Posts Tagged "David Cameron"

The Political Alphabet

A simple little dictionary with the hot topics in politics at the moment, so beginners can look slightly more informed. This could be an updated yearly thing, so enjoy it. If you can think of better ones, please post them in the comments!

A is for… Afghanistan

NATO forces are fighting insurgents in Afghanistan with casualties increasing; each week the Prime Minister announces a few more British troops who have lost their lives.

B is for… Brussels

The Government plans to introduce a “Sovereignty Bill” to require a referendum every time power is moved from Westminster to Brussels. They have broken away from their natural sister parties in the European Parliament to form their own group.

C is for… Cuts

Cuts dominated the election campaign and the Chancellor is pushing for up to 40% budget cuts in government departments, as well as public sector pay and jobs.

D is for… Deficit

The government claims to be dealing with the largest peacetime deficit (ignoring Afghanistan and Iraq) in history, forgetting the massive bailout required to stop economic collapse during the financial crisis.

E is for… Emergency Budget

A manifesto commitment, the Chancellor announced an “Emergency Budget” within 60 days of taking power. It announced cuts and tax hikes in an “80-20” ratio.

F is for… Fisking

A debate technique for internet nerds, whereby one article is ripped apart and argued with point by point, usually producing very long, boring and anal responses.

G is for… Gulf War

The Iraq war remains a controversy; the Conservatives forgot they voted in favour of it, Labour tries to distance itself from it and the Lib Dems can’t criticise it anymore because they’re now in government.

H is for… Harriet Harman

The Deputy Leader of the Labour Party who is now Acting Leader until the end of September, she took over when Gordon Brown suddenly resigned after the election.

I is for… Immigration

Always a subject of debate; from asylum seekers to polish plumbers.

J is for… Johannesburg

Where the World Cup took place.

K is for… Kremlin spies

Russian Spies from the Cold War were caught operating in a small house in the USA, 20 years after the Berlin Wall came down.

L is for… Labour Leadership

Following Gordon Brown’s resignation, the Labour party is now in the process of electing its new leader.

M is for… Milibands

David and Ed Miliband, two brothers, two former cabinet ministers and two leadership contenders.

N is for… NHS

The National Health Service is apparently to be ring fenced from damaging cuts.

O is for… Obama

The American President is under pressure to save the world, and then a massive oil disaster washes onto his shore.

P is for… Petraeus

The general who masterminded the “troop surge” in the Iraq War, he is now in command of the troops in Afghanistan, replacing General McChrystal who was fired for a series of unwelcome remarks.

Q is for… The Queen

This was the first election where it was thought that the Queen might need to intervene. She didn’t though.

R is for… Referendum

The Lib Dems wanted PR, then a referendum on PR, then AV. In the end, they got a referendum on AV. The conservatives plan to campaign for the “No” side and Labour should do likewise.

S is for… Smoking Ban

The Labour government had planned a review of the Smoking Ban five years after it was introduced. This will not happen under the new government.

T is for… Twitter

This was supposed to change the election. All it did was change the columns in the Guardian. A “social networking site” for political obsessives.

U is for… Underdog

During the election, Gordon Brown and the Labour Party tried to present themselves as the “underdog”. It worked for Rocky, after all.

V is for… VAT rise

One of the main features of the Emergency Budget was to raise Value Added Tax to 20%, after the previous government lowered it from 17.5% to 15%

W is for… Website

Please vote for mine in the Total Politics Blog Poll. Click the button on the right or this link here.

X is for… X-factor

Simon Cowell, famous for manufacturing Pop Tarts through TV “talent” shows came out and supported, to everone’s surprise, the Conservative Party.

Y is for… Youtube

YouTube never really took off in politics, after the Tory Party launched “WebCameron” featuring the Conservative leader washing dishes.

Z is for… Zac Goldsmith

The Tory MP who ousted former Lib Dem London Mayoral candidate Susan Kramer, it was published in 2009 that he had “non-domiciled” tax status.

David Cameron and the Collaborators

John Prescott made an extremely appropriate, intelligent and articulate comment recently. Whether he knew it or not.*

John Hutton, a former Labour minister who has been appointed as “chair of a new public sector pension commission” joining Labour MP Frank Field’s appointment as a “Povery Tzar”.

