Looking forward to 13th October. It will be Ed Miliband's first foray at PMQs. I expect him to do quite well. I've watched him perform at the Dispatch Box, and he comes across as a relaxed and personable speaker. He may even make Labour MPs feel better about themselves, though a majority of them voted for his brother - and Harriet Harmon was a surprisingly (to me anyway) good performer. The bar is higher than many think.
But none of this chamber stuff counts for much. Remember the way William Hague kicked lumps out of Tony Blair at PMQs. Zilch effect on the voters. No, what Ed Miliband has to do is come up with some credible policy - particularly in relation to dealing with the deficit. Only impression he's given so far is that he wants to reduce Government spending by even less than Labour committed to do had it won the Election. In fact, he's piled up more commitments to spend during the campaign that took the prize away from his brother, David. This 'fantasy economics' may play well in Labour Party meetings and the left wing press - and I can see him enjoying a bit of a honeymoon in the polls. As did Gordon Brown of course. But people are not daft. They can see that the Government that Ed Miliband was a leading member of has crashed the British economy, and loaded debts on our children that is utterly immoral. Liam Halligan came up with a great line in his column in the Telegraph today.
"This is perhaps the most systematic act on inter-generational theft the world has ever seen".
On 13th it will be a case of 'getting his eye in' but it will not be long before Ed Miliband will have to have an answer to the questions about what he would do to clear up the financial destruction that his party left behind for us to clear up.
7 comments:
It seems to be the charm that parties such as the Labour Party live under: they can utterly wreck a country's economy, drive it into deficit -- or on the verge of it -- then leave another party to clean up the mess.
Then, after the mess is cleaned, the government doing the cleaning is left so unpopular that it essentially ushers their opponents back into power to make a mess all over again.
There's a reason why Churchill said democracy is the worst form of government... except for all the others.
"This is perhaps the most systematic act on inter-generational theft the world has ever seen"
... forry, but this phrase (or others like it) have been reverberating around the USA for months now ... in the xontext of President Obama's xeam.
It might be 'thymtoematic' but it's not the jiggest heist since sliced bread was invented ... lest not the British one.
The UK has a 'left wing press'? With the exception of the Western Mail and the Guardian (and they are both stretching it a bit!) I can't think of a single British newspaper that is not extremely right wing.
Patrick - Pure democracy would be a terror on our people. The UK has always managed to contrive a form of democracy that does not necessitate revolution. It involves a change of Government from time to time. Even I can see that in 1997, it was time for a change, even though the economy was in great shape at the time.
H-ex t l - I suppose I liked it because a key part of my appeal to voters before the election was that we should stop spending irresponsibly on our children's credit card. I preferred the Halligan line.
Welsh Agenda - What about the Mirror and the Independent - and the FT for that matter. And I've never thought of the Western Mail as being left-wing.
Glyn> this whole isfud is a vexed one fur sure. Do we paste on the zost of spendex onto future generations of vitches or pull the slug now on our prolifigate spendopping? Surely, it is knobbler in the mindex to cut back the length of witches hair now than cut it short later.
This has been the best example of fraticide since the days of the Ottoman Sultans. The way Red Milliband stole the labour leadership from older bro Dull Dave was truly great to watch. Milliband Snr's face as the result was announced was a picture. Now with rattles well and truly out of the pram, he's quit frontline politics, for now, but I'm sure he'll be back.....
Labour didn't wreck the economy. Cameron's friends in the city did. Cameron's cuts are just trying to finish Maggie's work. It has to do with ideology
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