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Whether Cameron was giving an honest answer to a straight question, or whether he had decided to head off speculation about his retirement after an EU referendum (if he wins in May) or whether he shot his mouth off without thinking, is now beside the point. He has thrown the whole Tory election campaign off the rails. Nobody is sure that it can be got back on track, although politics being what it is, there is still everything to play for.
Unfortunately he is the victim of his own idea to legislate into existence fixed term parliaments, when the whole evolved system depended on the very flexibility he has now closed down. This is because the UK has a parliamentary democracy using the powers of an absolute monarchy with only one elected chamber functioning under a regime of tension between the executive and the legislature. A fundamental feature was the power of the prime minister to go to the country for a mandate whenever he judged the moment right, either because the government was riding the crest of the wave of public opinion or because it had lost a vote of confidence. Now and again prime ministers carried on until the maximum five years was reached and quietly left to be defeated in the election which followed.
The reason for these arrangements are complex and confused, but they have to do with the fact that the government is the Queen’s but the members of it have to come from parliament which is charged both with holding it to account and enacting its legislation. The uncertainty of the prime minister’s intentions acts as the catalyst which gives the whole process form. The fixed term parliament has not really worked and it is clear it should have gone a year ago, or at the latest in the autumn of 2014 and the fixed nature is at odds with the absolute flexibility of the constitution in general. A fixed piece of a flexible whole is usually a fault requiring repair in any system or mechanism.
This whole episode, based on a harmless remark underlines this. We either have to go back to all the uncertainties and flexibilities of our fabled unwritten constitution, or we have to have a proper written one, approved by the people, by which rules government is carried out. Meanwhile the consensus among those who profess to know is that Cameron has shot the whole Tory party in the foot. We shall see.
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The news that the little boy whose parents were put through hell when trying to organise his treatment has made such good progress and is now cancer free is wonderful. It vindicates the decision by his parents to fight for the treatment in which they had confidence, not because it was more effective than that offered by the notorious Southampton General, but because it has fewer side effects.
The story has, in its good outcome, profound lessons for all authorities who find themselves caught up in a medical dispute with parents of children with serious life threatening conditions. They are these. Doctors know a lot but they do not always know best. If medical hysteria replaces measured judgement and well intentioned discussion is replaced by threats, then the very medical authorities who see themselves as saviours instead unwittingly become heartless killers. I know. My family was stricken by the loss of the life of one of our children because we succumed to the threats issued by a medical grouping of which Southampton General was a part and whose flawed treatment proved needlessly fatal.
Because of the controversy over the forecast cuts to spending on public services, which various commentators and think-tanks as well as the OBR portray as spine chilling, there is no sustained Tory post budget bounce appearing in the polls. The odd advance here and there, but others are pushing Labour a point or so ahead. Essentially nothing has changed; the two main parties are neck and neck and the voters seem willing, a good many of them anyway, to scatter their votes across a wide ark of minor parties, making the outcome beyond even guessing at this point. So Labour could still win? Yes it could if it were both clever and bold. It could achieve a major surge which would break the log jam holding Labour in tandem with the Tories. And the surprising thing is it could be a break out at its perceived weakest point. The point from which the Tory strategists would least expect a major game changing attack. The economy.
Essentially the two big parties are neck and neck in large part because to ordinary people there is little to distinguish them on policy. There are differences, but at the edges. There is no big ideological divide as of old between capital and labour, state ownership versus private enterprise, suits against overalls. This is best illustrated by the fact that Darling, the outgoing Chancellor, in 2010 had a programme of fewer cuts and more borrowing and the incoming Osborne followed a much more austere policy of major cuts and less borrowing. Yet in the end Osborne has wound up after five years at exactly the place Darling was headed for, which Osborne had denounced as inadequate.
Everyone knows the Tories are up there for business, the professions and the City, while Labour champions the squeezed middle, the lower paid and the real economy in which most people live and work. Yet the Tories appear more efficient at looking after their own through the ever growing size and power of the financial sector.
What Labour lacks post Thatcher is something which will give them an ideological edge and an idea which can offer transformation to the living standards of the majority, by rebalancing the economy away from assets to people, whose efforts deliver a surge in manufacturing and home grown industries from electronic to space with pots and pans in between, which will curb imports, repatriate jobs and expand exports. Driving it all must be enormous infrastructure renewal and an initial target of one million affordable local authority homes to rent. The consequential increases in tax revenue and reduction in benefit costs, especially housing benefit, are mouth watering, but the problem is that to fire it up, borrowing levels would become too exotic to be credible.
But just suppose Labour could come forward with a programme which could do all this without borrowing. Is that a dream? No it is a real possibility. There is a new idea based upon previous practices used in WWI and WWII, adapted for electronic money, which if adopted by Labour, could not only give it a renewal of its inspiration and mission, but could also deliver a clear victory in the general election in May. Click here to find out how Dynamic Quantitative Easing can deliver the key to a better future.
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It has become a near daily occurrence for candidates from all the political parties who are standing in the general election in May, or those around them, to be embroiled in controversy relating to expenses, donations, inappropriate comments and so forth. Whether things are getting worse or whether social media helps to root out problems more easily is not clear. What is clear is that every time a headline breaks it damages all parties equally and not just the one involved. This is because the biggest issue out there is a loss of voter respect for those who govern or seek to govern them. We may be underestimating the ultimate cost of this to the effective governance of the country.
There can be few ceremonies in all of recorded history as unusual as that taking place in Leicester today. As every student knows Shakespeare cast Richard III as an ogre and that is how he was seen and thought of thereafter. He did not even have a memorial. The whereabouts of his remains were subject to speculation, but the location unknown. Then a dedicated team of archaeologists dug up a car park in the city and found his bones. Now he is to be honoured as a King and reburied in the Cathedral, his reputation undergoing something of a rehabilitation as people concentrate more on the recorded history and less on the Shakespearean drama. It is all a curiously fulfilling epitaph for the fallen House of York.
