Oh to be in England now that Labour has gone!

Anyone who has followed this column these last three years has heard, and perhaps even felt, my distress at the state of my dearly loved homeland. But at last the once Great Britain has finally freed itself from the yoke of bureaucratic, centralist Soviet style control after 13 years of government where only incompetence outdid corruption and left a nation virtually bankrupt and on the point of a very serious social breakdown in many areas.

This must sound one-sided and harsh but it is, nevertheless, an accurate and fair assessment of the ‘Cool Britannia’ brigade who promised so much, delivered so little and passed on the most poisonous of chalices to any incoming government in the proud history of those tiny islands that built the modern world.

Even at the end, this cancer of deceit, deception, class warfare and political corruption proved hard to extract from the corridors of power following an election result which was as wishy-washy and muddled as the world’s opinion has become of this famous empire race.

Some British people had thought that a hung parliament was a desirable result. It was not, and that became clear to all in the five days of uncertainty that followed polling day.

Initially, the election result seemed to have been unsatisfactory for all concerned. It appeared to have failed the nation, as there was no immediate strong and stable government to tackle Britain’s massive problems.

It was an even more depressing result for the Labour Party – delivering the worst loss of seats since 1931, the worst share of the vote since the famous Thatcher Conservative victory in 1983, over two million less votes than the Conservatives got and over 100 less seats in England. That last point meant that Mr Cameron was denied his outright win by Scottish and Welsh voters who can vote for the UK Parliament despite having their own assemblies where the English are not represented. Therefore, this was Labour’s most humbling defeat in its history and would have been even worse if it hadn’t been overseeing the changing of the electoral boundaries to their advantage over the last decade. This, in itself, is hardly a satisfactory state of affairs.

It was also a disappointing result for the Liberal Democrats. They had been expected to do so well after their leader’s strong showing in the first televised leaders’ debate. In the end they lost five seats and were reduced to 57 MPs as a result – although, again, hardly a fair reflection of their getting around 75 per cent of the Labour vote and yet some 200 seats less than them.

Nor was it a good result for the Conservatives. They gained more seats than in any general election since 1931, Mr Cameron achieved a bigger swing to his party than Mrs Thatcher had in 1979; he had also received a higher share of the vote than Tony Blair had in 2005 and on a larger turn out which traditionally favours Labour. Yet he had not won outright and some of his party blamed him and his campaign rather than the real culprit – a constituency make up that allowed Blair a 60-seat Labour majority on a smaller vote share than Cameron who was left 19 seats short of an outright win.

As we now know, five days of madness then took place, while the obscenity of a no result had the public furious with the outcome and all the people who had previously, and foolishly, said they favoured a hung parliament melting silently away.

However Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg seemed to accept the hands that the electorate had dealt them graciously. It mattered not that Cameron had to be now pragmatic while Clegg needed to be opportunistic. At some point, as everyone prayed, the national interest would have to be put first.

If it wasn’t, then it would not be too long before Labour’s reckless handling of the British economy would have the UK replacing Greece in the European condemned cell. That is the extent of the national debt crisis. Indeed, interest payments will have increased on that £1.5 trillion owed by the Labour government by nearly £2 million since you started reading this article – and all of that will be expended just to service the debt and therefore none of it can be spent on the very public services that Labour said it was so keen to protect. So when Brown announced over a decade ago, ‘Boom and bust are over for good’, he was right as he had replaced that with boom and totally bankrupt.

Therefore, it was completely necessary that the negotiators for Messrs Cameron and Clegg set about creating a coalition manifesto that all wings of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties might support, however suspiciously, and that might enable Britain to have a five-year government of acceptable majority and strong complementary policies. It was evident to all but the most partisan and silly that this was the minimum that Britain needed if it was to have any chance of making it through the harsh realities it must now face as a price it must pay for Labour’s lack of good economic and social husbandry.

So, in the end, this may not be the government that anyone voted for but it is, thanks to an unfair constituency make up and the people’s choice, the government that the British have got.

This government is a broad church that commanded nearly 60 per cent of the votes cast by the people on 6th May. It has said it will stay until 7 May 2015 – which gives certainty and enough time to let the painful decisions so badly needed in order to repair both the economy and the broken social structure of the country take hold and produce results.

Its new manifesto is surprisingly cohesive and with five Liberal appointments in a Cabinet of 23, it reflects a genuine attempt to share power and make this coalition work.

