I see I haven’t blogged for over a week. Most remiss of me. But then I do think if you have nothing useful to say, shut up. A message many in politics would do well to bear in mind.

Have just spent my lunch hour at Lowry, looking at their Myths of the North exhibition. I am sure you can guess the idea – lots of photos of cloth caps, Ena Sharples and – inevitably – a whole room dedicated to Blackpool. It was all fairly predictable. Lots of photos like the one above. A deck chair (wow!). Fading posters of vocal groups of yesteryear. But two things caught my eye. One was a magnificent modernist poster circa 1960 for the Blackpool Pleasure Beach in bold red and blue which was glorious. The second was the introductory panel written by the museum’s curator which described Blackpool as being the ‘biggest, brashest and most innovative’ of the North’s seaside resorts.

Now, it’s the word innovative that catches my eye. That’s what we need a big dose of now. And it can’t just be left to Basil Newby – as innovative and entrepreneurial as he is. I know I go on about this quite a lot, but Blackpool really does need to think outside the box. That’s why I’m celebrating the opening this week of Number 1 South Beach – the luxury themed hotel offshoot of the famous luxury Blackpool B&B in St Luke’s Road. And no, I don’t have shares in them. But it looks every bit as good as the B&B. And it’s the kind of innovation we need far more of. Why, for example, can’t we make a bit more of our fabulous hinterland that produces such great local food? Why do we have to go to Poulton and Garstang for a farmers’ market? A bit of extra healthy eating wouldn’t go amiss.

It was also nice to see some innovation from Labour down in Bournemouth. Sales of hairspray will have rocketed. It is a shame Gordon Brown’s recycled speech was not as pristine as his greying locks. For someone supposedly so sure of his moral compass that he can’t shut up about it, you would have thought he would have had the confidence to come up with his own themes for the speech at the very least. But then he is a politician strangely lacking in confidence, it seems to me.

For all the shilly-shallying, will-he-won’t-he of the past week (and the next), amidst all the clap-trap, it was instructive to read this morning of the latest piece of incompetence from this Government. They may be good at the spin – “Not Flash, just Gordon” is a good line, you have to admit, even if untrue – but they have never been good at the governing. Most of their announcements this week – deep cleans for hospitals, British jobs for British workers, more help for have-a-go-heroes – are all (a) impossible anyway without other legislative changes, (b) problems caused by this Government’s misrule in the first place and (c) Conservative themes for many years. Why, after ten years, do the elderly still not get treated with dignity in our hospitals, despite every Labour conference and election manifesto seemingly trumpeting them doing something about mixed and dirty wards. More matrons is an annual battle cry. We must have so many now it is a wonder there is physical space for the patients. Except we don’t, do we? Most of it is just talk to cover up their incompetence.

Today’s incompetence? On the day the Government is forced to concede that the prison population has reached an all time high, they are also announcing the abolition of the National Offender Management Service. This was the replacement for the Probation Service that was meant to reduce reoffending and constrain the growth in the prison population. It has been a disaster from start-to-finish, featuring the usual IT system failure, and much more besides. They are scrapping it, bizarrely, so that the Ministry of Justice is not seen as a failure. Errrmmmm …. sorry chaps, but the words ‘not fit for purpose’ spring to mind. And in the meantime, those on community service are apparently being sent home when they turn up for duty because there aren’t enough staff to deal with them.

This is the reality of Britain under Labour. Shiny new names, holding out the prospect of a better, brighter future. But underneath that is utter incompetence, a lack of strategic insight, and a concern for tomorrow’s headline rather than a better future for the country.

I think that’s my rant over for today!