Man in a Shed: David Cairns

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

"He has been our worst Prime Minister ever - both in respects of the nation and the party"

This is brutal, but realistic self criticism just posted on Labour Home. Couldn't disagree with a word of it - except I think we all deserve a general election, not just members of the Labour party.

David Cairns MP resigns

For the Union Tue Sep 16, 2008 at 03:04:55 PM

It was whispered, now it is official - a minister of state has put on record his view that under Gordon Brown, our party is doomed to electoral disaster and backbench wilderness.

Brown has to go....we are now officially in damage limitation mode. He has been our worst Prime Minister ever - both in respects of the nation and the party.

No charisma, no vision, no mandate. It is time to start afresh with an election - (something our party is becoming worryingly averse to.)

However I don't think Brown is finished...

Further:

"He's so unpopular that no one can remember a time since Neville Chamberlain, after Hitler invaded Norway, that anyone was so unpopular. And we can't allow that situation to continue." George Howarth MP [Labour former minister]

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