Sit by me – I do the best cocktails on Air Malta
The cabin crew of Air Malta are in dispute with their employers and have announced industrial action. This amounts to not showing the movie, not serving any tea, coffee or alcoholic drinks and not handing out The Times newspaper – due to it not publishing their union’s press releases. However, in a very old fashioned British way they remain extremely polite and keen to please.
Personally, I don’t mind the early KM100 to London this way, as I don’t yet fall out of bed on to a glass of wine. However, when returning to the island on the KM101 I do miss my lunchtime tipple. As a result, I now buy three quarter bottles of champagne and three miniature Cointreaus and mix my own cocktails. I usually sit in seat 5A and would be delighted for you to join me. Just send your order to the MIS along with your credit card details and we will see you right. Cheers!
Blighted Brown’s dustbin is full or is it? There is a lesson here for all democracies
The disgraceful state of Britain’s social disintegration, its debt ridden economy, its dishonest MPs and the appalling corruption, smear campaigns, intimidation and bullying of a government that would have been unimaginable only 15 years ago defies belief. Can it really be true that the nation that ruled the world’s largest empire ever and largely created the world as we know it could have sunk so low so quickly?
Of course some of Britain’s problems can be traced back to the start of the 20th century, others the end of the Second World War and most perhaps were hatched in the 1960s and grew like malignant cancers over the next 50 years. Moreover, even great leaders such as Margaret Thatcher, while having cured many economic ills, failed to switch off the nanny state and re-introduce family values.
However, not many would have prophesised the extent of naked ambition, corruption, amoral thinking, disrespect for parliamentary democracy and disregard for decent ordinary folk that would be brought to government by Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and their prince of darkness, the despicable Lord Mandelson.
To bankrupt a nation by reckless policies might be considered a disaster. To encourage the collapse of British society by naive political correctness mixed with Stalinist central control and sheer incompetence can be thought of as outrageous. To achieve both at the same time must be as unforgettable as it is unforgivable – and yet this is precisely what Britain’s Premiers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have achieved in 12 years at No 11 and No 10 Downing Street.
As the better read of you will remember, we are talking about, in the case of Brown, the man who sold the nation’s gold at the bottom of the market. You recall, the man who encouraged bank deregulation and promoted poor regulation. The man who encouraged massive personal debt to support a consumer society living beyond its means, which resulted in Britons owing more personal debt than the rest of Europe added together – mostly raised on the back of a housing boom which is now over. The very same man who single-handedly wrecked the pensions of millions by unfairly imposing a double tax on them. Yes, the same chap who happens to have invented hundreds of stealth taxes in order to fritter away trillions of pounds on treacle thick incompetent bureaucracy and public services that only got worse in the process. Indeed, the very man who has wasted even further trillions on bailing out banks he allowed to get into a mess in the first place, and stimulus packages that all sensible economists realise are alarmingly misguided. That’s right, the guy who allows billions to be wasted each year on bogus benefit claims and even ensured that one trillion was spent last year alone by the government on management consultants despite the amazing jump in civil servant numbers.
Consequently, Britain now boasts one of the world’s highest levels of government debt, is having problems raising money both at home and abroad and has committed its future generations to a lifetime of high taxes in order to repay all of this folly without any benefit to themselves.
As a result, the IMF now recognises that Britain will be harder hit by the recession than anyone else in the G20, while the EC report that only Latvia and Estonia will have a worse time of it than this once mighty nation. Not surprisingly, the pound has collapsed amid all this exceptional mismanagement.
Meanwhile, the social fabric of life in Britain has all but collapsed. Britain tops just about every disgraceful league table in Europe from street knife crime, to child abuse, domestic violence, child pregnancy, drug addiction, families where no one works and social service fraud, to name but some.
In addition, on Brown’s watch the Royal Navy is falling apart, soldiers are sent into battle with faulty equipment, Britain’s borders leak thousands of illegal immigrants each year, the prisons are overflowing and hospitals are dirty and likely to infect patients. As a consequence, Britain, the inventor of the National Health Service, has slipped well outside the world’s top 20 ranked health services and is ranked below Jamaica while it sits at the bottom of most EU league tables concerning treatments for diseases like cancer.
Children leave school with no ability to read or write, have no sense of right or wrong or social skills while both parents and teachers who want to help them are prevented from doing so, as they might infringe upon their human rights by attempting to impose any sort of order or discipline on them.
Britain’s exceptional history is ignored, as is Christianity and even Christmas in case it offends Moslems. In the same way, people who wish to follow the family values they were taught are discriminated against just as victims are by a government keen to promote the rights of criminals and anti-social offenders instead.
Even a previous Home Secretary has admitted the Home Office is not fit for purpose as the Stalinist idea of central control has led to an explosion of bureaucracy, targets and incompetence that would have us all dying from side-splitting laughter if it wasn’t so serious.
