Gordon Clown .Com

The Daily Mail has unearthed a 200 page pamphlet produced by Gordon in his socialist student days, giving parasites a load of helpful hints and tips about how to sponge a living from state benefits. These days, Gordon has translated his ideas into a reality with the highest number of people off work on sickness benefit ever seen.

It is not a leaked copy of Gordon Brown’s manifesto in his campaign to succeed Tony Blair, but a 200-page booklet produced as a socialist student leader in the Seventies, long before “stealth taxes” were invented.

However, cynics will say the seeds of the welfare State boom under Labour can be seen in the document edited by 22-year-old firebrand Brown when Rector of Edinburgh University.

Entitled Alternative Edinburgh, it provides a revealing insight into his attitudes to the State and the law in its suggestions of ways to live for free.

“If you’re British and can give an address, free money is available from social security, basic £5.80 per week,” it says.

“Social and medical benefits are your right, not charity hand-outs, so never be reticent about claiming them. For whatever the reason the so-called welfare State was brought into being, it can and must be used to its full extent.”

Young Brown had his own “five-year plan”: a council takeover of shops, pubs and cafes, a crackdown on car owners and a 50 per cent rise in local taxes to help the working class.

Some may say little has changed.

A taste of things to come once Gordon moves nextdoor to become Prime Minister, perhaps?

Happy Easter, Gordon!  As people all over Britain unwrap their chocolate eggs this morning, Gordon is discovering his very own sickly surprise as a Times/YouGov poll reveals that 57% of people think he is unfit to lead the country, after the damaging pensions trickery was revealed last week.  Only 41% thought he was doing a good job as Chancellor, down from 51% in March.  Meanwhile, over half of those polled characterised Tony Blair as “out of touch, untrustworthy and overly concerned with spin”.

Finance minister Gordon Brown, overwhelming favorite to succeed Tony Blair as prime minister, suffered a blow on Sunday when an opinion poll showed more than half of Britons thought he was unfit to lead the country.

In another setback for Brown, a newspaper said there was growing pressure for another member of the cabinet to challenge the Chancellor of the Exchequer for the leadership of the Labour Party when Blair steps down.

Blair is widely expected to quit in June or July after a decade in office. With no serious challenger yet emerging, Brown has been seen as a virtually automatic choice to succeed Blair as party leader and prime minister.

But some Labour politicians doubt Brown’s leadership credentials and opinion polls show he would fare badly against David Cameron leader of the main opposition Conservatives.

The Sunday Times said only 27 percent of 2,218 people questioned in a YouGov poll thought Brown was fit to be prime minister after a row last week over his handling of pensions. Fifty-seven percent thought him unfit.

The poll showed Britons were losing faith in Brown’s stewardship of the economy — his strong point until now.

Forty-one percent thought Brown was doing a good job as finance minister, down from 51 percent in March.

Not great for Gordon.  Meanwhile, it seems a serious challenger in the upcoming leadership contest could be emerging as John Reid has revealed that he will back a David Miliband led challenge to Brown’s bid for Number 10.  Gordon was hoping for a clear run to nextdoor, but now it is becoming increasingly clear that he may face a full leadership campaign, with all the dirty dealing revelations that is likely to bring out into the open.

John Reid, the Home Secretary, will back a Labour leadership challenge by David Miliband in order to stop Gordon Brown taking over, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt.

If Mr Miliband does not stand, Mr Reid is even prepared to fight the Chancellor himself as a “last resort”, friends have disclosed.

The revelations are a huge setback for Mr Brown’s hopes of taking over from Tony Blair, almost certainly at the end of June, as smoothly as possible.

They also offer the starkest evidence of the seriousness of the split between the Chancellor and Cabinet ministers who want to preserve the Prime Minister’s political legacy.

Mr Reid’s intervention means that Mr Miliband, the Environment Secretary, who was on a family holiday in France last week, is under the most concentrated pressure he has yet faced to run against Mr Brown, the overwhelming bookmakers’ favourite to be the next prime minister.

Mr Reid, seen as a potential candidate until a series of -crises at the Home Office, has been tipped as likely to remain in his job under Mr Brown. But that now appears impossible with Mr Reid ready, according to his friends, to act as Mr Miliband’s “standard bearer” inside the Cabinet and even to stand himself if no other credible challenger enters the fray. The decision raises the prospect of a Miliband-Reid “dream ticket” trading on the Environment Secretary’s youth and the Home Secretary’s experience.

