophrenic and internally contradictory list to you, as it does to me, then it should come as no surprise that, as Adam Smith’s is predicts, our economic conditions are equally schizophrenic and internally contradictory. Particularly difficult to reconcile are the ideas that we want to generate enough wealth for all to have a decent standard of living, but we encourage people to purchase less, consume less, work less, invest less, and spend less. On the one hand, material wealth is vital because we consider those with little of it poor, and poverty is a moral evil. On the other hand, material wealth is wicked because we consider those who pursue it greedy and destructive, and greed and destruction are moral evils.

‘Give the poor purchasing power!’ we cry. ‘They are deprived of their material needs!’

‘We are purchasing too much and becoming soullessly materialistic!’ we cry. ‘We do not need stuff!’

And so we end up with a moral culture that sets a minimum level of wealth below which there is poverty (a moral evil) and a maximum level of wealth above which there is greed and consumerism (moral evils). Then we demand of the ‘market’ that it confine itself to the space in between.

Economic exchange proceeds accordingly. Some economic actors direct all of their considerable effort toward generating enough wealth to avoid the lower limit. Unfortunately, this drives certain sectors above the upper limit, so we require other economic actors to direct their resources toward driving wealth-generation down again. Back and forth, back and forth, boom and bust, extreme wealth and extreme poverty, like a giant economic pushme-pullyou.

And Gordon Brown says ‘markets need morals.’

Gordon, the market has morals. It has our morals, and it reflects them accordingly. And your ‘enabling state’ reflects them too: it encourages business, it restricts business; it removes wealth, it grants wealth; it helps individuals at the expense of the community, it helps the community at the expense of individuals; it seeks wealth, it condemns wealth generation.

And you complain that the results are imperfect? The results are a perfect reflection of our moral values.

So to return to the question – What Would Adam Smith Do? – I doubt he would argue that we should change effects to fit causes. If he could see the flawed reflections of our moral code, he would advise us to search out the flaws in our moral code.

WWASD? He would say to us, ‘Stop putting garbage in, and you’ll stop getting garbage out.’

The Prime Minister’s speech at the RSA on Tuesday deserves a good kick up the metaphorical backside, for it is an excellent example of how the language of liberty and change has been appropriated to describe actions which are entirely contrary to the principles of liberty, self-government, and human rights – and, of course, change.

Many people have assured me that, without government, there are no rights (‘Look at Somalia!’), and to a certain practical extent, I believe this to be true. If one’s right to life can be trampled upon by someone else with impunity, that right is de facto non-existent. Some government or authority is necessary to guarantee that others cannot infringe my rights – what is known as the rule of law. But that right is equally non-existent if the government itself can trample upon it with impunity, which is why I advocate a limited government without the power to infringe rights. There is naturally room for argument about what system of government best enables that ideal, and about the nature of its limitations and how they are guaranteed. But the ideal itself is sound.

It goes without saying, then, that rights supplied by the government, either through provision or financing, are not what I consider to be ‘rights’ at all, but entitlements; and that a government in the business of providing entitlements is ipso facto approaching the opposite end of the scale from my limited-government ideal, whatever else its virtues may be.

Notwithstanding the question of rights versus entitlements, another advantage of limited government is its inability to change itself. Not only does this confer stability, which is certainly an important consideration, it means that the government has not the power to grant itself more power. However small a remit the government might start out with, if it has the wherewithal to arrogate more and more aspects of public (and private) life to itself, it will not stay a limited government for long. So in addition to safeguarding the rights of the people, a truly ‘limited’ government must not contain within itself an easy mechanism for expansive self-alteration.

Only under the auspices of a government weak in all aspects except the rule of law can a people be both in word and in practice free. That, my friends, is liberty.

Gordon Brown clearly does not see things my way.

His speech, called ‘Transforming Politics,’ displays a curious mixture of impotence, brazenness, and lies.

Impotence, because he is the Prime Minister, and most out of all other Britons has the power to transform politics – yet he insists that the people in their diffuse millions must do this, people whose jobs, families, and responsibilities lie outside the realm of politics, people whose sole real political power is a single vote, warped and distended and subject to pressures far more numerous and dislocated than an individual’s choice of candidate. Gordon Brown has his hand on the tiller; he gets on with the job at hand; he single-handedly saved the world’s banking system. Why, then, is the hand he wraps round the lever of the nation’s political culture so weak?

