Simon Heffer concludes this Telegraph piece about why there must be public spending cuts, despite the public statements of all the political parties which by omission suggest the contrary, with this:
Having just witnessed the American election, I am aware of one other point. In the run-up to elections, people say absurd things about the economy to garner votes. Barack Obama has made $1.3 trillion of spending promises. He will shortly have a rendezvous with reality. He will not deliver on those promises. He will instead have to preside over a financial situation whose full horror we have yet to see here. Wiser and older heads in his administration will need a plan to deal with reality, even though one was not promised during his campaign.
This is what we need here. An early election – which Mr Brown might as well call, since the Tories have been found out and are slipping back in the polls – would at least get all the lies and idiocies out of the way. One party would then have to confront reality, just as Mr Obama is about to have to do. Then we could end the pretence of a pain-free recession, and get on and take it. So long as our politicians feel they must butter us up and make out that what is to come won’t hurt a bit, the only way is down.
All the lies and idiocies? That would be asking too much. But you can see what he means. My first reaction was: what a frightful commentary on the state of public opinion just now, if no politician dares tell it like it is. But then again, it is the very fact that Cameron is not telling it like it is, but instead just following idiotically behind Mr Brown, that is causing his current decline in the polls, which I confess I did not see coming.
I can’t recall who said it – I think one of the Coffee Housers – but the best recent comment on the Conservatives I heard said something like: Cameron was picked to deal with good times, in a way that Blair was doing, and Brown subsequently couldn’t. But face Cameron with a catastrophe, in which the option of pretending to be nice to everyone no longer exists, and he is a rabbit caught in the headlights. Mr Brown loves a good catastrophe and is benefitting from this one now, even though it is to an appalling extent a catastrophe of his own making. Like I say, I did not see that coming. The voters now face a choice between clever and determined but deluded, and nice – well, polite, in a smarmy old Etonian manner – but bewildered.
One thing I do seem to recall saying a few months ago, although I can’t recall when, was that Cameron believed he merely had to say and then do nothing in order to sail into power and stay there for a decade. Only “events” would upset such a calculation. Now, those events have arrived. Optimistic Conservatives presumably now hope that Cameron is “keeping his powder dry”, and will stir up a rhetorical storm come the actual election campaign, whenever it materialises and when it will be too late for Brown to steal all Cameron’s brilliant policies. But I am starting to think that Perry de Havilland has had Cameron’s number all along. There are no brilliant Cameron policies. There is no Cameron powder, or not the sort that accomplishes anything. Which means that a general election now would simply prolong the reign of idiocy, no matter who wins.
Brian, I think the problem is that Cameron has spent so much effort on trying to remove any semblance of small-government opinion from Conservatism, that he has removed any basis from which to form a decent attack on the government, let alone give a coherent narrative of why we are in this mess.
Reading Coffee House and all the other Westminster-village blogs is a deeply depressing experience. As Ian B of this comment board likes to remind us, far too much commentary is little better than the equivalent of sports reporting: who is in, who is out, who is popular, who is unpopular. The blunt reality is that 80 per cent of our laws are no longer decided in Westminster. Take VAT, for instance. There is a proposal doing the rounds to reduce VAT to give the economy a boost, but we cannot because of the EU. Yet the fuckers who voted for this, and claim that we would be “bad Europeans” by opposing it, are the people who now try to claim that Gordon “off balance sheet” Brown is an economic statesman. How is loading future generations with oodles of debt “statesmanlike”, exactly?
Cameron has utterly failed to counter this absurd narrative, and of course the media, which is hostile to free market ideas, will not help in this sense. We have a few blogs, no talk radio, none of the hinterland of grassroots libertarian/conservative groups to counter this shit.
“President Obama will not deliver on his government spending promises”.
Why not?
“Because it would destroy the economy Paul”.
That is not what the Nobel Prize winning “economists” will tell him – they will tell that more government spending HELPS the economy. And most of the people who control the universities (and other such) will agree with them.
And even if President Obama thought that yet more government spending (on top of wild spending Bush) would destroy the economy – why should that bother him?
“Because he will not relected Paul”.
Will he not?
In Chicago government spending has greatly increased in recent years (the old Mayor Daley now looks like a fiscal conservative compared to his son and the rest of the machine) – and, for example, the sales tax in Chicago (when one takes State, County and City together – and that is how people pay) is the highest in the country. So much for “careing about the poor”.
Does that mean the Democrats are likely to be swept from power in Chicago? No it does not.
Their policies have destroyed the South Side of Chicago – and they are even more popular there.
The plan is to make the whole United States a vast Chicago (if not a vast Detroit) – and not just economically, culturally also. With Bill Ayers style “progressive education” finishing the process of creating the revolutionary masses.
It is an evil plan, it may be an insane plan – but it also may not be an insane plan.
It may work.