“John wants David to stand against Gordon,” said a close friend of Mr Reid. “He believes he will do so - and that if he does, he can win. It will take balls to stand. But there is no use saying ‘wait till next time’, because there may not be a next time. John is making it clear he does not want to stand himself. He will be 60 next month. But if nobody else does, he will, as a last resort.”

The developments make it certain, for the first time, that a Cabinet-level challenger will declare he or she will fight Mr Brown. Any candidate must first obtain the signatures of 44 MPs, but friends of the Home Secretary say that would be no problem for either Mr Miliband or Mr Reid, such is the growing disillusionment about the Chancellor among backbenchers.

In recent weeks, according to senior Blairites, the party’s private polling has shown the Chancellor’s popularity falling badly among voters - particularly after his 2p cut in income tax was denounced as a Budget “con trick” by the Tories and he was found to have acted against warnings from his civil servants in his decision to launch a “raid” on pension funds in 1997 which has cost them £100 million.

Ministers close to Mr Blair also believe the next Labour leader should be English. They suggested that Mr Blair feared that Mr Brown would “wreck” New Labour’s achievements.

The pain continues for Gordon today as readers of the Telegraph are asked to comment on how the Great Pension Robbery Of 1997 will affect them.  The sentiment is clear for all to see, and it’s not pretty.  It must be plain to all but the most backward members of the general public now that Brown has created a crisis waiting to happen by raiding our future to pay for his.  The Labour Party will surely soon realise Gordon is a lame duck candidate and a non-starter as Labour leader and Prime Minister.  Who knows what damage he could do if he ever makes it as far as nextdoor?

Some of the comments by Telegraph readers are shown below to give an impression of just how anti-Gordon the public is becoming:

Mr Brown should face criminal charges for stealing £100bn of pension funds from us over the last 10 years.
He is a duplicitous serial offender from whom we have no protection.

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I am age 68 and it looks as if I will need to work to age 75 in order to erase the damage made to my pension by Mr Brown, I ask the people of England, do we want this man in charge of us ?. I think not.

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The RECENT REVELATIONS with the release of the ’suppressed’ treasury documents show just how completely Gordon Brown is unfit for high office. I had always assumed that his disasterous decision to abolish the tax relief on pension fund investments was due to incompetence. Now I realise just how callous the man is. Along with millions of others my pension fund will be worth at best half of what I had expected when originally planning my retirement. The number of families destined to have a much poorer quality of life in retirement can directly lay the blame on one person. Adding ’salt’ to the wound is the realisation that his generous pension postion is not only ‘ringfenced’ but will be paid for by his many victims.

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This is a disgrace. He ignored advice and has ruined, or will be responsible for the ruin, of the lives of nearly everyone in the country except for foreign immigrants. In better times this would have been a resignation issue. I expect we wont even get an apology. Blame the CBI? Like all New Labour they blame everyone but themselves and take responsibility for nothing.

The above are just a handful of the 250 comments that the Telegraph website has received on this issue at the time of writing, universally condeming Gordon Brown for his out-and-out theivery.

Gordon’s “hand-in-the-till” tactic of abolishing tax credits on dividends in his 1997 budget seems to be coming back to haunt him 10 years down the line.  The CBI have complained that Brown was warned at the time that such a stunt would cause a £100 billion black hole in pensions, and that this prediction appears to be coming true.

Gordon Brown’s decision to abolish tax credits on dividends was a “misjudgment”, according to Richard Lambert, director-general of the CBI employers’ body, who said on Sunday that the move had weakened occupational pension provision.

Mr Lambert, a former member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, said the scrapping of tax relief in Mr Brown’s July 1997 Budget had made “a significant contribution to the weakening of the country’s occupational pensions platform”.

“There was a misjudgment by the chancellor,” he told the Financial Times. The CBI had privately warned the Treasury at the time the move was “not a good idea”.

