The Burke and Hare of modern politics
Much has been written about David Cameron being a Blair manqué. The accusations of style over substance, the eye-catching initiatives, the willingness to alienate his party, the constant drive for modernisation, and the sleight of hand that leads one to believe that one day soon it will be necessary to count the spoons.
And here is some more evidence for the prosecution: grave robbing.
With the corpse of Billy Cox over his shoulder, Cameron declared the 15 year-old’s murder tells us…
…our society is badly broken and we need to make some big changes, starting now.
Needless to say, Blair – rightly – denounced the sickening hyperbole of it all:
This tragedy is not a metaphor for the state of British society, still less for the state of British youth today, the huge majority of whom are responsible and law-abiding young people.
If only he didn’t have previous form on the issue himself. Witness Blair’s wailing and gnashing of teeth over the still-warm cadaver of murdered toddler Jamie Bulger in 1993. The freakish murder he said was…
…the ugly manifestation of a society that is becoming unworthy of the name.
And the law and order arms race between Labour and the Conservatives was born. It goes without saying that we were no more up to our knees in murdered toddlers in 1993 than we are murdered teenagers in 2007.
Cameron might be a new dog but he knows the old tricks.
Update: Nick Robinson makes the same point.
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The King is Dead, Long Live the King.
Every time I see the Cameron ripping of Blair initiative I think the same thing: what will people do when he’s elected and they realise he and the Tories are no better than Labour?
The Blair/Cameron double act continues with mind-numbing monotony.The level of commentary provided by the mainstream media soundtrack is pitched at the right level for the great unwashed to follow.By now they ,yes even they,have worked out that they will have no real choice at the next election.
No,if they bother to vote at all the result will be more of the same.As long as the supermarket shelves stay stacked no politician need worry about being brought to account.They’ll sit on their fat Royle arses and watch the Middle East go up in flames.Round 2 is set for Iran in Spring.
They’ll watch their taxes skyrocket but they won’t complain that’d be just too embarrassing and ……and well it would mean they’d have to get up off their arses.
I mean it seems barely credible now that the people whose votes Cameron is after are the same people that thought Blair was “a pretty,straight kind of guy”.This the man whose credibiity was shot through the day he turned up at the WI!The pathetic specimen who’ll blather ceaselessly about the need for our young men to be stuffed into the charnel house but will never stop to question his judgement when half a million people have died in a war he backed.
Cameron as next PM would signal to the rest of the world what a dumb, appallingly gullible people we have become or maybe we’ve been like that all along.It’s a frightening thought and wer’e not very good at facing those.
Our enemies,and we’ve now got a few,will be emboldened still more to see the sorry apology for a democracy that we’ve become elect to office someone who,to anyone with a brain bigger than the size of a walnut,can see is not a serious candidate for public office.These same “enemies”,once they’re shot of us,and they pretty soon will be,will vow that the new country they build for themselves will never rot to the sad shadow of democracy we now have.
Leon: what will people do when [Cameron]’s elected and they realise he and the Tories are no better than Labour?
Speaking entirely for myself, not be the least bit surprised.
At least whoever succeeds Blair is less likely to sign up to any hare-brained American invasion plans.
This raises a more general question ….
I can no longer vote for any political party – though I MAY vote for two of my local present candidates, for as long as they remain.
Over the past 40 years, the Conservative party have successively thrown away their claim to govern, by colluding with Labour to destroy three vital national “subjectsâ€Â: Education, Transport and Defence.
The class-prejudices of both these parties has conspired to ensure that someone like my father, whose own father died when he was 13, leaving my grandmother alone with two sons to bring up, would be totally unable to go to a good University, and retire an F.R.I.C. Between the destruction of the Grammar-schools, which were always the best way “up-and-out†of the mire, the removal of student grants, the dilution of education-standards to pander to the lowest common denominator, and the blatant prejudice of both of the parties means that someone in those financial circumstances would have to leave school, unqualified, now.
The “lemocrats†are hopeless, here – they claim to be pro-education, but when one of their local councillors is functionally-illiterate then they can equally be written off.
Transport: The crook Marples put his hatchet-man, Beeching in, and what did the Labour party do afterwards? Nothing. The mad Major privatised the railways in a disastrous fashion, and what did the Labour party do? Continued to screw it up, and support domestic AIR transport, of all the insanities possible.
Defence: The defence-cuts of the madwoman of Grantham got us the Falklands War. What will the proposed Navy cuts bring us?
Given that, unless we are very lucky, a major war is coming, and we are going to see our Royal Navy river and coastal patrol defeated. Very clever, I don’t think. In fact, I regard it in the same light as the pre-Falklands’ conflict cuts – treasonous.
Then there are the other parties:
I used to be a member of the Lemocrats, and from personal experience, I wouldn’t trust them further than I could spit. Also, they seem to have caught dear leader holy Tony’s habit of creeping to any and every religious pressure-group going. We can only have ONE law for all the people, with no exceptions, and especially no religious exceptions.
UKIP?
I agree with David Cameron on one thing at least – they are fruitcakes.
Green?
Very worthy, at first sight – but. ….
No nuclear power(!) We need nuclear power to tide us over the next 50 years. And their insane “anti-4×4†campaign is producing very unpleasant, witch-hunting side-effects.
Respect/BNP?
I’ve bracketed these two together, as they are indistinguishable, in practical terms.
BNP are an openly fascist mob, and Respect back “Hizbollah†– who are also fascists.
Now what do I do?
“Given that, unless we are very lucky, a major war is coming, and we are going to see our Royal Navy river and coastal patrol defeated.”
Err, against whom precisely?
Two obvious possiblities …
(1) The US goes christian-fascist in 2016 (after 2 terms of Hilary) and tries to take over – with the US-based wonderful christians here as a 5th column.
(2) The muslim fascists get their act together, and attack “the West’s” sea-borne communication/transport/supply links.
After all, something like 90+% of out imported materials (including food) comes in by sea …..
You are a short-sighted as those who wanted defence cuts in 1933-36.
Come to that, any opportunistic attacker, simply because our defences are so weak.
G. Tingey – Hizbollah, facsist. Please explain, or are you using that word as a general insult because you don’t like them?