YOU DID NOT NEED to be a genius to realise that last May’s general election was a contest best lost. For whichever party had won it, that party was guaranteed to suffer the wrath of an angry electorate, irate at the cuts that would prove pressing just days after the ‘victory’.
How does it go? For every £8 billion in cuts this government will be forced to make, the Labour party would have made £6 billion? This is the extent of the difference between the Coalition and the Her Majesty’s Opposition; yet to hear the opposition’s complaints one would have thought the differences between the parties were of great ideological significance; as they indeed were 30 years ago.
The people of Lilliput went to war with their neighbours over what each felt was to be the correct end of a boiled egg to slice open before eating it. This was Swift’s way of illuminating the lack of meaningful differences between the political parties, and the hyperbole and exaggerated anger each deployed against the other on the public stage.
To listen to the present mooing and exotic displays of outrage by all parties at 12 noon on a Wednesday, one would have thought that serious differences were being chartered by the party leaders as they face each other over the dispatch box; rather than the infantile point scoring, whose sole function is to be declared a winner on that evenings news.
What is needed today is another Jonathon Swift to satirise this modern variant of Lilliputian politics. But unfortunately there is no such successor to his crown – although we are in dire need of one.
THIS COUNTRY NEEDS to reduce its budget deficit to the tune of some £170 billion. It needs to do so because this nation’s economic credibility is at stake. We see today what is happening in Ireland, Portugal, and, worse of all to come, Greece.
There are many in this country, who I venture to suggest, are working in the public sector who think in terms of spending our way out of every conceivable economic crises. They demand that their life-long employment, and final salary pension schemes, should be exempt from the various outrageous fortunes usually encountered within the private sector due to the tidal ebbs and flows of capitalism.
It is to this vast and ever growing group of people that the Labour opposition seeks to make their appeal. It is in this context that their rhetoric implies chasms of separation between themselves and the Coalition: they give the impression that if they were once more in power the much needed cuts in the public sector would be made in such a way so as to avoid the need for any public sector worker to fear for their job. This is because, so their rhetoric goes, they would seek a longer timeline for making the cuts – but, in the meantime, their rhetoric continues to give the impression that such cuts were the fault solely of that nasty Coalition.
To pretend to people that there is a comfortable way through our present predicament only debases further the reputation of the politicians among the people who it will be incumbent upon to pay-up.
WOULD IT NOT HAVE BEEN better for the country if the last Labour government had managed to claw to their embrace the Liberal Democrats into coalition and continued to govern? For having had more than a passing hand in the economic calamity that befell us, surely both the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats should have, from a purely Conservative point of view, been allowed to govern the nation.
Both the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats have far more in common than does the Conservative Party with either of them. If things had been different, and, after May 5th 2010, Labour had indeed formed a Coalition government with the Liberal Democrats, the Conservative Party would have been in a much stronger position today. But ambitious politicians eager to rule, are incapable of seeing the big picture.
AS I SAID AT THE BEGINNING, this was an election that disadvantaged the winner. Today we have a coalition of opposites who have declared that they put party politics before the interests of the country. Unfortunately politicians are not generals who seek to win wars, but rather battles. The Conservatives were so desperate to grab the levers of government once more after the 2010 general election, that their leader sought to coalesce in coalition with a party that previous Conservative governments would sooner have faced a firing squad over, than had dealings with.
Today, many Liberal Democrats are wishing that they had indeed accepted Gordon Browns enticements, including the AV (and yes) without a referendum to stand in the way.
To those within the Liberal Democrats who now wish their ambition for power had been differently arranged by their leader Nick Clegg, I wish them nothing but bad luck for the future.
As for David Cameron; if he were my chess opponent, I would have long since tired of check-mating him. This is not because of my brilliance at chess, but because David Cameron wanted his ambition to come true so much that he was prepared to countenance a coalition in order to gain power.
Like all leaders of their parties in parliament, they wish either to be prime minister or, in Nick Clegg’s case, as leader of a party that has only periodically tasted any kind of power since the first half of the last century, to be once more invited to share the Holy Grail in order to partake of power.
By taking power as he did, David Cameron has effectively given the Labour Party a further go at spending whatever he manages to salvage in the way of surplus after reducing or eliminating our national debt. He could have allowed Gordon Brown to seek a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, and by so doing, he would have delivered the country once more to Conservatism. But as things now stand; if the deficit has not been three-quarters eliminated by the next election, what has managed to be salvaged will be hurriedly spent by the next Labour government.
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