It is quite clear now that this is not a coalition govt. It is a Tory govt. How long the Lib Dems will put up with this is the big question. My hunch is that the tories have decided that they can push the lib dems around with the knowledge that the Lib Dems will get the blame if they pull the plug on the whole shooting match.

The Lib Dems will be attacked by the right wing media if they bring the Conservative govt down. And I don’t think the Lib Dems like being in the spotlight. They got a taste of what it is like in the election to be perceived as the threat to the tories and as corporal Jones used to say…..“they did not like it up them.”

Lib Dems are now caught I a spiral of despair where they will be pulled further to the right , but they are powerless to stop it without having the fury of the tory machine brought in to attack them.

I think this level of spin has simply shocked everyone on the left. The real figures show that the UK is not the basket case that the Tories make it out to be (see William Keegan’s piece quoting the annual report of the Bank for International Settlements). But the relentless spin coming from Number 10 (and the broom cupboard occupied by Nick Clegg) is being spewed unchecked by the Press, so that everyone thinks the nonsense must be true. It is not.

2 Absolutely.

The International right wing and their private corporations have brought on this crises through their greed and are now using this crises as a way of destroying the social welfare systems that have long been their targets. It is double whammy for the poor. Obama has fallen for it and is now negotiating away social security which is not what his supporters voted for.

The Conservatives are just following their orders from their corporate masters, and the Lib Dems are about to make themselves irrelevant for the next 50 years. If I were more cynical I would think that Clegg is a CIA plant sent to destroy the Liberal party.

@2

Sure, but what can be done about it? The Labour party is headless and navel gazing, the rest of the Left (like libcon) is smugly saying “I told you so” and the LibDems think that all their Christmasses have come all at once because they have a referendum on a voting system that they don’t want that they won’t win anyway.

The Tories are moving so fast on this that we will have lost our public services before anyone will have noticed.

Oops I meant [3] Sally

RB – When the opposition has the ball, you do not attack, you defend when needed and wait until another opportunity arises to take the ball back.

The Tories are riding the wave of popularity as much as they can, for as long as the can and as long as they don’t start to dip in the public face they will come out and say just as much as they wish. I was surprised that they didn’t, in fact, say 50%. IF they had then they could have pushed for taking the NHS out of the ring-fencing. I am looking at what they will do to bring it in. That could simply be the ace they will hold as both carrot and stick for the public – until, and if, they get a second term.

I would ask New Labour if they really understand how much mistrust, and do they realise how much they are detested by the public as a whole, not a few hand-picked back slappers who simply tell them that they need to say the right things and everything will be all OK.

Part of the Tory narrative is, “Look what we inherited” – and, so far, it is working. For years the Tory press has been hitting away at the collective consciousness, and obviously New Labour were out-spinned, insomuch as people new it was going to be a fucking mess when they took office. And they are doing exactly what is to be expected. But, where are they going to trip up? Figures, Stats? Go ask how much people now trust figures from New Labour, they don’t, because New Labour is not trusted, at all.

D’Mil, E’Mil or Balls – what they are going to have to do is admit, as public penance, how wrong New Labour were. And that isn’t going to happen.

Will, I agree that this a way of getting the NHS budget into play. Call me Dave has alraedly lied about VAT so NHS spending will be the next big lie.

I am quite sure that all those policeman and teacers getting the sack will start asking for nurses to get theirs. Usual Tory ploy, Divide and rule.

“asking departments for blood-curdling 40 per cent cuts, making unprecedented cuts of 25 per cent appear moderation itself,”

Or, of course, select your 40% cuts and then we in Cabinet will choose among them to produce the 25% with the least effect on frontline services.

It isn’t, after all, that strange for a bureaucracy facing cuts to *start* with the frontline services now is it?

You know, local councils always close libraries first, rather than sack a few bureaucrats etc…..

@4: “The Tories are moving so fast on this that we will have lost our public services before anyone will have noticed.”

Exactly. A news report in the FT on Sunday night raises immediate question marks over all public sector capital projects, even those which survived a previous, thorough Treasury purge conducted shortly before Osborne’s “emergency” budget on 22 June:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/73e886cc-8792-11df-9f37-00144feabdc0.html

Additional new capital spending cuts will certainly put LibDem MPs in a difficult predicament, especially those with ministerial jobs in the Treasury and the Department of Health.

