The UK Labour Party are said to be doing rather better in the opinion polls.

Crikey.

I am baffled that anyone at all would still vote for them. What does it take these days in terms of incompetence to be 100% discredited and thrown down the steps of public opinion?

Plus it’s not just the incompetence. It’s the sheer sustained banality and selfishness of the top people concerned, as they set coarse, publicly funded spin-doctors on each other then quickly kiss and make up when they see a camera.

Last night on ITV News a grinning reporter noted that the story of Gordon Brown’s bullying in his own office was not likely to go away, but added that voters seemed to be approving when he was portrayed as ‘passionate’ and ‘committed’ and ‘intense’.

What is happening?

Simple.

Peter Mandelson has been Milosevicising the UK for over ten years, and it shows.

Part of the remarkable success of Milosevic in Serbia, where he effectively ran the place for some 15 years despite one disaster after another brought about by his stupidity, lay in his ability to dumb down Serbia’s collective expectations. To replace reality with sloganising.

Thus rock bottom, which Milosevic duly reached in 2000. When people were reduced to one loaf of bread as things decayed, it was a Huge Victory when the standard of living soared to 1.5 loaves per day.

A 50% increase in wealth! Thanks to the Government! Long live Serbia! 

Here it’s the same trend but from a higher altitude.

Last night’s ITV News was dominated by emotional interviews with relatives of patients who had died in another NHS hosital collapse. There was fleeting reference to the role played by ‘government targets’. But the sense of the news clips was to whip up populist injustice that the people who had run this hospital had escaped without serious sanction.

See eg this morning’s Daily Telegraph:

Bosses at scandal-hit Stafford Hospital escape scot-free

Buried at the bottom of the article is this:

Andy Burnham, the Health Secretary, said it was unacceptable for NHS mangers to be responsible for major failings at one organisation and then to get another job elsewhere in the service. The trust admitted Mr Yeates left with six months’ notice pay and his salary at the time was around £160,000. But officials said they were trying to discover if he had received any other payments on departing.

Huh?

Huh?!?

No. That’s merely disgraceful.

What’s unacceptable is that the media do not finger the Health Secretary and the Labour Party for allowing this and so many other scandals to happen on their watch.

The bureaucratic obsession with Targets which has led to so much dysfunctionality in the way the UK works itself can be traced back directly to Gordon Brown’s long years at the Treasury, when his bullying and control-freakery was directed at the UK as a whole. not merely his glum immediate team.

And so it goes on.

Every fiasco is the responsibility of anyone other than the government whose policies and attitudes have created the framework for such fiascos.

Any puny success is hailed as a great victory by Ministers and their passionate, committed and intense Great Leader.

And as more and more people emerge uneducated and sulking from Labour’s state education system unable to do anything other than emote in a soap opera way about the life’s challenges and complexity, an ever-larger electorate of lumpen whiners grows. People dependent on the state not just for their endless ‘benefits’ but now for their very thought-processes.

So TV marketing heads in their direction, and politics stops being about anything adult. Instead we turn public life into a Reality Show, or more accurately an Unreality Show.

And shallow, greedy post-modern TV executives – above all in the BBC where salaries exacted from the TV licence poll tax have soared to the sky – are complicit in New Labour’s Mandelsonian furtive subversion of any sort of comitment to truth and honesty.

As that happens it is next to impossible for the Conservatives and other parties to do anything but get dragged along. Because they have to show they care.

Gordon Brown is unambiguously revealed to be unfit for office? Quick, get out the Thesaurus … flip-flip-flip as pages turn … Gottit.

He’s intense. Passionate. Committed.

He’s not bullying people selfishly for himself. He’s doing it generously for you, the voters. Look, he can even cry on TV to show how sincere he is.

Who does not remember the end of George Orwell’s 1984?

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding ! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast ! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose.

But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

George Orwell got it wrong.

Gordon Brown is not bullying people selfishly for himself. He’s doing it generously for you, the voters. Look, he can even cry on TV to show how sincere he is.

In 2010 it’s Big Brother’s enormous face and tearful eyes gazing down on the blank-eyed voters, with Peter Mandelson on his EU pension and UK salary lurking out of screenshot propping him up in his chair.

O cruel, needless misunderstanding ! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast !

Yes. Gordon’s won that victory over himself.

He’s suffered horribly. But he’s prevailed.

He loves us, the voters.

So everything’s alright.