Wednesday, June 11, 2008

At last ! It's about the economy, stupid

While those of us who had spotted the problems with the Blair/Brown vision of Britain in 1997 began to come out and declare the emperor and his chancellor to be stark buck naked, many of the glitterati and chattering classes still clung grimly on to the view that the mirage of a touchy-feely multicultural, diversity-tolerant, welfare-everywhere Britain was all we needed to go forth in an increasingly nasty, unfair, intolerant, competitive and brutal world. Never mind that just about all our innate advantages but one was being steadily overturned or overtaken: no more "free" oil/gas; agriculture and fishing industries neutered by the EU; barmy military crusades; barmy immigration tactics; hopeless housing policies; the near-destruction of parliamentary politics.

Blair has broken every toy he inherited and wasted virtually every tax he (and Broon) raised with almost nothing to show for any of it other than a vastly fatter public sector, with many pointless jobs for the boys and girls. He probably deserves to be impeached and locked up for many of his more wilfully stupid acts; however, marrying Cherie was a life sentence, so perhaps he is already suffering enough.

Perhaps top of the list of impeachable stupidity is the total neglect of power generation capacity that is at last being appreciated for the potential catastrophe that it truly is; but as long as there was that talismanic "chicken in the pot", naive voters were quite prepared to ignore the basics and leave Brown free to fritter away all (and more) of the benefits of John Major and Ken Clark's remarkable but completely forgotten last 3 years of financial recovery.

The feel good factor remained afloat on a sea of credit while inflation was suppressed by the transparency of markets as a result of the Internet and communications revolution.

All most doom mongers have ever wanted to do was to be able to drag the debate back to the core issues around the economy before it was too - but while that pot remains chicken-bearing, no one wanted to listen. It is astonishing how deaf the normally sensible British population has become as a result of the growing indifference to politics.

Perhaps we will start to hear less of the "I don't vote, I can't change anything" nonsense that has typified the Blair years. With the chickenless pot a reality, the fear is no longer one of change, but fear of no change, since the bloke in charge of the empty pot has clearly and so comprehensively lost the plot. Indeed, it becomes clearer by the day that he never actually had it; he just got very lucky indeed.

The frustration of being forced to watch the cabal of Blair's ruling minorities being allowed and encouraged to exercise their various irrelevant dogmatic prejudices while Rome burned, has been excruciating. Nicely exemplified by the bearded legions of local council Nazis and their love of the bin Gestapo.

This is no time for gentle adjustments. What we need now is a government willing to take on the big issues; David Cameron seems to be winning trust as the genuine family guy and ready to dare to say that youth crime and single parent families and working mothers might actually be connected in some way. Let's also hope he is surrounded by the necessary brutes that are needed to take apart 10 years of socialist faux-utopia, and replace it with sustainable policies and tactics - including ways to remind everyone in the UK and EU that it was the Common Market that we voted for - which was a very different thing to the Franco-German empire we now have.

Common sense is the cornerstone of the Majority Party: it should be an essential part of every policy - yet it is astonishing just how far old-fashioned common sense has been replaced by the common nonsense of the politically correct. The news that Ken Livingstone has more time to spend with his newts might have marked that tide's turn at last.

Oh yes, and that one innate advantage even Brown cannot completely squander (although he is doing his best) is the fact that we invented the English language and still have a great deal of creativity to provide within it just as the rest of the world has decided it is the de facto global lingua franca. (Please try and forget the cash being squandered to ensure that your council tax bill can be provided in Welsh, Gallic, Hindustani and 27 dialects of Arabic...)

Bring on the election before the lights go out, and stay out. Those chickens are coming home to roost anywhere but in that pot on the table.

No comments: