Now I don’t normally buy the Daily Telegraph, but then I don’t normally buy a daily paper at all – it’s all just too “Meh” and tedious. But I broke with tradition yesterday as I had a hospital appointment and time to waste. And I have to say that I wasn’t disappointed; the general standard of journalism to interest me was, as expected, sadly lacking – I couldn’t even get a decent start on the crossword.
However the “Torygraph” did contain an absolutely scathing OpEd piece by Simon Heffer about the upcoming election and the usefulness (my word) of the main protagonist parties under the banner “The only thing you won’t hear in the next 30 days is the truth“.
Being the paper it is you would expect the piece to be anti-Labour, the ruling whatever-the-opposite-of-an-elite-is. And it was. And anti-Lib Dem. And it was. And pro-Tory. Was it heck as like. The Tories came in for a mauling as well. In fact the headline for the piece almost says it all; it is completed really only by the sub-head: “The parties’ cosy consensus will leave millions of voters effectively disenfranchised”. Let’s sum it up by saying that Heffer is not impressed. Not at all he isn’t. Try this …
[…] election campaigns are about assertion and not fact. Much of what you encounter in the next 30 days will be propaganda, and should be treated accordingly. Your intelligence will be insulted in a most insolent fashion. The truth will be kept from you on every possible occasion. Artifice will entirely overpower substance.
And that’s just the opening paragraph. Let’s read on …
The Labour Party has failed utterly in government. It has not merely wrecked the economy, with long-term consequences: it has taken a path of repairing the damage that will, through its emphasis on high taxes, borrowing and public spending, cause more harm before it does any good – if it does any good. It has also been derelict on matters of such significance as our schools, our universities, law and order, immigration and our Armed Forces. It lies about its record […]
Yet, despite this atrocity, the Conservative Party has, in the five years since its last debacle, done remarkably little to convince the public that it understands what is going on, let alone that it has any concept of how to make our country more prosperous, better run and generally happier […]
And the Liberal Democrats? They have a flexibility of principle that leaves even that of Mr Cameron standing; a record of opportunism and incompetence in local government (the only place they have had any power) that puts Mr Brown’s moral and intellectual inadequacies in the shade […]
Oh dear! And yet it gets worse …
All that is certain […] is that we shall end up being governed by a social democratic government of some sort […] because the likely programmes and conduct of another Labour or a new Conservative administration will be broadly social democratic. By that, I mean that the state will play a large role in the management of our country; there will [be] a strong redistributive element to policy; levelling down, whether through the education system or the welfare state, will continue. What this means is that a significant proportion of the electorate that wants none of these things will have been effectively disfranchised. [my emphasis] […]
For the frustration of the non-social democratic majority […] has only just begun. No one from the main parties will tell the truth about the need to sack hundreds of thousands of people on the public payroll in order to ensure we live within our means. Nobody will tell the truth about how lower taxes increase revenue, because there are too many cheap votes in bashing bankers who earn lots of money. Nobody will properly defend capitalism as an essential ingredient of a free society. Nobody will champion selective education, which gives such a chance in life to bright children from poor homes, and nobody will be truthful about the pointlessness of much university education.
Nobody will dare to be radical about the corrupt effects of the welfare state. Nobody will take the radical approach needed to counter the results of unlimited immigration. Above all […] nobody will confront the public with the realities of our membership of a European Union governed by the Treaty of Lisbon […]
All these things matter to people who are honest, hard-working, love their country, and seek only to be allowed to get on with their lives, undisturbed by the state, and to keep more of what they earn […]
And finally …
That still leaves the problem of how Britain will ever be run properly, whether by a tribal introvert who wishes to suffocate us with his “values”, or a PR spiv whose “big idea” is to appoint 5,000 commissars to assist the development of “communities”. There will be more absurdity yet.
As one of my friends on Facebook said the other day: in a month from now a different set of the wrong lizards will be running the country. After all, whatever they say and whatever they stand for, they’re all lizards and they’re all wrong. It’s called politics. Meh!