Wednesday, September 18, 2013

If You Think This Government Is Useless Wait Until Nick Clegg Gets His Hands Around The Throat Of The Next One

I have just seen the highlights, if you can call them that, of Nick Clegg’s speech at the Liberal Democrat’s party conference. To say that I am incensed doesn’t even begin to cover it!
The sheer arrogance of the man. He has apparently decided that he is the only person who can dictate government policy and that it is the Lib Dem’s who should be the arbiters of what the next government can or can’t do.

It looks to me as if his only policy is to prevent what he believes to be the excesses of the other two parties. I thought that the whole point of an election campaign was to present polices to the electorate and let them decide whether they were acceptable or not. Nick Clegg’s view seems to be that the electorate can choose whatever party and/or policies they like, he will decide, after the people have spoken if they can have them or not.

The other thing that strikes me about what he said in his speech is that the result of his stance will be a government in stasis and stagnation, a leadership unable to lead, an executive deprived of executive decision making powers. He wants to have a lukewarm, insipid parliament and a cabinet of none of the talents. Just look at what Vince Cable has managed NOT to achieve while he has been in the Department of Industry and look at the damage Chris Hulne did in the Department of Energy. Do we want this replicated after the next general election?

Nick Clegg is a man seemingly incapable of keeping his manifesto promises or even his given word in a coalition deal. I don’t think his own party supporters, or the electorate in general will forgive him for reneging on his promise over tuition fees and his deliberate wrecking tactics in respect of boundary changes is looking increasingly like a cynical ploy to foster another hung parliament; a scenario that benefits nobody but himself and his party.

If you want a country that is going nowhere, if you want a government that can’t govern, if you want to watch our international competitors race past us economically then a coalition is the quickest way I can imagine to bring all that about.

Nick Clegg has already admitted that he’ll sell himself (and I suspect sell himself very cheaply indeed) to anyone who will keep his seat in a cabinet chair and his nose in the trough. A paltry number of seats from a rump of a principal-less party should not be a mandate for them to anchor us in a morass of ineffectual government.

It is my hope that the Conservative Party are given a majority at the next election. However, if we don’t get a majority, but are the largest party I hope that David Cameron will have the steel to tell |Mr Clegg to sling his hook back to the back benches and try and go for as long as he can as a minority government. My prediction is that if that happens it won’t be too long before Mr Clegg departs Westminster for the much more lucrative pastures of Brussels.

Sunday, September 15, 2013

It’s The Conference Season; Liberals Beware It Looks Like An Outbreak of Doublethink Fever Has Already Broken Out In The Department Of Energy.

 

Wind farm opponents are living in stone age, Ed Davey claims.
(Headline from today’s Sunday Telegraph (14/09/2013)

 

Opponents of wind farms are living in the “Stone Age”, Ed Davey has said, as he declared war on Tory Cabinet colleagues over turbines.

Mr Davey is the Liberal Democrat Energy Secretary. He is reported in many of the Sunday papers today of attacks on his Conservative Cabinet cousins over what he sees as their recalcitrant attitudes and behaviour in seeking to block his “reforms”. Until now, Davey has kept the bitter behind-the-scenes battles to himself. Now it’s the conference season and it looks like he has decided he needs something to appeal to the bearded, sandal and sock wearing hard core Liberal lefties, He wants voters to know what he is up against and how hard he is having to fight against Tory opposition to his Green measures, such as wind farms, wave power, and covering large parts of southern England with solar panels. These he believes (well today he says he believes) are vital to safeguarding the country’s energy supplies. He calls these measures “Keeping the lights on”, I call it a recipe for brownouts, but we are all entitled to our opinion.

While he is currently making all this Green noise in the newspapers and in Glasgow, no doubt for the furtherance of his all party Liberal image and surrounded by the (ever dwindling) party faithful, it seems he has other ideas outside of the heady atmosphere of the conference hall.

In his day job Mr Davey, is overseeing plans for a new generation of nuclear power stations and he is adamant they are necessary. “I’m prepared to make the case . . . for new nuclear [power stations] because we can’t take low carbon options off the table,” he said He also says; I  have looked at a whole range of issues which people might have thought were difficult for a Liberal Democrat. For example, shale gas. I made the environmental case for [it]. That will be controversial in parts of the environmental movement.

