Phillip Blond is one of those annoying people (like Maurice Glasman really, and I know them both). He can say some really interesting things sometimes and then go so way off on a tangent you wonder what planet he's on.
This from an article in the New Statesman yesterday is bang on:
David Cameron remains an enigmatic figure who, although personally popular, is unable to offer a credible account of what he and his government stand for. At different times, he has been a progressive Conservative, a compassionate one, a "muscular liberal", a liberal Conservative, or a purely pragmatic politician who can easily dispense with ideology.
Blond was meant to provide Cameron with his ideas. If he's confused as to what Cameron is for you can be sure the rest of us should be.
And you can also be sure that the Conservatives should be worried. As the Observer noted yesterday, Osborne's in the same boat - a politician who only wants power but without idea as to how to use it - which is why his policy is to stand back and watch disaster happen.
That wins you an election once.
But not twice.
And I have a feeling Ed Miliband really does have a big idea now - and one that resonates. For a party that relied on Dave as it's best bet - and lost the last election despite that fact - the current void he offers voters is a nightmare waiting to happen which if it wasn't so tragic as to its current consequences would be fun to watch.
As it is, the obvious fact that the UK has not got a government fit for purpose becomes more apparent day by day.
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Cameron is intellectually shallow and relies on his PR background to make the case – his use of ‘decisive action’ relates to more or less everything he says about the great issues of the day but he never expands on what this decisive action might be. He has apologised for his sexist attitude to female MPs but apologies are easy to make and lets hope that the female electorate see through this nonsense. Now we have to witness his ‘John Wayne moment’ following the NATO war in Libya in which hundreds of civilians have been killed and injured by NATO bombs.
At least Ed Miliband has brought the concept of morality into the political discourse and is questioning the fundamentals of our economic and political paradigms. There has to be a debate about these issues because it is obvious that we cannot continue as we are.
Well he’s pledging to give us the most competitive tax regime.
I asked my old seminar tutor in 2003, who was either in the same year or one below that of Cameron at Brasenose, how to improve Oxford University and his reply was ‘raze it to the ground’, by which he meant that what Stefan Collini has later called ‘exam-adepts’ from public schools are using the university system as a finishing school, rather than to make additions to knowledge. It seems that Osborne and Cameron are hoping that the Bank of England eggheads through QE will bail them out of the austerity mess they’ve created.
Agreed
But I have no love of Oxford
Typical left wing thinking. The UK has one of the greatest educational establishments on the planet, renowned along with Cambridge as a centre of excellence the world over, so what shall we do with it? Oh yes, abolish it.
Reform it
Because it has been captured and now does not deliver what it was intended to do
Isn’t that called market failure when it happens in the private sector justifying takeover?
I am horrified by the incestuousness of the media, politicians and the judiciary, the majority of whom seem to have shared their student social lives with each other. I would be equally happy with abolition or any other reform which disrupted this breeding ground for a shared consensus amongst our power elite. And that is before mentioning the disproportionate representation of the privately educated.
There was a good suggestion in the New Statesman to make Oxford and Cambridge post-graduate only.
What is Cameron for?
To look like Iggle-Piggle
He is for asset stripping the public sector, nothing else.
Both Cameron and Osborne were groomed by their class for their current roles for some time, possibly from their formative years. Their ideas are clearly not their own and never have been. Without a hand up their backsides manipulating them they have no real idea of what to do, and we shouldn’t blame or criticise them for that. It’s the system which shepherds such obvious puppets (muppets?) into power which needs to be done away with.
BB
The main trouble being that we have a three-party muppet show.