God, I’m sick of politics and since I spend a lot of my time listening to BBC Radio Five Live that’s not going to work very well.
Obviously, being a cuddly, soggy damp slightly left of centre Labour man, the politics I most despise is Tory politics and it’s everywhere at the moment. As we all know, Cameron and Osborne are not strategists. There is no long term philosophical master plan behind them, everything they do or say is based upon short term gain; tactics, basically.
Osborne in particular deals in the sort of politics people loathe, forever setting traps for opponents in order to gain the maximum political advantage. Putting his spending plans into law? That’s a trap for an opposition who, he believes, will be seen to be soft on bringing down the deficit that, under him, is going back up again. Already, Osborne has borrowed more than Labour did in 13 years, including the worldwide financial crash, which according to the Old Etonians was “Labour’s mess”. I assume the cataclysmic meltdowns elsewhere in the world were all Gordon Brown’s fault too? And funny now that our economy is enjoying a mini property and debt-fuelled boom just in time for the General Election, Cameron warns that pressures on other economies in Europe and beyond could have an effect on ours. Well, no shit Sherlock?
Today’s announcement was a repeat of the one Cameron made two years ago, about investing in more roads and better railways. (To be fair, Gordon Brown was always re-announcing stuff too.) And yesterday, Osborne announced a boost for the NHS by promising more money for the NHS, a third of which was already within the NHS budget. And all because the Tories know they are weak on the NHS so Osborne tries to diffuse things with some short term tactics.
Every Tory minister refers to “the government’s long term economic plan” in order to convince us that they have one. It’s supposed to stick in our heads and a PMQ session will never be without it. But they don’t have one, save austerity and shifting the wealth from the poor, in particular the working poor, to the better off. But Osborne has said those with the broadest shoulders have made the biggest sacrifices. This from a man who stands to inherit a knighthood and a billion quid from the family business in due course. “We’re all in it together,” said the Chancellor, as if we were totally stupid. I doubt that Gideon has visited many food banks lately and Iain Duncan Smith seems to think they only exist for people who have spent their dole.
The government, and the opposition too often, bangs on about things that I am not that interested in. The constant war on the EU where we are told we must reclaim powers from Brussels but no one knows which ones have gone and of course the hideous bigotry of politicians who suggest that all these wretched foreigners want to do is claim benefits. They know full well it’s a lie but when did a lie stop a political statement.
We have many months of political bullshit in what will be the longest election campaign of our lives, because we now have fixed term parliaments. I really wish someone from any party, but obviously I would prefer Labour, to come up with a big idea, something positive to change the country, something we can believe in, something positive and hopeful. We all know what the Tories will be like, a grim negative campaign organised by Cameron’s Aussie fixer Lynton Crosby culminating in a slogan that will effectively be “They’re shit.”
But the spin does my head in. These politicians don’t act like they are our representatives. They behave like we live in a dictatorship, which we do: an elective dictatorship where we vote and then the government does what the hell it likes for five years, getting the unpopular stuff out of the way, and breaking all those promises, in the first year.
There are, of course, decent men and women in the Commons, probably most of them if the truth be known. Some, like Dennis Skinner and Kenneth Clarke, tell it like it is. Oh for more like them, and David Davies, Alan Johnson and Charlie Kennedy, who actually sound like human beings.
But listen to what they say and then listen again.
