steepholm

Despite myself I'm beginning to feel rather fond of Lord Howell, the ermined fuckwit who called the north-east of England "desolate" yesterday. Speaking to The Telegraph today he has apologized and explained that he actually meant to insult the north-west. So that's all right.

Parody cannot improve on the original...

What was in my mind was much more the drilling going on off the Lancashire coast. But it came out of my mouth as the North East, which you can blame me for rightly. And that has created a great furore.

The North East wasn’t in my mind at all. Afterwards, I checked my words again, playing back the debate.

It was a stupid error of mine to mention anywhere at all. The general story is right – that we want the derricks for fracking to be far away from residences in unloved places that are not environmentally sensitive. I don’t want to see gas fracking subsidised like wind farms are. A lot more care must be taken than has been the case with wind farms, which have caused terrible desecration. It’s odd that they’ve decided to do this in sensitive places down in Sussex.

In unrelated news, the Court of Appeal today recommended that the DPP give further consideration to the guidelines for assisted euthanasia.

''The Government can't create jobs. The Government can create the environment which is conducive to the creation of jobs but it cannot create jobs and we mislead ourselves if we believe it can.''

Thus spake Lord Myners (until recently a Labour finance minister) in Parliament yesterday. It's not the way of the Lords to cry "Bullshit!", so I am performing a service by doing it for them. I mean, has Lord Myners not heard of the public sector? Soldiers, nurses, teachers, civil servants, police officers, and all that jazz? Where does he imagine those jobs come from? Perhaps he thinks that the Government only "creates the environment" in which nurses will be needed - perhaps by making people feel ill - and then watches them magically precipitate? Or maybe it's like the way people put up nest boxes in the hope that a blue tit will make its home there. Imagine the excitement at the Department of Education: "Hey, remember that school we built in the centre of Dewsbury? I just checked the webcam, and we've got teachers!"

Actually, if Lord Myners wants to see an example of a job created very directly by government, he need look no further than Lord Myners. Paul Myners was given his job as Financial Services Secretary directly by the government of Gordon Brown, which also (because of course we don't bother with details such as democracy in New Labour) made him a life peer. It's a pretty good job, in fact. You can't be sacked, unless you commit a serious criminal offence; you can come in as often or as seldom as you like; you get rather impressive perks; there's no interview to go through; and, under current recommendations you are due a pay increase of over 24.5% this year, while many of us elsewhere in the public sector have enjoyed an increase of... [checks pay slips]... ah yes, nothing at all. How odd that Lord Myners didn't think of himself and all the other members of the House of Lords when he made that statement, considering where he made it.

Still, it's certainly a boost to the old morale to be told by someone like Lord Myners - whose own main claim to fame is that he approved Fred Goodwin's pension arrangments - that you don't exist, or that your job is not a real job because it's not directly generating wealth for UK PLC, or whatever else he might have meant. I expect plenty more of the same, though: public sector workers are clearly due to be demonized as parasites over the next few months. One comfort is that if this is an example of a Labour minister, the transition to the Tories will be barely perceptible.

On the other hand, I do blame him for last night's venal dream.