2008a
"Gordon Brown is no newcomer to the political scene, someone starting with a clean sheet. We know him to be a miserable, bean-counting bungler with a tenuous grasp of the truth. He now says that he has changed and he plans to change everything to do with government. But experience says he's about as genuine as a 9-bob note. So Gordon has a severely uphill task ahead of him."

June 2008 IN BROWN'S BRITAIN . . . The New Labour new NHS contract for dentists has created a new dark age in dentistry, in which extractions have replace creating crows & bridges, and the customers are paying more for inferior treatment. SOFT ON CRIME Only one-half of the 8,350 foreign criminals released from gaol during the last year were deported despite Gordon Brown's promise to get shot of all of them. Another stealth pay rise for MPs The government plans to increase the amount of taxpayers' money which MPs get for the upkeep of their constituency offices from £2.8 million to £6 million. PLAIN USELESS As well as losing data stored electronically, HMRC has been leaking it via routine mailings. The design of their P810 Tax Review Form is so bad that they can be sent out with the customer's National Insurance number and employer details visible in the envelope window showing the recipient's name and address. SLEAZE CAMPAIGN Brown & Balls are waging a knocking campaign against faith schools in an attempt to curry favour with the extreme left of the Labour party for purely selfish personal reasons. OUR MONEY The slice of household income taken by taxes is the highest since 1991 thanks to Gordon Brown's Stealth Taxes. Cash for the Brown Hole, not for saving the planet Gordon Brown's eco-towns are – guess what? – just another scam. They are all about raising £275 million by persuading developers to buy redundant Ministry of Defence properties and land, and the 'green' standards will be reduced, and normal planning regulations circumvented, to ensure that the towns are built. NOT ENOUGH WIND Brown's plans to power the nation via wind turbines is also fatally flawed. Studies of wind velocity have found that at the time of maximum demand – in January & February – the weather can be cold but not windy, so conventional power stations will have to keep switching off and on as the unreliable wind chooses to blow or not. IN BROWN'S BRITAIN . . . Despite 11 years of pious cant and 10 years of Stealth Taxes imposed by our former Chancellor, Labour's social engineering efforts have made no difference to the gap between rich and poor. As in 1997, the rich have a disposable income 6 times that of the poor. Worse, the poor lose 40% of their income to taxes compared to 35% for everyone else. POWER FAILURE Gordon Brown is planning to bump up the cost of energy by at least 25% with 'green' power generation schemes. But the government's plans for building vast numbers of wind farms are unrealistic, there isn't enough time to build nuclear reactors for when we need them, and the nation will have to build a large number of conventional power stations; at great cost to the taxpayer; to bridge the gap when the wind doesn't blow. OUR MONEY Paying off Blair's Downing Street advisors; because Brown couldn't work with them; cost the taxpayer £500,000. OUR MONEY When Lord Savile wraps up his Bloody Sunday inquiry, he will have wasted £188,000,000 of taxpayers' money on massaging the collective egos of the IRA. Around £90,000,000 went to lawyers. Goodness knows what he blew the rest on. U-TURN Lacking ideas of their own, Labour have decided the time is right to steal the Tory policy of having a Border Police and rebrand it as Gordon's latest BIG IDEA. SOFT ON CRIME The government is giving £150/week to bin Laden's ambassador in Europe as incapacity benefit because he reckons he had a bad back which stops him from working. Which he can't do anyway because he's banged up in a safe house for 22 hours per day to stop him getting involved in terrorism.    That's on top of the fifty grand a year his wife is claiming in various benefits and the £500,000 it costs the taxpayer to police him after the judiciary let him out of gaol on 'uman rights grounds. GRABBING The government thinks everyone else should get a below-inflation pay rise but it's quite happy to let MPs have a scrutiny-free £150/day for turning up at the House of Commons – which is what they're supposed to do as it's their job – instead of being embarrassed by having to claim a second-home allowance. SOFT ON CRIME The government is trying to sneak in a system under which the length of a criminal's sentence will depend on how full the gaols are. This is Labour's way of avoiding having to face the consequences of ill-considered legislation and being force to build more prisons. PLAIN USELESS The wheels are coming off Eddie Balls' plan to close 638 'failing' schools. But 25% of them were rated 'good' or 'outstanding' by the government's own inspectors, and Ofsted thinks only 11% of them need outside intervention. SOFT ON CRIME Labour's latest scam for making space in gaols – if a convict does a runner, the time spent absconding will be counted as time served in gaol even though it wasn't GERRYMANDERING The government is planning to limit general election campaign expenses to £12,000 per candidate. Which becomes £22,000 for a sitting MP as they get £10,000 of taxpayers' cash for 'communicating with constituents'. Which gives sitting Labour MPs an automatic