This piece of mine appears in today's First Post.
Neil Clark: Treacherous Clegg is looking like the Ramsay MacDonald of modern politics.
It's one of the biggest political U-turns of all time. Just six weeks ago, during the general election campaign, Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg was attacking Conservative plans to introduce major cuts in public spending before the economy was secure.
“Do I think that these big, big cuts are merited or justified at a time when the economy is struggling to get to its feet? Clearly not.” he told Jeremy Paxman in April. "Of course I would vote against cuts which would destroy any chance we would have of having a sustainable recovery."
Now, though, it's Clegg himself who is making the case for big, big cuts. "We have to take action now so that we can still be in control of our future," he says. Postponing the cuts "would not only be irresponsible, it would be a betrayal of our progressive values".
Could it be that there are really two Nick Cleggs?
You can read the whole article here.
4 comments:
Well, that's assuming that Lib Dems actually care about anything. The sort of people I meet who vote LibDem tend to be people who haven't enough money to identify with the Tories but think Labour types are a bit 'common' and 'old-fashioned'. They don't care what Nick Clegg does because they're unlikely to pay enough attention to know, unless of course it's something a bit more drastic like smiting all the first-born. They've already lost the anti-Tory voters; after that just about anything goes.
Neoliberal deficit hysteria cannot be underestimated. The idea that a sovereign currency issuer like the the UK or US could go insolvent is downright silly, and the fact that allegedly well-educated and sophisticated politicians believe it is disheartening. Sometimes I wonder if politicians really believe the deficit hysteria or know it's nonsense and are just pandering to business interests.
If Nick Clegg were serious about making cuts, then a bundle could be sdaved by cutting down on foreign military adventures. But in that respect Clegg is no worse, if no better, than Blair and Brown, who embarkled on the adventures in the first place.
I think the issue is “Has Nick Clegg deceived the voters, did the voters expect not to be deceived, and have the voters ever not been deceived. Had Nick Clegg not been deceptive would he have violated the Political Code, would he have dishonored his University credentials?”
I once heard an English Lord say, “We believe in a degree of democracy.” I assumed about 3%. A graph I saw recently that would indicate how this percentage has diminished over time, the graph I mention is of the exponentially increasing rate that the Americans are printing money, which could also be used to show the increase in the Iraqi population (doubled) over the last 10 years; the war appears to have had no effect on population growth.
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