Only class war to offer voters

No such slacking over at Sky News, where clearly the fact that the company doesn’t get a £3.5bn windfall from the government every year means that journos have to be in over the New Year period.

It doesn’t seem to have made them any less subservient to the PM though as they dutifully report his pitiful whingeing about what he thinks the country would look like under the Conservatives. I’m happy to quote:

“The Prime Minister says he was resolved to delivering “radical” public service reform, “a new, cleaned-up politics” and tackling terrorism as priorities in the new year. Mr Brown also promises to publish the first part of a “prosperity plan for a successful, fairer and more responsible Britain” later in the week. The proposals include investment in high-speed rail, aerospace, the digital economy, clean energy and other “industries and jobs of the future”.”

Radical public service reform went out of the window with Frank Field in 1998, his talk about cleaning up politics would be more believable if it were backed up with action and, er, I thought that we’d been tackling terrorism since about 1969. And we know that Labour tackling terrorism is code for taking away more civil liberty.

As for his prosperity plan, we’ve had stories about high-speed rail before, aerospace is anyone’s guess, clean energy is nothing new and the “other” stuff is just bluster. Investing in all of these things is easy to announce – far more difficult to deliver on time, to specification and to budget. Government, particularly during the Labour tenure, has a dreadful record on overspend and delayed capital projects from the MoD to IT systems across all government departments.

And where is all this investment going to come from by the way? It’s just nonsense. Labour has nothing new to offer apart from class war and divisive rhetoric. I hope the public votes for an alternative  – and frankly that includes the Lib Dems in northern inner-city seats where the Conservatives won’t win – to deliver a strong verdict against this shambles of a government that has led Britain to the brink of bankruptcy and hastened our decline.