Thursday, 2 October 2008

Fiddling About and Losing Control

Reports that the Westminster prime minister has begun to set up an emergency committee to take charge of Britain’s response to the financial crisis, similar to Cobra, with its secretariat run from the Cabinet Office, indicate a devastating blow to any understanding that there is stability in our country's governmental institutions and settled arrangements.

What is the Treasury for, if not to deal with financial and economic matters, crisis or no? And the Chancellor of the Exchequer is now bereft of any authority as well as any responsibility.

As the Leader indulges, indeed is unable to deny characteristically, his control freakery, European Union regulation, other European member-states of the EU (acting in their own interests with a speed that underlines Brown's indecisive incapacity), and enormous financial institutions to which Brown has sold our financial independence while boasting of controlling any threatened meltdown, are now telling him what is to be done and what he will conform to.

Meanwhile he sets up committees and tears up our system of government.

9 comments:

Sackerson said...

I wish I knew what to say. "Fear not the struggle nought availeth?"

Do you hope Cameron will turn out to be much different, and to the country's benefit?

hatfield girl said...

No idea, S. It would be difficult to be worse and remain a democrat.

What availeth is individual and determined expression of dissent. Plus whatever facts and argument help to disturb the determined varnishing of reality engaged in by truly frightening percentages of the media and the apparat.

Anonymous said...

The end of time has just begun.

Sorry. Listening to the new Dylan and the words sailed in front of me. In another song .. "I feel affection for all those who sail with me". Extraordinary late offerings from an extraordinary man.

Boris has sacked Ian Blair. Nothing works. Everything's broken. Sorry. Mr. Z got in the way again. Go BoJo, or something like that.

BBC failed to note that both the London Assembly and some Police whatsit whose name I can't be bothered to look up, but the top coppers' club, I guess, had both formally expressed no confidence in the man.

Ken. Blair. Do the Go Bo Jo.

It's fascinating in a grizzly way watching the economies of the "modern" world unravel, and watching New Labout putrify. Brown does terrify me though. "Anything it takes" is not a pretty thought, lying in his lap. Sometimes I wish we had a history of assassination of political figures.

Anonymous said...

I knew there was something else. Is it just me, or do recent photos of Bush show a man who is scared shitless? Fear is written all over his face, which once was ever smug.

Or is it just me?


Bob says ... Things are breaking up out there. He has no problem formulating his vision, unlike The Dear Leader.

Bill Quango MP said...

Bush does have the look of the damned.
I think it just dawned on him that he broke America.

Anonymous said...

Elby said: ""Anything it takes" is not a pretty thought, lying in his lap."

Especially with all the powers he has bestowed upon himself. Civil Contingencies Act, and the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act to name but two very scary pieces of law that signally fail the Hitler/Stalin test.

The end is close, and there is nowhere to go, because it is moving in the same direction everywhere.

hatfield girl said...

Americans are being pretty impressive right now, though, BQ., insisting they don't get held to ransome by bankers trying to put the frighteners on them, and that their elected representatives do just that - represent them.

Go, Americans!

hatfield girl said...

', and there is nowhere to go,'

Two aspects to that, Y:

Lots of people don't want to go anywhere. They are folded into niches and enclaves of decency and in what is, after all, their own country, wondering how to hold out and doing what they can to force that last civil act in a democracy for peaceful change - a general election.

The other is that there are still places to go, much of Europe is as it wishes to be and just try any of the manoeuvres used by the New Labour regime, particularly the entrenched reductions in civil liberties and increases in state powers, and their tribunals would come down like a ton of bricks. Not to speak of their populations; can you imagine the games with the bin collections being played in France? There would be riots, and more imaginative retaliations. In Naples the central government fell and the new government sent in the army till holding people to ransome over refuse was cleared up. Lots of camorra in prison now; which is where lots of the new Labour camorra should be.

But abroad is abroad, lovely to visit and then you go home. It's the destruction of home that is both unbearable and incomprehensible except in almost apocalyptic terms.

What are they doing it FOR?

Elby the Beserk said...

What are they doing it for? Ideology. Dumb, sclerotic ideology. Of the sort that hates it that one person might be doing better than another, of the sort that makes the solution of everything to reduce it to its lowest common denominator, rather than trying to raise all to their highest potential