Friday, 28 May 2010
time for reflection
the Silly Boys have not updated their website for ages now, and it is still saying that the Tories and Liberals are "unprincipled" to have gone into coalition and taken over Reading Borough Council. They are also spinning (and His Master's Voice has faithfully copied out, to be followed by others) that Labour was in power for 27 years. Not so. And while we are on the subject of principles, I was there when Labour got the chairs of committees (without actually taking control) in 1986. The council had gone Tory from NOC in 1983 and the chairs of committees were acquired because a renegade Tory called Hamza Fuad (great bloke, I liked him, he was mayor one year, I wonder where he is now) voted with Labour against his own group. He was not a fan of M. Thatcher. Two seats won the following year enabled Labour actually to take control. But using a renegade Tory to get power? Is that principled? Personally I have no problem with any of it, politics is about power and there is no virtue in opposition, but most in the Labour Party seem to disagree. A bit rich though for Zim One Lovelock to talk about principles. Hein?
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6 comments:
Commentary on the Reading election results seems to have largely ignored comparisons between local and national trends.
For a long time Reading Labour boasted of bucking the national trend. Now that seems to have gone into reverse with Labour's Reading showing quite a bit poorer than the national trend.
The national swing from Labour to Tory was 5% while in Reading West it was over 12%. In Reading East for Labour to come third in a seat they held until 2005 counts as a humiliation.
In the local elections, Labour may boast about staying the largest single group with the same overall strength. But nationally Labour picked up more than 400 council seats and won control of 15 councils.
The media have largely ignored or underplayed how bad the results were for Labour in Reading.
So much so for "Reading is bucking the trend". Words of Mr Salter, then MP, on every TV station back in 2008! It is now...
"The media have largely ignored or underplayed how bad the results were for Labour in Reading."
I think Mr Akroyd is being too generous: the Press simply do not understand how bad the results were, because they do not have the skill to analyse them from first principles. We must get used to the idea that politics is now about Personalities, not complicated things like policies or psephology.
It is silly to condemn the Lib Dems (led by the Orange book crowd) for the coalition with the Tories, because both are Whig (= Thatcherite) parties, one pro- and one anti- Europe(the Christian Democrat European group is to the left of both the European Liberal group and the reactionary group).
Some Reading Lib Dems are unhappy because they are ignorant of their own party (as well as of everything else).
Nor, m'dear, have you updated yours for a (little) while now. With all the frantic cost cutting activity in Whitehall in which Ministers are cracking the whip and civil servants are the whirling dervishes, has nothing worthy of telling us reached you? This morning some concerned important person has told us that all of Europe is in danger of making the same mistakes as in 1931, i.e. cutting public spending and causing a massive depression, so what say you?
Or are you on holiday in some place where the net does not enmesh you?
You seem strangely silent this past week.But there again nowt much happening in the world is there...?
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