NuLabour's achievements

A post at Old Holborn that deserves to go viral. Here's my adaptation:

1. Trans-generational debt: the regime is borrowing more and faster - as a proportion of GNP - as the state did to cover the cost of World War II, a debt which was not paid off until 2005; it has increased state spending by 11 percent of GNP since 1997, which is exactly the size of the internationally recognised structural deficit in British state finances; the regime has already inflicted £22,500 of debt on every child born in Britain for the foreseeable future, and is adding to it every day.
   
2. Surrender of sovereignty: promised referendum on the Lisbon Treaty refused; approximately 70 percent of all British laws originate in the unelected and unaccountable European Commission.
   
3. Electoral fraud: ballot boxes stuffed; extension and gross abuse of the postal ballot; voter registers tampered with; constituency boundaries gerrymandered.
4. Police statism:the police now wear black; crime statistics manipulated; police kill innocent people with impunity; abolition of habeas corpus - citizens can be imprisoned for 42 days without being arraigned; Parliament invaded by agents of the executive for the first time since Charles I; torture condoned; criminalisation of misdemeanours; no right to photograph the police.
5. Surveillance: children monitored at school by commisars, their behaviour logged on a state database for life; national DNA, iris scan and biometrics database; 4 million CCTV cameras; breach of arbitrarily imposed ASBOs constitutes criminal behaviour; emails and telephone conversations recorded.
6. Freedom of speech: criticism of minority cultures criminalised; media (largely self-) emasculated; right to peaceful protest curtailed; curfews imposed on entire communities; libel laws used to infringe freedom of speech in other countries; legal injunctions permit the well-connected to prevent inconvenient truth being published (e.g. the adulterer Andrew Marr, Nu Labour's point man in the BBC); Freedom of Information Act severely curtailed.
   
7. Economic suffocation: 111 tax rises and the longest national tax code in the world; £100 billion taken from private British pension funds to pay the agents of the state; fall from fourth to thirteenth in world competitiveness ranking; business taxes raised from among the lowest to among the highest in Europe.
8. Collapse of social cohesion: violent crime up 70 percent; gun crime up 57 percent; highest proportion of children living in single-parent households in Europe; highest proportion of children living in workless households in Europe (five million people on unemployed benefits); lowest level of social mobility in the developed world.
9. Public health: cancer survival rates among the worst in Europe; fatal hospital-acquired infections the worst in Europe; no screening of immigrants for communicable diseases leading to a significant increase in the incidence of AIDS and tuberculosis.
10. Education: collapse from 8th to 24th in the world education rankings of maths; collapse from 7th to 17th in the rankings of literacy; fifteen percent of the adult population functionally illiterate; national education standards (GCSE and A-levels) debauched.
11. Defence: deliberate under-funding by Brown (in order to expose Blair's grandiosity) contributing to abject defeat in Iraq and a failure to achieve any of the strategic objectives in Afghanistan; absurdity of 'punching above Britain's weight' mercilessly exposed.
12. Political amorality: culture of government secrecy used primarily to conceal corruption and incompetence; criminal (for anybody else) abuse of expenses and other privileges by members of parliament exposed; the most powerful men in the ruling regime are a dry-drunk with a history of psychotic breakdown and someone who was - twice - forced to resign for financial impropriety; when top bureaucrats and ministers retire they go straight into lucrative sinecures with companies to which they steered contracts when in office.

The NuLabour regime had its mandate renewed twice and thirty percent of the electorate wants more of the same. The cowed opposition parties promise only to fiddle at the margins.

If anyone can identify any reason for optimism, I would be most grateful if they could share it with me.