Take Me To Your Leader Writer

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...has written more leaders (newspaper editorials) than anyone alive or dead, an honour still to be recognised by the Guiness Book of Records or the Nobel judges. I have produced them for the Daily Mirror, Daily Mail, Sunday Mirror, Today, the Sunday People, the Evening Post (Hemel Hempstead), the Caithness Courier and the Student (Edinburgh). My creed is: Have opinions, Will travel.

Tuesday, 1 May 2012

Yes, it is the worst government ever

In her Guardian column today, Polly Toynbee says this is the worst government of her political life. An exaggerated claim? I don't think so.
Some months ago, a long-time friend who has been at Westminster for 40 years told me the coalition was the most incompetent government he had known. Yet what it has done since then makes its first year in office look ordered by comparison.
The one thing that might be said about the Tories in the past was that they could at least run things vaguely well. Not this lot. They are utterly, totally hopeless. Wherever you look, they have created chaos.
Some of it is because they don't have any real beliefs but it is their absurd over-reaction to avoid (at least, they hope to avoid) criticism from the Mail and similar papers that shows them at their most ridiculous.
The queues at passport control have been caused by hysteria at the accusation they are soft on immigration. Ditto the block on foreign students coming to the UK, which is proving disastrous for many universities.
Not bending away from complete reliance on austerity, as just about every other European country is now considering doing, is due to fear of being thought of as  weak - always a sign of weakness.
The most sickening aspect of Cameron's defence of Jeremy Hunt yesterday wasn't his disgraceful aggressive bullying attacks on Labour but the braying masses of Tory backbenchers behind him. Can it really be that everyone in the country knows Hunt has a case to answer, to put it mildly, except for Conservative MPs?
At the core of the problem for the Government is not its coalition with the LibDems - most of whom aren't much better -  but ministers' total lack of understanding about what governing is or, indeed, what management is. It is the nature of the party now that it chooses such inadequate representatives.
As it happens, there are a few rather good new Tory MPs but they won't get anywhere purely because they are rather good.
Meanwhile, the country sinks ever deeper into economic woes, structures and organisations that have been the backbone of our civilised society are being dismembered, voters are understandably becoming ever more disenchanted and the Right continues its remorseless rise.
We are in heavy seas on a rudderless ship with a crew of hopeless incompetents at the wheel.