Gordon Brown tramples on postal votes

[TrueBlueTerrier]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jh ... ost320.xml

By Andrew Gimson
Last Updated: 2:54am GMT 20/03/2008

John Hutton sounded more indignant at being accused of writing four lines of doggerel than closing 2,500 post offices.

Alan Duncan, for the Tories, quoted the following ditty, composed by an anonymous Cabinet minister:

At Downing Street upon the stair

I met a man who wasn't Blair.

He wasn't Blair again today.

Oh how I wish he'd go away.

Mr Hutton, a Blairite minister of such ability that he has survived into the Brown era, bridled at the suggestion that he could be the author of these lines: "I would write better poetry than that."

We have not read any poems by Mr Hutton, so cannot judge how good his defence is.

But the tone of injured innocence in which he denied authorship of the verse sounded far more convincing than the detached and ironical tone in which he defended the post office closures.

When it came to post offices, Mr Hutton adopted the manner of a barrister handed a somewhat ridiculous brief, who is professional enough to defend his client but is not going to make a fool of himself by developing any kind of emotional attachment to the cause.

The name of the client happens to be Gordon Brown, who had appeared shortly before at Prime Minister's Questions, where he made a rather embarrassing impression.

For when David Cameron, for the Tories, congratulated Mr Brown on making "the right decision" to meet the Dalai Lama, the Prime Minister replied in a crude tone: "We make the right decisions at all times."

How Mr Brown laughed at what evidently struck him as a witty retort.

Even dictators like to have their little jokes, and there was an authentically Stalinist quality in Mr Brown's riposte: a totalitarian parade of infallibility, with tanks on hand to crush anyone who stands in his way.

The post office closure programme appears to be proceeding in rather the same spirit.

Though set in motion before he became Prime Minister, one can well imagine that as chancellor of the exchequer he decided this mass cull was the only way forward.

And the manner of the closures is thoroughly totalitarian, with the pretence of consultation doing nothing to hide the brutal determination to get rid of 2,500 branches.

This emerged clearly during Mr Duncan's opening speech for the Tories, in which he observed that "a game of pass the parcel" is in progress, with MPs discovering that when they manage to keep one post office open, "another one is going to be closed".

Testimony flooded in about the bogusness of the consultation process, and continued to flood in once Mr Hutton was on his feet.

So many members interrupted him with tales of woe from their localities that Mr Hutton could make almost no progress with his prepared remarks: "I've been speaking for 20 minutes and, as I said, I'm still on page one."

Mr Hutton quite enjoyed remaining calm in the face of this onslaught.

He showed that he could take it, and allowed MPs to make protests which can be reported in their local newspapers, and at the end of the process he had not budged one inch.

This is how our elective dictatorship works: apparatchiks like Mr Hutton go through the motions of free debate, after which the will of the elective dictator prevails.

Not that Mr Brown was elected to the post of Prime Minister. He reached No10 by evicting the elected incumbent, and has funked holding an election of his own.

But we would not dream of questioning Mr Brown's judgment, for as he himself says, he makes the right decisions at all times.

[POSTMAN]

I think it's really,really good that these guys are now taking an interest in what's going on.
I guess they were busy in Oct/Nov last year then.

[Night Tonic]

Reason Hutton wiped the floor with them is they had no viable alternatives to whats going on. Sat through most of it. Even the NFSP were backing the government on this.

[POSTMAN]

Wouldn't it be easier to find out who wants out,bit like when we go for evr,then go from there.
Then they can do some jigging about,as down my way,out of 2,1 was closed,but the one left open wanted to go,either way cause of where they were,customers would have to walk the same distance to get to one if you know what i mean.

[Night Tonic]

If they based it on least profitable ones, whole areas would be completely devoid of post offices. That was a Tory suggestion - dead at the first hurdle.