These parties campaigned on an anti EU integration and anti-Muslim platform. Their success is due to the enormous feeling among the people of Europe against, on the one hand, the destruction of their powers of self-government and their assimilation into the undemocratic Euro superstate, and on the other the threat to western culture from Islamist conquest. On both of these seismic... That’s a great way of restoring trust in the political class. Next, the Tories intend to strengthen the Bank of England’s role in keeping the country out of debt by getting the Bank to oversee a new Debt Responsibility Mechanism, which will allow it to issue a public warning when private sector debt is running too high.... On both sides of the pond, politics has surely never been more febrile and volatile. In the US, the Palin bounce has given way to the McCain stumble. In the UK, ‘Brown is a dead man walking’ has given way to a ‘Brown post-conference bounce’ and the Tory lead looking fragile. Within a few days, all that can change again; and then again. Indeed, I am currently in Birmingham for the Tories’ conference where the optimism and enthusiasm are palpable. This volatility is due to a combination of the unprecedented events through which we are living and the inadequacy of the political class that is expected to respond to them but hasn't got a clue how to do so. The public’s recognition years ago of the latter has resulted in its profound mood of ‘a plague on all your...
Monday, 29th September 2008
The distant sound of breaking glass
3:32pm
We should all be shuddering at the news from Austria where neo-Nazi parties, including the Freedom Party led by Hans-Christian Strache (pictured) have emerged as the biggest parliamentary block. It’s awful not just because it’s Austria, that cradle of Nazism which shows yet again that its terrible past remains its present. It’s because the implications are much wider for the whole of Europe – and are unlikely to be recognised before the danger spirals into the unspeakable.Back to the drawing board, boys!
1:27pm
I’m scratching my head over George Osborne’s proposed Office for Budget Responsibility. I’t supposed to give us confidence that a new regulator will mean that future governments will never again be able to live above their means. This tells us that no Chancellor of the Exchequer can ever again be trusted to look after the nation’s finances. George Osborne is the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer. So he is in effect telling the British public: ‘Trust me, I can’t be trusted.’A woolly cross-breed on the fringe
1:03pm
During this party conference season, I have found myself in very familiar territory in meetings on the fringe. There they all are, the kind of people so familiar to me from my years at the Guardian: earnest folk anxious to create a better world and discussing social issues such as crime and family breakdown, the high-minded middle-classes wearing Oxfam on their backs and in their hearts, agreeing that young delinquents need a second chance and to be mentored by people exactly like themselves, listening approvingly to calls for more day-care and a better work/life balance to create that family-friendly citadel in the sky – but having a go at me for ‘polarising’ people by telling a few home truths about the consequences of family breakdown in our family-smashing society because this ‘upsets’ and ‘offends’ people who come from...Our political landscape
11:50pm
Monday, 29 September 2008
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