I wrote last week about Labour’s dire case of Doublethink. Methinks this is a condition which could be catching? Is Mr Davey preparing the way to continue his coalition career by cosying up to Ed, Doublethink, Miliband? Now,If only they could get Nick Clegg to hold ONE idea consistently, he clearly failed with tuition fees, maybe they could have a close fit with Miliband Minor and his Newthink party. It would appear however that Cleggy’s chances of simultaneously accepting two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct is somewhat beyond him. Ed Davey for leader you might have thought,but maybe he learnt all he knows about Newthink and Doublethink from master “Yoda” Vince Cable, the Benedict Arnold of the Labour and Liberal left who went over to the dark side aeons ago?

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Wednesday, September 4, 2013

The Labour Are Not Guilty Of Hypocrisy–Just Doublethink

In an article in today’s Daily Telegraph (04/09/2013) Graeme Archer points out that despite Ed Miliband campaigning for a NO vote against limited military action against Syria, in concert with the USA and France, now that Parliament have voted against it It turns out that Labour didn't expect the Government to lose. Now they want the chance to vote again.

Ben Bradshaw, MP for Exeter, a former Labour Cabinet minister, suggested [Mr Archer’s emphasis] that ED (the conquering hero who won the NO vote) would now support a second Parliamentary vote being called. Wouldn’t  this motion then have to be substantively identical to the one voted down 96 hours ago? If so you have to wonder if the Labour Party (Mr Miliband aside) wanted the original motion to succeed why didn’t they vote for it in the first place? I believe that this just goes to show that Miliband was not doing what he did for the good of democracy, or the good of the country, but only what he perceived, in the very short term, to be good for him.

Meanwhile Jim Murphy (MP for East Renfrewshire), Labour's defence spokesperson, said that "really significant developments in Syria" would imply that “of course the Prime Minister has the right to bring that back to Parliament." We know that thousands have already been killed in Syria's civil war; perhaps we should as Ed how many more would make it "significant"?

Now, if we were to apply logic to this position; (Okay, I’m aware that logic and the Labour Party are not comfortable bedfellows, but stay with me for a minute) then given the Government's motion you have to ask your self three questions:

1) Do you think Syria is a matter with which Britain should be involved?

2) Do you think Syria is a matter with which Britain should not be involved?

3) Are you not sure?

If your answer to the first question is YES then surely you should have voted FOR Mr Cameron’s motion. If you go with question two then surely you should have voted NO. If you were not sure then shouldn’t you have ABSTAINED? What I am now unclear about is is how you can vote against involvement on a Thursday and then, over the weekend, or maybe even as you were walking through the NO lobby, decide that it's all the Prime Minister's fault that you don't get to vote again next week, because this time you would support him.

Perhaps Ed Miliband is starting to worry that his behaviour last week confirms the negative perception we have of his personality. That he behaved like a total amoral lowlife toward his brother in his naked desire to to sell himself to the unions and become leader, maybe a bigger drag on what the public thinks of him than is generally appreciated by the pseudo-intellectual, metropolitan Neo-Marxists, toadies and “Yes Men” he has surrounded himself with. It looks like they have retreated to the position of: “When the facts change, I change … my opinion, moral stance, political ground, etc., etc. (strike out what does not apply). It may be more accurate to say: "When it looks like I might be on the wrong side of Received Opinion, I'll do whatever it takes to turn that focus group around.

Perhaps however something else going on in the mind of Miliband Minor and the members of the labour Party? Some, far more cynical that I, may think the original stance and this new one show up the blatant hypocrisy of these cheap hucksters who will, like a cheap whore, adopt any position for preferment, or maybe they have taken a leaf out of George Orwell’s 1984 had have adopted Big Brother’s concept of Newthink and Doublethink?

Newthink is language that deliberately disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words.Within Newthink is “Doublethink”; this is that the act whereby an individual or a group of people, for example in this case the Labour Party, can simultaneously accept two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct. This is Somewhat related to, but almost the opposite of what we consider to acceptable behaviour in a civilised society i.e cognitive dissonance. This is where contradictory beliefs cause conflict in one's mind. Newthink and Doublethink are notable due to a lack of cognitive dissonance — thus the person, or group engaging in them are completely unaware of any conflict or contradiction. The question we must ask is “Do we want people capable of Newthink and Doublethink running the country?”

Ed appears to have lead his party to a place where they now believe that there is nothing that he,or the party could say to us now that we would not believe and even should they all “about face” we would continue to believe them. What that leads to is more of the “Wisdom of Big Brother; ““War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”; “If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”. I however would prefer to live in in the twenty first century than 1984 and will be voting that way in 2015.