advantage over rivals. IN BROWN'S BRITAIN . . . The number of civil servants going sick with stress has shot up since Gordon Brown became prime minister – except at the Treasury, where the sickness rate has fallen by one-third now that the staff no longer have Gordon throwing wobblies and mobile phones at them SOFT ON CRIME The detection rate for violent crime has fallen by one-third since Labour took office. It used to be 82% in 1997. It's now down to 57%. PLAIN USELESS Police Community Support Officers, a.k.a. blunkett's bobbies, spend so much time filling in forms that they have little or no effect on crime on the streets. The government is keen to force chief constables to hire more of them instead of expensive real coppers. OUR MONEY The Home Office has blown £29,000,000 on a plan to house thousands of bogus asylum seekers at a former RAF station at Bicester, Oxfordshire. The plan was unveiled in 2001, contractors were paid huge wedges of dosh, and then they collected further monster cancellation fees when the Home Office finally realized that the scheme was unnecessary and unworkable. OUR MONEY Gordon Brown used £1,700,000,000 of taxpayers' cash to buy a victory in the Commons on his 42 days' detention for terrorist suspects clause, knowing it won't get through the Lords or past 'uman rights legislation. He blew £1,200,000,000 on buying the votes of 9 Ulster Unionist MPs then he had the cheek to lie about what he'd done at his monthly press conference, claiming that there had been no deals and the vote had been won by 'the strength of the argument' to a background of mocking laughter. IN BROWN'S BRITAIN . . . Gordon Brown is always sounding off about Britishness but his Labour government spent £116 on promoting St. George's Day (April 23rd) this year, £114 in 2007 and £0.00 in 2006, 2005 and 2004. Which tells us just how sincere Brown & his cronies really are. IN BROWN'S BRITAIN . . . The labour party blames Council Tax rises for driving an extra 300,000 pensioners into the ranks of the poverty-stricken. As C-Tax doubled while Gordon Brown was Chancellor, is that an admission of guilt? OUR MONEY We have a Scottish prime minister and the top end of the government is packed with Scots, so it's no wonder that the Scottish NHS gets 20% more taxpayers' cash than the English NHS. MALADMINISTRATION The government's negligence during the part-privatization of Qinetiq, the MOD's research wing, cost the taxpayer £90,000,000. The senior managers, of course, all made a bundle out of the sale. U-TURN The government has abandoned its promise to halve child poverty by 2010, admitting it was just spin and a sound-bite that sounded good at the time. ALIBI IN PLACE A. Darling is now saying that he spotted the 10p tax rate disaster as soon as he became Chancellor but Gordon Brown wouldn't do anything about his own bog-up, so the mess isn't Darling's fault. PLAIN USELESS Security at the Home Office website is no barrier to hackers. A bunch of them managed to set up a phishing site for an Italian bank on the HO's Crime Reduction website. ANOTHER SCAM The governments intends to change the planning regulations for new homes by stealth so that they will not be entitled by weekly refuse collections by the local council. It is part of the on-going New Labour policy of offering reduced services for the same, or more, money. BROWN POSTURING Gordon Brown promised to deport all foreign criminals when they get out of gaol. Unfortunately, his tough talking hasn't reached the ears of the Immigration service, which is ignoring all foreign criminals sentenced to less than one year in gaol. Worse, Brown is also handing £170 of taxpayers' cash to all criminals released 18 days early to compensate them for the loss of board & lodgings in gaol. OUR MONEY 25% of all Council Tax collected is disappearing into the gold-plated pension funds for council employees. IN BROWN'S BRITAIN . . . Soldiers fighting Labour's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are being paid less than traffic wardens. PLAIN USELESS 30% of students are dropping out of their courses at universities & former polytechnics despite the vast amounts of taxpayers' cash thrown at efforts to get them there. The government's response was to lie about the drop-out rate. OUR MONEY Soaring oil and energy prices have gifted the government a tax windfall of £1,700,000,000 since the March Budget. Remember that when the lying sods start pleading poverty! DITCHING LABOUR The Surrey, Leicestershire, Staffordshire and West Midlands police have decided to ignore Home Office targets, which count sheer numbers of crimes and ignore their severity (murder is rated as significant as a caution for littering). For the moment, they will get on with real policing. 4 police forces down down, 40 to go. MORE LIES The government has been caught out in another swindle. A study funded with public cash has found that fortnightly rubbish collections carry an increased health risk from rats, flies and seagulls, and that rats and insects could be encouraged into the home environment.    Despite having this evidence in its possession, the government has been claiming that there is no proof that reducing the frequency of rubbish collections creates a health risk. But persistent Parliamentary questions have nailed the lie and exposed the truth.    169 of 1,350 councils in England have stopped weekly rubbish collections, 140 of them in the last year.

