Dave's Reality Or Hyped-Up Hope

The Tory conference opens with a bang with Dave facing a grilling by Marr, while wriggling around doing the EU referendum shuffle. Cameron has to prove he's a man who can. Faced with smug Brown it shouldn't be too difficult.

The top picture, taken from BBC On-Line news, says it all. Brown's satisfaction after the Irish were duped and blackmailed to say 'yes'. Smug, arrogant with more than a hint of petulance. Fight tooth and nail sure, but Cameron's Tories will have to face Euro reality sometime.

Under a dirty tricks banner of 'recovery or ruin', the choice was spun as a vote over leaving the EU or accepting the new treaty. False hope won, paving the way for warmongering Blair to massage his ego and bank balance, presiding over an EU superstate, where democracy plays second fiddle to grandstanding power politics.

But the politics of false hope are coming to an end. The illusion of dreams are being shattered by doses of reality, after years of a political narrative that conned the country during the Blair years.

Irish ayes are smiling sure but all eyes turn to cool Cameron. The Orange Party's big concern is whether the heir to Blair will turn into the man himself. Talking the talk, walking the walk, all things to all men. All style and no substance. Voters remain unconvinced.

In the US, where Obama and Blair were born in the same stable, Americans are starting to see through the con of a slick snake-oil salesman. Promising the earth and delivering nothing as the shine wears off and reality kicks in. Mr Ambition must not make the same mistake.

At the heart is the vexed question of the economy. That means jobs and a grotesque national debt which has become a carbuncle on the face of the country. Belts have to be tightened. The public is savvy enough to understand the Thatcher housewife rather than Brown sauce.

Increasing taxes to hit well-off Peter to pay poor Paul are fine up to a point. But for many it's galling when the government has frittered away the country's wealth to create a false sense of security, leaving behind a legacy of insecurity.

Will voters put up with Cohen's Etonians? Will 'liberal' England turn its back on a so-called Labour Party and put its faith in the once despised ruling class? New Labour is flogging a dead horse with its 'Tory Toffs' line. People don't give a monkeys as long as a trusted soul gets to grips with a country in the grips of a social and economic crisis.

It took a long while for the harsh truth to sink in. A bunch of woolly thinking 'social democrats' and their cronies highjacked a traditional political party for their own selfish ends.

The public have been living in La-La Land in a cosy 'liberal' unreal world, now they're waking up. Shallowness reveals a rotten inside. A worm in the bud, corrupt to the core.

A decade of failed New Labour policies have taken their toll. The public is weary. The economy has been ruined. All that's left are the failed policies of a fag-end government with a lame duck leader. But to pull it off Cameron has to stand and deliver bold, radical alternatives. A breath of fresh air.

Cameron sets off to the Tory conference like Thatcher in '78, just months before an election. A point not missed on Oborne writing in the Mail: "The similarities are uncanny." This is not Blair '97, he argues, more Thatcher '78. Cameron has to contact and convince that the Tories are up to the job of turning things around and confronting the decade of inherited failures.

Dave has to be honest. Tell it how it is. Let voters decide. And don't for one minute try to hood wink voters. They've has a decade of lies, spin and deceit from the current bunch of ruling political elite.

How refreshing if Cameron can pull it off. That's why the Sun's backing Dave. That's why it gets the goat of the Gang of Four. At Brighton on the Rocks, shameful Brown was set on saving his skin with rehashed policies to pick up a few votes. But the 'underdogs' turned into dead dogs with a toothless biteback. In the end, it's Brown wot lost it.

The sham of the 'politics of hope' will take time to unravel into reality. It falls to Cameron, to spell out the grim financial realities that await the country over the next few years.

The New Labour government with its vast army of cronies and hangers on has shown itself incapable of dealing with the problems which beset the country. As David Blackburn points out in the Spectator, with the politics of hope dead, Cameron has everything to gain by being realistic.

No pain, no gain. But can Cameron tell voters what he stands for and where he stands? Voters are no fools. Ordinary folk are biding their time before reality kicks in. That reality won't go away, despite New Labour's cunning plan to use dead 'hope' to dupe the public into living longer in La-La land.

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Brown's Labour Isn't Working

People struggling in the real economy took another battering today as unemployment is set to hit the two million mark by Christmas. There's little hope for anyone on the horizon, apart from the banks, as experts warn the devastating impact is only just beginning.

The number of people "out of work" rose by another 164,000 between June and August, to 1.79 million, according to government figures, the biggest rise since 1991.

This is despite the best efforts of the government to manipulate the easy target of unemployment figures and mask the true number of people not working who do not claim benefit.

Unemployment is now set to climb above two million by Christmas. Some forecasts put it at three million the year after. 

Even New Labour union sympathiser, Brendan Barber from Unite, reckons, "There can be no assumption that the people who are losing their jobs will find it easy to get new ones."

