Posts Tagged ‘David Cameron’

The Least Worst Option?

Tuesday, May 11th, 2010

An outbreak of reality seems to have broken out during today among Lib Dem MPs although, according to Laura Kuenssberg’s tweets and the Sky ticker, it took Ed Balls to treat their negotiators with contempt for them to realise that Labour were more interested in wrecking a coalition rather than creating the impossible ‘rainbow’ or ‘progressive’ coalition that an inherently unstable combination of naive Lib Dem MPs and ennobled fixers like Adonis and Mandelson ever thought might be feasible.

So in the end Clegg miscalculated and gave an impression of weakness and vacillation in his leadership that will probably undermine his power in any coalition. As this blog said this morning ‘they fail[ed] to appreciate the startling concessions on PR that they have already extracted from both main parties’ — although, in reality, Labour was cynical enough to string the Lib Dems along on their pet policy of PR while blocking on the economy and other issues, which must have been a position designed to inflict most pain on their negotiating team.

I still maintained this morning that ‘it’s potentially as likely as not that Clegg will form a coalition with the Tories as Labour but the point is still valid that he is a weak leader who has failed to take his party with him — there would certainly be dissent from both Lib Dems and far-right Tories to such a coalition.’ Ironically, such dissent is probably going to be less now after such a farcical day than might have happened previously.

The Liberals must feel like fools, having paraded proponents of the ludicrous coalition with Labour on the news channels all morning — and there were plenty of them. Only when treated with contempt by Labour did they stare reality in the face and realise, in retrospect, that initially their negotiators had rattled the Tories into giving up more than they probably actually needed to.

While Gordon Brown’s exit was choreographed to be dignified, it would have had far more integrity had he announced his intention to stand down on Friday. In the end this is probably the least worst option — some of the Tories more recklessly capitalistic ideas being moderated by the Lib Dems — and Cameron came out of the whole shambles as more statesmanlike than one might have anticipated and genuinely prepared to put national matters before party interest, which is something today’s spurious negotiations by the Labour Party showed their senior figures could not be trusted to do.

I don’t have any illusions that this will be a government that’s going to be popular — and friends have pointed out already that their austerity will hurt everyone personally. However, Labour were going to have to do that anyway and would probably have allocated the cuts in a more partisan way — at least a coalition will be less able to indulge in the poison spin of the likes of Mandelson and Campbell, who everyone should be glad to see put back in their boxes.

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‘Be Careful What You Wish For…

Friday, May 7th, 2010

…or you just might get it’ could be applied to Nick Clegg and anyone who voted for him out of an anti- motive rather than any love of the Lib Dems.

At the time of writing (12.45pm) the Tories have 294 seats, Labour 252, Lib Dem 52 and The Others 27, including the admirable Caroline Lucas’s win for the Greens in Brighton. This means that a joint Labour-Lib Dem coalition is still 22 short of a majority and is only 10 ahead of the Tories as a whole (with 25 mostly large rural seats yet to declare).

This means Clegg can only deliver a majority to the Tories. It’s fairly likely that any Labour-Lib Dem deal would need to get the support of some of the smaller parties. They might be able to get some support from the Greens on an ad hoc basis but they’d still have to go to the self-interest of the nationalists.

Should Cameron and Clegg come to some agreement then this would be undoubtedly the most stable outcome — even allowing for some dissent within both parties. A joint Tory-Lib Dem cabinet might also have the happy result of perhaps sidelining a liability like George Osborne and replacing him with Vince Cable.

Yet Clegg and Cameron will probably engage in some brinksmanship. The Tories will be extremely reluctant to endorse proportional representation — but Clegg should probably treat his new putative best friends Milliband, Balls, Harman and Brown’s sudden conversion to the cause with the contempt and suspicion it deserves. He’d be a fool unworthy of holding the balance of power if he trusted politicians whose main motivation seems to be to stab their leader in the back in order to succeed him. The Tories will reject the more leftish policies that Clegg stood on — quite a lot of them, such as the immigration amnesty and Trident.

I guess Cameron will reject most of Clegg’s demands and he could justify this by the poor showing overall for the Lib Dems, which seeing as Clegg was apparently still popular must have been influenced by their policies. He will probably see if Clegg has the nerve to make the so-called ‘coalition of the defeated’ with Brown.

