The Hotel Cameronia.
Deja-vu pervades the headlines on a dead, ice cold January day. Reasons for failures thought to have long since been established are repeated, as if for emphasis, as if to drum in how crap we are, you are, we all are. The polls were wrong because the samples were wrong; the wrong young people were recruited; the right older people weren't recruited; and no one has the slightest idea if it's fixable, except online polling is the solution, not the problem. Online is always the solution, not the problem.
Labour lost because it was just that little bit crapper than the Conservatives. David Cameron's crap, but Ed Miliband would have been worse. He didn't convince, the public didn't trust the party on the economy because it had been too busy obsessing over itself to fight back against the coalition's everything's Labour's fault line, and they also didn't believe the party would be nasty enough on welfare or to immigrants. Considering voters preferred the Tories on that particular issue, David Cameron having presided over the highest ever net migration figure after promising to get the numbers down to the tens of thousands, that's quite the achievement. Yes, it's true the public no longer trust any politician to get immigration down and the monster is completely out of the bag, but that doesn't alter the humiliation.
Janan Ganesh in the FT expands on the crap motif, only he mistakes it for apathy. David Cameron is the apathy prime minister. He's like Tony Blair, only not messianic. He's a plausible prime minister, just like he's plausible as a human being. He looks like one, talks like one, but never truly convinces on any level whatsoever. And yet it's enough. He goes to summits, gives a soundbite, walks off, manages to sound engaged for a couple of hours in the Commons, then it's on to the next thing. He's pushed through and will still be pushing through brutal cuts to public services and benefits, but all the hard work, strategising and thinking is done by other people or behind the scenes, as evidenced by his blithe or ignorant letter to his own council. He faces scrutiny, or seems to, and yet he doesn't. On occasion he gives the most fatuous, embarrassing, even downright stupid answers to questions imaginable, like last week when he said with a straight face that he couldn't tell us who any of those 70,000 moderately extreme Islamists we're backing in Syria are as he didn't want Assad or Islamic State to know who to target. Or yesterday when he insisted that our help to the Saudis in Yemen is to make sure they don't carry on bombing eye hospitals, rather than to help them carry on bombing eye hospitals.
He does it though on things that don't matter, that no one is truly interested in or which don't decide votes. When you think about it, despite being prime minister for nigh on 6 years, not once has Dave faced a real, full-on crisis. Some of it is luck, some of it judgement, but not once has he truly, properly come unstuck, with the exception, possibly, of the Syria vote. Yes, he went through the riots, Milly Dowler/Leveson, floods, the Scottish independence referendum, at times seeming to react to events rather than leading them, and yet each time he pulled through without being damaged. The Syria vote more than anything was an example of misreading his own party, something he has done repeatedly, but that hasn't as yet come back to truly bite him. It could yet on his biggest gamble, the EU referendum, only it doesn't seem to bother him as still the casual, laid-back, apathy man approach is continuing, as the Graun laments.
Then again, we are apathy nation, or if you prefer, mild Britain. Arguments and denunciations might fly across the internet, seething rage might be broiling underneath the surface, inequality might be worse than ever, we could be at the dawn of the era where the bottom is pulled from underneath middle earners just as it has been from the low, and yet nothing seems to change. We are not being buffeted by a refugee crisis, as mainland Europe is. We don't have a Bundy Bunch taking over government buildings and waving firearms in the face of the state. We are not at war with terrorists, as France's president insists his is. Even our alleged equivalent seems quaint in comparison to the Paris attackers; shooting a soldier, a police officer or a civilian, as the prosecution/the accused are confused over which it was, from a scooter with a silenced pistol? It doesn't seem worth dignifying by describing it as terrorism.
The truth is, there isn't an alternative being articulated. You can tell there isn't when the Times' opinion pages are taken up by columns on variously, students banning things, the police over Operation Midland, "Putin-loving Corbynistas", and anti-consumerism. Polls being useless taken as point, Labour has not made the slightest in-roads into the Tories since the election. More are exercised over Labour itself than the government, while elsewhere pompous arses make twats of themselves, act as martyrs for "saying the unsayable" and get rewarded for it. Margaret Beckett in the Labour report might say the future isn't bleak, there are reasons to be positive, and there are in the sense apathy man doesn't have a replacement, the EU vote will divide the Tories like nothing else, and their majority remains tiny, but in which sense exactly does Corbyn look like an answer when Miliband wasn't?
