Vote blue, get crap!
You can somewhat see the logic behind "a senior Tory source" being given the OK to brief the Sun and the Mail that our dear PM said it's time to "get rid of all this green crap." Forced into a corner by Ed Miliband's conference speech, and apparently unprepared to go after the big six energy companies for putting up energy prices year after year, the quick fix appeared obvious: dump the subsidies for green energy and the vulnerable which appear on the bill and instead fund them out of general taxation. You'll still pay, you just won't have it pointed out in black and white every quarter. As the source said, it's no longer vote blue, go green, it's vote blue, get real!
Choosing to brief the Sun, which has long since lost its short-lived enthusiasm for all things green due to the sad defenestration of James Murdoch, with Keith never missing an opportunity to tweet about how wonderful fracking is, and the equally antediluvian Mail with Dave's new creed was just bound to lead to positive coverage. Right? Well yes, except for how it pretty much represents the final renunciation of everything he and his supposedly changed party were meant to be for prior to the 2010 election. You can make a case that the coalition's welfare reforms are at least partially about fixing the "broken society" we heard so much about before the election and almost nothing about since, but no one can argue with a straight face the big society has amounted to anything. It was always hysterical that the Tories, plenty of whom are unconvinced climate change is man-made would be the "greenest government ever", yet Cameron went as far as to change the party's damn logo to a tree, not to mention put a mini wind turbine on his house. To abandon it all leaves the equivalent of a gaping hole in the middle of his head.
Little wonder then even ConservativeHome is wondering exactly what Dave is for. We should perhaps mention Downing Street are denying Dave specifically said the words attributed him by both the Mail and the Sun, but seeing as Cameron and friends have been touting reducing the green levies for a good few weeks now, it hardly seems the source made up the colourful line for exaggerated effect. Rather, it reflects both the strategy we're told Lynton Crosby has advised, the scraping of "the barnacles off the boat", getting rid of extraneous policies that distract from all those marvellous things the coalition has achieved, such as reducing the deficit (currently £53bn higher than Osborne had planned it to be by this point), welfare reform (don't mention universal credit), immigration controls (net migration nowhere near the promised reduction to under 100,000 a year) and better schools (so long as you want your children to go somewhere that resembles a prison), and Cameron's gambit of saying the smaller state is a good thing, and that you really can do more with less.
Like with the interesting decision by Danny Alexander to say the coalition couldn't have achieved economic stagnation for three years without his party's input, it's certainly one strategy. The problem is, just as there's little evidence for a shift to the left among the wider public, although Miliband's conference speech undoubtedly brought us towards today, the idea that by returning to their traditional core themes the Conservatives are likely to see their decline arrested simply doesn't stand up. Despite some of the more old school Tory MPs believing they would have won outright in 2010 if Cameron hadn't gone in for hugging huskies and all the rest, the real problem was, as Nick Boles this week admitted, most people don't believe the party has changed. They still see it as the party of the rich, policies such as getting rid of the 50p top rate of tax at the first possible opportunity hardly doing much to alter the perception.
More prosaically, to go in the space of 3 years from telling people to vote blue to go green to saying that was a load of crap is just ever so slightly taking the electorate for fools. As Zac Goldsmith tweeted, apparently having heard it in a Westminster tea room, if Cameron can drop something that was so central to his image, he can drop anything. The point surely though is that Cameron enjoys relative popularity despite not really standing for anything. Newsnight earlier in the week asked whether Miliband would inspire an ism like Thatcher and Blair, skipping over how Cameron has (so far) failed to. Cameron does resemble Blair, but only in how during Labour's first term our Tone was Teflon Tony, with nothing sticking to him. By abandoning the last thing we were meant to think he believed in, Cameron really ought to hope events don't conspire to paint him in a far less attractive light.
Choosing to brief the Sun, which has long since lost its short-lived enthusiasm for all things green due to the sad defenestration of James Murdoch, with Keith never missing an opportunity to tweet about how wonderful fracking is, and the equally antediluvian Mail with Dave's new creed was just bound to lead to positive coverage. Right? Well yes, except for how it pretty much represents the final renunciation of everything he and his supposedly changed party were meant to be for prior to the 2010 election. You can make a case that the coalition's welfare reforms are at least partially about fixing the "broken society" we heard so much about before the election and almost nothing about since, but no one can argue with a straight face the big society has amounted to anything. It was always hysterical that the Tories, plenty of whom are unconvinced climate change is man-made would be the "greenest government ever", yet Cameron went as far as to change the party's damn logo to a tree, not to mention put a mini wind turbine on his house. To abandon it all leaves the equivalent of a gaping hole in the middle of his head.
Little wonder then even ConservativeHome is wondering exactly what Dave is for. We should perhaps mention Downing Street are denying Dave specifically said the words attributed him by both the Mail and the Sun, but seeing as Cameron and friends have been touting reducing the green levies for a good few weeks now, it hardly seems the source made up the colourful line for exaggerated effect. Rather, it reflects both the strategy we're told Lynton Crosby has advised, the scraping of "the barnacles off the boat", getting rid of extraneous policies that distract from all those marvellous things the coalition has achieved, such as reducing the deficit (currently £53bn higher than Osborne had planned it to be by this point), welfare reform (don't mention universal credit), immigration controls (net migration nowhere near the promised reduction to under 100,000 a year) and better schools (so long as you want your children to go somewhere that resembles a prison), and Cameron's gambit of saying the smaller state is a good thing, and that you really can do more with less.
Like with the interesting decision by Danny Alexander to say the coalition couldn't have achieved economic stagnation for three years without his party's input, it's certainly one strategy. The problem is, just as there's little evidence for a shift to the left among the wider public, although Miliband's conference speech undoubtedly brought us towards today, the idea that by returning to their traditional core themes the Conservatives are likely to see their decline arrested simply doesn't stand up. Despite some of the more old school Tory MPs believing they would have won outright in 2010 if Cameron hadn't gone in for hugging huskies and all the rest, the real problem was, as Nick Boles this week admitted, most people don't believe the party has changed. They still see it as the party of the rich, policies such as getting rid of the 50p top rate of tax at the first possible opportunity hardly doing much to alter the perception.
More prosaically, to go in the space of 3 years from telling people to vote blue to go green to saying that was a load of crap is just ever so slightly taking the electorate for fools. As Zac Goldsmith tweeted, apparently having heard it in a Westminster tea room, if Cameron can drop something that was so central to his image, he can drop anything. The point surely though is that Cameron enjoys relative popularity despite not really standing for anything. Newsnight earlier in the week asked whether Miliband would inspire an ism like Thatcher and Blair, skipping over how Cameron has (so far) failed to. Cameron does resemble Blair, but only in how during Labour's first term our Tone was Teflon Tony, with nothing sticking to him. By abandoning the last thing we were meant to think he believed in, Cameron really ought to hope events don't conspire to paint him in a far less attractive light.
Labels: climate change, Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, David Cameron, media coverage, politics, Tories
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