by Duncan » Wed Sep 24, 2008 4:25 pm
A few points:
The Iraq war is a bit of a side issue now. I think we are all fairly settled in believing what we believe about it whatever side we take, and as an issue it is therefore a dead duck. My personal take is that it was the right war at roughly the right time, but we needed to put in place a slightly stronger legal justification to start fighting, and when we won there seemed to be absolutely no plan for the peace. Our leaders should take the rap on both counts.
Cameron is lucky at the moment. He can snipe from the safety of the opposition benches at a time of grave economic turmoil and apparent unrest on Labour's back benches with virtually no threat from a toothless "Cameron-lite" Nick Clegg. The Conservatives have no agreed policies on anything much, but when they have to present a vision for the future in the run up to an election, their unity will suffer and their poll ratings will slide.
The real question is whether Brown can actually unite enough of his own party behind him to go into an election looking like a credible leader. Even so, he may never recover from the impact of the Credit Crunch - economic hardship is as much of a vote loser for governments as a disunited party, an ineffective leader and sheer boredom at seeing the same faces on TV all the time.
Tax is always an interesting one, but attitudes to it depend on your underlying political standpoint. I'd always rather pay more taxes of it meant I'd get better healthcare and education services, plus better provision for environmentally-friendly transport services and renewable energy. The British Empire was built on a high tax economy, and I've never been able to see a good reason for governments to reduce tax take overall. The balance of direct and indirect taxation, and where taxes actually fall is more significant - given the Treasury's recent screw-up over the 10p tax rate, I'm not convinced that New Labour have really thought this through.
And as for fox hunting, there is an element of class about it, but it is much more about the different perspectives of townsfolk (the vast majority of the electorate who see foxes as cuddly furry creatures) to the countryside. if you talk to country folk, you get a view based on the fox as a vicious killer of game, with a particular penchant for mass-murdering domesticated poultry. They are wild animals to be treasured, but if their numbers are not controlled they become vermin to be exterminated. A larger proportion of country folk also have access to horses (whether they own them or not). For the hunter there is no better feeling than riding through the countryside as part of a group, particularly when you have a wily and elusive objective. Stables and packs of fox hounds have been kept as an asset for generations - the ban has put specialist rural livelihoods at risk. While I understand the ban, personally I think it is political expediency aimed at a group who are unlikely to be Labour supporters in the first place, without enough acknowledgement of the impact on the tenuous economics of rural life.
"No more 200-yr-old flakes of parchment getting trapped in 'problem areas'..."
Liu Yuante