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PMQs: Cameron is fooling the country
Cameron’s new attack line is fundamentally dishonest, but it worked reports our Political Editor Harry Cole
With the Conservative Prime Minister buying land off his lobbyist neighbour for £140,000, cash, and the news breaking just as the clock was striking noon that in the last quarter eighty-nine percent of the Labour Party’s funding came from the trade unions, who will be striking next week, the dividing lines drew themselves for today’s Prime Minister’s Questions.
Though those expecting fireworks would have been sorely disappointment.
Any thoughts still lingering from the summer that the boy Ed was starting to get the hang of these weekly duels and the better of the Prime Minister have been well and truly dashed by a series of boring outings.
The Leader of the Opposition has taken to asking questions, such as today on youth unemployment, that he already knows the answer to. He's wasting the chance to actually hold the government to account.
Today was a test run for phrases that we will be hearing a lot of in the coming months. The Prime Minster was trying out lines about the ““people who got us into this mess in the first place”, presumably as a sounding board before next week’s Autumn statement. Ed’s new, “he’s out of touch” attacks, while clearly true, fell flat with his whinging delivery and toddler-stamping-foot tone.
No doubt we will be hearing a lot more from the Tories that “no single other mainstream party anywhere in Europe” thinks that the answer to this crisis is more debt. This is a powerful line that strikes at the heart of Miliband’s relationship with his brutish spendaholic Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls, who has already pledged various billions in spending commitments, such as solving youth unemployment by simply putting hundreds of thousands of school leavers on the public payroll.
However the line is incorrect, there is another mainstream political party that thinks more debt is the answer, and they are even in government - in the UK. It’s more than a little ironic that Cameron is using the line when his government will increase our debt by 2015 from £950 billion to £1.4 trillion.
The Leader of the Opposition is either too dim to make this point, or totally comfortable with the notion. Either option renders him unfit for high office.
Harry Cole is the UK Political Editor for The Commentator. He tweets at @MrHarryCole and is the News Editor of Guido Fawkes, Westminster's leading political website
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Great article as always Harry. There is a third (and probably THE) reason why Ed Miliband refuses to push on the increase in debt; and that is simply because it is Labour's legacy. Just as it takes a long time to slow and turn a great heavy ocean liner in the face of an iceberg, so the spending momentum (most of which is spent on public sector services) cannot be arrested in the term of one parliament, such is the sheer scale of the problem.
Article is written well but some of your comments are unnecessary. The last point is especially bad, of course under rules of pmqs ed miliband was not afforded the right to rebut camerons line, and with this having been published half an hour after pmqs he wouldnt even have the time to comment on this point. Clear case of point scoring on your part Harry Cole which renders your points invalid.
There is a very simple solution to this problem - government just decrees that henceforth, public spending will not exceed tax revenue, and cuts of 30% or so across the board will now be imposed to achieve this.
Not sure that's politically acceptable, yet.
Engineer - lovely idea, but what are the odds spending would drop, rather than taxes rise, to balance the equation?
And pretty sure Mr Brown as chancellor had a set of golden rules he wouldn't break, he just changed the definitions of the parts of the equation to make them fit. Shylocks the lot of them
Yawn.
This article really says and does nothing.
Is it an article about all the political parties being suicidal left-wing-statist and now being bought by banks and big business?
No.
Peter Hitchens does this much better.
Is it about how we cannot really take 'Dave'/his liberal cronies in all three parties seriously for 4523 reasons, but the latest one being the banker takeover of the EU?
No.
Peter Hitchens does this much better.
Once again, this magazine lacks either the integrity/foresight or both to describe the political class as the vermin scum that most of them are, because then they would be sidelined by the establishment.
Anyone who engages in the political rhetoric of today is either dimwitted, a lickspittle or both.
A reply to 27feet.
I'm not sure that you quite understood my point. It is theoretically quite feasible to decree that public expenditure will not exceed whatever tax revenue can be raised (not easy, I agree, as it would lead to considerable uncertainty about what was in the cash-tin to be spent at any given time). No budgets in advance, just spend what you have in hand, and no more. You'd have to say to all departments that they should budget on a budget of about 70% of what they now spend. How they chose to meet that would be up to them - all pensions and benefits reduced to 70% of current levels, staff levels or salaries reduced to 70% of current, and so on.
Like I said - not politically acceptable.
Not so easy, sorting this deficit, is it? It was certainly a hell of a lot easier to accumulate it than eliminating it will be.
Engineer.
You don't need to reduce salaries by 70%. All that is required it to take a coin, toss it up and call heads or tails. Half the people on the public payroll get the sack on the basis of their staff number being odd or even. My gut reaction is that government will continue to function but have less opportunity to interfere with the rest of the economy. Deficit sorted, growth will then commence.
The current reality is that people taking the government shilling are out of touch with the reality of the rest of us, and listening to Mark Serwatka on Radio 4 today confirms it.
Eds main problem is that he lacks spunk, he niether makes me angry (like Gordon) or charms me (like Dave), also being a member of the last government doesnt give him much scope to attack.
While i agree that Dave is dishonest to use the line that he does we sometimes forget he is a politicon and therefore dishonest.
A great piece by a up and coming star :-)