What Brown should really apologise for (From The Northern Echo)

What Brown should really apologise for

11:54am Tuesday 17th November 2009 in

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"CURIOUSER and curiouser," said Alice of her experiences in Wonderland.

What would that little girl say if she were living in Britain today?

For the weirdness of Wonderland looks like sanity compared with present mindnumbing lunacies, the latest being Gordon Brown’s apology for events which happened before he was born.

From 1930, under the Child Migrants Programme, many poor children were sent to “a better life” in Australia, Canada and other of our colonies. Unfortunately, some were abused and ended up in institutions or as cheap labour on farms.

Mr Brown has asked government officials to consult with survivors of the Child Migrants Programme, so that a statement can be made in the New Year.

In a letter to the chairman of the Health Select Committee last weekend, Mr Brown said: “The time is now right for the UK government to apologise for the actions of previous governments. It is important that we take the time to listen to the voices of the survivors and victims of these misguided policies.”

It’s insane. But if Mr Brown is in an apologising mood, I can think of many more places where he might usefully start. He could begin by saying sorry for selling off the country’s gold reserves when gold was at its cheapest for years: now the same gold is selling for more than £750 per ounce.

Then he could apologise for doubling the number of employees in the public sector. I’m not talking about nurses, teachers and policemen – useful people like them – but the hordes of compliance officers, checkers, snoops, busybodies and pen-pushers: the social police invented to enforce political correctness.

He could express his regret in public for his large part in a government which pays sickness and disability benefits to half a million people who are perfectly fit for work. And for allowing immigration to run out of control to an extent whereby the government doesn’t even know how many illegal immigrants there are in the country.

He should apologise for increasing government spending to its highest level on record and so burdening us all – and our children and grandchildren – with decades of massive debt. And for the public policy which allowed building societies to turn themselves into banks – really speculative betting shops – and allow individuals to borrow way above and beyond what they could possible repay.

How about saying sorry for presiding over hospitals so filthy that 300,000 people every year contract a serious infection on the wards? Or for pouring billions into a schools system from which – on the government’s own figures – 43 per cent of our children emerge after 11 years of full-time education unable to read, write and count efficiently?

What about the referendum pledge over the Lisbon Treaty? That was “a firm guarantee”

remember. The Labour government’s benefits culture of these past 12 years has created a rampant, indisciplined underclass which makes our towns and city centres drunken, obscene, orgiastic and intolerable.

Instead, we have this fatuous apology for a thing that was not his fault: child migrants.

We know why, of course. So that compensation can be paid to their descendants – and for this we shall all pick up the bill.

This creepy habit of issuing spurious apologies has gone too far.