If he truly wanted to transform politics, he with his executive orders and compliant cabinet and virtual stranglehold on his parliamentary party could do so. There is nothing to stop him. He claims to know what the people want, and he unquestionably has the power to make it happen – why insist that nebulous public action be a necessary condition?

Politicians, and Gordon Brown is no exception, must find it tremendously hard to imagine what they would want from politicians, were they regular people on the street. They have entered the rabbit hole; they are incapable of stepping outside of their own frame of reference. Ask any man or woman in the grocery store or the bus queue, and they will tell you: politics should be practised by decent people who are not obviously fraudsters, liars, confidence tricksters, or panderers, who realise that their job in a democracy is to represent the will of their constituents and advocate for policies that are beneficial, practical, and above all reasonable.

Ask a politician what sort of person should be practising politics, and who the hell knows what answer you’ll get. It might be the one I mentioned above. It might be ‘whoever knows what’s best.’ The honest answer (which you’ll never get from a politician, obviously) is either ‘me’ or ‘whoever can get the votes.’ This is not unfounded supposition; it is revealed preference.

Brazenness, because he appears to believe that if he repeats well-worn memes often enough, someone, somewhere, might derive meaning from them. How many times have we heard the following:

‘power back to the people’

‘democratically accountable’

‘giving people… rights to control the services they depend upon’

‘change’

‘power redistributed away from the centre’

‘fair access to all’

‘improving public services’

‘lasting peace and shared prosperity’

‘neighbourhoods’

‘diversity’

Brown endlessly repeats the buzzwords and key phrases, empty assurances that nobody disagrees with and which therefore mean nothing. Brown’s key speech about transforming politics is a repetition of all that his Government has been saying for the past decade. And he does not imagine his listeners will pick up on the obvious contradiction: change and transformation are in reality more of the same.

Lies, because he represents himself as a champion of the people against an outdated, unfair, and ossified constitution – which was equally outdated and ossified thirteen years ago when Labour won a landslide of seats under its unfair auspices. If the need for constitutional reform is so obvious now, it was equally obvious then, yet Labour did nothing. If, as Brown says, the choice is between ‘a new politics, where individuals have more say and more control over their lives,’ or ‘a discredited old politics, leaving power concentrated in the hands of the old elites,’ why were the British people not presented with this choice thirteen years ago, when it was no less real and pressing?

Constitutional reform is the last refuge of the desperate. With little prospect of a democratic mandate under the current system, acutely aware of his general unpopularity but clinging on to power with determined and bloody fingertips, the constitutional reformer sets out to circumvent imminent oblivion in the only way left to him: changing the rules in the middle of the game. It isn’t that the rules don’t need changing; it’s that he hadn’t the will to change them when he was winning. Now that he is losing, he suddenly apprehends that the same rules which used to give him unfair advantage will now deliver unto him unfair defeat.

What were once unfair rules must now become fair, before the game is over, while he still has the power to change them. He is a creature of the immediate; he will not bide his time until the next game.

Does Gordon Brown believe we will not notice this? And if we do notice it, does he expect we will trust in his party to deliver the constitutional change that best suits the people rather than what best suits the Labour party? He, with his parliamentary majority, his executive authority, his supine monarch, his cowardly cabinet, his draconian whips, his placemen in the upper house?

And so he promises us change for our own good, change that will empower the people and enhance their liberty, change dressed up in the beautiful language of freedom and democracy, concealing the meretricious reality beneath: that this government has great power, too much power, and cannot be stopped from infringing the people’s rights or changing itself to accrue yet more power. If this were not so, Brown’s constitutional reforms would be a pipe dream. And yet we are supposed to believe that the endpoint of this vast exercise of authority is to reduce that authority.

Forgive me if I’m a bit doubtful.

And yet it’s all so plausible, which is how he gets away with it. What reforms, specifically, is he proposing?

1. A democratically accountable House of Lords.

…a modern democracy cannot tolerate power to initiate and revise legislation being held for ever by those without a mandate from the people.

Quite right. While there are certain advantages to having an upper house that is not susceptible to the whims of the populace, such a chamber is manifestly not representative of the will of the people.

