Gordon Brown's Conference Speech.

I know, over a day late and distinctly half-arsed. Who says satire is dead. I've finally read Gordon Brown's speech to the Labour party conference. Well not all of it because I got fingernails to watch grow but I am particularly intrested in specific passage in which Brown said;

"And I do think it is time to address a problem that for far too long has gone unspoken, the number of children having children. For it cannot be right for a girl of sixteen to get pregnant, be given the keys to a council flat and be left on her own.
From now on all 16 and 17 year old parents who get support from the taxpayer will be placed in a network of supervised homes. These shared homes will offer not just a roof over their heads but a new start in life where they learn responsibility and how to raise their children properly. That's better for them, better for their babies and better for us in the long run."

This policy announcement must've played very well with the party delegates as they discussed the speech in the bars, restaurants and verandas of Brighton. You see at their party conference the fascist British National Party (BNP) announced exactly the same policy although they managed to do it with less Arbeit Macht Frei* rhetoric. This convergence of policy should have allowed the younger Labour party delegates to convince themselves that the party leadership was finally ready to take on the BNP on the policies and in the Labour heartlands where they've been gaining ground. It also gave the older delegates and policy geeks the opportunity to point out that this was originally a Labour party policy from their first term that was never put into action. That last point is not strictly speaking true because the policy is already up and running in Croydon.

The house directly next to mine (#50) is a four roomed, semi-detached family home that has been taken over by the council. Since it was taken over it has been converted into a four bed roomed, student style accommodation that is used to house young people (mainly girls) on the councils housing list in a sort of glorified bail hostel. After around 11 months of me stopping seeing this Rebbecca girl and she had still failed to give birth Croydon council began housing young, single mothers in this supervised property. The thinking seems to be that after promising the world that I would soon be settling down with a girlfriend and a baby and failing to deliver the council decided that they would deliver potential girlfriends with ready made babies straight to my door. The hope was that I would fall in love, face up to my Council issued responsibilities and finally respect their authority!!!! That hasn't happened yet and apparently today is the day that Britain is being forced to re-tune the box(500).

*I kid you not. The English translation of that phrase is the driving force or recurring meme at the heart of the Labour party's welfare reform policy. When I heard a council official, at a meeting about mental health reform, recite it with no recognition of what he'd just said I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.