Entering the polling station looking for Superman

So, the news is saying that Gordon Brown has announced he's going to "re-think" his policy on tackling government pressures. It's also saying algae turns Polar Bears green, but that's funny in a non-ironic way. But Brown re-thinking his policies? I wonder why that could be? Perhaps it's because since he became Prime Minister, everything seems to have gotten a lot worse, so obviously his current policy isn't working very well.

I doubt it's his fault, though. Our economy, at least, was doing fantastically well while he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, so I doubt moving to the top spot somehow fogged his economic vision. Sadly for him, the inevitable crunch came about once Brown eagerly jumped into Blair's still-warm seat, so it looks like he'll be remembered as a terrible PM. Unless the crunch is beaten and the economy sustained while he's still in charge. I'm going to stick with him being a terrible PM then.

It won't be just Brown that gets the brunt of this criticism, however. Even though New Labour has done some fantastic things for us these past eleven years, as a nation we tend only to remember the things that we don't like rather than all the good stuff. It's always been like that, and probably always will.

When people remember Thatcher, we don't think about her great strides with improving the NHS, nor the abundant benefits of her privatisation policy. We think about how she was a horrible person who had some vendetta against the North. Or at least that's what history has warped her into.

When we think of Eden (and this is going back a bit, now) all we can think of is how he screwed up the Suez Crisis. We vaguely recall he had some mildly impressive policies, but they never surfaced because he had a nervous breakdown and had to quit, thanks to everyone shouting at him about handling the Suez Crisis as well as possible under immense pressure.

And once New Labour is knocked off the top-spot, which may be in a fair fews years considering the current calibre of opposing leaders, we won't remember the improved foreign relationships, we won't remember our economy being stronger than ever before, we won't remember showing the world Britain is still important thanks to the Olympic and Capital of Culture bid-winners.

No, we'll remember New Labour as a nanny government that passed all sorts of laws to stop their Sunday afternoon being ruined, such as banning fox-hunting to keep the noise down, banning smoking to keep the air clean, the devolution of power to Scotland to put an end to angry Scots phoning them up for favours, increasing the National Minimum Wage so their teenage son can afford a taxi instead of asking for a lift, and warring with Iraq so they don't get bombed while taking a stroll round the Lakes.

Unfortunately for Brown, this is the way we are, and given that he was in charge when we all ran out of money, we won't be erecting a statue of him any time soon. As with all PM's, when anybody opens the newspaper to see a string of bad news, they say "this is terrible, why isn't Brown sorting all this out?" For some reason we think our government is full of supermen who could deal with all our problems if they only decided to bother.

So I want to hop on the bandwagon and open up BBC News' homepage, and urge Brown to put on his cape and deal with the following; asian police officers fired for "racist reasons", 22-year-old paedophile "schoolboys", historic piers constantly catching fire, floods across England and Wales and a string of deaths and murders all over the place. Once he deals with all those problems, he may be well on his way to being a revered PM. But if he doesn't do his job properly, we may soon be attacked by green Polar Bears.

Until next time, my red-faced readers......sayonara!