Europe | Joe Jots

The problem with David Cameron? Well, there are many, but the one I’ve noted recently is that he promises a lot. He says ‘I’ll change things here, I’ll offer more, I’ll make this work better.’ But he doesn’t actually do things. He doesn’t address the parliament on these matters and work to change. He’s reacting. This week at the Conservative Party conference, he was reacting to UKIP defections by saying he’d scrap work protections and do a few other things out of the UKIP playbook.

In response to the approaching referendum on Scottish independence, he promised to devolve more powers to the Parliament in Edinburgh, among other things.

Reasonable as he often sounds, Cameron uses the tricks of the abuser and 9 year old boy. When he finds himself in trouble, or hears that his partner (Scotland, the right wing of his party) is trying to leave, he promises to do better. I cringe when I hear this kind of thing coming from his mouth because as a world leader, he’s supposed to put this stuff up front. Much as I despise Maggie Thatcher and just about everything she stood for in her leadership of Great Britain, when she had a move to make, she made it. Crushing the unions? She stepped up and got the job done. War with Argentina? Order the ships to be built. Cameron, on the other hand, realises he’s about to be punished and like a guilty child promises to do better.

National elections are getting close and these things seem to work. Did his promises work in Scotland? They might have done so. The matter there might also have had to do with Salmond’s great dearth of any actual plan. Among other things.

Why is this asshole lying to me? He says one thing in public, but can’t be trusted to follow through and secure the deal, or to step up and take responsibility for his vision. My feeling is that he doesn’t actually have one. He got into office because the population didn’t feel New Labour (aka Tory Lite) had anything more to offer. And he’ll retain his position until someone with more than a miliband of charisma comes to the fore from the Left. I vaguely recall when one of the characteristics we looked for in a leader was vision, as opposed to ‘that vision thing’. We still prefer it to the tinned thing that weasels like Mitt Romney offer, but we don’t hear it any more.

Time and again in that conference speech, Cameron says, ‘this is what a conservative government *will* do. At one point, he says he didn’t want a coalition government, that it was forced on him. It wasn’t forced: the Tories didn’t win a majority, therefore, to form a government required a coalition. The LibDems could have gone to Miliband and offered their services. The time of New Labour was over and they knew it. So, everything Cameron says he *will* do is based on whether he can secure a straight-up majority. The fact remains, that all these things he promises, he can negotiate in parliament. He can achieve many of them with the compromise a mature democracy engages in because that’s what mature people do. (Note, of course, that the US House of Representatives returned to nursery school about 5 years ago and there’s no sign the teacher is ready to let them go even to kindergarten.)

He talks about scrapping the travesty that is the zero-hours contract. If he were to put this to parliament tomorrow, he could get a win. Labour thinks they’re lousy as well. I’m pretty sure zero-hours contracts are a gift the Tories gave to business to take away more workers’ rights. Labour would welcome the opportunity to debate and vote. No need to wait for the election.

He addresses global business saying that Britain has ‘rolled out the red carpet…cutting red their tape and cutting their taxes…Now you must pay what you owe.’ Again: Put this to parliament. What a wonderful source of deficit-cutting income – Amazon and Starbucks and Apple paying taxes commensurate with what they earn doing business in the UK. Votes wouldn’t be unanimous, but parliamentarians not owned by big business would happily vote yes.

And again, on the opportunity to raise the income level at which taxpayers owe the top rate of 40%. No need to wait except if it’s a threat.

He also talks about differences in how the Tories and Labour view education, but that’s a matter for another post.

September 16, 2014

Yesterday’s adventures included finally finishing the Essentials training for the software I’ve been documenting for a year. Training, until a couple of months ago took a back seat to just catching up with the astounding amount of writing that had to be done. My manager agreed with me that I could take Mondays as my training day. It’s nice that the same week that I sign a permanent contract with the company, I finish the prerequisite for all the advanced training.

