The row between the PM and the Foreign Office Minister, Lord Malloch-Brown, over helicopters, caused me to think about loyalty. I have worked in about 10 different vocations, from hairdressing at 15, through the armed services, engineering and consultancy, and looking back I can’t remember a single case where loyalty within the workforce, and between the workforce and the management was disruptive. Respect has a lot to do with it, but lack of respect for one person does not necessarily mean lack of loyalty to the same person.
The fact that somebody as senior as his Lordship should break ranks is a clear indication to me that he had reached that ‘N’, point when things are not allowed to go on as they are and somebody had to speak out. It seems that the whole of Parliament, with all its fancy traditions, archaic ways of communication, is being brought to its knees through this government’s inability to make up its mind quietly, sensibly, and with taking all things into account, rather than rushing for a sound bite. What I find despicable is that we the taxpayers are footing the bill time and time again for untried experimentation, which clearly doesn’t work, and yet is repeated. I have already written my views on the treatment of the crunch, which was clearly a disaster because they’re now changing the rules again. The expensive advertising on television upon things like knife crime, which are not yielding anything like the return any normal business would expect, is a case in point, repeated constantly in different areas. The way they keep changing their mind about how they’re going to run the Swine Flu pandemic, and rushing to tell us about each change in policy, which only confuses us, and must cost a fortune to advertise and implement, is beyond belief.
It would seem, unfortunately, that Brown is hanging on by a thread, being screamed at by the opposition parties who have the advantage of being able to pretend that they have policies, when everyone knows that by the time they get into Parliament, things will have changed so much, in this ever-changing kaleidoscope of politics, that those policies that they were using as a basis of their manifesto, will not be implemented