….same as the old boss?
I don’t generally write about politics – it’s too easy to take up an entrenched position that you can’t move out of. Much easier to watch everything, say nowt on the subject and keep your options open. But here in the UK, we’ve come to the end of a pretty momentous month of politics – I can hardly not say anything.
So – Brown got forced out. I don’t understand why so many people hated him. He wasn’t the best leader we’ve ever had, but he was certainly far from the worst – how about Thatcher, Douglas-Home, Eden, Blair, to name a few? – and he was refreshingly human and bumbling. (All leaders should be a bit shambling and bumbling, imo) At the end, he was pretty much the national scape goat.
So now we have this coalition – the ConDem coalition as it’s already been dubbed – to govern us. One or two of their proposals are encouraging. They’ll get rid of the proposed ID card scheme and the Childrens Contact Point Database, uphold the principle of jury trials and put and end to the storing of everyone’s DNA. And Vince Cable, the man who believes that banking reform is urgently needed, has been put in charge of finance and banking.*
All well so far. But the Tories have managed to block LibDem proposals for greater taxation of the rich to pay for public spending, disguising it by trumpeting their tax cuts, which will actually help only a small minority of the lower-paid and do nothing at all for the millions who don’t earn enough to pay tax. There is no doubt at all that there is going to be deep cuts in public spending in the next few years; the LibDem tax plans, if accepted, would have made these a lot less severe than they’re going to be.
I’m a pensioner, on basic state pension; I have children who are already struggling on low incomes. So, on the whole – I’m not happy. Not happy at all.
*It now seems that the announcement that Cable would be given the powers to actually carry out his proposed radical reforms and curbs of the City and banking systems was an “organisational misunderstanding”. But of course.
PS – I voted SNP. So don’t blame me for the mess!