All Kinds Of Things Become Possible

Peter Hitchens writes:

This Liberal Conservative Government is so Left-wing that even Labour is now attacking it from a conservative point of view.

Jack Straw, a former Home Secretary, has cunningly sniped at Kenneth Clarke’s plans to reduce the use of prison, producing these interesting figures: ‘The number of offenders given short sentences does not reflect a failure of the prison system, but the failure of those same offenders to respond to non-custodial sentences by going straight: 96 per cent of short-term prisoners have at least one previous conviction; three-quarters have seven or more, typically for multiple offences each time.’

Having dumped the Blairites by rejecting David Miliband, Labour is now free to get tough on crime and mass immigration. If it does so, then I think it can pretty much guarantee to win the next Election against the current lot, on any system of voting.
When the Tories abandon their own supporters as thoroughly as they are now doing, all kinds of things become possible.

Labour might even rediscover its old loathing for the European Union, another issue on which Mr Cameron has failed to live up to his own words. Logically, Labour ought also to be in favour of restoring grammar schools, since they help the poor. But do they have the courage and honesty to admit that most of their policies for the past 50 years have been wrong?

No more wrong than anyone else's, of course. And less wrong less early. Especially, though not exclusively, about the EU.