The Wrong Man

Jeff Randall: We haven't been cynical enough about Gordon Brown

Some key quotations from an article by Jeff Randall in yesterday's Telegraph:

The great misleader: ""Misleading people". That was the accusation levelled by Gordon Brown at the leader of Her Majesty's Opposition. This was akin to Paul Daniels complaining that his rivals use sleight-of-hand to fool the audience.  When it comes to misleading, Brown is the boss. He is Marvo the Misleader, the Daddy of Dissemblance. Where others employ fake magic, Gordon's trickery is real: successes appear from nowhere; failures vanish.  If misleading were ever to become an Olympic sport, Brown would win more gold medals than Mark Spitz."

Always misleading: "Whether it's on crime, education, taxation, truancy, health, child poverty, public finances, economic growth rates, domestic elections, the European treaty (aka constitution) or the most obscene distortion of all, weapons of mass destruction, almost nothing we are told seems to bear scrutiny.  When examined closely, time and again, there are omissions and distortions, fudge and mudge."

Misled about immigration: "We were told by Labour - dishonestly - that 13,000 immigrants would arrive here from the EU's new Eastern European members. At least half a million have turned up and more are on their way.  Instead of admitting the problem and dealing with it, the Government tries to dress it up as a brilliant manoeuvre to solve our pensions crisis and make us richer.  A recent study claims that immigrants contributed £6 billion to the economy last year. That may be correct, but it does not mean that we're all better off. It's not the size of the national pie, but the slice that each of us gets that matters. Immigrants don't just help pay for the pie, they also eat it."

Does Brown think we're stupid?: "Brown has a reputation for being formidably clever. Perhaps this is why he treats the rest of us as if we were graphically stupid. How else can we explain his expectation that the public will keep swallowing fiction as fact?  His final act as chancellor was to boast of a tax-cutting budget. Except it wasn't. City economists quickly worked out that the tax bill had risen.  Crime, we are told by the Home Office, is going down. Maybe. But violent crime, according to the Centre for Crime and Justice, has been going up."

Just Gordon posters

As Brown goes to Lisbon for the summit today, the Conservatives have got three Smart cars touring around Westminster towing this poster. William Hague, Caroline Spelman and Mark Francois launched it outside Millbank half an hour ago. Hague said:

“Gordon Brown began his time as Prime Minister talking about listening to and trusting the British people. He said that keeping manifesto promises was a matter of trust for him with the British people. He was right then. But this blatant breach of a manifesto commitment shows why he is forfeiting the people’s trust. He may wish to forget his promises. We will not let him.”

Gisela Stuart criticises Brown's "old-style politics" for "lacking veracity"

Labour MP Gisela Stuart has been one of the most outspoken people on the left in calling for a referendum on the EU treaty.

Now she's turned it up a notch in the Evening Standard by linking the deception over not holding one with Brown's attempts to say that he didn't cancel the general election because the polls turned:

• "Recent events have shown some rather old-style politics, with the Prime Minister looking indecisive and lacking veracity"
• "To pretend that Labour was not gearing up for an election or that opinion polls played no part in the decision to postpone it was silly and gave David Cameron some of his most damaging ammunition."
• "Sticking to your guns in defence of a patently dishonest position is not leadership but the soft option and a cop-out from a specific promise made to voters."
• "The path adopted by the Government is neither honest not coherent. We have reached the absurd position where the Government says there will be a referendum only if its red lines are not met, so presumably it will ask people to vote 'no' on a treaty it has not signed."
• "The red lines are red herrings. It's a matter of trust and integrity. A referendum was promised. It should be delivered. If Labour can't trust the people, why should the people trust Labour?"

Ouch!

A man who is casual with the truth

In his Saturday column for The Times, Matthew Parris highlighted some less-than-honest words from gordon Brown during his speech to the TUC:

"Two untruths, one trivial, one large, were both thrown casually out by the Prime Minister in his speech to the TUC on Tuesday. I’ll start with the smaller: a sneaky little fib and hardly worth rebutting, but revealing of character because it was something Gordon Brown certainly knew to be untrue, didn’t need to say, but said anyway just to purchase some minuscule and momentary advantage for himself. In words cut from the text distributed to the media, but which I heard him deliver, he said this: “The current Conservative leader was the principal economic adviser to the Chancellor of Black Wednesday and he stood alongside Norman Lamont...”  David Cameron was not, of course, the principal economic adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He wasn’t an economic adviser at all. He was a special adviser; there were scores of them; still are. They don’t count for diddly-squat, many are barely out of university, their opinions on big economic decisions are neither relied upon nor, in most cases, even sought, and Mr Cameron, as it happens, was 26, an age at which the young Gordon Brown was still railing against Margaret Thatcher’s legacy.  Nice, however, to see him paying homage to her on Thursday.  Anyway, just make a note and file it away: an illustration of how carelessly Mr Brown twists when it doesn’t matter..."

Read more of Matthew Parris' commentary here.