Yesterday I got the pleasure of once again watching prime ministers questions, but for some reason it seemed like a repeat. Now unless the BBC have decided to start repeating the show and have somehow forgot to take the ‘live’ from the corner of the screen I would say it has become pointlessly repetitive and in turn (dare I say it) boring.
Now by repetitive I do not mean the parts at the beginning where each party with any particular weight gives there undying condolences to the fallen soldiers of a privatised war. Nor do I mean where the speaker gets a cushion to sit on so as to look less like a jockey and more like a normal sized human being. I actually mean the rhetoric coming from the front bench of the Conservative party. When asked the question about youth unemployment being at its highest since some awful 'do gooder’ closed the workhouses the Prime Minister replied with the usual, 'its all the previous governments reckless spending that put us in this mess. Apart from being a repeat of every answer that had gone before it is worrying to see how the opposite bench react (by doing nothing).
The problem with rhetoric is that it can often turn from political catchphrases into something more sinister, which is 'public knowledge’. What the prime minister and most of the Conservative party have tried to do in the last year and a half is get it into peoples heads that public spending is wrong and for the most it seems to have worked. They have alienated quite a few sections of society along the way, but what the right are very good at it seems is making the majority of the population believe that it is somehow good for them. Or if that isn’t possible they make them believe that absolutely no one has any choice in the matter.
Lets get one thing clear, it is not public spending which is bad, most of the country would agree with that. It is borrowing to unsustainable limits which is bad, which is what the previous government did. This as I’ve said, most people know, however, what people may not know is that it was not spending on family tax credits, the NHS, or fighting the Taliban which got us into unsustainable debt, it was bailing out the banks. Which, in turn was caused by lack of regulation, which was backed by both political parties (the Conservatives wanting less regulation).
Don’t get me wrong there are plenty of lessons the modern day Labour party can learn from the past 13 years (one being how to stick up for itself). Essentially however, it is an ideology which many people would agree got us into this mess, an ideology that was started before the previous government and one which ironically, because of the economic situation we are now in, is being shoved down our throats more and more.
One less known rhetoric is just forming one which I would think has lingered in the back of the Prime Minister’s mind for a while, which is of cause the Unions affiliation to the Labour party. Why David Cameron sees it now as suddenly a good opportunity when it was the Unions who practically formed the Labour party and have been a part of its voter base for about 80 years is another matter. A lot of people would argue that this is a stab in dark and one which will only alienate yet another section of society. However, a problem arises if this rhetoric works as well as the other, the unions could lose even more public support dragging the Labour party down with it.
On a final note, I’d say 'the pot calling the kettle black' doesn’t quite do it justice upon describing David Cameron’s decision to attack the Unions for not having an overall majority when it called for its recent strike action. This is because the Unions pitiful 31% in favour of strike action is actually higher than the governments populous vote.