May 2008 PLAIN USELESS The government's £13 billion scheme to put all NHS patient records on a universally accessible computer system is currently running 4 years late. It's about to get even later after the Japanese company Fujitsu was fired for asking for more money to do extra work caused by NHS bosses shifting the goal posts. PHONEY GREEN TAXES The government's 13-band 'green' vehicle tax is all about raising £4.4 billion in taxes while reducing carbon emissions by an insignificant fraction of 1%. ANOTHER SCAM The government is eager to issue everyone with a Carbon Quota Card, which will be debited every time someone buys power or fuel, travels, etc. DEFRA has made the gross underestimate that the scam will cost £2 billion to set up and have annual running costs of £1.2 billion.    This useless government's record on trying to run large IT projects (the NHS computer, tax credits, etc., etc.) proves that any Carbon Card scheme will be a major flop and just another way of creating public sector non-jobs, which saddle the taxpayer with the obligation to pay out a gold-plated pension in due course. In short, it would be the Labour party buying jobs for its supporters with other people's money once more. CORRUPTION POTENTIAL The government wants to take over the task of appointing chief constables to ensure that only coppers 'on the labour message' get the jobs. PLAIN USELESS Labour has failed to deliver on 50 out of 76 of its own targets for the nine major public spending departments, including Justice, Health, Children, Work & Pensions, Culture, Media & Sport, and International Development. LABOUR IN ACTION The PROMISE by Tony Blair 7 years ago – 7,000 more NHS beds by 2010. The DELIVERY as of 2007 – 30,000 fewer NHS beds than in 1997. BROWN ECONOMICS The Department of Transport decided to spend £55 million on a computer system, expecting to produce efficiency savings of £122 million. But the computer still doesn't work, it will cost £120 million including fixes and it will save just £40 million over its planned life – a nett loss to the taxpayer of £80 million. Don't you just wish they'd shoot everyone in this useless government who gets a 'bright idea'? OUR MONEY Ministers & officials plan to blow £250,000 of the taxpayer's cash on junkets to the Peking Olympics. JUST POSTURING Gordon Brown's celebrated 'deep clean' of NHS hospitals has blown £50 million on nothing more than a publicity stunt, which is just a psychological reminder of the dangers of hospital superbugs. The money would have been much better spent on enforcing hand-washing policies and isolating infected patients. PLAIN USELESS Over the last 7 years, this government has spent £2.7 billion on trying to reduce youth crime. The verdict of the Centre for Crime & Justice Studies is: "All the expenditure and activity to reduce youth crime has had no measurable impact. Claims of significant success are overstated." LABOUR IN ACTION In 2005, Tony Blair surrendered £1 billion/year of Mrs. Thatcher's rebate from the EU in exchange for a promise of a Common Agricultural Policy review. Well, we've had the review and nothing is going to change. The CAP's subsidies to inefficient French & German farmers will continue to inflate food prices in Europe by 20% above world prices. OUR MONEY The Commons' Speaker has given up the struggle after blowing £150,000 of taxpayers' money on trying to keep the details of MPs' expenses a secret. MPs are worried that once details of what they get away with are made public, their allowances will be police properly. OUR MONEY Over the last 4 years, £10 billion has been lost to fraud and blunders by Gordon Brown's flagship tax credit system. That's nearly enough to pay for the Olympics [budget £13 billion and rising]. It's also enough to give everyone a 5-month holiday from paying Council Tax. BROWN DISHONESTY Brown unveiled the UK Environmental Transformation Fund to grab himself some headline in November 2007. Now, the news has leaked out that, contrary to expectations, he's not giving away British taxpayers' cash to grabbing 3rd World Countries with climate change alibis. They're all up in arms because he plans to offer them loans at fancy rates of interest. BROWN REALITY Gordon told us a year ago that new immigrants will have to be able to speak decent English to get a visa. The test, now revealed, exposes another Brown lie. All it requires is a very basic and limited knowledge of English, and it's purely cosmetic. OUR MONEY EnergyWatch says the big power companies are rigging prices in Britain & Europe via a bogus link to oil prices and making households pay £400/year over the odds for gas & electricity. Our complacent government, needless to say, is letting them get away with it. U-TURN One on the way – Gordon Brown has abandoned his 'essential' 42-day detention limit to avoid the embarrassment of a defeat on the Counter Terrorism Bill and further loss of mandate. OUR MONEY The government has raked in a windfall of £505 million in fuel taxes over the last 2 months due to soaring oil prices. This is more than enough to scrap the planned 2p/litre rise in October but there's no sign of that happening. LABOUR INACTION The £12.7 billion upgrade of the NHS IT systems in England will be delivered in six years' time – a mere 4 years late. OUR MONEY The £2.8 billion which the Chancellor is having to borrow to fix some of Brown's 10p tax rate balls up is, by coincidence, the amount of tax revenue lost every year to blunders by HMRC staff. And who put their systems in place? Some bloke called Brown, wasn't it? EMPTY PROMISES Labour's pledge to build 240,000 new homes per year by 2016 has been exposed as just hot air. The number of houses built fell by 25% last year and this year's total is unlikely to exceed 120,000. Gordon Brown's target of adding 3 million new homes by 2020 might be possible on the planet which he inhabits, but it's a no-hoper on Planet Earth. THE DUNWOODY DIVIDEND Hoping to buy a win in the by-election at the vacant Crewe & Nantwich seat, the Chancellor has borrowed another £2.8 billion to compensate 80% of the people who lost money in Gordon Brown's 10p Tax Grab sometime in the future. Which leaves another 1,100,000 victims of the grab with a hole in the wallet. BUT the bail-out is for this year only. Everyone still gets clobbered with this tax-grab next year. SAFETY LAST Five years ago, the government decided it would be too much bother to check 'air side' foreign workers at airports for criminal records and membership of terrorist groups. Instead of just banning anyone who hasn't been vetted, they did nothing. LEADING BY EXAMPLE The poisonous effect of Labour philosophy on the police force is illustrated by that fact that over the last 7 years, six chief constables, deputy chief constables or senior force leaders have been required to quit under a cloud for fiddling their expenses, not being up to the job or groping female coppers. MAY-DAY DIVIDEND Gordon Brown has been forced put put his Bin Tax (a.k.a. pay as you throw) on hold to make the labour party less unelectable and save the targetted families around £100/year. UPDATE Some councils have announced that they plan to stick another £100 onto their Council Tax bills by stealth if they're not allowed to charge the Bin Tax so that customers are guaranteed that they will have to pay more for less in the way of service. LIFE UNDER LABOUR 169 local councils, 29 more than at this time last year, have abandoned weekly rubbish collections in return for cash bribes from the government, which tried to bury this bad news on May Day, while the local elections were being held.