Today's figures come as inflation soared to a record 15 year high of 5.2 per cent, even using the government's discredited CPI index, following sharp rises in fuel and food prices.

After leading the way with the £500 billion bank bail-out and pseudo-nationalisation, experts predict the UK will now "lead the way" into world-wide recession.

Meanwhile, Brown is having praise heaped upon him from money-men around the world, as they rushed to join him and throw two trillion pounds of taxpayers cash and unrealistic borrowing to prop up the world economy, according to the Daily Telegraph. 

But there's little praise in the real world of the real economy, where people are worried sick about losing their jobs, getting work, facing crippling food and fuel bills, while trying to make ends meet struggling with spiralling debt.

Cameron's Conservatives and Salmond's SNP are right to attack the government's past economic record, creating the false boom and then the real gloom of the real economy, which directly affects people's lives. LibDem, Vince Cable, would do well to do likewise or face being labelled Mr "Has Been".

There are few words of comfort from Brown, who said the government would do "all it could to create work and help people maintain their jobs. Unemployment and redundancies are something that we wish to avoid wherever possible." 

Brown should get out into the real economy and the real world a little more often instead of coming out with the same tired old platitudes.

The Saatchi Tory Party 'Labour isn’t working' poster, which helped the downfall of Callaghan and the rise of Thatcher in the 1979 election, came at a time when unemployment stood at a paltry 1.4 million. Those were the days. How times change.

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Cameron, A Man With A PM Plan

Cameron is a man with a plan, striding forward, looking backwards. The Tory conference threw up a rare beast - a politician who spoke with conviction, spitting out his disgust at the government which has wrecked the economy and people's lives. He's hungry to govern. But did he convince voters he's the Chosen One?

This was a very different Cameron from a year ago, a Cameron who then persuaded the Tories to ditch their old ways and put on a caring face. Here he was not afraid to praise the old guard of Howard, Duncan-Smith and of course Thatcher.

Cameron didn't feel the need to have the young turks behind him - Osborne and Hague were all he needed. And here was someone who acidly pointed out that even when Brown gets it right - he also gets it wrong. If nothing else, that was a clap-line most of the country would agree with.

And someone who, at last, managed to cast off the heir-to-Blair image that has haunted him. He could barley hide his disgust for Blair as a man of all style and no substance. 

It was time to reassure voters about the slogan 'Plan for Change'. He had a plan, not a Blair "miracle cure", to mend the broken society and finally get to grips with the economic mess of years of New Labour. His was a government-in-waiting.

The Party faithful of course lapped it up. But in the streets, in the pubs, in the shops and around the water-cooler, they are the people who he has to convince. He thinks he's ready to govern but do they?

One striking fact came across from today's conference speech. Voters may not agree with all the broad brush stroke policies and a manifesto is some while off - but you could trust him to deliver - with passion. 

In the pub, after watching the conference speech, a lefty bloke remarked: Well, I'd vote for him. Anything is better than the smug arrogant bastards we have at the moment. And that's from someone who would spit on Thatcher's grave. And that probably sums up the mood of the country.

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Bush and Brown, The Mutual Admiration Society

It was the mutual admiration society today, as Bush and Brown fawned over each other. If any two men ever needed each other and deserved each other, it is these two. Both are facing disasters in public opinion polls and both are frantically searching for their legacies. 

So what do you do if your policies are a mess at home and public opinion of you is at its worst since records began? Bring on the troops and tap into national pride where you think you are on politically safe ground.

Thatcher's flagging political career was saved by the Falklands and Brown wants to try and pull it off with Afghanistan. But Thatcher knew she had public opinion on her side.

Brown has to do something to appease his new pal Bush. It's clear the UK has a timetable for pulling the troops out of Iraq, possibly with an announcement before September's Labour Party conference. He'll want it also before the next General Election so that may be sooner than we think. And the US is losing its taste for Bush and war.

Brown has to do something to show he is still right behind the US. After all, there are all those warships, troops and aircraft and huge military contracts with the US. So send more troops to Afghanistan and try to regain the political agenda. 

The war in Afghanistan was a lost cause before it started. Afghans have been fighting foreigners and each other for centuries. From the British in Victorian times, then the Soviets and now the US and the UK again. And what are we really doing there? Waging war on the invisible Taliban and at the same time protecting the poppy fields which produce most of the UK's heroin.

With some weird logic, Brown is reported as saying: "We have resolved that it is in the British national interest to confront the Taleban in Afghanistan or Afghanistan would come to us."

'We' have resolved have we? He's even using the Thatcher 'Royal We'. And the Afghans? What, come all the way from Afghanistan to the UK? Doesn't he know it's a land-locked country and they haven't got a navy or an airforce! So how do they get here? On foot? We'd see them coming a mile off. It's '45 minutes to destruction' all over again.

The number of UK soldiers killed in Afghanistan since 2001 reached 102 last week.

Playing politics with people's civil liberties is one thing - playing politics with people's lives in this country and abroad is shameful.

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