Yet another reminder

As we get closer and closer to the final countdown, everybody - but everybody - has a view on who we should (and, more often, shouldn't) be voting for.

Justin McKeating over at Chicken Yoghurt has just posted one of the best pieces CF has seen for a long, long time, on why we shouldn't vote for more of the same, more of Gordon Brown. Over to Justin:

"The trouble is, you can spend so much of your time worrying about the theoretical horrors of a Tory government that you forget the practical horrors of a New Labour one.

"Complicity in torture. Chemical weapons in Iraq. The children of refugee’s developing post-traumatic stress disorder in internment camps. Women who clean the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s office living on lentils to pay for a school uniform. Should I go on?

"You listen to Brown make his ‘barnstorming‘ speech to Citizens UK with its ‘compassion’, ‘goodwill’, ‘fairness’, ‘duty’, ‘friendship’, ‘justice’, ‘dignity’ and ‘good society’, and you wonder how we reconcile those with the above list of grotesques. I’ve said it before and I’ll damn well say it again, Brown invokes the decency with which he says he was brought up and you wonder what the hell happened to it. The rhetoric is a long way behind the reality.

"I don’t think he’s that good an actor which rules out pathological lying. Look at this letter from Brown to Open Kingdom on the subject of the detention of child refugees. As someone with a horrified fascination with what our so-called civilized society does to these children, I could spend all day pointing out what I’ll charitably call errors in his letter, much of it contradicted by many an unread and unreported study.

"Brown clearly believes what he’s saying and writing (or written for him), so is he deluded, in denial or so insulated from the real world by his handlers that he has no idea of the terrible things his government does in his name? His letter to Open Kingdom makes me think he either has the facts but doesn’t wish to admit them or someone is keeping the facts from him. Does he close his eyes and ears or does someone blindfold him and cover his lugs for him?

"Whatever the reasons it’s no way to run a country while laying claim to the virtues of compassion and decency. Brown’s running a government that’s yet to find a minimum standard of human decency let alone the lofty peaks of sainthood he tries to scale with his cheap talk.

‘If you fight for fairness, you will always find in me a friend, a partner and a brother,’ said Brown in his speech yesterday. Reading that next to an account of a child refugee screaming in the night at Yarl’s Wood makes my lunch rise. (Brown was non-commital at best when question about child detention. He ‘wanted no child to suffer’. Which is nice.) It reminds me of what Jamie Kenny said about George Best when the old bastard died:

I’m a football fan, but fuck the football too. It meant nothing from the moment he first raised his hand to his wife. If he could have avoided living like a swine by staying in Belfast and working at Tesco’s, then he should have done that.

"I’m a fairness fan, but fuck the minimum wage too (wave it at the family living on lentils). Brown’s ‘achievements’ meant nothing from the moment that child first started to scream."


Very well said, that man.

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