Vernon Bogdanor is an Arsehole

The Times has really gone downhill…

First it has as it’s Big Question. “Is Al Murray’s gay Nazi homophobic?”

To which the only rational response is, “Who fucking cares?”

Next they have a comment piece by Vernon Bogdanor which is awesomely dreadful. It’s so bad I’m going to fisk it so you don’t have to. OK. Strap in and hold on to your hats…

Why not talk to the Lib Dems before the election, Mr Brown?

Britain’s social democratic parties must join forces to avoid the 21st century being another Conservative century

Economic crises generate political upheavals. In Britain, the recession could terminate Labour’s years in office, inaugurating an era of Conservative hegemony, and invigorating the radical right in the form of the BNP.

Brilliant opening Bog. Conflating conservatism with the likes of the BNP. Ace. This is gonna get rough Boggy…

That would be a paradox since the credit crunch is moving opinion in a social democratic direction. Since the 1980s a central motif of British politics has been the failure of the State; now it is the failure of the market. Victims of the recession remain, no doubt, sceptical of the State, but they want what only it can deliver - protection against unemployment and against failure in housing and banking. Far from repudiating the State, they seek to huddle under its umbrella.

Wowsers! Is he Polly in disguise? The idea that only the state can provide is… Well, it’s Communism isn’t it? That’s not Mr Boggy’s beloved Social Democracy. It’s out and out (Ed) Balls to the wall, raise the Red Flag and fellate the corpse of Lenin Communism.

Yet, on present trends, Labour, a social democratic party, is heading for defeat. Perhaps the best that Gordon Brown can hope for is a hung Parliament. That would probably lead to a minority Conservative Government and a rapid second election; although, if Labour came near to a majority, it might seek an arrangement with the Liberal Democrats.

I am also hoping for a hung parliament. Though possibly not in the same sense as Mr Brown. Boggy, Labour are heading to defeat for reasons which are so cunting obvious they’re on the GCSE syllabus. You sir are snorkeling through Cairo. You are that deeply in denial. You seem surprised that Labour are going to lose. That puts you in a minority of about two. Your pal being that cack-handed monocular cunt Brown.

An obvious question arises - if Labour would be prepared to talk to the Liberal Democrats after the election, why not before? Why should Gordon Brown not seek a coalition government, a government of national recovery, to bring all social democrats under one roof? That would revive the new Labour project of realignment that collapsed only because it won by a landslide in 1997; and it would transform the economic psychology of an electorate coming to believe that Britain’s economic problems are too serious to be resolved by any one party alone.

A Government of National Recovery? Dear Sweet Mary, Joseph and Jesus Horatio Christ on a fucking landspeeder! I think he’s starting to take the piss. Note the sentence about “bringing all social democrats under one roof” and in the next sentence he mentions a landslide… And that “any one party alone” schtick has a beard you could lose Karl Marx in. Shall I translate what Boggy is really saying? He’s so desperate for the Left to remain in power that he is prepared to advocate anything. Anything.

Mr Brown understands that modern governments must transcend the rituals of tribal politics. On forming his government in 2007 he offered the Liberal Democrats Cabinet posts, and made a number of appointments to junior and advisory posts from outside the Labour Party.

There is an obvious Labour incentive to seek a coalition. But why should the Liberal Democrats agree to sustain a beleaguered government? Would Nick Clegg be able to lead a united party into a coalition? Jo Grimond, the Liberal leader in the 1950s and 1960s, used to complain that as soon as you try to do something with the Liberal Party, it breaks in your hands.

Boggy has now thoroughly lost it. Nick Clegg is a dismal cunt but even he isn’t daft enough to chain himself to a government which has so thoroughly lost the plot as to make “Murder She Wrote” look plausible. Barack Obama cut short his meet and greet with Broon to see the Boy Scouts of America. Obama has gone up in my estimation for that. Broon is so clearly a dead man wanking that only a total mentalist like Boggy could conceive of a plan so lame. But then Boggy is clearly a dyed-in-the-wool leftie arse-clown who is running scared.

Yet the Liberal Democrats believe in proportional representation. It is inconsistent to support PR and be hostile to coalition, since the party is unlikely to achieve, unless by some miracle of parthenogenesis, an overall majority without an intervening period of power sharing. The strategy of the long march, perfected by their election strategist, Lord Rennard, would, under present trends, yield a Liberal Democrat majority in 2050, too late for Mr Clegg, young as he is, to enjoy it.

“Parthenogenesis” is a big and clever word. Which is why Boggy deploys it utterly pointlessly.

Moreover, coalition gives the Liberal Democrats the chance to insist that Labour fulfil its pledge of a referendum on electoral reform, perhaps a year after the next election. The Conservatives are adamant against electoral reform, even though disadvantaged by firstpast the post; when the Welsh Conservatives sought, after the 2007 Welsh Assembly elections, a rainbow coalition with the Liberal Democrats and Plaid Cymru, based on PR for local government, the Shadow Cabinet would not hear of it.