The cynical interpretation: an undemocratic upper house is also not susceptible to the whims of the Commons and acts as a bulwark against hasty, radical change and as a brake on the tremendous power of the Commons. More than in practically every other Western democracy, the majority party in the elected legislature of Britain wields almost unchecked authority. The unelected, (theoretically) non-partisan Lords is one of the few impediments.

But, I hear you say, the upper house in the United States, the Senate, is elected and partisan, and still gets the job done! To which I reply, the lower house in the US, the House of Representatives, has nothing like the power the House of Commons wields. The majority party in the House of Representatives is not the Government, and its leaders constitutionally lack executive authority.

Only when executive authority in Britain is separated from the majority party in the Commons does having an elected House of Lords make sense. While the majority party in the Commons continues to control both the legislature and the executive, making the Lords both partisan and elected will only strengthen that control, not weaken it.

So does Brown propose to reform the Commons in accordance with this prognostication?

No.

2. Increase parliament’s ability to hold the Government to account.

…parties should elect their own members of select committees in a secret ballot; select committee chairs should be elected by a ballot of the whole house; and non-government business should be managed by members of parliament, not the executive.

Quite right. Parliament is in theory sovereign; it should also be so in practice.

But:

…the proper role of parliament is, indeed, to scrutinise the executive and it should be given all the necessary tools to do so.

Parliament should, at this moment, deny Gordon Brown the ability to give them these tools. For tools which can be given can also be taken away. And once it is statutory that Parliament scrutinises the executive at the will of the executive, the legitimacy of that will is forever enshrined in the constitution. When power is granted, it is just as important to examine the implications of the granting as the actual power. This reform serves only to cement further the control of the executive over the operation of the sovereign legislative body.

3. Electoral reform, from FPTP to AV.

The alternative vote system has the advantage of maintaining the benefit of a strong constituency link…

I am sure this is true.

However:

The first past the post system maintains a clear link to a member of parliament’s constituency and it has usually given governments a clear mandate to govern.

If this is true, why change it? We don’t fix what isn’t broken. FPTP maintains the same strong link to the constituency as AV would; in addition, it has the advantage of usually conferring a clear mandate to govern. What does AV offer that overcomes this obvious advantage of FPTP?

…it also offers voters increased choice with the chance to express preferences for as many of the candidates as they wish.

Ah. AV allows a major party candidate to slide into office as the second preference of those who voted first for a smaller third party. The alternative-vote system will clear up that nasty problem of marginal seats while having little negative effect on elections in safe constituencies. To complete our journey through cynicism, all we need ask is: what is our biggest third party, and which major party are its voters more likely to prefer as their second preference?

Hands up all those who voted Lib Dem in 2005 because they hated Blair the war-monger but couldn’t stomach voting Conservative.

4. Transparency in public decisions and documents.

Over and above our commitment to transparency through FOI we are committed to progressively reducing the time taken to release official documents – ensuring the public have access to public papers far quicker than ever before.

Excellent.

I have no problem with this, actually; it’s one of the few pieces of wheat in all of this chaff. But it is only a small step in the right direction; the government of this nation needs to realise that all public business – everything done in the name of the people with the democratic authority of the people as its claim to legitimacy – must be open to the people. All documents should be official, and all documents should be public. All meetings, committees, hearings, inquiries, and the record of their business should be accessible to the electorate. Everything done in the name of the people and by right of their democratic authority belongs to the people.

5. Make public services more responsive to individual users.

Public services will not only be more personal in future but they will be more interactive – with the ability of the citizen enhanced to make their views known directly and influence the way our communities work.

Great.

Just one problem. At the moment, public services are accountable to the government. The government, as properly elected representatives of the people, oversees their operation, officially assesses their quality, and controls their funding. The government is the middleman, the mediator, between the public and the public services. The best way to make the public services directly accountable to the public is to remove the middleman. Will the government now allow the people to directly oversee the operation of public services, to directly assess their quality, and to directly provide and control their funding?

No, because:

…we do not rest our case on the delivery of better services to people merely on aspirations or targets: we are offering personal guarantees to citizens about the rights they can expect and enjoy.

