Brown out, or Brownout ..?

Some of us didn't need 12 months to realise Gordon Brown was going to be really bad at the job. There is no example in modern history of a Chancellor ever doing any good as a PM - just as precious few over-promoted accountants ever manage to lead dynamic businesses through testing times. Maybe it has something to do with those obsessed by numbers and precision being acutely aware of the downside to everything, and upside of nothing?

As with all the creaking infrastructure in this overpopulated land, energy planning has been shambolic. We are now about to run out of power in the UK; so yet more fantasy-land policy is dreamed up, and this time it concerns the questionable £100bn investment in unpredictable performance wind turbines - mostly, it seems, in order to obey EU rules and regulations.

Guess who controls the industry for wind turbine manufacturing? Correct! The Germans.

But for a lot less cash we could build nuclear reactors. Oops - did I see "we"? We sold our run-down world pioneering nuclear industry some time ago, so any building is likely to be done by the French, who get 80% of their electricity from modern nuclear sources now. Or maybe we can contract Iran or North Korea to build it for us?

No wonder the Franco-Prussian empire, aka the EU, is so keen to force the carbon agenda on other EU states. While Blair, aided and abetted by Brown, spent ten years smoozing anyone and anything to do with vacuous celebrity and financial speculation, other countries were still trying to make things that create wealth, rather than just worship or manipulate it.

The Boy Cameron might find it tricky to lead with a policy of getting UK out of the EU, but he could safely promote the notion that the EU now needs to hold a referendum across the entire EU to get the people's mandate on a range of topics that have clearly become contentious.

The campaigning around such an event might actually do more to raise awareness - and even appreciation - of the core issues facing the people of the EU. Opinion polls suggest a vast majority in favour of free trade, but hardly anyone wants anything more, especially the ceaseless stream of ever more invasive social engineering initiatives.