Happy Birthday

Our MP, rich and successful Merchant Banker, Andrew Mitchell was in town last week.

He took time out from a busy schedule to congratulate a resident who has reached the age of 108 and he issued a statement on the Burmese emergency.

I suppose we can forgive him for dropping in on the 108 year old. It didn’t harm anybody and it is a good age. Mrs Barker had lived through around 50 years of various disastrous Tory governments so she was entitled to a visit from Merchant Banker, even if he did bring his photographer with him.

The statement on Burma was much more significant.

We are at the stage in the life cycle of the current government where the general election starts to loom. There are reasonable odds to be had that the date will be next year. Less, perhaps than twelve months to make up our minds.

So the Shadow Secreary of State for Overseas Development could be expected to give us a glimpse of an imaginative approach to the utter shambles which faces South East Asia.

What we got was another dollop from the Constituency Phrase Book. This serves to say very little about Walmley Cricket Club, it congratulates the lady in the Orchard House Nursing Home and now it is pressed into service to sum up the post- typhoon tribulations.

Merchant Banker at his most authoritative:

Get a needs assessement from the UN
Get a generous world response to a UN appeal
Get Burmese Government to give access to the relief effort.

Oh!, and the final earth shattering statement – “Trying to go against the grain doesn’t work.”

We pay him to make this up!.

Is there no smidgeon of his well padded being which is tempted to thread a way through the meaningless platitudes and address the heart of the issue?

Which is that the Burmese Government is not going to cooperate and hundreds of thousands of people will die unless the West finds a way to force the issue.

Alas Forcing Issues is not Merchant Bankers Bag.

He’s very good at the other stuff.


Nightwatchman