The Wrong Man

Brown's neglect of British farming

The recent outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease brings back painful memories of the 2001 outbreak which saw farmers across the country watch helplessly as their cattle were slaughtered by government officials.

Perhaps learning from the mistakes that Tony Blair and he made in 2001 Gordon Brown was quick to act; he cut short his holiday to demonstrate that he was in control and took the credit when the disease appeared to have been contained, saying ‘Britain is open for business…We have restricted the disease to a limited area of this country.”

But five days after the livestock movement ban was lifted new cases of foot-and-mouth were reported and that was just the first of several new outbreaks.

Now farmers who have struggled with the fear of another foot-and-mouth epidemic are facing the threat of bluetongue disease. In times passed a beleaguered farmer might have looked to the government for help but no longer.

One of the travesties of Gordon Brown’s decade at the top of government is his neglect of British farming.

• Under Labour 31% of farming households are living below the UK poverty line. The average farmer earns less than £14,000, half the amount a farmer earned in 1997 and nearly half of farms have a net farm income of less than £10,000. Dairy incomes have fallen by 20% in the last year alone.
• Under Labour almost 80,000 people have left the agricultural labour force and 2,125 dairy farms in England have closed since 2002.
• Under Labour Defra regulations are up 40% since 2003. According to their own figures the cost to business of Defra regulations is £527.8m
• Under Labour bovine TB has accounted for almost 160,000 cattle and £500 million.  22,000 cattle were slaughtered as a result of bovine TB in 2006 and the total cost of bovine TB is now £100 million per annum.
• There is also the failure of the Rural Payments Agency - documented on Warmwell.

It is no wonder an August study in the British Medical Journal found that farmers have the lowest quality of life in Britain, with a suicide rate twice the national average.

Gordon Brown might aspire to national leadership but his treatment of Britain’s farmers show while he will never stand for the heart of England.

Gordon Brown - the plagiarist

Danny Finkelstein has got a great post over at Comment Central.  It appears that the ever-so-authentic Mr Brown has had to borrow the speechwriting skills of Bob Shrum.  Danny compares speeches by previous Shrum clients with Mr Brown's effort of Monday...

"Al Gore 2000 nomination acceptance speech: I know my own imperfections. I know that sometimes people say I'm too serious, that I talk too much substance and policy.

Gordon Brown: Sometimes people say I am too serious and I fight too hard and maybe that's true...

Al Gore 2000 nomination acceptance speech: I pledge to you tonight: I will work for you every day and I will never let you down."

Gordon Brown: This is my pledge to the British people: I will not let you down.

John Kerry 2004 nomination acceptance speech: And what can I say about Teresa?  She has the strongest moral compass of anyone I know.

Gordon Brown: And this is my moral compass.

Bill Clinton's State of the Union 1995: As we move into this next century, everybody matters; we don't have a person to waste.

Gordon Brown: This is the century where our country cannot afford to waste the talents of anyone."

I hope Mr Brown will ask for a discount from Mr Shrum.

Brown's council tax rebate for servicemen is unfunded

With much fanfare Gordon Brown has announced a 25% council tax rebate for servicemen in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Conservative defence spokesman Liam Fox shows that the money for this rebate is coming from the existing defence budget and servicemen will still be more poorly treated by this arrangement that convicted prisoners...

• No new cash. There is no new funding for today’s announcement – cash will be reallocated from the existing MoD budget.
• Rebate ‘less than prisoners’. Prisoners pay no council tax at all in the UK – but if you serve in Iraq or Afghanistan for six months, today’s announcement means personnel will get just £140 off. This means that over the course of a year, troops are still £1,181 worse off than a prisoner (based on Band D).
• Fiddled figures mean less cash for troops. Today’s MoD press release boasts a 25 per cent rebate based upon ‘the average Band D Council tax bill’. But the small print shows that they’ve not actually used the Band D figure to calculate the rebate. Instead, they’ve used the figure for average council tax. This means, troops living in Band D accommodation, such as families, are getting £25 less than they should (£140 rather than £165).

