Fool me Twice

Picture poor old Vince Cable shuffling home to his Twickenham semi after another hard slog in Whitehall, looking forward to a glass of bitter shandy and a glimpse of the evening's play at Wimbledon.

Perhaps he sits in silent company with his wife, unable to express his anguish of what he finds himself carrying out in Government. He should be totally sickened as his progressive and redistributive instincts are confronted with the daily menu of vicious cuts in welfare and public services.

George Osborne and his work trainee Danny Alexander presented a vile, despicable budget on Tuesday. The message came through clearly: the recklessness of the banks will be paid for by the struggling majority. The slashing of welfare payments by £11bn was certainly breathtaking and back to the old Tories of the early 80s which Cameron kidded us had been consigned to history. "We're all in this together," said Osborne, the millionaire son of a Baronet, on slashing housing benefits and so guaranteeing big rises in homelessness.

Compounding Vince’s misery must be the biggest economic questions about whether £40bn worth of fiscal savagery, at a time where recovery is so fragile, risks knocking Britain back into recession. There is also the small matter of regressive measure of putting VAT up to 20 percent which Vince railed against throughout the election. That just can't be spun.

The Departmental cuts of a quarter or a third look, er, impossible to implement. Some Ministries like Transport can put a moratorium on all building projects and save a few billion but take a Department like the Home Office where the commitment to community safety could not be viewed as luxurious indulgence. Cuts that deep will mean we have decide if we no longer monitor sex offenders, discontinue providing home security to the elderly or make do with 50,000 less police officers.

Cameron said to Andrew Marr a few days before the election, “Any Cabinet minister, if we win the election, who comes to me and says 'here are my plans and they involve front line reductions' will be sent back to their department to go away and think again." That claptrap was about as convincing as George Bush senior when he promised, “no new taxes.”

Vince is central to this odious deceit, kidding the country the severe hardship and steeply rising unemployment and poverty is “unavoidable”. But ultimately he’s kidding himself his heart is in it at all.

A Scroundel's Refuge

The oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico looks about the worst man-made environmental disaster since Chernobyl. Its cause appears to be risky well management from the lead company BP and the American population has rightfully poured barrels of scorn on them.

It hardly helped the corporation when it massively understated the scale of the daily flow and one of its execs described it as "tiny" ccompared to the size of the Gulf.

However BP has recently found an allay in the Daily Mail who has taken exception to President Obama bashing 'British Petroleum' as a swipe at our entire nation. Mail columnist Amanda Platell (above) said on BBC's Question Time, the "anti-British" sentiment was seriously harming the relations between Washington and London to the extent we should consider withdrawing our troops from Helmand.

The Mail often rages against Europe in this little Englander manner (although Platell is Australian) so it is unusual to lay into our oldest ally the US. But the only way the Mail can make this story run as if Obama and the US media had broadened their anger to any other aspect of Britishness or Britain. The plain fact is they haven't.

Platell and other polemicists seem to expect us to take this leap of logic. Their approach is more akin to Fox News where the extreme edge of a story is placed as the mainstream.

And in the end the Mail looks like they are defenders of a company whose reckless decision-making will cause long-lasting damage to 1,500 miles of coastline. And not forgetting 11 rig-workers were killed in the initial explosion.

It's rather like sympathising with a bully who has hurt his hand beating an old lady.

Circles of Hell

This is a picture of Gary Purdham, farmer’s son, Rugby League player and father of two small children. He was murdered, quite without motive, by gun-owner and part-time taxi driver Derrick Bird in Cumbria yesterday. Gary Purdham was helping his uncle carry out the annual hedge-trimming on his farm near Gosforth, when Bird drew up in his taxi and shot him point-blank.

Bird appears to have 'flipped' like other gun-owners and had taken out his simmering paranoid frustration on the innocent community. He felt he could, because he owned and had inherited a stack of rifles and shotguns. In some people possessing a lethal weapon lends them a sense of imperviousness, of hidden power over their seemingly inferior peers.

Like all mass-shootings, the assailant comes to realise exerting power of life or death over strangers is finite and their suicide is a common feature to all firearms massacres. And as usual the weapons were legally owned. The ban on handguns between 1996-8 meant the mass-murderers favoured weapon, the pistol, is no longer easily available and the ammunition is now very hard to come by. So it is a surprise, Bird could murder so many with a shotgun and a .22 rifle.

The law is probably not the best solution here. But independent scrutiny of firearms licensing is long overdue as police seem to simply dish them out to their old mates with little consideration for their mental health. Thomas Hamilton’s licence was approved eventhough the assessment could have not been more explicit in raising potential dangers of letting him have his gun back.

But better policing is no compensation to small boys waking up today to find their Dada still gone. Bird’s acts of evil consign him to the same ignominy as Ryan and Hamilton, fitting testament to other quiet, loners who carried out unspeakable horrors with legal guns.