The hung Parliament compelled David Cameron to fill five Cabinet seats with Lib Dems, rather than, as originally intended and publicly announced, with Peter Mandelson, Alan Milburn, Stephen Byers, James Purnell and Andrew Adonis, the middle three ennobled for the purpose, and all five in receipt of the Labour Whip even while serving under Cameron. David Miliband would also have attended Cabinet as Leader of the "Opposition", but that, too, failed to go according to plan.
In the absence of such colleagues, however, Cameron pressed on regardless, with the policies that Lord Milburn would have pursued as Health Secretary, and with the policies that Lord Purnell would have pursued as restored Work and Pensions Secretary, having already begun to implement them when he had last held that office.
But the Health and Social Care Bill, which would have won Labour the 2010 Election outright if anyone had known about it in advance, is now denounced by absolutely everyone, while the vicious forced use of the unemployed to take away the jobs of the low-paid has been well and truly rumbled, as have the antics of the private companies being paid by how many sick and disabled people they pass as fit for work. Next on the hit list ought to be the savage slashing of school budgets in order to fund the racist vanity projects of London media gadflies.
The era that began with the death of John Smith, an era which ended within the Labour Party with the election of Ed Miliband, is now also coming to an end in the country at large.
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"The hung Parliament compelled David Cameron to fill five Cabinet seats with Lib Dems, rather than, as originally intended and publicly announced, with Peter Mandelson, Alan Milburn, Stephen Byers, James Purnell and Andrew Adonis, the middle three ennobled for the purpose, and all five in receipt of the Labour Whip even while serving under Cameron. David Miliband would also have attended Cabinet as Leader of the "Opposition", but that, too, failed to go according to plan."
ReplyDeleteYou keep on saying this, though I don't think you've said it at such length before. What is the actual evidence that this was going to happen?
What this describes is a National Government, similar to the one formed in 1931, if not one formed in 1940. The economic crisis in 2009 had enough similarities with the 1931 crisis for this to be somewhat plausible, but again is there direct evidence that any politicians contemplated this?
And why ywould the election result prevented this? Mathematically, Cameron gets a majority with the support of part of the Labor Party just as easily as he gets one with the support of the LibDems, and as you have claimed maybe there is more ideological congruence in the former setup.
The matter-of-fact statements made in and to various media could not have meant anything else, but were treated by those media as unremarkable.
ReplyDeleteThey wouldn't have brought the Labour Party with them, but neither they nor it would have cared. As much as anything else, they had all either left the Commons or never been in it.
The deal with Adonis notably fell through because of his - not the Conservative Party's, but his - support for grammar schools.