Prescott called them both “Collaborators.”

A piece on LabourList (here) did not approve of such language. Au contraire, I respond.

Prescott, not always known for his eloquence, found exactly the right word.

The first note I want to make is that the comment comes just after June 18, the 70th anniversary of the “Appel du 18 juin” where General Charles de Gaulle escaped to London and made his famous speech calling for the French to resist defeat and carry on fighting. More on that later.

Nicolas Sarkozy came over to meet David Cameron to mark the occasion, which brings me on to the French connection:

When Sarkozy was first elected in 2007 as the President of France, he tried the same tactics that Cameron is using now. In a move called ouverture he attracted a few high profile Socialists into the government. Obviously and appropriately, they were expelled from the Parti Socialiste, though that was because they became proper ministers rather than committee-type people.

Although it is in the news now, it ultimately means nothing more than a quick headline grab to cause instability in the Opposition. Popular and welcome Mr Field is in the Parliamentary Labour Party (cough), his sudden change of heart (cough cough) is no great defection.

Just as for a lesson for the future, Eric Besson (a poached-socialist) is one of the most unpopular ministers in the already unpopular French government, and intellectual magazine Le Point was forced on its front page to ask of Sarkozy the question: “Is really he SO crap?”

History is brilliant.

Update: John Prescott responded this evening via Twitter to tell me he did know it.

With My David Cameron change is possible!

Though many aspects of Spain are incredibly backwards, there’s something incredibly modern about their politics.

They don’t have silly minority parties like the Lib Dems, they don’t have mad communist parties like in France, and they actually talk about the problems instead of personalities, unlike Britain.

What most struck me though, is their campaigning, and I have two main examples of how Spain is miraculously ahead of the game.

Here’s the first example. You are all familiar with this picture of Obama with the slogan “Change.” below:

I then realised that this ground-breaking piece of imagery was nothing but a jumped up PSOE campaign from 1982. Have a glance at Felipe Gonzalez:

The topline reads “Vote PSOE” and the slogan means “For change.” Suspicious, no?

Anyway, this is just an aside compared to what I want to go into. My second example pertains to the infamous Conservative Cameron poster campaign:

Which bears an amazing resemblance to the Spanish Conservative Party’s (el Partido Popular) election posters in 2008, which was also just a picture of their leader with a slogan. Take a look at “Make it to the end of the month” “With Rajoy it’s possible“:

Note that the British Tories decided to drop the blue coloured background.

So, the next interesting development is that in Britain, everybody lauded the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the My David Cameron website for it’s (very good, I shall add) instant poster parody maker of the above poster, and subsequent campaign editions. However, back in their elections in 2008, that’s right, they had their own DIY-Rajoy poster generator!

And they call it New Media!

Lib Dems in blatant hypocrisy shocker!

Three months after David Cameron held a public meeting in Bath, Nick Clegg, better known as leader of the Shadow Conservative Party, has managed to find time in his busy, busy, schedule to do likewise.

When Cameron came to visit, the Lib Dems criticised the Tories over the amount of information participants were asked to give, claiming that the meeting would be rigged or filled with Tory apparatchiks. They smarmily added that their meetings are open and honest.

Now, even by their own criteria, the Lib Dems have failed. They are now under fire for asking that residents sign up online and receive an e-ticket.

“Nobody wants to come to my party.”

It could be suggested that the Lib Dems are getting scared. With a majority of 4,638 and a certain sentimental element to it, Bath could be in danger of falling to the Tories, despite being Lib Dem since 1992 when Tory Party Chairman Chris Patten helped win the General Election despite losing his seat.

In principle, I see nothing wrong with the fact that people are asked to register because it helps organisers get a good idea of the numbers. On top of that, they can prioritise local residents.

If only there was some easy and simple way of proving identity, without the awkwardness of a passport or the need to know how to drive. Some sort of card, for your identity, like all other nations have. That’d be a radical idea, though just the sort of thing the Lib Dems oppose.

When Cameron came, he was warned that residents would ask questions regarding the Bath Transportation Package, which directly contradicts Conservative policy on Green Belts. He avoided and refused to answer the question for fear of embarrassing his Tory Council.

