|
The how, why, and what of the Cameron-Clegg calamity
Melanie Phillips makes up for her impassioned but non-specific denunciations of Cameron and Clegg in her last blog piece with a brilliant analysis and summing up of the disaster that has occurred. Of all the articles on the British election I have linked so far, this is the best. Like no one else in the British commentariat, Phillips grasps the terribleness of this wholly unexpected outcome of a Conservative/LibDem coalition government, and explains how it came about. When Cameron failed to carry a majority, I said that this was a good thing, because an outright majority would have put the seal on Cameronism and thus meant the death of conservatism in Britain, at least in any recognizable incarnate form. But just as with the Democrats’ seeming defeat on Obamacare in the weeks following the election of Scott Brown, when no one, including me, imagined the lengths and depths to which the Democrats would go to pass Obamacare, no one, including me, imagined the lengths and depths to which Cameron would go to save his political hide—going beyond his remaking of the Conservative Party as a liberal party, to actually marrying the Conservative Party to a party which, as Phillips puts it, is broadly to the left of Labour. So this election, which had been universally expected to bring about a historic defeat of the British left, has renewed it in a new and even more repulsive, if telegenic, form: ConLibism, CameronCleggism. Why does the left need BlairBrown, when it has CameronClegg?
Blair and Brown, both of whom at least had some core beliefs, though most of them were bad, were ruinous for Britain. All the indications are that the vacant-faced Cameron, who believes in absolutely nothing except getting and keeping himself in power, which he always and instinctively does by moving left, not as a natural believer in the left, but as a natural dhimmi to the left, will be worse.
Email entry |