What Boggy really wants is a deal which means that lefties rule the roost ad eternum. He claims to be a “social democrat” and he’s 50% right. He’s a socialist. He just ain’t a democrat. He wants Mandy to slip Cleggie his length so some cockamammie coalition can carry on with “the project” of fisting the population of Britain until the beshitted knuckles reach the gullet.

There are, of course, deep differences between Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Yet a government of national recovery would not be a mere coalition of convenience. The two parties have been able to work together perfectly well in the devolved parliaments in Scotland and Wales, to the benefit of progressive government. They could surely agree measures to stimulate the economy, combat the collapse of the housing market, achieve greater control over the banks and reform the regulatory system.

The Scottish Parliament is a joke. The Welsh assembly is a bad joke. If that is the best argument you can come up with Boggy then you can go fuck yourself because not even that tosser Clegg will do it for you.

The differences between Labour and the Liberal Democrats are minuscule in comparison with what divides them from the Conservatives. The Conservative approach of “sound finance” and a balanced budget is contrary to that being followed in other advanced societies, and would only deepen the recession, while the policy of tax cuts has been shown in the US to be ineffective. Moreover, it was the economic philosophy of Margaret Thatcher that created the ideological conditions that made financial meltdown possible. As recently as last spring, George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, was calling for more financial deregulation and a smaller role for the State.

So “’sound finance’ and a balanced budget” is a bad idea. As are tax cuts. Boggy really is a piece of work! They broke the mould when they made him. Broke it and dumped it in the Mariana’s Trench. If the cunt was any more abysmal he’d be one of those intriguingly ugly bottom-feeders that Discovery shows when they’re not obsessing about Nazis. And blaming Maggie! Pathetic. She left office when I was at school. A lot of water has flowed under many bridges since. OK Boggy, riddle me this? If this is all Maggie’s fault how come your golden boy Brown in ten years never managed to set it aright? I mean he was chancellor of the ex-bastarding-chequer. Or did I just dream that?

The Left has been here three times before, and each time, because it was unable to co-operate, it opened the door to Conservative hegemony. In 1924 Ramsay MacDonald’s first Labour Government rejected co-operation with the Liberals. The Conservatives, he said, “were gentlemen, but the Liberals were cads”. Nine months of Labour government were followed by five years of Conservative rule.

The Left arrives at this juncture because it is wrong. It always fucks up because that is the nature of the beast. Don’t blame the Liberals for Labour’s misfortunes. Certainly not 1920s Liberals who were possibly actually Liberal.

MacDonald again rejected co-operation in 1929. But, by the end of 1930, he had changed his mind, and sought a coalition with David Lloyd George, the Liberal leader, to combat the slump. It was too late. An electoral reform Bill, providing for the alternative vote, was passed by the Commons, but wrecked by the Lords. Before it could be put to the Commons again, Labour was blown out of office by the financial crisis of 1931, to be succeeded by nine ruinous years of “National” - in effect Conservative - government.

“Nine ruinous years of National government”. I thought you liked coalitions?

In 1978 James Callaghan failed to call an election partly because he did not want a hung Parliament and another Lib-Lab pact. The outcome was 18 years of Tory government.

There are two ways of looking at that. The first is that our government ought to have been decided by a bunch of gits in smoke-filled rooms. The second is that Thatcher won the election because Harold-Bloody-Wilson had driven the country to the brink of bankruptcy to such an extent they were no longer burying the dead and that by even Mugabbean standards is a FAIL.

Three times, a divided Left helped the Conservatives to regain power for long periods. By contrast, the Conservatives succeeded in drawing to themselves figures from outside their party, such as MacDonald, and secured landslide majorities.

Or possibly because they were popular which is what Democracy is about?

It was because the forces of progress were so often divided that the 20th century was a Conservative century. If the Left can unite on an agreed programme of economic reform and electoral reform, the Conservative century could be succeeded by the progressive century.

Now the pooch has been truly screwed. The “forces of progress”. Oh fuck me senseless with a knotty prop! Progress occurs when free people do things. It just happens Boggy. It is retarded when retards like you try and gerrymander it. In 1900 the fastest growing economy on the planet was Russia’s. Look at the plight of the place now? There is nothing “progressive” about being progressive. It achieves fuck all other than songs about Ukrainian tractor factories and vile tyranny. And more to the point you are so obviously suggesting a grand alliance of “the left” to shut down the democratic process that you are almost blatantly calling for Soviet totalitarianism.

Vernon “Boggy” Bogdanor is a Professor of Government at Oxford University. He is also an utter arsehole.