Red-Faced Recession Depression

Red-faced economists and the media were left with egg on their faces as 'surprise' figures out today showed the recession depression hasn't ended. It's the worst ever. Reverse ferrets all round. Dozy Darling is trying to put a gloss over it. Deluded Brown has some explaining to do.

"Growth will come," said the chancellor taking a chance. "But it will take time." Is that the best you can do, Darling?

Red-faced ferrets struggled to change headlines and copy. The government statistics office (ONS) had released grim news. News agency, Reuters, put it on the wires:

"The economy contracted unexpectedly in the third quarter of this year, squashing hopes of an end to the downturn and instead making the current recession the longest on record, official data showed on Friday."

A duped media had fallen over itself, buying into false hope and optimism. The BBC had cleared the decks, ready to swamp output with swathes of 'good news': that nasty bout of depression recession was just a cute little downturn after all.

Earlier The Times had a go with: 'Britain is set to climb out of recession'. The Guardian reported 'Figures show rise from recession'.

From ITN it was: 'Figures to show UK out of recession'. The myth-making Mirror gleefully reported: 'Figures show rise from recession'.

The shock ONS figures revealed GDP fell by 0.4 percent between July and September. The economy has contracted for six successive quarters for the first time since records began in 1955.

Deluded Brown was all set to announce the recession depression is officially over for him and everything's hunky-dory in La-La-Land, pinning his hopes on recovery as part of the cunning election ploy.

Many were taken in by the spinning grin. New Labour attack dogs were ready to round on Honest Osborne as a fag-end government put its money on a last roll of the dice, playing the mythical false hope game.

But figures were much worse than analysts' expectations of a 0.2 percent rise, according to Reuters. This is now the longest recession since records began.

Wriggling out of the reverse ferret, Reuters reports: "Not a single analyst out of the 35 polled by Reuters before the data had expected a negative reading."

The shocking figures make a mockery out of all the Brown sauce that "Britain is best placed to weather the global downturn”. At this rate, the UK will be the last G7 country to come out of recession.

The economy is sinking fast, despite pumping in a painful £175 billion over-hyped stimulus to prop up a decade of disaster.

Bunkered Brown and his scary grin have been forced back in hiding with only a harsh dose of reality for comfort, until the next set of 'miracle recovery' figures.

In the real world, the green shoots sham is withering. The Land Registry is set to axe 1,500 jobs as part of a cost-cutting plan. Official unemployment is topping two and a half million. Behind the fiddled figures, it's gone through the roof.

Retail sales are stuck in a rut, confounding spinners and doggedly refusing to budge. Manufacturing and construction are both taking a big hit.

Banks are sailing off into Galbraith's 'wild blue yonder' after trousering taxpayer's cash in the trillion pound bank bail-out con.

A mountain of national debt keeps piling up. A dire economy is disappearing down a black hole.

The Deluded One continues to take the country down the road to rack and ruin. His crafty plan to fool some of the voters some of the time lies in tatters.

Bottom picture: Private Eye

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Burying Bad News

With all the kerfuffle over Maggie Mandy's postal strike and the BNP rumble in Auntie's jungle, cynics would say it's a good day to bury bad news. Sure as eggs is eggs, a few choice gems crawled out of the woodwork. And what a rotten lot they are.

Man-made climate change con - Advertising watchdogs are investigating a scary £6m government 'climate change' ad over claims it's 'misleading and too "scary" for children'.

Billed as a "bedtime story", the Advertising Standards Authority has received 357 complaints about the ad made for the ridiculously misnamed 'department of energy and climate change'.

And that comes the day after government climate change figures were branded 'misleading' by the government's own UK Statistics Authority.

Fiddling crime stats - The old ones are still the best. Violent crimes have been 'wrongly classed' as 'not really a crime at all', according to policing watchdogs who say some police forces are not recording all acts of violence as, er, crimes.

The chief inspector of constabulary found officers classed some reports of violence and assault as "no crime" - just to make every one feel that little bit more safe in their beds.

Green shoots sham - The Land Registry is set to axe 1,500 jobs as part of a cost-cutting plan helping to save £92m a year. Retail sales are stuck in a rut, confounding spinners and doggedly refusing to budge, with consumers remaining a tad cautious about spending.

Brown's War - After troops got a beating in Basra, the Royal Navy is sneaking back into Iraq with around 200 Royal Navy personnel to train local forces, according to the armed forces minister. Kind-hearted Baghdad politicians have agreed to let them back in - but this time without iPods.