April 2008 EXPEDIENT APOLOGY Looming disaster has forced Brown to apologize for the mess he created when he abolished the 10p tax band in search of favourable headlines. After much dithering, he has been persuaded to say he's sorry in the hope that it will limit the damage in the May Day council elections. U-TURN Brown has finally admitted that it was a mistake to downgrade cannabis from Class B to Class C in 2004. So after months of dithering, he might do something about it. Or not. LIFE UNDER LABOUR The chance of being shot or stabbed has gone up by 25% since 1997 and the chance of being bludgeoned to death has risen by 57%. U-TURN Gordon Brown has been embarrassed by a rebellion of his back-benchers into admitting that he screwed up when he abolished the 10p income tax rate. He has promised to compensate the victims of his rip-off to buy off the rebels in the week before the local elections. But whether or not he will deliver on the promise remains to be seen OUR MONEY The Treasury tried, but failed, to hide this in a boring routine announcement:    Paying gold-plated public sector pensions will cost each of our 25 million households an extra £1014 this year with more to come next year and every subsequent year. OUR MONEY Gordon Brown doesn't want to admit he made a big mistake by abolishing the 10p tax rate and making 5 million people worse off, so he's launching a 'government charm offensive', which is likely to be as low on charm as it is long on offence.    Meanwhile, the Chancellor (him with the eyebrows) is wriggling furiously and talking about 'correcting the package' some time in the distant future. LABOUR IN ACTION A government target is costing the taxpayer £300 million per year.    People who claim incapacity benefit have to be checked by doctors working for Atos Origin, a company hired by the Dept. of Work & Pensions. The DWP has a target level for complaints from AO's customers, and AO has to pay a cash penalty if too many customers are checked again after making a complaint.    This leads to AO doctors exaggerating the customer's disabilities to make sure the customer doesn't complain. So while the government is talking tough about getting people off incapacity benefit, its own policies are swelling the ranks of people getting the benefit without qualifying for it. LABOUR IN ACTION Gordon Brown's promise of 'a different type of politics' has hit the buffers. He had a cull of Blair-appointed spin doctors when he took over as PM. Since then, he has given enough jobs to stooges to bring spin-doctor spending back to the level of the worst excesses of the Blair years. OUR MONEY Government minsters spent £5 million on booze-ups and parties last year, including £1.2 million spent by the Treasury on junkets. ANOTHER SCAM The government handed out £86 million to the areas affected by last year's floods but collected £525 million in VAT on the repairs; a profit of £439 million. Not so generous after all. LABOUR IN ACTION The government is allocating up to £1,800/pupil LESS to the best performing grammar schools than to the poorly performing schools, at which it is throwing cash TO NO EFFECT. All the government is achieving is to punish the best schools while wasting money on the schools that Gordon Brown is threatening to close! OUR MONEY Home Office spending on consultants (qualified & unqualified) and image polishing has gone up 2,000% under Labour. It was £7.6 million/year in 1997. It's now £150,000,000/year. SPIN EXPOSED The government has been forced to admit that its plan to rebuild every state school by 2020 was just spin. The 2002 scheme has been downgraded from 'target' to 'aspiration' as a precursor to quietly booting the thing into touch on the next Bad News Day. LABOUR IN ACTION After launching a sleaze campaign against faith schools, Eddie 'Crazy Tongue' Balls is doing the same to grammar schools. The country's best schools just don't fit in to his crypto-communist social engineering plans as excellence is 'elitist' and anathema to the class-war wing of the Labour party, which is striving to drive everything decent into the dirt in the hope that if nothing works and nothing is any good, then no one will notice how useless the Labour government is!

