Only Idlers and Stick-in-the-Muds Can Lose, Brown Assures

The Glorious Successor's fingernails could be heard scrabbling desperately at the vestiges of government today as he sought to reassure New New Labour's core vote about the state of the economy. In the face of global problems which his chancellorship either did or did not foresee, Britain cannot be immunised against financial crisis. On the other hand, Britain has been immunised against financial crisis: "our economy is better placed to weather any global economic storm than it was the 70s, 80s or early 90s". Therefore, speaking to the Scottish Confabulation of Business Interests, Gordon assured them that nothing would be done to help poor people at the expense of rich corporations: "We will ensure that no one who is prepared to work hard and adapt to change will lose out as a result of global forces"; the sufferings of those who are already losing out must have resulted from something else. Sunspots, perhaps. Anyway, the CBI director general has said that a windfall tax would be the worst way to assist the fuel-poor; or, in Oldspeak, that a windfall tax would not be desirable for the CBI. The Local Government Association says that the six major electricity producers have increased shareholder dividends by a mere two hundred and fifty-seven million pounds; which only goes to show the extent of their difficulties. Gordon hopes that the energy companies will accept a three-year obligation to install "home-based energy efficiency measures" for all those cripples, pensioners and poor people who have been pumping carbon into the atmosphere; unfortunately, despite what Gordon calls the "most robust independent competition regime anywhere in the world", negotiations with the robustly competitive energy firms are incomplete.