This might please many of Clegg’s casual and tactical supporters but would be an insult to his party activists and loyal voters — who must already be demoralised, having fought against Labour and, in most cases, have not succeeded in removing many Labour MPs themselves. Brown is also likely to have to make disproportionate concessions to the nationalists as the Lib Dem support seems unlikely to produce a majority in itself. It would also be political suicide if there was an election in the near future as those who voted tactically anti-Tory would probably return to Labour if they had been seen to be able to not lose this election.

If Cameron was quite cynical, he’d probably not be too disappointed to rebuff Clegg and see what kind of ramshackle coalition Brown (or those who seek to dispose of him in his own party) could put together. Remember this government is going to have to finally face up to dire economic reality and institute massive public spending cuts as well as raise taxes. The Tories might think it cuter to let Brown face his own music and bank on his Commons arithmetic falling to pieces (think of the rebels on the Labour benches if the hatchet is taken to public spending) and expect there to be another election within a year or two.

Of course, Clegg may also take the same view and realise that it would be electoral suicide for the Lib Dems to prop up an inevitably unpopular government — perhaps getting proportional representation would then be their only chance of avoiding obliteration.

Overall, Cameron’s best strategy is probably to offer Clegg very little and try and call his bluff into propping up Brown. If the Lib Dems either have to support him or be complicit in helping Brown try and dig himself out of his huge hole — either propping up someone who’s currently pulled in 29% of the popular vote or replacing him with someone too gutless to have tried to replace him before the election.

This is all in the context of Cameron’s undoubtedly disastrous campaign — sabotaged last year by Osborne’s ‘Age of Austerity’ and more recently by his baffling ‘Big Society’. Brown got away with outrageously negative campaigning — effectively ‘vote for us or you’re more likely to die of cancer’ — and he was the incumbent of thirteen years. Cameron was stiff, aloof and complacent and hardly tested the massive own goal presented by Brown’s and New Labour’s monumental incompetence.

If this posting is marginally less lucid and more discursive than normal it’s because I watched the 11.5 hour BBC coverage of the election night non-stop with Sky and ITV streamed on laptops and making frequent reference to the BBC website (which seemed to lack information in favour of clever animations) and, more frequently, to the Guardian’s web pages on each constituency.

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Sky Debate

Friday, April 23rd, 2010

I’m feeling a bit annoyed that I wasted a night watching the debate and its analysis as it really told us very little.

Most people seem to view it through a lens distorted to fit their existing preconceptions — which, in reality, is no bad thing because 90 minutes of spin and rehearsed soundbites is a terrible way to discuss and present policies. The only thing the debate shows is the presentation skill and, to a lesser extent, the personalities of the leaders.

On that basis, I take a counter-intuitive view and think that Clegg would be a disaster, precisely because he performed better in the debates. Anyone from the left who complains about how Blair sold out socialism and led us into wars they disagreed with should steer well clear of Clegg. His style is so modelled on Blair it’s untrue and if you’ve been fooled once before by a spin merchant who says the right soundbites in an election then you shouldn’t be deceived again. This isn’t to say that the Liberal Democrats have necessarily bad policies but that they are currently not competing on policy — just the shininess of Clegg.

Despite looking like some pompous clown mannequin from a horror film, Brown impressed me with his attacks on Clegg. His whole strategy for re-election is risible and nonsensical. ‘I got you into this mess now let me get you out of it.’ However, you know what you’re going to get.

Cameron was better but still worrying. He was good at attacking Brown over the scaremongering leaflets but still seems to believe the focus group rubbish about voters not liking confrontation. Look at the most popular politicians we’ve had in the last 30 years — all conviction politicians, particularly Thatcher and Blair. People want someone who will stand up and fight for them. Brown’s popularity has principally been salvaged by his stubborn determination to fight on. Cameron is still like some fop who’s been brought up to think that if anything goes wrong then pater will be able to salvage things with his chequebook.

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Camerong

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010

My initial reaction to the party leaders’ debate last week was that Brown was slightly better than expected, Cameron poorer and Clegg seemed to be rather unjustifiably pleased with himself. Seems I was more critical of Clegg than the media reports most of the public have been.

The Clegg bandwagon is clearly ludicrous: he’s in a position, unlike the other two, of never really being held accountable for what he says. He’s blandness personified, which if often an appealing attribute as it lets other people project their thoughts and values on to him.

