Browned off by former PM’s doom-mongering on indy
THIS week, former prime minister Gordon Brown once again donned his sandwich board to proclaim “the end is nigh” if Scotland becomes independent.
He’s like the irritating street preacher, prising leaflets into your hand when you’re running for the train.
In his latest declaration, Brown predicted: “The NHS at 80 years old would, sadly, be in trauma if independence should ever happen.” Thanks for the diagnosis, Dr No. Not so long ago, Brown told us independence would lead to fewer organ transplants and a drain on the blood banks.
In his apocalyptic vision, we’ll all be barefoot, gorging on midgie burgers and humble pie.
Or, as one witty tweeter put it: “Every jobby would be a hedgehog in an independent Scotlandshire.”
Someone wrestle the megaphone from this man and sit him in the sunshine with a sherry.
This is no wise old sage. He was the Rodney to Blair’s Del Boy – a pair who sold us war with the duplicity of market traders flogging wonder gadgets.
And he is counterproductive to the unionist cause.
When he speaks, I want to scream “Yes” to Indy2 with the enthusiasm of Meg Ryan in the When Harry Met Sally fake orgasm scene. Even when I am in a “Do we have to?” kinda mood.
Writing in a newspaper, Brown said the recent SNP Growth Commission report stated there would be less public spending than under the current Tory austerity measures. Aye, we’re doomed, Captain Mainwaring, doomed, I tell you!
He spoke out ahead of the health service’s 70th anniversary and what a bummer of a birthday toast.
The SNP’s record on health is poor, with Scotland’s cancer treatment waiting times at their worst level in six years one of a number of failings. But it’s ridiculous to argue the health service would be better off shackled to the Tories and the sinking ship of Brexit. And unless the tide changes enough in favour of Jeremy Corbyn, we are stuck with this toxic bunch of Jeremy Hunts.
An independent Scotland would be no utopia but neither would it be the dystopic nightmare Brown would have us believe.
Leave us to decide our future, be it Yes or No. Butt out and let the many credible unionist voices take the platform to argue their case.
The man who misregulated the banks, sold off our gold and left a £167billion hole in the UK’s public finances when he lost the 2010 election is no reliable financial soothsayer.
He cared not a jot for the health of the British servicemen or innocent civilians being blown up in the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Those strategic failures which further destabilised the Middle East cost us £29billion, a tidy sum which could have bought a lot of nurses and hospital beds.
In the hellholes where he is culpable in the spread of Isis, catastrophe is real not imagined scaremongering.
A recent report revealed widespread complicity by the intelligence services under Blair in torture and rendition after 9/11.
The dirty little secrets of the governments Brown helped steer will take decades to emerge, if the truth ever outs.
The Brown revisionism is nauseating and he should be sat with Blair in a dock in The Hague, not wandering the globe revered as an elder statesmen.
It’s time Gordon retired his crystal ball and left the fortune tellers to ply their babble at the fair.