The Tories have claimed that Brown deliberately attempted to bury the bad news of the release of the documents under the Freedom Of Information Act by releasing them just after the start of the commons easter recess:

There were suggestions, denied by Treasury officials, that the chancellor might have been seeking to prevent a more damaging disclosure later - possibly in the middle of the contest for the Labour leadership that is expected to see him succeed Tony Blair.

Another sly piece of trickery from the tricky sly chancellor we have come to know.  But the real bad news for Gordon came today when it was revealed that he could face a Treasury Committee enquiry into why he chose to ignore the warnings and push ahead with the tax rises anyway:

A possible investigation by the influential Commons Treasury committee into one of the most controversial actions of his decade as Chancellor threatens embarrassing publicity during his leadership campaign this summer.

The Tory MP Michael Fallon, deputy chairman of the Treasury Select Committee, said yesterday that he will propose an investigation into Mr Brown’s 1997 decision, which ultimately cost pensions an estimated £100 billion and contributed to the collapse of hundreds of schemes.

Mr Brown could be summoned to testify to the Committee on why he went ahead with the tax change, despite explicit warnings from Treasury economists that it would result in a huge chunk being taken out of retirement savings.

Labour sources acknowledged last night that any suggestion Mr Brown was personally responsible could further dent his appeal at a time when polls already suggest he is less popular than David Cameron, the Tory leader.

John McFall, the Labour MP who chairs the committee, said he would decide on the matter in the coming weeks, but pressure is mounting at Westminster for Mr Brown to answer for his abolition of the dividend tax credit.

Things are slowly falling into place ahead of the Labour leadership election, which seems likely to prove a fairly rough ride for Gordon.

Gordon’s forecasts in his past budgets have been exposed as a sham today, the lies laid bare for all to see by Liam Halligan.  Gordon has borrowed from the future simply to buy his way into Number 10, and seeming has got away with it so far.  But the true cost will only become clear several years after he has departed from the Treasury.

I worry that the Chancellor is heavily relying on our “future” to secure his “future”. He is chalking up massive, multi-billion-pound liabilities, the vast majority of them hidden from the national accounts, which taxpayers will have to meet only once Brown has disappeared from the political scene, his prime ministerial ambitions fulfilled.

In 2003, when we went into deficit, the Chancellor said we would be out of the red by 2004. When 2004 arrived, and the deficit had deepened, he said a surplus would be achieved, instead, by 2006. Well, here in 2007, we are still in deficit. And - surprise, surprise - Brown again predicts a swift turnaround.

This Chancellor often declares that he has “proved independent forecasters wrong”. It is true that the economy has grown quite strongly in recent years - and often by more than non-Treasury economists have predicted.

When growth is stronger than expected, though, tax receipts should be higher and spending lower, meaning that Brown’s fiscal forecasts should also be better than expected. But in each of the past seven years the Chancellor has ended up with a bigger-than-forecast fiscal hole - meaning higher borrowing too.

In this year’s Budget, Brown said he would need to borrow £118bn between 2007/08 and 2010/11. In his 2006 budget, he forecast borrowing of only £102bn during the same period.

So, in a single year, Brown has quietly increased taxpayers’ future liabilities by £16bn. Paying that off will cost us the equivalent of an extra penny on income tax over the four years during which the extra borrowing will take place.

Peer into Brown’s “off-balance-sheet” liabilities and the numbers get scarier still. Chief among these is the future bill for the final salary pensions of state workers.

The Chancellor’s public sector recruitment campaign means the eventual cost of these pensions - all of which will be met by taxpayers - has ballooned in recent years. The latest official figures, relating to March 2005, put the bill at £530bn - bigger than the entire national debt.

Given all those extra state workers, such pension costs reached an estimated £640bn in 2006 and £685bn today. So again, Brown has jacked up taxpayers’ liabilities over the last year - this time by £45bn.

Then there is the controversial Private Finance Initiative - much of which, again, is not on the Government’s books. Brown has approved a slew of new PFI deals over the past 12 months, increasing our future liabilities by no less than £24bn.

So, a chancellor who last month claimed - amid much fanfare - that his fiscal rules had “once again been met” has, in one year, added a total of at least £85bn to the bill we taxpayers face.

In recent years, Brown has used our money in a crude attempt to spend his way to popularity. In my view, it is a popularity he will never achieve - not least because he consistently tries to fool us.