Tomorrow's Daily Noos? - Deluded Brown is hoping the recession depression is officially over for him and everything's hunky-dory in La-La-Land.

Time for one of his scary grins. But if ONS figures show the recession isn't really over yet, someone should report him to the advertising standards authority.

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'Maggie' Mandy's Last Post

Striking posties are being set up as election pawns by a government hoping tough talk is a vote winner. Delivering the attack is still smarting Mandy, egging on postie-bashing bosses and blocking a deal.

The strike is now set to go-ahead despite last ditch talks. A sign of a fag-end government drifting and dithering around with no political direction.

But Dithering Brown still has time to get off the fence and tell Maggie Mandy to call off the dogs.

The Orange Party is still retching from Mandy's cringe-making pantomime at Brighton, trying to be one of the boys.

Now Maggie Mandy's throwing a strop, squaring up for a battle with posties to smash the strike, still smarting after the Communication Workers Union helped spoil his Mail sell-off plans.

It's pay-back time. The CWU is taking a hammering with all the spin Mandy can muster. But the CWU is fighting back, branding Mandy's bosses-backing line "blantantly untrue and extremely unhelpful".

Mandy's at the wrong end of the pantomime horse if he thinks attacking the posties would boost the dead-end government's appeal to voters.

Is there really any public sympathy for the smug arrogant bosses at Royal Mail? The Orange Party has nothing but the deepest contempt for sharp-suited fat cat Crozier at the helm with the slick patter of a dodgy used-car salesman.

The bitter dispute is tearing the Party apart. Split down the middle between New Labour cronies and true Labour trade unionists. In the commons Tories tried to milk the divide and Bunkered Brown for all it's worth.

Party loyalty is at breaking point. What does Royal Mail do? Hire thousands of 'strike-breakers' for a pittance and order Mail managers to break their contracts and work on the front-line.

Labour MP John McDonnell has already warned: 'This may be part of an election strategy, for Brown and Mandelson to be seen as tough by taking on a union."

Has Bunkered Brown or Maggie Mandy been down to Mount Pleasant? It's not pleasant. What an insult to claim posties are stuck in the past. They're protecting a cherished public service.

Thousands of jobs have gone over the last few years while the firm racks up a whopping £321m operating profit.

Postal workers are caught in the jobs trap. Firefighters and refuse workers too are up in arms as bosses have them over the jobs barrel and force through cheap below the belt working practices.

It's starting to have all the hallmarks of the 'Winter of Discontent' that put an end to Callaghan's Labour government. Yet this political and industrial mess can be sorted.

Make a start by putting £1m plus a year Crozier and his greedy bunch of Mail robbing side-kicks in their place, instead of letting them play tough guys and union-bashing bosses.

Ex-postie union leader, Al Johnson, could mediate, instead of leaving workers up the Swanee.

Maggie Mandy too should get out of Thatcher's '80s and move with the times. Royal Mail is a publicly-owned company. He's responsible for it with a plumb cabinet job.

Dithering Bunkered Brown and Maggie Mandy could still get on the blower to fat cat Crozier and give him notice to strike a deal with the CWU and sort it out. Otherwise sack him.

And when the lads are back at work - sack him anyway. After all Mandy has been quick to point out this is a 'damaging dispute'. The damage is being done by using postal workers as an election pawn to dig up the festering remains of a withering Party.

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Borrowing Brown's A Crying Shame

Eye-watering public debt and a dire economy disappearing down a black hole. Borrowing Brown banging on about climate change, leaving behind a mighty mess. The Deluded One is taking the country down the road to rack and ruin. It's enough to bring tears to your eye.

The public is getting punch drunk with failure fatigue and numb from eye-watering economic incompetence.

Borrowing Brown's well on course for a place in the record book of shame. He's managed to pull a mangy rabbit out of the hat, more than doubling state borrowing in the first half of this year to a record £77.3 billion high. One hell of a record.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show government borrowing has ballooned by £14.8 billion in September, hitting the highest level since the country was left on its knees in the 1946 war wreckage.

Over the first six months of last year, borrowing was a mere drop in the ocean of debt - a piddling £34 billion, nearly half of today’s total. How we gasped then.

Yet for all the grand talk of belt-tightening, there’s little sign of it. As reckless Brown struggles to cook the books, the disreputable gimmick was a fire sale of the last few public assets set to raise peanuts.

