So, Gordon Brown called Gillian Duffy a 'bigoted woman', after being charming to her face. He spent the rest of the day trying to make things better.

Actually, in the scheme of things, I think he did pretty well in the circumstances. Accidents happen, and it's a measure of your character what you do next. Brown can't have been comfortable having to go apologise like that, and my view is he did it well.

The reason why you should never vote Labour is for what happened next. Prescott let rip, accusing Duffy of being part of a Murdoch plot.

And the Guardian ran attack articles on her too, which encouraged further Duffy-kicking by the dribbling left-wing morons who inhabit CiF.

Not so long ago, no self-respecting editor would have run stories like these. He, and it would invariably have been a 'he', would have said that old working-class ladies like Gillian Duffy are off limits for the press.

Now, it looks like Labour are so hateful they'll put the boot into anyone who stands in their way.

Filed under: Politics with tags gillian duffy, gordon brown, left wingers, reasons not to vote labour
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Gordon Brown paid his cleaner £262 a month to clean his flat and charged it through to the taxpayer.

When challenged by a bunch of kids on Radio 1, the best reason he could come up with was that he "has a wife who works and kids". As if that distinguishes him from any other British family, or excuses his greedy, money-grubbing behaviour.

He also thinks it appropriate to charge you and me so that he can watch Sky TV for free. Ordinary mortals pay for it themselves, out of their post-tax income.

He hasn't shown a shred of remorse for abusing the public purse in this way. He doesn't even think he's done anything wrong.

Filed under: Politics with tags gordon brown, mps' expenses, reasons not to vote labour
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John Prescott is, in my view, possibly the most odious, vile, obnoxious Labour politician that ever lived.

I already blogged about his voter-punching, secretary-shagging exploits here. And that's not all. His Cabinet career is peppered with failure and incompetence of the highest order.

Now, he has even tried to defend Gordon Brown's "bigot" gaffe today, saying that it was all just a Murdoch-led conspiracy. Eh?

Filed under: Politics with tags idiots, john prescott, reasons not to vote labour
23541 Comment »http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fcablog.org.uk%2F2010%2F04%2Freasons-not-to-vote-labour-47-john-prescott%2FReasons+not+to+vote+Labour+%2347+-+John+Prescott2010-04-29+13%3A02%3A30Christie+Malryhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.fcablog.org.uk%2F%3Fp%3D2354

Srichand Hunduja is a megarich Indian. Hinduja had applied for a British passport but had had his application refused.

Then he pledged £1m of sponsorship to the Millennium Dome project and, after Mandelson had helpfully rung up the Home Office to move things along, found his reapplication was accepted.

Mandelson's inability to decide on a story and stick to it was his undoing. And he was forced to resign from the Cabinet a second time. Thence he was shunted out to exile in Europe, until Brown decided he needed him back, sleaze or no sleaze.

Filed under: Politics with tags home office, lord mandelson, reasons not to vote labour, sleaze
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This was the promise:

"We will not raise the basic or top rates of income tax in the next Parliament."

The rest is history.

Labour, of course, introduced a brand new 50% rate for the highest earners, which will start from 2011.

And, although not a strict breach of the pledge, Labour's removal of the 10p rate was very much a breach of its spirit.

Filed under: Politics with tags income tax, manifestos, reasons not to vote labour
23481 Comment »http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fcablog.org.uk%2F2010%2F04%2Freasons-not-to-vote-labour-49-broken-manifesto-pledges-on-income-tax-rates%2FReasons+not+to+vote+Labour+%2349+-+broken+manifesto+pledges+on+income+tax+rates2010-04-29+11%3A03%3A25Christie+Malryhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.fcablog.org.uk%2F%3Fp%3D2348

Every now and then you find some real gems on Twitter. And then sometimes you find stuff like this:

suggestion to abolish icaew seems well supported.

It didn't provide a link, so as a public service for you, dear reader, here it is:

The Tories will allegedly abolish the FSA.

The FSA can claim they relied on figures provided by members of the ICAEW. The ICAEW practice "flat earth" [fair value] accounting!

Value accounting is described on the net:

"Fair value accounting provides more transparency than historical cost based methods. Maybe if companies in the United States and Asia had measured financial instruments at fair value, regulators, depositors and investors could have acheived greater regularity and market discipline and avoided some of the losses that investors and taxpayers have had to pay during previous downturns in the economy."

I assume that was written well before 2007.

I suggest there is no "maybe" about the conclusion.

Arguably if the ICAEW had moved away from "flat earth" accounting the current financial tsunami would have been averted.

The biggest mistake I made in my business career was to allow "City" advisers to convince me to replace a perfectly adequate "Cost and Works" Financial Director with a member of the ICAEW. This was in 1988, at the time of Heritage plc's flotation. It was explained to me that the"City" knew only members of the ICAEW comprehended quoted company accounting!

Well supported? It's a drivel-laden stream of unconsciousness.

It's pretty apparent that fair value accounting helped bring the crisis to a head. And that's a good thing, because it's only once you admit that there is a crisis that you can start to deal with it. If we had laboured under a system of accounting that did not require the downside of the cycle to be recognised as quickly, businesses could have masked the full extent of their losses. How does that help the economy?

This isn't a full-on endorsement of fair value for everything forever. But nor does it pretend that the only alternative is historic cost forever.

The ICAEW defends its position on fair value here.

Filed under: Institutes, Other blogs with tags accountingweb, fair value, icaew, idiots, jeff lampert
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In 1997, Brown promised us that he wouldn't raise income tax. Of course, he lied. While not raising the rate of income tax, he found all sorts of tricks to raise income tax anyway (e.g. fiscal drag) and other taxes besides. He did this by using stealth taxes - not being honest about his tax-raising intentions.

There are simply hundreds of stealth taxes, including the pensions tax grab. Many of them are documented more fully here.

Filed under: Politics with tags reasons not to vote labour
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The NHS supercomputer is one of those crap Labour IT projects that sound simple on paper but never manage to deliver the promised benefits because they're managed and coded by morons. The only surefire thing is that they will cost many times the original budget.

The NHS supercomputer was meant to be a single place where all patient medical records would be kept, so doctors could always access your records when they needed to.

Its original budget was £2.3bn. Yet whatever could go wrong did go wrong and its latest budget is £12.7bn. It's still not delivered.

Where is the cost control? Where did heads roll? Why do we always end up spending several multiples of the original budget for anything Labour buys?

Filed under: Politics with tags nhs, reasons not to vote labour
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Last year, Harriet Harman crashed her car into another car.

As with some of her other Cabinet colleagues, she was talking on a mobile phone at the time.

This is typical of Harman's disdain for the law, at least as it applies to herself. She wants all-women shortlists for everyone else, but not when her husband is standing. And she is forcing through legislation to require companies to publish meaningless gender-equality analyses.

Filed under: Politics with tags harriet harman, reasons not to vote labour
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Goldman Sachs has been in the wars this week, criticised for selling a product to a customer that it then bet would fail.

Yesterday it was in front of the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which worked itself into a lather as senators tried to find greater, more ridiculous hyperboles with which to beat Goldmans up. They simply couldn't understand how one part of Goldmans could take a contrary position to the interests of one of its customers.

But the argument is ridiculous. It basically boils down to this:

Would you criticise a department store for selling sun-tan lotion to a customer while it also sells umbrellas on another floor?

Filed under: Current issues, Ethics with tags banks, goldman sachs
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