The northlondonhippy

(Did you want a bub­bler? Funny, because I’m giv­ing one away, along with a shit­load of other prizes. Go on, click this link to find out more)

I’m start­ing a new cam­paign today and I’m going to need help from all of you. It is my desire to see Gor­don Brown removed from Num­ber 10. Brown’s been Prime Min­is­ter long enough. Too long!

Gordon’s gotta go!

GGG!

Gordon’s
Gotta
Go!

Gor­don Brown is by far the worst Prime Min­is­ter the United King­dom has ever had, bar none. Even war-monger Blair had a bit of charm and charisma; Brown is a charisma-free zone.

I could actu­ally cope with Gor­don Brown’s stiff and unpleas­ant demeanour, if it weren’t for his total lack of vision and point­less poli­cies and you know where this is going…

Reclas­si­fi­ca­tion…

Yep, I’m a one-issue kinda guy.

The Advi­sory Coun­cil on the Mis­use of Drugs (ACMD) is the inde­pen­dent body which advises the gov­ern­ment on drugs pol­icy. No gov­ern­ment has ever ignored their rec­om­men­da­tions since the board was formed. Ol’ Gordo is prepar­ing to ignore their advice and reclas­sify cannabis to Class B from its cur­rent sta­tus of Class C.

The ACMD have reviewed cannabis pol­icy three times in the last sev­eral years; the first time Tony Blair and David Blun­kett fol­lowed their advice and put weed into Class C. See, Blair wasn’t all bad. There was this and North­ern Ire­land, the rest, well that was all pretty bad.

The sec­ond time the ACMD recently reviewed cannabis, they again reached the same con­clu­sion. This was done in the heat of the polit­i­cal firestorm that fol­lowed the orig­i­nal declas­si­fi­ca­tion deci­sion and it only reaf­firmed the move and the gov­ern­ment left it alone.

The third review of cannabis was requested by Brown, in light of the “new evi­dence” of the dan­gers of cannabis.

The truth is, there is no new evi­dence, there are just con­flict­ing stud­ies which don’t come to any real con­clu­sions regard­ing links between men­tal health prob­lems and cannabis use. That hasn’t stopped the media from try­ing to whip up a Down­ing Street inspired shit storm of hys­ter­i­cal spin, paint­ing cannabis as the devil’s weed. It was reefer mad­ness mark II, only these days, most of us know much better.

The ACMD reached the same con­clu­sion on their third review, that cannabis should remain in Class C — the report was deliv­ered to Gor­don this week. The con­tents of the report were leaked to the press sev­eral weeks ago though they have yet to be made offi­cially pub­lic. Their deci­sion, along with Gordon’s over­rul­ing of it is expected to come some­time after yesterday’s local elections.

Now, here’s the cool bit. If Gor­don Brown ignores the advice of the ACMD, the mem­bers of the ACMD are pre­pared to pub­licly resign in dis­gust. That’s how seri­ous this is.

On top of that, the Asso­ci­a­tion of Chief Police Offi­cers (ACPO) are report­edly pre­pared to reassert the cur­rent guid­ance on cannabis pos­ses­sion, if Gor­don does reclas­sify to Class B. In other words, they will con­tinue to oper­ate as if it was Class C.

Just a quick expla­na­tion on the dif­fer­ences between the Class B and Class C — the penal­ties are exactly the same for pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion under both. The end user ends up worse off under B.

Where they dif­fer is when it comes to per­sonal pos­ses­sion — under Class C, you should be cau­tioned and have the weed con­fis­cated. Under Class C, you can still do time, up to 2 years in prison. Under Class B, there is tech­ni­cally no con­fis­cate and cau­tion option, the penalty for pos­ses­sion is 5 years in the big house.

Any­one with a brain knows that the clas­si­fi­ca­tion of a drug has lit­tle to do with how peo­ple view it. Cocaine is Class A, car­ry­ing the stiffest penal­ties for pos­ses­sion, but peo­ple still take it. A lot of peo­ple, actually.

Since cannabis was declas­si­fied, usage has gone down. Since cannabis was declas­si­fied, far fewer peo­ple are unnec­es­sar­ily impris­oned for a vic­tim­less crime. Since cannabis was declas­si­fied, we’ve had a drug pol­icy in this coun­try that was on the verge of sen­si­ble (with sen­si­ble being com­pletely decrim­i­nalised or even bet­ter legalised, taxed and sold like liquor).

Gordon’s rea­son for all of this is the same rea­son he uses for every­thing he does. Gor­don knows best.

Like fuck he does!

To say that Gordon’s drug pol­icy is cre­at­ing a com­plete mud­dle would be an under­state­ment, like say­ing an ocean is slightly damp. It’s becom­ing an unmit­i­gated dis­as­ter full of lies, hys­te­ria, mis­steps, mis­in­for­ma­tion and decided lack of con­sis­tency or honesty.

In other words, for fuck’s sake, what a twat!

