The coalition must do more than blame Labour

Ian C

Quite right. Gove's body language was negative/defensive and not once did he say that he was going to e.g. get more for less, from sweeping changes - including cnecessary cuts - that are any way necessary to improve education(also due to Labour ideological statism).

Sitting there like a man who thinks he has won the argument already is not a good way to go.

Naomi Muse

Spot on, David.

The rejoinder and backhander that we're all working hard to correct the mess left by Labour, should only be used as a Parthian Shot having put all the positive goals clearly.

Richard of York

"Labour talk down the economy"
I spat out my deow egberts all over my new keyboard....thanks John boy Redwood.
The Tories have done everything they possibly can to talk us into a double dip before and after the election.
I sense a devious plan here from Mr R to try and turn the tables and find a smoke screen.
He really is a slimeball no wonder they left him out of the cabinet, his reputation as a snake still hovers over his head every where he goes.

Commentator

Are you surprised? The Tories have spent 13 years not in opposition but having a nervous breakdown. They no longer have the backbone to challenge the left's dreary mantra of (i) higher public spending is always good; and (ii) private choice is bad.

Occasional Ostrich

Richard of York
July 7th, 2010 5:42pm

Dowe egberts (sic) eh?

If I hadn't been raped by excessive taxation over the last 13 years I might be able to afford that.

Chris Rose

I agree with you, and a similar thought struck me as I watched a clip of PMQs this afternoon. All Cameron's answers seemed to hinge on the previous government's record.

We have had 13 years of this kind of stultifying debate; now is an excellent opportunity to bring freshness to our political dialogue.

The Man

I agree that Balls got the better of Gove on Newsnight. Depressing.

Simon Stephenson

Richard of York : 5.42pm

"The Tories have done everything they possibly can to talk us into a double dip before and after the election."

Not quite everything, surely, Richard?

They could have structured the emergency budget so as to delay the start of deficit reduction, as Labour were advocating, and also to have given a less-than-clear signal to the bond markets that they really had the stomach to tackle on-going public overspending in a serious and decisive way. This would have been as much as Labour could ever have achieved, especially with Mr Brown in charge.

Had the emergency budget been constructed on this basis, the received wisdom is that this would have led to an immediate hike in UK interest rates, which would have led quickly to a contraction in the economy without being offset by the structural fiscal imbalance having been addressed.

It may well be the case that we are destined for double-dip no matter what the authorities do, but I'm afraid that it stinks to high heaven when Labour supporters assert that only they have the answer to our problems, when the big hole we are in is almost entirely down to the erronious and nonsensical "answers" they have given to the questions posed during the last 13 years.

Richard of York

@Oc Ostrich

Oh well at least the letters were all there if not in the right order!
DOWE Egberts is on special offer in Tesco's hurry you might get some before the rush.

denis cooper

All the secondary schools here have formally inquired about becoming academies or whatever Gove now calls them, but the local paper reports a councillor saying that in fact it wouldn't greatly change the existing good relationship between the head teachers and the LEA.

denis cooper

And the time to start piling well-deserved blame on Labour was about a year before the election, specifically when the government started to borrow newly created money from the Bank of England in order to maintain its excessive spending without any (net) recourse to gilts investors.

Sebastian Flyte's valet

The best way the Coalition could mobilse positive and revolutionay approach from the public sector is to state categorically that there will be no compulsory redundancies. The 600,000 jobs can be achieved easily through natural wastage. Why not say that now?

At the moment we have Maslow's Heirarchy Of Needs attacked right at the bottom. You will never get buy in while that is allowed to continue.

Richard of York

@Simon

I hope for everyone's sake you are right in all you say.....sadly I fear you are wrong, me and many organisations home and abroad feel you are wrong.
My guess is Oik felt that there would be a double dip regardless and that he had nothing to lose...which is not the same as your arguments.
It is one heck of a gamble Oik is taking, if it comes off he will be a hero if not then the fires of hell will turn on him and those who supported him.

Occasional Ostrich

@Richard of York

Yes, but where might I get Douwe Egberts?

Simon Stephenson

Richard of York : 8.12pm

"My guess is [George Osborne] felt that there would be a double dip regardless and that he had nothing to lose"

What on earth do you mean by this? That Osborne's actions are no more than a spiteful action of class warfare, with the wellbeing of the national economy featuring only marginally in the calculations?

Grow up! Just because each and every one of Gordon Brown's actions was structured to cause maximum difficulty for his political opponents doesn't mean to say that this is the modus operandi of every politician. There are people, you know, who are competent and confident enough in their own ability to believe their work will survive the test of time; people who see no justification in applying costly and unnecessary dollops of concrete just to make the costs of future dismantlement artificially expensive.

Osborne, Cameron and the rest of them are out to convince the country that their policies offer a better collection of outcomes than those offered by the Labour Party. They're not in the business of creating ineffective structures where the costs of dismantlement preclude the switch to ones more efficient and appropriate.

Mind you, if they were to arrange matters so that flawed characters like Brown were never again allowed to get within a sniff of a position of power, I think there'd be a huge sigh of relief from the serious politicians in every political party.

Richard of York

@Ostrich
Hands up give in!

Your man Gove did well today by the way schools minister but can't add up or proof read his own report.....so I am not that bothered.
Cafe Hag is nice too.

Rabyrover

@Sebastian Flyte's Valet.
Natural wastage might work when you want to slim down. Not when you want to axe a whole department or quango.

TrevorsDen

The DoE's own civil servants are incompetent you mean Mr York. hardly worthy of their pensions, but then - no matter how useless a civil servant was you would want them to have an ever bigger pension, paid for by mugs.

