Labour Conference Amnesia

It is the first conference after a change of government; repudiating the previous set of fools, trumpeting a change agenda, extolling the virtues of the new, fresh-faced team. Our new Labour government has certainly wasted no time in promoting their new programme that sweeps away the wasted years under, err, Labour. Instead of Labour replacing Conservatives after an election we have Brownies replacing Blairites after a coronation. Except that hasn’t happened either because many of the faces in the Brown government are exactly the same faces that were in the Blair government. In an Orwellian rewriting of history the doings of the last government have been assigned to some unnamed others and then trashed with enthusiasm. So, 24-hour drinking looks to be going the same way as super-casinos, now that the casualty wards are filling up with those maimed through drink. The downgrading of cannabis may be reversed as more pitiful tales of those tipped into psychosis through skunk are reported. It doesn’t stop there though; apparently the NHS hasn’t had enough change and the new big idea is to personalise it, whatever the hell that means. So, more pointless government targets and reorganisations appear to be on the cards. Spin is one thing that hasn’t changed though, with the soundbite friendly Council Tax rebate for soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan being pushed for all that it is worth. Of course the money comes from the military budget; that is the one they use to pay for things like bullets and helicopters, so our army is likely to remain short of both. What’s a few soldier’s lives against a couple of days of good headlines though. No wonder the head of the army thinks that the nation’s relationship with the military is broken.