Saturday 4th October

What is it with these politicians that whenever times get tough they have to appear to get tougher?  This morning we had Cameron (who had a pretty poor conference as commentators tear into the unfunded tax promises and even how we would possibly cut the remaining almost 95 billion annual deficit, but that’s later) strutting his stuff in Afghanistan, just after he had stopped over at Cyprus to be seen alongside our pilots who are currently bombing Iraq.  They call it being Prime Ministerial, Statesman-like – I call it pretty daft.  It maybe started with Thatcher, I cannot remember Harold Wilson or Callaghan or Heath meeting the troops – but then we weren’t constantly at war in those days.  Then Tony Blair continued the charade, he just loved meeting the troops and then sending them off to die in ever larger numbers.  And now Cameron every so often, and far too often it would seem, is seen as a serious warrior, even if he is actually watching the final retreat from a war we just could never win.   I am not sure just who these images are supposed to appeal to.  Tory voters I presume, who may be tempted to vote for Ukip, but will flock back when they see their wonderful Prime Minister in a war-zone.

Last night on Newsnight, they had three radical thinkers trying to come up with ways of cutting the deficit.  They had been given the brief to immediately cut ten billion from public spending.  Now I would argue that we should be looking at how we can redistribute wealth through tax changes rather than cut already cut services.  One of these thinkers came up with the idea of scrapping the replacement for Trident, arguing that nuclear weapons were pointless, that Britain would never actually use them etc., etc.  On the other side were three “experts” who had successfully torn up the plans of the previous two.  They had no real arguments against scrapping our nuclear deterrent, except that somehow it would diminish us in the World, that it would be a signal to other countries that we were now a second league nation.  None of them actually said that Britain would be any less safe, or disputing the massive savings that would ensue.  Having an ‘independent’ (but actually controlled still by America) nuclear deterrent is another Macho gesture, an annual subscription to the ‘Big Boys’ club.  But actually Germany and Japan manage quite well without nuclear weapons and have forged ahead without spending huge sums of money on a gesture which if ever used would all our spell mutual destruction.