David Cameron’s the front man for this government, doing his PR act flitting from one issue to the next, trying to plug the holes in the dyke whenever they regularly appear. George Osborne is the real power behind the throne, the custodian of the government’s agenda. So when Cameron gets himself photographed cracking the whip on a dog-sleigh in the Arctic, it’s all smoke and mirrors. When Osborne said in the Autumn Statement: “We are not going to save the planet by shutting down our steel mills, aluminium smelters and paper manufacturers”, that’s the authentic voice of brown-nosed anti-environmentalism retoxifying the Tory party. Continue reading
Tagged with Coalition
Unemployment – a price not worth paying
The awful rise in joblessness, so long expected, is now under way – not from a base of a million as in the 1980s, but upwards now from a very high platform of 2.5 million already. Yet the Commons exchanges debating this yesterday were disappointing. Osborne, summoning himself up to his full stature of smug and dismissive arrogance, used two tactics to divert the Labour attack. He is a born provocateur of the most shameless and brazen kind, and constantly taunted Balls with every aspect of Labour policy with which he thought he could cause trouble, to which Balls unwisely responded time and time again, thus enabling Osborne to transform the occasion from a bruising denunciation of Tory economic policy into a long-drawn-out, pugilistic, knock-down brawl. Sadly, unemployment was the loser. But there was worse to come. Continue reading
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Hackgate: notes on political crises
Westland didn’t bring down Thatcher, Major took on the Maastricht Bastards and lived. Not even the combination of illegal war against Iraq, the Kelly suicide and cash for peerages was enough to force Blair to quit. Prime ministers, it seems, invariably ride out a little local difficulty.
I do not see anything in either the extent or the seriousness of Hackgate that leads inexorably to the conclusion that the Coalition is on the point of imminent collapse. Blog posts and newspaper columns from both the more impressionable variety of younger leftist and diehard Tory rightwingers who never had much time for Cameron anyway should probably be disregarded.
The British electorate repeatedly demonstrates a surprising willingness to forgive and forget. Remember the MPs’ expenses scandal, when it was widely suggested that the next parliament would be chock-a-block with the likes of Esther Rantzen and Simon Heffer, elected on independent tickets? It never happened, of course.
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Three strikes and you’re out, or is it one?
Thursday’s strike over Government proposals on public sector pensions will bring to a head simmering tensions on several fronts. Rising anger over the cuts, though the pensions dispute has nothing whatever to do with the budget deficit, will reinforce the resistance, thus far and no further, on an issue where the Government is seen to be acting manifestly unfairly. It will bring Tory taunts (e.g. at PMQ on Wednesday) to a crescendo about Labour supporting strikes. It will put on display Tory intransigence in arbitrarily imposing an unjust settlement and then goading the unions to strike against it. It will give the union-bashing media a field-day. And, most important of all, it will put to the test the Labour leadership and the unions in how to handle a virulent and revanchist counter coup determined to strip away working class and public sector advances of the last 60 years and shrink the State. Continue reading
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The debate shouldn’t be whether to resist, but how to resist
In thirty years time, school kids studying history will be asked to answer the following question: “How did the British Conservative Party transform a private sector crisis into a crisis of public spending?” However it is answered, the maddening injustice of what the Tories are trying to pull off will scream through the ages. An economic collapse caused by neo-liberalism is being “solved” with the most extreme dose of neo-liberalism yet. A catastrophe unleashed upon us by a deregulated banking industry is being used to hack further chunks off the welfare state established by the 1945 Labour government. A nightmare triggered by the greed of the wealthy elite is being used to kick working people and the poor. Continue reading
