Thursday, November 29, 2007

THE YOUNG ONES RULE

Is part of Gordons problem that his team are just a bit too naive?

The folk in the photograph on the left are six of Gordon Browns inner circle of advisers - his top team of Ed Balls, Ed Miliband, Dougie Alexander, Yvette Cooper, Andy Burnham and of course the recently resigned Peter Watt; they share one striking similarity, youth.

I have highlighted before the seemingly inexorable rise in the number of 'career politicians' - that is very bright young men and women who leave the education system with top grades and go straight into the political system with no experience of real life in between.

No amount of intellect or education can replace a bit of life's experience and good old-fashioned common sense; and sadly it seems that many of the people running our country and especially the Labour party might be clever but they aren't proving terribly savvy.

Surely anyone with the slightest bit of real-life experience would know that just because 'systems are in place' to prevent something going awry doesn't mean that nothing can go wrong; especially where human beings are concerned.

It can be the case with very clever, very young people that they slip over the edge from confidence to arrogance; they can come to believe that they need take no lessons or advice from anyone else. And so it was that warnings about looming crisis like Northern Rock were ignored.

So this Government constantly finds itself under siege for errors and mistakes stretching from their own donor crisis to 25 million missing bank account details that it keeps insisting shouldn't happen; but have.

Worse still, arrogant Government ministers believe that the solution to each mistake they have made is yet more laws; so the ID card is their answer to the loss of data, and state funding is their answer to Labour donors breaking the law.

Mr Brown rushed to dismiss many of the older and wiser heads in Government for reasons more connected with his own insecurity than anything else and now finds himself surrounded by a coterie of teenage 'yes' men and women who apparently couldn't run a whelk stall, much less the country.

He should wake up to the fact that the last thing this country needs is another raft of badly drafted, hurriedly passed laws and rules that on current form, his own party will be the first to break.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I completely agree with this Marcus. Very depressing, and also a feature of the Tory front bench team