Versus his utterly hysterical media critics.
On and on they drone that he is in crisis, that he is failing to make any headway, and so on. Yet the insolent voters consistently place his party ahead of one half of the Coalition while signalling that they intend to wipe out the other half as soon as the opportunity presents itself.
But that would mean ... well, it would mean that you did not have to be Tony Blair in order to win a General Election. Imagine that. They can't. They honestly, genuinely cannot imagine such a thing.
Something increasingly resembling a proper Labour Party, complete with Lord Glasman and everything that he represents looming large in the background and even the foreground, is consistently ahead of the Conservatives in the polls.
Meanwhile, the nearest thing to a Peter Hitchens Party, though in fact with a far higher and more classically Tory view of the economic and social role of the State, is consistently on par with the Lib Dems.
The universally Blairite, and therefore Cameronite and D-Milibandite, media have no idea how to cope. The best that they can do is report what they think ought to be happening, as if it actually were. But it is not. And it never will be.
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Yawn. Opinion polls. Hate them when they don't support your point, but now it's all "yeah, look at the polls"
ReplyDeleteI just enjoy the fact that this time even they cannot rig the opinion polls, and thus the polls at the polls. How long before they stop polling altogether, because it no longer serves its purpose? Will it be before, or after, the 2015 Election?
ReplyDeleteI wonder how the BBC will avoid reporting a Miliband victory in 2015?
ReplyDeleteThere'll be no politics at all on the BBC by then. They are almost there already.
ReplyDeleteAll posts currently displayed have a total of 73 comments. Andrew Gilligan, eat your heart out. I'm not kidding. Or Will Heaven, whose number you certainly have with your latest comment on his effort.
ReplyDeleteLike Coffee House and the Staggers, Telegraph Blogs allows anybody on the neocon-Eustonite-Blairite spectrum but nobody not on it. When will there be a suitably high profile site for us?
When someone comes up with the readies.
ReplyDeleteThe wish list of contributors trips off the tongue, but they could not very well work for free, and why should they?
I sometimes think of tapping my ex-tutees. But no. Give them 10 years. And we can't wait that long, can we?
I think that you are being unfair to Peter Oborne. And there are more or less paleocon writers on PostRight. But overall, you are right, of course.
"There are posh boys who on their first night at university had dinner with David Lindsay. And then, there are posh boys who didn't."
ReplyDeleteSo you write under someone else's pouring of scorn on Heaven's latest piece of gap yah gibberish. How Telegraph Blogs keeps out of Private Eye, I do not understand.
By all accounts, those who have sat at your feet would crawl over broken glass with their flies open if you needed or merely told them to.
On topic, please.
ReplyDeleteYou mean RightMinds, not PostRight. PostRight was the much missed American Conservative blog, currently in some sort of suspension, for which you and a band of your merry men used to write. You should all get back together again for something.
ReplyDeleteFunny you should say that...
ReplyDeleteBut come on now, on topic.
"Something increasingly resembling a proper Labour Party, complete with Lord Glasman and everything that he represents looming large in the background and even the foreground" means that you people have staged a coup in my party and intend to stage a coup in my party. You are nothing if not brazen.
ReplyDeleteWhy can "they" not rig polls any more? Why is it that ones which showed cameron doon well were faked, but these are genuine? Who is "they" anyway? And are you seriously trying to become a serious political commentator whilst peddling this paranoid rubbish? (don't tell me Peter Hitchens argues the same, because he doesn't - he just complains about the don't knows being screened out)
ReplyDeleteIt's not "paranoid", it's just a fact.
ReplyDeleteThe purpose of an opinion poll, as anyone with even the tiniest amount of sophistication knows and as I'm not sure that pollsters even bother to deny, is not to measure public opinion, but to influence it. That is why Americans openly classify pollsters as liberal or conservative, left-wing or right-wing, Democratic or Republican. But we seem to be less urbane over here.
Historically, the influencing of public opinion by the polling section of the media has been enormously successful. It is not hard to do: ask the right questions, ask the right people (almost all polling is now by phone, so they know whom they are polling - from market research and what have you, the know a huge amount about the person at the other end of the line), discount "rogue" answers no matter how numerous, discount people who answer "none" even when they outnumber any other single category, we all know the tricks.
People are made to feel that there is a mass movement afoot, and that they ought to want to be part of it. That is rarely, if ever, true: the Conservatives took fewer actual votes in 1983 than in 1979, and neither Labour in 1997, 2001 or 2005, nor the Conservatives in 2010, have taken as many votes as the Conservatives in 1992, when the pollsters, incorrigibly of the "centre ground" (regular readers will know my views on that one), tried and failed to engineer a hung Parliament by telling everyone that it was going to happen anyway. It didn't.
But now, even their bag of tricks cannot be deployed to deliver the required results, so the rest of the media have to make it up for themselves rather than rely on the pollsters to deliver "objective" and "scientific" confirmation of the editorial line. It would take a heart of stone not to laugh.
David,
ReplyDeletePlease see the link update below.
http://malcolmclarke.blogspot.com
Updated from.....
http://leftwingmal.blogspot.com
Thanks
Malcolm :)
Will do, thank you.
ReplyDeleteYour opponent in 2013 if the buses to Lanchester, Burnhope and the Bede's have not been restored by then. Then again, I doubt you see yourself as up against anyone apart from the two sitting councillors, three serious candidates for two seats.
ReplyDeleteAmong other things that would have to be in place, notably my state of health.
ReplyDeleteUnder normal circumstances, I would vote for the re-election of the two sitting Councillors (one Labour and one Independent), and even sign their nomination papers if they would have me.
Normal circumstances include the lately discontinued bus services to Lanchester and Burnhope, and the lately discontinued transport subsidy to the four Catholic secondary schools, including Saint Bede's.
Now, back on topic, please.
We have not yet reached a situation where a general election is a straight popularity contest. Party politics still has a role to play and I believe should have a part to play at every level of politics. Ed is not an Independent, as you correctly state it is the Labour party that are ahead in the opinion polls.
ReplyDeleteParties should get behind their leader. I think he is doing quite well at the minute especially in not getting into drawn into 'these strikes are wrong' territory this time around.