The government will still be the mediator. As mentioned above, whatever it is in the power of government to grant, it is also in the power of government to take away. And so more and more authority gathers at the centre. Rights which are granted by government are not rights at all, but entitlements; and entitlements granted to the people are as far from being ’subject to people’s direct control’ as it is possible to be.

6. Strengthening local government.

Local government should be free to innovate and to be creative in delivering better public services.

Quite right.

But:

…we inherited a situation where local government had been starved of funding and had very little power over decisions taken that affected their communities.

This is an implicit admission that he who controls the funds controls the power; and by starving local government of funds, central government had also starved it of power. Nothing in Gordon Brown’s proposals mentions giving local governments responsibility for raising their own funding. As long as local authorities must rely on the central government to pay for whatever it is they deliver, they will always be at the mercy of central government’s demands, no matter how ‘free to innovate’ they may theoretically be.

In fact, Brown skirts around this issue with admirable vagueness (if vagueness is the sort of thing one admires):

It is true that in the past local government has had too many streams of funding from a multitude of central government sources. Our total place reforms are potentially transformative in the better use of resources: they will allow local government and its partners to reach across all the funding coming into an area and enable better choices to be made at a local level about how this money is spent.

I’m not even sure what he means. What are ‘total place reforms’? How reassuring is that word ‘potentially’? What he appears to be getting at is that although the funding will still come from central governments, it may no longer be hypothecated, so local authorities will have more say in how to spend their hand-outs. I’m at a loss as to why he needs such an elaborate circumlocution to make that point, unless it is his desire to gloss over the fact that central government will still control the extent of local spending.

7. Codify Britain’s unwritten constitution.

…I have asked the Cabinet Secretary to lead work to consolidate the existing unwritten, piecemeal conventions that govern much of the way central government operates under our existing constitution into a single written document.

The various arguments for and against written constitutions are numerous and complex, and it may well serve the British people to have a definitive document; others will know better than I whether this is the case.

In the summer I announced that we would consult on the question of codifying our constitution as part of the consultation exercise on the British Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.

For those of you who have not read the consultation document on the British Bill of Rights and Responsibilities, allow me to draw your attention to some of the key points contained in the Ministry of Justice’s green paper.

First, the government considers that the key constitutional question in need of answering is

of the relationship between the citizen and the state and how this relationship can best be defined to protect fundamental freedoms and foster mutual responsibility as this country is going through profound changes.

The impetus for this kind of constitutional codification is explicitly the presence of change and crisis. Gordon Brown believes that ‘if we are to decide to have a written constitution the time for its completion should be the 800th anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta in Runneymede in 1215.’ That gives us five years, during a time of change and crisis, for formulation, deliberation, debate, revision, judicial scrutiny, and finalisation. Enforcing an arbitrary time limit on a process that requires deep scholarship, consultation, bipartisan agreement, and lengthy deliberation during a time of change and crisis when that process cannot even command the government’s full attention is a recipe for disaster. (And the time limit is essentially arbitrary. There is no pressing need for a codified constitution by 2015. The year just happens to be the anniversary of something vaguely historically relevant on the popular connotations of which Brown would like to capitalise.)

Second, the codified constitution being mooted is not the lofty, concise document the United States enjoys, which merely sets out the fundamental rights of the people and the operation of their government. No, the British version will contain much more:

How individuals should live together, what rights and freedoms we should enjoy in relation to one another and against the state and how they should be balanced by the responsibilities we owe each other are among the most fundamental questions in politics. They are not abstractions, removed from the practical politics of jobs and housing and healthcare and education, because they concern the constitutional arrangements which determine how power is distributed in our country. They determine how every other question in our public life will be answered. They are not just about the historic protections of the individual against the state and balancing liberty and security. They are also about the frustrations that can arise in daily life, especially when using public services, and reflect the key role for town halls in tackling these frustrations by making information easy to access and involving local people in the decisions which affect them. They are about getting support to combat anti-social behaviour and to tackle the discrimination and prejudice many of our people still have to endure. They are about the smoking ban, the hunting ban, and taking action to prevent climate change.

This constitution is to be about everything a Briton encounters in his public life – except, apparently, the structure of his government, which is nowhere mentioned.

