Sir John Major is spot-on with his
comments about the difference between Tory sleaze in the 1990s and
Labour sleaze now. And rather than
bluster on about how useless a Prime Minister Major was, Labour people ought to have the good grace to accept it.
5 comments:
Adultery causes more hurt, damage and distress than any irregularities in political party funding. Major has no right to the moral high ground.
With regard to Stephen Rouse, whilst adultery does cause more hurt, damage and distress to individuals, it's not quite as bad as screwing the country over in the form of bribes. Who knows what policies and behind the scenes arrangements were made in the reception of such payments.
Well said Paul.
It is just a pity so many NuLabor members are doing a three monkeys act.
Major's government tried to send three innocent men to jail over Matrix Churchill.
That said, Blair manipulated and misrepresented intelligence to take us to war in Iraq.
On a more general note, sleaze (and public dislike of it) is, from conversations I've had, one of the main factors responsible for the fall in turnouts in recent GEs (OK, it rose marginally in 05, but it was fairly pitiful given how easy postal voting was made). Labour's sleaze campaign against the Major government had a certain blowback, when, even in the bright new dawn of the 97 GE, turnout was the lowest since 1935. Then, when there were scandals with Mandelson and Vaz (and, worse still, when Blair bought back the likes of Mandelson) it just fed into a particular perception (not least among core Labour supporters) that Labour were no different from the Tories, and the more general popular jibes 'They're all as bad as each other', 'They're all corrupt', and 'They're all in it for themselves'.
The other two factors are New Labour policy failures, and the perception (often justified) that (as suggested in Peter Oborne's book) we now have a Political Class, the members of which have more in common with each other than the electorate, and which often behaves with the same arrogance and sense of entitlement as the nomenklatura did in the USSR. The sacking of Elizabeth Filkin is but one example.
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