@EddieIzzard - just a few reasons why I think you're wrong on Labour

Eddie, I adore your comedy and have immense respect and regard for your charity campaigning this year. But i think you are wrong to mix these with political campaigning on the same platform as your comedy/charity platform. That's why I reacted so immediately and (frankly) angrily to your tweet today about the fox hunting ban.

I spent just 10 minutes on the list below. They are my opinions, no one else's, I'm not acting as anyone's proxy. I am not a member of any political party.

So:

1. More time spent on debating the hunting ban than a great deal of much more important and impacting legislation


2. Blair's repeated lies and innuendo about Lords 'voting down' hunting ban - they did not. Oh and Blair never got to vote for it did he?


3. An illegal war


4. Lies about intelligence before an illegal war


5. The Bernie Ecclestone money back guaranteed policy change


6. Higher unemployment than when they came to power


7. Northern Rock happened in Winter 2007-8, and collapsed in Feb 2008. Fannie and Freddie went in summer 2008, Lehman Brothers Autumn 2008. So chronologically the bank failures started here not the USA (unless you are called The Doctor or have a spare TARDIS).


8. Higher debt than when they came to power


9. Failure to get even close to child poverty targets, and accept responsibility for so doing.


10. Failure to understand that income poverty targets as a % of average income can NEVER be achieved. Do the maths.


11. A government habit of redefining targets to appear to have succeeded.


12. The selling of billions of gold reserves at a near all time low


13. An all-time record national debt that will exceed £1.4 trillion, and still spending months talking about investment and not the now accepted cuts and tax increases.


14. Failure to govern and accept responsibility, just setting targets that do NOT mean anything will definitely improve and just allow a civil servant to get the sack instead of a minister.


15. Accepting responsibility now meaning someone else gets sacked (the video will be on youtube somewhere)


16. A Home Office unfit for purpose


17. Inadequate prison capacity so that crooks are on the streets and not locked up


18. Failing to manage our borders so that illegal immigration is rife


19. Failure to deport foreign crooks


20. Failure to manage terrorists by (amongst other actions):


21. A Human Rights implementation (good idea) that ignores the general Human Rights of the entire population (Asimov's zeroth Robot Law)


22. 24hr drinking that leaves city centres a wasteland not fit or safe or comfortable for the average citizen


23. Crooked nationalisation of Network Rail


24. Using govt spin doctors to act against individual, powerless citizens


25. The massive growth in spin and its costs


26. A complete failure to understand that Government bodies and civil servants do not create economic wealth. Yet they now have better terms of employment, pensions, and rewards than the wealth generating private sector.


27. Failure to resolve the West Lothian question


28. Stealth taxes by the bucketload


29. The surreptitious and undemocratic regionalisation of England to a hidden EU agenda and with unelected regional authorities and bodies


30. The broken promise on the Lisbon Treaty


31. The cowardly 'will he/won't he sign in public, with the others' Lisbon Treaty episode


32. The failure to properly arm our forces in Afghanistan


33. The failure to keep the Military Covenant


34. The devaluation of political debate


35. The cowardly assumption of a moral high ground to which Labour have no right, and have not earned


36. The failure to honour the Gurkhas until shamed by the wonderful Joanna Lumley into respectable action


37. The wholesale destruction of one of the world's best pension cultures and value to the point where basic rate tax payers have no proper financial incentive or security. Ten years ago our pension system was a model to the outside world


38. The expansion of the guilt by assumption and Big Brother culture world leading to councils misusing stealthy and subversive anti-terror legislation against innocent citizens


Peter
 
NB Updated 29th December to enumerate them so that comments can argue the toss more easily :-)