When Mrs Thatcher first arose from out the azure main...this was the charter, the charter of the land. Tories, never, never, never would U-Turn.
But times have changed and nothing can be the same..not even the "warmth" and "love" for her famous catch phrase: "U-turn if you want to the Lady is not for turning".
Regretably her party's current crop are not of the same mettle. And U-turns seem to be the order of the day.
But where to start? Oh yea "we are all in it together"!
Such a lovely feeling of togetherness....not..all in it together? Well not MPs, the Royal Family and now it seems Whitehall mandarins! So we are not all in it together at all. U-turn? Just one among many.
The “Big Society” is in the soup with absolutely everybody disagreeing with “call me” (except Dean), so we got yesterday's announcement of £100 million knee jerk aid to bribe people into being facilitators. No Need to go over the details. It was well covered in an earlier post.U-turn?
New Politics® is also in trouble, with two Tory MPs Bernard Jenkins and Dr Sarah Wollaston being very critical of the strict whipping system employed over the NHS reforms (in England). It seems that latter, an NHS doctor pre 2010, wanted to be on the committee that scrutinised the bill, but was told she could only be on if she did not table any amendments that the Government had not approved and HAD to vote for the Government line no matter what. What was it “call me” had to say about that before the election 1n 2009? Oh yes:
“There are far too many laws being pushed through, with far too little genuine scrutiny from MPs. And excessive whipping of MPs by party hierarchies further limits genuine scrutiny. This has to change.”
Then of course there is the reason Dr Wollaston entered parliament in the first place. Remember when “call me” wanted people from, and with experience of, the real world after his old lot proved to mostly be totally out of touch and on the fiddle. So he threw the Tory selection process open, well Dr W is one of that intake. Clearly though she is not a party patsy and so now her HNS experience are not wanted on the committee to scrutinise the HNS Bill. Isn’t New Politics wonderful, looking a lot like the old kind. U-Turn?
Then on to DEFRA and that daft woman Spelman. Her big idea was to sell off all England’s forests. Starting with an initial 15
% that would raise £100 million right away and then more later in tranches. But regrettably that idea did not go down too well in the shires where 85% of Tory voters including Boris Johnson’s sister didn’t like it. Bit of back pedalling came up with still selling off the 15% but a consultation on the rest. Not good enough so then we were told that the 15% would only be sold to nice responsible people who would look after it. Still not good enough so now that 15% has also been included in the consultation. Why bother with a consultation? U-Turn, well there have been so many here it’s hard to keep track.Oh dear I feel I have not even got started with this subject but look at the length of the post already, and we have not even begun to tackle Michael Goves various U-turns. That is even more complex than DEFRAs an would probably make a post all of its own.
Well there have been so many in these few short months of Tory rule that I was thinking of asking the readers what their favourite U-turn is!
Pics: Margaret Hilda getting ready to not do a U-turn; Dr Woolaston; The idiot Spelman and the pickled egg (the latter hasn't done a U-turn yet I don't think!)
Lot of this new breed of politicians have no spine, only spin. None of them seem to even have a basic grasp of the general housekeeping rule of not spending more than you take in and seek instead to sell off the family silver to keep up the lifestyle. They've used a scalpel to reduce expenditure not reverse it when they should have gone in with a chain saw. They're just delaying the inevitable slump and depression unless they get radical on what they actually spend versus what we actually need.
ReplyDeleteSo what would you cut QM?
ReplyDeleteAny thoughts on the U-turn situation?
I'd cut the royals and the house of lords and all but the most necessary embassies, and aid to countries like India. I heard that idiot Mitchell this morning trying to justify the millions that we send to India, when they have a space programme, nuclear weapons, and they themselves send aid money to Africa.... just for starters. And Mps in their first parliament would be only paid £35,000.
ReplyDeleteBut back to the subject. The trouble is that Cameron seems to have demanded a big idea from every department; unfortunately most of them were crap, resulting in them having to be ditched or amended.
To add to your list we have IDS’s insistence that they were going to reduce Housing Benefit after 1 year (completely ignoring the fact that the benefit is paid to people in low paid work and pensioners as well as the terminally shiftless that they seem to think all benefits go to). The result would have been completely disastrous, ironically mostly for London, which is why Boris said “over my dead body”.
The next thing is that suddenly the economic situation was less awful than they had thought and the plan was put back for a year, while someone actually puts a little bit of thought into it. Of course the “better economic situation” excuse was blown clean out of the water by Ken Clarke at the weekend.
The idiotic ideas on English education emanating from Gove the House Elf have been a mixture of wrong and illegal; the English health plans that no one except the Health Secretary thinks are sensible are going to have repercussions beyond belief. And Mr Cameron encouraging faith schools in England as part of the big society, at the same time as ranting about the stupidity of multi-culturalism and the need for us all to homogenise around English custom and practice beats the hell out of any kind of joined up thinking.
This man is not fit to be prime minister. He just isn’t bright enough, and his only vision is of us all volunteering to do stuff (despite every poll showing that the bulk of people are not interested, for a variety of reasons (perhaps the attitude evinced by his “loadsamoney” predecessors in the Tories that everything has a price rather than a value) that they are not interested in doing any more volunteering, or indeed any at all.
Recall of poor MPs, where did that go, or was NC worried about his own performance.
ReplyDeleteTo add to the cuts list foreign war involvement, overseas embassies, a complete overhaul of the banking system in the UK and Whitehall workings.
tris
ReplyDeletecut out the devolved Governments more trouble than they are worth all you get are mad men trying to hack the (sacred)Union to bits.
and then you have listen to and read all the fantastical tales on the evils of Unionism.
with the swivel eyed nats getting more swivel eyed more paranoid.
get rid and then we can have some peace and quite once again
A complete turnaround of subsidy for the nuclear industry by subsidising by the back door.
ReplyDeleteMinisters are breaking their promise on subsidies for nuclear power
I see Niko is getting worried about cuts he must of seen the latest poll!
CH yea all good, was recall of useless MPs not part of New Ploitics as well?
ReplyDeleteMr MixedPickle: yea get rid of the devolved administrations and we can all go back to the land of never ending Tory rule from England. The Halcyon days eh!
ReplyDeleteTreasure Islands
ReplyDeleteps If you mention cuts to Niko he will sit down and cross his legs tightly as May the 5th is getting closer.
http://renfrewshirecouncilexposed.blogspot.com/
ReplyDeleteA new blog that will be exposing all the corruption in Renfrewshire Council of all parties and officers.
Cool Anon. Always happy to see corruption exposed.
ReplyDeleteI've put my name in the hat for a free copy CH!
ReplyDelete