Beware slogans

We shall have the pre-budget report election campaign this week. Does anyone doubt that, as G.Brown has virtually dictated it, it will have little realistically to solve our economic problems and everything to try to gain an electoral advantage over the Tories? I write this not as a protesting opponent, as all governments use their final months with promises to do better and certainly better than the other shower!

Instead I write about the slogans dressed up as policies which, it seems, we are to have. Saving painless millions, if not billions, with un-detailed worthwhile elimination of waste, taxing the few undeserving high paid, passing a law to achieve something, pretending that things are not so bad as all the experts say.

One of the worst things about NuLabour, or are we back to OldLabour now, is to pretend that merely talking about something achieves immediate and effortless success. Thus education was to be the objective and yet despite all the money lavished, results with dumbed-down exams are no better and in many cases are worse. Child poverty was to be eradicated by 2010, and yet even before the recession the numbers had fallen by only 10%.

Perhaps of all the slogans the one which seems the most cynical was the sentence in the Queen's Speech, when her majesty was required to read out, "The government are going to work to build trust in democratic institutions."

Parliament has been emasculated by the executive, the executive in turn by the prime minster and cronies. We were plunged into a new European"State" without a vote, and we are under the power of well over 1,000 unelected quangos who make decisions which are unchallengeable and on bases known only to the government its master.

The government clearly does not listen or understand, or it would realise that holding a few cabinet meetings at great expense in a few provincial centres does not "build trust in democratic institutions.