Cogs

Problem is, its infecting their whole campaign. Portillo pointed the other night that their campaign is so confused he hasn't yet come up with a single 'doorstep argument' that his supporters can use and he has a negative poster campaign (grinning Gordon Brown) that doesn't match his positive "Big Society" campaign (itself already forgotten now as they've moved on to "vote tory or the pound gets it"). And then of course we had him pulling his election broadcast at the last moment and replacing it with what amounted to a reply to Clegg. Not exactly Churchill style leadership is it. I feel sorry for politicians sometimes when people claim they'll just say anything to get elected but I think with Cameron its looking more and more justified. What does he stand for really?

Dave isn't doing enough I'm afraid. Next time, if you have to choose a PR man to lead your party, pick one who was actually good at PR. Apparently Cameron got all his jobs through his mummy phoning up her friends, quite clearly he has reached the limits of what nepotism can achieve for him now. Gordon is rumbling away, it doesn't really matter what he says or doesn't say. Clegg is at least present and is doing a good job of looking like a third of the debate if you see what I mean, perhaps slightly more, which is what he needed to do. If this is the much-vaunted "Cameron fightback" its deeply underwhelming. He doesn't seem to have a personality of his own. First he was pretending to be Blair, I see tonight he is pretending to be Clegg from last week, peering down the camera and delivering "hard truths". What a fake.

Ah a recycled criticism of another "liberal". Seem to recall it didn't stop that other guy doing OK.

The ITV worm can be found just a click away from the ITV homepage.

Cameron's Nick Clegg impression is quite amusing.

Yes it is.

I don't think this is a financial thing as much as a values thing. This is the real cull of the 'middle class' actually because the most important thing about the MC as a group was the need to look after money very carefully indeed. You didn't have the expensive trainers on a whim because the money was better spent elsewhere, it was only chavs who went pay cheque to pay cheque and then found themselves short when it mattered. For some reason this changed radically into "aspiration" (ie. conspicuous consumption) about 25 years ago. What sort of a so-called adult goes into debt to buy clothes and beer? I reproach myself if I don't save a good chunk every month, I was brought up to believe thats what adults do, the idiocy of getting in debt for consumption disgusts me actually. No sympathy, bring back debtors gaols. [smiffy's case is obviously a bit different for the record]

To be honest that is more a perception -- I might even say 'old saw' -- put about by people in the private sector. Public sector employment hasn't been especially secure for getting on for a generation now. The FT contract is very prevalent, in fact more prevalent than in the private sector, and what did you think the point of all the box ticking and league tabling actually was? I think people expect Ministers to read out some numbers like if a biscuit factory employing 200 closed, it doesn't work like that. They write a memo to a civil servant who writes another memo... and a dozen memos later a line manager discovers he has 10 employees and enough money to employ 5 of them. Nobody has been made redundant by the Minister of course, he is in fact privately opposed to any such thing, if local organisations choose to react regrettably to the memo, that is entirely their business. Now perhaps you start to see why the Tories are so desperate to localise everything ASAP.

Freud called it "the narcissism of small differences".

Clinton a neo-socialist... WTF?

Right, so theres this desert island and I've got two loaves and you've got three fish and ... in 3-2-1...

Ah, an optimist. If only were were dealing with human nature and there was a wizard behind the curtain we could either appeal to or drag kicking and screaming into the daylight. Its much worse than that, the entity isn't Goldman Sachs, its NYSE: GS, a far more terrifying creature with all the moral depth and ethical sophistication of a virus. It can only do one thing and must only do one thing. It does of course employ human beings to enact its will and maybe some of them will be caught doing naughty things, but the greater evil is an Inhuman Nature that can never be caught because while it exists legally as an entity, it resides ultimately in a set of imperatives and demands quite divorced from any human being. All its employees are expendable and can be replaced, some through human failings like death or old age, others through not conforming sufficiently to its demands. Yet for all the equivocation about its coporeal existence, back in the real world we see the evidence around us of the degree to which this thing's will is bent upon its aims. This is of course something we've been frightening children with for years. The thing about stories we tell to scare children is that they always reveal some sort of truth about what scares us as adults even if we can't quite articulate it. The Vampire Squid is real enough.

Betcha can't provide a source for that quote.

It is a response to the rest of your post. You're demanding Brown answer a question he doesn't want to answer because he can't. Look at what Brown can talk about; he can defend his record to the extent that is possible (and slightly beyond perhaps!) and say "it will be worse if you pick the other guy" which is what he did. Thats it. You want anything more from him, you are going to have to force him to do it. Cameron didn't do that and neither did Clegg. Its the same problem we've had for 13 years and part of the cause of our general suffering, the Tory opposition has just never turned up. And I say again, you can criticise New Labour as much you like now, but when they were in opposition they were a hell of a lot better than any form of the Tory party has been since 1997. Remember Blair slapping Major about to the point that PMQs turned into a bloodsport, on and on and on for months and months? Its just never happened this time round.

Really, an opposition politician said that before an election? Whatever next! Why should we trust Brown? I don't know, Cameron never managed to ask him did he. This reminds me of football managers complaining that a team playing for a draw in a second-leg cup tie "killed the game off" and "were negative" as if it wasn't their job not to let them do just that.

He's the incumbent after 13 years in office, its different. It is unpopular to say this, but Brown in opposition was streets ahead of Cameron tonight if you really want to make that comparison.

I think Clegg did really well, but then he was always going to, he had the benefit of going in with no expectations surrounding him - the benefit of being virtually anonymous! Brown did OK, his main job was just not to ****** it up, he's been in power for 13 years, there were never going to be any votes to win or lose for him on the basis of his own performance short of a total meltdown anyway. Which is presumably why he agreed after all, to give DC the chance to lose a few. I was always against the idea of these debates anyway, there was a thread here when it was being mooted. I don't recall anyone agreeing with me at the time, perhaps they have now?

"polite" Try inept, vacuous and shallow.

You know why we've had these debates really don't you? Hopefully they've finally learned a lesson here about the gap between reality and fiction. For God's sake, put the DVDs away. In any case, the Yanks require debates because they don't have the House of Commons, they don't have Prime Minister's Question Time and often the candidates have never otherwise officially met (a Senator vs. a Governor being not untypical). For this reason they sometimes have a bit of spark to them, our own effort was always doomed.

Seems fair. Well done the Tories for choosing a posh PR man... who, it finally turns out, isn't very good at PR. DC in a nutshell.

Cameron is atrocious.

The Guardian hasn't been a left wing paper since it started supporting New Labour. There isn't a left wing paper left now, maybe the Mirror in between the stories about 'slebs and football. All right wing now, like 99% of the rest of the media.

Hrm. Break someone's legs through negligence and expect to be asked to give them 10k at most. Lie to the capitalists and get fined 500k. An approximate indication as to where our values as a "society" (sic) can be said to lie, although I'm sure they wish they could get more than 500k out of him.

NHS? Thats a "boomer interest" spending commitment. They'd sooner empty every primary school in Britain than cut the NHS by a penny. Worked hard all their lives and retired at 55, they're entitled, children aren't.

Are they mods or rockers?