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Monday, December 20, 2010

David Cameron's Winter of Discontent


This piece of mine appears in today’s First Post.

Neil Clark: A prolonged Arctic winter could topple the Coalition

Britain crawls towards 2011 with petrol prices at a record high, unemployment rising and inflation catching hold. The trade unions, inspired by “the magnificent student movement”, are threatening nationwide strikes in response to the coalition’s "unprecedented assault" on the welfare state, according to the recently elected Unite leader, Len McCluskey, writing in today’s Guardian. While the Daily Mail counters that the Prime Minister is planning a showdown at Downing Street today with McCluskey and other union leaders .

2011 was always going to be a tough year for David Cameron and his coalition government. But Cameron’s biggest problem - and the one which could make or break his administration - is something no political commentator could possibly have predicted: the weather.

You can read the whole of the article here.
UPDATE: On the same theme, there's an excellent piece in today's First Post by Max Eilenberg.
Prime Minister David Cameron, normally to be found some distance behind the shit deflector that is Nick Clegg, is nowhere to be seen. London's Mayor Boris Johnson, never at a loss for a pointless phrase in Latin, has nothing to say.
Is this what the Tories meant by the Big Society? Did they intend the state to have no responsibility in crises like this? That people - families, the elderly, businessmen and women, tourists - should be stranded in Arctic conditions and left to fend for themselves?
You can read the whole of the article here.

3 comments:

David Lindsay said...

The Lib Dems will not split. They will quietly fade away, mostly into the Conservative Party that actually defined itself by hoovering up Liberal Unionists, Liberal Imperialists, National Liberals, Alfred Roberts's daughter, those around the Institute of Economic Affairs, and the followers of David Owen, all of whom have successfully presented themselves to Tory voters as Tory politicians when not in fact any such thing. That essential fraud is the very definition of the Conservative Party.

No, if it's a split that you want, or at least that you want to keep an eye out for, then, dutifully ignored by the courtier media, there is now a body of MPs which is right-wing as variously defined, which is already about as large as the Lib Dems, which is growing steadily, and which functions increasingly as the separate party that it is difficult to see how it can avoid becoming in the course of this Parliament. Those MPs will not join UKIP. The very idea, darling. Rather, they will expect UKIP to join them.

Vladimir Gagic said...

There was an article in today's Wall Street Journal about how the British finance minister is wooing American banks, like Chase and the like, into moving there operations to London. The British selling point is that Congress and Fed are over regulating American banks. This is very ironic as American politicians, like uber neoliberal Bill Clinton at the recent White House press conference, acknowledge private sector and banks have plenty of cash. Yet these same politicians wonder why, if they are sitting on so much cash, isn't the private sector hiring? Of course the answer is the banks and corporations already have what they want, a ton of cash; so why spend it by hiring?

It is a sad world when American politicians, putative liberals no less, wonder why banks want to hold on to their money, and the same time, English politicians want those very same banks to move to London.

neil craig said...

"is something no political commentator could possibly have predicted: the weather."

Depends on whether they actually believed their catastrophic warming lie. The fact that almost all alleged believers in it are opponents of nuclear power, the only practical way of producing CO2 free power (note that windmills have produced about 0.1% of power over the last few weeks) shows tbhat it is impossible to believe in catastrophic warming, oppose nuclear power & be in favour of civilisation not ending & 10s of millions dying.

I give the eco-Nazis, well most of them, enough credit to assume they know warming is simply a lie designed to promote fascism.