March 2008 OUR MONEY Four Financial Services Authority executive directors collected £300,000 from the taxpayer in bonuses while asleep at the wheel and letting the Northern Rock catastrophe happen. And Adam Applecart, the man who sank the bank, is in line for £760,000 from the government as part of New Labour's policy of rewarding failure with generous hand-outs of taxpayers' cash. OUR MONEY Gorbals Mick, the Commons' speaker, has spent £1.7 million of taxpayers' cash on home improvements to his grace & favour residence since October 2000. FRIEND OF TERROR Justice Minister Jack Straw's minions are letting terrorists out of gaol early to make room for other criminals. HOGWASH The government's claim that mass migration is good for our economy has been exposed as garbage by the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee. Immigrants grow the economy but they also consume any gains, so their nett contribution balances out at zero. BROWN TOWNS The government is exhuming failed plans for commuter dormitory towns, giving them a fake 'green' spin and recycling them as eco-town schemes. In the Brown era, bad plans become good ones in the name of green posturing. OUR MONEY The upper limit for second-home expenses claims for MPs is £23,000. Labour MP Chris Mullins has just confirmed that most MPs see this as a spending target to aim for, which explains why most of them claim just a few hundred pounds less than the 23 grand. GOAL POSTS MOVED The government can't meet its target of halving MRSA infections in NHS hospitals by this month, so March has been scrapped in favour of June 2008, but this target date isn't set in stone either. OUR MONEY Over the last 8 years, the government has wasted £10 billion on a half-baked plan to get half of all people between 18 and 30 into a university. At the current rate of progress, the target will be met in 2126 at a cost to the nation of a further £147,500,000,000. SHORT-CHANGED A scam, which was uncovered last month, has cost the taxpayer twice as much as the government admitted. Prisoners taking college courses in gaol have claimed £730,000 in grants and student loans, not £370,000 as the government wanted us to believe. OUR MONEY The Commons speaker is wasting £100,000 of taxpayers' money on a spurious appeal against a Freedom of Information tribunal's order that the second home expenses of 14 big league (ex-)MPs should be published. The MPs include David Cameron & Gordon Brown, and they have all said they have no objection to publication of the data (but none has been in any rush to do it). LABOUR IN ACTION The government has signed us up to an EU scheme to make 5% of all petrol & diesel come from biofuel sources by 2010. But both Professor Robert Watson, the govenment's chief environmental scientist and Sir David King, the former government chief scientist, are saying that some biofuel sources can accelerate climate change and they all help to put up food prices and encourage starvation in poor countries. SWINDLER The Statistics Commission has rapped Eddie Balls, the Childrens' Sec., over the knuckles for making up his own statistics for shabby political stunts, and for failing to maintain the required standard of integrity for government ministers. SWINDLE In January, staple food & drink prices went up by 5.6% and utility prices (gas, electricity) rose by 3.5%. But the government's Consumer Prices Index rose by only 2.5%. This scam is achieved by including occasional-purchase items, such as DVD players, in the official figure to drag it down artificially and allow the government to swindle pensioners and the receipients of other paid-for state benefits. MONEY GRUBBING After 13 years, an MP is entitled to a pension of £20,000 per year. The average person doing a proper job in the private sector would have to work for 62 years to build up the same pension pot. MONEY GRUBBING Councils which have switched to fortnightly rubbish collections now have the government's permission to charge households £50/year for weekly collections. Additional collection charges have nothing to do with saving the planet, it's just another Labour Stealth Tax. SWINDLER Eddie Balls, the Childrens' Sec., has been caught in the act of burying more bad news. He tried to hide the fact that the government's system deprived 100,000 children of a place at their first choice school behind some imaginary admission code violations cooked up by his department. OUR MONEY In 2013, Britain will pay £10.5 billion to the EU as the price of membership but receive only £4.2 billion back in grants. This is a consequence of Tony Blair's attempt to buy himself popularity by surrendering a huge chunk of the rebates won by Mrs. Thatcher. LABOUR IN ACTION New sentencing guidelines mean that addicts who steal to feed a drug habit won't go to gaol. They'll be left in the community and allowed to carry on stealing. OUR MONEY The estimated cost of Blair's wars in Iraq & Afghanistan for this year is £3.3 billion – twice last year's figure despite massive troop withdrawals from Iraq (where the forecast is a 72% rise in spending). The forecast for Afghanistan is up by 122% and £10 billion has been wasted on these two wars since 2003. The latest figures show that the government has been hiding the true cost of these wars in past years but increasing scrutiny is forcing part of the truth into the open. LABOUR IN ACTION The Ministry of Defence closed a repair facility for RAF Tornado aircraft to save money. Which means it now has to raid a fund for removing land mines to pay BAe Systems to keep half a dozen Tornados flying in Iraq. BROWN'S BRITAIN Average family incomes up 3.4% this year, the family cost of living up 9%. LABOUR IN ACTION The government has spent £350 million since April 2006 on a 'flagship' scheme to get first-time buyers onto the housing ladder. Just 45 people have benefitted; 7 in London, 115 in the South East, 55 in the South West and none at all in the East Midlands. The cost to the taxpayer is £780,000 per customer. JUST PLAIN CRAZY As a £8 million upgrade project approaches completion, the government wants to close down the world famous Joderell Bank radio telescope to save £2.7 million; which is the amount of cash claimed as expenses by 16.8 greedy MPs. DODGY STATISTICS The government has 'proved' that 24-hour drinking has produced no increase in disorder, violent crime and hospital admissions. How? By leaving any figures which conflict with the desired result out of its latest batch of bogus statistics. OUR MONEY The British Chambers of Commerce have calculated that the 83 'most expensive' regulation introduced by Labour since 1997 have cost British industry £66 billion. The BCC lacked the strength of will to cost a further 1,800 somewhat less burdensome bits of red tape. NHS WAITING LISTS The government's target on waiting times for hospital treatment has eliminated long and short waits, but it has also removed clinical judgement and need for treatment as a factor in deciding how quickly a patient gets to hospital. The net effect of the target has been to INCREASE the average waiting time.    At present, 72% of trusts meet the government target of 18 weeks and waiting times are increasing. OUR MONEY Gordon Brown's foolish decision to sell half of Britain's gold reserves when he became Chancellor, and his botched execution of the sale, cost the country £4 billion. Which is twice what the Bank of England lost when Britain crashed out of the European Monetary System and headed off down the road to a strong, low-inflation economy, which that liar Brown claims he created. LABOUR IN ACTION Companies involved in the government's PFI projects are moving the income and profits to tax havens abroad. PFIs were Gordon Brown's method of moving the risk of public projects to the public sector, while hiding liabilities off the books to avoid breaking his elastic Golden Rule. He has also removed the risk of the taxpayer sharing any profits. And if a PFI company goes bust while the project is being built, the taxpayer has to pick up the pieces. LABOUR IN ACTION NHS trusts in England cut services when they were in debt, and kept the cuts in place when the books balanced again. As a result the NHS is heading for a surplus this year of £2,000,000,000 – all cash which could have been spent on patient care but wasn't. JUST SPIN Gordon Brown's target of halving child povery by 2010 has been confirmed as bogus. Neither the will nor the cash is available. LABOUR IN ACTION The government is insisting that anyone who gets a British passport must be able to speak English. But it has already blown over £1,000,000 of taxpayers' money on translators for passport applicants who can't speak English.

