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.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Concert and Blues

Tallinn is full tonight... Big concerts on at the Song field The Weeknd and Bonnie Tyler (!). The place is buzzing and some sixty thousand concert goers have booked every bed for thirty miles around Tallinn. It should be a busy high summer, but it isn´t. Tourism is down sharply overall. Only 70 cruise ships calling this season, versus over 300 before Ukraine. Since no one goes to St Pete, demand has fallen, and of course people think that Estonia is not safe. We are tired. The economy is still under big pressure, and the fall of tourism is a significant part of that. The credit rating for Estonia has been downgraded as the government struggles with spending. The summer has been a little gloomy, and soon the long and slow autumn will drift into the dark of the year. Yesterday I met with more refugees: the usual horrible stories, the usual tears. I try to make myself immune, but I can´t. These people are wounded in spirit, carrying their grief in a terrible cradling. I try to project hop

Media misdirection

In the small print of the UK budget we find that the Chancellor of the Exchequer (the British Finance Minister) has allocated a further 15 billion Pounds to the funding for the UK track and trace system. This means that the cost of the UK´s track and trace system is now 37 billion Pounds.  That is approximately €43 billion or US$51 billion, which is to say that it is amount of money greater than the national GDP of over 110 countries, or if you prefer, it is roughly the same number as the combined GDP of the 34 smallest economies of the planet.  As at December 2020, 70% of the contracts for the track and trace system were awarded by the Conservative government without a competitive tender being made . The program is overseen by Dido Harding , who is not only a Conservative Life Peer, but the wife of a Conservative MP, John Penrose, and a contemporary of David Cameron and Boris Johnson at Oxford. Many of these untendered contracts have been given to companies that seem to have no notewo

Bournemouth absence

Although I had hoped to get down to the Liberal Democrat conference in Bournemouth this year, simple pressure of work has now made that impossible. I must admit to great disappointment. The last conference before the General Election was always likely to show a few fireworks, and indeed the conference has attracted more headlines than any other over the past three years. Some of these headlines show a significant change of course in terms of economic policy. Scepticism about the size of government expenditure has given way to concern and now it is clear that reducing government expenditure will need to be the most urgent priority of the next government. So far it has been the Liberal Democrats that have made the running, and although the Conservatives are now belatedly recognising that cuts will be required they continue to fail to provide even the slightest detail as to what they think should guide their decisions in this area. This political cowardice means that we are expected to ch