Skip to main content

Me, me, me...

Oh dear... the launch of the "unofficial" UK election campaign in a blaze of posters seems to have begun.

Discussion about the profound, existential crisis facing the country is reduced to some unilluminating truisms- preferably banal ones. The absurdly airbrushed David Cameron announces that he will cut the deficit and not the NHS. Hmm... The NHS is in another crisis. Not, it is true, the funding crisis that it endured under the Conservatives, but a far more serious one. The system as it currently stands soaks up more money and delivers generally worse outcomes than most European comparables. The lack of accountability and responsibility is leading to gold plating at every level: the tripling of GPs compensation over the past decade has not delivered triple the care- indeed GPs now work a fraction of the time that they worked 15 years ago. Hospitals struggle to cope with basic cleanliness- and unrestricted visiting is sending MRSA and other superbug infections out into the community. The NHS is highly dysfunctional, but Mr. Cameron dares not be seen as a threat to this holy cow.

Meanwhile the use of the personal pronoun "I will..." underlines the central role of Mr. Cameron in the campaign, but the reality of our Parliamentary system and indeed the scale of the crisis requires huge collaboration and much high level teamwork. Apart from the potential hostage to fortune that taking the challenge personally represents, the fact is, it is not true: Mr. Cameron can do nothing on his own, and it is a mistake to pretend that he can.

As the first salvos are loaded the fight a long election campaign, my heart sinks at the prospect of shrill trite, dishonest and just plain stupid political debate, when all the time the hour of economic reckoning comes closer.

This is not a very adult way to start the debate.

Comments

Anonymous said…
With a commentary like that, you should be a conservative.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...