Triangulation, triangulation, triangulation

gareth

Mel - I think you're overestimating the electorate in some way. It's hard to define but in my neck of the woods the greatest hardship of the last ten years was when Sainsbury's ran out of pesto.

Life is so easy now, most things are cheap and freely available and politics and politicians can afford to inhabit ever more surreal landscapes of scholastic jargon and rules and pledges -not sure why - no one understands or cares why we're massively in debt.
It will take an intrusion of reality on a big scale to change things.

david elder

Triangulation? Pythagoras for PM!

Q. Why does triangulation mean that the tories can't lose?
A. Because triangles can have right angles but not left angles.

So a Cameroon victory is as certain as a proof by Euclid. The only problem for the Cameroons will be working out what to do when they and their number crunchers reach Number 10. Construct a parallel to their opponents? Take a perfectly smooth politician and extend him/her by a perfectly straight line to the money trough?

C. Gee

So the election is between Clinton and Obama? Tough choice. An emetic or an enema?

michael

Blairite Gordon ... as if.

Prudent Gordon ... has anyone checked the bank statement lately?

Jez

I don't even want to go there.

I'm glad i flunked Maths now!

YouCannotBeSerious!

Any plans for a comment on some of the anti-semitic nonsense coming out from senior figures in the Catholic Church? Why so reticent?

-Ed.

The tea party movement here in the US is shaking things up wonderfully well in the right direction by delivering our message directly to our Congress critters and to our president. (The One even had to lower himself recently and respond to none other than Sarah Palin in a failed attempt to stop his slide in the national public opinion polls.)

As a mere distant observer of things UK, it appears Mr Cameron wet his finger and raised it in the air to gauge public opinion; unfortunately he was standing inside a windowless room when he did it.

Arthur

Yes, but Obameron was 'placed' to get it wrong, wasn't he?
I'm surprised you don't 'get it', Melanie.
Or do you?

Dee Ranged

Let's suppose we have a hung parliament.

Will Obameron then get the push?

And who will take his place to lead the Tory machine to victory?

Only Hague has the gravitas - but he's not interested.

God help us!

Baron

spot on Melanie

michael

New labour's 1997 middle England promise land.
Old labour's 2010 middle England track record....They haven't had enough time to complete middle England's re-engineering.

john east

Stay positive, and enjoy the election show.

If Brown wins, or enters a coalition with the Liberals we are stuffed. If Cameron manages to scrape in we are perhaps slightly less stuffed, but stuffed all the same.

Now for the positive bit. If you've got any spare cash, get it into gold, $CAD and $AUS then sit back, open a lager and enjoy the show.

If you haven't got any spare cash, but only have debt, then you have my sympathy, for what it's worth, but you are well and truly stuffed in which case you may as well just sit back, open a lager and enjoy the show too.

E Hart

Spot on, Melanie.

There are all camped in the middle ground of the electoral Ponzi scheme. The apex is too small to matter and the base tends not to vote. That just leaves the middle - and surprise, surprise, that's where they all are with the same if not similar policies. It's a dire indictment of British politics and our electoral system.

Cameron is so abject he has failed to garner enough support to put any distance between the Tories and Labour and he's forgotten that UKIP will be clipping away at his vote in many of the key marginals.

He is also rattling along with a posse of buffoons - aka "Captain's of Post-Industrial Britain" - in claiming that 1p in the pound increase in NI will bring these institutions and the job market to its very foundations. They said the same about the minimum wage before gorging themselves on all the cheap UK and EU labour available. It didn't happen. There is strong chance it won't happen for Cameron either.

Tiberius

This blog is tongue-in-cheek, right Melanie?

Norm

For the first time in 30 years I had a conservative politician at my door last Saturday. The candidate for Newcastle North. Brave lad as the Conservatives usually come in last around these parts. The problem for me was he couldn't really answer the concerns that I had because CMD doesn't appear to have a policy for them. It seems to be a vote for us because we're not them situation.

Augustus

Political triangulation is a new one on me. In family triangulation, where two parties are dysfunctional, a third party appears to be required as a go-between. If Brown and Cameron are veering to the right/left one can assume that the third party here is Blair, whose campaigns were a success. However, my gut instinct tells me that Brown & Co., once elected, will in fact
become steadily more like old Labour than new labour, following the trends elsewhere in America and Europe where left and right are creeping away from centre politics.

As we all know, the right focuses on the creation of wealth and believes that all boats benefit from the rising tide. The left inhibits the creation of wealth by demanding the redistribution of wealth. Thus, the right respects and protects private property, while the left thinks that it belongs to them and is theirs for the taking. An individual must make the case for his particular before making the case for the other. Particularism before universalism. Neither should be to the exclusion of the other, but the former comes first. It is only natural to fight for yourself before fighting for others. And when it comes to war and peace, the left views the world as it would like it to be, the right views the world as it is. The left charges the right with being warmongers, the right seeks peace through strength. It believes the enemies of peace must be confronted whereas the left believes they should be appeased. The right believes that honest confrontation leads to peace, and appeasement generally leads to war. There is a very clear ideological battle between the two: The state versus the individual, capitalism versus socialism, private property versus public property, and confrontation versus appeasement. Cameron must shape up for the ideals his party truly stands for and forget being heir to Blair.

William Boyd

I call it squaring the circle me.

Triangulation's just so gcse everyone gets a certificate in it even though we all know they can't count to ten.

What was the completely different thing (sic) Blair stood for of course which wasn't crime and family values incidentally?

Gary Wintle

House prices must fall, yet Cameron appallingly panders to the greedy by declaring the aim of raising house prices, and thus crippling young couples and families denying millions of Britons the right to their own home, purely to appease the greed of the suburban NIMBYs.
This idiotic house price rise will destroy the social fabric of this country more than anything else, condemning millions to poverty.

Trickle down economics has been totally discredited, if anything, wealth floats upwards. "All boats rising" is nonsense. Look at how our banks steal from the taxpayer then sell off Cadbury's. These investment bankers and hedge funds are anti-British and should be treated as such.

The Tories also have a logic problem in that they supported the welfare handouts to the spongers in the City, sending the message that they are against welfare for the poor, but all in favour of giving your money to fat greedy bankers.