February 2008 OUR MONEY 20% of all Council Tax is being used to fund gold-plated, final-salary pensions for council staff, who can retire as young as 55. LABOUR IN ACTION Labour's 24-hour drinking culture is responsible for 180,000 more crimes since November 2005. CRIMINAL NEGLIGENCE The government has been stealing from hundred of thousands of households knowingly and deliberately for years. The Blair regime discovered in 2005 that thousands of houses had been placed in the wrong Council Tax band. Instead correcting the errors, the government chose to cover up an embarrassing blunder – which has now been exposed.    Up to 400,000 houses are involved in mistakes going back to 1993, which is when Council Tax was introduced. The taxpayer will now have to stump up rebates for overpayment running into tens of millions of pounds. STEALTH TAXES People buying houses have had to put £31.5 billion into Gordon Brown's coffers since Labour took power. He achieved this shameful grab by failing to increase the threshold for the tax in line with rising house prices. YET MORE SPIN Labour's claim to have ended youth employment has been exposed as just spin. The government's own figures show that 1.24 million (one-sixth) of the nation's young people are not in work or education, and that's an increase of 15% since 1997. LABOUR IN ACTION The government has had to drop its policy of equality in the crimes counted towards its arbitrary targets. Someone has realized that the police are concentrating on littering and kids chalking hopscotch grids on the pavement as they count the same as armed robbery & murder but don't involve much effort.    Some gullible people expect this to mean that the police will now be obliged to go after real criminals but more seasoned travellers in the New Labour world know that their senior officers will just find a new way of giving us purely cosmetic policing. CRIMINAL NEGLIGENCE When Chancellor, Gordon Brown made it his personal policy to deprive the Armed Services of the money which they need for proper equipment. And the Ministry of Defeence under Labour is staffed by people who aren't up to the job. As a result, the Oxford coroner is ruling that troops sent ill-equipped to Afghanistan and Iraq were "unlawfully killed" because of this government's negligence. MORE MONEY WASTED The government is wasting £130 million per year by failing to use or rent out the empty office buildings and official residences owned by various government departments. Some 78 acres of floor space are allowed to lie vacant in prime areas of London and elsewhere while the taxpayer continues to pay for leases and maintenance. DUMBING FURTHER DOWN Children will be able to get a foreign language GCSE without being able to write or speak the language if the government adopts the latest bright idea from its advisors. Written exam papers have already been abolished in favour of multiple-choice papers with tick-boxes. Oral exams could go next because they are "too stressful" for pupils. JUST PLAIN USELESS The government, which has a record of getting troops killed by sending them into battle without proper equipment, is sending the last of the army's reserves to newly independent Kosovo. If there is an emergency elsewhere, the MoD will have no reinforcements left to send to the trouble spot. The decision has been called 'unsustainable' and 'demented'. YET MORE SPIN Labour's latest Big Idea for messing education around lasted just 10 minutes before htting the buffers. Culture Sec. Andy Burnham announced on Radio 4's Today that every British schoolkid would have to endure 5 hours of culture per week. But by 8:20, Mr. Humphries had forced him to admit that it's not a guarantee, only an 'aspiration'. Especially if the government hopes to fund all this culture on £15 per pupil per year. YET MORE LIES The government would like us to believe that half of all migrants come from the EU and they have no control over them. But Imigration Minister Liam Byrne has been caught out in a whopper. In fact, two-thirds of all migrants come from non-EU countries and he does have the power to limit their flood with visa and work-permit restrictions. STEALTH TAXATION The government is abandoning its plans to build more roads in favour of 'active traffice management' schemes. Which comes down to installing more speed cameras and sending out more speeding tickets to motorist who ignore local speed limit changes. LABOUR'S SPY FORCE The government's latest crime-fighting BIG IDEA is to turn Neighbourhood Watch groups into its own version of the Stasi, which will be tasked with checking up on tax discs on neighbours' cars and rubbish put out on the wrong day as well as watching yobs and the homes of drug dealers. ANOTHER LAZY INCOMPETENT The Electoral Commission has let Scottish Labour leader Wendy Alexander off charges of accepting illegal donations to her leadership campaign because she's only a bit dodgy and incompetent, not totally corrupt. MORE MONEY WASTED The government has let convicts taking university courses in prisons claim millions of pounds in grants and student loans. JUST PLAIN CROOKED The Queen made a deal with the government under which she surrendered income in exchange for a guarantee that taxpayers' cash would be forthcoming for the upkeep of royal palaces. But this government is depriving Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, Frogmore in the castle's grounds and others of money for essential repairs. No surprise, the cash is being blown on the 2012 Olympics. JUST PLAIN CROOKED The Labour government has stolen £4 billion from national lottery funds since 1998. This money was supposed to be additional to Treasury funding for health and education projects. Gordon Brown has, dishonestly, interpreted that as instead of. GOLDEN RULE? In an uncharacteristic burst of honesty, the Office for National Statistics has insisted on adding the Northern Rock's liabilities to the National Debt, which means the Gordon Brown's much fractured rule about public debt not exceeding 40% of GDP has been broken officially. But no harm done, as the rule has been lying in ruins for years, thanks to