Glenn And Steve's Night With The Brain Cell

Pretty much the first thing I ever blogged about was the curious comparison between the dying years of the Major government and the end of the Blair era; between a government working hard to find new ways to screw you with your pants on and one working hard to find its butt with both hands. In an odd combination of deja vu and whatever the exact opposite of nostalgia is, the evidence is building that Labour's new generation are similarly lacking in competence.

Because what we find in The Grauniad (which, let's be clear, I wouldn't touch with a barge pole if it wasn't the only news site that works well on my N900) is The Ed Miller Band pontificating on the manifesto what he wrote. He, of course, believes that it's a radical agenda, but what are we told is the talismanic policy?

The People's Bank.

Hmmm, now where have I heard the idea of the government providing alternative forms of financial institution? Gee, that sounds an awful lot like what Vince Cable had in mind for the nationalisation of banks! Ed, you remember Vince, don't you? He's one of those Lib Dems, that's right, the people you think are agitprop Tories. So an idea he had two years ago is what passes for radical now, is it? Oh, and by the way, given that the government owns enormous chunks of lots of banks, what do you want to base the People's Bank on?

The Post Office?

That's nice, Ed, but I don't know if you remember that three years ago there was this massive swathe of post office closures, a programme Mike German AM described as equivalent to Doctor Beeching in its intentional, fallacious, financially-driven destruction of infrastructure (hey, that's a good line, wonder where he got it from...) Which government was it that presided over that, despite being told repeatedly that the proper approach was to find ways to better use the network? Oh yes, that's right...

And while we're at it, I'm sure I've heard a provider of financial products describing them as "The People's". Who was it who was doing that? Ah, maybe all that time in the queues you made longer got to you...

Between an actual Labour party so devoid of ideas it may have passed the point of heat death and a trade union movement that still hasn't realised it's spent thirteen years paying for its right royal rogering and is now going to get it whether it likes it or not, only one question remains; how useless must David Cameron be if he can't definitively say he's going to beat them?