So the future is upon us. The Lib Dems managed the unthinkable and ended up in government, sort of, making an unholy alliance with the Tories and Nick Clegg is now ‘our’ deputy prime minister to ‘call me Dave’ Cameron.
At first it seemed some of the country welcomed this coalition, as it was painted as a chance to mould the tories into something resembling human and to push through the reversal of some of New Labour’s regressive policies, namely the abolition of university top up fees and maybe even the withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan. Notice I’m not going into detail here, since a thousand million other blogs out there have already done that.
One of the rewards of ‘electing’ this lot (though I like to call it ‘settling for’ – people *didn’t* vote for this, Clegg chose to clamber into this swamp) was the Spending Review – in theory a review of the state’s financial spending, in reality an excuse to start a massive slashing of public sector jobs and benefits under the guise that there-is-no-other-way to repair the losses caused by a humongous bail out of the banking system. The left wing press (if you can call it that) have carefully documented the potential (nay logical) effects of all these cuts, and it doesn’t look good for anyone other than the already wealthy. Which is convenient for the coalition, because 18 of the cabinet happen to be millionaires, and let’s face it, MPs are not getting a pay cut any time soon, unlike the rest of us.
I’m not old enough to remember the tories last time round, but considering the battering the welfare state took from Thatcher and then Major, I’m surprised that anyone is surprised. This is what they do. New Labour may have done an ideological 180 after quietly dropping Clause Four but even then the clue was in the name – New Labour were clearly planning to be different from Labour of old. But did everyone else get the same feeling of dread in their stomach I did after realising the Tories were getting back into power, or did they think they had somehow discovered a social conscious in the back of their Bentley? ‘Dave’ may be younger and prettier than Maggie Thatcher, but you know he must have kissed a picture of her before bed as a teen. All he’s ever done is be a Tory. It’s all he’ll ever do.
Perhaps it was the idea of Lib Dems holding back the nastiest streak of Tory ideology of old that comforted – the streak that says that if you’re poor, it’s your fault, if you’re rich you deserve it, and there will always be poor people because let’s face it, the working classes are a different species and should know their place etc. Maybe that held some weight at first. But that only works if you know nothing about the Lib Dems. Unfortunately, they have always been all things to all people. Perhaps a century of the liberals in almost total opposition, making no mark on the ideology of Left vs. Right, makes a political party like that – craving power that is always just out of reach, power becomes the object, even more so than in parties that have had a day or two in the sun and know their time will come again.
Now I’m getting to a point that really worries me – New Labour are now in opposition, and their leader Ed Milliband is scrabbling around to find a space to plant himself back on the political spectrum, having been ousted and replaced by two parties that really have little difference in policies and would have done all the things that people hated about New Labour anyway. Being ousted and replaced by someone who is practically identical to you must be confusing, especially if you now have to go and work out what it will take to get you back in power.
As a result Ed Milliband has just come up with the idea of a ‘peoples party’ – I say come up with, in reality more like just discovered a couple of old Labour party pamphlets in mother’s desk drawer and thought ‘oh, how novel’. He wants to ‘reclaim’ the idea of the Big Society, which is hilarious since Cameron came up with it first and even he doesn’t really know what it means yet. So his big idea is to steal someone elses, therefore becoming even more similar, ad nauseum. This is the credit these people give us.
The real danger is that people will take him seriously. That in a spate of collective amnesia, of the type that got working class people to vote Tory again, people will actually look to the Labour party as some kind of alternative. Again, my age means I can’t tell how often this has happened before, and this is probably normal, but at least in the past people thought they were voting for something fundamentally different. So is the best we can do?
Have we no imagination??


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