Why did David Cameron keep referring to Labour backbench plots against Gordon Brown? It seems very insecure to do that. Are the few remaining moral and social conservatives, Eurosceptics, Unionists, and foreign policy realists on his own backbenches (there will be next to no such Tory MPs after the Election, and none at all in the Parliament after that) giving him some grief at last? Better late than never, I suppose.
Why does Shailash Vara, a very close Cameron ally, imagine the Prime Minister to be this country's directly elected Head of State? Just as it is taking a Labour Government to flog off the hospitals, as announced today, so it would take a Tory Government to legislate for the monarchy to die with the present Queen. And just as time was when no Labour politician (and few Tory ones) would have considered such flogging off, so time was when no Tory politician (and very few Labour ones) would have considered such legislation. But not any more.
And why did Phyllis Starkey, on The World At One, compare the Tories at PMQs to "Harrow Sixth Form high on drink and drugs"? Harrow? HARROW! As if David Cameron would give house room to anyone so low-born as to have gone to Harrow!
But she's got the boozed-up and coked-up bit right, of course. Thank God that they still have nothing more to console them than overturning a mere seven thousand majority in Cheshire two years before a General Election, after managing a crudely projected forty-four per cent of thirty-five per cent (including neither most of the West Country nor anywhere in Scotland).
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And the Tories are going to abolish the Monarchy because...?
ReplyDeleteUnder the Socialists the NHS budget has more than doubled. I don't quite see where these hospitals are being "sold off" to.
Oh, all sorts of funny money operations through the PFIs and PPPs. And now outright privatisation has been announced by Ben Bradshaw. Only Labour can, although the whole Political Class wants to. Imagine if the Tories tried.
ReplyDeleteLikewise, although the whole Political Class wants to withdraw from Northern Ireland, join the Euro, abolish the monarchy, and hand over Gibraltar (and the Falkland Islands, once Thatcher is dead), and all those in it who aren't Scottish want to dissolve that Union as well, only the Tories could actually do these things. Imagine if Labour tried.
Think of the Treaty of Rome, the Single European Act and the Maastricht Treaty. Think of the Sunningdale Accord, the Anglo-Irish Agreement and the Downing Street Declaration. Think of how Heath started the ball rolling on devolution.
Think of Thatcher's refusal to recognise the Muzorewa-Smith Government. Think of how the Tories began the practice of electing Leaders even while in government, and let the hereditary peerage go without a peep (a continuation of their own record, since the case against the trade union barons of organised labour checking bourgeois capitalism was and is the case against the hereditary barons of the aristocratic social conscience checking bourgeois capitalism).
Think of all sorts of things.
But the Socialists haven't privatised any hospitals. Quite the other way around, they're now giving public money to non-NHS hospitals, effectively spreading the State's tentacles further and further into the private sector. (When the Tories were doing this sort of thing in education in the 1990s they were roundly condemned!)
ReplyDeleteIn reality of course this is just straightforward New Labour sleaze: give taxpayers' money to "private" organisations whose fat-cat bosses can then hand part of it on to the Labour Party (for a peerage or two). Their most brazen policy in this regard in recent years has probably been state funding for the bloody unions. (Why doesn't Alistair Darling just write the cheques out directly to the Labour Party? Or, better still, himself?) Somewhat bizarrely, fomer Labour MEP Richard Balfe is now trying to sell this last one to the Cameronistas! (You can take a Socialist out of the Labour Party...)
"Political Class" is a silly, Peter Oborne-type term for the Socialists and their supporters in the mainstream media. Yes, Heath was a coward, but he's dead now, and arguably he had quite a lot to be cowardly about (e.g. Britain's defeat by the Nazis - and invasion by the Americans - during the War, and her having been wrecked economically by decades of Government overspending and unionism - not to mention his own personal fondness for public lavatories, etc.). I would hesitantly suggest that the political situation now is somewhat different.
The Belfast Agreement was built on the Downing Street Declaration, which in turn was built on Mrs Thatcher's policy (worked out by Willie Whitelaw, amongst others) of infiltrating and subverting the IRA in the 1980s. Strangely, Blair's only notable foreign policy "success" (apart from Sierra Leone) had very little to do with Blair himself. (In fact his "peace at any price" attitude almost certainly finished off the Ulster Unionists and the SDLP.)