Fully Responsible

Peter Hitchens writes:

David Cameron said on Friday that it was a good thing Labour won the 1997 General Election, something that a remotely awake media would have blazoned across the sky in vast headlines, but which they buried instead.

His words, spoken in Bedford, were: ‘I think we know in 1997 the country needed change.’

Do we know that? Did it ‘need’ the ‘change’ it got – 13 years of political correctness, stupid wars, tax and spending? I hardly think so.

Generally, the Prime Minister pretends at voting time that he didn’t like the Blair-Brown junta. But if it turned out that he’d voted Labour in 1997 and 2001, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.

Mr Cameron, in full election mode, is now banging on (as he would call it if anyone else did it) about drunkards and illegal drug abusers claiming benefits for being drunk and drugged. He doesn’t mean it. He regards types like me, who think that you can stop drinking too much if you want to, and that people take heroin because they like it, as horrible reactionary brutes.

But unless you accept that people are fully responsible for their own actions – and modish liberals like Mr Cameron spend half their lives denying this – then the logic leads - inexorably to paying them ‘incapacity benefit’.

Likewise his opportunist moaning about judges making privacy law. They do this because Parliament (under his beloved Blair) gave them the power to do it. He knows perfectly well that this is the case.

How can I begin to tell you how much this man and his party do not deserve your support? And how much they laugh at you when you give it to them?

And:

As the Libya policy goes wrong, the nation’s brakes have failed. Where is the high-level criticism? Where the questioning? The Prime Minister was interviewed at length on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme and even managed to give some (duff) racing tips but, incredibly, was not asked about Libya.

Parliament has not been recalled – did you know that only the Government can do this? The main effect of our intervention has been to prolong a civil war, and the futile carnage in Misrata is largely our fault. Having intervened supposedly to prevent a massacre in Benghazi, we may be causing one in Misrata.

The only truly humanitarian course now available is to provide an evacuation fleet to get non-combatants out of that city as soon as possible.