Labour's record in government

Using the sort of levels of self-deception normally associated with a North Korean government official, Jackie Ashley is defending Labour's record in government:

Somebody needs to fight back against the hysterical torrent of abuse being poured on Labour's economic record, which after all included a decade of good times, the rebuilding of public services, and successful action to stave off a full-scale collapse in the banking system. It may be too early: the self-righteousness of the Labour-haters now matches the self-righteousness of New Labour in its pomp. But the time will come.

Where to begin? The torrent of abuse against Nu Labour might occasionally sound hysterical, but frankly that is with good reason. Labour's economic record is abysmal; they created a massive recession, over-spent to such an extent that radical cuts were the only way to keep this country afloat. And the decade of good times? Built on foundations of shifting sands, and as soon as the tide came in, those foundations were washed away, bringing the whole edifice down with a resounding crash. Praising Labour for the good times is a bit like praising Bernie Madoff for the good times; it misses the point that the failure was entirely down to what happened in those good times.

And the public services - what Labour managed to achieve there was to render every public service in this country not fit for purpose. The NHS is now, in many respects, deeply unhealthy. The education system often fails to educate people on any level. The armed forces are overstretched and underequipped, and the police force is lost in mindless bureaucracy and propped up by hundreds of ersatz officers with all the gravitas and authority of a vice-prefect in a school. The welfare state has ceased to be a safety net for people in need and has instead made living off benefits into a career choice. Labour didn't rebuild the public services; it battered the living crap out of them. The only way it could have undermined public services any further is by dropping napalm on all the public buildings in this country.

And stopping a full-scale collapse in the banking sector? Someone needs to spend less time listening to the self-aggrandising wibblings of Gordon "Saviour of the World" Brown. Labour simply took billions of pounds of the taxpayer's money and spent it part-nationalising shit banks that were failing. It is the same as borrowing a billion pounds and putting it on a three-legged horse with a lung complaint to win the Grand National - it is a jarringly stupid course of action, and one that borders on criminally negligent.

It is too early to start fighting back against the abuse heaped on Labour over their record in office, and it will always be too early. That's because their record in office was shocking - anyone defending it simply makes themselves look very, very stupid. The best bet for the Labour party is not to mention their record - a little like Basil Fawlty and the war - because when they do mention it, they simply point out just how incapable they were in power, and why they should not be allowed back into government for at least a generation.