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Denzil_DC

(7,188 posts)
1. It's going to take a lot more than sharp exchanges across the floor of the House
Wed Jan 1, 2020, 07:36 PM
Jan 2020

to expose and impede what the Tories are cooking up.

The recent election threw up many embarrassments and scandals for Johnson and his party that would have been severe setbacks, if not curtains, for previous contenders for government. Little of it cut through, none of it was decisive.

Some of that is obviously down to disarray and very poor campaigning among Labour and the Lib Dems, but not all of it.

Some of the media did try to hold the Tories to account (e.g. Channel 4 News, which had a "good election" ), but it's undeniable that there were too many "mistakes" from the BBC that favoured the Tories to attribute it all to overwork and rush and innocent cock-ups, so I don't think it's credible to dismiss that as a factor, and the BBC's headlines do still tend to set the day's media agenda. It's just something we have to live with and try to deal with.

Here in Scotland, for instance, the media are mostly relatively hostile to the SNP in government. In the last but one election, in the UK media the SNP was presented as the scary alien bogeyman that would be pulling Miliband's strings. That prospect wasn't something the media focused much on the most recent election, but there were plenty of other outgroups and distractions up the Tories' sleeves, and too many in the media were happy to parrot and promote them.

Zingers across the dispatch box may excite some of the media and politics geeks for a few hours, but I'm sceptical that they influence the wider public to any meaningful extent. The House of Commons's standing's already been seriously, if not terminally, degraded during the last parliament.

If there were lessons from the recent election campaign, I think one of them is that it's impossible to be too cynical about politics nowadays. If all politicians are seen as full of hot air, why not vote for the ones who offer glib solutions, rather than those who more honestly point out that the way ahead is complicated, and is going to get even more complicated, with uncertainty the only certainty?

I'm more than tired at the prospect of Labour dissolving yet again into infighting while the world burns. That's nothing new. It's a major reason why I abandoned Labour many years ago, having felt that it had abandoned me. The party tried tilting rightwards, but only Blair, for some reason, seems to have been able to make that work electorally, and even he began to struggle towards the end of his time in office. It's arguable that the Blair years sowed the seeds for what we've reaped since and are reaping now.

But the Tories have also been a fractured party over the years, even during Thatcher's reign. They've found what appears to be a temporary solution to that with the great wild goose chase that is Brexit.

How long it will be before the cracks appear again once Brexit starts to become real and needs to be defined and enacted and ways ahead emerge that can't possibly satisfy all the constituencies within the Tory Party, we'll have to wait and see.

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