Cameron out!

by Daphne Liddle

EVIDENCE is mounting that David Cameron has ceased to care whether the Tories win the coming general election. He’s done his bit for his ruling class masters and his thoughts are now drifting to a well-rewarded retirement with little work except the occasional lucrative lecture tour.

This is the only explanation for the lack of logic or consistency, from any point of view, in the plethora of proposals currently coming from the Tory leadership.

There are many reasons why he would not want to be in Number 10 in six months’ time. The global capitalist economy is gearing for another catastrophic collapse that may well be triggered by the housing bubble in south-east England bursting.

The bubble has seen London and the Home Counties become a repository for fabulous gilded palaces, tower blocks and mansions that are empty, uninhabited, and slowly rotting. They are owned by wealthy foreigners around the globe as investments because the prices have been steadily climbing.

The much-boasted “recovery” of the British economy is based mainly on this bubble and fixing the stats by including the earnings of prostitution and illegal drug dealing in the gross domestic product (GDP). In reality Government deficits are steadily growing.

If Cameron is elected he will be held to his promise of a referendum on Britain remaining part of the European Union. It would almost certainly mean we would leave the EU — but under the auspices of an increasingly right-wing and xenophobic regime.

The Tory party is totally divided on this and Cameron may well have lost the will to fight this battle.

His reaction to the Charlie Hebdo terrorist killings in Paris was a predictable kneejerk to “defend the right of free speech” by curtailing all our civil liberties and once again revising the attempt to allow the Government and security services unfettered access to all our electronic communications.

There is no evidence that the terrorists in question used any secret electronic communications. Indeed most of their communications seem to have been via normal telephone lines and to have been well monitored by French intelligence services.

Which just goes to show when you are monitoring thousands of suspects simultaneously you can never predict which of them is going to explode on you.

Cameron demanded there should be no “means of communication” which “we cannot read”.

The geek community fell about laughing. It would mean the end of security protection for all computers in this country — commercial, public sector or private. It would render all data easy to hack: health records, tax records, criminal records, business negotiations and so on.

In the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations of the US National Security Agency spying on millions around the globe, the giant internet service companies have been obliged to introduce new levels of encryption or face losing all their customers to service providers in other parts of the world who will provide this security and who are beyond the command of Washington or London.

A new survey by the Tories’ own oligarch Lord Ashcroft has shown that the voting public do not trust the Tories with the fate of the NHS.

After surveying 20,000 voters in November, Ashcroft found that Labour has an 18-point lead over the Tories on the NHS, and only 15 per cent think the service has improved in the last five years.

The findings prompted Ashcroft to claim in the Guardian that the party’s failure to decontaminate its brand”, and the absence of a clear explanation of the purpose behind the coalition’s health reforms, “led voters to fall back on their assumptions about Tory motivations”. The public are not fools after all.

Ashcroft’s qualitative research based on focus groups, the list of words most associated with the Tories was dominated by “cuts”, “poor” and particularly “privatisation”.

The poll also showed the NHS is regarded as one of the three most important issues for voters and their families, with 69 per cent citing the cost of living, 54 per cent improving the NHS and 49 per cent improving the economy. These figures also show that British voters are not as obsessed with immigration as our political leaders seem to think.

The Tories are also promising a new round of swingeing economy cuts and new anti-trade union legislation.

We have so many reasons to get them out in May but that will not be enough unless Labour has a clear majority so it has no excuses not to carry out its election promises.

And then we must descend on them in force to make sure they do keep those promises and a lot more.