Wednesday 23 May 2018

Not being worse


In normal times, a demand from the leader of the opposition that an incompetent Prime Minister, patently making very little progress in managing her own party on the major issue of the day, let alone managing relations with people outside both the party and the country, would cause many people to conclude, “Well, he couldn’t do much worse, could he?”.  Not doing worse is hardly a compliment to anyone’s ability, of course, and it isn’t the same as ‘doing better’.
But these are not normal times.  When the leader of the opposition shares the same red lines as the Prime Minister, and seems to be essentially demanding the same thing – a unique customs relationship where the rules applying to other members don’t apply to the UK, and access to the EU single market on the same terms as members but without following the same rules – and where he would face the same problem of keeping his own party on side with whatever he says, there is little left to distinguish between the two.  Perhaps he’d be a better negotiator, but I’m sure that I’m not alone in wondering on what basis anyone would believe that Corbyn’s negotiating skills are going to be superior to those being deployed at the moment; there seems no obvious reason to believe that they would be.
None of that invalidates the, “he couldn’t do any worse” argument however; if only because it’s difficult to imagine how anyone could.

1 comment:

dafis said...

Perhaps the common denominator between May and Corbyn which influences their performance, or lack thereof, is the senior civil servants and clusters of SpAds that seem to hover around them. These are the people with the deviant agenda, the "clever buggers" who can take a vague instruction and turn it into something completely different pointing and squirting well away from any original goal.

Add to this proclivity of faceless bureaucrats the mad Mrs May's own tendency to waffle and her underlying affection for how things were pre June 2016 and it is perfectly understandable that Brexit is a crisis. Like a pack of demented creatures thrashing around in a damp cardboard box this UK government is a racing cert to tear a lot more holes in its own credibility before it implodes. When it does we have the prospect of J Corbyn and his pack of squabbling critters taking off to give us yet another episode of "government by the daft".

What good might come from it ? Well the Scots might not make the same mistake next time, vote FOR independence and really slip the leash. As for the Welsh - it's up to us. We can aspire to do it ourselves and show a bit of political cojones or do what comes easiest for many - lie down, curl up, and let London chuck us some scraps from time to time.