Cameron is getting desperate. Throwing around billions in unfunded promises (the NHS, housing association hand-outs, raised inheritance tax threshold) cut no ice. The inevitable promise of higher rate tax cuts (unfunded again) didn’t impress. The boast that the Tories had turned round the economy from a basket case to a world beater simply didn’t ring true in people’s lives. The claim that the Tories represented the ‘party of working people’ is beyond satire. So having used up every trick in the book, including vilifying Ed Miliband which turned counter-productive once people saw him at length on TV and could make up their own minds, Cameron has now resorted to the most preposterous device of all – trying to inflame English nationalism against the Scots in order to turn voters against a Labour-SNP deal after the election. Continue reading
Tagged with David Cameron
Cameron gets rattled: where’s the leadership quality he like to boast of?
Cameron is alarmingly showing increasing signs of losing his cool. He does so quite regularly at PMQs when he gets caught out and his face blushes puce. He did so again under fire from Paxman in the recent TV contest between him and Miliband when, unlike at PMQs, he didn’t have the privilege of the last word and had to face repeated questions drilling down on controversial issues. And now, after a poor start to the Tory election campaign, he’s at it again, tossing out wild rhetoric unjustified by any evidence. He accused Labour of “over £3,000 in higher taxes for every working family to pay for more welfare and out of control spending; debt will rise and jobs will be lost as a result”. It’s worth unpacking this because every one of these allegations he bandied about is wrong. Continue reading
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Cameron’s bad day: with more ‘victories’ like this, he’s sunk
Any objective person watching the Cameron-Miliband TV duel (although it was faux because Cameron was too frit to submit himself to a direct face-to-face contest with Miliband) could be in no doubt that Miliband won. Unlike Cameron, he didn’t get flustered or rattled, and he projected himself more strongly both in personality and on policies. So bang goes one of the only two factors that the Tories count on to win this election.
The other, the economy, didn’t survive Cameron’s mauling by Paxman: how could he claim that the government’s economic policy was working when he’d been forced to borrow an extra £500bn beyond what he planned, and the deficit was still stuck at nearly £100bn and was no longer coming down because Osborne had imposed semi-permanent austerity which reduced government tax receipts? Not the best way for the Tories to start the election campaign. But another incident on the same day worked out even worse for Cameron. Continue reading
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PMQs – the spectacle and farce – is rotten and out of touch and needs radical reform
It’s been a long, tedious road; but here we are. In regular slots since the 13 October 2010 Dave and Ed have faced off in gladiatorial combat over the dispatch box. How did it go? It was pretty poor, from Labour’s perspective. Especially when, for those who score such things, Ed Miliband had come out on top.
As you might expect, Ed started with the question mark over the Tories’ VAT plans. Referencing Dave’s retirement plan and his desire to give “straight answers to Dave questions“, he was asked whether he would rule out a VAT rise? As Osborne had previously said he had “no plans“, it was hardly shocking that – for once – he gave an affirmative answer to the VAT rise. Continue reading
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Why Dave has ruled out a third term
How short are political memories? Being someone with stints in Leninist organisations behind me, one lesson I talk from those times was how the party styled itself as the collective memory of the class. Hence why the repetitious lead offs on the Russian Revolution and rinse and repeat articles on the old beards. However, it turns out those comrades were right.
In the Labour Party, as a rule, there is little sense of shared histories. Policies that were tried and failed before make comebacks from time to time. There is little systematic education and therefore the lessons learned by previous generations of activists are haphazardly handed down informally to newer members. The Conservatives, on the other hand, are a qualitatively different story. More so than Labour. they appear to live from moment to moment, chasing polls and obsessing over headlines in papers whose circulation and influence shrinks by the day. History is not something to be learned about, for the drawing of necessary lessons, but rather serves as a convenient stick to batter the opposition. Continue reading
