Labour-Lib Dem coalition: not the way ahead
ED BALLS could not have made himself clearer when asked whether he would countenance a joint Labour-Liberal Democrat administration in 2015. As it happens, the shadow chancellor would like to see one in right this minute. ‘You could do it tomorrow,’ he told the Telegraph’s Mary Riddell in an interview for Fabian Review. ‘If you [...]
Liberal Democrats: the contradictions of populism
MUCH of the rhetoric emanating from the International Convention Centre in Birmingham over the last couple of days is marked by a degree of ostensible radicalism well beyond anything heard in ministerial speeches under New Labour. Where business secretary John Hutton proclaimed that huge salaries were something to celebrate, his successor Vince Cable attacks ‘pay outs [...]
Toppling the government? Sorry Vince, that’s the SWP’s job
VINCE Cable was branded a ‘Marxist’ after taking a tokenistic pop at the City in his last Lib Dem conference speech, and it seems this entirely unwarranted praise has gone to his head. Now he thinks he can bring the government down. No Winter Palaces will require storming in this instance, though. It will be [...]
Mike Hancock: more at stake than leggy blondes
IT’S being billed as a latter-day cross between the Profumo scandal and Ronnie Wood’s fling with that Kazakh cocktail waitress. But Mike Hancock is a neither Secretary of State for War nor guitarist in the Rolling Stones. He is instead an otherwise obscure Liberal Democrat backbencher who, in representing Portsmouth South, has an obvious constituency [...]
Vince Cable: a populist, not a Marxist
POLITICAL theory does have a name for ritual rhetorical denunciation of fats cats and the labour movement alike, in the name of standing up for the little guy. It’s called populism, it is generally considered an ideology of the right, and it was the only –ism that the business secretary was retailing in his speech [...]
Nick Clegg: the Andrex puppy’s number two
REMEMBER Nick Clegg’s speech to the Liberal Democrat conference in 2008? That’s right, the one where he blasted David Cameron as ‘the Andrex puppy of British politics’, with the implication that the Tory leader was all PR campaign and no knickers. Remember Nick Clegg’s speech to the Liberal Democrat conference in 2009? You know, the [...]
The case for universal benefits
IT REALLY should be a simple matter for politicians to work out their position on a question as straightforward as universal benefits. After all, the arguments for and against are relatively well known. Logic suggests that ostensibly egalitarian and redistributionist parties will tend to be in favour of them, while parties animated by a more rightwing ethos [...]
The betrayal of absolute anti-Toryism
IN DEMOCRATIC theory, people are supposed to vote for whatever it is that they happen to be for. But many who can remember how the Nasty Party got its nickname vote against what they are against. Welcome to the world of the absolute anti-Tories. When it comes down to it, we don’t give a flyer what [...]
Daily Mail and Nick Clegg: pot calls kettle Blackshirt
‘HURRAH for the Blackshirts’ is probably the most famous headline in Daily Mail history. But today’s ‘Clegg in Nazi Slur on Britain’ will one day surely rank right up there with its well-known predecessor. Let us not forget that the middle market tabloid was openly sympathetic to Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, and repeatedly [...]
General election: the contradictions of the Liberal Democrats
THE Liberal Democrats’ basic marketing pitch, at least to the politically unsophisticated, is that they are not the Labour Party and they are not the Conservatives. Unfortunately for them, the only way they can hope to take part in the next government is in coalition with one or the other of the formations that they [...]
