Sunday 5 July 2009

Cabinet Fractures

Ian Dale suggeststhat Gordon Brown's cabinet is tearing itself to bits with bitter power struggles going on almost constantly.
I'm not sure the Sunday papers are going to make happy reading for Peter Mandelson. Simon Walters has the story [in the Mail on Sunday] of how Mandy refused to talk to Gordon Brown until he asked Shaun Woodward to leave the room (hilarious).
But more seriously for Mandelson, the Sunday Times accuses him of covering up a report into MG Rover.
Mandelson's almost mystical ability to spread discord is hurting Brown now. Mind you, there can be no sympathy for the auld fraud: if you try to make a deal with the devil, somewhere down the road you're gonna get burnt.

What motivates this pair is probably beyond rational thought. I would hazard, though, that with the former, it is vanity on a legendary scale and with the latter, it is unprincipled, demagoguic fanaticism combined with a delusional sense of his own importance. One thing they have in common is their ability to alienate almost everyone unfortunate enough to have to work for them - and to lie constantly, deliberately and without the slightest compunction. No wonder Labour is in total disarray.

There's more, though. Add to this the story in the Sunday Telegraph that Alan Johnson acted unilaterally in the so-called U-turn over ID cards - he didn't tell Brown he was going to do it - and the Independent on Sunday's report of a new backbench rebellion brewing over the 10p tax fiasco, and you have a perfect picture of government paralysis.

You would be forgiven for suggesting that an electorate battered by a severe slump, rising unemployment and a debt crisis that's become nothing short of a national emergency deserves far, far better than this. And you would be right. One question that's beginning to loom large, consequently, as the economic situation continues to deteriorate (despite what certain quarters of the press would have us believe) and government in-fighting escalates is where will it all end?

History suggests an answer to that question: collapse.

5 comments:

  1. It will all end come the next G.E
    Then it will start again under the Cameroons.

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  2. The question is, whenever this useless government collapses - and it will do just that - will it be before or after the nation's economy collapses too. It's everyone's responsibility to at least try to bring down Brown before he can do any more damage. He goes, we stand a chance. He stays and we're ruined.

    Complacency about the next general election isn't really an option any more, at least to me. I hope the "Cameroons" know that. Even if you have no faith in them, they are better than the current lot.

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  3. The Tories aren't perfect, that much is obvious, but, of the available options, they'll probably be able to hold the confidence of money markets long enough for us all to step back from the financial abyss (what happened to Northern Rock could easily happen to the UK as a whole).

    Add the fact that Labour have evolved into an unequivocally malignant force and the choice becomes even clearer.

    I'm not an unconditional Tory supporter but they're the only thing on offer that might be able to rid us of Labour, and who might be able to halt our slide into a pseudo-communist state (I don't say 'reverse', because I'm not that much of an optimist).

    Not forgetting that it was Tory ignorance/excess/fanaticism that laid the ground for Labour's catastrophic run of election victories (I don't think they've 'looked into the mirror' on this truth, even now).

    All the main political parties will ultimately bring ruin if allowed to pursue their ideology to its 'logical' conclusion - Labour have been in power for too long, and it shows.

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  4. I agree with you, Mr S (as always!)

    Labour are fond of playing at counterfactuals, with "the Tories would have done nothing about Northern Rock etc" being one of Brown-Ball's favourites.

    One comment I posted in response to an example of that type of nonsense on Cif some time ago took the form of an alternative history of my own. I suggested that the seeds of Northern Rock's failure and the banking crisis generally can be traced back almost exactly to the rise of New Labour in 1997 - and the foundation of the new regulatory body. If there had been a Tory government after '97, none of this would ever would happened. There would have been no housing bubble and there would have been no bust. Admittedly, there would have been two shallow downturns, one in 2001 thanks to the dotcom bust and another from Q2 to Q4 of 2008, from which we would now be recovering. There's lots of economic evidence to support this view.

    Needless to say, the Left hated it - but it got a helluva lot of those 'recommend' things. Probably because, as counterfactuals go, real history demonstrates that one made a lot more sense than Labour's limp propaganda.

    That's why I will vote Conservative at the next GE. But we should all put constant pressure on them all the time to ensure we get maximum efficiency, performance and answerability from a Cameron government.

    Until then, I will count the days until this current nightmare is over.

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  5. Total agreement here Mr Den and very well put on the alternative history - a cool breeze of sanity to displace Labour's feculent miasma of untruths.

    Now just waiting for that election eve codeword: Meltdown.

    =)

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Any thoughts?