Man in a Shed: The phoney war for Labour Deputy Leader

Thursday, June 08, 2006

The phoney war for Labour Deputy Leader

Who wants to be deputy leader of a major political party ? Usually only those who have given up on ambition. You're better of with a major portfolio in government the the Treasury or Foreign Office.

So why are so many people campaigning for the Labour Deputy Leadership at the moment ?

My guess is that its because you can campaign - without direct disloyalty to Blair. Canvassing can now be undertaken under the cover of positioning for the Deputy Leadership. A campaign could then transform very easily into one for the Leadership just by removing the word Deputy.

More and more I think Gordon Brown blew it in May. If he had acted - no one would have opposed him. Now they are organising to do just that. Everyone is grabbing for the purple of a dying empire.

No comments:

Post a Comment

The pound in your pocket

"We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists." James Callaghan

“The trouble with theoretical economists is that they don't understand that when you have a deficit, you can only finance it by borrowing, and you've got to persuade people that it's worth lending money to you and that they'll get their money back... there's no way of escaping it.” Dennis Healey during the 1976 Stirling Crisis.

"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens ... Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of over-turning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." John Maynard Keynes, 1920.

"To preserve [the people's] independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude." Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States of America,1801-1809.

Inflation is taxation without legislation .. Milton Friedman