A Family Man

Say what you will about Bill Blunt, but there are few people in the world he would hesitate to urinate on if they were on fire. Common human decency, together with a bladder that’s not as functional as it used to be, mean I would rarely pass up an opportunity to extinguish the flames if a fellow human being were suffering in anguish while being burned alive.

There’s always an exception that proves the rule, however. In the case of the Honourable Member for Darlington, I’d keep my legs well and truly crossed.

What can be said about Alan Milburn that hasn’t already been said? He started out his political career working in a Socialist bookshop in Newcastle, peddling Marxist tracts to anyone who accidentally stepped over the threshold of Days of Hope - rising, inexorably, to a place in Tory Blair’s cabinet as Secretary of State for Health. Whilst in office, he oversaw the introduction of the so-called Private Finance Initiative – for which read letting the private sector construct hospitals, which they’d then lease back to the NHS at huge cost to the public purse.

In a little-appreciated annexe to his career, he also abolished Community Health Councils, the last vehicle for democratic influence in the health service (which, for more than a quarter of a century, had kept the worst excesses of NHS managers in check).

As Wikipedia so succinctly summarises:

“Following his resignation as Secretary of State for Health (to spend more time with his family) [in June 2003] Alan Milburn took a post for £30,000 a year as an adviser to Bridgepoint Capital, a venture capital firm heavily involved in financing private health care firms moving into the NHS, including Alliance Medical, Match Group, Medica and Robina Care Group.”

Whatever Milburn’s real motives may have been, his family clearly thought better of them since, in September 2004, he returned to Blair’s government as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster – a role he renounced once Gordon Brown was appointed as Prime Minister in June 2007. Since then, he’s continued as a constituency MP for Darlington. He might have gained some solace when he accepted Pepsico’s offer of a £25,000 a year ‘to attend a handful of meetings and offer advice on health, nutrition and the company's "strategic direction"’.

Now, it's been 'reveled' (sic) that Milburn has been invited to head up a ‘new commission’ on social mobility. We can only presume that Gordon Brown would much prefer Mr Milburn to be inside his tent, rather than outside.

Now, there’s a tent I’d rather not be near to if it was on fire...

Ten Days That Shook The World

Hovering on a precipice is never an easy thing to do, at the best of times. When you're a newspaper editor faced with day after day of imminent financial apocalypse, however, it must seem near-impossible.

Staring into the abyss can get a bit monotonous when it's a daily feature of life. After all, there are only so many times readers want to know that their savings in some obscure Icelandic bank have gone down the plug hole. When we've already been told that we're on the brink of disaster, only the actual disaster is 'news'. It must all start to feel as if you're one of those chaps who used to parade our town centres carrying billboards proclaiming that 'The End is Nigh'.

For most of us mere mortals, it's easier to just switch off and watch The X Factor than to try to understand the intricate details of multi-billion pound bail-outs of our financial institutions. Gordon Brown, meanwhile, is demonstrating the kind of firm leadership we all wished he'd shown from the day he became PM. Anyone who was around during the last big market collapse (under the Tories) might be forgiven for feeling more reassured that we have a dour Scot at the helm in these difficult times. I know I am.

Cometh the hour, cometh the man. Brown seems to have an instinctive grasp of economics, even if his political judgement hasn't always been what it might be - witness his dithering over any number of issues over the past year. Well, now that the chips are down, he's rising to the challenge. I suppose a decade or more of privatisation and deregulation has taught us that the market doesn't always know best and, suddenly, nationalisation doesn't make us feel dirty any more. Still, I can't help feeling that £50billion of taxpayers money shouldn't really be 'injected' into institutions that have hardly demonstrated they can use money wisely. Far better to invest it in some decent, green, infrastructure.

It's not all doom and gloom, however. There are an awful lot of estate agents out there getting very good at Solitaire, I hear. After years of making a mint by doing err... not a great deal, really ... their chickens have finally come home to roost. According to the Daily Telegraph, they're now selling, on average, just one house a week. Such a shame.

All Bets Are Off

Early days for the Brown premiership, but I am already liking what I see.

The Blairite obsession with opening up gambling in the UK was always one I found disturbing. There was never any evidence, of course, but the suspicion was always there that money might have passed hands between US casino giants and politicians, or their stooges, to help sweeten the process.

The news today that Brown has turned his back on the deal to open up US-style super-casinos here in Britain has got to be good. I never bought that specious argument about how they'd bring growth, jobs and prosperity to our run-down inner-city areas. More likely, they'd bring in their train a focus for criminals, greater indebtedness and increased gambling addiction to areas of our country that need that like a hole in the head.

Hats off, then, to the new PM. Keep going as you are, and you may even tempt old Bill to vote Labour.

A New Day Dawns

It's not often that we awake, in the UK, to a new Prime Minister running our country. In the last 25 years, it's happened only 3 times, after all (and that's including today!). So, the occasion should give us pause to reflect, perhaps, on what the future might hold under Gordon Brown.

There are those who would dismiss Bill Blunt as someone who skips lightly across the pond of life, and ducks the hard political issues. Not so. I'm as much at ease discussing the future prospects for the nation as I am the Eurovision Song Contest. Anyone who takes even a cursory glance at the list of topics covered by my blog will see that I cast my net widely.

And so, what of this Brownian future?

Expect a big announcement on something major, soon. Just as he stunned the world by handing over responsibility for setting interest rates to the Bank of England on his first day as Chancellor, so he'll want to stamp his mark on the history books with some dramatic change. It's Gordon's way. He's a man of substance to Blair's style. He's a thinker with a rigorous, intellectual mind, where Blair was an instinctive popularist. I doubt he'll be so easily pulled into the role of lapdog to the American President in quite the way that Blair was.

For what it's worth (and I have never held a brief for the man) I think he will be good for Britain.