Skip to main content

Poisoned Polls

Within the course of a day we have seen some very different opinion polls released. Some seem to show the Tories are moving ahead, others show a recovery in Labour.

I am slightly surprised to see the government not being hurt more by the recent rash of bad publicity. The unmasking of John Prescott's secret Croq (uet) habit may not have any major impact, despite the shrill and rather snide comments in the press. As for Larry Lightweight- the current Tory leader- his rather pitiful choice of Ernie, the Fastest Milkman in the West as one of his Desert Island Discs was perhaps one of his more genuine political decisions over the past six months - the remaining choices were trite and formulaic. When a squity, playground kid just wants you to like him, he comes across in much the same way as David Cameron does now- unctuous. I am afraid my gorge just rises and I have the feeling of wanting to give him a good duffing up. The fact is that even on the right, anyone with intellect has some serious doubts about Cameron's soft soap shuffle. The Daily Telegraph, I notice, has been extremely grudging in giving respect to the Tory Leader. For me this underlines the fact that political support remains volatile and brittle- Despite Tory triumphialism, I do not see a sufficient head of support for them to win an outright majority and, given that this ought to be a highpoint of honeymoon support, the Conservatives are very far from home and dry.

Partly I think that opinion formers see through the shallow rhetoric of the shiny public schoolboys and detect the underlying policy vacuum. The failure to put forward an coherent policy agenda is a serious one. Part of the Blair revolution was the intellectual fire power the seemed to be deployed against the outgoing Conservative's- While the then Shadow Chancellor's speech on endogenous growth theory was widely mocked- "it's not Brown's, it's Balls"- it did demonstrate a certain seriousness about economic policy. This seriousness is missing from the Nivea-ed front bench figures such as Osbourne, Ed Vaizey, or indeed Cameron himself.

This provides the Liberal Democrats with an interesting opportunity. Although the Tories have tried to paint Ming Campbell as "too old"- the fact is that he remains very trusted by the electorate- with the erosion of the labor front benches reputation for probity, and the rather shallow Conservative front bench, it may well be that the discourse might favour seriousness in the coming months. The opinion polls are a snapshot- but they are not the photo finish and much may evolve over the next year or so.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Post Truth and Justice

The past decade has seen the rise of so-called "post truth" politics.  Instead of mere misrepresentation of facts to serve an argument, political figures began to put forward arguments which denied easily provable facts, and then blustered and browbeat those who pointed out the lie.  The political class was able to get away with "post truth" positions because the infrastructure that reported their activity has been suborned directly into the process. In short, the media abandoned long-cherished traditions of objectivity and began a slow slide into undeclared bias and partisanship.  The "fourth estate" was always a key piece of how democratic societies worked, since the press, and later the broadcast media could shape opinion by the way they reported on the political process. As a result there has never been a golden age of objective media, but nevertheless individual reporters acquired better or worse reputations for the quality of their reporting and ...
1 comment
Read more

The Will of the People

Many of the most criminal political minds of the past generations have claimed to be an expression of the "will of the people"... The will of the people, that is, as interpreted by themselves. Most authoritarian rulers: Napoleon III, Mussolini, Hitler, have called referendums in order to claim some spurious popular support for the actions they had already determined upon. The problem with the June 2016 European Union was that the question was actually insufficiently clear. To leave the EU was actually a vast set of choices, not one specific choice. Danial Hannan, once of faces of Vote Leave was quite clear that leaving the EU did NOT mean leaving the Single Market:    “There is a free trade zone stretching all the way from Iceland to the Russian border. We will still be part of it after we Vote Leave.” He declared: “Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market.” The problem was that this relatively moderate position was almost immediately ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Liberal Democrats v Conservatives: the battle in the blogosphere

It is probably fair to say that the advent of Nick Clegg, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, has not been greeted with unalloyed joy by our Conservative opponents. Indeed, it would hardly be wrong to say that the past few weeks has seen some "pretty robust" debate between Conservative and Liberal Democrat bloggers. Even the Queen Mum of blogging, the generally genial Iain Dale seems to have been featuring as many stories as he can to try to show Liberal Democrats in as poor a light as possible. Neither, to be fair, has the traffic been all one way: I have "fisked' Mr. Cameron's rather half-baked proposals on health, and attacked several of the Conservative positions that have emerged from the fog of their policy making process. Most Liberal Democrats have attacked the Conservatives probably with more vigour even than the distrusted, discredited Labour government. So what lies behind this sharper debate, this emerging war in the blogosphere? Partly- in my ...
20 comments
Read more