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a politi­cian so out of step with his coun­try. He hasn’t a clue what gen­uine peo­ple are like. He can’t relate to any of us, because he is a com­plete social outsider.

Imag­ine, if you can, meet­ing Gor­don in your local for a drink. He’d order a pint of what­ever you’re hav­ing, but then hardly touch it. He’d try to talk to you about fis­cal respon­si­bil­ity and moral author­ity, when you would rather talk about the foot­ball or how cool that new Iron Man movie looks. He would stand uncom­fort­ably in the crowd, mak­ings oth­ers feel uneasy, yet you would def­i­nitely get the sense he thought he was bet­ter than you, though you wouldn’t in a month of Sun­days ever guess how he jus­ti­fies it in his head.

Yes, Gor­don, you are socially awk­ward and that was fine when you were the Chan­cel­lor and every­one thought you were doing a good job. No one thinks that now! The econ­omy is up the spout, it’s screwed, its fucked and Gor­don is to blame.

I’m pay­ing £1.10 a litre for petrol. That’s really bad! (And for my Amer­i­can read­ers, I reckon that’s about 8 bucks a gal­lon and you didn’t read that wrong!)

The cost of food is sky­rock­et­ing too. But that’s not what is upset­ting peo­ple at the moment, its the decline in house prices.

The econ­omy here in Blighty has been falsely inflated due to the hous­ing mar­ket. House prices were mak­ing wild gains, but that’s stopped now. Peo­ple can’t trade up every year or two because their homes aren’t increas­ing any more. In some cases, they are decreas­ing and a term from a long time ago is creep­ing back:

Neg­a­tive equity.

That’s a fancy pants way of say­ing your home is worth less than the amount you owe on your mort­gage. It’s wank speak, really and it only mat­ters if you are sell­ing your house. If your house is not on the mar­ket, then it doesn’t really mat­ter, but it might be the rea­son you can’t put your house for sale.

What would you do if you had a 100K loan and your house was only worth 75K. Where would you come up with that extra 25K to pay off the bank, plus inter­est? You wouldn’t, you’d just keep pay­ing your mort­gage and thank­ing god you have a roof over your head.

No one I know is get­ting rich or even get­ting ahead just by work­ing. The peo­ple I know who have seri­ous money in the bank, or have leap-frogged the rest of us on the prop­erty lad­der have done so by mak­ing vastly inflated prof­its on prop­erty trad­ing. That’s what has really been dri­ving the economy.

Guess what? The econ­omy is run­ning out of steam and is grind­ing to a halt, thanks in a large part to the cur­rent hous­ing mar­ket crash (or should I say crunch so I don’t panic anyone?).

And Gor­don is to blame!

As I write this, the local elec­tion results are drib­bling slowly out of my tele­vi­sion. The topline is a sim­ple one, it’s the Labour party’s worst show­ing in 40 years. They’ve come in third, after the Tories and the Lib Dems.

And Gor­don is to blame.

Brown is a polit­i­cal liability.

Oh who am I kid­ding, he is a lia­bil­ity in every con­ceiv­able way.

I don’t think I’ve ever dis­liked a politi­cian as much as I dis­like Gor­don Brown.

I have this fan­tasy that this after­noon, after all the elec­tion results are tab­u­lated, cer­ti­fied and released and the true pic­ture of the Labour mas­sacre is con­firmed, that a small group of very senior Labour types swing by Num­ber 10 for a pri­vate chat with Brown.

In this chat, they ask him to resign asap, right then and there. When he refuses, they tell him if he doesn’t resign his posi­tion as Prime Min­is­ter, they will invoke a spe­cial extra­or­di­nary ses­sion of Par­lia­ment and call for a vote of no con­fi­dence in his leadership.

In other words, Gor­don can do this the easy way or he can do it the hard way and its his choice.

Gor­don is con­fronted with this dif­fi­cult deci­sion and he chooses to resign to make it seem like it was his idea. He returns to the back bench where we hardly ever hear from him again.

Or I’ve got another sce­nario, which I just thought of, just now. He could return to Num­ber 11 and be the Chan­cel­lor of the Exche­quer again, because of the dire eco­nomic out­look, the depart­ment needs his exper­tise again!

Basi­cally, any­thing that ends his pre­mier­ship before he can fuck up any­thing else is good with me.

I’ve even got a catch phrase for you. You can use it as a greet­ing, when you meet peo­ple. Bet­ter yet, you can use it to sign off let­ters and emails. Maybe I should get tee-shirts printed. How can we lose when we have my win­ning slo­gan? Go on, chant along with me!

GGG!

Gordon’s gotta go!

GGG!

GORDON’S GOTTA GO!

GGG!

GORDON’S
GOTTA
GO!

Three G’s means Gordon’s not for me!

GGG!

Gordon’s gotta go!

GGG!

Are you all with me?

(While we’re on the sub­ject of weed, check out the northlondonhippy’s cannabis truth series.)

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