| Topic: | Losing patience with Cllr Hearn's ridiculous parallel universe here | |
| Posted by: | Thomas Barry | |
| Date/Time: | 20/05/13 23:04:00 |
| "What we need is a full blooded Conservative Government and not the Con/Lib coalition that David Cameroon has to work with. The current opinion polls sadly suggest that a Lab/Lib pact is on the cards NOT New Labour. " I'm normally a patient, reasonable person who can take a joke, but this really is ridiculous. You, in the Conservative Party, have a serious problem here, and until you face it you'll carry on doing what you've been doing for thirty years - chasing some mythical dream of a Conservatism that never existing, refusing to face reality and thereby ensuring that Labour become the default party of government (which, while better than any current Conservative Party, is hardly an enticing democratic prospect). There's a simple reason for this - you've run out of conmen. Quick lesson: Rule 1 of Conservative ideology is, of course, about protecting power and since money is power this therefore relies on keeping money safely in as few hands as possible. Since this eventually wrecks the economy, you need to ensure no one notices, which for a while can be done with cheap, easy credit and in particular a housing boom. Unfortunately this eventually runs into the very solid wall of declining ability of people's wages to pay for it, this also being hit also by the requirement to keep as much money and power out of the hands of workers in order to further Rule 1. Result: a demand crunch and people finding that the cost of living is outstripping their ability to pay for it and they have no leverage or power to make this happen and the government turns a deaf ear, preferring to pursue policies which put even more power in the hands of the rich and restrict our ability to do anything very much about it (centralising power, reducing legal aid, privatisation, getting rid of human rights and employment protections and so on). We now face, regardless of what happens next, a lost decade of growth and consequently a deficit reduction programme that's stalled, with predicted £120bn deficits for the next three years Incidentally, Cllr Hearn, before criticising France do take a moment to actually look at what's happened in the UK since Osborne killed growth by trying to impose an economic strategy that relied upon several impossible things happening at once. So, you reach for the conmen and the tame journalists, you tell them that it's all the fault of immigrants (wrong), benefits claimants (wrong) or the EU (wrong). You make them good and angry, and hopefully not in a mood to check the fine print before voting for the party that promises to be toughest on all three, which is the Tories. Brilliant, just tell everyone in April 2015 how tough you've been and start counting your majority. Enter UKIP, which not having to worry about sanity, the law or actually running anything at all ever can reverse positions on a dime and talk any old nonsense *and get massive amounts of airtime thanks to your driving the anti-immigrant/benefits claimants/EU rhetoric up the agenda* and there's a new toughest party on the block. Result: massive desertion from the Tories, slightly less desertion from Labour and practically no desertion from the Lib Dems, and a lost 2015 election (the number of Tory target seats occupied by yellow bottoms is too high for a swivel-eyed strategy to gain them, and until you've seen a Lib Dem in a survival fight you've no idea what dirty tricks are. Oh, and pissing off the entire Tory press by calling them liars wasn't clever, either (obviously they *are* liars, but so are you so don't draw attention to the fact, eh?) and you really don't want to get into a fight with the Mail, Times and Telegraph simultaneously in case they blow the gaff. It's time to face facts - you can never be tough enough on immigrants or welfare for the swivel eyed tea party types you've created via your strategy to lie to the public about why in one of the world's richest country they're now poor and getting poorer, because they've been taken in by a fairy story and now believe only in magic solutions. Furthermore even trying to chase them further into Loonyville will result in further damage to the economy (being fake-tough on immigration is particularly bad for us in this regard, let alone the EU nonsense sending a chill through the business world who've found to their horror that the Tories they previously backed without a qualm are no longer listening to them). Finally, you've got to take seats from Labour, particularly in London, and from the Lib Dems to stand any chance of a 'full blooded Conservative Government' and those are the two places most likely to recoil at a dogfight for bigot votes and least likely to vote UKIP. So you aren't going to win them. Labour are going to take LD seats in cities, Clegg's lot's going to hang onto much of the rest and Brentford & Isleworth is going to go redder than Cameron's face at Prime Minister's Question Time. I've no doubt that this is going to be completely ignored in favour of retreating further into isolationism, fantasy and conspiracy theorising about who's really to blame, because that's the natural reaction to what you know deep down to be true; the Conservative Party is only bleeding to death because it's been brutally stabbed in the back by itself. |