The Long March

DavidCameron5This from Gerry Hassan on Our Kingdom:

“The progressive story of Britain is in deep, deep crisis, perhaps mortally so; it has been battered by the onslaught of Thatcherism which killed off the gentlemanly, benign Tory unionism which understood intuitively where to push and when to caress the strange hybrid that is the union. It was then brutalised by Blair’s twin track continuation of Thatcherism consolidated along with his grotesque application of the British state and foreign policy. This leaves us with the old but now emaciated parables of Tory unionism and a Labour version of Britain reduced to little more than flag-waving and barking at ‘toffs’ in the supposedly ‘classless’ accents of mid-Atlantic corporate efficiency – ‘the people’s story’, savaged, humiliated… and over.

Events are moving fast here in Scotland. An incoming Conservative Government in Westminster in 2010 will have a scant to non-existent Scottish mandate. It will have to preside over massive public spending cuts much more savage than Thatcher in 1979-81. The Cameron Conservatives have barely begun to think anything about Scotland, and they are to put it mildly going to have their plate full next year, and will not want to be looking for avoidable northern troubles. It is highly probable that they will, along with the painful medicine offer the Scots a conciliatory gesture of going beyondthe proposals of the Calman Commission, to full fiscal autonomy, which could be presented well in the Tory shires as tackling the ‘subsidy junkie Scots’.”

View Newsnight Scotland here.

Comments (0)

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  1. Scunnert says:

    Without a media what do we know?

  2. naldo says:

    Still cannae get ma heid roond aw this defeatist spraff bout the Tory ascension.

    I hope it never happens and will do all i can to prevent it (which, i concede, isnae much).

    If it’s said often enough, folks will reckon it really is a foregone deal and they’ll give up hope of stopping it.

  3. Cornwall Forward! an article on the UK democracy blog OurKingdom: http://www.opendemocracy.net/blog/ourkingdom/philip-hosking/2009/09/18/cornwall-forward

    All comments welcome.

  4. Latricia says:

    Dag nabbit good stuff you wphieprsanppers!

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