Tuesday 8th May
As well as the elections in Britain last week, there were also elections in Greece and France. And it seems that the electorate does not like the people and the parties they elected only a few years ago. In our case that was just two years ago, after about ten successful years Labour came up against a brick wall, and it is easy to say ‘It was the economy- stupid,” but actually most people had been relatively unaffected by the recession of 2008/2009. The vast majority of people then, as now, were paying record low interest rates on their mortgages, it was only savers who were suffering, and there are a lot fewer of them than the former. It was the air of incompetence and a lack of confidence in the persona of Gordon Brown that was the real turning point for Labour. It was always going to be hard to follow Tony Blair, and just as John Major suffered from a lack of dynamism following the divisive but very charismatic figure of Margaret Thatcher, so too did Gordon Brown appear dull and boring in comparison. David Cameron, and Nick Clegg to a certain degree, appeared attractive and dynamic at first, but one can hardly call their 2010 election results spectacular. Neither party nor of course Labour seemed to have either the answers or the confidence of the public, so it is no surprise that they should have fallen even further behind in public opinion. It seems that like the Greeks and the French we do not much like the leaders we have elected only recently. Perhaps this is because all political parties are rather constrained as to what they can actually do about things, but it is rather more likely that in fact they are not that good. Sarkozy promised much but in the end delivered little, and as for the Greeks maybe they are a rather special case anyway. But what of Mr. Cameron; first indications are that they are simply going to batter on regardless and hope that either an economic miracle rescues them or that people will simply not trust Labour with the country’s finances in future. A bit of a poor message that “Look, we may not be very good, but at least we aren’t as bad as Labour were. We underestimated the task and the medicine we applied may not have worked so far, but we have every belief that it will eventually.” The worst possible result will be that we have more or less a re-run of last time with no party winning well enough to govern on their own. Would the LibDems even dare to go into coalition with Labour if they were the largest party next time? Nothing would surprise me.