Cameron’s priorities boggle the mind, but if he fails, there’s always Ed
“Better keep your fingers crossed that nothing seriously bad happens”
Listening to our callow political leaders at the annual political party conferences you would never guess that Britain faced economic meltdown, or that next year the world will have to handle an unprecedented political upheaval as France, China, Russia and the United States change political leaders.
Labour leader Ed Miliband looks and sounds like an arrogant student union upstart who has recently been converted to Marxism, with his trite, over-confident and superficial ideas. His suggestion that companies can be divided into saints and sinners, presumably by a corporate commissar, was risible and could only have come from the mouth of someone who’d never spent a day in the real world. What on earth was he thinking he would achieve by saying he was “his own man”. Would anyone say “I’m not my own man”? As for Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg’s speech to the Liberal Democrats, I can’t remember a word of what he said, apart from lots of silly, immature insults aimed at the Tories. (That title sounds important until you remember that John “Lord” Prescott had it once) I did though hear the egregious Energy Secretary Chris Huhne say words to the effect that “we don’t want any tea-party tendency here”. There’s no chance of that, because, contrary to what Huhne would have you believe, the Tea Party movement in America is a spontaneous political uprising where local people, sick of the direction their government was taking, were able to back candidates in primary elections who reflected what they wanted. The Tea Party was able to induce a hefty movement to the right and made sure Congress heard what they wanted. That couldn’t happen in Britain. Our corrupt political system is controlled centrally by all the main parties. Any attempt to move the Tory party to the right, for instance, would fall on stony ground. There is no way for the grass roots to be heard in Britain.
Tory leader and Prime Minister David Cameron has tried to play with the idea of primaries, but ever the machine politician, he would distort and dilute the power of these elections by opening them up to all constituents, thus defeating the object. As for Cameron’s performance at the conference, it beggars belief that speaking to a nation facing economic catastrophe, his first thoughts were about how Tories had done nice things in Rwanda, how his grandstanding in Libya had been a great success (this will come back and bite him in due course when the Muslim Brotherhood takes over in Libya and Egypt and the Arab Spring is shown to be nothing of the kind), then praising the troops in Afghanistan (another costly, initially crucial but ultimately futile exercise. You can’t reason with people who would kill the educators of women) then some nonsense about Nigeria.
Cameron repeated the mantra about not rescuing Britain’s economy on the backs of the world’s poor. That might make some sense if the kerzillions we are dumping on the third world was being put to some use, but we all know most of this money goes into Swiss bank accounts. Cameron should invite former Pakistan cricketer Imran Khan around to number 10 for tea.
“Unfortunately, aid has been a curse for Pakistan. It is not helping the people, it is disappearing in corruption. It is probably disappearing in Swiss bank accounts, or it’s going into the army. If we have aid which keeps feeding these governments, it’s propping them up. If we don’t have aid we will be forced to make the reforms and stand on our own feet,” said Khan in a recent visit to Britain.
But no. International Aid Secretary Andrew Mitchell insists, in his pious, self-righteous, Church of England way, that we must direct huge amounts of money we don’t have to corrupt third world countries, at the same time that his government slashes the armed services and raises university tuition fees for its citizens. Remember that the government borrowed more than £15 billion in August.
Perhaps the most fatuous suggestion from Cameron was his call for homosexual marriage. The house is on fire and there are no escape routes, to paraphrase Foreign Secretary William Hague, but Cameron wants to keel over to an extremely noisy but minority political group. Perhaps someone should point out to Cameron that the government’s own figures from the Office of National Statistics show only 1.3 per cent of the population claim to be homosexual. So even on political grounds this is kowtowing to a miniscule section of the electorate. But it will of course impress his metrosexual friends. More grandstanding opportunities here.
Cameron must be the luckiest politician ever. He has Ed Miliband as his main opposition, which just about guarantees he will win the next election, and to be honest there doesn’t seem any chance that Britain will get a proper conservative government any time soon. Is it too much to ask that Cameron will call the LibDems bluff, contrive an issue which will force even this lily-livered bunch to pack their tents and go? Then can we have –
a referendum on the European Union.
a British Bill of Rights after dumping the Human Rights Act
Energy policies which eschew any nonsense about human induced climate change.
Assume that prison works in the criminal justice system.
Embrace grammar schools to make sure Britain’s poor once again have access to world class education.
Slash the aid budget, and promise that any future assistance will depend on reforms to end corrupt governance first.
Reinstate the promise for a bonfire of the quangoes and unnecessary regulation.
Dump the 50 per cent income rate for high earners and remember that the more you earn, the more tax you pay. There is no justification for making some people pay tax at a higher rate, unless you’re a class warrior.
That’s enough common sense to be getting on with.
So Britain faces an economic crisis now, and maybe a global political one next year, and we have an immature Prime Minister with little experience of the real world, a penchant for grandstanding and political fixing, and lacking any political principle, backed up by Nick Clegg and an even less impressive CV. If these two clowns go down, Ed Miliband will be forced into the breach.
Better keep your fingers crossed that nothing seriously bad happens.
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