The Curmudgeon

YOU'LL COME FOR THE CURSES. YOU'LL STAY FOR THE MUDGEONRY.

Sunday, March 02, 2008

A Candy-Coloured Brown

The Glorious Successor has courageously conceded that, after nearly eleven years with him at the centre of government, it's going to be an uphill struggle to build "the Britain of our dreams". The Glorious Successor was attempting to rally that shrinking band of unfortunates known as "Labour activists" in anticipation of the local authority elections in two months' time. Naturally, he sprinkled the usual stardust about "creating and sustaining a strong economy" in which the Government cannot afford to pay its own workers in line with the rate of inflation; and, equally naturally, he whispered the usual statistics of a future Utopia: three hundred new schools, three million new homes, a taste of the whip for those lazy overpaid GPs and, for all I know, fifty new divisions of the British army poised to roll across Russia. In line with the New Labour doctrine that rhetoric equals commitment, he described child poverty as "the scar that demeans Britain" and pledged, yet again, to eradicate it. "Imagine if together we build a Britain where what counts is not how high up you start, but how high you can reach," he said, and proceeded to conjure up "a Britain where every parent of every child born today can watch them as they sleep and dare to believe that nothing is beyond them realising their potential", except for market forces, global economic factors, necessary measures to curb inflation, climate change, the energy crisis and all those other little inconveniences which the Government has no particular intention of doing anything about. As for children born on other days, they'll just have to fend for themselves.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home