One line for the UK, another line for their friends in power...

When I watched Barack Obama live on late night (UK) BBC TV make his anger shown at the pressure he had been put upon by the far right to drop his healthcare reforms, he announced: "If you want a fight, you can have a fight".

In these days of compromise, it was both thrilling and slightly embasrassing that he'd had to get to this so soon. But he fronted it out, and said he would rip apart the banks so the state could never again be held to ransom by the greed of the society it endorsed. Hardly a cure, but a dose of medicine that was popular with all but the nincompoop,

So when I heard the Radio 4 news that "george osbourne has said he will support Prez Obama's plans to split up the banks" I thought it was an opportunist leap by the greasy Tory beaver to grab a piece of limelight by stating the bleeding obvious. This was a good policy. But then a small search of the clarification of Osbourne's (and indeed the Conservative Party's) support as to the extent of this policy is reported differently worldwide.

Take this report from the Wall Street Journal which pitches George and the Global Banks very much on the same side. To see it, you'll have to click the title of this post as google doesn't want to play cut and paste. He was lying. He no more wants small banks any more than the small cock he already has.

But this kind of detail doesn't matter any more, does it? It's not that we like David or George, we just don't like Gordon. But even under his worse New Labour spin, would GB really be this much of a mealy mouthed lying tosser?


He's pretending to be just like you. He even believes he's just like you. But he isn't.

Ken Clarke knows Cameron's social engineering policy will be neither fair or effective

When Ken Clarke was Chancellor under John Major, he and the Prime Minister knew that the married tax allowance was becoming an outdated attempt to interfere with the social structures that were forming at the time.
More and more children were being born out of marriage, but into perfectly good homes. Just because marriage wasn't on the lifestyle agenda of the parents of those children, it couldn't possibly be argued that they needed to pay more tax to subsidise their married next door neighbours.
Nor did it look good encouraging failed relationships to stay together, prejudicing single parents or attempting to align the Government with ultimately a religious framework endorsed by institutions that still believe in magic.
However, while those heady days of a modernising Britain may seem a long way away under Brown's uninspiring, bank-manager-style Premiership, they will be revved swiftly into reverse thanks to Cameron and his social innovator, Ian Duncan Smith, a man so earnest in his own banality that you could believe he were a speech writer for Noel Edmonds on Deal or No Deal.
Duncan Smith's visits to "Real Britain" make him look like Alan Partridge stumbling through a Mumbai slum. Admittedly IDS was taking one for the team in a party that prefers not to mix with, be educated with or pay (against the minimum wage) the poor.
While taxing drugs like alcohol and nicotine may have a place in trying to curb a behaviour that then has to be supported by the society that provides it, to encourage marriage by the tax system is as misguided as China's attempt to reign in its birth rate by unfairly treating families who had girls.
Except it's not misguided, because we've been here before. What next? No sex before marriage, the shaming of children born out of wedlock, tightening the right of pregnant women to choose abortion - they all line up together giving the real picture behind Cameron's 1950s rose-tinted glass pseudo Utopia, where the rich don't get bothered and the poor stay out of sight.

David Cameron. He's pretending to be just like you. He even believes he's just like you. But he isn't.