Oh bugger...

You don't have one. Look at the electoral rules.

All this "change" shit which Brown was spouting yesterday is bollocks. Just before he took over, he called for London's transport system to be good enough to be fit for the Olympics in 2012. Unfortunately, he was the one that fucked it up in the first place by forcibly hiving off the tube to profit-grabbing private companies just before Livingstone was first elected Mayor. I suppose the one 'silver lining' if you could call it that is that, unlike Blair, Brown doesn't have himself looking over his shoulder brooding that the wrong man is in power and that it should be him. Whether that makes any difference as far as the rest of us is concerned, time will only tell.

Perhaps this talk of change is as close as we'll get to saying that 'we woz wrong'.

I pray for a more insightful and pragmatic Health Secretary. Hewitt seems to have achieved little beyond antagonising large chunks of the workforce.

She brought a whole added dimension to the concept of being patronising. Grrrrr......

I suspect we're going to have to get used to these 'changes'.

Brown and Darling are both of the "Dour Scot, tighten your belt" brigade. The best medicine tastes nasty and all that.

Brown has been one of the luckiest chancellors in living memory and despite drawing in oodles more personal tax via various nefarious means, selling off large amounts of our gold at a long term low price etc. etc. has failed to improve the lot of most people and services beyond what would expect over the last ten years (in fact, we are are one of very few economies where standard of living has retreated and relative taxation has increased over this decade). They are the types who go "by the book" and utilise pre-determined means to achieve their ends and if those ends aren't achieved (because the world is a changing place and they tend not to take account of that), they'll simply state, ah, that wasn't supposed to happen but it's not their fault, it's the rest fo the world...

He seems to think that simply throwing money at the problem and placing ever higher levels of 'monitoring' and 'reporting' on everything provides the solution rather than actually correcting the root problems. In reality he is invariably delaying the inevitable problems and perhaps creating a bigger bang as a result. This though is not only his fault, most government departments have become ever more woefully inefficient and overstaffed where once again it seems to be more about job creation as opposed to completing the job.

The populace of this country is riding the crest of huge personal debt to maintain their standard of living, inflation is set to rise further, thereby as are interest rates, so export's are looking doomed for the forseeable plus the increasing tax burden and threatened rate hikes means people may well spend less, dramaticlaly slowing the economy, threatening the employment of those people with the high debts and so on... I don't envy Darling, he's going to have to put in place some pretty unpopular policy, or be left in the shit, or ride his luck until the next election when it will become SEP (someone else's problem). Because I don't think he's clever enough to sort it out.

I hope for two things. 1. He proves me wrong and he brings his sense of responsibility to the fore and instills in his cabinet some kind of genuine and combined desire to stop us being woefully poor at everything we touch, from the Olympic badge, through education to foreign (military) policy and brings a bit of statesmanship back to the position he has inherited. 2.He becomes a little more isolationist in policy (still keep an eye on what's happening around the world and how this influences the UK but perhaps stop poking around overseas so much). I suspect I will be disappointed.

Be afraid, be very afraid...

Change is a wonderful thing - it's a latest buzzword along with globalisation, the global economy and global warming - I've decided it is best to ignore any sentence that has the word global in it.

Back to change though - why is it a good idea to change something that's broken for something else that's broken - doesn't make any sense to me. How about repairing and improving things or is that too radical - after all didn't somebody say things can only get better.

I think GB is one of those people who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing - it shows just how mediocre the powers-that-be are when the best they can come up with is Darling-Brown. They really aren't inspiring figures like Wat Tyler and Guy Fawkes.

Who wrote Brown's pathetic speech - did he do it himself or pay somebody (if so I'm sure he'll ask for a refund).

BTW is A.Darling related to the Captain Darling who fought with Blackadder in the first world war?

Laugh I thought I'd never start.

As a wise poet once said The future's so bright I gotta wear shades

Coffee Darling?