So where was I going with that in part I? Well as I said, all this reminded me of a line in “Withnail and I” where over a long and obviously boozy lunch, Monty laments: “we are shat on by Tories, shovelled up by Labour”…
People’s patience and sense of reality about how quickly ‘shit shovelling’ can be completed is maddening at me at the moment. While we are “shat on by Tories” we seem to have very little tolerance or patience for those that are required to “shovel” up the mess.
After 12 years of Howard maintaining a criminally negligent line of conservative complacency to protect the vested interest and taking no responsibility for the future whatsoever – no investment in infrastructure, no effort to sensibly deal with the Murray-Darling crisis until it was too late, no investment in education and no action on climate change – we have asked Rudd to come in and clean up the mess. But we expect him and his to attend to all of that in a manner that exacts no pain or sacrifice whatsoever – and in one three year term? Now that a few of the projects have gone awry and either haven’t gotten off the ground at all (Hospitals, Broadband), stumbled (loft insulation stimulus) or have left themselves open to cheap shots from the right (climate change, the economy), the polls are turning south and the timid are heading for the Tory comfort zone that got us here in the first place.
This is perhaps the story of right vs left throughout time immemorial. Conservative forces indulge the powerful at the expense of the weak and disadvantaged until such time as guilt/discomfort gets the better of us and we appeal to the left to save us – until that gets too unpleasant and expensive, or just doesn’t happen fast enough, and we return to those that would indulge us in return for power and popularity. So the cycle goes on…and on...and on.
In the US I am aghast at what is transpiring, slowly but seemingly inevitably. Obama was swept to power on a quite unprecedented wave of hope and optimism not 15 months ago and already American patience has evaporated. He was literally expected to save the world. All he needed was a cape. Climate change, two wars, economic and financial meltdown, healthcare reform – the list is endless. Is 15 months enough time to do any of that, to even figure out where to start? Yet he stopped the rot in the economy, stopped one war, turned the tide of the other and delivered an almost, almost workable deal for Healthcare where so many others had failed. The deal only fell over because Ted Kennedy (ironically the country’s greatest ever advocate of healthcare reform) died and let the Republicans take the balance of power in the Senate by seizing Massachusetts (a hitherto Democrat state since the war) on a wave of nothing but impatience and political restlessness.
Obama inherited an unholy mess. Not least of which was that while Clinton balanced the budget by 2000, Bush in his first term managed to create the largest peace-time debt in America’s history by the end of his first term (mostly through tax cuts for the rich and an illegal war for oil!). Yet the Republicans are already attempting to paint the deficit as Obama’s problem, the war as his failure and the economy as his mistake.
I guess my main point is [stamps foot] rather naïve – political memories are too short. We need more tolerant attitudes to the challenges we hand our leaders when they are clearing up the mess created by short term, self-interested conservative administrations that indulge our gluttony until there’s no more to have. We need to be more intelligent when we listen to them in opposition when they blame the rescue team for the very mistakes they made. We need to recognise political rhetoric when we see it and we need to be more realistic about how long this Tory shit takes to shovel up!