Howard breaks Godwin's Law, Labour win election by default
It's over. In an interview with Jon Snow on Channel 4 News just now, Michael Howard directly compared Tony Blair to Uncle Joe Stalin.
Most surprisingly, it wasn't for the obvious reasons - suspension of habeas corpus, being responsible for the deaths of loads of people, trying to get complex data on everyone in the country, using threats to gain votes, maintaining a constant fear of some nebulous external ideological threat to keep the populace docile etc. etc. etc. - but for introducing targets to the NHS.
Which actually started under John Major.
And, erm... wasn't it Lenin who came up with the Five Year Plans Howard was referring to? He needs a bit more Education, Education, Education, methinks...
This may not quite be Godwin's Law, but it's good enough for me. Election's over, folks. Time to head to the pub.
(Although I will be here all night tomorrow liveblogging the thing anyway - contributions to the beer fund most welcome...)
2 Comments:
You are probably right about Howard. Unfortunately he's right about the NHS: central planning and targets aren't the answer. Same goes for education, where the Tories have the only good policy I've heard mention of in the whole campaign from any party.
Too right - NHS targets are nice in theory, but God-awful in practice (pun only partially intended).
My father's a dentist, albeit a Tory dentist so a tad biased, and from what he's said, although it had all been going downhill since the 80s it has become immeasuarably worse since '97, with the focus no longer on treating the patients as well as they can but simply shifting as many as they can. The new dental payment system they're introducing will, apparently, only serve to bugger it up even more.
I have no idea if the Tories' proposals would be better, but they surely can't be much worse...
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