Inspired by this story:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-16958852

He 'wont rule out' women quotas for boardrooms. Big wow. What does that even mean? What else wont he rule out? Appearing on Strictly? Copulating with Gideon on the despatch box? Selling the Falklands to the Argies for a box of buttons?

Ive noticed this a lot with this government. Someone has a brainfart, or reads some obscure study, and thinks - 'Wouldnt it be good if we could do X?'. Well, steady on there - the thing about policies is that people might not like them. Better dip our toes a little bit first, eh?

So there's a story leaked to the press - 'The government are considering X'...and they wait. See what the reaction is. If there's any hostility, no matter how ill informed, or if its a tiny minority, then rejig the policy a little. Then we get 'Senior government ministers are planning...', and the process repeats. By now, assuming no flak is incoming, you may even get a junior minister breaking cover and attaching their name to it. Over and again.

Finally, once the plan has been watered down and bastardised to the point where its as inoffensive as it is ineffective, it may actually get put before parliament.

Where's the leadership - where's the notion that 'We beleive that X is good for the country, and we're going to spend some political capital to get it done, and we'll try damn hard to persuade the doubters, rather than collapsing in the face of dissent'.

Im not arguing for an autocratic regime who bulldoze opposition, but i'd like to see the government arguing for things, rather than taking the line of least resistance.

Or is it just me?

Well they certainly aren't taking the line of least resistance in dismantling and privatising the National Health Service.

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I'm a nasty, violent lefty. You cunt.

Well I think 10 out of 10 for observation. But it sounds a bit like you're complaining without really putting forward a solution.

The trouble any government has is that it's a majority of the house of commons. They could whip all their MPs into voting the same way and push something through like that but it's not quite that simple, as I'm sure you realise. The other MPs, independents and those from many other parties have the power to kick up such a stink if the government does something seriously unpopular that they never would. Whipping is also fairly undemocratic as its use of the party mandate rather than leaving it up to the individual MPs to do what they think would be best for their constituents. A reckless government which did not try to do things the population and opposition were mostly in agreement with (save for some tweaking) wouldn't last very long and could cause civil unrest. We're seeing some of that as a side-effect of both Labour not being in power and the policies being pushed under this regime.

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Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.
"Emmett is able to write fairly well, he clearly isn't unintelligent overall" - Quote MALCO - Wed Sep 14, 2011 9:57 pm

And they say UKIP doesn't do irony!

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Where there is great doubt, there will be great awakening; small doubt, small awakening, no doubt, no awakening.

Political satire the Jenner way.

yeah

What's your answer to the question? I think it's a well observed point, but so what?


Is there an echo in this forum?

I count two 'non-opinions' in a row

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Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.
"Emmett is able to write fairly well, he clearly isn't unintelligent overall" - Quote MALCO - Wed Sep 14, 2011 9:57 pm

You can't count either. It's as clear as a bell to me what those opinions of UKIP were.

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I'm a nasty, violent lefty. You cunt.

Moving back to the actual debate it's probably connected to the running the country by focus groups, the problem with that is I don't think since the early Blair years this has been done effectively and with any long term analysis.

The media will go with a story based on one or two polls, regardless if these are analysed for outliers. So that's why you get Cameron ahead, Cameron ahead, Miliband ahead, Miliband ahead.

You also get those awful rogue polls where they ask 24 people.

The GCSE scrapping is a prime example of this.

Why talk about 'Senior ministers'? Why doesnt Gove come out and make an announcement, rather than trialling it in the media?

This is a government of PR people, former Advisers leavened with a bit of "Commercial experience".

Commencial experience representing the boardroom types who'll breeze in, suggest "Run it up the flagpole and see who salutes"
and then chase off to some other hare brained project.

So we have a government by Kites and U-turns.


It doesn't help that in coalition there is no definitive manifesto document to measure government ambitions or achievements.
It's equally unhelpful that the manifestos of both ruling parties were largely fictional to begin with (eg Student fees, referendum on europe).

I see one particularly sinister development.
A lot of seriously doctrinaire policies are being kited that made no appearance on either manifesto.
Playtime for the Springbok cheerleaders at the Monday club.

Say what you like about the Tory government of 1979, at least their 'commercial experience' was based on decision making (usually about how many people to fire). Compare to the current lot who appear to have been mostly diligence lawyers, blue skies thinkers and assorted room meat.

What worries me is how many policies and initiatives are kites being flown, then the resulting hoo-hah creates so much noise we don't see what's going on through the back channels.

Then again, it's not just some coalition thing. Labour managed it a few times - frogmarching to the cashpoint, anyone?

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Ten seconds... the pain begins.

Fifteen seconds... you can't breathe.

Twenty seconds... you give up and turn off the Jeremy Vine show.

On the note of lack of leadership, it's been notable that the front benchers are very absent from any sort of scrutiny on newsnight, QT, etc. There's a guardian article on Chloe Smith being on newsnight, after Gideon backed out (presumably on fear of being made to look like he hasn't got a clue what he's doing, heaven forbid):

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012 ... t-disaster

The article is worth looking at for the video clip alone (from around 6:30 is when it gets good).

They were a bunch of voracious, evil cunts.

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I'm a nasty, violent lefty. You cunt.

Not all of them. Some of them were to the left of New Labour, and really hated unemployment. Unfortunately, Thatcher kept them out of the economic briefs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Gilmou ... raigmillar

But they were experienced, voracious, evil cunts.

And to be fair they limited their voracious, cunty ambitions to a small extent.

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Where there is great doubt, there will be great awakening; small doubt, small awakening, no doubt, no awakening.