Third, this constitution will deliberately not include some of the things we have come to consider fundamental rights. Consider, for instance, this passage:

Additional protections in relation to liberty of the person or fair trials may not be necessary as the belief in their fundamental nature is already so deeply entrenched, culturally and politically, and there is no fundamental threat to them. At this stage, the Government does not propose the inclusion of the principle of habeas corpus or a right to trial by jury in any new Bill of Rights and Responsibilities, but it remains open to all arguments for and against as part of an informed public debate.

The Government does not propose to include habeas corpus, fair trials, and trial by jury in the written constitution as, apparently, there is no threat to these rights and no current need to protect them. You may draw your own conclusions about the wisdom of that plan.

Fourth, the proposed constitution is not intended to have legal effect – that is, the rights or responsibilities codified therein are not intended to be enforceable by an individual in court. It is not intended to have the statutory force of an Act of Parliament. In fact, its purpose would be only this:

A non-statutory declaration could be readily amended and updated over time. Its effect would be intended as primarily political and symbolic rather than legal. The fact that a charter or declaration might not have statutory force or was otherwise not justiciable would not mean that the exercise or the text itself lacked force. It could still carry great legitimacy in the wider sense of that word, by the strength of the consent behind it, and by the way in which it helped to set standards, as yardsticks of the behaviour we expected of others and of ourselves as members of UK society.

In short, Brown’s ‘written constitution’ would be a poorly-drafted, cumbersomely huge, non-traditional, non-justiciable framework setting out the minutiae of Britons’ lives without holding the government to any definitive principles of action or, even, guaranteeing its legal responsibility to protect the rights listed therein, let alone enforce the many entitlements also included.

(There are numerous other problems with this proposed ‘constitution,’ which you may identify by reading it yourself provided you accept the risk to your blood pressure.)

The rest of Brown’s speech is a clever call for his political opponents to agree with him. This, truly, is the language of politics: for if they disagree with him, they would entrench privilege and unfairness at the expense of the people; and if they agree with him, there is no need for them at all.

The not-so-clever part of his peroration is the constant call for change. Change, by definition, would be something different from what we have now. And what we have now, what we have had for thirteen years, is Labour. I have to wonder at Brown’s motivation for reminding us all of that. And for enumerating a deliberate and concentrated program of attacks on the existing checks and balances on the Government’s power that are, at the moment, the only institutions and processes in the country that limit the majority party’s near-incalculable power over public life and protect the few fundamental liberties remaining to the people of Britain.

From Anna Raccoon, a timely parody of one of my all-time favourite poems:

“O Voters!,” said Old Cyclops,
“You’ve had a pleasant run!
Shall we be voting Me again?”
But answer came there none–
And this was scarcely odd because
He’d pissed off everyone.

Funniest thing I’ve seen all day:

From commenter D. Bum at the Devil’s Kitchen:

But when it comes to broken promises, explicit promises, Labour and the Liberal Democrats are two cheeks of the same Vichy arse and I would gladly cut off his cock and winch Gordon Brown’s intestines from his treacherous stomach and cook them for him in front of his remaining eye before cutting him in four and beating the rest of the cabinet to death with bits of him, the cunt.

D. Bum, I commend you.

Madeleine Bunting, 28 June 2009:

Powerful, grand narratives legitimise power, win our allegiance and frame our private understandings of how to measure value and create meaning. They also structure time – they fit the present into a continuum of how the past will become the future. This is what all the grand narratives of communism, socialism, even neoliberalism and fascism offered; as did the grand narratives of religion. Now, all have foundered and fragmented into a mosaic of millions of personal stories. It is a Tower of Babel in which we have lost the capacity to generate the common narratives – of idealism, morality and hope such as Sandel talks about – that might bring about civic renewal and a reinvigorated political purpose.

…

Curtis argues that we are still enchanted by the possibilities of our personal narratives although they leave us isolated, disconnected, and at their worst, they are simply solipsistic performances desperate for an audience.

Madeleine Bunting, 30 September 2009:

I can launch my own catalogue of complaints against Gordon Brown as well as the next columnist, but I’ve no appetite right now to join what increasingly sounds like a mob lynching. There is something about the assembled chorus of received wisdom which makes me go contrary; group think rarely produces good judgments.

