New Britain: Nation Of Shopkeepers And Bankrupt Billionaires

Hurrah! The people of New Britain are now bankers every one!

We all own a bank and can write cheques for whatever amount we want because it is our money and we own it!

Well, not quite.

Wonderful Gordon “Prudence” Brown and his puppet Darling of the Treasury have actually saddled almost every man, woman and child of this nation with a debt of £1000.

Yes, it sounds like Monopoly money and, of course, that is the way the bankers and politicians look at at when it gets to the level of squillions of squid. After all, they are hardly going to have to find that kind of money in the real world.

That job they leave, as always, to the ordinary taxpayer.

So, Northern Rock has now been nationalised. The choice of last resort.

The only saving grace is that we will not have the indignity of having high streets full of Virgin Banks, selling Virgin Mobiles and Virgin Atlantic flights and Virgin Cola and Virgin Condoms. We have been saved from the bilious spiv dream of Rodney Trotter in Only Fools and Horses.

So, does it feel as if you now have access to untold riches?

Or does it seem that your incompetent government has made yet another total and absolute mess of things and sold you a pup?

We had all better hope that there are no more runs on the banks as the recession starts to bite, otherwise we may all end up paying for their collapse for the rest of our lives.

Gordon Brown: your money unsafe in this man’s clunking iron fist.

British Parliament Now Wholly Owned Subsidiary Of Big Business

When Britain was re-named UK Plc under Margaret Thatcher, it sounded like a catchy, if empty slogan. It was just part of the zeitgeist, where everyone was a thrusting go-getter in the dog-eat-dog commercial jungle. In Thatcher’s brave new world, everyone was going to be rich. Apart, of course, from the legions of poor on whom the rich always depend: or, more accurately, on whom they stand after they have trampled them underfoot.

Now, in New Labour’s New Britain, this selling of a nation as a commercial enterprise has actually come to pass. Britain no longer has an independent legislature, but is governed entirely by the diktats of big business.

If Mrs Thatcher was accused of selling the family silver in her mania to sell public assets and utilities on the cheap to businesses on the make, New Labour can trump her in that they have sold the nation down the river because a handful of businessmen barked orders at them and they responded by asking “How high do you want us to jump?”

Everyone knows that the Tory party is just the political wing of business, so from them it is expected. However, not only did New Labour readily jump into bed with big business like the local bike on a drunken night out, it was happy to sell its children and family into prostitution and slavery without actually bothering to ask for payment.

To a degree, it is not that we ever imagined or pretended that business was not pulling the strings of the puppets in Parliament, it is just the clumsy ineptitude of New Labour in making it all so publicly humiliating and so financially incompetent.

Under Blair, they had to receive the blessing of business in order to be electable, but business did not just sprinkle a few drops of water on the figurative forehead of the nation’s government, it gave them a thorough waterboarding. Both Blair and Brown are so in thrall to what they see as the inexplicable mysteries and wonderments of business, the magical enchantment of how business can make money appear as if from nowhere and the trembling craving that maybe, just maybe, some of that could find its way into the pockets of the nation’s administrators, that they have allowed legislation to become entirely subordinate to the whims, quirks and tantrums of a few business leaders.