Man in a Shed: Gesture politics

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Gesture politics

The Coalition has just put through two actions that I would have rounded on with avengeance if they had been carried out by the last Labour government.

So I'll savage this one instead:

1) The Carbon limits suicide note
Never mind the lazy short hand we have all adopted about talking about the element Carbon as shorthand for green house gases. The Coalition has just decided to go with Huhne and Letwin's destroy the economy option of laying down and dying- or at least promising to do so at some time in not so far off future, but beyond the life time of their political careers naturally. ( Come to think of it many things may be beyond Huhne career life time, but I digress .. )

2) Declaratory legislation
Instead of action and progress we get legislation promises. The environment will be looked after - sometime in the future, soldiers will be decently treated - sometime in the future, and overseas aide will be kept high - binding the future.
This is the worse type of use of the law. It will be great for the cult of human rights lawyers and their fat fees and egos to feed off, but its undermining our society. Its a new form of national debt of promises - where today's politicians get the credit, but leave the pain for tomorrow. It is also a subsitute for action.
I always find the more someone promises things the less reliable they are. Your word shoudl be you bond, not legislation.
Jill Kirby does a good job of arguing against this than I can here.

Not good, not good at all.

2 comments:

Chuckles said...: I can think of several splendidly appropriate gestures, not including the Boy Scout salute.; 5:18 pm
James Higham said...: MiaS - this is why many of us rounded on Cameron in 2007. We were accused of disloyalty to the party.

At that point, the Tories had it all to do and so, admittedly, he wasn't replaced with a real leader from the true conservatives.

Now the pigeons have come home to roost.; 9:47 am

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"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens ... Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of over-turning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." John Maynard Keynes, 1920.

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