I dunno, Maddy: perhaps that grand narrative you were looking for all along, that ‘group think’ you now distrust, is the ‘received wisdom’ that Gordon Brown is a colossal fuck-up. It certainly seems to have, in your words, won our allegiance and brought about ‘civic renewal and a reinvigorated political purpose.’

Be careful what you wish for…

H/T the Heresiarch.

Being a politician must be so hard sometimes. Sandwiched between three mutually exclusive needs – to promote himself, to cover his ass, and to appear to be a normal human – any successful office-holder will, from time to time, find himself forced to make statements of extremely dubious morality, not to mention crass stupidity:

The paper quotes the mole as saying: “It’s not easy to watch footage on the television news of a coffin draped in a Union Jack and then come in to work the next day and see on your computer screen what MPs are taking for themselves.”

The mole claimed the contrast between conditions facing soldiers and the MPs’ claims “helped tip the balance in the decision over whether I should or should not leak the expenses data”.

Asked on Sky News if he understood the motivation for the expenses leak, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said: “I don’t think so.”

What’s happened to you, Gordon? Did somebody polarise your moral compass to point south? Or do you truly not understand why somebody might feel morally obliged to expose how the nation’s representatives were busy enriching themselves at the expense of the lives of the nation’s defenders?

Hey, though, at least the soldiers have helmets, boots, and socks. What more could they possibly need? Never mind that, by your own admission, the taxpayers’ cash you spent on refurbishing your kitchen could have equipped two extra soldiers – or given nine of them a £1000 pay rise. But where’s the point in that, right? The more of them who die from lack of equipment, the fewer you have to pay for, making the pot of money available to you that little bit bigger.

…and yet somehow so amusing:

“The only way Gordon Brown can win the general election is if Madeleine McCann’s body is found in David Cameron’s garage.”

Flatmate had a right good laugh at that. So did I.

Independent regulation of all remuneration of MPs – that’s it?

(1) How fucking embarrassing. The governors of our nation admit they cannot be trusted to govern themselves.

(2) Is it really possible to have ’statutory independent regulation’? I mean, who is going to choose these regulators? From what funds will they be paid? From public funds? In which case, are they really independent?

(3) If they will be paid from public funds, how much hiring and paying and funding of this new, presumably civil service, branch of the state is going to go on? When this came up in a discussion with libertarians on Saturday afternoon, a figure of £600,000pa was posited. Small change in terms of spending, but surely part of the whole scandal is that public money is being spent not only too much, but unwisely!

(4) Brown’s little press conference would have been a hell of a lot better without his autoencomium. His own Bill of Rights and Duties (ugh), and New Labour’s devolution, reform of the House of Lords, etc., etc. Nobody cares or wants to hear that sort of boasting in this situation.

(5) Someone has asked what the definition of ‘breaking the rules’ is, under which MPs will not be able to stand in the next election. Brown has no answer. I suspect that since the running excuse is that all these expenses were within the rules – and, indeed, it appears many of the most obnoxious ones were – we will see bunches of these bastards standing again, more’s the pity. (That, or Brown intends to use this ploy to neutralise his political enemies.)

(6) Brown has no response to a remark about how the public are saying that, if they did this stuff, they’d go to jail; the example given is of a shoplifter offering to return or pay for his booty. Brown’s claim: not an equivalent situation, because Hazel Blears acted within the rules. No ‘discipline’ for her then. Aha.

(7) A radio reporter-type has said Brown should call a general election. His response: it is the system at fault, not the Government, since ‘all parties must take responsibility for this.’ Never mind that the real reason for an election is the total collapse of public confidence in government. When the government cannot govern – as it appears not to have done over the past three weeks – a new democratic mandate is needed. Brown must be hugely delighted on the inside that the European elections are happening so soon, as it means the public will take out their justified rage and exercise their democratic privilege there – where it will have no effect on Labour’s continuing grasp-of-dead-hand hold on the UK. Once the voters have vented their spleen on MEPs, perhaps their disaffection will be purged! (He hopes.)

(8) A question about the Tamil protestors. Brown defends freedom of assembly. [Stopped listening; laughing too hard.]

(9) Brown keeps smiling – what the fuck has he got to smile about? He’s also leaning on the lectern in a way that, I’m sure, Obama the Orator never would. This bizarre body language actually makes him look… bored.

