Thursday 27 September 2007

Welcome To The Big Tent

Opening the Fabian Review when I got in last night, I was startled to see an article by Iain Dale. Welcome to the Big Tent, Iain. Your Ministry awaits you. But then again, since you really are one of the talents, probably not.

Facing Iain's article was one by Mark Oaten, in which he referred to his own party as "the Liberals" over, and over, and over again. On the radio last week, his Leader talked about "the SDP and the then Liberals", with no mention of "the then SDP". Something is going on here. But what is it? Now that the Wilson-Callaghan-Healey-Hattersley-Smith-Brown Succession is at last restored, I think that we can all more than guess. I give the Lib Dems a year.

17 comments:

  1. I might be missing some irony here. But did you really describe Iain Dale as "one of the talents"? How does that square with your dislike of the political class? Iain Dale's blog displays the worst kind of Westminster village navel-gazing and gossip, obsessed with personalities at the expense of policy, and obsessed with himself and his own self-advancement above all else. Surely that's exactly the kind of thing you usually take a stand against?

    ReplyDelete
  2. That's not my reading of it all. Certainly not of the comments, which are at least as important, as Iain himself would no doubt agree. Yes, a lot of them are right-wing nutters. Well, there are a lot of right-wing nutters about. And by no means all the comments fit that bill.

    ReplyDelete
  3. His comments boxes might be good. But having good comments boxes isn't evidence that you have talent yourself, obviously. Iain Dale's own writing doesn't display much of it.

    ReplyDelete
  4. You mean, "He's a Tory". Well, so are Bercow, Mercer, Eliasch, Thatcher, Tebbit, Comrade Digby, and plenty more to come. And you happily welcome them into government.

    ReplyDelete
  5. You're on to something here. Dale is angling for something or has already been offered it. Why else would he write for the Fabian Review? Same with Oaten. The tent gets bigger and bigger.

    Your point about the LibDems is spot on as far as it goes. The SDP lot are going home to Labour under Brown. But Oaten and others illustrate that the Liberals are heading in that direction too. They just won't be so quick about it and won't strictly be joining the Lbaour Party.

    ReplyDelete
  6. No, it's not that he's a Tory. It's, as I said before, that his blog "displays the worst kind of Westminster village navel-gazing and gossip, obsessed with personalities at the expense of policy, and obsessed with himself and his own self-advancement above all else". Some Tories do that, but lots don't. Some Labour people do, too. And certainly plenty of journalists do. It's not meant to be a party political point, so much as a point about the way politics is discussed, and the kind of people who have the most prominent voices in the discussion ("the political class", if you like, of which Iain Dale is very much a part).

    By the way, I don't know why you think I welcome those people into government. I'm not in a position to welcome anyone into government, since I'm nothing to do with it.

    ReplyDelete
  7. If he were, then he'd be an MP by now. To put it bluntly, at his age. Middle-aged blogging booksellers are not Political Class.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Nor are people with degrees in German from UEA.

    ReplyDelete
  9. So what kinds of degrees disqualify one from membership of the Political Class, and why?

    ReplyDelete
  10. Quite. Parliament could do with (for example) at lot more middle-aged blogging booksellers with degrees in German from UEA, and a lot fewer Miliband-Balls-Cameron-Osborne types. Only we can make this happen.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Anonymous 12:04 PM, none in particular.

    But far too many of them read Politics or something very close to it (Economics, Modern History) at Oxbridge (and, above all, PPE at Oxford), straight out of either public schools or the sort of state schools that might as well be.

    They then moved straight on to cadet Political Class jobs that can only be done by people with rich parents (see a previous post). And after a few years of that, the party machine parachuteed them into safe seats, setting them up for life.

    They have no idea how ordinary people live or how the real world (whether public sector, private sector or voluntary sector) works. They have all known each other for ever, and their primary, or even their only, loyalty is to each other. They believe only in office and its trappings, not in anything else in particular.

    Furthermore, they assume all sorts of outrageous behaviour to be perfectly normal: Mandelson's lying on a mortgage application form, Prescott's having sex in the office, Blunkett's giving his spouse's pass to his mistreess who was in fact someone else's spouse, and so much more besides.

    "Everyone does that sort of thing!", they squealed, on a entirely cross-party basis. Not to mention, "What ordinary people get up to is far worse!" And they really believed it.

    Are these the people that you want running the country? Because these are the people that we have running the country. Until we rise up and do something about it.

    So, what are you waiting for?

    ReplyDelete
  12. That's a great relief: it means that I'm not Political Class, and nor is anyone I know. Phew!

    ReplyDelete
  13. Nor is anyone most people know. That's the point.

    Mind you, you don't actually HAVE to be public school/as good as, or Oxbridge, or a Politics/Near Enough graduate. Although it helps. If that's the right word.

    ReplyDelete
  14. It also means that all the people I know who have jobs in government and the Labour Party, and I know a few, aren't Political Class either. Good! All is not lost!

    ReplyDelete
  15. Well, you can't know any members of the present Cabinet, for a start!

    ReplyDelete
  16. No, I don't. But I think limiting your definition of the "Political Class" to people who are in the cabinet makes the whole thing banal and self-proving. I thought it was supposed to cover a much wider group than that - as I understand Peter Oborne's thesis (which admit I haven't read) it extends beyond the cabinet to cover senior politicians and advisors of all parties, along with political journalists and so on, all of whom supposedly come from the same relatively small group and understand only their own little world.

    The point about the cabinet ministers you have in mind is that they have come up through the ranks of this class, in various different ways - if the class started and ended with the cabinet, then it would be a very different sort of thing, and one couldn't come up through the ranks of it because there wouldn't be any.

    ReplyDelete
  17. As I said, for a start.

    Yes, that is Peter Oborne's thesis. And it is unanswerable.

    You can't come up through the Political Class "in various different ways". That is a very large part of the problem with it.

    ReplyDelete