Monday 5th August

It is almost inevitably a fact that we aren’t told everything.  Governments would argue that they cannot possibly be as open and transparent as many of us would like.  And in the world of diplomacy certainly it would be a strange change of centuries of practice if we were actually told of ongoing discussions.  So, being more a pragmatist than you might think, I do not expect things to change, certainly not in the near future.  More and more politics is not about presenting actual policies to the public, but about deception.  It probably started many years ago, but was perfected during the Blair years, where presentation and spin became the order of the day, and you had to wade through all of that to discover what was really being done.  And Blair won three elections with that strategy.  It could be argued that the means justified the end, in that life became immeasurably better for so many.

However the same tactics were used in the run-up to the Iraq war and it was like watching a slow-motion conjuring trick.  You knew you were being duped, but somehow the hands were moving too fast, or the words weren’t quite in sync with the pictures.  And despite the protestations and the denials, the pathetic inquiries, the apologies even, it is still makes people very angry that we were dragged into a war that hardly anyone actually wanted.

And now we are being duped again. There is an un-admitted campaign to present the economy as almost healed, the skies ahead sunny, all problems solved.  And it might just succeed.  The Conservatives are certainly looking very confident for a change.   Labour’s poll lead is disappearing fast, and Milliband is either invisible or appears to be bewildered and seems to have no answers.

But what is really going on, is it mostly spin or is there really a change.  I suspect that the Tories will do just as Thatcher did, look after about half the population who are doing okay, and don’t give a fuck about the rest.  As always in Politics, it is getting re-elected that is more important than actually improving the world.