But it's worst than that. The total net debt now stands at £824.8 billion - around 59 per cent of the UK's entire economic output. Quite a few green shoots will be needed to turn that around, on top of billions spent on greenwash.

We're all doomed. The economy is running away with itself to pay for a decade of failure. Spending is running well ahead of tax revenues, with tax receipts for the month at just £35.4 billion compared with spending of £45.7 billion over the month.

Just to meet interest payments on its disgusting debt pile, the government shelled out £5.9 billion - 43 per cent more than the same month last year and the highest monthly payout on record.

This should sound a warning bell. If debt continues to mount at that rate, borrowing for the year would surge past the £200 billion mark - far ahead of desperate Darling's £175 billion forecast which is already saddling a whole generation to come with government-inflicted debt.

That opens the door to the dreaded double-wammy, with the IMF laying down the public spending law and the country in danger of losing it's 'triple A' rating. International money men will drop UK investment like a ton of bricks.

The discredited government is clinging on with its last card, playing the politics of false hope and optimism as it limps along to the general election. But voters are fed up being fed so many lies with a daily diet of pork pie politics. Honest Osbourne saw off that sham, winning plaudits on both sides of the Atlantic.

Grand economic theories hold no sway with voters. What they see is a government which has discredited the once laudable centre-left agenda with squandered public spending, wasteful public 'development' agencies and an off-balance sheet PFI sham.

Short of banging a few heads together or indicting Bunkered Brown for economic war crimes, the only solution is one the Orange Party has called for before - a massive US style debt ticker - opposite parliament - to drive the shameful message home.

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Bully Boy Balls Gets His Teachers Pet

Blinky Balls has been branded 'a bit of a bully' over his demolition of parliamentary democracy, as deluded Brown's fag-end government drifts aimlessly along. But there's more to this little outburst than meets the eye. A broadside has been fired against Brown's side-kick as the struggling Supreme Leader bumbles along with post-conference blues.

Not many New Labour politicians can raise the hackles of the Labour left and the Blairite hitchhikers like 'Blinky' Balls.

But it's taken parliamentarian and party loyalist, Barry Sheerman, to say in public what every one has known in private for so long.

Only during Smeargate did Balls' true despicable colours come out, when he was exposed as one of Downing Street's gang of ruthless 'reservoir dogs'.

In the death throes of a discredited government, parliamentary democracy is being devoured in a last ditch bid to shore up power in the hands of a deluded, self important elite.

Now Balls is riding rough-shod over parliament, appointing one of his cronies to the non-job of 'children's commissioner', despite the whole of the commons committee dead set against the decision.

'Children's commissioner' for England was a non-starter anyway. A non-job with a fat salary, big office, big budget. A guaranteed gob making mealy-mouthed pronouncements to suck up to the boss.

All part of Balls' empire building in the stalinesque department of schools, children, dinner ladies, et al, before Cameron's quango-hunters go for the kill.

Sheerman has rightly asked why committees should bother vetting appointments if they were ignored. But hey, why should a little matter of parliament get in the way of a patsy.

During the MPs' expenses scandal, triple flipping Balls escaped the wrath of even the Telegraph.

Despite the Baby P scandal and SATS fiasco, Balls managed to wriggle out of blame, passing the buck with a bucket of whitewash while hiding behind the smokescreen of accountability.

But Balls, propped up by his City pals from his days at the treasury, has only one political protector and that is Beleaguered Brown.

The Orange Party reserves a particular distain for Balls, particularly when he makes occasional forays to woo the left.

There's something distasteful about a politician who's making the most of his privileged upbringing and riding on the coat-tails of one discredited PM to keep him in power, backed up by the macho Downing Street bully boy machine.

But an MP and cabinet crony who thinks he knows better than the commons, imposing his will against that of a respected and influential commons committee, is playing a dangerous game of cat and mouse politics. Balls can survive only as long as Brown survives.

Sheerman's outburst over Balls came as he makes a play for the chair of the PLP which at a stroke would kick Brown into touch.

With Brown drifting along with post conference blues, Sheerman fired an opening shot in the battle to oust Brown and save the Party.

The Balls broadside was delivered with precision to take out his side-kick and stop Balls' leadership dream in its tracks.

Nice one Barry. Now all it takes is for Mandy to make his move with a march of the Millipedes. Before or after Glasgow NE?

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