The economic crisis overshadowed David Cameron's conference, and it is blunting his edge as Opposition Leader in parliament as well. Since he has no clear alternative ideas to those being put forward by Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling, he is having to broadly offer support while taking issue in minor areas. Thus, at Prime Minister's Questions today - and repeating a tactic pursued by George Osborne on the 'Today' programme this morning - he chose to attack executive bonuses. Emotionally significant, the bonuses are economically insignificant, quite apart from the fact that the Tories are unconvincing scourges of city bonuses. It is a tactic that smacks of populist desperation, and the the Cameron-Osborne team might be best advised to examine their underlying economic answers more closely. Then, they might be able to come up with more convincing alternatives. Or perhaps, when both parties are so ideologically close, there are no convincing alternatives?Incidentally, best line of the afternoon probably belonged to Nick Clegg - "When a ship is sinking you send out the lifeboats, you don't argue about who steered it into the iceberg."
5 comments:
Clegg's line sounds brilliant on paper, but his delivery of it was shite - Gareth Gates would have got through the line in a more eloquent style than he did.
How would you 'score' it Giles?
Brown - 8
Cameron - 5
Clegg - 6
Nick Robinson describes how Brown has actually grown in the crisis:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/nickrobinson/2008/10/at_least_gordon.html
It's like the Falklands. Without the unnecessary loss of life.
The problem is that the government believes the ship to be sinking because there aren't enough holes in the hull for water to escape and so proposes to create more holes to stop the ship from sinking. The problem however is that water is coming into the ship through holes in the hull!
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