Balls lied on Newsnight, which is not quite the same as saying he 'got the better' of Gove. In the follow up segment the labour apologist could not say where else the cuts would come from - until right at the end after a bit of desperate though he said 'Trident'. Laughable since the trident replacement is years and years away.

We DO need to make these cuts because of labour incompetence; unlike Ministers Redwood has plenty of time to orchestrate his reasoning - if he were less just a little less self serving he could be a minister too, and practice what he preaches. His lack of politics means he now talks from the outside - thats HIS fault.

nonny mouse

I thought Gove beat Balls on Newsnight. I guess I'm in the minority then.

Anan

Let's see shall we? Labour created a load of jobs, paid for by printing money out of thin air, to employ unemployable morons of the servant/working class up north after the mines were shut down. Now, the whole world knows that the country was paying these people with fake money, and to save the value of the currency and Britain's economic position, we must stop this printing of money, which automatically means that these fake jobs can no longer be sustained. If these ill-educated yobs can't understand why they no longer have a job, tell them to ask their precious representatives at the Neue Arbeiters Partei and the union mafia that funds it.

Major Plonquer 1

It must be very intimidating having Balls in your face while the public is watching.

Now I know how Sally Bercow feels.

Boudicca

I thought Gove sat back and let Balls rant so the viewing public got a clear look at the character of the man who would be leader. Not so very different from the last one, with his weird facial expressions (mad bug eyes in his case) tractor stats and need to dominate the discussions.

A majority of the electorate is enjoying watching the coalition Government co-operate and compromise .... so Balls gets on Newsnight and demonstrates very clearly that Labour only wants confrontation and ideology ...... not clever if you want to appeal to the majority (but I bet tribal Labour voters loved it).

Please, Lord, if Abbott can't be Labour leader, please let Balls win; Labour will be out of Office for decades.

Victor Southern

It is true that Gove made some mistakes in his announcement - reading out a list prepared for him by his civil servants. He has apologised in the House, quite correctly.

That is far cry from 13 years of Labour Ministers deliberately lying to the House on almost every imaginable topic. Of those I can remember only two, Stephen Byers and Estelle Morris who admitted error and I will give Lady Morris the benefit of the doubt.

EyeSee

A very large part of the reason Labour seized power in 1997 was because too many people had forgotten the mess Labour made of their last stab. This time Labour have been positively criminal in the destruction of the UK and no-one should be in any doubt how it happened and why. Never again should stupidity, incompetence and carelessness be seen as attractive qualities in a party vying for power. Most of the effort put in during 13 years by Labour was to demonise the Tories (see how successful this has been by listening to dimwit comedians who always get a laugh by just saying Tory). Well the Tories don't need to stoop to the gutter level of Labour, but do need to keep pointing out that Labour deliberately impoverished this nation (in every way). The Tories shouldn't try to make Labour unelectable, they should have done that themselves. But do people really realise the depth of the ineptitude deployed by Labour?

Occasional Ostrich

@Richard of York

So you think Gove actually compiled what must have been a multiple page report?
And then proof-read it himself, rather than having a minion do it for him?
I'm sure you've ruled out sabotage by a disaffected (un)civil servant.

AngloWelshDragon

@Anan
"to employ unemployable morons of the servant/working class up north after the mines were shut down"

I strongly agree we need to cut the obese public sector but I really hate it when people write as you do, apparently without irony.

Frankly to any one stumbling on this page you make yourself, and the rest of us Coffee Housers, look like a bunch of pretentious knobs.

Nash

Rubbish! Labour should be blamed until my grandchildren or their children pay off the debt they created.

King John is still reviled today - with no King John II because of the tarnish brought to the name. The same legacy should be true of Labour - may we have Tory Governments or Lib-Dem Governments or Coalitions of the two - BUT NO MORE LABOUR EVER!!!!

Anthony Zacharzewski

"Raped by taxation" says someone upthread - classy. Drop into a rape crisis centre sometime, then see how easily that phrase comes.

I agree with many here that Gove's performance on Newsnight was woeful. To many it sounds like nothing more than political point-scoring to go on about "Labour's deficit". People do remember that there was a banking crisis before there was a fiscal one, and that it started in the US, whether or not they think that Government spending at home was also part of the problem.

Positive attitudes win, negative attitudes lose. This is the general rule of political PR.

Richard of York

@Long legged flightless burd

Glad to see the conspiracy theorists are still alive and kicking....give my regards to Dodi's dad when you see him next.

Simon Stephenson

Anthony Zacharzewski : 3.07pm

"Positive attitudes win, negative attitudes lose. This is the general rule of political PR."

So it seems. But we appear to have reached the stage where realism, of any sort, is deemed far too negative to be admissable to political communication, with the result that the political conversation, such as it is, of the mainstream takes place in cloud-cuckoo-land.

There would be some, I'm sure, who would argue that is this feature of modern society that is the overriding reason why we seem so blind to the prospect of unintended consequences, and why we never, ever seem to recognise that risk and uncertainty make many noble ideas unpursuable.

Occasional Ostrich

@Anthony Zacharzewski

Rapio, rapere, rapui, raptum, to seize and carry off, to snatch, tear, wrench off. The meaning of the Latin original is considerably broader than you intimate, indeed it is just as relevant to the context in which I used it as it is to your narrow interpretation of it as a sexual assault.

Occasional Ostrich

@Richard of York

Yeah, RoY, I concede that suggesting any conspiracy is stretching it a bit thin, but you don't honestly believe that Gove compiled ANY of this himself, do you? If you do, perhaps you should have watched Newsnight tonight. Don't shoot the messenger.