Missing in action - by Richard... Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Missing in action - by Richard... Tuesday, April 13, 2010

What you will not find in today's Conservative Party manifesto:

But the tragic truth today is that no matter how much we strengthen Parliament or hold government to account, there will still be forces at work in our country that are completely unaccountable to the people of Britain. People and organisations that have huge power and control over our daily lives and yet which no citizen can actually get at.

Almost half of all the regulations affecting our businesses come from the EU. And since the advent of the Human Rights Act, judges are increasingly making our laws.

The EU and the judges - neither of them accountable to British citizens - have taken too much power over issues that are contested aspects of public policy and which should therefore be settled in the realm of democratic politics.

It's no wonder people feel so disillusioned with politics and Parliament when they see so many big decisions that affect their lives being made somewhere else.

So a progressive reform agenda demands that we redistribute power from the EU to Britain and from judges to the people.

We will therefore hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, pass a law requiring a referendum to approve any further transfers of power to the EU, negotiate the return of powers, and require far more detailed scrutiny in Parliament of EU legislation, regulation and spending.

And we will introduce a British Bill of Rights to strengthen our liberties, spell out the extent and limit of rights more clearly, and ensure proper democratic accountability over the creation of any new rights.

David Cameron, 26 May 2009
Speech: "Fixing Broken Politics"

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A surreal election - by Richard...

David Cameron, we are told by The Guardian will today "promise to deliver the most extensive devolution of power in a generation" when he declares that a Conservative government would hand people "direct control" over how they are governed nationally and locally.

In a direct invitation to voters to join him in governing Britain, the Tory leader will promise in his election manifesto to offer California-style referendums on any local issue if residents can win the support of five percent of the population.

This is from a man who is content for the UK to remain an active member of the European Union - our supreme government which makes most of our laws - a man who refuses to offer the nation a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, and a man who would have us bound hand and foot by an international treaty on climate change, made under the auspices of the United Nations.

If he believes he can present this as "devolution of power" and get away with it, the man is either incredibly thick, or he thinks we are. Either way, this election is getting surreal - even more so when you look at the version of the manifesto The Times has been reading. It tells us that Mr Cameron will launch the Tory manifesto entitled "An Invitation to Join the Government of Britain in South London today".

Why has the government of Britain moved to South London? I thought it was in Brussels.

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That manifesto - by Richard... Monday, April 12, 2010

Jim Greenhalf sees something deeply sinister in the cover picture of the Labour Party manifesto.

He's right.

GENERAL ELECTION THREAD

Monday, 12 April 2010

That Picture on the Labour Manifesto...

It conjures up the days of Flanders and Swann, before the Beeching cuts, when Britain was networked with state-owned railways and families could take a steam train into the country, find a sunlit hill, and look towards the future optimistically.

Richard North says it reminds him of railway posters of 50 years ago. It reminds me of the kind of Communist art, call it social unrealism, favoured by Joseph Stalin: bright, sunny landscapes with smiling peasants in collectively-owned rippling wheatfields; the strong arms of bronzed industrial workers; the excitement of electricity pylons.

Only, in the picture on the cover of Labour's manifesto the cosy Beatrix Potter fields are unmarked by either electricity pylons or wind turbines. There they stand: the ideal white nuclear family, without an iPhone between them: mum holding the baby, dad standing with son, gazing into what looks like a nuclear explosion of a sunrise. In the far distance the silhouette of a city on a hill. The caption is: A Future/ Fair for all.

Wait a minute...isn't this picture of an England on which the sun does not set reminiscent of the picture Winston Churchill painted in his Finest Hour speech of June 18, 1940, just before the Battle of Britain?

...If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world move forward into broad, sunlit uplands...

It's a picture of the future in the guise of the imagined past, how things used to be before Windrush docked, before Yorkshire's mill owners imported all that cheap labour from North West Pakistan, before the egregious European Union opened its borders and opened up Blair's Britain to the wondrous benefits of over-population, religious intolerance and cultural diversity.

It's a future devoid of the social anxieties of the present. In short it's a picture of Peter Pan's Never Never land, where no one grows old, needs emergency hospital treatment or the assistance of the police or social workers. A future where youngsters are not abused and killed, where families are functional, crime is low, the weather is always sunny and the trains run on time.

The subliminal message of this piece of kitsch is, of course:- if you, the voters, can withstand the blandishments of David Cameron and Nick Clegg, then we, the Labour Party and you, can look forward to a sunny future.

This must have been the sort of picture that the Ministry Health, under Enoch Powell, showed round the townships of Jamaica in the mid-1950s, when London was short of nurses and bus conductors. While I didn't expect Labour to be honest and publish a picture of a wasteland, nor did I expect them to treat the public like foreigners, although in one sense I suppose we are.

Even people unable to read can see through this picture. Just because they can't spell subliminal or discuss semiotics in their pilates class, they know when they are being sold a pup. Think of all the people who have come back from a shit holiday in Spain, having mistaken the picture on the holiday brochure for reality.

For Labour's dream to be reality Gordon Brown and his merry chairpersons would have to stop immigration, restore marriage as the only basis of family life, withdraw all planned spending on climate change schemes - wind farms, again - and abandon John Prescott's scheme to fill greenfield sites with 300,000 new homes.

The boy in that idyllic picture can grow up sure in the knowledge that he won't be called upon to get his legs blown off in some doubtful foreign war. The baby, assume it's a girl, in the interests of balance, won't grow up hiding her face under a veil.

A future, fair for all: if you can forget the Australian national anthem - Arise, Australia fair - it's almost a line from a party marching song.

A future fair for all

A future fair for all...