PPI and Railtrack liabilities, to name but two, but lying Brown hasn't admitted it before. LABOUR IN ACTION Gordon Brown has handed the job of looking at MPs' perks & expenses to the Members Estimates Committee, which is packed with people who have a record for obstructing attempts to put details of MPs' expenses into the public domain and/or a history of charges of sleaze and abuse of expenses. PLASTIC POLICEMEN HM Inspector of Constabular, Sir Ronny Flanagan, has investigated the state of policing under Labour and found that 3,000,000 to 6,000,000 hours of police time are wasted every year on Labour's pointless bureaucracy, which is the equivalent of taking 1,500 to 3,000 coppers off the front line. And at the senior management level, the police are so scared of missing government targets and getting into trouble that senior coppers actively foster a culture which rules out showing initiative and taking risks.    Labour's constant promises of reform and red-tape cutting have been just spin. Government targets make the police concentrate on easy meat; minor criminals and motorists; and they just won't engage major criminals. LABOUR IN ACTION The new Housing Minister, Caroline Flint, wants councils to evict tenants who are unemployed and won't get a job. But councils have a legal duty to house homeless families, so the evicted workless will just end up in a different council house. From which they will be liable for eviction again. It's just circular bureaucracy and jobs for life for the council staff handling evictions and rehousing, and yet another new Labour way to waste taxpayers' cash. MORE MONEY WASTED Gordon Brown introduced his flagship tax credit scheme in 2003. £6 billion was overpaid in the first 3 years of the scheme. £2 billion was recovered, £700 million was written off. Of the remaining £3.3 billion, £1.6 billion is deemed unrecoverable. An investigation by the Commons Public Accounts Committee has found that HMRC is failing to make the system work and repair Brown's blunders. LABOUR IN ACTION Convicts are to be locked up in their cells for the weekend from Friday afternoon (instead of the evening) to cut prison staffing costs. But the inmates will still be paid for the work they would have done during the afternoon if they hadn't been locked in their cells. MORE MONEY WASTED The government is chasing the Moslem vote by awarding extra allowances to the husbands of multiple wives. Polygamy is illegal in this country, but anyone who marries half a dozen women in a country which permits it can bring them here and collect extra income support spousal allowances for the upkeep of their extra wives, not to mention extra helpings of housing benefit, Council Tax benefit, etc.    The government reached this decision in December 2007 but didn't announce it, hoping that no one would notice. YET MORE LIES The Children's Minister, Kevin Brennan, has denied that the government offered cash bonuses to councils for meeting arbitrary adoption targets and encouraged social workers to kidnap 'cute' babies from vulnerable mothers with the assistance of the family courts. So it must be true. SOFT ON CRIME The government is working up the nerve to abolish prison sentences of less than one year to ease prison overcrowding. Burglars, muggers and other violent criminals will get places on Alternative To Custody projects. They will build bird boxes and other worthy items during the day, and they will be left in the community to continue their criminal career in their spare time.

January 2008 MORE MONEY WASTED EU rules let Poles working in Britain claim child benefit for families living in Poland. So that's £22 million down the drain every year. Plus £30 million more for families living elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Not to mention the undisclosed millions paid out in tax credits. YET MORE LIES The Health Minister Lord Darzi has announced that Labour's multiple manifesto pledge to end mixed-sex wards in NHS hospitals is "not achievable because medicine has moved on".    Translation: "Under Labour, hospital patients are just pieces of meat and target fodder, and their wishes are irrelevant." PLAIN USELESS Gordon Brown's financial regulation system has been condemned as useless by the Treasury Select Committee. The government, the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority were all guilty of 'systematic failure of duty' over the Northern Rock shambles. Darling and Brown dithered until all confidence in Northern Rock had gone, the Bank failed to spot a crisis brewing and the FSA failed to spot the bank's reckless business methods. ANOTHER DIRTY DEAL Gordon Brown has bought off his back-benchers by giving them 1.9%, like the police, but letting them claim on their expenses without producing receipts, up to £43,000 in items costing £250 or less, and giving them an extra £10,000 to pay to members of their families pretending to be office staff. THE BITER BIT? Part of the bonus-winning argument for not paying the police their full 2.5% (the guy who came up with this scam got a £10K bonus) is that there are plenty of people eager to join the police force so the police don't have to be paid properly. But as that same argument applies to MPs, maybe they should get no pay rise at all until the demand for this job slackens. EDUCATION, SCHMEDUCATION Brown crony Eddie Balls, now posing as the Education Minister, has declared that schools will be required to teach their pupils how to cook. But he failed to mention where all the money needed to build kitchens in the schools will come from. Or which other subjects will be dropped from the curriculum to make way for cookery classes. CASINO SPIN There was a big fanfare when Brown cancelled Blair's super casino. But now that the dust has settled, Gordon is eager to go ahead with building the 16 other casinos in the plan. MORE MONEY WASTED The Chancellor, a.k.a. Him With the Eyebrows, has come up with a solution to the government's Northern Rock pickle. Everyone in the country has to give £2,000 to Richard Branston, the prime minister's newest pal. PLAIN USELESS The Ministry of Defence has had 3 laptops, which containing personal details of thousands of (potential) recruits, stolen from cars since 2005, but nothing has been done about letting people take these unencrypted files out of MoD premises.     