Friday 26 February 2010







The Great Clunking Fist

‘Gordon Brown's rages are... deeply destructive to good governance, and are a key to understanding why this man's government has been so unco-ordinated, unhappy and ineffectual in so many ways’ writes Jenni Russell in the Guardian. It’s well worth reading.

But it goes a lot deeper than just the personal fear that paralyses good government. It creates a paranoid, inward-looking and self-important elite unable to gain true perspective. Groupthink is the result, where individual creativity, uniqueness, and independent thinking are lost in the pursuit of a bunker mentality. All advantages of reasonable balance in choice and thought disappear.

And then we wonder why they failed to foresee the financial meltdown caused by the credit crunch, the longest and deepest recession in eighty years, MP’s expenses, the 10p tax disaster, or the deeply de-humanising effects of centrally imposed, top-down targets that distort our public services. And all of these in just the last two years of Labour government.