"I will put an end to Punch & Judy politics." - David Cameron
Do you remember that line from Mr Cameron when he became the leader of the Conservative Party? If I was a cynic, I might say that this was his first failed promise, or even the first claim as leader that he had no intention of seeing through.
In all seriousness, though, regular readers of this blog will no that I am no fan of career politicians from either side. A few moments ago I saw on the news some of the exchanges from the House of Commons today. Cameron, Miliband et al could scarcely have cut a less childish figure had they been dressed as Peter Pan & Captain Hook, complete with prosthetic hand.
The facile and boorish behaviour on the part of both sides does not serve well as an advertisement for British Politics. The backbenchers shout and jeer over the top of one another whilst the front benches, the supposedly "senior" politicians, seem to little but pull faces at each other. Never could a title have been less deserved than "the Right Honourable Gentleman".
Cameron seems to be developing a nasty little habit of belittling and attempting to humiliate female parliamentarians. In the past we've had episodes of "Calm down dear". Today when he received a question during PMQs from Shabana Mahmood, he sarcastically congratulated her on it being "well read". I say "developing", I wonder if a better word would be "revealing".
Just to prove that a real MP never misses an opportunity to score a cheap joke at the expense of their opponent, during the speech by Jeremy Hunt, Labour's Dennis Skinner stood to tell the House that "when the posh boys are in trouble, they sack the servants". A reference to the comments made earlier this week by Nadine Dorries, yes; humerous, yes, but not a single substantive political point was being made.
In other news, it turns out we are back in recession. So far, the Coalition have offloaded parts of the NHS to Virgin Care & other private companies, parts of the police service to G4S, cut frontline officer numbers, cut the numbers of teachers, cut services left, right and centre, and yet not only is there negative growth, Government borrowing is more than expected, and the deficit is growing by the second. At the risk of stating the obvious, where's the money saved by all these cuts going? The IMF?
Now, I'm not an economist. I'm not even an accountant. However sometimes I think that politicians attempting to control the economy is futile. The economy controls the politicians. They might as well try to take credit for the weather.
I'm not saying that Labour necessarily handed the crisis of 2008 well, but it is the Conservative's "Inconvenient Truth" that the financial crisis started in the US. Despite this, faced with difficult questions about going back into recession, Cameron reverted to the desperate "all Labour's fault, we inherited this mess" line. That might have worked in the first 6 months of this Government, but the Tories must think we're all thick if they think we're going to fall for that two years into this term.
