Skip to main content

Low Expectations

The latest poll apparently show that voters believe that David Cameron is thought to be a better leader than Gordon Brown, and much is being made of the idea that Mr. Cameron has "sealed the deal" with the British people.

The reality is of course rather different. As someone said to me the other day: "If Cameron or Brown are the answer, then Goodness knows what the question was!". The fact is that the voters have not forgotten the chaotic and sleazy end to the last Conservative administration, and the fact that Labour has got itself into something like the same kind of trouble is creating a certain resigned despair amongst the electorate.

The failure of the constitution and the creation of an isolated political class is leading to exceptionally low expectations of our political leaders, and even these vanishingly small hopes are usually crushed.

As Nick Clegg noted the other day, the state of our Constitution amounts to an emergency, and yet the cosy cabal of LabCon will not reform a system that gives them- and them alone- all the power and privileges of government, even when they themselves know that they do not have the competence to rule.

As the long and grinding election campaign gets under way, only the Liberal Democrats are prepared to offer genuine reform- and that is a message of hope that might yet confound the low expectations of the voters.

Comments

Alex said…
It's true that the state of our Constitution is an emergency, but then really it has always been so.

The 13 British American Colonies managed to solve their Constitutional problems by fighting a revolution.

I do wonder what it would take to wake the rest of my countrymen up. Very rarely does a Constitution radically change peacefully as our "unwritten" one would in order to solve our difficulties. And that's what I'm afraid of. That we may be stuck with our shoddy Constitution for generations more, because it takes a potentially violent crisis in order to do so. And it takes a lot to get us British riled up about anything.

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 ...

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 ...

One Year On

  Head vabariigi iseseisvuspäeva! Happy Estonian Independence Day! It is one year since I stood outside the Estonian Parliament for the traditional raising of the national flag from Tall Hermann tower. Looking at the young fraternities gathered with their flags, I was very sure that Estonia too would soon be facing the aggression of the criminal Russian regime. A tragic and dark day. 5 eyes intelligence had been clear: an all out invasion was going to happen, and Putin´s goals included- and still include- "restoration" of Russian imperial power across Europe, even to the Atlantic. Yet there was one Western intelligence failure: we all underestimated the guts of the Ukrainian armed forces, the ZSU, and its President and people. One year on, Estonia, and indeed all the front line states against Russia, knows that Ukraine saved us. Estonia used that time to prepare itself, should that "delayed" onslaught ever be unleashed, but equally the determination of Kaja Kallas, ...