George Osborne’s Last Straw vs My Back

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

George Osborne is receiving a lot of stick for his last-minute decision to postpone the planned 3p/litre increase in fuel tax left intact in his most recent, politically disastrous budget. Most recently he has been accused of cowardice for sending an unprepared junior minister – Economic Secretary Chloe Smith – to defend the government’s short notice U-turn on the BBC’s flagship ‘Newsnight’ programme.

Reports The Telegraph:

Chloe Smith last night strugged to answer questions about the decision to postpone the 3p rise in petrol duty.

After she refused to say when she found out about it or how it will be funded, the Economic Secretary was accused of being “incompetent” by Jeremy Paxman, the BBC’s Newsnight interviewer.

Mr Paxman also asked her whether she ever woke up and thought: “My God, what am I going to be told today?”

I think that we can now safely add political incompetence to the list of charges being levelled against Mr. Osborne in the wake of this all-too-avoidable mess up.

This is supposed to be a Conservative-led, tax-cutting government. It was bad enough that the 3p/litre increase in fuel duty was allowed to remain in George Osborne’s most recent budget in the first place, but the fact that it’s postponement was only announced yesterday, and that senior ministers had no prior notice whatsoever is an almost unforgivable act of political stupidity, for which David Cameron was predictably savaged during Prime Minister’s Questions today.

But more concerning to me even than the incompetent way that this – and almost every single other political decision of any significance recently – has been handled by the government is the fact that the Conservatives are boasting about their policy U-turn and rather petulantly demanding praise for their actions.

Take this typical tweet from Robert Halfon MP:

“In Welsh questions said to Minister that stoppage of August fuel tax rise means £16 million injected into Welsh economy”

I despair, I really do. I thought that it was only in the dystopian, nightmarish land that was Gordon Brown’s Britain that cancelling a planned tax increase could be said in any way to be injecting cash into the economy. How is making the decision to not do something monumentally stupid and increase a key tax that would punish many already-squeezed households in any way an injection of cash into the economy? At best it could very charitably be called a preservation of the status quo, or the maintenance of steady-state, though given the economic uncertainty created by arbitrary and last-minute changes of key fiscal policy such as this, even that assessment is doubtful.

This is almost as bad as the risible time when a desperate Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson tried to claim that the Conservatives’ election manifesto promise to cancel the planned increase in employers’ National Insurance tax contributions would “take millions of pounds out of the economy”, as though the state were the ‘real economy’ and not the other way around.

I’m done with all this, I really am. I actively campaigned for the Conservative Party at the last general election in 2010. I delivered leaflets, probably annoyed my friends on Facebook and Twitter with my political posts, and talked to countless people on the high street. And for my efforts, and those of all the many people who did far more than me to try to end Labour’s grip on power in this country, all we get is a government with a broken political radar, one which betrays core conservative principles and apparently one which pouts and expects praise and candy for doing precisely the things that it should be doing without any outside pressure from their political base, such as not raising taxes on squeezed households during a recession.

Michael Gove for PM, as soon as possible. Anyone else with me?

Weak Arguments For A Weak Cause

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

The Daily Telegraph reports that Argentine president Cristina Kirchner has warned her compatriot Olympic athletes that they should avoid doing “something stupid” to publicise their country’s claim to the Falkland Islands during the upcoming games:

“They (British) are waiting for us to do something stupid, but we’re not stupid,” Fernandez said.

An Argentine politiican had suggested that athletes wear a logo on their Olympic uniforms that would carry the message “Las Malvinas son Argentinas” (The Falklands are Argentine). The proposal failed to gain traction.

Because, of course, the right time to do something stupid to publicise your country’s sovereignty claims is during meetings of the G20 and in chest-thumpingly jingoistic television commercials.

Time for a certain country – or at least her head of state – to grow up a little and focus more on pressing domestic concerns rather than seeking to open negotiations about the sovereignty of a territory that has no desire to come under their rule, perhaps.

Come Dine With Me, Says Obama

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I wrote yesterday partly about cults of personality, with relation to some of Vladimir Putin’s recent shenanigans. I thought no more of it until I saw this tweet from President Obama’s Twitter feed:

This gushing quote led to this article from the Obama-Biden campaign website, in which a firefighter known only as “Jim” gushes about his excitement at winning a competition to have dinner with the president, and about how “normal” a guy Obama is. Some exerpts:

After walking to the restaurant, says Jim, “There was a lot of excitement. I felt like we were in the middle of the universe. Think about it: You’re in this restaurant, and you know nobody is coming in, you’re not going anywhere, there’s a lot of protection, and it’s for one guy who’s coming to have a meal with you. It’s a wild feeling. Our nerves were still kicking in—but I kept telling everyone, ‘It’s a good nervous.’ I wasn’t so much worried about what I would say to him, because I’ve watched him over the last few months and I knew deep down inside he was going to be a normal guy.”

And this:

“But then, he caught me off guard because he started asking me about being a firefighter! I wanted to know so much about him, but he was such a normal guy who just wanted to have a conversation. He turned to me and said, ‘You’re a firefighter, right? How long have you known you wanted to do that?’ I told him I have a picture of me as a little boy wanting to be a firefighter, and he said ‘Oh, so you’re one of those guys!’ He wanted to know all kinds of things, like how many fires I go into, how many guys do we have at your station, and I thought ‘Here’s the President of the United States, and he’s asking me about my job—this is just so cool.’ He really wanted to know!”

