I don’t know who
he is, but Ryan Giggs
deserved his privacy
Rear Window
Arnold Kemp on John Knox
The Cafe 2
Donald Skinner-Reid (25 May) tells portions of the truth in the hope that in doing so it somehow illuminates a greater truth; eh, well, no it doesn’t.
The option to increase income tax hasn’t been used and won’t be because, by itself, that power is useless. It’s a bit like saying: ‘Here’s the power to use the accelerator pedal but, no, you can’t touch the clutch or the brake. Now, off you go and drive the car…’. Donald just failed to mention the bit about the other pedals.
He tells us that Conservative voters vote SNP. Well, I’m sure some have and some will. And? But the cracker is that the SNP is ‘inherently racist’ and the evidence for this is, other than his own wishful thinking? It’s that students from England will have to pay fees in Scotland. Brilliant. No amount of discussion of the Laffer Curve can disguise such embarrassing nonsense.
John McDonald
SR Extra
‘About Chernobyl the WHO report states ‘…4,000 deaths projected over the lifetimes of the some 600,000 persons most affected by the accident, is a small proportion of the total cancer deaths from all causes that can be expected to occur in this population’. To use Tony Blair’s chilling Iraq war phrase, 4,000 people have had their ‘lives cut short’. Thirty people were killed directly. In the 10 years up to 2009, 52,785 coal miners died in China. Between 30,000 and 100,000 died in the 1990 Gulf war – a war over a large oil well running under the border between two countries. All are energy-related horrors and there are plenty more.’
John McGrath’s essay for the weekend
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Today’s banner
Reflections on the Clyde of the squinty bridge
Photograph by
Islay McLeod
Let’s just get on
with (that coalition)
government
R D Kernohan
Some of Nick Clegg’s more considered reactions, once the pain of the AV debacle and election results had begun to wear off, suggest that he has recovered his nerve and his grasp of the coalition’s economic priority.
However the most important argument for coalition remains the need for stable and courageous government for Britain. Neither the country not the Liberal Party has much to gain from the constant friction, tactical manoeuvring, and festering ill-feeling which would accompany a Conservative minority government. In any event, the collapse of the coalition, whether by formal separation or after sustained Liberal provocation and rebellion, would bring an election which the Tories might not win but the Liberals would certainly lose. Cameron would certainly seek an election while the existing conventions still apply and would be able to force one if the proposed new rules had taken effect.
The real tactical difficulty of the coalition has not been caused by the Liberals’ foot-dragging over the rather experimental reform of English policing, or even their dislike of English Tory reform of the National Health Service, which now displays the mixture of good works, spiritual arrogance, and vested interests once characteristic of established churches. The problem is inability to concentrate minds, hearts, and political attention on the economic priorities settled a year ago. That is not altogether surprising, for one of the problems of modern politics is an inability to concentrate attention on single issues, however important. The CND failed to do it in the worst years of cold war and nuclear peril. Ted Heath fought an election against the miners in 1974 and sustained the ‘Who Rules Britain?’ theme for less than a week. Alex Salmond learned that you were likelier to win elections if you didn’t go on about independence all the time. It’s hardly surprising that the supreme priority of cutting Britain’s deficit has often been lost sight of and that many Liberals in public, and some Tories in private, have blanched at the inevitable protests against the practical implications of the policy. We all want other people to live within their means but we want to retain the style to which we ourselves have become accustomed. And one of the strengths of Western democracy, the articulate profusion of pressure-groups and special-interest lobbies, inevitably weakens the power and sometimes the will of government.
Some of Nick Clegg’s more considered reactions, once the pain of the AV debacle and election results had begun to wear off, suggest that he has recovered his nerve and his grasp of the coalition’s economic priority. That could be more important than LibDem braying about being ‘more assertive’ and even the prime minister’s hints of a more ‘business-like’ relationship. He should have ensured that relationship from the start.
But some other sensible comments from Clegg have an unintended relevance to the mood of his own party and therefore the coalition’s future. He is right to criticise Salmond and the SNP for ‘constantly developing a sort of politics of grievance’, expressed in their case by ‘blaming everything on London’. The danger to the coalition is that many Liberals will also pursue politics of grievance, blaming every coalition problem on the Tories, behaving like an opposition within a government as a reckless group of Tories once did at John Major’s expense and then their party’s. The coalition should be a partnership, sharing blame when agreed policies prove unpopular and sharing credit for attempts to mitigate the impact of the unkindest cuts.
The best exit strategy for the LibDems is still the one they settled on last year. Try to keep the coalition going for a full term, claim at least half the credit for whatever has gone well, and portray Labour as either undeserving or unelectable. Events will show if that is workable. But it is a better prospect, for party as well as country, than taking the blame for wrecking the coalition.
R D Kernohan is a writer and broadcaster and a former editor of the Church of Scotland’s magazine Life and Work
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