Sunday
Hazel Blears (not one of our favourite people here) has just, in among a lot of ignominious verbiage about what a fine job the government is doing, done something unignominious, by contriving the following deadly soundbite, in today's Observer:
YouTube if you want to. ...
Which echoes Margaret Thatcher. This lady's not for tubing, it would seem. This collapsing government has been, like all collapsing governments as described by their members, failing to get its message across. No, the message has well and truly got across, but people don't like it.
And the YouTuber himself has contributed another memorable one-liner, in the form of this outburst to a journalist last week:
"You are impugning my integrity."
Well, yes.
Many have declared themselves baffled by Brown's protestations concerning his own extreme moral excellence, which they often take as true merely because Brown himself appears to believe them, and his actual moral depravity, as if the two things together make no sense. Well, if you agree with him that he really is morally excellent, then indeed you will be baffled, because clearly he is morally repulsive. Actually it all makes perfect sense. He is, in his own hopelessly non-functioning eyes, a morally excellent person, doing an excellent job. Therefore all means, however depraved - intimidating colleagues shamelessly, robbing the rest of us blind - are excusable, obligatory even, to keep him in that job, and to prevent anybody else, obviously truly depraved, from trying to take the job away from him. Gordon Brown's moral excellence in his own eyes and his moral depravity in all other eyes are logically intermeshed, his delusion of moral excellence being just one more item on the long list of all his actual depravities.
Someone once quoted me a British newpaper editorial from some time in the middle of the 20th century which essentially said "It is important we maintain good relations with the present regime in the USSR, because if they are destabilised and Stalin loses office, then the hardliners might take office". (I do not have a reference. This might be apocryphal. If anyone has a reference, please sent it to me). The argument about how me must preserve the status quo because of the other terrible things that might be out there does seem to stick in some people's minds for some reason.
Posted by Michael Jennings at May 3, 2009 02:20 PM
Summed up by the old proverb "better the devil you know than the devil you don't know."
As an egomaniac, Brown's personal interests are presumably above any conventional concepts of morality. It will be interesting to see his deterioration in the face of ever increasing public vilification - Guido and others arereporting rumblings from the bunker.
Posted by RW at May 3, 2009 03:18 PM
Heh hee, followed the link to the Hazel Blears article and just loved the almost totally one sided comment thread. Great fun.
Posted by Chris H at May 3, 2009 04:37 PM
If Hazel Blears were to turn up on my doorstep seeking to explain her governments policies, the first question I would ask would be; "WTF is a Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government and WhyTF do we need one?"*
In my ideal world, communities are self-organising groups of families, friends and neighbours seeking to improve their lives by mutual co-operation, and local government is a neccesary evil that provides a few basic services that the local communities can't provide for themselves.
The idea that central government should have any interest in what my local community does - let alone that there should be a whole ministerial department maintained at vast expense to the taxpayer to poke it's nose in my affairs for the sole purpose of giving the likes of Ms Blears a comfortable living and the power over me she craves - is incomprehensible to the point of Pythonesque absurdity.
So Comrade Hazel, scrap your whole department, and all the other prod-nosey, jobsworth supporting, money grubbing departments, along with all the laws and regulations they have spawned since their inception, and we might have something to talk about.
*Actually, the first phrase I would likely utter would be: "Snick, snick! Get off my lawn!" Sadly, in this liberty loving country of ours, the actions would have to be mimed.
Posted by Kevin B at May 3, 2009 07:13 PM
