The GOS has made it his business on this website to highlight the annoying, unfair, cruel, undemocratic and downright stupid things that happen in the world and in Great Britain in particular. He looks on it as a service to other like-minded old codgers, an outlet for his near-terminal depression at the thought that sixty years-worth of hard-won wisdom and maturity serves only to reveal just how lunatic everyone else is, and a worthwhile hobby that fills his time and saves him from having to go shopping with Mrs.GOS.
But now something has happened, or looks as though it might happen, that has really got him seriously worried.
In a frightening article in the Daily Telegraph today (12th May), Andrew Pierce outlines what Gordon Brown might be planning to do once he becomes Prime Minister. For instance …
• According to a broad hint from Jack Straw his campaign manager for the leadership, Brown may scrap ID cards.
• Brown himself has said that he intends to sort out the NHS, although he does seem to think that making every doctor's surgery into a kind of drop-in centre open all hours, will magically solve everything, providing jobs for all those hundreds of junior doctors, conjuring thousands of nurses out of thin air and causing 75% of NHS administrator desk-jockeys to die a lingering and painful death, preferably from a disease that makes them enormously fat so the hospitals will refuse to treat them because it must be all their own fault.
• He will restore the link between state pensions and average earnings, banished since the Thatcher government.
• He will go ahead with plans to build more nuclear power stations. Let's hope he does it quickly, before the entire nation sinks beneath the waves under the weight of all those damn wind turbines, each turning out just enough electricity to power an NHS administrator's computer.
• He will OK the building of two new aircraft carriers for the Navy, giving a £3.5 billion boost to British shipyards. Frankly we'd have thought it made more sense to take all those destroyers etc. out of moth-balls, otherwise it would only take one lucky Exocet to sink 50% of the fleet.
• He will engage Iran in talks about Iraq, possibly working through the EU. This would be in sharp contrast to the White House which has refused to do so, and may mark the end of Britain being the USA's lapdog where foreign policy is concerned.
• He will turn back the clock in Whitehall and end Tony Blair's "sofa government" with key decisions being made in Downing Street by the PM and a handful of his favoured advisers.
• He will press ahead with plans for a written constitution, which will lay down the right for the House of Commons to hold ministers to account, and to vote before British troops can be committed to military action.
• Unlike Tony Bliar who has used Chequers to host weekend binges for his celebrity supporters, Brown will go home to Scotland most weekends to be with his family, and will use Chequers only for official functions like international summit meetings.
It's early days yet, of course, but if Brown really did do all these things or even most of them, we'd be faced with an incredible prospect: we might be forced to admit that Gordon Brown actually made quite a good Prime Minister.
Now, that's scary.
The GOS says: Note to self: "Don't worry. Do pigs fly?"
either on this site or on the World Wide Web.
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