However, as mentioned in a previous post, Cameron deserves something more severe than the sentence for treason if he fails to dislodge the unelected Gordon Brown. What does it need to unsettle this government — yesterday had inflation looking as if it might get out of control and today with the announcement of an approximately 2.5m unemployed figure. This government provides so many open goals it’s untrue — the airspace fiasco is just the latest in a string of incompetencies.

What seems to be clear is that the Tory campaign is in trouble — all down to the debate. I can say what I like about Gordon Brown but I’ll have to admit he has tenacity and a weird determination to cling on. The problem with Cameron is that he needs to look like he has some passion to do the job but instead he’s been acting as if he’s waiting to be carried into 10 Downing Street on a donkey. I’m hoping, just for the sake of the election, that he shows a bit of spark in the next debate.

There’s something quite disengenuous about the popular presentation of Cameron, not really helped by his demeanour and his amazingly stupid decision to stuff his cabinet with so many other old Etonians, like George Liability Osborne. In many ways Cameron is just an honest manifestation of what we already have — that the country is dominated by a wealthy elite educated at the top public schools. At least he’s not a fraud trying to cover up his priveleged past. Look at how Clegg and Harman (both Westminster), Blair (Fettes), Balls (Nottingham), Darling (somewhere in Scotland) and so on try not to draw attention to their expensive educations. In fact the contempt that the media tries to generate for Cameron is probably a result of some inter-public school inverse snobbery.

Yet Cameron has the air of someone who seems to think he’s been born to lord it over the non-Etonians and that if he happens to fail in removing Brown then it’s not much of a big deal — he’s not going to be struggling to pay the mortgage. That’s not something that could be said of the last two Conservative prime ministers.

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Dave on the Verge of Treason?

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

The poll in the Sunday Times that gave the Tories a lead of  only two points is a wake up call for everyone with an interest in politics. It is a very damning verdict on the competence of Cameron and also shows the lasting hostility to the Tories nearly 20 years after their removal of Thatcher’s divisive influence. I have a theory that Thatcher’s worst legacy was to leave an embittered and deeply politicised academic and cultural establishment which became receptive to the abhorrent and cynical use of political correctness (for want of a better description) as a neo-Stalinist tool of power and manipulation that has been the most insidious hallmark of New Labour — something that will wreak far more long-lasting damage to the country (IMHO) than anything Thatcher did.

This fairly superficial embitterdness towards the Tories seems to suggest that there isn’t the sort of popular acclaim for removing this clapped-out disgrace of an administration that there was with Major in 1997 — ironically a government now which seems to have been the most effective of the last 50 years (so much for the threat of hung parliaments). Even so, I think the whole country would want to see Cameron and company ritually disembowelled if they wake up the morning after a general election to see Brown’s psychotic grin as he walks back into Number Ten — no doubt with Alistair Darling, James Purnell, Caroline Flint and the rest on their way to the Gulag as he preaches about a listening government of all the talents.

Almost all Labour MPs seem to realise it’s in their best interests for Brown to lose by a small majority so they can cast him out to howl impotently with his forces of hell (Balls) and that they could look forward to a fairly new election with a leader who’s a member of the human race. Personally I’d consider voting for a Labour Party led by Darling — the only one with any guts shown in the last couple of years.

There are really two words that describe Cameron’s biggest mistake — George Osborne. Bad enough that Cameron is an Eton toff but at least he presents a semblance of humanity. Osborne both looks and acts irredeemably like a complete anachronism and irrelevance to the vast majority of the voting public — an image of the Tory party that goes back to Douglas Home and Eden. He reminds me of that awful upper-class ventriloquists dummy that Ray Alan (remember him) used to turn up with on dire 70s variety shows — mind you the dummy showed more independence of thought and character than most Labour MPs.

I’ll be disenfranchised — voting in Bercow’s constituency so no Labour, Tories or Lib Dem candidates. Should UKIP stand I certainly wouldn’t vote for them but I’m hoping the Greens put someone up. While I disagree strongly with a lot of their practical policies, I have great sympathy with their basic premise — that global capital is a rapacious monster that’s defiling and destroying the world for the benefit of few but the very richest elites — which makes it bizarre that Brown and Blair so worshipped it.

I also like the practical application of green principles — protecting nature, growning your own and so on and I took delivery of a box full of seed potato and onion sets yesterday to prove it. Give a man a potato and you feed him a bag of crisps, give him a seed potato and some soil and (in my case) you get the magic of digging up a few knobbly organic specimens and you give the slugs a feast.

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