Sharpe's Opinion
Thursday, 29th Jan, 2009
Dizzy points out the problem with Labour’s standard attack lines:
Think about it for a moment. Unless you’re born inot a deeply politically active family, you don’t really become politically conscious until what? Ten years old at the very earliest perhaps? There is going to be a great swath of new voters out there who will only ever have really known Labour in power, the memories of the early 1990s will not ring for them, so the salience of the term “cuts” will not conjure up the same disingenuous images
I count myself among that great swath. To me, the Labour Party are the corrupt and sinister ‘nasty’ party. To older folk, it’s the Conservatives.
I would argue, though, that the corrupt party can always be described as ‘the incumbents’.
Comments
Another way of saying exactly the same thing just occurred to me: Power doesn’t corrupt, complacency corrupts.
The best kind of government would be one that changes things in its first term, gets credit for changing them in its second term, and then leaves office before it gets complacent. In the prescient words of Harvey Dent “You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the enemy”…
It is fascinating to see the likes of Dennis Skinner, Sir Peter Tapsell et al still carrying on with their line, regardless of which party happens to be in power.
Why does the ruling party run out of ideas?
If Cameron wins power and shows the country how sensible and progressive the Conservatives have become, Labour could be out of power for a very very long time.
It’s the ‘showing the country how sensible and progressive the Conservatives have become’ bit that I’m sceptical of. We can but hope.
Equally, due to my above argument, Labour being out of power for a long time would not necessarily be a good thing™. Unless somebody else (I supposed LD’s wouldn’t be that bad) came to topple the Conservative Party, they’d eventually become the corrupt and complacent enemy again.
I’m a generation beyond both of the ones you discuss! (Thanks for that…!)
My earliest political memories are:
the 1970s:
(a) the lights going out because the Labour government was too incompetent to keep the power stations running
(b) news reports of men standing round braziers outside chain-link fences, because they didn’t want to go to work (as I saw it!)
and the 1980s:
(c) Arthur Scargill declaring that he did not accept the result of the 1983 General Election and that he would bring down the democratically elected Prime Minister, because she thought it was alright to close a pit if there was no coal left in it to dig up.
It is somewhat difficult to vote Labour after that introduction to politics.
My first political memory is of the run-up to the general election in 1997, when my dad told me Labour were the party for people like us, & Conservatives were for the ruling class.
So much for that…
asquith
January 29, 2009 at 2:31 pm