Gordon Brown signs his death warrant

[English assassin]

I think the broken society was just a silly soundbite slogan, coined back in the days when it looked like 2010 might be a contest. I think it means things like parents not keeping an eye on their kids and old folks dying unloved in "care" homes.

If they REALLY were going to do what I think it would take to fix that sort of broken society I'd be quite excited. It would mean, obviously, government sitting down and saying, "you know what, we can't do it all. In fact we can't do much of it.

We said we could keep you healthy with the NHS, but that was a lie. If you want to stay healthy you need to take responsibility yourself, and eat well, exercise, and take up vaccination and screening when its offered. We'll still do our best but really, you are going to have to accept that spending many thousands to extend the lives of cancer patients by two months is not going to happen.

We said we could keep you safe with the police, but that was a lie too. If you want to stay safe you need to keep an eye out in your local communities, but henceforth when you tell us that Kev Scrote is skipping school, or Mrs Scrote says Mr Scrote is about to murder her, we will do something about it, at once. And "something" will involve the attendance of hefty policemen, not arresting you for infringing little Kev's human rights or sending a leaflet on domestic violence to Mrs Scrote.

We said we could improve the schools with testing but that was a lie too. All tests are abolished. No one does anything with the data anyway. Oh, and by the way, public examinations have been a lie for the last 20 years (come on, do you really believe school children have been getting cleverer and cleverer EVERY YEAR since we introduced GCSEs? ) Henceforth they will simply get a mark and a quartile. No grades.

And of course we said you would have a comfortable old age, but that too was a lie, (although not perhaps entirely our fault,) and you had better plan to work to about 70 and save for your own pension. We in turn won't use means testing to make saving pointless.

Obviously all this means we will need far fewer civil servants so we will be sacking about a third of them over the next two years.

In short, you people need to take some responsibility for your own lives. We for our part undertake to do nothing whatsoever to increase the role of the state unless and until it is clearly shown that that would be beneficial to the public at large."

Do you think they will be saying all that? No, they won't. And the public would fill their pants if they did. Instead they will carry on managing the big state, albeit, we have to hope, in a slightly less ieological way than Labour.

By the way, has anyone else noticed how the welfare state inadvertently played into the hands of ultra capitalism? By which I mean, the only reason employers can dump the social costs of demanding that their workforce work long hours, at low wages, move around the country, and generally behave in a way that makes it next to impossible to care for family members or even act as an active citizen, is because the welfare state is supposedly there to pick up the shortfall by caring for granny, paying benefits and the like.

Then again I guess the states are a case where the employers do that anyway so the argument may not hold.

[JR-]

And of course we said you would have a comfortable old age, but that too was a lie, (although not perhaps entirely our fault,) and you had better plan to work to about 70 and save for your own pension. We in turn won't use means testing to make saving pointless.

brown taxing pensions was one of the stupidest things i have ever witnessed.

[rory_20_uk]

I disagree that the welfare state has caused people to work long hours for poor pay. That's been happening for the last 200 years. But children then didn't go to school until 18, so would either help in the house or have a job of their own. Some elderly people lived a long time, but the majority were dead long before they are now as there was no care nor medical treatment.
Then there was no choice: you worked doing what you could where you could - there just wasn't a safety net.

As to the rest of it - right on. But as you point out, the days where the politicians gave the voters tough love are well over. Best just pander to the largest demographics and cling on to power.