More bollocks from Brown, bias from the BBC and some advice for David Cameron

The BBC report with a straight face that: "Gordon Brown promises hi-tech 'efficiency savings' " With the 'news' that

"Gordon Brown has said technology such as crime maps and online school reports will cut bureaucracy, as Labour attempts to halve the Budget deficit.

Ahead of Wednesday's pre-Budget report, the PM said "efficiency savings" would help to save £12bn over four years - £3bn more than planned in the Budget. "

Leaving aside the fact that I am sure I have heard this sort of promise of Labour "efficiency savings" before with little or no fulfilment, what is this conflation? The story is about £3 billion of extra savings over the Budget, but let's be generous and say it is really about the £12 billion; that's 12 billion of an annual deficit of £175 billion, so this announcement addresses under 7% of the deficit and it's best not to consider the percentage of the National Debt, oh OK it's about 1.5%. Looked at another way, £12 billion is about 2% of Government expenditure... Looked at any way it's of no consequence, it's the sort of figure that could be found in measurement errors accross all Government spending and yet the BBC present it as major news.

The contrary views are left to end and are reported as claims not facts.

"The (Conservative) party has also called for a moratorium on all government computer projects, claiming Labour has spent £100bn on IT since 1997 and that contracts worth another £70bn are due to be renewed or commissioned in the next two years."

Are the Conservative Party's figures correct, if so why does the BBC not say so?


Gordon Brown's announcements more and more resemble the sort of tractor statistics announced by the Soviet Union in days of old. The figures are always better, the figures will always get even better in the future but all the time the figures get further and further from reality. The other comparison, a comparison that is increasingly easy to make is with George Orwell's 1984:

"But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry of Plenty's figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connexion with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connexion that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head. For example, the Ministry of Plenty's forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at one-hundred-and-forty-five million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than one-hundred-and-forty-five millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain."

We are witnessing a Labour government that has run out of ideas and money but still wants and expects to rule over us (for our own good) and thanks to the unfairness of the current electoral boundaries, the expansion of vote-rigging via the postal vote and a supportive BBC may well still do so.

We have as Prime Minister a man whose grasp on reality and truth seem at best tenuous but who still manages to keep his grasping hands on the instruments of power because of a complicit Labour party, a compliant BBC and a cowardly Conservative party. David Cameron and the rest of the Conservative leadership need to attack Gordon Brown for what he is and what he has done to this country. The attack needs to be brutal and honest and it needs to articulate what so many of the people of this country think and feel - the Labour party have fucked up and they need to be held to account. David Cameron needs to stop being statesmanlike and hold Gordon Brown to account for his lies, his incompetence and his destruction of Britain. PMQs on Wednesday would be a good place to start this new phase of the fight agaonst Labour misgovernment.