The people have spoken, but we don’t know quite what they have said.
Ed Miliband, Energy Secretary
Fuck, I am enjoying myself with the British election and its aftermath. Complete disaster from a leading world ‘democracy’, people shut out from voting, all these men in business suits scrabbling for power. But the greatest pleasure is the pile of egg on Philip Blond’s face. End of an era, he prophesied, the death of liberalism, the birth of a new society under the oh-so-private-school-I-have-a birthright-to-power Cameron. In an apocalyptic frenzy that was really a reflection of the UK election cycle, Blond and his blue labour backer, Alasdair Maclagan, must really think that Cameron is about to sell his soul to the devil: a deal with the wet-lettuce Clegg, a Liberal democrat, the purveyor of all that has led us to the edge of doom. Plus, you’ve gotta love the Vulgar Marxist’s entertaining posts while the vote was unfolding.
9 May, 2010 at 9:09 am
Seriously, they can only vote for one branch (or whatever they call it) of their government and they can’t even get that right.
9 May, 2010 at 10:14 am
Funniest thing is, checking his Twitter, Blond is for a Lib-Con coalition, while Nick Clegg is the most liberal liberal about – he once said in an interview that he was liberal to the core and by instinct, and unlike other UK politicians is prepared to talk about his politics in ideological terms, ie liberalism, constantly bring up that he is a liberal, quote JS Mill and others etc etc. Remarkable from someone who writes the secret alliance of liberalisms left and right have created a ‘broken society. I full predict a respublica article about new liberalism and their stuff on community in relation to the big society on the Respublica blog.
9 May, 2010 at 10:20 am
A post on T.H. Green, Hobhouse or Hobson will be up in the next few days, about their version of civic liberalism, mark my words.
9 May, 2010 at 12:39 pm
At that point he will lose whatever credibility he might have had. He must be so totally pissed off that his anticipated time of remaking the world has slippe dout of his grasp. As the Strugatskys said, it is hard to be a god.
9 May, 2010 at 8:58 pm
Blond has already been on TV blaming the conservatives for retreating from their big society rhetoric and not selling this properly – in other words they didn’t ‘get him’.
Personally speaking as a LD member the thought of a Lib-Con agreement scares the hell out of me. I just can’t see it going anywhere.
9 May, 2010 at 10:04 pm
I can’t see it lasting even if Cameron and Clegg do make a deal. The tories and labour have more in common!
10 May, 2010 at 10:04 pm
My friend, a particularly brilliant liberal and Lib Dem member, has said he will quit the party if they go into coalition with the scum.
11 May, 2010 at 11:18 am
It would be not only the uneasy alliance of liberal eocnomic policy and conservative social policy, but the yoking of conservative and liberal social policy as well. What an ungainly beast.
9 May, 2010 at 11:43 pm
The Tories gave up on the the Big Society ‘complete crap’ (anonymous senior Tory) because, as Tories have widely admitted, no one had a bloody clue what this vague thing really meant. I’d love to have heard some prospective Tory MP try to explain Big Society without it sounding like some wet media public relations bollocks.
If the Lib Dems get into bed with the Tories and the slashing cuts come in, I’m looking for a silver lining and hoping that all those Red Tory/RO twats who backed the Tories suffer as much as all the others: let’s see how far their position in the ‘natural order’ remains – here’s to them joining the poor man at his gate. To get into bed with a party who gleefully destroyed the miners on a brutal scale, lied to shipbuilders and did what they could to destroy them, took the country to 3 million unemployment, introduced the Poll Tax (when Cameron and co were joining the Tory party)…well, they can shove their Big Society up their collective arse.
I don’t know if the Red Tories (and RO sympathisers) believe they will really influence the rabid neocons/neoliberals of the Cameron clique or they just love a bit of power and like to feel all important. Either way, they… well…insert your own insult.
Did like the Ed Miliband quotation though.
11 May, 2010 at 11:22 am
One of Max Horkeimer’s most telling points is that religion loses its oppositional stance when it sides with some form of state power. Red tory and radical orthdoxy are an extraordinary case in point – and fucking naive.
10 May, 2010 at 12:37 am
If you want to be more annoyed by all things Blond and Red Tory vs Blue Tory:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2010/may/09/general-election-2010-hung-parliament
http://twitter.com/Parsifal2
http://twitter.com/Phillip_Blond
Blond has been arguing on Twitter with some Tory about Big Society etc and, perhaps most annoyingly, promised to discuss further over ‘over a good claret’.
Any suggestions where to ram the good claret?
10 May, 2010 at 11:40 am
My guess is his derrier has become rather voluminous.
10 May, 2010 at 11:41 am
If this deal comes off, then it will confirm the sense that the political class is in fundamental agreement that it really is more interested in preserving itself.
12 May, 2010 at 11:07 am
Find that sense confirmed. Fuck.
12 May, 2010 at 10:22 pm
Roland, £50 says the LibDems’ll be fucking slaughtered in the next election. They’ll go the way of the Aussie Democrat party after the deal with Howard on the GST pulled them apart.
They’ll get reform of the electoral system they always wanted, but find themselves unelectable.
Tragedy wears a yellow power tie.
13 May, 2010 at 8:13 am
I am with the VM on this one.