On top of this, hardly a day goes by without another new example of government corruption or sleaze grabs the headlines as minister after minister is caught fiddling expenses; or claiming rent for properties from people who turn out to be wives using maiden names; or claiming living expenses for properties rented out to third parties while living in grace and favour government properties, and so on and so forth. The list is endless even down to the ex Home Secretary, the hapless Jacqui Smith, claiming rented porn videos on her expenses. Indeed, so out of control is the position that most Cabinet ministers earn nearly 30 times the average wage of their constituents, and the majority of this by way of untaxed and highly dubious expenses claimed from the poor and over burdened taxpayer.
As if all of this wasn’t awful enough and even too bad to be true, we learnt in April news that adds evil intent to the existing tales of corruption, incompetence and 1960s red brick university politically correct hypocritical champagne sovietism.
Gordon Brown’s right hand man, the Downing Street Press Adviser Damian McBride was then forced to resign after a series of e-mails he sent from Number 10 Downing Street to fellow spin doctor Derek Draper, a close friend of the King of Labour Spin Lord Mandelson, were leaked.
In the e-mails, Mr Mcbride, one of the Prime Minister’s most trusted allies, discussed inventing lies of a vile and unfounded nature about leading members of the Opposition concerning their private lives. It was planned to feed such invented stories into political blogs on the web about Conservative leader David Cameron and other senior Tories in the hope that this would lead to an effective smear campaign of gossip and end up in the national press. The clear intention was to counterbalance all the recent bad publicity that the government had brought upon itself by inventing some against its political opponents.
Although it would appear that this government has sunk as low as imaginable in Britain and worse than the antics of the USA 1972 Watergate scandal, there is nothing new about any of this really. Tony Blair came to power in 1997 promising to ‘be whiter than white’ and yet from Labour’s first months in office it became clear that incompetence and corruption would be covered up by an army of spin doctors intent on perverting the truth.
Blair and Brown have always been at the centre of this, often having their spin kings brief against the other. They both hired many ‘attack dogs’ over the years and Mcbride was but the latest in Brown’s case. Moreover, as he reported direct to the Premier and allegedly copied in another close Brown ally of the time, another ex Cabinet minister Tom Watson, it seems inconceivable that Brown did not know what was being planned. Indeed, Brown’s biographer, Tom Bower, has already declared that nothing would surprise him from a man who is “ruthless with vindictive intent against enemies he wants to destroy”.
One person to appear ‘whiter than white’ (perhaps a politically incorrect statement used by Blair) in the recent MPs expenses scandal was Teflon Tony himself. Surprised? Me too. But wait! His expenses could not be investigated as they had been mysteriously shredded. Surprised? No, me neither. The man whose utter disregard for parliamentary democracy was on a par with King Charles I; who had a ‘weapons of mass destruction dossier’ invented to ensure he got his war with Iraq and has blood on his hands for the death of Dr Kelly; has now converted to Roman Catholicism and with supreme arrogance has decided to lecture the Pope on modernising Roman Catholic beliefs. Unbelievable? No I’m afraid that it is not!
Meanwhile, while Teflon Tony has found RC religion, Brown sees himself as an enlightened Protestant Christian busy saving the world economy. However, we know differently. Gordon Brown is a corrupt, incompetent liar who has forgotten the difference between right and wrong and whose utter contempt for the rest of us prevents him from sincerely apologising for anything. The British people never elected him Prime Minister and his moral authority to govern, like most of his once elected Cabinet, has now gone.
Today, he hides in his bunker, surrounded by unelected Cabinet ministers saved by the equally unelected Lord Mandelson, who is well remembered as a minister who, when he was once an elected MP, had to resign twice from the government for his corrupt dealings.
I sat behind Peter Mandelson recently on a flight from Naples to London. As we came in to land my little two-year-old cried as his ears hurt. Mandelson, a gay man who isn’t ever likely to be a father thank God, turned and looked with disdain at George. What an instantly recognisable and reliable photograph of the British government he made.
His boss faces a general election next year. There is only one realistic choice – that of David Cameron’s Conservative Party or the return of this rump. Eighteen per cent of the British electorate apparently still think they might vote for Labour, despite the fact that the party polled its worst performance ever at the recent European elections. I wonder what drugs these people are on?
Iran reminds us even Britain
isn’t that bad
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the rather unkempt looking dictator of Iran who delights in rigging elections, killing protestors, torturing detractors, admiring mass murderer Vladimir Putin and wishes to nuke the west before North Korea can, reminds us all how even Gordon Brown has some way to go on the Richter Scale of evil leaders. I’m a Christian who has written many times here that Islam is not wicked – but my God, many of those who act in its name are.