Liam Fox commented:

“Gordon Brown loves to grab a good headline and pretend he’s backing our troops. But as ever, when you look at the small print, you discover it’s another con trick. This will squeeze the frontline budget as there is no new money. The discriminatory nature of this discount will fuel divisions within the Armed Forces as it only applies to those serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.  The fact that prisoners pay no council tax, while our boys on the frontline do, shows how low a priority the Armed Forces are under Gordon Brown.”

Is Mr Brown really keeping you safe?

Mr Brown likes to portray himself as the man who will keep you safe from terrorism.

In reality Brown's Britain has lost control of its borders, refuses to ban extremist organisations like Hizb ut-Tahrir and is cosying up to extremist Muslim organisations.

In yesterday's Observer Nick Cohen examined another way in which Gordon Brown is undermining the long-term security of our country: He is doing nothing about Saudi subsidy of extremist mosques.  The whole article is an essential read.  Cohen focuses upon the ways in which the authorities have failed to progress the findings of Channel 4's Undercover Mosque programme.  That programme discovered "Saudi clerics pouring out their loathing of unbelievers" as well as "pamphlets and DVDs that attack women, Jews, Christians and explain that Aids is a Western plot."  "They are available," writes Cohen, "at the bookshop of London's Regent's Park mosque, which was built with Saudi money and is run by a Saudi diplomat."

Tory MP Paul Goodman has written to Government ministers about the West Midland Police's appeasing decision to complain to OfCom about Channel 4 rather than investigate Undercover Mosque's findings.

Mr Brown needs to answer some questions

After Mr Brown's evasive performance on Andrew Marr's BBC1 programme this morning, Conservative HQ has listed ten questions that Mr Brown still needs to answer:

1. "If education is his ‘passion’, why is it the case that two in five 11-year olds cannot read, write or add up properly?
2. When did he first know about the problems at Northern Rock?
3. Why does he think that £1.3 trillion of consumer debt is ‘a good thing’?
4. Does he also think it is ‘a good thing’ that Government debt has grown by over £150bn since 1997, and is forecast to grow by the same again over the next 5 years?
5. Is he happy with the level of immigration into the UK in the last ten years?
6. Will he take responsibility for the fact that after years of promises to tackle MRSA, the number of people killed by MRSA has quadrupled since Labour came to power?
7. Why did he deny that a lot of the increase in health spending has gone on bureaucrats when the Government’s own figures show that the number of managers in the NHS is increasing almost three times as fast as the number of nurses?
8. If he really believes that we should show greater appreciation for our troops, why does he continue to allow them to live in such poor accommodation?
9. Why didn’t he talk about our broken society when the Government’s own figures show that violent crime has doubled under Labour?
10. If he really wants to trust the people, why doesn’t he let us have a say on the European Constitution in a referendum, as he promised before the last election?"

Spinning the roulette wheel

When the Labour government first proposed relaxed laws on gambling such as the introduction of supercasinos much was said about Brown, then Chancellor, ditching his roots as the son of a Church of Scotland minister. He cleverly redeemed himself on becoming Prime Minister, however, by doing a U-turn and scrapping the plans for supercasinos.

Now he's showing a worrying complacency towards the massive issue of problem gambling - something which affects low income families more than aristocrats and international spies. His press team have tried to spin The Gambling Commission's damning prevalence report as an encouraging progress report, saying that it shows that only 1 in 100 people are problem gamblers. It doesn't take much scratching of the surface to see the real nature of the report, they got this statistic by ingeniously including the lottery.

Tobias Ellwood MP, Shadow Minister for Media, Culture and Sport, gave us this statement:

"With the dexterity of a steely eyed poker player, Gordon Brown gave little away in the lead up to the Gambling Commission's report, allowing speculation to flourish that problem gambling was on the rise. When the cards were finally placed on the table, it seems that a mere 1 in 100 adults has an addiction to gambling. Look a little closer and we see this is a clever bluff. The number of problem gamblers jumps considerably to 1 in 7 for users of spread betting, 1 in 10 for users of Fixed Odds Betting Terminal's and 1 in 10 for users of betting exchanges; the very areas of gambling that will now be advertised on our television screens. If Britain wants to be the regulatory beacon of socially responsible gambling that the Government promised, Gordon Brown will need to look the nation in the eye with a little more senerity and commitment."

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Gordon Brown is 'the wrong man' for Britain's future

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