Speaking of which, I’m bored now too. Most of the snide questions I was droolingly anticipating have been asked, and Brown is now wittering like a madman: a maximum of words, a minimum of meaning, and enough use of the passive voice that, if this were transcribed into Latin, the page would be littered with -turs.

Make that turds. Which represent exactly what Brown, his speech, all other MPs, and the whole rotten edifice of this state are worth.

A new version of the Hail Mary, over at Lambeth Palace. I liked it so much, I’ve put it into Latin:

Ave, Gordon, gratia carens,
Dominus non tecum.
Vituperatus tu in hominibus
et vituperatus fructus laborum tuorum, recessio.
Nefas Gordon, pater incompetentiae,
interveni usque non adeo pro nobis civibus
nunc et in hora mortis perduellionis.
Amen.

Trust me, peeps: he means it.

I now have the sure and certain proof.

Fucker.

Excellent piece in the Independent:

Clarkson didn’t say that all Scottish people are one-eyed. He didn’t say that all one-eyed people are idiots. He didn’t say that Scottish people are idiots. What he said was:

1) Gordon Brown is one-eyed.

2) Gordon Brown is Scottish.

3) Gordon Brown is an idiot.

So (we might ask) what the hell is it that those angry Scottish people were angry about? They can’t be angry at the notion that a Scotchman can be an idiot, since the idiot is a staple of Scottish mythology; no other nation would take the majestically drunken Glasgow numpty to its heart with such joy. They can’t be angry that Gordon Brown has one eye, since having one eye is (a) a mild misfortune and (b) considered raffish, piratical and sexy war-wound.

So the only thing left is that they are angry because Gordon Brown is Scottish. Which is not something Clarkson can apologise for.

Just happened across an amusing fantasy in the Daily Mash, my favourite part of which is this:

But last night chancellor Alistair Darling was like: “Hang on a minute, how come it’s always us?…What does IMF stand for anyway? International Mother Fuckers?”…

An IMF spokesman said: “Do you really want to know why? Fine. Your banks were the entire basis of your economy and now they’re shite. Your currency is used bogroll, you don’t make anything of any value, you’re governed by clueless arseholes and 99% of your population is up to its tits in debt. That’s why.”

Mr Darling added: “Yeah, fair enough.”

I recalled suddenly that last night I had a dream about loss of supply, complete with a vision of Brown and Darling standing open-mouthed at the dispatch-box, staring at one another in horror until one of them says, ‘Automatic dissolution? That can’t be right! How come nobody told us…?’

But never mind; we must square our shoulders bracingly against the winds of ill fortune. Worse things happen at sea. And all is not lost: my father has just sent me an email that says, in its entirety, ‘I read this morning that the pound increased in value against the dollar; that should help you some.’

[bella goes away to ponder whether weak dollar at all related to this]

From the Telegraph, I see that Gordon Brown, our monocular prime minister, is trying to weasel out of his pledge of ‘British jobs for British workers.’ It was a stupid thing to say, considering the free movement of labour that is about the only benefit of the UK’s membership in the EU, and now there have been strikes over some Italians taking the fabled ‘British jobs.’

Fair enough; I’d probably weasel too.

But then, when asked his view on possible sympathy strikes, he burbled this:

“That that’s not the right thing to do and it’s not defensible,” he replied. “What we’ve set up as a process to deal with the questions that people have been asking about what has happened in this particular instance.”

That’s not even a sentence.

He went on: “When I talked about British jobs, I was taking about giving people in Britain the skills, so that they have the ability to get jobs which were at present going to people from abroad and actually encouraging people to take up the courses and the education and learning that is necessary for British workers to be far more skilled for the future.”

He wants people in Britain to have the skillz. Hurrah. But his loquacity (can I call it that, or is the choice of word almost too kind?) is awe-inspiring. The education and the learning. Well done. Skillz – learnin’, you know – for British workers to be more skilled.

Wouldn’t it have been vastly easier, and consumed less precious oxygen, for him to say, ‘I didn’t mean jobs. I meant skills. You know. British skills for British workers. QED. Now fuck off, I’m busy.’? Clearly, sensible, concise elegance is too much to ask for from somebody who makes his living by his silver tongue. The twat.