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| Deckchair Dave |
They crow that Labour has dropped slightly in the polls, but is it really anything to crow about? How is Labour supposed to maintain a momentum in the polls when it's been almost three months since the opposition has been able to hold this government to account properly in parliament? The prime minister has been deliberately shirking his duties and has in effect been sticking his metaphorical middle finger up at us all (including the right wing press). He has deliberately arranged all of his visits to fall like this because he is a coward and did not want to answer to or face Ed Miliband across the dispatch box. Is it right that the Tory supporting press have become so bias and so politically dogmatic that they are allowing "Deckchair Dave" Cameron to hold our parliament and our democratic process, and the public, in such utter contempt? Cameron is making a mockery out of our whole parliamentary process, he even used parliament to hold a 7 hour long party political broadcast on behalf of the Tories when Margaret Thatcher died and was allowed to get away with it. One is forced to wonder, if this had been a Labour government behaving in such a fashion, would they, or we, have ever been allowed to forget it?
With it being three months since Labour have been able to hold the government to account properly, that they still managed to do extremely well in the local elections, gaining seats places like Harlow and Norfolk etc where they have to gain in in order to win the next general election shows that their vote is solid at around between 7 and 10 points. Something the Tory supporting press have largely ignored in favour of publishing negative comments about Ed Miliband and promoting Ukip. If this lead was repeated at a general election Labour would win it with a clear working majority.
The right wing press have continued to fawn over Ukip even though they do not have control of one single council and do not have one Westminster MP, when in fact the Green party did much better than Ukip and won more seats in the recent local elections! Something else the right wing press are ignoring is Ukip seems to have become the acceptable political face for the extreme right wing EDL and BNP supporters to lurk behind, as the press ignore the "one size fits all" Nigel Farage. The man who is on the vitally important EU fisheries committee and has not attended one single meeting in years, leaving our fishing industry unrepresented. The man that hates the EU and wants us to pull out, yet wants to gain many UKIP MEPs, which when they fail to attend the European Parliament will leave the UK largely unrepresented but will still draw their salaries and expenses! Why aren't the right wing press pointing all of this out to the public? More to the point, why do so may Conservatives MPs want to join forces with Ukip and behave like this and the right wing press not hold them to account?
Despite lack of fair coverage and unbiased reporting in the right wing press for Labour, they still won their by-election comfortably in South Shields, where both the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives dropped large percentages of their votes. Ukip gained votes but came nowhere near winning the seat. In fact it has been Labour that has held off the Ukip "charge" and prevented them from winning seats and taking control of councils in the county council elections. The Liberal Democrats actually lost about 13% of their vote in South Shields by-election, they lost 14% of their share of the vote in the Eastleigh by-election, this is in line with national polls, if repeated as uniformly as this across the country then the Liberal Democrats are at serious risk of becoming a political non-entity. Why aren't the press reporting this instead of giving a completely skewed picture?
Us on the left of the political spectrum understand only too well that the right wing press have been notoriously reluctant to publish anything detrimental towards the Conservative party, but taking into consideration the "little local difficulty" Deckchair Dave has concerning the Leveson press regulations and the right wing press's hostile reaction to any change at all, as well as the impending lobbying scandal, I wonder, could all this now be about to change?
So far the press have given Cameron, Hunt and Osborne a fairly easy time over their dodgy involvement in Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB take over bid and the hacking affair and the various serious scandals, u-turns and lies that have engulfed and dogged this government in just three years! But even the Tory press will have to report what is exposed when Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson (and others) stand trial this coming September on a range of very serious charges, not least perverting the course of justice. It could be a very uncomfortable Autumn for Cameron and the Tories and that is without the infighting over Europe, gay marriage and Ukip splitting the party and the Government, into not just two factions but several!
Meanwhile the results of another poll show that the public believe Ed Miliband is a very honest politician. What a rarity, and as the public see more and more of him in the run up to the general election in 2015 (if this parliament lasts that long) there could be a major upset.
After all who do you think the public will want for a prime minister - Dodgy Deckchair Dave or Honest Ed?
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