Time for a ‘two-term’ solution

Like the last Tory government, the current Labour government is living on borrowed time. Much of the hype about how Brown was going to be a welcome break from the Blair years has vanished, probably because Brown was partly responsible for much of what went wrong. The honeymoon has worn off and we are now seeing what happens to any government after it has been in power for more than 10 years. The Brown government is devoid of any new ideas, desperate to stay off the front pages and recycling policies that have already been rubbished.

These are desperate times for the country. Everything that can go wrong is going wrong. The debacle in the home office and the entire legal/penal system is a farce. Schools have pretty much failed and the cracks are now showing in the buildings which have taken the lion share of the investments. The NHS is still in poor health from short-sighted financial and resource mismanagement. Europe, immigration, cross-border policing, economic migration, drugs and people-trafficking related problems make for quite an unholy union at present and yet the federal juggernaut steams ahead. Society is broken beyond repair in many cases, people are spending more than they are earning and we are no safer today than we were prior to the introduction of counter terrorism measures. The transport system is at breaking point and people are living under a false economy.

Our appetite for interference on a global scale has not waned and the relation with the US, as Brown put it, is stronger than ever. Climate change and world poverty are important issues of course but the immediate challenges facing businesses, workers, commuters, parents, children, pensioners, the sick and the victimised here in the UK are far greater. No amount of glossing over the cracks is going to fix these problems. Most people have seen this coming and the extent of the challenges facing our country are slowly surfacing through a combination of excellent probing from the opposition and people waking up to the fact that we are all pretty much living in a state of denial.

Any government is susceptible to some criticism after it’s been in power for over 10 years but the coming of Brown was supposed to be a new dawn, a break from the past, offering a new vision for the country. The reality is its pretty blurred. The last 3/4 years of the Blair government (and already the Brown government) has shown extraordinary levels of incompetence. Brown has often been characterised as scrooge particularly when it came to funding for the armed forces or funding for local councils, yet he has been the biggest waster, pouring billions into failing projects and initiatives that are the hallmark of Labour in the past 10 years.

I am firmly of the view that the only way to stop this type of rot and complacency is to introduce a maximum two-four year term’s for any PM, to breather new life into stalemates as we have at the moment. Brown could have called an election and didn’t and so we are left with the possibility of having to wait another 2 years so he has run things right down to the ground. Whereas if Blair knew his time was to be up in 2005, new ideas, new faces and much needed injection of a vision would have been sought by all parties. The current system could well take us down the road of 18 years of Tory government where much of the last 3/4 years became a damage limitation exercise with people longing for change for changes sake. Setting term limits would limit the amount of damage caused by parties dragging their heels.