Monday, 10 January 2011
Saturday, 8 January 2011
If you were to stroll across Parliament Square one autumn night and look upon the statuary surrounding it,
you'd notice an imposing figure with it's obvious prominence.
The colossal statue of Winston Churchill, bathed in a purplish light and casting an enormous shadow across the lawn,
occupies it's place on the prime corner in the heart of Westminster.
Just to his right there is a more diminutive yet more deserving of a character.
Churchill may be the leader most remember but it was David Lloyd George, portrayed with arm outstretched, coattails blowing in the wind, who changed the nature of the state forever.
As an MP, Chancellor and later Prime Minister during World War I, Lloyd George embodied the concept
that economic and social change can be made manifest through government.
He oversaw the policies of old-age pension, unemployment benefit, financial support for the sick
and infirm which today remain the backbone of the modern welfare state.
His support for Women's Suffrage and his "People's Budget" of 1909 were radical departures
and key milestones in the battle for a more equal society.
He remains the bravest challenger that the acronistic House of Lords has ever known, even after
a century has passed. That fact alone, speaks volumes and is a genuine and monumental indictment on the political lethargy of the last hundred years.
John Maynard Keynes, the economist, spoke of "A half-human visitor to our age from the hag-ridden magic and enchanted woods of Celtic antiquity".
Churchill later eulogized him saying, “Those who come after will find the pillars of his life’s toil upstanding, massive and indestructible.”
It can be fairly argued that David Lloyd George led Great Britain through some of its's greatest trials and left it wiser and more compassionate than anyone before or since.
Friday, 7 January 2011
Regardless of all that's been claimed by Mr. Osbourne he has to admit that raising VAT is the most uncreative, unimaginative & dull of all the options on the table. I mean, it's all a bit 101 isn't it ? The bluntest tool in the shed ?
Any Chancellor with wisdom would realize that perhaps now isn't the time to further trouble an economy already feeling tapped and pressured. He could have waited until the time was a bit more ripe if at all.... Then again, we'll all just get used to it won't we ?
If he truly cared for people, which incidentally, should be the first criterion of a Chancellor, let alone a politician, he might ask himself what really is in the best interests of the country but it seems that he doesn't really have a clue. Or a care. It's going to worry a lot of people that are already terrified. Nice.
The day George Osbourne is remembered as a great Chancellor is not on the horizon as far as I can see. They may say he "did what was required" or " was tough when necessary" but fundamentally he lacks or, seems to lack, any sense of the common touch. I think it's known as the "vision" thing
We need epochal, humane, far sighted thinking, we get...a VAT rise. The genius of simplicity ? Maybe.
Considering the vast amount of alternatives that have been presented over the last few years it strikes me as both cowardly and cynical.
True, it may go some way towards lowering the consumption of needless frippery and arguably the incremental price rise can be seen to be meaningless but there is no arguing that percentage wise it hits the lower income bracket harder as a proportion of their income.
Robin Hood in reverse indeed.
Just lame, luddite economic policy really.
In other words...Conservative. In extremis.