January 2009 Archives

IF somebody asked you to come up with a scheme to cause trouble in Northern Ireland you could not have done better than to propose compensation for the relatives of terrorists who were killed while attempting to slaughter innocent members of the public.

So just how the Consultative Group on the Past managed to convince itself that this offensive, barmy idea would help bring "closure" to the province escapes any form of explanation.

It has instead, and predictably, created more hostility and division than any other single issue since the signing of the peace agreement.

Equally baffling is why the Group believes that paying blood money to the relatives of murders is acceptable if the pay outs are called "recognition" instead of "compensation".

The idea is, of course, that a similar amount of "recognition" should be paid to the families of the victims. Which, in itself, seems to this outsider, to be patronising and cheap.

What is twelve grand supposed to represent in terms of the loss of both parents or a husband or a child? What are the recipients supposed to do with the money? Go on a cruise and forget about their loss?

Presumably all those relatives of the victims who sought a cash payment have already received one under the Criminal Compensation scheme.

It is yet possible that Prime Minister Gordon Brown, having studied the full report of CGP may decide to ditch these proposed paltry "recognition" payments altogether. Failing that, there is one way of demonstrating the contempt with which this foolish plan deserves to be treated.

All of the 3,000 or so families affected could write to the leader of the Consultative group, the former Church of Ireland Primate Lord Eames, and tell him what to do with his "recognition".

Who knows? It might actually serve to bring both sides a little closure together.

Five days on and the most revealing move made by President Obama is still what he did the day before he took the oath of office.

He painted a wall in a centre for homeless teenagers.

This tells us a lot about the priorities of a man.

Facing an economic collapse described by his own advisers as "the mother of all crises", smouldering ruins in the Middle East, global warming and fighting in two wars he still found time to take off his jacket and pick up a paint roller.

Clearly Mr Obama puts great store by his media image.

In his book, the Audacity of Hope, he writes: "I am who the media says I am. I say what they say I say. I become who they say I've become".

But, of course, the newspapers and the TV stations can only report what he allows them to see and hear.

And this is the man who used to be called Barry until deciding that the more exotic form of his name might go down better, given his future plans.

This is the father who, when the family moved to Washington, insisted on being photographed taking his daughters to school. But who had, in fact, been at home for just 10 days in the whole of the previous year.

This is the unreformed cigarette smoker who is sure to never be seen smoking.

So who it is that has moved into the White House we can only wait and see.

Is it, as so many seem to believe, the politician who can solve the crisis, create global peace and rebuild the world?

Or is it simply the decorator who is capable of nothing more than getting himself photographed giving what already exists a quick coat of paint?

When the Jonathan Ross show returns on Friday Tom Cruise will be the star guest, definitely.

We know this thanks to a deluge of carefully engineered on-off stories about the show in which the American film star was first thinking of appearing, then reconsidering, then definitely not appearing and then ...you get the picture.

Of course Tom Cruise is going to appear. He's got a film to promote. And he knows that the return of the Ross show is certain to command one of the biggest TV audiences of the year.

Which is bit odd. Since it's reappearance is supposed to represent the end of a term of punishment imposed by the BBC as a result of the appalling stunt pulled by the 46 years old presenter when, as a guest on the Russell Brand Radio 2 show, puerile and obscene messages were left on the answer phone of actor Andrew Sachs.

If I showed you a door and told you that if you pass through it you would face a one in 300 chance of being killed would you take the risk?
Me neither.

But those are the odds we both face if we happen to pass through the front door of our local hospital for any kind of treatment.

In his New Year message to the nation our Prime Minister told us that in the coming twelve months we must display the blitz spirit.

And just as the British people faced up to the German bombing we now have no choice but to summon up our stoicism, grit our teeth and see it through.

We were supposed not to be able to spot the big lie embedded in this patronising guff ---the idea that the catastrophe which awaits us in 2009 is the doing of some outside enemy, some force beyond our control and certainly beyond the Channel.

And in believing that the enemy might be in a bunker in Berlin we were supposed to completely overlook the fact that the guilty man is in fact in Number 10 Downing Street.
Gordon Brown has had his hands on the economy of this country for the past ten years.

It was Chancellor Brown who told us he had seen off Boom and Bust while presiding over the biggest unsustainable boom in our history.

It was Chancellor Brown who talked of "light" control of our banking and financial system when the whole edifice was being eaten away by the worms of greed, recklessness and worse.

It was he who put in place the new financial supervision system which was supposed to control dangerous excesses and to spot looming crises and which miserably failed to do either. Even the Bank of England now admits the system was woefully inadequate.

It was Chancellor Brown who encouraged growth based on private and public debt, who poured billions into public expenditure excesses when he should have been putting aside reserves.

He brushed aside pubic warnings that our monstrous mountain of unstable debt was threatening to become a disastrous landslide.

He oversaw a massive expansion of public sector jobs and a vast benefits free-for-all to hide the continued shrinkage of real employment.

And when the inevitable began to happen he told us that our economy was in better shape to weather the storm than any other on the planet. Another lie.

The size of that untruth can be judged by the fact that our public borrowing-- which he told us would be £25 billion this year --will instead reach £100 billion at least. And experts predict that our economy will suffer a bigger economic contraction than any developed country.

Now facing a New Year in which 1,000 people a day will lose their jobs, tens of thousands will lose their homes and untold numbers of firms will go bust he has the effrontery to tell us that we need to summon up the old British pluck. And break into a couple of choruses of Who Do You Think You Are Kidding Mr. Hitler? I suppose.

Even the normally somnolent Church of England has woken up to the enormity of his failures and misjudgements. There is hardly a Bishop in the country who has not condemned his policies as morally corrupt.

Given what this man has done to this country we all have a perfect right to be out in the streets demanding his immediate resignation, at least.

And calling for a full police investigation into the financial chicanery that got us into this mess.

An end to the lunatic policy of attempting to spend our way back to a position from which we got into this mess in the first place.

And for our politicians to come up with a vision of a future that might be both morally acceptable and economically sustainable.

And singing "Who Do You Think You Are Kidding Mr. Brown?"