They just don't get it

Harriett Harman tells us they have got the message. The Prime Minister is angry. So much so he had to repeat it three times. That was John Major’s technique. Watching ‘Mr Three Time’s’ government sink was rather boring. Watching the McMillan government go down against the back drop of the Profumo affair had great entertainment value. The final months of this government as it sinks into the depths will be painful. If only the waters were as shallow as some of the politicians it is consuming. Some of them still haven’t got the message.

The big mistake some MPs are making is that they don’t realise the questions voters are asking themselves. Why cant MP’s understand the simple words, ‘wholly, exclusively and necessarily incurred in the course of your Parliamentary duties’? Why should voters believe them when they try to convince us they know what they are doing? Competence, judgement, and honour are now being questioned. Even some senior politicians are clearly unaware of how ordinary people have to cope in a recession where keeping a job and a home is a losing battle for increasing numbers.

Politicians fail to understand that voters have a good idea of what is acceptable in the work place. To hear Sir Ming Campbell tell the Newsnight audience that the rules are in fact only guidelines, came as a shock. This from a respected MP and a Barrister. He is of course not the only lawyer in Parliament. Lawyers will exploit ambiguity and spurious justification in the performance of their professional duty. This doesn’t always work in a court, but to try it in the current public arena was a lapse of judgement.

For politicians to tell the public that this is all a distraction from major world issues is to state the obvious. The voters also know who has, in part, caused those problems. Government jumped into a war on doubtful grounds, failed to see where the money markets were taking us and then gave loans to the banks without seeking guarantees The present PMs talent for dithering and/or making policy on the hoof, compounds this poisonous mixture. We need a cooling off period not a General Election. Why? Because the deep waters which are consuming the worst offenders also contain more incompetents, especially those nasty sharks who once they have had our votes, will come after us.

Dacier