No more consensus: this time there is a choice

27 June 2009

The next election will present voters with two distinct futures, says Irwin Stelzer: Labour’s rising taxes and love of the EU, or the Tories’ spending cuts and plans for the ‘broken society’

Where is the clear blue water? MPs in both the Labour and the Tory parties have engaged in behaviour that is illegal, or tawdry, or both. Both parties are responsible for the dire financial condition in which the country finds itself, Labour by spending and spending during the fat years, the Tories by promising to spend just as much if given the chance, instead of calling for restraint. Both parties will have to cut spending in the future, although the Prime Minister continues to denounce ‘Tory cuts’, either because he is ‘delusional as well as dishonest’, to quote Matthew d’Ancona, or ‘has a weakness for inexactitude when it come to figures’, to borrow Andrew Rawnsley’s delicious phrase. Both parties have their scissors at the ready as they approach a review of the already inadequate military budget. Both parties think it is a good idea to levy extra taxes on foreigners who have helped to make London a world-class financial centre. Both parties say they will spare the NHS, which accounts for 15 per cent of all government spending, from any cuts, increasing the burdens that will be put on other public services.

So are voters faced with an echo, rather than a choice? If so, how to choose?

There are only two ways of deciding which party is most likely to lead the nation from the darkness of the current night into a bright new morning. The first is to ask whether you are satisfied with the condition of the nation. In America, Ronald Reagan virtually clinched the 1980 election by urging voters, ‘Ask yourself, are you better off than you were four years ago?’ when they put Jimmy Carter into the White House. With inflation and interest rates in double digits and a social revolution in progress that appalled most of the blue-collar workers who had been the core of the Democratic party, most voters answered ‘no’, and the Reagan Revolution of lower taxes, ‘morning in America’ instead of the malaise in which Carter seemed to revel, and a renewal of American military power was under way.

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john problem

June 25th, 2009 7:48pm Report this comment

Britain does have its own parliament and it doesn't seem to be functioning efficiently, obsessed as it is with its remuneration and fending off public opprobium. Not to mention a complete lack of competence. A very strong case could be made for saying 'No!' to all politicians and calling in the UN - or better yet, the Citizens' Advice Bureau who have the supreme qualification of knowing the public up close. You know, the 'hard-working British family' that our leader rabbits on about, never having met a single one.

Simon Stephenson

June 26th, 2009 11:27am Report this comment

Choice! I don't think you know the meaning of the word.

Who is offering us the opportunity to roll back the state, to re-establish the entitlements and responsibilities of individuals as part of society, to structure our existence around JFK's advice not to ask what their country can do for us, but to ask what we can do for our country?

Answer, no one. Every political party is a signed up member of the big-state society, and every political party is an advocate of the George W Bush method of intellectual debate - if you're not with us you must be a terrorist.

Some of us believe that the modern consensus, which brooks no argument, is to prohibit much of what makes humans wonderfully unique in the animal world. We are allowed no voice. There is no choice.

Ben

June 26th, 2009 2:41pm Report this comment

It is truly shocking that our 'modern' Tory party hasn't got the guts to reform the NHS and instead is simply committed to chucking even more hard-earned money into it. For the NHS today read British Leyland 30 years ago.

Dave, it won't work. Now get a radical skin on your back and start to overhaul our welfare state, root and branch.

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