He tells us a tax rise is a tax cut. He tells us a deficit is a surplus. The British public are not stupid. Yet, as his final Budget shows, this Chancellor treats us as such.

Lies upon lies from Gordon, year after year.  And yet it seems some people still believe he is a prudent chancellor and a viable option for future prime minister!  But as we have seen recently, it seems that none of Gordons lies can remain uncovered forever.

Gordon has been desperately trying to keep under the radar this week, as his Budget of a week ago appears to have been exposed as a complete sham and nothing but a pack of spin designed to fool the electorate.  And then there was the horrendous nose-picking incident, the video of which has now had well over 70,000 viewings on YouTube.

But it seems the press just can’t keep away as it was revealed today that child poverty has begun to increase again after almost a decade of steady declines.  This will come as bad news to Gordon who has a target of reducing it by 1 million by 2010.

Opposition politicians and poverty campaigners said a core government policy was failing and warned that its 2010 target could be missed by a million children, in spite of measures announced by Gordon Brown in last week’s budget.

Official figures showed relative poverty - those living on less than 60% of average incomes - rose to 12.7 million people in 2005-06, from 12.1 million the year before.It brings to an end the longest period of falling poverty since records began in 1961. The number of children living in poor families rose by 200,000 to 3.8 million.

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Mr Brown announced £1bn more in tax credits for poorer families in last week’s budget. Experts think that could lift 200,000 children out of poverty, but that would only be a fifth of the way to the 2010 target of one million. The IFS says the government would need to spend £4bn extra by 2010 on help for poor families to make its target achievable but Mr Murphy said the new strategy was about getting more parents into some of the 600,000 vacant jobs available. “People should never be better off on benefit.” The shadow chancellor, George Osborne, said the “depressing” figures showed “that poverty is increasing, inequality is rising, and the incomes of the poorest fifth are in decline. Gordon Brown made tackling poverty the great promise of his chancellorship, and yet he leaves the Treasury with poverty rising.” The Liberal Democrat work and pensions spokesman, David Laws, said: “These figures are dreadful for the government, with child poverty rising to almost a third of all UK children. Poverty in Britain is increasing again, and social mobility seems to have been falling. The government’s ambition to cut child poverty now looks in tatters.”

Not much good news around for Gordon at the moment, it seems.

A picture tells a thousand words, and plastered across the papers today were pictures of the Iron Chancellor filmed in Parliament sitting behind Tony, picking his nose! Impressing voters with his stealthy sneakiness (much like the tax cut cons in the Budget), but no doubt disgusting them at the same time, Gordon sat there and openly committed the foul act not once, but twice! Seeing is believing of course, so if you feel the need the video can be found here.

Massive headline on the front of today’s Daily Express: Now The Big Tax Backlash. Not great news for Gordon - he’s gone from hero to zero in a matter of days. The cheers from the Labour benches on Wednesday as he announced his 2p tax cut now a distant memory, and replaced by the jeers and groans of the media and public at large over his con attempt gone wrong. Exposed as a liar and a spinner, robbing from the poor to give to the rich, all in a desperate attempt to win a few lousy votes.

Instead of a tax giveaway, taxes will go up by the equivalent of £100 a year for every household in Britain.

As the backlash began against the Chan­cellor’s blatant deception, experts poring over the Budget small print discovered that Mr Brown is raising taxation by £2billion a year by 2010. And at least one in five families will be worse off as a result.

Mr Brown posed as a tax cutter. But as the Daily Express made clear yesterday, his 2p reduction in income tax was more than offset by other tax rises.

The deception led some to question whether the Chancellor had made the biggest blunder of his career and is losing his political grip.

Surely there can no longer be any question - whatever “grip” Gordon may have had at some point has long since deserted him. Since it has become clear that he is unable to work with others due to his numerous mental defects and attitude problems, who knows how long he can last in number 10?

With today’s budget, Gordon has tricked the public into believing he’s cut taxes, when in fact he hasn’t. In fact, the removal of the 10% tax band and the cut of 2% on the next band up will hurt low earners, and only benefits high earners very slightly. But as ever with Gordon, the sting is in the spin, and the BBC amongst others have fallen for it hook line and sinker with headlines such as “Gordon Cuts Tax by 2p”.