I strongly suspect this fundamental purge of capital projects derives from private polling by the Conservatives showing that they are doing well in the polls – perhaps because the public has had no experience so far of the swinging public spending cuts to come.

Private polls could lead the Conservatives to believe that if the coalition breaks up and an early general election ensues they might well win with a secure majority, the LibDems having been tainted and discredited and with Labour carrying an aura of intellectual and moral bankruptcy until it disowns the legacy that Blair left.

@6

What frosts my balls the most about the “look what we inherited” argument (aside from the relevance of that phrase as it applies to senior politicians, Tories in particular), is that it relies on the fact that people seem to have forgotten just how ropey the country had become in terms of infrastructure by 1997. Of course, the youngest voters were of primary school age when Blair and Labour took hold of the reins – so it’s not surprising in some cases.

In London alone, on the railways you had suburban and coast lines running rolling stock that was built in the ’50s, a Tube network that had lines running rolling stock of a similar vintage. Roads were gridlocked, and the number of homeless people on the streets skyrocketed. Nationally, you had crumbling NHS hospitals that had waiting lists spiralling out of control but seemed to be able to hire vast numbers of management consultants (who tend to vote Tory) to tell the dwindling percentage of front-line staff (most of whom don’t) how they should be doing things. You had privatised utilities and service providers jacking up bills and in many cases keeping the money offshore. OK, so the economy was slowly righting itself after the property slump of the late ’80s and early ’90s, but that was only because Ken Clarke was brought in and mitigated some of the more bone-headedly doctrinaire monetarist policies of the previous decade.

In short, during the ’90s you could visit France or Germany, then return to the UK and it would look like a basket case by comparison. So the “inheritance” argument doesn’t really wash in the cold light of day – if and only if one remembers far enough back.

Of course, Labour under Blair (and to an extent Brown, as he oversaw most internal policy from the Treasury) didn’t do nearly enough to reverse the damage and seemed to spend a lot of money doing so, which I suspect had a lot to do with using private service providers rather than doing it in-house as it were. But the fact is that the services we have now are a damn sight better than they were in 1997, and it would appear that like the US voters in 2000, the improvements have been taken for granted and our services are now at the mercy of those for whom they are not important, as they’re wealthy enough not to have to use them.

Yes – what a pity it was that we spent so much on all those wars:

“[Brown] said the Iraq war had cost Britain £8bn and the total cost to the UK of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had been £18bn, on top of what he repeatedly stressed was an increasing defence budget.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8552593.stm

There were warnings in press about the Budget deficit going back to 2001 and about the house-price bubble going back to 2002.

These are truly remarkable achievements for a left-centre government in power for 13 years:

“The chances of a child from a poor family enjoying higher wages and better education than their parents is lower in Britain than in other western countries, the OECD says”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/mar/10/oecd-uk-worst-social-mobility

“Housebuilding fell to its lowest level for more than 60 years in 2009 – with just 118,000 new homes completed, according to government figures. The number is the lowest since 1946, when official records began and represents a 17 per cent drop on the number completed in 2008.”
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/construction_and_property/article7032641.ece

@12
The sad thing is that the arms industry is pretty much the only heavy manufacturing base we have left – which puts us in a precarious position regarding the hit that sector will take if and when we withdraw from Afghanistan. Across the pond, Obama is painfully aware of this too.

“The sad thing is that the arms industry is pretty much the only heavy manufacturing base we have left.”

Yes – BAE is the UK’s largest manufacturing business. This might just help to explain Blair’s enthusiasm for war.

As best I can tell, the UK currently ranks as the fifth largest arms exporter:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_industry

Btw in the early 1990s when those nasty Tories were last in government, the UK was the largest manufacturer of TV sets in Europe. How times change.

I suspect our TV manufacturing output was slowly declining throughout the 1980s though – competition from Japan was outstripping us in quality and the Far East was outstripping us in terms of volume.

“competition from Japan was outstripping us in quality”

In the early 1990s, most of the major Japanese electronics companies had manufacturing plants in Britain, mainly in Wales as I recall, making TV sets. When CRT sets were superceded by flat screen sets, production relocated abroad.

The challenging problem in Britain for manufacturing is finding enough employees with the necessary shopfloor skills. We have well-mapped routes to gaining a potentially excellent academic education but there are fewer routes to technical education and for developing vocational skills and these routes tend to be obscure. IMO it was a great mistake to redesignate the polytechniques – which often provided valuable part-time courses – as universities.