For several years I refused to utter the word ‘barbecue’ because I felt it jinxed things. Invite your friends over for a barbecue and rain is guaranteed. So I started calling such events OGFEs: Outdoor Grilled Food Experiences. This past summer, after having a couple of OGFEs rained out too, I decided to chuck the word. Yesterday evening, my friend Cara invited me over for a barbecue – her man Trevor built a brick grill in front of their place and in fact, his dad was in town from Australia, and her folks and sister came over as well. Her sister’s man (John? I think so) is another American, from a small town in Illinois. Always good to expand the American contingent abroad, I say.

Right. Cara’s Scottish. I told her I had no dog in the fight, but I was curious what she and her folks felt about the referendum. Having lived in the Netherlands as long as they have (30+ years), they don’t have a vote, but are solidly pro-independence. It’s an exciting time and I’m pretty sure I’d vote for independence too, given the opportunity. This is a gut thing that has a lot to do with the amount of wealth from Scotland that moves to London without the Scots getting much in return. I also feel that modern conservative governments in the UK (and there hasn’t really been a liberal one since before Thatcher) haven’t done well by the citizenry in general and any chance not to have the banks of London set your monetary policy is a chance to take and run with.

The old political dictum, cui bono holds sway in England as it long has in America. Translated strictly as ‘to whose good’ or ‘who benefits’ it more loosely means ‘follow the money’. You don’t have to follow it far to know that the US no longer has any semblance of a democracy. Policy is about who contributes to the campaigns, who offers the greatest future lobbying salary to current congress-critters. Eric Cantor, case in point.

I’m pretty sure it was Tom Robinson who said, ‘When you see a politician speaking, you have to ask yourself one question: Why is this asshole lying to me?’ When the powers that be in Whitehall, today that being the leaders of the three main UK parties, plus former PM Gordon Brown (a Scot), say ‘We’ll make things better for Scotland, the question is ‘What aren’t you telling me about how union benefits your bottom line?’

There are numerous graphs online that detail how much tax money flows from Scotland to London and how much Scotland gets back in services. The ones I’ve seen tend to have a Scottish bias, but this has a lot to do with self-selected sourcing. I know I’m biased and that the blogs I read and the articles I tend to finish agree with my own points of view. That said, the numbers I’ve seen recently indicate a deficit of 10-20 billion pounds per year. Even if the Scots forego any kind of currency union, that’s a number they could make up pretty handily (says your humble reporter who has no background in economics at all).

It’s sad, however, that the heard sane voices of conservatism tend to favour the establishment and that the heard less sane voices of English conservatism are folks like Nadine Dorries and the BNP. Dorries gets quoted talking about Scots who ‘are paid to eat deep-fried Mars bars’ which does little to help the Yes camp. parties, plus former PM Gordon Brown (a Scot), say ‘We’ll make things better for Scotland, the question is ‘What aren’t you telling me about how union benefits your bottom line?’

It’s sad, however, that the heard sane voices of conservatism tend to favour the establishment and that the heard less sane voices of English conservatism are folks like Nadine Dorries and the BNP. Dorries gets quoted talking about Scots who ‘are paid to eat deep-fried Mars bars’ which does little to help the Yes camp. Source: http://www.bedfordshire-news.co.uk/Mid-Bedfordshire-MP-Nadine-Dorries-gives-view/story-22927469-detail/story.html

My feeling, if you haven’t cottoned onto it yet, is that I’d rather see a new experiment in democracy come out of the referendum, and perhaps see London look to new ways to be more representative of the people of England rather than less. I’d like to see the Conservative party live up to what they’re promising in the last days of the campaign – more power devolving to the territories and greater representation and less power in the hands of the House of Lords. If they really believed such things would be to the greater benefit of their voting constituencies, however, they would have campaigned on them several years ago. And followed through. The fact is the constituencies of the PM, the deputy PM and the opposition leader are the banks and the other denizens of the City of London. Follow the money.

Cameron the weasel

Scotland!