This time, with Clegg, I have no doubt that seagulls will be top of the agenda.

Nobody ever really wants to pick Nick for the team

Mark Reckons has commented on David Cameron’s proposal of a Tory / Liberal Democrat alliance. (Here’s the link to that)

In his piece, Mark shrewdly challenges Cameron to “prove it!” (Something the media tend to forget) and suggest that if the Tories are serious about an alliance, they should back Proportional Representation, no, sorry; he says “a proportional voting system”.

The problem is that Mark has ignored the fundamental problem with Lib/Lab/Con relations.

Nobody ever says they want the Lib Dems on their team and really means it.

Nobody wants to come to my Party

The Lib Dems were going to enter a Lib-Lab pact in 1997, (until I think my MP Don Foster made some remarks on the Today show and brought the whole thing crashing down?) and the Lib Dems demanded some sort of PR. The response was “I’m sure we’ll get round to something.”

Now, the Lib Dems are offered a Lib-Con pact… they want some sort of PR! It might just be their only aspect of continuity.

This is the problem with a 3 party system; it naturally screws up the balance of power. Labour and Conservatives can always find one bit of common ground, the Lib Dems should not be in the position of Kingmaker where the government is formed by whoever they support. Coalitions are naturally unsustainable that way. Perhaps if the Greens were more powerful we would see the cycle of Lab-Green coalitions against Tory-Lib ones, though I suppose that’s down to PR.

Cameron’s message at the moment is hardly friendly, if the Libs want to become a Gvt/Opp party, making our party system match with that of Canada, then their best way to achieve it is not “Ally with the Tories so we can become their enemy in the future.”

Nick Clegg has been sensible enough to reject Cameron’s poisoned apple. His best strategy is to continue being Lib Dem and try to collect the rag-tag bunch of “other” voters, instead of trying to fight the big boys in the sixth form.

Fixed Term Parliaments won’t necessarily fix Parliament

Panic-stricken MPs at the epicentre of the Expenses Scandal put out a range of “constitutional reforms” that would be able to fix parliament despite not having anything to do with the problem.

Fixed Term Parliaments have been shelved for a long time now; it was Labour Policy in 1992, but since they didn’t win nothing came of it. The Lib Dems have held on to it for a long time now, but since they’ll never win, nothing will ever come from it. The Tories aren’t really quite sure whether to be in a conservative mood or their “change” mood.

If the date of a General Election is fixed well in advance, we can certainly expect to see an increase of widgets like this:

Though at least they won’t be quite so arrogantly presumptuous as to second guess the Prime Minister, at least this one doesn’t say “countdown to victory” or suchlike.

I would expect the Conservatives to rather like the current system, since they have played it so well. In Opposition, they used the “Snap Election” card to its breaking point. Cameron asking Brown “Can we have an election? When can we have an election? I want an election! Muuuuuuuuuuum!” every week for about three months in Prime Ministers’ Questions came off well for him.

The real advantages to introducing a fixed term parliament in Britain seem negligible. On the part of the electorate, the advantage is little more than psychological as it takes power away from the Executive (and gives it to the Administrative); the flipside is that by taking this power away, the Prime Minister no longer has to take the make-or-break decision.

This puts a stop to the grandstanding and the bluffing over wanting an election and completely removes the debate away from “personal mandates” and other nonsense that people come up with because they don’t understand the difference between a Prime Minister and a President.

It also means the Prime Minister will no longer need to go to the Monarch and ask for her permission to hold a general election, thus removing the Monarchy even further from politics and eroding its case for existence in the 21st century.

With the “PM decides” model, the incumbent has the advantage of being able to call an election when it suits them; they also have the disadvantage of being in government, so logically they really are just trying to pick the least unfavourable date.

There have also been accusations in past elections of releasing a ‘favourable’ budget just before an election, with Fixed Term Parliaments the same practice will go on, it will just be a little bit more obvious.

With Fixed Terms, potentially a government can hold out on the people for three years and then come out all guns blazing in year four. Whether voters have short or long memories is a different debate but my inclination is definitely towards the goldfish end of the scale.