According to the BBC, Gordon Brown has declared that 2008 will be:

“A year for stepping up major long-term reform to meet challenges ranging from globalisation and global warming to the great unfinished business of social reform in our country.”

Let, me help, Mr Brown. Here are a few paragraphs you could use when setting out your agenda in Parliament:

All Members of this House and all the people of this country have a shared interest in building trust in our democracy. And it is my hope that, by working together for change in a spirit that takes us beyond parties and beyond partisanship, we can agree a new British constitutional settlement that entrusts more power to Parliament and the British people.

You have spent most of the last 6 months since you became leader attacking other parties - notably the Tory record in the years up to 1997.

Should you not be defending the 10 year record of the administration where you were the second biggest player - with an effective veto on policy - for the last decade?

or how about this:

And while constitutional change will not be the work of just one bill or one year or one Parliament, I can today make an immediate start by proposing changes that will transfer power from the Prime Minister and the executive.

I’d suggest that you start by find a paddle to extract us from the undemocratic creek, up which we are currently stuck.

It will be a devil of a job to get out of this mess, but that’s where you and the nodding Garfields on your backbenches have put us.

or this:

Britain is rightly proud to be the pioneer of the modern liberties of the individual.

Why is it apparently too much to hope that your Adminstration will continue that tradition?

If you want to do that, then you are are going to have to repent of this government’s claim assumption that it has the right to micromanagement of all our lives - whether it is confiscating our babies when no offence has been committed, siging treaties serving up British people to unfair capricious strongarmed highly questionable “justice” systems without requiring a prima facie case, or claiming the right to lock us up without trial for extended periods.

or this:

The Government will also bring forward plans to extend the period of time during which parties can use all women short lists for candidate selections and to give more time for all parties in this House to take up this new right if they choose.

Why not institutionalise discrimination in other areas, while you’re at it?

Some measures on shortlists would be acceptable - a minumum quota of 33% of both men and women, or twinning, both seem acceptable to me. The way you have done it guarantees not only that a generation of men have been discriminated against, but also that the quality of your candidates (and hence your “Blair-babe” MPs) was far lower than it would have been otherwise.

That is what happens when you throw away half of the political gene-pool - you reduce the quality of people elected.

And that’s leaving aside the fact that the whole “women’s only shortlist” operation was declared illegal in under Employment Law - quite rightly.

Did you roll back your illegal actions?

Of course not, and you and your colleagues carried on regardless by enshrining this discrimination in the law.

Wrapping Up

You seem to me like a ferret that has it’s head stuck in a very small pipe. The pipe consists of most of your policies. The only way you will get out is to break the pipe.