Gordon Brown: 'election is off'

It's good news and it's bad news isn't it ? Bad because it deprives people of the opportunity to get rid of this government asap, good because it shows Brown is not confident.

"A "remarkably calm, but not sunny" Prime Minister [...] admitted he had considered calling a snap election, and denied recent poor polls were behind his decision to stall." (Telegraph)

That Gordon Brown has deep-sixed any November election, when he and advisers around him were clearly strongly toying with/preparing for/talking up amongst themselves and letting the public believe the idea can only suggest the truth:

That some of the recent polls for the Labour party were just simply not stable, and that some of those polls which appear to put Labour ahead were perhaps as much about laying the groundwork for a possible November election rather than an accurate representation of what's what. I was very suprised when I started seeing these polls appear as they didn't seem to make a whole lot of sense.

Other polls of course, have not been so glowing in showing a clear victory for Labour, including the latest News of the World poll.

My big hope was, out of a combination of folly, misjudgement and hubris, as well various crackpot supporters egging him on, Brown would madly hold a November election and just loose or you would get a hung Parliament.

But Brown has clearly seen this coming, he tested the waters enthusiastically apparently in this party conference season with various announcements but has ultimately seen the writing on the wall. Of course all of this has made Brown look ridiculous:

"But the prime minister insists it was not the melting away of Labour's strong poll lead that led him to decide there would be no ballot. He told the BBC's Andrew Marr that he thought he would win an election but wanted to show how he would change the country, rather than being judged on how he had dealt with a series of events that have taken place since he moved into Number 10."(BBC)

Surely the BBC don't actually believe that ?

Don't forget various supporters urging Brown on in the past to call a snap election included people like Ken Livingstone.

Labour's communist police state again

You've probably seen the front page of yesterday's Mail on Sunday

"Officials from the top of Government to lowly council officers will be given unprecedented powers to access details of every phone call in Britain under laws coming into force tomorrow. The new rules compel phone companies to retain information, however private, about all landline and mobile calls, and make them available to some 795 public bodies and quangos. The move, enacted by the personal decree of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, will give police and security services a right they have long demanded: to delve at will into the phone records of British citizens and businesses"

As usual the Daily Mail are permitted to complain about all this stuff, but within the acceptable boundaries of plebdom. So it goes, "what if it falls into the wrong hands ?". But of course, one struggles to think what is the 'right hands' in this circumstance. We've talked about all this stuff before on here.

Council workers asking permission from a nominated person ? Various other agencies, quangos ?

You have to think about it. What possible means do they have to interpret or act on such information ? Presumably it will be possible to phone up any government agency and arbitrarily 'grass' on someone you don't like and get their phone call and internet web surfing use put into the hands directly of council, government workers ?

I remember when all this was being concocted, one of the 'selling points' about the phone snooping side of things was that it will only be a small amount of data, ie it couldn't show the subject of the phone call itself (obviously), but that's not the case with internet data retention (which council leaders and quangos will have access to next) , the subject of intent is very much known from the URL requested, and can be much much more intimate. And I don't think people really understand the implications of this.

And where are the powerful voices against all this ? Where is business ? What are they afraid of ? Are they afraid the Labour spin machine of doting commissars obsessed with hideous ideology will turn against them and start looking at their phone calls and internet records ?

Naturally all this itself is just one small part of the the regime's ongoing plans.

This sounds a like a communist police state to me, hidden behind the crap about 'shared values, security, terrorism, a new 'modern' crime' and so on. As such I think it's only fair to treat the country as that as I've said before. How else exactly are you supposed to treat it ?

And there is another factor to all this too. Those civil servants and council workers compliant in the destruction of basic human dignity with this are also damaging themselves as well as sadly becoming a becoming a real legitimate target in their own right.

Worryingly, as pointed out by Colonel Turner in the interview I posted recently, is that while you have a collection of just career junior ministers and council employees, you have people in government who know exactly what they are doing too, and this has to be a source of enormous concern.

As Colonel Turner also points out, one would imagine there is a gradual 'process of persuasion' but there has been none really, and the Iraq War has wrongly become the focus of sin, isolated out by both Labour, and people in the media supportive of them, as some lone anomaly where it can be cautiously conceded that 'mistakes have been made'.

This is of course obscene, and again, a way of moving the debate away from the war crime of Iraq itself, and the kind of thinking, the kind of judgments and zeal to sell that crime in the first place along with all of Labour's other crimes.

If anything about Iraq, it seems that a number of people in the Labour project were quite happy with it if only to ensure there is then a resulting security concern at home that can then be used to implement their own re-writing of society into an Orwellian socialist nightmare.

But as I've said here before here, I believe responsible council workers or employees of government agencies should be ready to blow the whistle on all this, and resign and disrupt these activities as necessary. I also feel strongly that at least people should not acknowledge the legitimacy of this at all, in any case where it may pertain to them and refuse to co-operate with any results leading from it.