'The
truth is that both major parties are now just commercial organisations, who
raise money wherever they can get it to buy their way into office through
unscrupulous election campaigns. They then presumably reward their donors once
they are in office. The electorate are a constitutional necessity for this
process, but otherwise their fears, hopes and desires are largely irrelevant.
They are to be fooled and distracted with scares (‘The other lot will privatise
the NHS!’ ‘The other lot will nationalise your children’s toys and then wreck
the economy!’ ) or with loss-leader cut-rate offers, like supermarkets (‘Vote
for us and get a cheap mortgage!!’ ‘Vote for us and have your rent frozen!’) .
Even if these wild pledges are implemented, the customer will pay for them
through higher taxes elsewhere, just as with supermarket loss-leaders. By
playing our part in this ludicrous pantomime, we license it to continue forever.
I have thought for years that the key to ending it was simple and obvious. We
could revenge ourselves on these fakes by refusing to vote for them. The arrival
of new parties, UKIP on one side, the Greens on the other, made such a revolt
and redemption even easier.
But
I must now admit that the people of this country actually seem to prefer to live
the same experience over and over again, and seem astonishingly ready to believe
the crudest propaganda. I seethe with frustrated amazement at the Tory claim to
have fixed the economy, so blazingly untrue that in commercial advertising it
would get them into serious trouble with the authorities. Ailing GDP figures
just before the election were barely mentioned in the media, but easily-obtained
statistics on productivity, trade, manufacturing and construction, are all bad
and the Tories have missed their own target (whether wise or not)on deficit
reduction. In any case, the Tory record on the economy is dreadful.The idea that
they are economically competent in general simply doesn’t stand up to
examination. Leave aside Winston Churchill’s disastrous decision to force us
back on the Gold Standard , have we all forgotten the ERM catastrophe, in which
a Tory government threw £27 Billion into the sea for nothing, because their best
brains had mistakenly lashed sterling to the EU’s exchange rate ? What about the
irresponsible Reggie Maudling boom of the early 1960s (Maudling left a note for
his Labour successor , Jim Callaghan, saying ‘Sorry to leave it in such a mess,
old cock’ which was almost certainly what Liam Byrne had in mind when he left
his famous note saying ‘Sorry there’s no money’. What of Harold Macmillan’s
decision to spend wildly in 1958 which caused his entire Treasury team to resign
in protest , the irresponsible Tony Barber boom of the early 1970s, and of
course the devastation of manufacturing industry in the early years of the
Thatcher government? Now we have a dangerous housing bubble, official
money-printing and the organised theft from savers by the abolition of interest
on deposits. I’m not actually saying Labour are much better, or any better, but
to vote Tory because you think the economy is safe in their hands is actually
daft.
As
for the Scottish scare, this is if anything even more shocking. Mr Cameron’s
macho mishandling of the referendum, refusing an option for Devo Max, came close
to bringing about a pro-secession vote. So did his generally cack-handed
management of the campaign. Then, his partisan and petty pursuit of ‘English
votes for English laws’ (plus his discourteous gloating about the Queen
allegedly ‘purring’ at the result) infuriated Scottish voters who had until then
taken the ‘vow’ of maximum concessions seriously. It probably precipitated the
landslide to the SNP (one of the few occasions when this expression
‘landslide’has been justified). I have written here about Michael Portillo’s
interesting admission that he no longer clung to traditional Unionism. I think
we have every reason to suspect that many others in the Tory Party would
privately be quite happy to say goodbye to Scotland.
A
Tory Party really concerned about the loss of Scotland would have done as Norman
Tebbit suggested, and urged its supporters to vote Labour to stop the SNP.
Instead, to the dismay of elder statesmen and experts such as Michael Forsyth,
it talked up the SNP, paying elaborate compliments to Nicola Sturgeon after the
leaders’ debate (George Osborne and Michael Gove were observed doing this) . To
claim, while behaving in this fashion, that the Tory Party is a bulwark against
the SNP and Labour is in their clutches is absurd. The SNP are delighted by the
Tory victory, which makes it all but certain that they will get a repeat
landslide in next year’s Scottish general election, with a manifesto commitment
to a second referendum, which I think they will then win. Let us see how Mr
Cameron now copes with the SNP’s sweeping victory, for which he must take so
much of the blame...
As
for the famous EU referendum, who really thinks that the propaganda forces which
got Mr Cameron his unexpected majority won’t also be activated to achieve a huge
vote to stay in the EU? And then the issue will be closed
forever.
What is the point of saying all this now,
when it’s all over? Because it is true, and because to speak the truth is
valuable in itself, at all times.'
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