Skip to main content

Conservatives' unforced errors

It is now only weeks from the General Election.

It is a general Election that the Conservative Party is expecting and indeed is expected to win.

Why then is the Tory Party in such an incredible mess?

There is no sense of coherence anywhere- policies are made up with great rapidity, and abandoned within a few days of announcement. It is not just that the Tories are "keeping their powder dry" for government- they genuinely don't know what they are going to do. They insist that they will be fiscally disciplined, then return from Davos feverishly back pedalling on what should be a central part of their economic policy. They announce tax policies that crumble in a single weekend.

The latest "policy announcement" is that employees in the public sector will be allowed to form co-operatives. A fine idea in principle, but there is absolutely no sense that the Conservatives understand the first thing about the details. It is impossible to even critique the policy, because it has clearly been dreamt up within the past few days- and this upon the eve of a transition to government!!

This is an absolute disgrace.

Gimmicky, stupid and dangerous policies are being thrown around because the Conservative Party exists in an intellectual vacuum. Where is the sense of unity of ideology? Where is the sense of focus?

There isn't one.

Frankly it is absolutely contemptible to watch a bunch of Public Relations airheads totally destroy their credibility. I hold no brief for Gordon Brown. I do not want any more Socialism in the UK. I do not want to see a Labour Government after the next elections. However this appalling display of infantile gesture politics amongst the Tories makes me increasingly certain that the young politicians on the make in the Conservative Party will be just as disastrous as the Blair-Brown fiasco.

Of course large numbers of Conservatives also feel the same way. The latest internal party fiasco was in Westminster North, where the Conservative candidate- whose immature style of "tweeting" makes her sound about 14- needed to be rescued from her own resignation through the intervention of Cameron himself. Frankly the Westminster Tories are an unappealing lot at the best of times but I did have a certain sympathy for the local constituency chairwoman (now removed from office) who clearly found the candidate extremely hard to take. The disillusion with Cameron in her statement was quite obvious- and all of this is well before Mr. Cameron can be certain of becoming Prime Minister.

The empty headed Cameron project is headed for a wreck upon the rocks of its own vacuity. If History does indeed repeat itself, "first as tragedy, then as farce", then the self-styled heir to Blair will be a failure on an industrially farcial scale.

I am just not sure that Britain is going to get the joke.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Waiting for the Barbarians

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum? The barbarians are due here today. Why isn’t anything going on in the senate? Why are the senators sitting there without legislating? Because the barbarians are coming today. What’s the point of senators making laws now? Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating. Why did our emperor get up so early, and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate, in state, wearing the crown? Because the barbarians are coming today and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader. He’s even got a scroll to give him, loaded with titles, with imposing names. Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas? Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts, rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds? Why are they carrying elegant canes beautifully worked in silver and gold? Because the barbarians are coming today and things like that dazzle the barbarians. Why don’t our distingui...
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

Lib Dem v. Tory (Round 2)

The Liberal Democrats stand for a distinct political ideology. It is an ideology built around both socially and economically liberal precepts. In as far as our ruling Labour government can be said to have an ideology at all, it coincides with Liberalism only incidentally. Labour stands for pragmatism, and where it does not there is still a core of values that are collectivist and not individual. Sometimes people are prepared to claim the moral high ground for policies of social solidarity and redistribution of wealth. Liberals may argue in favour of equality of opportunity, we can not argue in favour- as Socialists do- of "and equal society". The reason is simple: Socialism does not work. If one places equality above freedom, then eventually we get tyranny. This is why, while we may argue in favour of a more equal society as being a stronger society, the tools that we may use to gain -in our view- socially desirable outcomes must rest upon freedom above all else. As PJ O'...
14 comments
Read more