The Labour Party Conference speech by Gordon Brown seems to be full of the usual NuLabour verbless sentences, wittering on about "the renewal of New Labour"
A few impressions:
Apparently, to prevent genocide, there is allegedly going to beome "action" on Darfur in the Sudan.
Presumably, this must mean military action, but since the UK armed forces are already at full stretch, this seems like a hollow promise.
There was only a vague promise on Terrorism to "do anything necessary" and to devote "any necessary reources" to the problem.
However, he used the phrase "win the battle of ideas, for hearts and minds".
This phraseology is redolant of the Vietnam war era motto of "if you have 'em by the short hairs, their hearts and minds will follow".
There was some vague allusion to a Written Constitution, without actually promising one as such.
He used an example of an employee wishing to set up their own business, something which has been made far more difficult than it should be, due to the extra taxation, bureaucratic red tape and utter incompetence, for which the Chancellor of the Exchequer is directly responsible.
Gordon Brown mentioned "Identity Cards" and "Moving on beyond 28 days detention"
Why did Gordon Brown deliberately mix up anti-terrorism measures with anti-social behavior ones ?
How exactly does the National Identity Register and ID Cards scheme make any difference whatsoever to either Terrorism or Anti-Social Behavior ?
"I want a radical shift of power to the centre" - a Freudian slip ?
Parliament to vote on "going to war" ? N.B. no real "wars" are declared anymore, it is all "police actions" or "peacekeeping" etc, never formal declarations of war.
He made an allusion to reducing the amount of Patronage, which is something for which Tony Blair is infamous for.
Overall it was not a disasterous speech. It was full of one or two sentence ideas, without any detail, attempting to cover far too many topics.
As a result it was not paricularly inspiring for the audience outside of the Labour Party Conference.
More comments when we read the full text of the speech.
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