Welcome to the Hotel Cameronia. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.
Labour lost because it was just that little bit crapper than the Conservatives. David Cameron's crap, but Ed Miliband would have been worse. He didn't convince, the public didn't trust the party on the economy because it had been too busy obsessing over itself to fight back against the coalition's everything's Labour's fault line, and they also didn't believe the party would be nasty enough on welfare or to immigrants. Considering voters preferred the Tories on that particular issue, David Cameron having presided over the highest ever net migration figure after promising to get the numbers down to the tens of thousands, that's quite the achievement. Yes, it's true the public no longer trust any politician to get immigration down and the monster is completely out of the bag, but that doesn't alter the humiliation.
Janan Ganesh in the FT expands on the crap motif, only he mistakes it for apathy. David Cameron is the apathy prime minister. He's like Tony Blair, only not messianic. He's a plausible prime minister, just like he's plausible as a human being. He looks like one, talks like one, but never truly convinces on any level whatsoever. And yet it's enough. He goes to summits, gives a soundbite, walks off, manages to sound engaged for a couple of hours in the Commons, then it's on to the next thing. He's pushed through and will still be pushing through brutal cuts to public services and benefits, but all the hard work, strategising and thinking is done by other people or behind the scenes, as evidenced by his blithe or ignorant letter to his own council. He faces scrutiny, or seems to, and yet he doesn't. On occasion he gives the most fatuous, embarrassing, even downright stupid answers to questions imaginable, like last week when he said with a straight face that he couldn't tell us who any of those 70,000 moderately extreme Islamists we're backing in Syria are as he didn't want Assad or Islamic State to know who to target. Or yesterday when he insisted that our help to the Saudis in Yemen is to make sure they don't carry on bombing eye hospitals, rather than to help them carry on bombing eye hospitals.
He does it though on things that don't matter, that no one is truly interested in or which don't decide votes. When you think about it, despite being prime minister for nigh on 6 years, not once has Dave faced a real, full-on crisis. Some of it is luck, some of it judgement, but not once has he truly, properly come unstuck, with the exception, possibly, of the Syria vote. Yes, he went through the riots, Milly Dowler/Leveson, floods, the Scottish independence referendum, at times seeming to react to events rather than leading them, and yet each time he pulled through without being damaged. The Syria vote more than anything was an example of misreading his own party, something he has done repeatedly, but that hasn't as yet come back to truly bite him. It could yet on his biggest gamble, the EU referendum, only it doesn't seem to bother him as still the casual, laid-back, apathy man approach is continuing, as the Graun laments.
Then again, we are apathy nation, or if you prefer, mild Britain. Arguments and denunciations might fly across the internet, seething rage might be broiling underneath the surface, inequality might be worse than ever, we could be at the dawn of the era where the bottom is pulled from underneath middle earners just as it has been from the low, and yet nothing seems to change. We are not being buffeted by a refugee crisis, as mainland Europe is. We don't have a Bundy Bunch taking over government buildings and waving firearms in the face of the state. We are not at war with terrorists, as France's president insists his is. Even our alleged equivalent seems quaint in comparison to the Paris attackers; shooting a soldier, a police officer or a civilian, as the prosecution/the accused are confused over which it was, from a scooter with a silenced pistol? It doesn't seem worth dignifying by describing it as terrorism.
The truth is, there isn't an alternative being articulated. You can tell there isn't when the Times' opinion pages are taken up by columns on variously, students banning things, the police over Operation Midland, "Putin-loving Corbynistas", and anti-consumerism. Polls being useless taken as point, Labour has not made the slightest in-roads into the Tories since the election. More are exercised over Labour itself than the government, while elsewhere pompous arses make twats of themselves, act as martyrs for "saying the unsayable" and get rewarded for it. Margaret Beckett in the Labour report might say the future isn't bleak, there are reasons to be positive, and there are in the sense apathy man doesn't have a replacement, the EU vote will divide the Tories like nothing else, and their majority remains tiny, but in which sense exactly does Corbyn look like an answer when Miliband wasn't?
Welcome to the Hotel Cameronia. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.
Labels: Conservatives, David Cameron, election 2015, Jeremy Corbyn, Labour, politics
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