UPDATE The MoD has admitted that a further 69 laptops and 7 PCs have been stolen from its offices over the last year, proving that its security stinks, and the ministry lacks the technology to encrypt data, one of the officials has further admitted. ANOTHER SWINDLE The Big Lottery Fund, which is supposed to distribute money to good causes, has given £250,000 to Stockport Council (Trivial Democrat run) for a project to 'improve the way staff manage moods'. £883 million has gone to other councils for similar abuses of the system. EXTORTION The government's policy of pricing poor people off the railways, as an alternative to building more track and providing more trains, has made our train fares the highest in Europe. LOR 'N' DISORDER Police officers solve an average of 10 crimes each per year, and each one solved costs the taxpayer £10,000! LOR 'N' DISORDER Home Sec. Jacqui Smith reckons she doesn't feel safe going out at night in London, even with a posse of police minders, after 10 years of Labour's failures on crime. So what hope do the rest of us have? YET MORE LIES The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee has concluded that the Lisbon Treaty, in their area of expertise, is the same as the rejected EU constitution, and government ministers are lying when they say it's completely different. YET MORE SPIN Gordon Brown's plan for ending Labour's "nanny state culture" and disabling the elf 'n' safety nazis is to create yet another quango and give more jobs to more of Labour's mates. So don't expect anything to happen in this decade. BLACK HOLE £700 million of lottery cash, which should have been repaid after the Olympic Games are over, will now disappear into this black hole as the land which will be sold off after the Games has been overvalued by £1 billion. U-TURN The government has surrendered £1 billion of Britain's EU rebate while getting nothing in return. It had been agreed that the rebate would be dropped only if the Common Agricultural Police was reformed, but Gordon Brown has abandoned that condition. USELESSNESS CONFIRMED Gordon Brown has asked for his Welsh/DWP Minister Peter Hain to be excused for failing to declare more than £100,000 in donations to his failed labour deputy leadership campaign. Hain isn't corrupt, Brown insisted, he's just incompetent.     UPDATE Brown's charge of incompetence against Hain has been backed up by the National Audit Office. As Work & Pensions Sec., Hain has failed to do anything about the £2.5 billion lost through benefit fraud and bungling by the DWP staff. YET MORE SPIN Gordon Brown's promise of a "major new crime crackdown" is jsut a recycle of the same thing promised by Tony Blair, Charles Clarke & Jacqui Smith, who all grabbed a headline and moved on without actually doing anything. SOFT ON CRIME The government is going soft on dangerous drivers. The latest sentencing recommendations will ensure that killing someone with a motor vehicle will normally result in 'community punishment' rather than gaol, even if the driver is totally unqualified and uninsured. U-TURN Labour promised prison staff the right to strike in the 1997 election manifesto and reversed the Tory ban on strikes in office. 11 years on, Justice Sec. Jack Straw now wants a ban on strikes in prison to stop prison staff protesting against a pay swindle of the sort inflicted on the police force. U-TURN Gordon Brown, who says he's in favour of lifetime learning, wants to abolish the grant scheme for mature students, which lets them retrain for the demands of the job market in later life. YET MORE SPIN All 1,500 hospitals in England were supposed to get a 'deep clean' by March. But only 3% (or 30%, Labour won't say which) have been done since last September.  • The medical profession has confirmed that this "gimmick" will have no effect on superbug infections and it's a waste of money. MORE SPIN The government decided in December 2007 to stop deporting bogus students who overstay their visa, a leaked memo from the Border & Immigration Agency has informed us. So Gordon Brown's claim to be running a 'robust' immigration system is just spin. MORE MONEY WASTED The government has admitted wasting £2 billion on abandoned computer projects since 2000. This is an "above the surface figure", however, for a vast Labour iceberg. No figures have been released for the cost of fixing blunders in computers systems which have not yet been abandoned, and the collateral costs to the taxpayer arising from botched computer schemes, e.g. the massive fine imposed by the EU for DEFRA's failure to pass on EU subsidy payments to farmers. U-TURN Six months after droping broad hints about putting an end to New Labour's 24-hour drinking culture, Gordon Brown has gone soft on changing the licensing laws despite clear evidence that the Blair changes are encouraging binge drinking and public disorder. NEW DEAL, WORSE DEAL Councils will be sending out vehicle assessors with tape measures to raise more money from people who dare to park a car outside their own house. This stealth tax will rise by 50% for vehicles of length 12' 10" to 14' 7" and double for vehicles longer than 14' 7". CROSSED WIRES Brown crony Eddy Balls is launching a literacy drive at a time when public libraries are being closed at a rate of over one per week because government interference is forcing councils to spend the money elsewhere. Parents will be required to read to their children for at least 10 minutes per day and cynics are expecting local councils to be obliged to send round inspectors with books of penalty tickets to make sure that the literary obligation is observed. NEW DEAL, WORSE DEAL Gordon Brown is rewriting the NHS Covenant. Only fit and healthy people will be allowed to enjoy the full range of services. The obese and smokers will still have to pay their full contributions to the NHS but they will be told to go away until they are slimmer and/or they have been nicotine-free for 3 months.