2300 Hrs GMT
London Sunday 1 February 2009
KHOODEELAAR! TOLD YOU SO! Even Rees-Mogg echoes the very central [as in crucial] advice we gave to Brown.. Brown went OTT with debts-gluttony! Quit debts creating! We reiterate advice to Brown.
SCRAP DEBTS-CREATING CROSSRAIL...
Our analysis of Rees-Mogg will focus on HIS fallacy and his own ignorance….
Rees-Mogg has deliberately overlooked [or has failed to even spot] Cameron’s own sloppiness and failure to show that he will scrap wasteful scams starting with Crossrail..
[To be continued]
For reference only:
AADHIKAROnline quoting from the Times London web site, piece by-lined to William Rees-Mogg and dated 2 February 2009:
William Rees-Mogg
From The TimesFebruary 2, 2009
Cameron starts to show true Tory colours
The Opposition leader cares about the burden of debt - and that is a very Conservative concernWilliam Rees-Mogg
The opinion polls of last week were showing a big Conservative lead. YouGov, for instance, recorded Conservative support at 43 per cent, Labour at 32 and the Liberal Democrats at 16. Other polls produced a similar lead for the Conservatives, large enough to elect a Conservative government with a substantial overall majority.
The Labour Party has lost the benefit of the so-called Brown bounce. Even on the perception of “economic competence”, YouGov put David Cameron seven points ahead of Gordon Brown. The next general election cannot be postponed beyond May or June of 2010.
The global recession is becoming even more serious. Unless there is an early and unexpected improvement in the world economy, the Government's electoral position is more likely to get worse than better. There is no reason to think that delay will help Labour.
Perhaps we have reached the tipping point of political expectation, when the Labour ship will capsize and a Conservative victory becomes the general expectation. If so, people can be expected to turn towards the rising sun. It is at least the rational expectation that Labour will lose power, after 13 years in office, and that Mr Cameron will become the next prime minister. He has handled the leadership with considerable skill. One has to go back a surprisingly long way to find a Conservative Leader of the Opposition who has done the job as well. Yet there are still many people, including some Conservative voters, who say that they do not feel sure that they really know who he is, or what his main policies would be.
The public attitudes towards Mr Cameron seem to divide into three groups. His main support comes from the centre. He is popular with centrist Conservatives, with Blairite Labour voters and with some moderate Liberal Democrats. He is seen by older Conservatives as belonging to the Disraelian “One Nation” tradition, and stirs memories of Iain Macleod and Rab Butler in some older voters. It was the One Nation group that secured 13 years of Conservative Government from 1951 to 1964. In the present Shadow Cabinet that tradition is represented not only by Mr Cameron himself, but also by the return of Kenneth Clarke.
Strategically, Mr Cameron has placed himself in a centrist position not unlike that of Tony Blair. It is probably the strongest place on the political battlefield - the past four general elections, going back to John Major's victory in 1992, have been won by moderate leaders.
However, there are also criticisms of Mr Cameron both from the Left and the Right. The Left in the Labour Party tends to rely on the standard formulae of the party machine. Gordon Brown hopes that repetition will convince people that Mr Cameron is an ineffective leader who will do little or nothing. Presumably this line of attack has been tested in focus groups. But it has been undermined by the failures of the Government itself. It is not convincing to repeat that the Opposition would do nothing if voters are coming to believe that the Government's policies do not work.
There are, inevitably, Conservatives who would prefer a much more Thatcherite leader. They do not regard themselves as “liberal Conservatives”. But the Thatcherites are very loyal Conservatives who want their party to get back into office. They care about winning. Like the “old Labour” supporters who criticised Mr Blair, the Thatcherites will grumble, but they will also canvas and - above all - they will vote. Mr Blair never had too much difficulty with old Labour; after 12 years out of office one should not expect Mr Cameron to have too much difficulty with the Thatcherites, who were, in any case, proved right on some very important issues in their time.
There is also an interesting question. What does “liberal Conservatism” mean to Mr Cameron? He had a revealing discussion with Will Hutton in The Observer yesterday. A word he uses repeatedly is “responsibility”, a word that belongs to the Conservative tradition. There is an element of stoicism about the Conservative philosophy, and any stoic is a person who accepts his duty, and has the strength to carry responsibility. Mr Cameron says: “That word ‘responsibility' is really crucial for me: it's the golden thread that connects all our policies and positions.” He sees responsibility as being a personal matter - he does not want to put responsibility on to the State rather than the individual.
Mr Cameron introduces this concept of responsibility on a number of issues: corporate greed, the economy, society, the environment, welfare reform, City regulation, carbon emission, decentralisation. He does not consider that mere stateism is the best way to fix the excesses of the market.
As Mr Brown has attacked the Conservatives for failing to produce policies to deal with the world recession, it is interesting to read Mr Cameron's discussion of Keynesianism. He has thought seriously about the broader implications of policies of financial stimulus. “If by Keynesianism you mean a big fiscal stimulus regardless of the level of Government borrowing, I don't agree. The reason is simple: because the Government is already planning to borrow so much, if we borrowed a lot more we'd actually make the recession worse.”
The financial problem that Mr Cameron would have to meet after winning an election would be the repayment of government debt. There is nothing progressive, or liberal, about excessive debt. As George Bernard Shaw observed: “Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.” Mr Cameron may well need to be a decisive as well as a liberal-minded prime minister. Debt may be the enemy. He cares about the burdens we are loading on to the future. That is both a Conservative and a responsible matter for concern.
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William Rees-Mogg
William Rees-Mogg has had a distinguished career with The Times and The Sunday Times. He was Deputy Editor of The Sunday Times before becoming Editor of The Times in 1967, a position he held until 1981. He was made a life peer in 1988. Since 1992 he has been a columnist for The Times, writing on a variety of issues. He has also been chairman of the Broadcast Standards Council and British Arts Council
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