As Oscar Wilde noted, losing one parent is a disaster, losing two is distinctly careless. Cameron might reflect on that. Backing off one policy may be serious, but backing off six, as he has done over the last few weeks, is beginning to look like a rather careless life-style. The latest one, yesterday, beating a hasty retreat from Danny Alexander’s ill-advised attempt to lay down the law with the unions over public sector pensions whilst still supposedly in the middle of negotiations, is perhaps the most careless of all – an own goal which gratuitously exposed the Government’s weakness.
There has been bitter (and justified) resentment from women, especially those born 1953-4, about the gross unfairness of abruptly raising the retirement age when they were already so close to it, but the complaints got nowhere – until Alexander’s intransigence coalesced against him the biggest strike threat for a century. Within a day the Government caved in. We must thank Alexander for so brilliantly highlighting the reviving role of the unions. But there’s still more to it.
Like the Grand Old Duke of York, Cameron’s got form. Let Ministers get on with it – Cameron, like Blair, can never be bothered with detail – until the YouGov poll sets the alarm going by finding that some government policy is unpopular. The hapless Minister is then immediately hung out to dry and word is then passed down via some papal nuncio that the policy’s changed. Lansley most notoriously over the NHS bill and Clarke over 50% discounts in jail terms in exchange for an early guilty plea. Added to that has been the retreat over selling off the nation’s forests and the abandonment of welfare plans to dock 10% of housing benefit off anyone unemployed more than 12 months. And let’s not forget the about-turn on foreign policy, from opposing intervention in Libya initially to now exulting in the lead role to depose Gadaffi.
