A question of motivation

Flitting through the opinion pages this morning, there’s one headline that stands out far more than any other. It’s on Charles Moore’s column for the Telegraph, and it reads, ‘Even I’m starting to wonder: what do this lot know about anything?’ What follows underneath is effectively a catalogue of the ‘small things’ that may accumulate and cause voters to question both the coalition’s motives and its ability.

I’d recommend that you read the article in full, but here is one passage from it that deserves highlighting. It concerns Francis Maude’s jerry can line:

‘But now that I have heard the Conservatives’ private explanation, which is being handed down to constituency associations by MPs, I begin to feel angry. The private message is as follows. “This is our Thatcher moment. In order to defeat the coming miners’ strike, she stockpiled coal. When the strike came, she weathered it, and the Labour Party, tarred by the strike, was humiliated. In order to defeat the coming fuel drivers’ strike, we want supplies of petrol stockpiled. Then, if the strike comes, we will weather it, and Labour, in hock to the Unite union, will be blamed.” There is a key difference which ministers have not spotted. When Mrs Thatcher piled up the coal at power stations until the strike began in 1984, she was not inconveniencing the public. In 2012, the Coalition is trying to press-gang the public, without saying so, into its political battles. All those people queuing on the forecourts were pawns in a Government-organised blame-game.’

If this really is the motivation behind the Tories’ eagerness for people to stockpile, and they are putting it about that it is, then Charles’s will not be the only anger they face. Exposing Labour’s union ties is one thing; doing so by putting the public at expense, or perhaps even at risk, is quite another. And while it’s true that sound advice and cunning politics can sometimes overlap, it would surely be preferable if governments leant more towards offering the former than the latter.

This story also suggests a blunt ‘us versus them’ approach to the unions that could actually come to harm the Tories in future. Treating the unions as a political enemy to be defeated may occasionally be understandable, but it can also blur distinctions between different unions or between the union memberships and their leaderships. In fact, here’s another suggestion for your Saturday reading pile: Robert Halfon’s recent pamphlet entitled Stop the union-bashing. It’s a bracing argument, whatever your own views on the matter.