And finally this:

“Thankfully, he was exactly the way I imagined he would be. Like I said, I’ve been watching him, and he just seems so normal, and that’s exactly what he was. I wish I could have sat there for four hours and talked to him—he was just a good guy, normal. You’d never guess you were sitting there with the President.”

I’m pretty sure that he isn’t that normal (average Joe doesn’t typically ascend to the highest office in the land) and that I would guess that I was sitting there with the president if I had been in Jim’s place.

Now maybe I got out of bed on the wrong side today, and I certainly don’t want to pour any scorn on Jim the Firefighter’s evident joy and excitement to have met the president, I think that it is a wonderful thing. But given the fact that political opponents and a lot of more-or-less impartial observers tend to recoil a little at Obama’s tendency to make things about himself, about his taking credit where credit should perhaps be shared, his frequent use of the word “I” in speeches and so on, I’m wondering how wise it is to set up a competition to have dinner with the president, and then publish glowing testimonials from the winners in which they reveal how spellbound they were by his brilliance and normal guy charm.

So is this just a harmless way of re-enthusing the base about Obama’s likeability (given the fact that few people other than committed supporters are likely to see it), or is it part of a faux-pas which plays into a Republican narrative about the president’s ego and supposed cult of personality? I’m not quite sure myself, but if I were Obama’s campaign manager I might look to tone down this particular avenue of promotion. Neither he or Romney are ever likely to be seen as the guy you want to have a beer with (and a good thing too – I would want the leader of the most powerful country in the world to perhaps be a bit too busy and intelligent to want to entertain me over a pint), and I see little point in trying to change perceptions on this front.

Not that it is anywhere near as bad as similar online efforts in less fortunate countries, such as Vladimir Putin’s website for children, discussed in this old article from BBC News online:

On this new website, you can visit Mr Putin’s office – there you’ll find a virtual Vladimir sitting with his back to you – click the cup of tea on his desk, and he’ll answer some important questions.

No, not things like “Does democracy in Russia have a future?” or “When will the conflict in Chechnya finally end?”

Questions like these:

“Are you allowed to touch the President with your hands?” The answer – “no”.

Or “Who’s more important, the President or your mother?” Answer – “your mother”.

And “What should you do if you love the president too much?” Answer – “just calm down.”

Mind you, for those Russian schoolchildren who may already love their president a little “too much”, this site is bound to be a hit.

I think the “Come Dine With Obama” promotion is a little tacky, and that it will ultimately be a futile attempt to make the president seem more in touch with the common man, but at least it’s not like this Kremlin scheme, much as some on the right would like us to believe that Obama is attempting to recreate Soviet Russia in Washington DC.

On a lighter note, I was also reminded of this rather more humorous riff on the same subject from The Onion, this time about former president George W. Bush.

On Death Panels

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

Sarah Palin - ObamaCare - Affordable Heathcare Act - Death Panels

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Normally, I try not to lend this person’s activities any of my time or attention, but Politico reports that Sarah Palin is resurrecting her scaremongering “death panel” message in anticipation of the upcoming US Supreme Court ruling on the new health care law’s constitutionality.

Says Politico:

Palin charged in a August 2009 Facebook post that the Democrats’ health care bill would empower a “death panel” of government bureaucrats who can decide who lives or dies. The 2009 claim earned Palin Politifact’s “Lie of the Year,” but she said today that the president’s health care law’s Independent Payment Advisory Board makes life-or-death decisions.

“It was a pretty long post, but a lot of people seem to have only read two words of it: ‘death panel,’” Palin wrote today. “Though I was called a liar for calling it like it is, many of these accusers finally saw that Obamacare did in fact create a panel of faceless bureaucrats who have the power to make life and death decisions about health care funding.”

No, Palin. People read the whole thing, their minds just stuck on those two words – “death panel” – because it was such an outrageous distortion of one of the best bits about the Affordable Care Act, or ObamaCare. Requiring health insurance providers to cover end-of-life care discussions between patients and their doctors was an excellent idea, one that would have encouraged thousands of Americans to decide whether or not they would want very aggressive and costly treatment during their final days, potentially saving them or their loved ones from unnecessary and prolonged pain and anguish when the time comes, not to mention saving vast sums of money and lowering insurance premiums for everyone.

Equating this with a room full of stern bureaucrats weighing the value of your life in their hands and deciding whether or not you are worthy of treatment was a case of shameful fantasy and hyperbole, and ultimately resulted in this provision being struck from the finished law – and you think that you are doing the American people a service?

Essentially, this seems to come down to a quibble about which invisible, mysterious forces are allowed to exercise life-or-death decisions over us (for after all, there is potentially unlimited demand for healthcare, and very limited resources to go around). Palin seems to prefer the invisible hand over the faceless bureaucrat, but if she could think in full colour rather than monochrome black/white, right/wrong for just a moment, she might realise that rationing of healthcare inevitably occurs in any system, and that the unchecked free market is little better a solution than the dark room of emotionless socialist bureaucrats created by her fevered imagination.