The danger to the new government will not come initially from the Labour Party in opposition, which is defeated, discredited and now distracted by a leadership contest, but from the far right of the Tory Party and the far left of the Liberal Democrats whose tribal instincts will resent the presence of the other in the same government. This, and the fact that some Tory MPs will no doubt be resentful that junior ministerial posts, which might have gone to them, will now go to Liberal Democrats, presents the immediate threat.

Nevertheless, this remains the most courageous, sensible and completely necessary experiment in recent British political history. This is supposed to be grown-up politics working in practice. I believe the actions of Cameron and Clegg have been brave, progressive and right, and that the very least their tribal MPs and the wider British nation might do is to give these young men of better moral stature and vision than the outgoing Labour Party, a decent chance and their best wishes for they will need both. We all know that it is going to be a hard road ahead.

The New Labour arrogance still has them thinking that the eyes of the world are on them. They are not – for Brown and his chums are now yesterday’s men. Oh to be in England now that Labour has gone.

The real New Labour legacy

So 13 years have passed since the Labour propaganda machine had Cherie Blair answering her front door in her short nightdress to receive flowers while, a few hours later, Downing Street was lined with flag-waving adoring fans of the incoming new Premier.

People with a grain of common sense or even a sense of history could see immediately then that New Labour were brash, arrogant, incompetent, unprofessional, unable to organise a piss up in a brewery and probably corrupt as well. And at no time over the next 13 years did these people disappoint.

This week the new British Premier was gracious when he said that Labour had left Britain a more open society at home and a more giving one abroad.

That was kind. However, this is the real Blair/Brown legacy:

1. A United Kingdom devolved but aborted stillborn parliamentary system, which is outrageously unfair on the English in general, and political rivals in particular.

2. A completely illogical reform of the House of Lords – other than the resultant ability to silence critics of Labour’s own political agenda.

3. An arrogant disregard for Parliament and its traditions.

4. A disgraceful expenses scandal by MPs from all parties but led in the main by Labour’s bad example and lack of control.

5. Government scandals of every complexion from consistently lying to the House of Commons, accepting cash for honours, seeking to smear opponents from either within their own party or the Opposition, theft of lottery cash, poor ministerial personal conduct and forced resignations, continual abuse of privileges and cynically burying bad news in a perpetual desire to deceive the public – to name but a few.

6. Inventing a dossier that basically lied to the British people in order to take the nation to war because Mr Blair felt it was right to do so but lacked the necessary evidence to prove his case – so he invented it.

7. Selling the nation’s gold reserves at the bottom of the market (it was perhaps ironic that gold reached an all time record high on the day Gordon Brown resigned) and then squandering the resulting cash on worsening public services. This is an area, despite huge investment, where Britain still trails most of Europe after a decade of simply throwing taxpayers’ cash at problems and issuing target dictates which only made matters worse.

8.Wrecking the world’s most enviable pension market just as the baby boomers were reaching retirement. This was done by virtue of a stealth tax, which meant that all pensions were subject to double tax.

8. Committing British troops to war without investing to equip them properly and thereby causing many completely unnecessary deaths.

10. Allowing the social structure of broken Britain to get worse year on year by throwing money around instead of self-betterment incentives. Therefore, failing to understand that ‘giving a man a fish feeds him for a day whereas teaching a man to fish feeds him for life’. As a result, Britain tops just about every despicable league table in Europe, and some British families exist where no one works and no one can remember when anyone ever did.

11. Giving Britain a Human Rights Act that protects terrorists, murderers, paedophiles, muggers and burglars while exposing the frailties of the poor, the weak, the old and the vulnerable and failing to protect them from these wicked people.

12. Failing to regulate the banks properly.

13. Encouraging the British public to continually borrow cash to support a Labour economy that survived by being driven by 75 per cent High Street consumer spend which was financed not by wealth creation but by borrowing against a housing boom which is now over. As a result, the British now have more personal debt than the rest of Europe added together.

14. Blowing simply unaffordable amounts of money on a Soviet style central bureaucracy that was as inefficient as it was wasteful. This, along with other horribly ill-thought out projects, has resulted in a national debt that is nearly twice the percentage of GDP as was that that resulted in the IMF having to bail out the Labour government in 1976.

15. And, from a Labour point of view, the worst point – over their 13 years in government the gap between the rich and the poor is now wider than at any time in our modern history.

This is the true result of 13 years of a Labour government. This was a government that seemed to insist that if you were a female, a lawyer, a Scot or a gay you were welcome into the cabinet but then failed to ask if you had any ability or experience to do the job.

RIP New Labour, you were more slick but a lot less honest than Old Labour – for the rest of the people in Britain the New Labour experience is ended and the nightmare is over.