One interesting thing about this measure is that, like a lot of measures in today’s budget, it doesn’t come into effect until next year.  This means, presumably, that whoever succeeds Gordon as chancellor in the next few months won’t actually need to announce a budget for a few years.  Gordon seems to be seeking to ensure his rules are followed even after he’s left office…
Other than that it was a fairly dull budget, unsurprisingly as Gordon is desperate to maintain the status quo to ease his passage into the house next door. Hopes for changes to Stamp Duty and Inheritance Tax went unfulfilled, and fiscal drag has been allowed to drag on in almost all cases, apart of course from the areas such as beer and fags where fiscal drag would be bad news for the treasury’s coffers.

Desperate to appear to be doing his bit for the green cause, Brown raised road tax for 4×4 “gas guzzlers” to £400, completely missing the point - as do most politicians - that global warming is far too large an issue to be solved simply through a few punative taxes on a small proportion of the public, and needs stronger measures to be affected at the multinational business level. Gordon took care of big business of course with a bit of corporation tax cutting - but simply passed it on to tax hikes for small businesses. Another nail in the coffin for entrepreneurship in Britain should ensure the ongoing brain drain continues.

Seems as if Gordon is coming under heavy fire again today, in the lead up to his big budget speech tomorrow.  And as the country prepares to breathe a collective sigh of relief that the “Iron Chancellor” won’t be at the treasury much longer to do any more damage, there are plenty who can’t resist sticking the knife in.

Not exactly surprising too, given that inflation appears to be spiralling ever more out of control as RPI hit 4.6% this month, it’s highest in over 11 years, and further out of kilter with interest rates than we have ever seen before.  Even the fiddled CPI measure jumped to 2.8%, despite the fact that it now includes such ridiculous items as mobile phone ringtones, presumably because the Office for National Statistics expects them to come down in price soon.

Edmund Conway in the Telegraph warns of the danger ahead as Gordon’s tax burden continues to shoot up, killing Britain’s international competetiveness:

But the most worrying accusation levelled at the Chancellor is that, as part of this fiscal expansion, he has clogged up the arteries of commerce with unnecessary and excessive taxes and regulations.

The tax burden recently soared to the highest level since the mid-1980s, while businesses calculate that since 1998 the cumulative cost of government red tape has climbed to £55bn.

Significantly, these changes have come at precisely the time when almost every other major economy is doing exactly the opposite. Ireland has boosted its growth and wealth dramatically by cutting taxes and regulations on businesses, and even countries such as Germany that are associated with high rates are slimming down more than Britain.

In short, under Mr Brown, the UK has gone from being a relatively low-tax economy to being a high-tax economy.

The effects of this change take years to pan out: companies gradually realise that they would be better off building their next factory in another country, foreign investment slowly dries up, economic growth slows and unemployment rises.

Worryingly, the first of these things is already happening. A recent survey from the CBI showed that one in five top UK companies is considering moving abroad.

The Institute of Directors, the accountancy firm Ernst & Young and the think tank Reform all warned recently that Britain was losing its competitiveness, and fast.

Even more surprisingly, perhaps, is the scathing attack launched on Brown by Lord Turnbull, Gordon’s “Sir Humphrey”  - former permanent secretary to the treasury.  Gordon, he says, has a “Stalinist ruthlessness” and treats colleagues with “more or less complete contempt”.

He cannot allow them any serious discussion about priorities. His view is that it is just not worth it and ‘they will get what I decide’. And that is a very insulting process,” Lord Turnbull said.

“Do those ends justify the means? It has enhanced Treasury control, but at the expense of any government cohesion and any assessment of strategy. You can choose whether you are impressed or depressed by that, but you cannot help admire the sheer Stalinist ruthlessness of it all.”

“The chancellor has a Macavity quality. He is not there when there is dirty work to be done.”

The article’s author even goes so far as to suggest that Gordon might not actually be a very good prime minister, given these qualities!

Lord Turnbull’s comments will raise fresh doubts about whether Mr Brown is prime ministerial material and will be ammunition for the Tories at a time when the opinion polls suggest the public is wary of Mr Brown.

While senior Labour figures admire the Chancellor’s intellectual ability and his political authority they are worried about his ability to run a team and to delegate.