Watching and listening to various politicians, political discussions and political commentators, I find things all very depressing.
Everyone knows, or should know, that 13 years of a Labour government left our country in a terrible mess. Of course, the problems were exacerbated by the banking crisis of 2008 but this was also a consequence of the actions, and inactions, of governments including our own so Labour can hardly claim to have been innocent. Given the appalling financial position that we are in, I find it almost shocking that recent opinion polls are suggesting that Labour are the clear favourites to win the next general election outright.
It's obvious that the memories of most people are very short and there's always a new generation coming along who have no real knowledge of what happened yesterday, even if they're interested in it. However, how it can be that the Conservatives not only failed to win the last election but have also made themselves so unpopular as to be rank outsiders to win the next is the question that has to be answered.
To my mind, the answer is two-fold. Firstly, Labour very deliberatly created a huge 'client state', committing enormous amounts of money that we did not have to all manner of benefits and other state hand-outs; so many people are now dependent on financial support from the state that it's almost impossible for any government to bring control back to state spending without upsetting millions of voters. Secondly, the Conservatives, in trying to make everyone believe that they're a lovely bunch of fellows, have mired themselves in a horrible mish-mash of pseudo-socialist policies that have alienated many of their natural supporters; add the two issues together and they'll be lucky to get 25% of the vote in 2015.
The Conservatives under David Cameron have completely lost their focus. Admittedly they have to accommodate at least some of the madness of their Liberal Democrat partners but they no longer seem to have any real conservative policies of their own either. Every pronouncement from Cameron adn his senior colleagues is hedges around with all manor of hand-wringing platitudes aimed at telling the unwashed masses how important they are or how much they will benefit from being screwed to the floor. Instead of telling the truth, that the country is in a potentially terminal condition, they prefer to pour forth a pile of condescending waffle, usually meaningless, always disingenuous.
The Conseravtives have stuck to the outdated and totally wrong notion that we have 'world class' public services when the truth is that the NHS is falling apart, our education system is wrecked and our transport system is hopeless; our border controls are non-existent, immigration is out of control and most of our laws are determined by a foreign conglomeration of countries whose disparate aims have little to do with British wants and desires. All of this while we have historically high levels of overall taxation, vast government borrowing and horrendous levels of both government and private debt. Basically, the country is on its knees and the people are gearing up to bring back the government which caused most of the problems, mainly because the Conservative-led coalition has been utterly inept in setting out the truth and has no clear policies beyond what has been dubbed 'austerity'.
Labour have it easy in all of this. They have stuck to their own outworn mantra that brands the Conservatives as the party of the rich while they are the party of the 'working man', the 'man in the street', the 'ordinary man', and so on and so on. They ignore the fact that investment bankers, despite their high salaries, are actually workers, that they walk the streets with the rest of us and probably work twice as hard as most; they ignore the fact that it is the current government which has made substantial increases in the basic personal allowance for income tax, benefiting millions of lower paid workers while recouping the difference from those who are better off. The trouble is that most people don't think for themselves, they only hear the sound bites and adhere to the outdated ideas of their forebears.
In the midst of all of this, Cameron has chosen to forsake his own natural constituency and, instead, try to win over those who will never see the light. His mad stampede over 'gay marriage' has no logic while his sycophancy towards the NHS education and the rest shows a total lack of understanding about the realities of our situation. His failure to make any meaningful statements about the European Union have alienated the right wing of his own party, while his failure to be truthful about financial matters has alienated everyone with the slightest leftish lean. All in all, Cameron's chances of being Prime Minister beyond May 2015 are remote and his chances of being Conservative leader beyond October of that year are virtually non-existent. How he can't see all of this is one of the greatest mysteries of the modern world and one that even Sherlock Holmes would have trouble explaining.
I'm left wondering what the Conservatives actually do stand for. It would seem they believe in the sanctity of the NHS but not of marriage; they believe in selling off our roads and ending so-called universal benefits. They believe in giving vast sums to foreign despots while cutting spending on our own defences. In fact, they believe in most of the things that a Labour government would do, so why bother with them ? The answer is that you shouldn't. The Conservatives have become so attached to the nebulous 'centre ground' that they are now almost indistinguishable, at least at the top, from the Liberals or Labour. My view is that, without a substantial repositioning, they're dead in the water.
Only 4 or 5 years ago it appeared that Labour was dead and yet they're still with us and likely to be the next government. Now it actually looks as though the Conservatives are the dead ducks and I can see no way back for them unless they really return to their roots. Labour have survived on the back of the impossibility of reversing the disastrous socialist policies of the previous 13 years and the consequence may well be total financial meltdown of the country and the ultimate demise of the Labour party, but not before they've had at least another 5 years in which to torture us. The Conservatives on the other hand will almost certainly suffer their own meltdown after the 2015 election and may well find themselves reduced to a 'rump' in parliament; all true Tories will, by then, have defected to UKIP, the only remaining mainstream party of the right.
Cameron may well go down in history as the last Conservative Prime Minister and, possibly, as the worst, Alec Douglas Home included, while the Conservative Party will become the new Liberals, a former party of government reduced to a handful of MPs. The 2020 General Election will be won by UKIP but, by then, it will be far too late to revive the patient and all any of us will be able to do is reminisce about the glorious days when Britain was a power in the world and we all had a decent standard of living. In the end, perhaps this is the ultimate perverse purpose of the Conservative Party, to destroy the nation that they once made mighty, in pursuit of some crazy 'one-nation' ideal.
